The Boss Wants Agentforce — But Where’s the Value Anchor?

My boss has started eyeing Agentforce.

Giving a company its own AI workforce makes for a great story. It’s not even a new idea — Salesforce, Microsoft, ServiceNow, and the rest of the SaaS and cloud crowd have all been building toward it, and the commercial returns are real and documented.

But looking at this from the size and nature of the company I’m actually at, once you get to closing the deal and making it work, three things are impossible to avoid.

Permissions.

Most enterprises are fragmented internally — data sits with different departments, systems are run independently of each other. Before an AI team can do anything useful, someone has to unify access across all of it. Buying the software is a procurement problem. Untangling permissions is an organizational problem, and the second one is far harder.

Designing each agent.

You need to know the workflow cold: where judgment calls happen, what the exceptions are, who’s accountable when something breaks. Same as the first point — ask yourself first: is there even one person who can walk through this workflow start to finish?

The value anchor.

Whether a product sells comes down to whether its value has an anchor — whether a customer can quickly tell you exactly where the value is. There are two kinds of anchors:

• A business anchor, where the value lands on one specific step or metric. A custom AI build for a single point in the process — expense review, reconciliation — and you can immediately calculate how much labor it saves, how much faster it gets done.
• A user anchor, where the value lands on one specific person. Buy a productivity tool and an employee feels the difference the same day they start using it.

Agentforce has neither. It sits in the middle — heavier than a point solution, slower than a productivity tool. The investment gets calculated across the whole chain, but the payoff takes a long time to show up. That doesn’t get anyone a win they can point to.

Just think about it from a fundraising angle: what actually carries a company’s revenue is usually the unglamorous, practical work that never makes headlines.