Salesforce has refreshed its SMB subscriptions by adding prebuilt Agentforce AI agents at no extra cost.
The agentic AI included in Salesforce Suites begins with the Employee Agent. This conversational AI agent can complete tasks such as updating CRM records, visualizing lead activity and other getting-up-to-speed tasks.
Also included are AI-generated customer email drafts and customer record summaries that can help a salesperson prep for a meeting or bring a customer service agent up to speed quickly on calls.
Salesforce Suites for small businesses debuted in 2023 and includes the Free, Starter and Pro subscriptions. Salesforce plans to migrate Salesforce Essentials customers — a product predating Suites — to Pro Suite in late 2026. The free agents are included in all three subscription levels.
Salesforce’s SMB offerings face significant competition in a noisy market. Google, Zoho, HubSpot, Copper and scores of others offer cloud subscriptions to compete with Salesforce, which has a reputation for serving larger customers.
But Salesforce has brand cachet in the business world that many of those others can’t match, said Keith Kirkpatrick, vice president and research director at The Futurum Group. Agentforce only adds to Salesforce’s reputation as a status symbol for a young business. It also gives users a handful of automations that tactically apply AI to everyday busywork without requiring engineers, data scientists and developers to get started.
SMBs who deploy Salesforce “want to have scalability, and to have access to the latest features,” Kirkpatrick said. “There’s [also] that sort of ego aspect of, ‘Hey, I’m a company that wants to show I’m in the big leagues, I have a Salesforce implementation!’ There’s a little of that, too.”
Salesforce’s philosophy in developing Suites is “easy by design, advanced by choice,” said Eddie Cliff, vice president and general manager of SMB & Growth Products at Salesforce. Meaning, SMBs can start using features right away. They can customize more to their specific business processes or integrate with outside applications as they grow and find value in the tools.
Yet, since AI is a blank canvas that can automate any business task with the right configuration, first-time users may need help getting their bearings.
“Something we heard early on from customers was, ‘We don’t know what we want to do, why don’t you just tell us what we should do?'” Cliff said. “So that’s where we really leaned in, [adding] best practice sales processes, best practice service processes — and really tried to simplify that and make it consistent through all the record pages, list views, reporting and dashboards.”
It’s not the first time Salesforce has given users a taste of Agentforce so they can try before they buy. Upon the release of Agentforce in 2024, Salesforce embedded free agentic tools into its Enterprise Sales and Service packages, calling it Salesforce Foundations.
Kirkpatrick said that Salesforce’s goal with free Agentforce in Suites is to capture business from SMBs on the rise, so they can monetize AI consumption after they reach a certain size and get them to buy into more complex Slack usage, MuleSoft integrations, custom Agentforce agents, and other subscriptions. It’s unlikely Salesforce can monetize SMBs themselves because the volume per customer just isn’t there.
“I think we’re a ways from that, particularly for a small business type offer,” Kirkpatrick said. “In the end, how many seats are these guys going to have? How much are they going to actually consume, versus a large enterprise? Not as much.”
Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.