With the launch of Agentforce Voice, Salesforce is entering a new stage of customer engagement through AI. The company announced the feature ahead of Dreamforce conference, taking place in San Francisco, which gives companies an option to interact with their customers beyond the text-based chat interface to AI solutions that sound more natural through voice.

Agentforce Voice enables companies to customize the voice of their agents. They can change tone, speed, and how the AI pronounces certain words in order to create a more natural and human-sounding experience. It will also allow customers to interject during scripting in order to have a smoother conversation flow.

Voice: The Next Frontier in Generative AI

When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, the generative AI explosion had primarily focused on text generation, but voice has emerged as the next big frontier in the last year. OpenAI has introduced partners that enable the AI to converse naturally rather than robotically, like Anthropic. Business platforms such as Salesforce are also now bringing similar experiences into customer service applications.

Agentforce Voice will partner with major corporate phone systems, including Amazon Connect, Five9, Genesys, NICE, and Maven’s Vonage. This partnership will allow businesses to harness AI-powered voice support capabilities to augment their existing communication while not having to overhaul all of the internal telephony infrastructure.

Competition Heats Up in AI Voice Market

What’s notable is that Salesforce is not the only company pursuing this goal. Bret Taylor, Salesforce’s former co-CEO, co-founded a startup called Sierra in 2023 that has already built AI agents that can generate phone calls. Sierra has a customer list that includes ADT, SiriusXM, and SoFi, and it is allegedly worth around $10 billion.

As more players come into the space, AI customer engagement is quickly shifting from a fun experiment to an everyday business use case. The goal has shifted from just automating a response to generating digital conversations that sound human.

Navigating Investor Pressure and AI Disruption

Despite these innovations, Salesforce has faced challenges in 2025. The company’s stock has dropped about 28 percent this year, even as the Nasdaq index has gained around 15 percent. Investors worry that the rise of generative AI could reduce the need for traditional software, especially as AI tools become capable of handling coding and customer support independently.

Anthropic recently demonstrated that its Claude Sonnet 4.5 model could build a chat app similar to Salesforce’s Slack in just 30 hours. Salesforce acknowledged in its earnings report that new AI products could disrupt workforce needs and affect demand for its existing software.

Still, CEO Marc Benioff remains confident. In a recent interview with CNBC, he said that change in business is rarely sudden or destructive. “Business is incremental, it’s evolutionary, it’s growing, it’s evolving,” he explained, downplaying the idea that AI could entirely upend the company.

What’s Next for Salesforce

Agentforce, launched last year, has already been implemented more than 12,000 times. However, some analysts believe adoption has been slower than expected. RBC Capital Markets recently noted that investor enthusiasm for Agentforce has cooled.

Looking ahead, Salesforce plans to offer early access in November to another tool called Agent Script. This will allow organizations to customize what AI agents say and how they respond, giving companies even greater control over their virtual representatives.