AI agents in the enterprise? Here's what Salesforce's Agentic Enterprise Index says.

To understand how the adoption of agent-based AI is actually progressing within enterprise-class companies, you could knock on the doors of the major vendors operating in this segment. Specifically, according to the most recent Buyers Guide 2025 published by consulting firm ISG Research, Oracle, Service Now, and Salesforce are the top vendors, followed closely by IBM, Microsoft, Google, and AWS. Alternatively, you could find a CIO or IT manager willing to pull the covers off AI projects actually brought to production. Or, an easier and more convenient option, you could rely on one of the many authoritative studies measuring the progress of implementing (and integrating) AI agents into the core of corporate information systems. The question, which has long revolved around this topic, is more or less always the same: how do these intuitive and fully customizable tools actually work at the individual process level and, above all, what benefits can they generate?

The latest edition of Salesforce's Agentic Enterprise Index, based on usage data from its proprietary Agentforce platform, provides a fairly accurate snapshot of how companies are integrating AI agents to improve customer experiences and streamline critical business processes like sales and other internal operations. What do the report's data reveal? They show that in the first half of this year, the number of agents created by early adopters of agentic AI increased by 119%, and the average number of customer service conversations handled by a digital agent increased 22-fold. The most active sectors, as you might expect, are those with direct contact with consumers, such as financial services, travel and hospitality, and retail, while sales and customer service are by far the technology's primary use cases (with the number of actions completed by agents overall growing at an average rate of 80% monthly). As for whether they generate returns (in financial terms), Joe Inzirello, Chief Digital Officer at Salesforce, is clear: "AI agents are already extraordinary value multipliers for companies, and data shows that as their widespread adoption increases, both their efficiency and the value they can generate increase."

Let's take other numbers from the Index for confirmation. From January to June, employee interactions with AI agents on a monthly basis grew by an average of 65%, and the actions taken by agents following these interactions

Interactions increased by 76%; at the same time, conversations between agents and AI have become more frequent and complex (growing by 35% in the last quarter), leading agents to act increasingly autonomously. Is human work, then, gradually disappearing? Absolutely not, compared to a course of action that sees many companies combining human capabilities with those of virtual agents, entrusting AI with managing initial contacts and the most common questions while leaving human employees to handle more complex cases. One percentage reflects this trend well: the increase (32%, compared to 22% in the first three months of the year) in handovers to human agents recorded in the second quarter of 2025, a sign – according to Salesforce – that virtual agents are improving their ability to direct customers and consumers to the most suitable experts.

Returning to the most common and accepted definition of the "agentic enterprise," the paradigm shift that large organizations must embrace and embrace is not limited to the mere automation of existing workflows, but to the actual transformation of processes through the drastic reduction of time and operating costs and the substantial improvement of the customer experience. Customer service (where agent-managed conversations have grown at an average monthly rate of 70%), internal and business automation, and sales, as stated in the report, are the areas with the highest agent presence. Specifically, their work involves the massive drafting and sending of emails, the creation of to-do lists, the sending of meeting requests, the requesting and identification of contacts, and the summarizing of contact information and interactions. Given the most intensive use of the tool, it's therefore not surprising that the travel & hospitality sector, notoriously among the fastest to embrace and experiment with technological innovations, is the one with the greatest increase in agent actions in the first half of 2025 (a 133% jump) and with the highest percentage of active corporate users of the technology (a sign of the effectiveness of the training provided to employees).