A report from Salesforce’s flagship AI event at London’s ExCeL Centre, 11th June 2024
Setting the Scene: A Campground for the AI Revolution
Walking into London’s ExCeL Centre for Salesforce’s Agentforce World Tour felt a little like stepping into a festival of the future. True to its “campground” theme, the venue buzzed with an energy that was part tech conference, part summer festival. Oompah singers on stilts greeted attendees at the entrance, while a robot dog roamed the exhibition floor alongside Salesforce mascots. Even a Formula One car had found its way into the campground, creating an atmosphere that was as much about celebration as it was about business transformation.
But beneath the playful exterior lay a profound message: we’re witnessing the arrival of what Salesforce calls the “digital labour revolution.”
The £6 Trillion Opportunity
Zahra Bahrololoumi, CEO of Salesforce UK and Ireland, opened the keynote with two simple words that she called “the most powerful in the world:” What if?
“What if every healthcare visit was personal? What if every family had their own financial advisor? What if your business never had to sleep?” she asked the auditorium.
These aren’t rhetorical questions. According to Salesforce’s newly released Digital Labour Trends Report, UK C-suite leaders believe digital labour will provide a 25% boost in productivity. The research reveals that 78% of UK organisations are already using AI agents, with another 14% planning adoption within six months.
The potential impact is staggering: Salesforce estimates £6 trillion worth of value to be captured through digital labour globally.
Real Results, Real Impact
The event showcased impressive early results from Agentforce deployments:
Salesforce shared their own results, with Agentforce handling 850,000 conversations on their help desk and salesforce.com website. Remarkably, 85% of help conversations were resolved without human intervention, resulting in £500,000 saved in operational costs and a 15% improvement in conversion rates for sales conversations.
Heathrow Airport, serving 83 million passengers annually, is deploying Agentforce across multiple touchpoints to transform the passenger experience. Their new AI-powered virtual assistant “Hallie” is designed to provide real-time, personalised support via WhatsApp, while enhanced Reserve & Collect services and personalised engagement at key journey points create a seamless end-to-end airport experience.
A Nordic retailer demonstrated the speed of implementation possible with Agentforce, achieving a 20% reduction in Average Handle Time and 35% estimated cost savings. Perhaps most impressive was the rapid deployment timeline: just four weeks from use case to production, with successful rollout across six markets.
Industry Insights: Learning from the Pioneers
Deloitte UK: Rapidly Adopting GenAI Across the Workforce
Deloitte’s presentation, from Davinder Kang, Director, Workforce Insight, Transformation and Heidi O’Leary, revealed the scale of their AI adoption, with a 468% increase in usage across UK operations and 1-2 million prompts processed monthly. Their approach focuses on building “Community Led AI Champions” and “Buildable assets” to drive widespread adoption.
One of Deloitte’s most valuable insights was that the GenAI adoption curve is “hilly” rather than smooth. Unlike traditional technology transformations, enterprise AI adoption varies dramatically from consumer adoption patterns. This requires robust change management frameworks, building curiosity and experimentation mindsets, and leadership advocacy that demonstrates both fluency and role modelling. The key to success lies in clear integration of tooling and rigorous value measurement.
Global Financial Services: Accelerating AI Experimentation Safely
A major financial services firm shared their systematic approach to scaling AI Proof of Concepts to enterprise-wide production while maintaining strict risk controls. Their framework encompasses AI intake processes, trustworthy implementation, tech enablement with governance controls, robust risk catalogues, regulatory alignment, and AI risk calculators.
The results speak for themselves: a 77% increase in confidence in safety alongside faster approvals through systematic risk management. Their key learnings emphasised focusing on the “right things” like net new risks while ensuring pragmatic and efficient approaches. They stressed the importance of driving adoption of core building blocks to vastly reduce time to production, providing real clarity to all stakeholders, winning hearts and minds through demonstration, and establishing clear ownership of risks.
