AI agents: there is no escaping them anymore. At its event in Brussels, Salesforce is also positioning Agentforce as the ideal platform for the next phase of AI.
Salesforce is bringing customers, partners, and technology companies together for Agentforce, which is taking place this year at Mont des Arts in Brussels. Agentforce is designed to help customers with the next phase of AI: AI agents, as AI moves from experimentation to ready-to-use assistants in this new phase. According to Salesforce we are experiencing the ‘biggest transformation ever’.
Belgium takes center stage
The keynote was opened by Ervan Pouliquen, who took over the leadership of Salesforce Belgium and Luxembourg a few months ago, succeeding Lien Ceulemans. The audience was guided to the start of the keynote by a saxophonist and a live singer. He kicked off by noting that the saxophone originated in Dinant, likely referring to the fact that Belgium is indeed capable of innovation.
Our country is clearly important to Pouliquen. The Frenchman has lived here for sixteen years and immediately made it clear why he took the role: he wants to help put Belgium on the global map within AI. According to Pouliquen, we have little choice: it’s either play with the big leagues or be left hopelessly behind. High labor costs and international competition make productivity gains essential, and he believes AI offers a unique opportunity for this.
To emphasize that statement, he says that companies must learn to handle innovation differently. In his view, AI requires a culture of rapid experimentation, failure, and trying again. “It’s like learning to swim by just jumping into the water. You don’t have to drown; there’s always someone to help, but it’s the fastest way to learn.” In the past, innovation was more linear. According to him, companies must learn to act faster and lose less time with ‘useless’ strategic discussions.
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel; you just have to decide which tire to put on it.
Ervan Pouliquen, General Manager Salesforce België & Luxemburg
According to Salesforce, Belgium must especially avoid falling behind again as it did during previous technological waves. Pouliquen criticizes the fact that companies previously responded too late to e-commerce or digital platforms. He believes that mistake must not be repeated with AI.
From data to context
One of the common threads throughout the event is the role of data. Salesforce emphasizes that AI only gains value when it has access to business context. During the keynote, Salesforce therefore no longer speaks of a system of record, but of a system of context: a central layer where customer data, workflows, history, rules, and processes converge. That context allows AI-agents to not only generate replies, but to perform relevant actions as well.
Salesforce states that many AI projects still fail today because they are built on fragmented systems. A model may be able to generate intelligent answers, but it lacks the knowledge about customers or processes to be truly useful for a company.
That is why the recent acquisition of Informatica has been important. According to Pouliquen, this acquisition gives Salesforce a strong narrative regarding enterprise data management. Informatica moet helpen om data uit CRM-systemen, ERP-platformen en externe databronnen samen te brengen in één contextlaag waarop AI-agenten kunnen werken.
Axepta BNP Paribas automates contract cancellations
A striking Belgian example comes from Axepta BNP Paribas, which is active in electronic payments. The company uses Agentforce to process contract cancellations largely automatically within Salesforce Service Cloud. Previously, employees had to manually navigate through various screens and systems to handle a cancellation. That process could take twenty to thirty minutes.
With Agentforce, the preparatory work is now done automatically. The AI agent analyzes customer information, interprets emails and call transcripts, checks business rules, and prepares the cancellation for human approval. According to Axepta BNP Paribas, this results in time savings of up to 80 percent.
The AI prepares the files completely, but an employee still validates the final decision. According to CIO Ruben Mortier, the project is not about efficiency gains or cost savings. The ultimate goal is primarily to give employees more time for customer retention and more valuable interactions. Mortier also emphasizes the importance of humans remaining consciously in control.
Barry Callebaut bets on Chef Callebaut
Barry Callebaut also takes the stage with an AI case. The chocolate company, together with Salesforce, developed a conversational agent called Chef Callebaut. It helps customers search for recipes, products, and training courses. According to Barry Callebaut, the classic website wasn’t meeting the demand of customers anymore. That’s why the company wants a more personalized digital experience.
The speed at which the project was realized was a highlight during development. The first MVP project was built in just ten weeks. According to the team behind the project, this was mainly because the company started small, with one language, one market, and a clear use case.
“We didn’t start with the idea ‘we need to build an AI agent’,” the team explained during their keynote. “We started from a very concrete need and a limited scope.” This approach is a recurring theme across various customer cases during the event. Salesforce focuses on concrete implementations that are already operational today. “That’s what customers asked for in feedback about the previous event,” Pouliquen states.
Slack becomes AI command center
In addition to CRM and data, Slack also plays a prominent role during the event. Salesforce positions Slack as the central interface for Salesforce AI agents. The evolution of Slack from a communication platform to an operational tool has been happening for quite a while.
Employees and AI agents must be able to collaborate frictionlessly in Slack. Demos show how agents perform analyses in Slack, automate workflows, and provide recommendations. Salesforce sees Slack as the place where human employees, AI agents, and business data come together.
International customers such as Trustpilot and reMarkable also shared how they integrate AI agents into their daily operations via Slack. Trustpilot, for example, introduced ‘Agent Sam,’ an AI agent that processes customer queries faster and supports human employees with complex cases.
According to Trustpilot, the project became operational in eight weeks thanks to clear business objectives and a strong focus on governance and data quality. AI agents received the same monitoring, training, and quality control as the company’s human employees.
Moving fast enough
European AI regulation was also discussed throughout the day, but Pouliquen does not see it as the biggest brake on innovation. According to him, the real problem lies elsewhere: companies are simply still moving too slowly.
According to Salesforce, the responsibility lies primarily with technology companies themselves to integrate regulation, management, and security into their AI solutions by default. That is why Salesforce is increasingly working with pre-built industry agents that take sector-specific regulations into account. This would allow banks or telecom companies to implement AI faster without having to develop processes from scratch every time.
Pouliquen also advocates for a more uniform European approach. According to him, Europe needs a single strong digital market that can compete at scale with American AI players. He believes national fragmentation would only slow down innovation.
Belgian companies in the spotlight
The ambition of Salesforce Belgium was sharply summarized by Pouliquen during our conversation. His goal is not only to help Belgian companies with AI projects but also to make them internationally visible within the Salesforce ecosystem. “I want to get iconic Belgian brands onto the world stage,” he says.
My goal is not to win the Jupiler Pro League, but to secure the Champions League trophy.
Ervan Pouliquen, Salesforce Belgium and Luxembourg
Salesforce provides an answer to the question of how companies can use AI to become faster, more efficient, and more competitive. Within Salesforce, Agentforce is intended to be the platform on which human employees and autonomous AI agents collaborate in a single business environment. This offers advantages for rapid and secure implementation, but only for organizations that go all-in with the Salesforce platform.