Optimizing Customer Engagement with Salesforce Communications Cloud + Agentforce

How are telcos are achieving 30% revenue growth? Salesforce may have the answer. Join hosts Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman on Six Five On The Road at #MWC25 as they sit down with Jeff Amann EVP & GM, Salesforce Industries, to discuss the evolution of customer engagement technologies, the exciting possibilities of Agentic AI, and how organizations can leverage these advancements to drive significant change!

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‍Key takeaways include:

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🔹Telcos Get a Growth Boost: Salesforce is helping telecommunications companies overcome slow growth, fickle customers, and fierce competition.

🔹The Power of Data Cloud: Unleash the hidden value of your data to personalize customer experiences and drive loyalty.

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🔹Agentic AI in Action: See how Agent Force, Salesforce’s AI-powered digital labor platform, can automate tasks, improve efficiency, and drive revenue growth.

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🔹Communications Cloud to the Rescue: Learn how Salesforce’s industry-specific Communications Cloud is transforming telcos and delivering exceptional customer experiences. Learn more at Salesforce. Watch the full video above, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, so you never miss an episode.

Patrick Moorhead:
The Six Five is On The Road in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress 2025. Daniel, I think it’s been a great event. Some of the insights, I mean, there seems to be a lot of optimism here, a lot of optimism about the industry when it comes to service providers, but also even carrier equipment providers getting into the enterprise. Like everybody sees opportunity.

Daniel Newman:
Yeah, I think we’re seeing the kind of amalgamation of opportunities coming together right now. AI has sort of turbocharged every industry and we know this, but this industry, there’s been a bit of a pessimism. You know, you and I have been, what, at this MWC show for over a decade straight. God, it feels like forever. And the last couple years it was almost like you felt this kind of little bit of drag and negativity. And this year it’s like the energy is just terrific. And I think it’s the service providers, carriers, the equipment providers, and of course some of the innovators in the enterprise that are all here together looking at how AI can really turbocharge the next wave of growth for these companies. And it’s great to see that enthusiasm.

Patrick Moorhead:
Well, it is. And whether it’s hitting that top line with potentially new services, you know, AI on the edge, I know we keep talking about it’s going to be big, but I believe that this truly is the next generation of that. And to do that, service providers need tools to help them hit that top line or reduce costs, and keep customers very happy. And I can’t think of a better person to have this discussion than Jeff from Salesforce. Jeff, welcome to the Six Five.

Jeff Amann:
Great to be here. Thanks for having me here with the Six Five. Great to see you, Patrick and Daniel.

Patrick Moorhead:
Yeah, it was. I really, really enjoyed our green room discussion. Right. With all this forestry around it, I guess it kind of is the green room.

Daniel Newman:
Yeah, I mean, let’s call it what it is. Salesforce has the coolest booth at MWC. And by booth it’s this outside garden experience. Here in Barcelona, obviously the weather’s kind of been hit and miss since we’ve come here, but today it’s a beautiful day. Energy’s out here. You can see people talking. I couldn’t get a coffee, the line was so long. But it also kind of goes back to what I was saying about these enterprise companies like Salesforce that have built these deeply capable, vertically integrated software stacks to serve this service provider, TOMS leader Telcos. These companies are looking for innovation. They’re looking for tools to get there. All right, you and I can keep talking. Let’s get Jeff involved. You know, you kind of heard our preamble, Jeff, and you know, this industry is challenged. It’s not been as easy as, say, the hyperscalers to drive revenue, but you’re here, you’re driving industries for all of Salesforce, not just comms, all of them. But you came when we talked, a lot of enthusiasm. Talk about the challenges that you’re sort of seeing for these service providers and comms companies that you’re working with here.

Jeff Amann:
Yeah, thanks. It is a tough time for telecommunications companies and across multiple vectors. So growth is a big challenge. Whether you believe the stats that say it’s going to grow at 1% or 2%, neither answer is very good.

Daniel Newman:
Slow me down.

