Salesforce surges on Agentforce success

Plus: China's new agentic hospital, how to choose the right coding agent, and more

Author

Michael Cunningham
December 05, 2024

In partnership with

Welcome back to Building AI Agents, your biweekly guide to everything new in the AI agent field!

Don’t fall for counterfeit agents, folks 🥂

In today’s issue…

  • Salesforce continues to soar as Agentforce outperforms

  • China’s new fully agentic hospital

  • Which coding agent is the best?

  • A new open-source visual model for GUI agents

…and more

📰 NEWS

Created using Google Finance

Salesforce stock soared nearly 11% yesterday on news that the company’s Agentforce platform is exceeding new booking expectations, with shares up nearly 43% since Agentforce was unveiled in September. Agentforce has been leading the charge into enterprise agentic AI, potentially acting not just as a catalyst for Salesforce, but for the entire sector.

Beginning today, OpenAI is conducting a 12-day-long event in which it plans to debut a wide range of new features, reportedly including a new model capable of agentic reasoning.

Tairex, a startup spun out of China’s prestigious Tsinghua University, is testing a full virtual hospital powered by AI agents, with 42 AI doctors across 21 departments, claiming impressive results in diagnosing and prescribing treatments for diseases.

AWS announced a new agent assistant for its Q Developer rival to GitHub Copilot, aiming to compete with recent agentic coding releases such as Cursor Agent and Windsurf.

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🛠️ USEFUL STUFF

Source: Pydantic

The widely-used data validation and manipulation platform Pydantic launched a new agent package with built-in integration for the company’s tech and support for most major LLM providers.

A X thread by Arize AI’s Aman Khan comparing the pros and cons of some of the major coding agents—Replit Agent, Cursor, Windsurf, and Vercel v0.

Startup ElevenLabs unveiled its new platform allowing users to build agents capable of conversing in real-time in over 31 languages, intended to enable next-generation customer service, tutoring, game characters, and many more.

Emergence AI is a startup founded by former staff from IBM Research to compete with major enterprise agent players such as Microsoft and Salesforce. The company’s new multi-agent orchestrator manages all of a company’s agents regardless of task, data modality, or software integrations.

💡 ANALYSIS

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff | Source: Big Technology

Benioff discusses the potential of agents to transform multiple sectors, including healthcare and entertainment, by augmenting human labor rather than replacing it.

This deep-dive explores the origins of AI agents, their evolution, and how they promise to address the spiraling costs of education, healthcare, legal counsel, and more. [Partly paywalled]

Stefan Slowinski, Global Head of Software Research at BNP Paribas, discusses the potential of agents to bring in significant revenue for tech companies and startups, justifying their high-flying market valuations.

🧪 RESEARCH

Action loop from Show UI | Source:

With vision agents all the rage, the authors of this paper debut Show UI, an open-source action model specialized for interacting with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to accomplish agentic tasks on desktops and the web.

CodeTree is a novel framework designed to address LLMs’ issues with multi-step reasoning in code-generation tasks by using tree search to generate and refine potential solutions.

Thanks for reading! Until next time, keep learning and building!

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