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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Leading companies increased AI agent adoption by 119% in the first half of 2025.
- Employee interactions with AI agents grew at an average monthly rate of 65%.
- Retail saw AI and agent actions grow at a monthly average rate of 128%.
AI agent creation among first-mover companies surged 119% between January and June of 2025, with service organizations leading the adoption of agents, with the average number of customer service conversations led by an agent growing 22 times in the first half of 2025, according to Salesforce’s Agentic Enterprise Index.
Salesforce analyzed and aggregated usage data using its own AI products to uncover the story of agents in the workforce. Looking at trends over the past six months, the Salesforce Agentic Enterprise Index analyzes the activity and engagement of businesses using AI agents to boost productivity.
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Additional data was sourced from Salesforce’s global proprietary research studies, totaling more than 2,000 responses. A global survey of over 6,500 service professionals revealed that by 2027, 50% of service cases are expected to be resolved by AI. Let’s find out more.
What is an agentic enterprise?
An agentic enterprise refers to an organization that uses autonomous AI agents to drive and execute business processes. These AI systems can act independently, adapt to changing situations, and make decisions without constant human supervision.
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The agentic enterprise represents a significant leap beyond earlier forms of AI, which were limited to predictive analytics (recommending a next action) or generative AI (creating content from a prompt).
The key characteristics of the agentic enterprise include:
- Autonomous action: Instead of just following pre-set rules, agentic AI agents can reason, plan, and take a sequence of steps to achieve a complex business goal.
- Continuous learning: Agentic systems learn from their environment and from past interactions. They can receive feedback, adapt their strategies, and continuously improve their performance over time.
- Goal-oriented: An enterprise user can give an agent a high-level objective, such as “resolve this service case” or “increase brand engagement in a specific market.” The agent then breaks down the complex task and executes the necessary steps.
- Integration with enterprise systems: AI agents can interact with enterprise data and systems to execute actions. This approach allows them to perform complex, multi-step workflows across an organization.
- Human augmentation: Agentic AI is designed to work collaboratively with human employees, freeing them from repetitive tasks so they can focus on high-value, strategic work that requires a human touch.
Agentic Enterprise Index: Key findings
The index revealed some interesting statistics regarding employee interactions with AI agents. In the first half of 2025, there was a significant increase in these interactions, with an average monthly growth rate of 65%.
Furthermore, employees are engaging in more sustained conversations with AI agents. This is evidenced by a 76% average monthly growth rate in agent actions stemming from employee conversations during the same period. Additionally, the number of actions completed by agents across use cases grew at an average rate of 80% month-over-month.
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The index highlighted another key aspect of employee use of AI agents: richer and more ongoing conversations, which resulted in a positive impact on productivity and satisfaction.
In the first half of 2025, employee interactions with AI agents grew at an average monthly rate of 65%. This engagement is also deepening, with the average volume of back-and-forth employee-agent conversations increasing by 35% in the past quarter. Furthermore, the volume of agent actions triggered by employee engagement grew at an average month-over-month rate of 76% across the first half of 2025.
Beyond AI agents, global worker adoption of AI has surged by 233% since fall of 2024, according to Salesforce’s latest Workforce Index. The report also indicates that workers who use AI daily are:
- 64% more likely to report very good productivity.
- 58% more likely to report very good focus.
- 81% more likely to report very good job satisfaction.
These results are compared with those of colleagues who do not use AI.
The top three most popular use cases for AI agents are customer service, internal business automation, and sales. In sales, drafting and sending emails is the most common agent action, followed by developing to-dos and scheduling meetings.
In the 2025 State of Service report, the most common use cases for service organizations included customer FAQs, order inquiries, conversation summaries, knowledge retrieval for reps, and personalized product recommendations. The index validated the report by adding querying and identifying service records, drafting and scheduling outreach, and follow-up emails as key use cases.
The impact of agents on customers
Consumers are increasingly embracing AI agents, with 94% opting to interact with them when given the choice. However, this usage doesn’t diminish the role of human representatives.
Businesses are effectively balancing the capabilities of both, using AI agents for initial contact and common inquiries, while human agents focus on more complex issues. In fact, Salesforce has observed an increase in escalations to human representatives, from 22% in Q1 2025 to 32% in Q2 2025. This rise indicates an improvement in AI agents’ ability to identify when a human touch is necessary and efficiently route customers to the appropriate experts.
The Agentic Enterprise Index suggests consumer-facing industries, such as retail, travel, hospitality, and financial services, are the top adopters of AI agents. Travel and hospitality saw AI and agent actions grow at a monthly average rate of 133% in the first half of 2025. Retail saw AI and agent actions grow at a monthly average rate of 128% in the first half of 2025, while financial services saw AI and agent actions grow at a monthly average rate of 105% in the same period.
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The Agentic Enterprise Index highlighted improved customer experiences as more consumers engage with AI agents. On average, 94% of consumers opted into agent interactions. The use of AI agents in customer service is exploding. Customer service conversations with AI agents saw a six-month compound annual growth rate of 2,199% for the average business. Salesforce’s survey revealed that nearly 60% of consumers who regularly engage with customer service AI agents feel the tech has become more helpful over the past year.
The Agentic Enterprise Index by Salesforce validates the perception that AI agents can help businesses remove wasteful activities. Through revenue growth and cost savings, agentic AI presents a $450bn opportunity by 2028.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, AI is a top priority for CEOs, with 79% believing it will impact their industry in the next three years. The AI agent adoption trends highlighted in the Agentic Enterprise Index validate the importance and business priority of AI agent adoption.