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NewsCRM & Data21m · 10:31 GMT · 4 min read
Can Salesforce Win the AI Front Door Inside Teams?
Salesforce says Agentforce Coworker usage has grown 21x in three months, with new access through Microsoft Teams and a $50 per user pricing option. Analysts Zeus Kerravala and Liz Miller see a pragmatic, predictable play, but customer impact remains unproven.
Salesforce has spent decades persuading customers to live inside its CRM. Now it wants its newest AI product to follow them out of it.
The vendor says usage of Agentforce Coworker has grown 21x in three months, reaching more than 185,000 users.
To keep that momentum going, it is taking Coworker into Microsoft Teams, connecting it to Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, and launching a $50 per user, per month option.
For Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research, the Teams move is the most telling part of the CRM giant’s announcement:
“By embedding Coworker natively into Microsoft Teams and connecting into Microsoft 365, Salesforce is taking a pragmatic departure from its traditional walled-garden strategy,” he told CX Today.
That is a notable shift for a company that has long wanted work to happen on its own platform.
What Coworker Actually Does
Coworker is Salesforce’s AI teammate for employees. Instead of working out which Agentforce agent to use, a worker describes the job; Coworker then plans the steps, coordinates the right agents and workflows, and returns results and recommended actions for review.
Salesforce’s example is a seller investigating an at-risk renewal. Coworker pulls together service history, identifies unresolved cases, and prepares customer follow-up. In Teams, a service manager can have it dig into an escalation straight from a chat.
Indeed, in discussing the announcement, James Nakashima, SVP of Product Management at Salesforce, said:
“The next era of enterprise AI isn’t about giving users more agents to manage. It’s about giving them one Coworker that brings the right agents together to get work done.”
Salesforce also stresses that Coworker works within existing permissions, sharing rules and access controls, with approval and audit options for supported actions.
New skills let a proven workflow, such as a top rep’s renewal playbook, become a one-line request anyone on the team can run.
Tackling Agent Sprawl
Salesforce’s move to tackle the growing issue of agent sprawl is a direct response to where enterprise AI has been stuck, according to Kerravala:
“The real bottleneck in agentic AI hasn’t been model <a href="https://bitcomme.com/uk-intelligence-agency-warns-ai-powered-ransomware-will-hit-critical-infrastructure-by-2028/” title=”UK Intelligence Agency Warns AI-Powered Ransomware Will Hit Critical Infrastructure by 2028″>intelligence,” he said. “It’s been context and fragmentation.”
Meeting employees where they collaborate, he added, “solves the ‘agent sprawl’ problem head-on.”
Liz Miller, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, sees the same shift as part of Salesforce’s commitment to a headless future for Agentforce, one that recognizes that work has “a space and place dictated almost entirely by the individual doing the work.”
“Instead of establishing agents in each presentation layer, Agentforce Coworker drafts off of established, governed and trusted skills that are already known to deliver the expected AI outcomes,” she told CX Today.
Salesforce is not the only vendor chasing that front door.
On its earnings call last week, Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft, said: “We think of Copilot as the new OS for work.”
