Salesforce Highlights Strengths in Innovation and Relationships at Agentforce World Tour

On Feb. 25, 2026, TBR attended Salesforce’s Agentforce World Tour event in Sydney along with 10,000 Salesforce professionals, clients, alliance partners and analysts. The following reflects TBR’s observations and discussions during the event as well as our ongoing assessment of Salesforce and its ecosystem partners. TBR’s Salesforce analysis can be found in its quarterly vendor reports, the Cloud and Software Applications Benchmark, and the Adobe and Salesforce Ecosystem Report.

‘Everyone is looking to agency [agentic AI] to drive their companies forward’

During a panel discussion with Salesforce clients, Australian business leaders and Salesforce executives discussed best practices for enterprisewide agentic AI adoption and for scaling pilots. Panelists mentioned common ideas such as ensuring clear ownership of projects and agents, defining desired outcomes at the start of any engagement, and co-locating technology teams with business teams (this blog and others from TBR dive into best practices for IT services companies, consultancies, technology vendors and enterprises with respect to agentic AI adoption).
 
One Salesforce leader noted that clients have expressed frustration that AI has simply allowed them to write better emails. Salesforce, he added, is working to show ROI at scale and “get more production value out of these products.” In TBR’s view, AI adoption sentiments expressed in keynotes, panel discussions, and show-floor discussions with Agentforce attendees reflect common themes around well-understood best practices, concerns and fears about enterprisewide adoption, and confidence that 2026 will deliver clear, measurable and significant ROI from agentic AI investments. This last point may reflect the setting and vibe of the event, although many of the specific use cases described by Salesforce professionals and Australian clients reinforced an overall sense about agentic AI.

‘As a leader, if you think AI is going to replace people, you have more problems than [adopting] AI’

At another point during the panel discussion, the CEO of an Australian student accommodation business described the leadership challenges inherent in adopting AI at scale, both within her company and in her experience speaking with fellow CEOs in Australia. She commented that the most significant hurdles were rooted in business processes and people, not in the technology, and that leaders who failed to consider enterprise resilience from a business perspective would likely fail to gain significant benefits from adopting AI-enabled solutions.
 
This CEO’s comments echoed the sentiment expressed by Sanjna Parulekar, SVP of product marketing at Salesforce, who said “context is king” (in adopting agentic AI) and that companies should focus on business workflows, particularly as large language models increasingly examine business workflows. Parulekar also noted that understanding AI-driven change management, including changes in roles and responsibilities, could help companies break down silos and more rapidly transform their business models.
 
In TBR’s view, the quote in this section’s subhead perfectly captures this CEO’s dilemma at present: AI promises a productivity boost when bots replace people, but successful adoption at scale seems to require more people with different skills. Digital full-time employees (FTEs) are not yet cheaper than human FTEs, but slow-rolling adoption seems untenable. What to do? For Salesforce, and the company’s consulting partners in attendance at Agentforce, the answers are clear: more software, more platforms and more AI, all aimed at solving business problems, not just adding technology for technology’s sake.

Salesforce in the public sector

In a special breakout session, Salesforce’s local and global public sector leaders made three critical points about the company’s overall public sector strategy and recent performance:

1. Licensing and permitting have been taking off as a use case, frequently tied to efforts to accelerate economic development.
2. Governments across all levels have been looking for consolidation, from point solutions to a platform, especially in the U.S.
3. As part of Salesforce’s public sector push in the U.S., the company has been providing partner-like training to employees at government agencies, disrupting traditional systems integrators. Notably, according to Salesforce, U.S. federal government agencies are increasingly looking to Salesforce to be the prime contractor on technology-centric engagements.

 
With the recent hype around the “death of SaaS” and other pressures on the business models of technology companies, Salesforce’s growing presence, success, and apparent disruption of competitors and alliance partners alike underscore Salesforce’s strengths in creating stickier client relationships and continually innovating, two qualities essential in the agentic AI age.
 
TBR’s overall takeaway from a day with Salesforce in Australia: Software is not dead. SaaS is not dead. Different wrappers, innovative use cases and deeply embedded relationships, both personal and technological, underscore Salesforce’s strength.