Salesforce EVP Addresses Ecosystem Comments About New Agentforce Pricing

Salesforce recently announced a new revamped pricing model for its flagship AI product, Agentforce, sparking a flurry of reaction – both positive and negative – throughout the ecosystem.

We caught up with Craig Shull, EVP of Pricing and Packaging Strategy, at the Agentforce World Tour in New York on May 21, to get the inside scoop on why exactly the new model was adopted, and to address community concerns about the change. 

$2 Per Conversation Is a Great Metric… Sometimes

Salesforce Ben told Craig about feedback from Founder and CEO of Elements.Cloud, Ian Gotts, who previously said of the $2 per conversation pricing model: “[Salesforce] don’t know how to price them yet, and right now, nobody wants to hand out a blank check – they want caps and predictable ROI.”

Craig said that when Agentforce was first launched in October, the $2 per conversation pricing model “really resonated” with a specific use case – that being a call center where the main concern is cost per conversation. 

These customers were able to estimate the cost they would be paying “really, really well”, and the concern about the “blank check” was not present because people could predict it. 

But Craig added: “What we found over the last six months is that there were so many more use cases that people wanted to use Agentforce for, and the $2 per conversation – it was a great metric, but not for those specific ones, which is why we introduced the concept of actions or flex credits to allow customers to get much more granular on exactly what they wanted to do, and they can match the cost to the ROI, specifically. 

“For our internal employees, we also launched what we call our Agentforce for Sales SKU or service, which provides unlimited actions for those employees. So that has really resonated well because people say, ‘Hey, these are heavy-use users, and they’re using these SKUs, we’re not going to be surprised.’ It’s an all-you-can-eat type package.”

This final “all-you-can-eat” package is an add-on for Enterprise and Unlimited plans. It comes included in Salesforce’s highest-end plan, currently called Einstein One Edition, which is being relaunched as Agentforce One edition – and will “include all of this employee action”, Craig said.

He added: “In that package, and that’s what we’re really excited about, we’re bundling lots of functionality. So not only will it have unlimited Agentforce actions, it will have Tab Next, which is coming out. It will have our Spiff acquisition from a year ago, so Sales Compensation.”

It’s Still Consumption-Based: Will It Always Be So? 

We asked Craig about the reasoning behind giving Agentforce a consumption-based pricing model – which has been largely retained with the new flexi-pricing updates – despite Salesforce’s history of having a pay-per-seat model in its early years.

Some of the positive feedback Salesforce Ben reported on amid news of the pricing changes included the phrase: “The bridge too far just got a little shorter”.

In response, Craig said: “I think that what we have done historically, especially over the last six months, is really listen to our customers and understand the challenges that they had with our pricing model and evolve it. 

“We think this is a massive innovation, and ‘the bridge too far just got a little shorter’. So that’s an awesome quote. But if we hear other things from our customers, we’ll evolve because we want to get Agentforce everywhere, and we don’t want impediments to do that.”

He added that Salesforce’s Digital Wallet will track every single action for all of your agents, meaning users can see on an up-to-the-minute basis what is going on, including a forecast for spending. 

“So it’s not like one day you’re going to wake up and be like, whoa, there was a huge spike,” said Craig. 

We asked if there would ever be a time when customers simply pay a flat rate for Agentforce.

Craig said: “One of the concerns clearly is people are like, ‘I don’t want to buy user seats and have them stuck’. We say, ‘You can have flexibility’. And then, coming at the end of the summer, we have the flexible payment options with pre-commit, pay-go. So we’re really trying to offer flexibility across the entire portfolio to our customer base.”

In our recent article, Steve Snell, Chief Executive Officer at Attentis Consulting, said the new pricing model reminded him of his “1991 cell phone data plan” where “every month’s bill was an adventure into the great unknown”.

We put this to Craig, asking again about fears that, despite Digital Wallet being able to predict ahead of time what you’re going to be spending – which will go some way to allaying those concerns – there may still be an instance where there are a huge amount of conversations with not much value provided in return. Even with the Digital Wallet, you cannot simply cap the bill, like you can with a cell phone data plan.

He told us: “The product and the Digital Wallet are evolving, so that is clearly something that is on the roadmap to provide. Again, the customer controls what the agent does and when they do it, so the customer has complete control of this. These are the inquiries that are coming in and what I want the agent to do. They have control of it, and they have a Digital Wallet that gets them to predict it. 

“I think the thing you said early on in the conversation is, each action should be very correlated to some value that you’re getting. And so if you have that example where it spikes up, well, if the agent is doing discrete things that a human would have had to do or something else, they’re getting value out of that specific action.”

What Exactly Is an Action?

All actions are not created equal. Closing a case, changing a status value, sending an SMS, or escalating something will each have a different level of value to a business, so is it the case that each of these actions costs $0.10 across the board? 

When Salesforce Ben put this to Craig, he told us: “When we went out and we talked to our customers for the last six months, initially we had tried to bucket actions into different values. Just like what you’re explaining. 

“The feedback that we got was, although academically, that’s maybe the right thing to do, it was really hard. And so customers told us, ‘Hey, start with just one action price, and we understand that there’ll be some that are a lower value and some that are higher, but on average [they even out].

“So then we priced it much more competitively. I mean, 10 cents when you look at the other competitors in the market is really competitive. And so we think that that strategy will enable people to utilize it for almost all use cases.”

Are All Agents Created Equal?

We wondered if the pay-per-action model might bring in an extra dimension to the concept of what makes one agent better than another. 

Hypothetically speaking, is it the case that one good agent could solve a certain problem in just one action, whereas another bad agent might take several steps to achieve the same result?

If so, this would mean that people might want to minimize costs and – either explicitly or implicitly – train their agents to take as few actions as possible to solve any given problem, meaning results might suffer when a several-action approach would have been needed.  

Craig told us he did not like the phrase “good agents” or “bad agents”, adding: “Our customers can define exactly how an agent works and what they do. It’s up to our customer to say, ‘Do I want this agent to do one action or do I want this agent to do four actions’, for a variety of different reasons. 

“They have that control. So they can build their agents however they want, and that will define how the actions are burned down.”

Final Thoughts 

Salesforce were eager to stress one concept loud and clear to potential Agentforce customers: control. From what the agent does, to how much you are spending, and even how Salesforce tackles their own roadmap for Agentforce, Craig stressed that they are listening to their customers, giving them what they ask for, and letting them decide how exactly their agents operate. 

While the ecosystem is great at providing some snappy criticisms of the CRM giant – the 1990s cell phone comment was particularly funny, I thought – it is also good at giving credit where it is due. 

The Mothership is an enormous entity, so change can sometimes be slow and conservative by dint of this, but this move, if nothing else, seems to be a step in the right direction towards addressing some community concerns around Agentforce pricing.