Salesforce Enterprise AI Harness latest salvo aimed at ServiceNow

Salesforce has upped the stakes in its battle with ServiceNow -- but has also given users more governance tools to manage their own AI agents and the data they access.

Many CX-oriented technology companies offer tools to manage environments that deploy AI agents from multiple vendors, a trend widely seen as either underway now or emerging over the next few years. ServiceNow has AI Control Tower, Genesys has its AI Control Plane, AWS has the Multi-Provider Generative AI Gateway, and a fistful of startups such as Gradial offer their own takes.

Salesforce technically had such capabilities too, starting with MuleSoft Agent Fabric, previewed at Dreamforce last year, released in January, and touted as an "agentic control plane." However, Salesforce has evolved that strategy by consolidating features from six different products, including MuleSoft Agent Fabric, Informatica and Data 360, into a new product, the Enterprise AI Harness.

AI harnesses are a recent way of explaining how agentic governance works, from controlling how they access data, what decisions they make and what actions they can take. Salesforce has productized this idea as a way to outflank its rival ServiceNow and beat back investor fears of the SaaSpocalypse -- a possible future where the market share of traditional SaaS vendors such as Salesforce, ServiceNow and even Microsoft is usurped by AI-coded replacements.

"Every company wants to control as many of the overall integration points -- and how they work -- as they can because they know that their customers are using several vendors," said Brent Leary, co-founder of advisory firm CRM Essentials. "If you're able to have more control over the cross-vendor orchestration of agents, you will be in the catbird seat."

Leary also pointed out that Informatica, Slack and MuleSoft were Salesforce acquisitions. Many customers remain that aren't on Salesforce. Enterprise AI Harness might be a fit for those organizations, and not just the Salesforce faithful, because it doesn't require numerous Salesforce subscriptions to build a multivendor agentic AI environment.

6 feature sets fused into one AI harness

Enterprise AI Harness includes numerous capabilities available today, with more planned for next year, starting in February. Among them are the following: a context layer of data, metadata and semantics; an AI reasoning and orchestration component; user-defined governance guardrails and controls; and security tools that enforce identity, privacy and permissions policies.

Under the hood of Enterprise AI Harness are observability tools collectively called the "AI Control Plane," which provide visibility into what agents are doing, how they are performing and the costs they are incurring.

Salesforce executive vice president and general manager Savinay Berry, who heads up the data management business, likens the present evolution of agentic AI management and orchestration to the early days of cloud adoption. Back then, many cloud vendors existed -- including specialized clouds for each vertical industry -- and the market eventually shook out into what we now know as the Big Three cloud hyperscalers: AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

Just like then, there is a horde of tech companies vying for the agentic AI control layer, who understand that many customers will use agents from multiple vendors, including Anthropic and OpenAI. Most AI harnesses now, he said, are point solutions that govern a small piece of IT territory; only a few attempt to tackle agentic management across the enterprise.

"There will be simplification. There will be consolidation, similar to how the cloud journey played out for many customers," Berry said. "We see consolidation and simplification happening. It'll happen much faster because the loop that it takes -- the amount of time it takes for any of our customers to get value out of this -- is a lot shorter than cloud [adoption]."

Don Fluckinger is a seasoned B2B technology journalist with more than 30 years of experience specializing in enterprise IT, digital experience and content management. As a senior news writer at Informa TechTarget, he delivers award-winning analysis that helps IT and business leaders navigate complex technologies to enhance customer and employee experiences. Got a tip? Email him.