SAN FRANCISCO -- While Salesforce used its annual Dreamforce conference to tout autonomous bots, autonomous agents are already on the ground in the form of self-driving taxis giving rides to humans brave enough to trust them -- including me.
Google's Waymo set free its all-electric self-driving taxis in San Francisco last June and plans to scale operations to other U.S. cities including Austin and Atlanta. Each white Waymo-branded Jaguar has sci-fi-looking spinners hanging off the car's front, rear and sides, and creepy scanner beacons on top. They look like a Jaguar hatchback version of Star Wars Imperial Stormtroopers. Or Doctor Who Daleks.
Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff mentioned Waymo in his Dreamforce keynote, connecting it to autonomous Agentforce AI, the flagship product release of this year's user conference. He asked for a show of hands of how many attendees had already ridden in one. It wasn't many.
"Let me encourage you to put the Waymo app on your phone while you're here and call the car to come and pick you up, because it is a moment -- the first time you take a ride in an autonomous car," Benioff said.
"The reason I'm making that metaphor is very simple. Because the first time you build and deploy your first autonomous agent for your company -- that is going to help you to be more productive, to augment your employees' [work] and to get better business results -- you're going to remember that first time, like your first Waymo."
I'd seen Waymo cars mapping Phoenix in previous years. Fewer and farther between than the 'Frisco fleet, they looked much less peculiar.
The 2024 Waymos look meaner. I was certain if I were to ride in one, my face would get rearranged in an inevitable accident. Or I'd witness an accident like the one that led to GM pulling its Cruise robotaxis off the San Francisco streets and blame myself because it wouldn't have happened if I hadn't summoned the ride.
Despite the misgivings, my instincts told me to do it anyway. So, the next morning, I spoke into the AI abyss of the Waymo phone app and summoned a robotaxi. I told the app, "Hasten us to Moscone!" Four minutes later, a car showed up, with "DON" brightly shining in its roof beacon.
Waymo self-driving Jaguar robotaxis seemingly wait at every other stoplight in San Francisco, some of them three deep in line.
The AI experience
The first roller coaster I'd ridden was Space Mountain at Disney World in the mid-'70s. It was my dad's idea. The darkness, the noise and randomly flashing lights scared the absolute bejesus out of me. While the human brain is largely a mystery, there is no doubt in mine that there's a direct throughline between that wretched ride to what would evolve 20 years later into a legendary fear of flying that has, thankfully, since gone into remission.
The previous day, I'd enjoyed my Uber ride from the airport. I'd been reading The Mango Season, an Indian romance novel recommended by my worldly pal Dave, who'd felt I needed to learn more about Indian culture. Turns out, my Uber driver, Fnu, hailed from the Hyderabad region, near where the novel's events take place. I peppered him with questions about things in the book I couldn't grok -- the food, Indian politics, movies, family traditions, arranged marriages, everything -- and he enthusiastically explained it all. I think I learned more from Fnu than I had reading the book.
And here I was the next morning, trusting this soulless car. Texting my friends, saying, "God is my copilot," like the bumper stickers say, ironically because this thing was truly godless -- just software and steel. There was no small talk with the driver. It was too busy monitoring everything, 360 degrees. The experience was rather peaceful, with the car's perfectly precise piloting through traffic and absolutely no drama in our car -- gentle acceleration, easy braking. There were a lot of other intense people around me, in their cars, distracted with their phones, not seeing the joggers and cyclists in the dawn hour and swerving through lanes like it was a NASCAR track to be first in line to jackrabbit start at the next light.
Despite the Zen of Waymo, riding in a car with nobody behind the wheel felt more than a little weird. It had no spirit. No soul. I had no idea how the "driver" selected my route or how it altered as traffic data evolved. I gave my credit card number to a company I never talked to. I wanted to ask the car why it seemed to randomly switch lanes when there weren't any other cars around, but there was no one to explain.
That said, it was so relaxing not worrying about getting scammed because this out-of-towner doesn't have the street map memorized and a taxi driver, whoops, takes a circuitous route to pad his fee by $10. It was nice not hearing skull-grating music turned up a little too loud, dealing with odd smells or hearing weird religious programming coming out of the speakers. It was an unexpectedly significant stress reliever knowing that this driver would never get distracted by a phone text, Uber app notification, radio dispatch or random Dreamforce carnival barker en route to the conference.
But hold up. The self-driving taxi, as wonderful as it is inside -- even to this high-strung ball of fear and anxiety -- presents societal and ethical issues outside the vehicle.
Will.i.am, best known as the founder of the Black Eyed Peas, but who also is a futurist, technologist and very smart early investor in AI startups -- including OpenAI, Anthropic and Hugging Face -- sees problems with Waymo, which could eliminate jobs. Salesforce, he said, has the right idea with Agentforce's autonomous agents, because they require humans in the loop.
"As autonomous AI is unfolding, Waymo is going to maybe f--- s--- up for a lot of folks that depend on delivery jobs, bus driver jobs, commute jobs," he said. "But what I loved about Marc's [Agentforce keynote] is that he said, 'We're going to augment the workforce with AI.' It's not, 'We're the Waymo of enterprise,' right? That was the part I love -- that it's augmenting jobs, rather than it's going to be a whole new path. You still need humans."
I'm with him. While the Waymo ride was smooth, calming and even allowed me to stream my favorite Boston radio station through the app into the Jag's speaker system, it was a little too comfortable. I decided I'd prefer Fnu from Hyderabad every day of the week over this surreal technology that somehow separates us from other humans more than our phones -- which I wouldn't have thought possible.
Autonomous AI for customer experience
In the grander scheme of tech, Benioff knows autonomous AI is a gambit. It's not guaranteed to work perfectly. He wanted Salesforce users at Dreamforce to jump in and try building Agentforce agents in Slack with no code.
Either the customer is going to be crying that it works, and it's going to be very emotional ... and it's wonderful, or they unleash their agent and it completely screws up, and their whole job is gone. It's one of those two things. I hope we're on the right side of history.
Marc BenioffCo-founder and CEO, Salesforce
"Get your hands dirty," Benioff said in his keynote more than once.
Salesforce pushed us scribes into the Agentforce "launchpad" area and had us watch actual Salesforce users build agents, live, without a net, and discuss with them what they thought of it.
"Either the customer is going to be crying that it works, and it's going to be very emotional ... and it's wonderful," Benioff said. "Or they unleash their agent and it completely screws up, and their whole job is gone. It's one of those two things. I hope we're on the right side of history."
Users who spun up their own agents told me they were concerned about data security, guardrails to prevent agents from altering otherwise good customer relationships, and how to make the agent hand off earlier when it couldn't cope with a customer request. Before buying in, they also wanted less ambiguous pricing, to know the potential hidden costs -- such as buying more licenses for things like Data Cloud -- and to also learn more about how customer authentication works, especially in regulated sectors.
In general, Salesforce customers appeared to love the ease -- and speed -- of setup. The people I talked to thought Agentforce was interesting enough to talk with their dev teams about the feasibility of upgrading present chatbots to autonomous agents. It's an open question as to whether time-challenged IT teams will be in a hurry to rip out stable rules-based chatbots and replace them with generative AI agents that look pretty good but need a lot of testing before they're trusted with live customers.
And while Agentforce is still all very much in the hype stage, Waymo's autonomous agents are roaming the streets of San Francisco, honking, changing lanes, picking up and dropping off passengers, and responding to the next app ping to take another ride. It's a "moment," the Summer of AI, indeed.
Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.
