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Artificial Intelligence

Salesforce Announces Huge AI Initiative and Calls It ‘Headless 360’

Skateboarders, don’t get any ideas.
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A boneless 360 is kind of a high-effort, low-reward skateboarding trick—a variation on an iconic move from 80s skateboarding that doesn’t actually look very cool in modern street skating, even though pulling it off is hard.

A “Headless 360” is, perhaps, if your head fell off while doing a boneless 360, which is not inconceivable.

It’s also Salesforce’s newly announced initiative to mash agentic AI into every corner of its product.

According to VentureBeat, whose reporter Michael Nuñez reported on the announcement of Headless 360 from the TDX developer conference, Salesforce sounds like it’s attempting something one must admit is pretty ambitious:

[The announcement of Headless 360] ships more than 100 new tools and skills immediately available to developers. It marks a decisive response to the existential question hanging over enterprise software: In a world where AI agents can reason, plan, and execute, does a company still need a CRM [Customer Relationship Management system] with a graphical interface?

Salesforce’s answer: No — and that’s exactly the point.

Last year, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff claimed 30% to 50% of the work within Salesforce was being done by AI, and said, “All of us have to get our head around this idea that AI could do things that before, we were doing, and we can move on to do higher value work.” Judging from the name, it seems they’ve not only gotten their heads around it; they’ve twisted them 360 degrees, and they’ve tragically fallen off.

To a large extent, Salesforce is supposed to automate businesses’ relationships with their customers—tracking what they’re doing, and timing and executing follow up interactions. With Headless 360, it sounds like they want users to be able to take their hands off the wheel completely—sign up for Salesforce, and then, in theory, literally never log in again.

Remember, Salesforce was one of the companies whose values dipped amid the SaaSpocalypse scare back in February. They are in a defensive position, making an argument for themselves as something that should continue to exist. Figuring out a way to use present-day AI across your entire flagship product does seem, in the short term, like a pretty high-effort maneuver. Let’s see if it’s also high-reward.

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