AI-powered martech news and releases: September 19

This is the second year that Salesforce’s Dreamforce and HubSpot’s Inbound conferences happened in the same week. That is, unless you ask Google’s Gemini, which told me 2024 is the first time. This is ironic and/or funny given the “AI is everything” theme of both conferences. The word from both events is agents, and that is not a euphemism for bots. Agents are autonomous tools that perform complex tasks without human intervention. Agents are the next big thing and may deliver all the promises made about AI. Both HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said so, and they know a lot about this. Shah said agents will soon be as ubiquitous and widely used as apps. Benioff went further, dedicating his company to them: “The only thing we’re going to do at Salesforce is Agentforce.” I’m attending Inbound, and Shah’s explanation of HubSpot’s agent builder made it look very easy to use. I would be astonished if the same isn’t true for Salesforce’s creation tool. I look forward to putting them both to the test.