Chapter 5Do You Need a Platform to Do Agents (and What's a Platform, Anyway)?
Around the time of the Agentforce unveiling, Salesforce released a new version of its high-level product placemat, or Salesforce-on-a-page. For years, it had used some version of the “clock and fan,” which depicts Salesforce's various clouds (Sales, Service, Commerce, Marketing, etc.) in a circle with a customer in the middle, and a stack of technical services (AI, Trust, etc.) fanning out on the right side.
Rumor had it this image was first drawn by Marc Benioff one day in Hawaii when he was looking at a fan.
Every large software company has some version of this schematic, which is supposed to provide an easy visual rubric for customers and prospects so they can see how all the various things offered by the company fit together. In the 25 years since its founding, Salesforce had accumulated quite a lot of products, so a coherent schematic was pasted into the beginning of pretty much every customer presentation – right after the “Thank You” slide and the “Forward-Looking Statements” disclaimer.1
The new placemat was totally different and conveyed exactly where Agentforce was to sit in the Salesforce strategy and product and messaging hierarchy (see Figure 5.1).
There it is: right on top. But you'll notice that Agentforce – while ...
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