Jeff Amann:
And of course, customers are very finicky, so we’ve trained them to make changes and to not expect loyalty. And that’s not a great thing in business. If your customers don’t expect to have a relationship with you, that something’s wrong. Also highly competitive, of course, a very fragmented market with new entrants who disrupt not just individual offerings, but they disrupt with new business models. So the existing players have to stay on their toes. And of course, the regulatory environment is three dimensional, especially for the global providers. And it gets more complex by the minute. So it’s kind of hard to necessarily figure out where do you go from here, how do you stay within those boundaries? And then I think last but not least, which is the biggest challenge. But thankfully, I think help is on the way. And I’m sure we’re going to talk about that. Data. There’s so much data about customers and about offerings that exist in this industry, but it’s stuck in these dark corners of the businesses, trapped in hundreds or thousands of systems and not usable. And it’s one of the things that this industry really needs to learn how to do better. And we can help with that.

Patrick Moorhead:
Yeah, I mean, boy, a lot of things packed in that. So essentially whether it’s driving the revenue, like you said, in this industry, customer service is somewhat viewed by consumers as an oxymoron. We also have multiple generations where they want different ways to interact with companies. Maybe it’s through chat, maybe it’s through online as opposed to getting on the phone. But the fact is we have five or six generations of people who they have to serve and they need to serve all of them in the way that they feel most comfortable doing.

Jeff Amann:
Agreed. Keep the customers where they are.

Patrick Moorhead:
No, totally. And as people are not necessarily living longer, but as people who have access to the service. You know, I mean, eight year olds with cell phones, I know they’re not doing the interacting. So I want to talk specifically though, how Agentic AI, it’s more than a buzzword. It’s activation beyond a chatbot. It’s doing things for you. How is Agentic AI helping to solve some of the challenges that you outlined?

Jeff Amann:
That’s a great question. I think when you think about what these customers of ours, the telco companies need, they need to be able to harness that data first off. So get it out of those dusty corners that I mentioned and be able to start to access it and use it.

Patrick Moorhead:
And is that in Data Cloud?

Jeff Amann:
That’s in the Data Cloud. So we have a product called Data Cloud that helps do that. So wherever that data exists doesn’t have to be moved to our system. It can stay where it is. It never gets copied. An ETL List and its wonderful product that really helps bring that data into the flow of work. And then once it’s there, that’s when you can start to do Agentic things to it. So suddenly now you’ve got the right data, you understand what that customer is up to, you can then connect it to that business process and actually start to turn the wheel around a little bit where you can be able to provide a personalized service to a customer. So we talked about, you know, customer satisfaction. Now you know that customer, right? So you can start to approach them in more of a personalized way, which does drive that loyalty. But you can also do things leveraging what we call Agent Force, which is a very easy to use AI powered digital labor platform, and allow for transactions to occur, allow for interactions to occur either assistive-ly or autonomously that are driven by that data. And then last but not least for us, we have a product called Communications Cloud. And Communications Cloud has been around for a very long time. Communications Cloud basically transforms the Salesforce Customer360 into a communication specific product.

So communications specific data models, communication specific libraries of business processes and best practices, and then communication specifically specific features and functions that are very, very powerful that matches up super well with what the AI needs are. Because you can have digital labor, that’s a step in the right direction. But if that digital labor can also be an industry expert and can understand what you’re trying to do, can understand and see the data that will help you do it right, and then can put that work into that moment when you’re interacting with the customer in whatever mode you’re in, whether they’re in your store or they’re online or they’re viewing social media, you can interact with them and make a difference in that moment. And that’s the kind of stuff that drives customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Patrick Moorhead:
Right.

Jeff Amann:
And it also can drive additional revenues because now you’re engaging with them and you’re able to offer them things that they’re interested in buying and then they want to keep buying from you. Happy customers buy more. And so not only can you sell them more, but you can also retain the customers that you do have. So the lowering of churn is another way to help that growth factor. So you can drive your revenues up. And with Communications Cloud, we on average increase our customers revenue by 30%. So 30%. And that’s even before the AI stuff is applied, which is pretty amazing. So we actually now have a hundred communications customers using Agent Force. 40 of them are already live. Bell Canada spoke yesterday about their B2B quoting agent, which is really powerful. So it’s real. And increasing revenues, decreasing cost because of the effectiveness, increasing loyalty, decreasing churn. That’s a winning formula. And suddenly those obstacles that I mentioned up front are no longer obstacles, they’re actually tailwinds, helping you grow your business. And that’s really what these companies need to go from the 1 to 2% growth to something that might be much, much higher than that.

