Full narration of the briefing. Click a section heading to jump the player to that moment.
Agentforce is the first thing Salesforce has sold you where the bill depends on how well the product works. Seats are predictable: you know the headcount, you know the rate. A meter is not, because the number that drives it is how many times your agents act, and almost nobody can state that number before they deploy. I am Tom, Claire has the arithmetic, and this session is how to estimate Agentforce honestly before you commit to it.
Not the vendor business case, your own, because the account team is compensated to attach this to your renewal and the sizing conversation is where a good deal is either made or quietly lost.
There are three commercial models and you need all three in the same spreadsheet. The original one is two dollars per conversation, regardless of what happens inside it. Then Flex Credits, which is the consumption model: five hundred dollars buys a hundred thousand credits, so one credit is half a cent. A standard action costs twenty credits, which is ten cents, and a voice action costs thirty, which is fifteen cents.
Third, per user licensing, from around a hundred and twenty five dollars per user per month, rising to the Agentforce 1 Editions at about five hundred and fifty, which bundle unmetered employee use plus a million Flex Credits and two and a half million Data Cloud credits per org per year.
Notice what those models have in common: two of them price the same work differently depending on one number, actions per conversation. A conversation that looks up an order, checks a policy and drafts a reply is three actions. One that authenticates a customer, retrieves history, checks inventory, arranges a return, updates the record and sends a confirmation is a lot more. Typical deployments land somewhere between five and fifteen.
That is why the vendor question, how many conversations do you expect, is the wrong question to answer first. The number you need is how many actions each conversation takes, and the only honest way to learn it is to run a pilot and count.
Here is the arithmetic that settles the model choice. Twenty standard actions at ten cents each is two dollars, exactly the conversation price. So below twenty actions per conversation, Flex Credits are cheaper, and above twenty, the flat conversation price wins. Take a service desk running fifty thousand conversations a month at eight actions each.
Under conversations, that is a hundred thousand dollars a month, one point two million a year. Under Flex Credits, eight actions is eighty cents, so forty thousand a month, four hundred and eighty thousand a year. Same work, same volume, a seven hundred thousand dollar difference. And that gap is entirely decided by a number most buyers never measure before they sign.
Now price the bundles honestly, because generous sounding allowances shrink fast under conversion. A million Flex Credits sounds enormous. Divide by twenty credits per action and it is fifty thousand standard actions per org per year, which a busy service desk can burn through in a couple of weeks. At the credit rate it is five thousand dollars of consumption.
That does not make the Agentforce 1 Edition bad value, the unmetered employee usage may well justify it, but it does mean the allowance is not the reason to buy it. Convert every included quantity into the unit you actually consume before you let it count toward the business case.
Then negotiate the consumption terms, which matter more than the discount on a meter you cannot yet predict. Four to insist on. A rate hold, so your credit price is fixed for the full term and growth does not reprice. Rollover, so unused credits carry into the next period rather than expiring as pure margin.
An overage price agreed in advance, capped, because unpriced overage is where consumption contracts go wrong. And a model switch right, letting you move between conversations and credits at renewal once you know your real action count. Buy in tranches rather than one large commitment, and remember Data Cloud is metering underneath every agent action, so forecast that meter in the same model.
The move: before any Agentforce commitment, run a pilot on a narrow use case and count two things, actions per conversation and conversations per month. Then price all three models against those numbers, side by side, with the bundles converted honestly. That single page is worth more than any discount you will be offered, because it tells you which meter to stand under before you are standing under it. Next session: what is coming, Agentforce 360, Headless 360, and how to negotiate against a roadmap.
See you there.
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