Salesforce is taking an unusual approach to keeping pace with the fast-moving world of artificial intelligence: letting its customers dictate the direction of its AI product development. Instead of setting a fixed internal roadmap, the customer-management giant is crowdsourcing feedback continuously—sometimes meeting with clients as often as once a week.
“The 18,000 customers are a wellspring of information that is really needed to get to customer success,” said Jayesh Govindarajan, executive vice president at Salesforce AI. He explained that the company builds an “agentic operating system” around LLMs, and that long-term innovation hinges on understanding real-world customer problems.
Salesforce was among the first to launch an AI agent management platform, Agentforce, in late 2024, before agentic AI became a major trend. Since then, it has rapidly released new products for voice AI and Slack. The company credits its customers for this pace. By rotating groups of customers and working with them closely, Salesforce identifies common needs and builds solutions that can be rolled out broadly.
One example is Engine, a travel management platform whose founder, Elia Wallen, meets with Salesforce weekly. Wallen said his feedback—like the unnatural feel of an AI voice agent—led to quick improvements. “If somebody is willing to actually help curate and build products that we need, they can help us better,” he said. Similarly, federal credit union PenFed developed an IT service management workflow using Salesforce tools, which Salesforce then made available to all customers.
Salesforce’s approach relies on the assumption that customers know what they need, even as many enterprises are still figuring out AI’s role. To mitigate risk, Salesforce also uses its own employees as heavy users of its AI tools and has shifted resources quickly in response to new technologies.
“We can’t wait three months or six months to get feedback,” said Muralidhar Krishnaprasad, president and CTO of Salesforce engineering. “We are literally reacting to it, week by week, month by month.”