Salesforce Builds the Business Case for AI Coworkers
Shared by John Foley from Cloud Database Report · November 8, 2026
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Welcome to the Cloud Database Report. I’m John Foley, a long-time tech journalist who also worked in strategic comms at Oracle, IBM, and MongoDB. Connect with me on LinkedIn [ https://substack.com/redirect/e0b07301-1462-41f8-9d63-c6a81d194ce2?j=eyJ1IjoiMTR3eXB3In0.f-xldB9G03IXstk7BAMCqX62DEM2cFHI5JhVsvW8cAA ]. This article has been sponsored by Salesforce.
AI teammate as native capability
As agentic AI advances in the workplace, two lingering questions continue to force business and tech leaders to tap the brakes before speeding ahead.
One, what is the business case? And two, what are the potential risks?
Those gating issues won’t disappear anytime soon, but we’re beginning to see how organizations can put agentic AI into the hands of more employees with immediate customer impact. And they can do so with the policies and guardrails they already have in place, so they’re not starting at square one.
Getting strategy and implementation right, and quickly, is critical because agentic AI adoption is on a sharp incline. In a recent survey, McKinsey found [ https://substack.com/redirect/34e06f09-6512-493f-bcea-f99ebb24f74b?j=eyJ1IjoiMTR3eXB3In0.f-xldB9G03IXstk7BAMCqX62DEM2cFHI5JhVsvW8cAA ] that 40% of large enterprises are scaling AI agents, up from 27% last year.
One way CIOs, CTOs, and chief customer & experience officers are converting agentic AI’s potential into “IRL” results is with an emerging generation of AI coworkers, AI-driven digital colleagues that work in concert with human employees, automating tasks and working autonomously to get things done.
AI coworkers go beyond a chatbot’s query and response or an AI copilot’s ability to summarize a document or draft an email. AI coworkers are able to execute multistep workflows and tasks across applications and devices. Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, ServiceNow, and Snowflake have all introduced them.
So has Salesforce, which has been at the forefront of agentic AI development, as I’ve been covering since Agentforce was first launched [ https://substack.com/redirect/4333fd5f-9c10-4472-8bb4-74cc70d20915?j=eyJ1IjoiMTR3eXB3In0.f-xldB9G03IXstk7BAMCqX62DEM2cFHI5JhVsvW8cAA ]. Earlier this year, Salesforce introduced Agentforce Coworker, an “AI teammate” that’s available natively in Salesforce and as an integrated capability in a growing number of the apps people use in the workplace every day.
Agentforce Coworker will become available this month in Microsoft Teams and as a desktop app for Mac and Windows, according to Salesforce. Also this month: It will become available as an iPhone app.
Up and running in minutes
I got a demo of Agentforce Coworker from Rohit Kapoor, Salesforce VP of Product Management for Search, AI, and Data 360. That overarching responsibility is noteworthy because it helps explain Coworker’s ability to discover, retrieve, and act on data, both within Salesforce and elsewhere.
Coworker is available directly through the search bar in Salesforce, and the full experience can be launched from an “Ask” button that’s adjacent to the search bar. Users are up and running in minutes. “It’s extremely easy to get started,” says Kapoor.
Improved productivity, engagement, efficiency
Agentforce Coworker may indeed be simple, fast, and easy to deploy and use, but we also know that business execs want to see proof points before green-lighting agentic AI deployments. For that, nothing’s better than real-world case studies.
Salesforce customer Fulton Bank has deployed more than 20 Agentforce Coworker use cases, supporting approximately 3,000 users. On the company’s Q3 2026 earnings call [ https://substack.com/redirect/33b0e91a-d332-4814-84da-49a49641ec4d?j=eyJ1IjoiMTR3eXB3In0.f-xldB9G03IXstk7BAMCqX62DEM2cFHI5JhVsvW8cAA ], Curt Myers, Chairman, CEO, and President of parent company Fulton Financial, credited those initiatives with contributing to process improvements that are helping serve customers more effectively and driving “meaningful” efficiency gains.
“We’ve expanded the use of Salesforce AI-enabled capabilities across the organization, powered by Coworker,” Myers said on the call. “These investments and enhanced usage are helping improve productivity, customer engagement, and support our long-term efficiency objectives.”
That’s a compelling reality check. Other early adopters include The Adecco Group, Accenture, and BACA Systems. All told, more than 185,000 users now use Agentforce Coworker, according to Salesforce. And usage is growing 2.8 times per month, or 21x over three months.
One reason for the fast growth, Kapoor explains, is that as organizations deploy more and more AI agents, employees are finding it difficult to actually use them all. Agentforce Coworker helps solve that problem by delegating next steps to the appropriate agents.
Another factor driving adoption: Because Agentforce Coworker is informed with business context (i.e. customer relationships, metadata, data sources) and can take action on a user’s behalf, employees are able to shift into a new way of working almost immediately.
Salesforce is introducing flat rate pricing of $50 per user per month for Agentforce Coworker. That pricing model should help make the investment easier to evaluate and control.
Key principles: context, action, headless
What makes Agentforce Coworker different from chatbots and copilots?
Multi-agent orchestration, the ability to coordinate specialized agents, is a key differentiator. Agentforce Coworker helps avoid agentic sprawl by coordinating agents, flows, APIs, and business actions to complete multistep work. In the words of Kapoor, it auto delegates.
Kapoor points to three basic principles:
Agentforce Coworker is aware of an organization’s and a user’s existing business context within Salesforce, which is how it can switch into action so quickly. A feature called Conversation History shares context from Salesforce to Microsoft and the iOS apps.
Agentforce Coworker can take action on behalf of a user and perform scheduled tasks in the background. Over time, it can even take over some of a user’s responsibilities, freeing them up for higher-value work.
Agentforce Coworker can be brought into other apps and surfaces through Salesforce’s headless architecture, which is underpinned by MCP servers that expose dozens of APIs. There’s also a new Coworker MCP server.
Taken together, those principles and capabilities like Conversation History and Skills make Agentforce Coworker smarter and more proactive. For example, employees can convert everyday work into reusable, repeatable Skills that can be shared, a net gain in productivity.
Importantly, businesses don’t need to start from scratch when it comes to governance and control. To get going, an administrator specifies which users and data can be accessed. Agentforce Coworker then automatically connects to existing customer data, metadata, permissions, and workflows.
New and next
Agentforce Coworker is available today in Salesforce and connects to data sources in Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. This month, it’s coming to Teams, iOS, Mac, and Windows.
Going forward, it will continue to show up in more places, with plans for Claude, ChatGPT, and more. “It’s being embedded where work happens,” says Kapoor.
In December, look for Agentforce Coworker for Salesforce’s Field Service, Consumer Goods Cloud, and Life Sciences Cloud mobile apps.
Additional capabilities are on the way. A forthcoming innovation called Daily Digest will proactively flag priorities as a kind of personalized brief, as illustrated below.
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