From Physical to Digital Labor: Will Salesforce’s AgentForce 2.0 replace traditional jobs and outsourcing?

Salesforce’s AgentForce 2.0 signals a new era of digital labor, redefining how enterprises manage productivity, outsourcing, and internal workforce models. By integrating AI-driven Digital Workforce Equivalents (DWEs) into its platform, Salesforce positions itself as a cornerstone of the agentic AI revolution, challenging traditional IT and outsourcing paradigms. We believe this release signals a clear path toward the services industry’s shift toward Services-as-Software:

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Digital Workers at Scale: What’s New in AgentForce 2.0?

The AgentForce 2.0 release promises:

1. An End-to-End, “Skilled” Digital Workforce: Simplified agent creation using the Agent Builder that automatically generates “digital workers” from natural language descriptions, allowing businesses to scale their digital workforce with minimal technical expertise. This includes MuleSoft’s connections to 40+ platforms like AWS, SAP, Workday, Adobe, and Oracle, streamlining data and task orchestration across ecosystems. Enterprises can add “skills” to the digital workforce, which are pre-built or customizable capabilities, allowing for easy deployment of agents for common sales, HR, customer service, IT, and industry-specific actions with minimal configuration.
2. Digital Workforce Deployment to Slack: Agents can operate directly in Slack, enabling enterprise-wide search, workflow execution, and contextual task management. Collaboration and communication are reimagined as agents seamlessly interact with human teams in channels and DMs. This is a direct attack on Microsoft 365’s CoPilot capability but it also creates a built-in ecosystem expanding the promise of Slack’s collaboration capabilities with an expanding digital workforce.
3. Enhanced Atlas Reasoning Engine: Atlas upgrades by differentiating between faster simple queries and slower complex reasoning. Improvements in metadata chunking, query reformulation, and future inline citations will improve the quality of the digital workforce’s responses and ensure transparency and trust. Atlas includes enhanced governance and security through improved policies, as governance ensures compliance, secure data access, and trustworthy operations.

Outsourcing in Crisis: DWEs Reshape Enterprise Labor Models

1. DWEs Can Replace FTEs: As HFS has already forecasted, Services as Software is the future of the service industry. Salesforce’s new capabilities provide for a more capable agentic AI solution to replace outsourced and in-house FTEs with a digital workforce. If workers are not completely replaced, fractional DWES will soon reduce manual workloads and support the remaining FTEs. Net result: fewer FTEs on payrolls, and more DWEs on Salesforce’s invoices.
2. The New Default for AI and Automation: Agentforce 2.0 positions Salesforce as a go-to platform for scaling AI across enterprises. By consolidating AI tools into one existing solution, Salesforce reduces the complexity of managing multiple service providers. Traditional development and outsourcing firms specializing in repetitive business processes, ITSM, and application maintenance will face declining demand as enterprises turn to digital labor – Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s Founder, and CEO, has pledged not to hire new development staff but instead rely on its Salesforce capabilities.
3. Salesforce Becomes a Vital New Ecosystem Provider: IT services already have relationships with Salesforce, and those will become more important. However, business process outsourcing vendors, especially call centers, sales teams, order entry teams, and digital marketing teams, will need to build formal partnership relationships with Salesforce to enhance their Salesforce offerings instead of building their own solutions that have a fraction of the R&D funding that Salesforce is pumping into their solution.

Salesforce Challenges Tech Giants with Integrated AI Workforce

The AgentForce 2.0 release challenges existing norms in the technology sector, creating ripple effects across software vendors, service providers, and IT ecosystems.

1. A Redefinition of Enterprise Platforms: Salesforce is no longer just a CRM enterprise SaaS provider—it is positioning itself as an operating system for the digital workforce. This shift forces other vendors, including AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud, to rethink their strategies. For example, SAP’s Joule, while included in some of its cloud offerings, is not included in its customers’ proprietary SAP HANA S/4 environments, requiring custom installation for all of its clients. If a client has Salesforce and SAP, Salesforce may be the more capable and easier implementation, relegating SAP to being a system of truth but not processing.
2. Platform Stickiness: By deeply embedding AgentForce 2.0 in the Salesforce ecosystem, the company strengthens customer loyalty and makes it harder for enterprises to switch to other platforms.
3. Shift Toward Unified Platforms: Salesforce’s ability to integrate its ecosystem (Customer 360, Data Cloud, MuleSoft, Tableau, Slack) into a single, cohesive solution sets a new standard for enterprise platforms. Competing providers with fragmented specialty tools must offer deeper integrations and more comprehensive solutions.
4. Pre-Built Capabilities Reduce Time to Value: With a GenAI-driven Agentbuilder and a growing list of pre-built skills, enterprises can implement AgentForce without the need for extensive coding or consulting services. While the implementation does mean new revenue sources, the ease of implementation requires fewer billable hours. It is imperative that Salesforce “global system integrators” build accelerators that Salesforce currently does not have, like industry-specific action, legacy system actions leveraging MuleSoft, and Data Cloud integrations.

Why AgentForce 2.0 Still Faces Major Hurdles

1. Everyone is a Microsoft Client, but Not Everyone Uses Salesforce: Salesforce has faced heavy pressure from CRM ecosystem competitors. This foray into providing enterprise-wide agentic AI drives into the heart of Microsoft, Google Cloud, and AWS’s strategies, as nearly every company has one, if not more than one, of these solutions. The hyperscalers, while leaders in cloud services and AI models, rely heavily on enterprises to build their own solutions. Salesforce’s pre-built, low-code approach drastically lowers the barrier to entry for companies, presenting a direct competitive threat – and will not go unanswered, either through direct response or through SAP and Oracle ecosystems.
2. Cost Model Evolution: With pricing at $2 per conversation (list price), Salesforce makes AI-driven digital labor accessible. However, questions remain about how costs will scale as usage increases across autonomous, non-conversational use cases (back office agents). Furthermore, calculating the number of transactions per DWE requires significant business governance investment.
3. Ecosystem Lock-In: Of course, with unparalleled convenience and integration, enterprises that adopt AgentForce heavily will become deeply entrenched in its ecosystem, raising switching costs over time. Salesforce customers are quite vocal about their escalating licensing costs.
4. Industry-Specific Solutions Still Lag: Salesforce still remains a largely generic set of horizontal solutions with limited industry-specific “skills.” Salesforce must continue to develop in-house capabilities to suit the needs of healthcare, insurance, banking, pharma, and many other industries, or they must develop an ecosystem of “plugins” that bring industry-specific understanding to Agentforce 2.0. In the meantime, this becomes an excellent place for service providers to invest, as they have the industry acumen Salesforce lacks.

The Bottom Line: Agentforce is Accelerating the Future of Services-as-Software

As Salesforce brings AI-driven digital workers to market, enterprises must evaluate their workforce models and outsourcing strategies. Leaders should assess how DWEs can augment their operations, drive productivity, and reduce costs—or risk being left behind in the digital labor force revolution. Furthermore, AgentForce 2.0 is not just about scaling digital labor; it’s about reshaping the technology landscape. Salesforce is positioning itself as the backbone of the AI-driven enterprise, combining ease of use, deep integration, and scalability to drive adoption – a landscape long held by hyperscalers and ERP providers. Regardless of where you sit in the ecosystem, the enterprises and the entire services industry has been served notice: service as software is coming faster than most predict.  . AgentForce 2.0 is a blueprint for the future of services as software —and Salesforce is leading the charge.

Posted in : Agentic AI, Artificial Intelligence, Automation, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), Buyers' Sourcing Best Practices, Cloud, Customer Experience, Employee Experience, IT Outsourcing / IT Services, OneOffice