The average number of AI agents activated per organization nearly tripled between February 2025 and April 2026, according to the second edition of Salesforce’s Agentic Enterprise Index, published ewarlier this month.
The customer relationship management vendor analyzed aggregated usage data from a cohort of businesses that ran agents in production every month of the analysis period on Agentforce and other Salesforce products. Salesforce said the findings are not indicative of its own financial performance.
Organizations went from an average of five activated agents in February 2025 to 13 in April 2026, a 7% compound monthly growth rate. Average time to create an agent fell to 1.9 days, a 53% decline over the period. The average number of actions per account grew at a 31% compound monthly rate across the 15 months.
Salesforce measures agent activity using a metric it created called the Agentic Work Unit, defined as one discrete task completed by an agent. As of April 2026, Agentforce agents had produced 734 million AWUs, growing roughly 15% per month. Retail accounted for 22% of total monthly AWU output and grew 18 fold over the period. Financial services also represented 10% of monthly output, with 13 fold growth. Public sector output grew 227 fold, healthcare and life sciences 19 fold and manufacturing 7 fold, though each accounted for less than 1% of monthly volume.
The average agent could act on six distinct skills by the end of 2025, up from two at the start of that year. During peak shopping season, the average retail agent acted on nine.
Salesforce also introduced a Sophistication Index scoring agent actions across five tiers of cognitive complexity, from record retrieval at Level 1 to database writes and parsing of raw user inputs at Levels 4 and 5. Financial services, manufacturing, and healthcare and life sciences scored 40 to 50, compared with 30 for technology and retail.
Escalation rates from AI agents to human representatives held at 32% even as the share of customer service sessions handled by agents rose more than 170 fold over five quarters. Retailers that deployed agents during the holiday season reported 8% year over year online sales growth, against 2% for those that did not.
Salesforce cited PenFed, a federally chartered credit union serving military members and their families, which deployed an agent called Ace behind online banking logins to evaluate account balances, check loan application statuses and transfer funds. A second agent, Echo, extends those functions to the voice channel, replacing legacy interactive voice response systems.