The Sales Performance Challenge
The event also addressed a critical business challenge highlighted in Salesforce’s State of Sales report. A staggering 84% of sales reps missed their targets last year, with only 67% expecting to hit targets this year. Sales inefficiency has become the biggest challenge for operations leaders, with sales reps spending only 30% of their time actually selling. In response, enablement has emerged as the number one growth tactic for sales leaders. This data reinforced why AI agents aren’t just a nice-to-have technology.
The Human Element: Louis Theroux on Authenticity in an AI World
One of the most thought-provoking moments of the day came from an unexpected source: documentary filmmaker Louis Theroux, who delivered a luminary keynote on “Human Connection, Authenticity, and Weird Relationships in an AI Powered World.”
Theroux, known for his human approach to storytelling, offered a grounded perspective on the AI revolution. “Machines may be brighter, faster, and better at processing,” he observed, “but they aren’t better at being human. And they never will be.”
His insights provided crucial context for the day’s technical discussions. While AI agents can handle transactions, process data, and even conduct sophisticated conversations, the irreplaceable human elements—empathy, genuine connection, the ability to navigate the genuinely weird and unexpected—remain uniquely ours. This perspective framed the entire event’s messaging about human-AI collaboration rather than replacement.
Major Announcements: The Platform Evolution
Marketing Cloud Next
Salesforce unveiled Marketing Cloud Next, marking “the end of traditional ‘do-not-reply’ marketing.” Built natively on the Salesforce Platform, it transforms one-way marketing messages into personalised, two-way conversations through embedded AI agents.
Capita’s AI Transformation
Using Agentforce, Capita aims to become the leading AI agent-driven business process outsourcing organisation in the UK. Their AI Catalyst Lab will deploy Agentforce across workforce management, assessment-as-a-service, and client engagement.
Brunel University Collaboration
Salesforce announced a partnership with Brunel University’s Centre for Artificial Intelligence, focusing on research and education through workshops, conferences, and community engagement. This builds on the one-year anniversary of Salesforce’s AI Centre in London and their £4 billion UK investment commitment.
The Bigger Picture: Values-Driven AI
Throughout the event, Salesforce emphasised that their success isn’t just about technology, it’s about values. The company has donated £810 million in grant funding to nonprofits, NGOs, and educational institutions, with £32.2 million specifically in the UK. Their employees have volunteered 9.8 million hours, with 63,000 hours contributed by UK and Ireland teams.
At the event, Salesforce announced £2.35 million in donations to three educational organisations focused on digital and AI literacy: Lead Education, Catch 22, and Urban Synergy. They also recognised The Big Leaf Foundation, which supports young refugees adapting to life in the UK, with a £10,000 donation. This commitment to social impact provided a meaningful counterpoint to Louis Theroux’s earlier observations about maintaining our humanity in an increasingly automated world.
The Path Forward
The central message was clear: every company needs to become an “Agentforce company” to remain competitive. This transformation requires a unified data foundation through Data Cloud, bringing all enterprise data together with zero copy architecture. Retrieval Augmented Generation gives AI agents access to the right enterprise context, while a deeply integrated platform moves beyond disconnected systems to unified workflows. Most importantly, this vision centres on human-agent collaboration, where agents work alongside humans rather than replacing them—a theme that resonated perfectly with Louis Theroux’s earlier reflections on irreplaceable human qualities.
Conclusion: The Festival of the Future
As the oompah band played and the robot dog continued its rounds, it was clear that Salesforce’s campground theme was more than just marketing flair. It represented a fundamental shift in how we think about work, productivity, and human potential.
The digital labour revolution isn’t coming—it’s here. And based on the evidence presented at the Agentforce World Tour, the early adopters are already seeing transformative results. The question isn’t whether your organisation will adopt AI agents, but how quickly you can safely and effectively integrate them into your operations.
In a world where 78% of UK organisations are already using AI agents, the companies that master this technology first will have an enormous competitive advantage.