Daniel Newman:
Well, I mean, 30% is, you know, anywhere from 15 to 30 times faster than what you’re suggesting. I mean, that would have to be, those would have to be winning case studies. The company has bet extremely big Salesforce on this Agentic pivot. You know, you’d almost argue the way it’s being marketed right now. And of course, you listen to your CEO Marc Benioff talk about this in public. I mean, he believes agents are the future. He’s gone all in on it. I’m pretty sure most of the branding around here at MWC is actually Agent Force, almost the next era of the company. And of course you suggested something that I think we found and we’ve done a lot of research on this too, but I call it prune to grow. So this is an industry, this first step in the value of Assistive AI and Agentic AI is going to be about the efficiencies. And I’m always really careful to say that because if you say it the wrong way, it sounds like companies are trying to cut their way to growth. And we know in the long term that never works. Having said that though, there’s a ton of efficiencies that come out of AI. Agentic AI, I think we’ve mapped about 4 trillion or even more of potential cost savings across the global economy. And then once you start to kind of find that optimization, you can accelerate productivity a bit. I’m just kind of curious, in your take, with all that in mind and everything else you’re seeing, kind of how are you thinking? Like, how are organizations at large thinking about the opportunity of Agentic and Assistive? Is it primarily about economies of scale right now and efficiencies, or are you really starting to see productivity really come into it? How are you seeing this more broadly?

Jeff Amann:
Another great question. So I think our customers do see the power of that. Mark, as you mentioned, is a true visionary here and really is understood for not just the last couple of years, but for 10 years now, the power of AI in the workplace, especially as what enterprise software can do with AI to benefit customers. So we’ve been at this game for a long time. Now with Agent Force, we’re making it just a lot easier for companies to actually do that. And the way that they’re approaching it is to say, okay, now I can start to gather my data, I can understand the contours of my business, I can start to use that in my business, I can start to create those interactions with my customers and drive more of that loyalty, satisfaction, increased revenue, et cetera. And how do I do that? Well, what they think about is less about the division between what’s assistive or what’s autonomous because I don’t think they’re really. Many of them aren’t necessarily ready for the autonomous system quite yet, but they’re starting to think about the tasks that they do today that really aren’t fit for humans. They might be very, very repetitive, they might have very base analysis that’s required, but time consuming analysis. So a human doesn’t do as good of a job as a computer. And furthermore, a human doesn’t actually love doing those things. They don’t love looking at policies while a customer is on hold and trying to answer these questions. They would much rather have a machine do that for them. So they’re picking those use cases where AI can solve that problem. And that’s how they’re thinking of efficiency today, which is I’m wasting precious energy of my people doing this very manual rote task. And if I could somehow offload that to a machine now my people can be super users, they can do much more effective things, the things that they can really excel at and I can upskill my team, I can make them more effective, they can do more of the high touch things that really help them grow the business. And meanwhile the machines do all the dirty work and then the results of that dirty work can be fed right back to that person.

So it’s like a little angel on the shoulder as they’re sitting there interacting with that customer. They now have this insight and this ability that they did not have before. And meanwhile the customer experience is so much better because they’re not being put on hold, they’re not having to explain who they are and try to explain what the problem is. And then they’re not trying to digest a bunch of stuff that doesn’t actually matter to them, they’re being given the things that do move the needle for them as customers. And it’s all happening very, very quickly. And that’s what really can drive some of that customer satisfaction, loyalty, increase revenue stuff that I mentioned earlier. And over time. I think what will happen is that as companies understand that the work that they’ve offloaded to the digital worker, especially if that digital worker is an industry expert by dint of using our Communications Cloud technology that now can be trusted. And speaking of trust, we have a trust layer built into Agent Force which is important for telecommunications companies to understand because of those regulatory complexities that I mentioned earlier. That digital worker has the guardrails,, has the guidelines, has the governance that a person would have. So now eventually that digital worker will be allowed to do more on its own. And I think that’s how we’ll pivot to be more autonomous, which will unlock even more efficiencies. But I think for a while now, there’s going to be a really good partnership between the assistive and the autonomous and an evolution to that continuing to grow and those benefits coming even higher.

