Cloud software giant Saifushi is sweeping the screen!
According to the latest news, due to the strong demand for AI, cloud software giant Salesforce plans to recruit 2000 people to sell artificial intelligence software to customers. And a month ago, the company's plan was only to recruit 1000 people. That is to say, within one month, the number of people planned to be recruited by Sequoia has increased by 100%.
Saifushi is one of the earliest CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software vendors to deploy AI functionality, and its commercialization results of AI functionality are becoming apparent. The latest disclosed financial report shows that AI application software has brought incremental revenue to the company, and the company's performance in the third quarter of fiscal year 2025 (as of October 31) exceeded analysts' expectations.
In October of this year, Saifushi launched its generative artificial intelligence product Agentforce, which can complete tasks such as customer support without human supervision. The company has been recruiting heavily to sell this tool. Mark Benioff, CEO of Sequoia, stated that AI agents, also known as autonomous agents, are reshaping the global labor market and the operation of various industries, driving a breakthrough change. Bank of America also believes that the development of AI proxy technology will drive a new wave of innovation, accelerating the development and deployment of AI driven applications.
In the capital market, Saifushi is also an AI giant stock, with its stock price rising nearly 100% last year and nearly 30% this year. Overnight, the three major indexes of the US stock market experienced a flash crash, with the FTSE falling more than 3%.
Saifushi launches a "crazy" recruitment campaign
On Tuesday local time, Mark Benioff, CEO of cloud software giant SoftTime, announced that the company will recruit 2000 employees to sell AI agent software, which is twice the number the company planned to recruit a month ago.
At a company event in San Francisco, Benioff said, "We are working hard to add thousands of salespeople to help sell these products. We have received 9000 applications for the 2000 positions we have created, which is nearly five times the number of applicants. This is amazing." Last month, Benioff said in an interview that the company plans to recruit 1000 salespeople specializing in artificial intelligence software.
Benioff also stated that the company's second-generation Agentforce technology will be available to customers starting in February 2025. This technology is used to create and operate AI agents, capable of handling complex problems in the Slack communication application of Safran.
At present, the homepage of Saifushi has showcased an experimental AI agent that can answer users' inquiries about the company's products. Customers in need of help can directly access a chat based help page, which conducts about 32000 conversations per week, of which about 5000 conversations need to be upgraded to human customer service, compared to 10000 previously.
On the other hand, Microsoft has also been selling a range of Copilot branded artificial intelligence tools. But Benioff said that if you look at Microsoft's website and see how it automates customer support, "you can't find it.
In response to this, Jared Spataro, Chief Marketing Officer of Microsoft AI, said in a statement: "It's interesting that Benioff said this. Microsoft has one of the largest customer support teams in the world. In customer service, Copilot helped customers solve problems at a speed that increased by 11.5%. Our sales team has also seen the actual impact, with an average increase of 9.4% in revenue per salesperson and saving time to focus on strategic, value driven work
AI new products drive performance beyond expectations
Recently, according to the financial report disclosed by Sequoia, the company's sales in the third quarter of fiscal year 2025 (as of October 31, 2024) increased by 8.3% year-on-year to $9.44 billion, higher than the average expectation of Wall Street analysts of about $9.35 billion; The adjusted operating profit margin was 33.1%, higher than the same period last year's 31.2% and also higher than the market expectation of 32.2%.
Looking ahead, Saifushi expects its growth momentum to continue, with expected fourth quarter revenue of $9.9-10.1 billion, while analysts expect $10 billion; For the entire fiscal year 2025, the company predicts revenue to be between $37.8 billion and $38 billion, a year-on-year increase of 8% -9%, and estimated earnings per share to be between $9.98 and $10.03.
The company's new product AgentForce is driving its performance growth. From the results, in the third fiscal quarter, AI drove a more than two-fold increase in the number of orders worth over one million US dollars compared to the same period last year, with over 2000 AI orders signed, including more than 200 AgentForce orders. Jin Rong, an analyst at Hua'an Securities, pointed out that as one of the earliest CRM vendors to deploy AI functions, the commercialization achievements of AI functions are gradually becoming prominent. Among them, AgentForce, as the company's groundbreaking independent AI agent suite launched in September, empowers service, sales, marketing, and business scenarios. In the future, AgentForce has about thousands of potential trading customers and is expected to continue to open up commercial space.
