The agentic age: a new frontier for AI and humans

FOR THE PAST YEAR, I’VE BEEN RUNNING SALES- force with a colleague who never sleeps, never takes vacations, and has read more than I could in 100 lifetimes. On a typical day, sitting with a few executives around the table, I’ll ask it to evaluate a competitor's moves, refine a keynote draft, or surface strategic blind spots we might have missed.

- BY MARC BENIOFF

This colleague is my AI agent, and we work together constantly. Sometimes it surprises me. Sometimes it challenges me. Sometimes, like all of us, it makes a mistake. But always, it expands what I can see and do.

We are at the beginning of the agentic era, the most significant transformation of work in history. For the first time, machines can perform not only repetitive tasks, but also cognitive work once reserved for humans. These AI agents—which can reason, adapt, and act on their own—are already reshaping thousands of companies and will ultimately touch every job and every person.

As the CEO of a technology company that helps customers deploy AI to unlock new levels of performance and decisionmaking, I believe this revolutionary technology can usher in extraordinary economic growth and entrepreneurship, while also creating significant new opportunities to improve health care, education, and quality of life.

The potential is so vast that some of my peers look at this trajectory and predict we’re approaching a milestone called artificial general intelligence, where AI begins to match, or even exceed, human intelligence. The implication is that while enabling leaps forward in every aspect of our lives, AI could eventually render human intelligence obsolete.

There I disagree. Large language models (LLMs) are extraordinary. But they’re already brushing against some of their upper limits. The biggest advances will come from AI agents that harness the power of LLMs and data to deeply understand a business and drive outcomes.