Obviously every Dreamforce is important, but Dreamforce 2025 is really a pivotal one for us.
Salesforce’s Chief Operating and Financial Officer (COFO) Robin Washington is in reflective mood during a catch-up at this week’s jamboree in San Francisco.
This year she’s attending Dreamforce in her capacity as the person responsible for balancing the books and keeping Wall Street, already giddy on an AI hype cycle sugar rush, on an even keel in terms of how it regards Salesforce. But in the COFO job description she’s also picked up operational responsibility for much of how Salesforce runs itself at a time when the firm has made a priority of being seen to be ‘Customer Zero’, AKA an organization that’s currently wolfing down a diet of its own agentic dog food on a regular basis!
So what’s her worldview then of where we’re at? When commenting, she speaks with great care - as she seemingly always does, which, let’s face it, is never a bad thing in a finance officer! - when she points out how far things have moved on since last year’s Dreamforce when the pivot around Agentforce dramatically took place:
I mean, this time last year, we had just GA-d Agentforce, and now we're here talking about the Agentic Enterprise and a very interconnected platform. More than that, all of our apps have been agentified and everything, so it's a major moment...We really are starting to see the flywheel going and [seeing] adoption. Even then, it's still very early, and we realize that. But the enthusiasm, the excitement of where we are today, it clearly is a moment.
On customer adoption of Agentforce, she goes on:
When we talk to customers, we know that CIOs are shifting where they spend budgets. We know that we're moving from discussions about AI to actual deployment of agents. We also know that [business] apps are driving the operationalization of AI. Why is that important? It's important because if you think about all the FUD out there about SaaS being dead, we believe it's a myth, and we believe it's a myth because of what we're seeing our customers do.
Priorities
Now that she’s settled into her COFO position, Washington has a three point to do list that she shares:
I've got three overall priorities. One is primarily growth, and the way that we're going to do that is to continue to focus on our customers success with acceleration and deployment of AI. That's number one.
But also we ourselves are focused on becoming an Agentic Enterprise, and I've added the word ‘Lean’ to Agentic Enterprise. How do we continue to scale profitably, focus on profitable growth, operational excellence? We’ve got a Lean Agentic Enterprise playbook that we're working through.
And then finally, shareholder return. Shareholder value is obviously very important to me in my role, and so we are strategically thinking about how we deploy capital. We've invested tremendously in our organic innovation, as you've seen over the last several years- $10 billion plus, to be specific.
What’s also true today is that less than half of those who have engaged with Agentforce are actually paying for it! That’s a situation that will clearly need to be addressed over time - how close that time is may yet depend on how quickly the ‘show us the AI money’ attention span of Wall Street short-termists runs out - but for now Washington is content to acknowledge that adopters are on a journey with agentic tech:
It takes time. When we talk about the Agentic Enterprise, we see our customers at early stages, with foundational customers kind of moving down the flywheel. But we really feel that we've got a great inflection point with growth.
She adds:
We're really seeing a shift relative to how AI and those budgets are being spent, and we're moving from [pilots] to true deployments. [We] now focus on really being able to talk about the stories of outcomes in a world of agents and humans working together...We’ve got multiple pricing models that are in place. Some are flex credits, where they're pre-paid, some are pay as you go. But that adoption is happening. The most important thing that we're honed in on is customer success. As we get those adoption cycles going, we get paid.
Bubble-bursting
But given that there are rival companies, who shall remain nameless, out there who are seeing their valuations soar to unfeasably dizzying heights on the back of the expectation among financial analysts that putative multi-trillion dollar pipelines of new AI business will result in hard cash in the bank in the near term, what does the clearly enormously pragmatic Washington make of speculation that the sector is heading for a dot com-style crash of epic proportions? As ever, she chooses her words precisely in response:
Thinking about the entire AI sector, from chips to data centers, there have been huge investments in building out LLMs (Large Language Models). I don't know if I'd call it an AI bubble. What I do believe is that this technology is fundamentally different than anything we've done before. It impacts everything and there are a lot of wholesale opportunities. When you have that type of opportunity, not everyone's going to win in this market, but we don't really see it as an AI bubble.
I interviewed an economist yesterday, and we were talking about the fact that any time you've seen this type of innovation, the ultimate productivity and economic impact that comes from it, even though there may be short term gyrations in terms of allocation of labor, they do provide huge productivity overall to economies. I think AI has the opportunity to do that.
Gyrating
On the subject of labor gyrations, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently attracted a rash of negative headlines in the tech and mainstream media when he seemingly announced on a podcast that the firm had laid off thousands of customer support people and replaced them with Agentforce bots. It was a carelessly-worded comment about a situation that in fact is considerably more nuanced than the idea of slashing headcount.
With her operational hat on, Washington elucidates:
AI impacts all of us, so it's causing us, it's forcing us, to re-think how we deploy people, how we enhance, re-skill, re-balance our resources. We really see AI as an enhancer. It's going to not only help us reduce cost and help us with cost avoidance, but most importantly, it's going to make our most critical assets, our employees, even better. That's really critical.
She goes on:
We, like all companies, have to make decisions about re-balancing skills, etc. not only with AI, but just with our continued organizational health. We’re always going to look at right sizing. We also are a performance-based culture, and we look at that as well. These are normal motions for any type of corporate organization, it's not specific to Salesforce - and not only across tech, but across the whole of industry. So I wouldn't attribute every move we've made only to AI.
I will, though say that with AI what we've been able to do with a lot of resources is re-allocate them to other areas. Let's take support. Instead of doing reactive support, we've been able to move to pro-active support. All the innovation that you're hearing about here [at Dreamforce], that takes resources, that takes people to support those products. So we've been able to re-allocate some of those resources to, for example, Forward Deployment Engineers for supporting new products. There's been cost avoidance there as well by us being able to re-allocate those resources.
AI is going to change the way we all work, she adds:
We all know it and understand it. The other thing that we've done is drilled in, not only for our employees, but for our Trailblazers in the whole Salesforce community, on giving access to skills training. Thinking about re-deploying, balancing, re-skilling, those are all things that are fundamentally important to our ecosystem.
That has career implications for anyone working at Salesforce:
We've trained everybody on creating agents, and we've got a lot of them out there, but we're honing in, like everyone else, in deciding what are the high value agents? For us now, there's about three and they're across our enterprise, working side-by-side with our employees on improving the employee experience, enabling our sellers, allowing us to better engage with our customers, and driving our operational efficiency.
My take
I was a big fan of former Salesforce CFO Amy Weaver and made clear my view upon her stepping down from the role that she would be much missed. I stand by that opinion, of course
But having had the chance to see Washington up close several times now, it’s clear that Benioff has chosen a worthy successor to step into the expanded role of COFO. Watching her present to a room full of financial analysts later in the day, she cut an impressive, in-charge-of-her-brief figure.
Even if I hadn’t come to that conclusion myself, a comment from Salesforce co-founder Parker Harris - whose views I’ve learned to hold in the highest regard over the past quarter of a century - would have caught my attention as he said of Washington’s presentation to investors:
I've never seen clearer slides around our financials than from Robin...I think our model has always been confusing to many [financial analysts]. It’s a recurring revenue model, and some of what you see is like from a distant star and we're seeing the future. We're trying to kind of explain that and show you where we are in time, as well as projecting out. And I think Robin has really led that a lot.
October 15, 2025
