Salesforces verlorene Rückrufe

Jeder gute CEO schreibt sich heutzutage gerne die unglaublichen Produktivitätsgewinne durch AI auf die Fahnen. Aber Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, der schon im Juni 2025 mit erstaunlichen Aussagen wie „30 % der internen Arbeit werden bereits von AI übernommen“ aufgefallen ist, hat jetzt noch einen draufgelegt. Martin Peers schreibt für The Information (Triggerwarnung: Es folgt eine kleine Matheaufgabe):

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff had a confession to make on the software firm’s quarterly earnings call Wednesday evening: In the past, a lot of potential customers didn’t get callbacks from Salesforce.

“Somewhere between 20 million and 100 million people who have contacted Salesforce in the last 26 years…haven’t been called back. It’s just because we didn’t have enough people,” Benioff asserted. But now every salesperson has an artificial intelligent agent that is acting as a salesperson. And that “agentic salesperson is calling every single person back,” Benioff said.

Hold on a second. How could it be that Salesforce didn't respond to that many people? His estimate translates to between 15,000 and 74,000 calls a week that went unanswered—or as many as 10,000 a day, including weekends. Does that make any sense?

Benioff’s explanation got more puzzling. He added that in the past seven weeks, the AI sales agent had held “conversations with tens of thousands of inbound leads, even setting up appointments…and helping close deals.”

If AI agents are calling back every single person, and Salesforce was previously ignoring between 15,000 and 74,000 calls weekly, then surely in the past seven weeks the number of inbound leads the agents were calling should be between 100,000 and 500,000, not “tens of thousands.” Aside from how Benioff just threw Salesforce‘s salespeople under the bus, what’s up with the figures he's citing?

Diese Zahlen sind offensichtlich komplett erfunden und stellen lediglich einen kläglichen Versuch dar, Investoren zu versichern, dass sie sich keine Sorgen um Salesforces verlangsamtes Wachstum machen müssen, weil die AI-Sparte „Agentforce“ alles richten wird. Die Wahrheit ist jedoch, dass niemand Salesforces AI Agents haben will. Die Börse hat Benioffs Spiel längst durchschaut und die Aktie seit Jahresbeginn beinahe 35 % abgewertet.