Daniel Newman:
Pat, it does, it does feel like we finally got what our PA had promised to be for a long time. It was such a letdown though. It feels like we’re kind of there.

Patrick Moorhead:
Well, it was. And you know, the early agents, I know, you’ve got a lot of impressive spec, you know, data for how many queries it was getting, it wasn’t activating and doing things with the highest degree of confidence. And this is where agents come in and really fulfill what I think we all thought AI would be. And for what it’s worth on this assistive versus digital labor, I mean, I think historically I’ve seen a lot of transitions and whether it was from mainframe to mini, mini to client server, PC revolution, social, local, mobile, and this rebalancing of work, I feel like this is the most thoughtful transition of tech I’ve ever been a part of.

Daniel Newman:
You’re aging yourself though.

Patrick Moorhead:
Well, it wasn’t even thought about.

Jeff Amann:
You’re aging me too.

Patrick Moorhead:
Yeah, I mean it wasn’t even thought about before. It’s like, hey, we’re getting rid of jobs. This is great, you know, so..

Daniel Newman:
We’re not talking about the typewriter.

Patrick Moorhead:
No, exactly. Listen, that was even beyond me. I’m not even. I didn’t even take typing classes. But, anyways, I did want to talk and we’ve done a lot of research on this. In fact, I feel like I’m standing in front of CTOs and boards of directors. What’s holding back AI? But I want to ask you, what are you hearing from your customer? What’s holding them back from getting into Agentic AI?

Jeff Amann:
Yeah, at the beginning I think it was general fear and paranoia of AI:
that subsided. Now people, I think, understand that it can be powerful, but then how to make it powerful is still a question mark in a lot of customers’ minds. I would say there’s probably three things that come to mind on that. First is the data, the all important data. How do we feed the beast?

Patrick Moorhead:
Great answer.

Jeff Amann:
What does AI consume? Yeah. And of course, you know, when you get the data right, that unlocks a lot of potential and that’s why Data Cloud is so powerful. Working with Agent Force for us. Then, I think we talked about trust, but I would say that’s another headwind people don’t necessarily understand. Will this thing go off the rails? Can I rely on that information? Is it going to get me in trouble? And fortunately, we’ve thought so much about that in our 10 years of AI and our 25 years of existence as a company is our number one corporate value. So we get it. And we’ve baked trust into everything we’ve done in Data Cloud, everything we’ve done with Agent Force and everything we’ve done with the Communications Cloud. So I think it’s a safe place for customers to come and use AI. But it is still something that they want to see. They’re very afraid of that.

Patrick Moorhead:
Part of that is results. Right. What you said is part of that is getting what they can trust.

Jeff Amann:
That’s right. That’s right. And trust can also mean a lot of things. It can be regulatory trust, but it can also be trust and accuracy of outcomes. Is it doing the right thing? So, yeah, they need to see it working as well. So that’s important. Probably the third thing I would cite is talent. I think people have been thinking a lot about, boy, I have to go hire a whole staff of PhDs if I want to use AI in my enterprise. And that’s really not true. So especially if you have the right partner, which I would say we are. That you don’t have to do that. In fact, Agent Force is so easy to use that I’m not a computer scientist and I’ve built many agents. I think we have a booth here where anybody can walk in and build an agent. It’s actually pretty cool. You can’t believe how easy it is and how powerful that agent can be. And I think that’s helping our customers understand we don’t need to go build a new talent pool. We just need the right partner. But I would say those are the three big impediments. But I think those are also rapidly evaporating as our customers start to understand that these are things that we can deliver on.

Daniel Newman:
Our research showed by orders of magnitude Agent Force versus kind of the DIY, it’s substantial in terms of getting things up and going. But you guys also kind of went through that transition. Jeff, I mean, you were a company. I remember Einstein in the initial days. You know, Mark said you’re going to have an AI in your boardroom, you know, maybe get rid of your board of directors, possibly, but, but I mean it wasn’t all easy sledding. I mean there’s been friction and it seems like you’ve sort of persisted through, removed the friction, made it accessible. And to your point, those barriers are lower. But you do make a lot of great points about why it’s probably more augmentation than pure autonomy at this point. But we will get there. I really do believe that.

