UK Salesforce customers are beginning to develop new business streams on the back of the supplier’s agentic technology, according to country chief executive Zahra Bahrololoumi and CTO Paul O’Sullivan.
At Dreamforce in San Francisco, executives outlined to a group of UK journalists how the company is working with customers to use its recent wave of agentic AI technology.
Bahrololoumi said it is important to register that the UK is the third biggest AI market, after the US and China, adding that she is proud of the London-located Salesforce AI Centre, launched in 2024.
“Remember the genesis of that AI Centre was to be the fulcrum point for a community – for our customers, policymakers, the government and education sectors – and it was to reflect our commitment around skills investment and capability development,” she said.
“It’s been a big success for us, and one of the most meaningful things has been that it allows us to build on one of the acquisitions we made, Convergence.ai. So, for the first time, we have an engineering and R&D capability outside of North America locally within the region. That allows us to service not just the UK, but also the broader EMEA region, and that’s … something we’ve never had that.”
Bahrololoumi highlighted a few UK customers where Agentforce has been material. One is Formula One, where she said they are taking fan engagement “to the next level and allowing them to monetise engagement with fans in the moment”.
“I was talking with Stefano [Domenicali], the CEO of Formula One, yesterday and what he’s most excited about is a [real-time] agent that is able to explain the rules of Formula One,” she said. “The most Googled thing when there’s a race and there’s a dispute is ‘What are the rules and what’s the procedure?’, and he agent will be able to answer that in the moment.”
Heathrow is another high-profile Salesforce customer, and Bahrololoumi said they are now reporting 95% accuracy from their customer service virtual agent, which is “eminently comparable” with human error.
She said there are customers whose use cases go beyond Salesforce’s core domain of customer service and sales, and beyond the “well-trodden path” of automating out repetitive tasks to free employees to work on higher-value work: “Historically, we have been front-office dominant, but we are working with a very large global company whose mission is to have a zero operations [ZeroOps] capability.”
“The combination of AI with robotics and operational technology in our physical environment will be a profound next chapter”
Zahra Bahrololoumi, Salesforce
ZeroOps refers to a fully automated operational framework for IT or business processes, eliminating the need for human intervention. Bahrololoumi also referred to an investment bank which is looking to compress the time spent with clients on pre- and post-meeting phases of engagement, which is highly material for bankers.
“Another example, which is not live yet, is with a very large energy and utilities company which has a well-trodden, highly automated service capability, but they don’t have a unified view of their customer that enables them to cross-sell and up-sell across different offerings,” said Bahrololoumi.
Business process outsourcing partnerships will be a fertile field for the application of agentic AI beyond Salesforce’s traditional core territory, she said.
In the same interview, Paul O’Sullivan struck a similar note in respect of “agent-to-agent conversations”, saying they have a “maturity pathway” for their customers.
“Stage zero is no agents,” he added. “Stage one is single agent, single task. Stage two is multi-orchestrated agent that can work across the front, middle and back office. The next stage is agent-to-agent conversations.”
He said that he was talking with two customers who are “both independently” wanting to explore that: “This means an opportunity to connect these two businesses. You would have two agents from their respective organisations talking together to offer a new sales and distribution model for them.
“They partner together already, they are both known entities to each other, but they don’t cross-pollinate, and we’ve now shown them how they can unlock exponential growth by getting these agents to communicate with each other and drive new revenue.”
Bahrololoumi expressed the view, also made at the London Agentforce World Tour conference in London in June 2025, that the potential of AI is bigger than of the internet, adding: “The combination of AI with robotics and operational technology in our physical environment will be a profound next chapter.”
And, just as the internet economy survived the dotcom boom and bust, so it will be with any conceivable bursting of the AI bubble. “We have to go through that in every innovation cycle,” Bahrololoumi added. “We adapt and adjust, and AI is embedded now. I don’t think we will go back. The people who will thrive will be the ones who work with AI responsibly. That is the most important point I would make.”
