Vivold Consulting
Product & Tech Updates

Salesforce Ramps Up Agentic AI Research with New Foundry Project

Key Insights

Salesforce has launched the AI Foundry, a new initiative aimed at accelerating agentic AI research and development. The project focuses on: - Bridging foundational research and product innovation through collaboration with strategic customers and academic partners. - Developing AI tools for high-impact enterprise areas, including simulated environments for testing AI agents and enhancing solutions like Agentforce Voice. - Exploring ambient intelligence to provide proactive, context-aware assistance without constant user input.

Stay Updated

Get the latest insights delivered to your inbox

In a strategic move to bolster its AI capabilities, Salesforce has introduced the AI Foundry, an initiative designed to fast-track agentic AI research and development. This project aims to bridge the gap between foundational research and product innovation by: - Collaborating closely with strategic customers and academic partners to develop cutting-edge AI tools tailored for enterprise needs. - Focusing on high-impact areas, such as creating simulated environments (like eVerse) to test AI agents in complex scenarios, thereby enhancing the consistency and judgment of solutions like Agentforce Voice. - Experimenting with ambient intelligence, which involves AI operating subtly in the background to offer context-aware and timely assistance without requiring constant user input. Additionally, Salesforce is investing in agent-to-agent interaction protocols, including cross-organizational ecosystems. Innovations like "agent cards" function as digital business cards to verify and describe each agent’s role and legitimacy. The company is also developing legal and ethical frameworks for autonomous agents in partnership with its legal and ethics teams. These efforts underscore Salesforce's commitment to delivering more intelligent, intuitive AI tools seamlessly embedded within enterprise workflows.

Related Articles

Google's chief scientist walks: Jeff Dean leaves after 27 years, taking three legends with him

Jeff Dean, Google's chief scientist and 30th employee, is leaving after 27 years to found Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation using AI to automate scientific research - taking co-founders Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le (Google Brain), and Oriol Vinyals (DeepMind) with him. Google is a founding investor and cloud partner, supplying compute for at least the first year, with Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures co-leading the seed. In the same announcement, Demis Hassabis steps down as DeepMind CEO to become chairman and Alphabet chief scientist, with Koray Kavukcuoglu taking over Gemini model development. Alphabet stock fell about 4%.

Open-weight models are months from the frontier - and refusing nothing

GLM-5.2, the open-weight model from China's Z.ai, now sits only a few months behind GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.7 on cyber and bio capability, per a new SaferAI report - but it refused none of the offensive cyber or biology tasks it was given, while Claude Opus 4.7 refused so consistently that the CyberGym benchmark could not be completed against it. SaferAI says Z.ai published no safety framework, pre-deployment testing commitments, or risk assessment. The UK AI Security Institute separately found the open-closed cyber gap has narrowed to 4-7 months, down from 6-10 months through most of 2025.

Texas slams the brakes on data centres - and the AI buildout's easiest frontier just closed

Governor Greg Abbott announced that all new Texas data-centre projects must be audited by the Public Utility Commission and grid operator ERCOT - a sharp turn for a state whose loose regulation and cheap power made it second only to Virginia for data centres. The trigger is a staggering queue: ERCOT's interconnection requests doubled from 233GW in January to 474GW, about 90% data centres, more than five times the grid's all-time peak demand. Audits will demand power and water use, noise mitigation, light controls, tax-incentive use, and ownership details - after a voluntary survey that most operators simply ignored.