Jeff Amann:
It’s some use cases, I think it’s still augmentation for a while.

Daniel Newman:
Yeah.

Jeff Amann:
But for sure, you know, even the most complex use cases will evolve to be autonomous. And by the way, it’s also possible to do relatively simple things to get going, which I think is something that people should think about what the first step in that journey is.

Daniel Newman:
Eat the elephant a bite at a time, as they like to say. So we only got, we got about a minute left. Just really kind of quickly. I’d love to get like your overall, what are your big exciting innovations for the Salesforce Communications Cloud that will be coming over the next year?

Jeff Amann:
I’m really excited about the Communications Cloud. It’s one of our biggest and fastest growing clouds that we have in the industries’ team. So we have 15 different industries in our portfolio and Communications Cloud, like I said, one of the largest, one of the fastest growing and it’s going to be a breakout year for Communications Cloud and there’s a few things that I’ll share with you. So first off on the AI front, we’re not just leaving it to our communications customers or any of our other industries customers to use Agent Force and figure that out for themselves. We’re actually pre-building agents for them. So you’re going to see things coming out of the Communications Cloud team that will attack some of these amazing sales use cases, amazing service use cases or also linking the two things together. So agentically selling, agentically serving and agentically selling more through the service and that will be out of the box. Working with Agent Force, working with Data Cloud and leveraging all those Communications Cloud assets that exist to tune it to very, very specific use cases that our communications customers need and of course all of our other industries customers as well.

That’s a huge innovation. And that’s going to make the time to value even greater for even the most complex use cases. That’s very, very exciting. The other thing that I would say is that we’ve been doing with Communications Cloud, we’ve been moving it to core. It had been because I was a co-founder of Velocity with David Schmeier, our chief product officer. That product was built as a managed package. It worked great. We’re taking all that now and moving it to the core, which sounds kind of like boring and maybe back office-y, but the unlocking of that is substantial because now all that functionality will exist on the core. And so the performance and scalability that we get out of operating in Core and also the interoperability with the other applications that our customers run are much more seamless, the cost to deploy much lower. So we’ve been working on that for a couple of years, sort of in the back room and that’s now hitting the market. So our customers, the ones here that are processing very large B2B quotes or high volumes of B2C transactions, are going to have no limits on what they can do on our product, which is fantastic and very quick and very, very efficient computing.

The other thing that we’re working on is making it easy for telecommunications companies to use Communications Cloud. We have won a number of awards with TM Forum, so we’re one of the top gold level certifications we’ve had. We’ve also won AI Innovation awards the last four years in a row. And so we want to make sure that we are following those standards and imbuing our products with them so that our customers have a very easy time connecting with third party systems, third party data sources, whether it’s with Agent Force or not, making sure that that’s something that’s very easy, easy for them to do. That’s also a very important thing. And then last thing I would mention is our overall digital experience. So what we’re continuing to expand the field of service that we can provide to telecommunications companies. To date we’ve been very middle office focused. So CPQ, EPC, order orchestration and now we’re really expanding into the service arena. So service transfer transformations as well as field service. We have a great partnership with Salesforce Field Service. So we’re attacking some of these use cases that can drive value beyond just the mid office for these communications. And you’ll see some new products coming out that will hit those head on and it’d be very, very exciting.

Patrick Moorhead:
Right.

Daniel Newman:
Well Jeff, that’s a great preview. He didn’t break the news, but I sense that there’s a lot of great things coming. Thanks so much for joining us. First time on the show, hopefully not the last time.

Jeff Amann:
I’d love to be on again.

Daniel Newman:
Thanks for joining and thank you everybody for being part of the Six Five On The Road. We’re here in beautiful Barcelona, Spain, at MWC 2025 in the Salesforce Garden. Hit subscribe. Join us for all of the great coverage we have here at Mobile World Congress. And of course, be part of the Six Five community each and every day. But for this show, for this episode, for Patrick Moorhead and myself, it’s time to say goodbye. See you all later.