Why winning with Agentforce depends on how you operate, not what you buy

Over the past couple of years, since Salesforce announced Agentforce, the conversation around enterprise AI has evolved rapidly. Much of the early focus was on what AI could do: Where can it save time? What can it automate?

Today, as AI agents move from assisting work to executing and orchestrating it, the bigger question is: How can we turn AI into business value, consistently and at scale?

Access to AI will not be the differentiator. The ability to operationalize it and consistently turn innovation into business value will be.

For Salesforce clients, Agentforce creates an opportunity to improve entire processes, not just isolated steps. Realizing that opportunity will require a new way of operating — and that’s ultimately where the differentiation lies.

Agentforce is changing how Salesforce works across the enterprise

For years, Salesforce had a well-defined role. It served as a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, a system of record, and a digital front office for sales and service teams.

Today, that role is expanding. Salesforce is now an enterprise AI platform for customer decisions, bringing together customer data, business processes, human expertise and AI capabilities in one environment.

Agentforce pushes that evolution further. AI is moving from assisting people with individual tasks to agents executing and orchestrating work across processes.

That changes more than the technology. It changes the operating model itself: how work gets done, who or what performs it, how decisions are made and how outcomes are governed.

Improving one step in isolation can deliver some benefits, but the bigger opportunity comes from improving the entire process.

Take the lead-to-cash process, for example. It covers everything from finding and nurturing prospects to closing deals and receiving payment. The process may start in Salesforce, move into SAP and touch several other systems along the way.

Agentforce cannot become another enterprise silo. If agents are going to execute meaningful work, they need to operate across the same systems, data and processes that people use today, including those beyond Salesforce. The opportunity is not simply to automate work within Salesforce, but to orchestrate it across the broader enterprise technology stack.

In this environment, the operating model matters more than any individual feature. You need to determine how data, people and AI should work together across the workflow. Which decisions should people make? Which can agents make? Where should people and agents work together? And how can you create the conditions for these new work practices to be effective?

Your Salesforce environment sets the stage for AI success

Innovation across the Salesforce ecosystem is accelerating.

New AI tools, agentic services and platform features continue to expand what organizations can do — and getting value from new capabilities depends on having the right data, processes and platform in place.

The problem is that most large enterprises do not have pristine technology estates waiting for AI. If you’ve been using Salesforce for more than 20 years, you’re probably dealing with customizations, technical debt, inconsistent data and fragmented processes. 

These issues need attention before AI can scale, because AI is an amplifier. When data is accurate and processes work well, AI can help people make better decisions faster. When data is poor and processes are broken, AI can magnify existing issues.

We’re seeing that organizations want a trusted partner that can simplify this fragmented environment and provide greater control, and this is where the Salesforce Outsourcing Service Provider (OSP) model takes on a broader role.

OSP creates an operating model for continuous innovation

Outsourcing is often seen as a way to hand over part of the technology estate so someone else can run it. In the Agentforce era, that view is too narrow.

An OSP acts as a single point of accountability for the entire Salesforce ecosystem, creating the operating structure needed to manage Salesforce as one environment and keep it ready for change. By bringing together licensing, platform operations, services and governance under one operating model, an OSP can provide a clear view of the entire Salesforce estate. 

The value goes beyond consolidation. Optimizing licenses, eliminating duplication and improving platform utilization can improve economics while creating greater flexibility across the environment. That value can then be reinvested into new capabilities and innovation, creating an economic flywheel that helps make continuous transformation almost self-funding.

The result is not simply a Salesforce environment that costs less to operate. It is an environment designed to continuously create capacity for what comes next.

Turning Salesforce innovation into value is an ongoing process

Bringing the Salesforce estate together is only the starting point. Within the OSP model, the greater opportunity is to move from traditional application management to AI-led application management services (AMS) focused on continuous value realization. As new capabilities emerge, you’ll need a consistent way to decide what deserves attention and what does not.

Does a new capability support a business goal? Is it worth the investment? Is the platform ready? Is the data reliable?

Start with the business priority. Assess what the technology can offer. Decide where to invest, put the capability to work and measure the outcome.

Once you go live, you’ll also want to know whether people are using the capability, whether agents are working as expected and whether the investment is improving the business outcome it was designed to support.

Use what you learn to guide the next decision. This turns Salesforce innovation into a continuous process of prioritizing, adopting, measuring and improving. It also gives internal teams more time to focus on bigger questions: Which customer decisions could we improve? Which processes should we redesign? Where could people and agents achieve more together?

In this model, AMS is no longer primarily about keeping the platform running. It becomes the mechanism for continuously identifying, deploying and optimizing the capabilities that create business value.

Do not start with AI for its own sake. Start with the business outcomes you want to improve, then decide where people and AI can work together to realize those outcomes faster, better and at greater scale.

As AI becomes easier to buy, how you operate becomes an advantage

Managing a combined workforce of people and AI agents will become a key capability in the years ahead. Leaders will need to decide how people and agents work together and understand the economics of that relationship.

This makes coordination across the enterprise critical.

The role of OSP will also change. In response to these developments and the capabilities introduced by Agentforce, NTT DATA is providing orchestration and observability across the wider technology stack, helping clients connect Salesforce to an enterprise-wide approach to AI rather than create another isolated technology environment.

Staying ahead will take more than knowing what Salesforce will release next. It will come from connecting those innovations to real business needs, orchestrating them across Salesforce and the broader enterprise, and continuously improving the outcomes they deliver.

As AI becomes easier to access, the technology itself will become less of a differentiator. The winners won’t simply have the best AI. They’ll have the operating model that turns continuous innovation into continuous business value.