Tianfeng Securities believes that Agentforce is expected to become a new growth point for Saifushi. The addition of Agentforce further improves the product system of Saifushi, forming an integrated platform system based on Salesforce Platform, with DataCloud, Customer 360, and Agentforce providing specific product services. Agentforce has stronger capabilities than the previous CRM AIEinstein solution. At present, products such as OpenAI big models are expected to further enhance the capabilities of Agentforce in the future.
Other analysts have stated that the announcement of the gradual availability of its Agentforce series products after October 2024 signifies the company's shift from AI assistants to AI autonomous agents, which is crucial for the market. This further informs investors about the company's AI strategy and alleviates concerns about its future AI commercialization. As a barometer of technology expenditures in the software industry, the unexpected revenue of Saifushi can serve as a signal for the market to judge the subsequent capital expenditures in the AI industry, and is expected to continue igniting the booming software stock market.
China International Capital Corporation (CICC) recently announced that it has raised its target price by 42% to $370 due to the potential for the development of its AI Agent to create new competitive advantages, while maintaining its "outperform the industry" rating. First Shanghai also released a rating report stating that it will maintain its "buy" rating on Saifushi, with a maximum target price of $450, an increase of 61.87% from the previous highest target price.
Analysts are optimistic about AI agents
Agents have become the biggest highlight of AI applications, and overseas AI application manufacturers and technology giants are accelerating the layout of AI agents.
Shanxi Securities analyst Fang Wenqian pointed out that in the field of decision intelligence, Palantir launched the AIP platform in April 2023 to enhance the automation level of auxiliary decision-making, and promoted it through the AIP Bootcamp training camp. Currently, it has been implemented in scenarios such as inventory management, hospital operations, and automated product classification; In the field of enterprise services, Safran officially launched the AI Agent creation platform Agentforce on October 24th, providing pre built agents including Service Agent for customer service scenarios, SDR Agen for sales scenarios, and Sales Coach. Within a week of its official launch, Safran achieved over 200 transactions.
In the field of enterprise services, ServiceNow released AI Agent in November, adopting a Multi Agent architecture, mainly targeting ITSM, customer service and other scenarios. In addition, overseas technology giants represented by Microsoft have also begun to tilt their focus towards AI agents in their application layout. On October 21st, Microsoft released 10 AI agents for sales, operations, and other scenarios, and will provide a public preview version this year that will be integrated into Dynamics 365. On November 19th, Microsoft announced that the Copilot Studio platform now supports users to build their own agents, and released 5 pre built agents. With the continuous efforts of overseas manufacturers, AI Agen has been gradually implemented in various industries.
Shanxi Securities stated that since the beginning of this year, AI agents have gradually become a key focus for major global model and AI application manufacturers. With the rapid improvement of the complex reasoning ability of underlying models, it is expected that next year will be the first year of AI agent explosion, with a focus on AI application related targets.
Recently, Yang Aili, an analyst at CITIC Securities, also pointed out that AI agents are expected to accelerate their implementation on both the B-end and C-end.
C-end: Agent is expected to become the operating system of the AI era. Agents have strong autonomy, complex tool calling ability, and visual ability, and can plan and operate devices such as mobile phones and computers like humans. With the improvement of Agent capabilities, it is expected to be placed at the core of computing systems, connecting and controlling peripheral devices, traditional software, storage systems, and network resources, becoming an operating system between users and a series of application software. But unlike traditional operating systems that require precise instruction sequences, agents can understand vague user intentions and translate them into specific operations.
B-end: Transitioning from AI assistants to agents. Currently, a large number of B2B software such as marketing and office have integrated AI assistants to complete single step functions such as text and data analysis. In the future, it is expected to be upgraded to Agent, which can receive instructions, develop plans, and use tools to complete tasks. According to Gartner, by 2028, 33% of enterprise software will integrate agents, allowing agents to make 15% of daily work decisions autonomously. By 2024, this proportion will be less than 1%.
Zheshang Securities stated that the domestic AI Agent ecosystem is accelerating its prosperity, and the promotion of self-developed products by manufacturers is expected to open up market space. With the continuous iteration of the multi-modal, complex reasoning and other dimensional capabilities of the domestic AI big model, companies with different backgrounds, such as domestic big model manufacturers, Internet manufacturers and digital enterprise service providers, are actively laying out the AI Agent application matrix. Recently, iFLYTEK, Caixun, Dingjie Digital Intelligence, Pan Micro Network and other manufacturers have released AI Agent product applications, which is expected to accelerate the landing and open space in office, finance and taxation, customer service, intelligent marketing and other scenarios in the future.
转播
