Behind Salesforce’s Landmark Agentic AI Deal With PepsiCo
The summer of 2025 has belonged to Agentforce.
The cutting-edge agentic AI platform has been on a world tour this year, as Salesforce has taken its roadshow around the world to promote its new flagship product.
The events have been a remarkable exercise in marketing, with stops in Tel Aviv, London, Zurich, Seoul and Melbourne already bringing together thousands of business leaders and practitioners.
After the success of the Salesforce tour, the timing seems right for the company to announce a new landmark partnership — one which demonstrates the effectiveness of Agentforce at scale.
PepsiCo is that partner.
Its adoption of Agentforce makes it the first major food and beverage company to implement Salesforce’s agentic AI system across its entire operations.
The deal is not a speculative or exploratory one either. PepsiCo is going all in on Agentforce, deploying it in areas ranging from customer support to sales.
Ramon Laguarta, Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo, frames the move as part of a broader transformation for the drinks giant, which is valued at more than US$92bn.
“AI is reshaping our business in ways that were once unimaginable,” he says.
“This collaboration with Salesforce is another step toward a more connected and adaptive PepsiCo — deploying AI to unlock smarter and faster decision-making, fuel innovation and power sustainable growth.”
Details of the partnership
PepsiCo intends to use Agentforce for more than just task automation. Its ambition is to overhaul the customer experiences it provides altogether.
As a part of the deal, Salesforce’s Data Cloud is set to consolidate information from multiple sources to create more comprehensive customer profiles, while the Consumer Goods Cloud will provide PepsiCo’s teams with real-time inventory data.
The hope is that this will improve PepsiCo’s processes in physical stores, optimising the firm’s stocking decisions throughout its global network of vendors.
Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s Chair and CEO, has acknowledged the significance of this moment for both companies.
“We are excited to see PepsiCo, a company whose products are enjoyed over a billion times a day, at the forefront of the digital labour revolution with Agentforce,” he explains.
“Ramon and his team are reimagining how work gets done by uniting human expertise with the intelligence of our deeply unified platform.”
The ups and downs of digital transformation
At Salesforce’s live shows this year, one of the key messages has been about collaboration between humans and AI agents.
It is thought that one of the areas in which this teamwork will be visible most quickly is in customer service.
Salesforce says that, by leveraging consumer data, Agentforce will be able to deliver targeted, automated campaigns that can appeal to particular customers.
To Athina Kanioura, Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer at PepsiCo, this approach makes sense.
“Embracing an AI-first world means reimagining an enterprise where humans and intelligent agents don't just coexist, they collaborate,” she says.
“With Agentforce, rich data is enabling better decision-making and efficiency across our organisation, paving the way for a more resilient future-ready enterprise.”
While the potential of agentic AI is clear, critics are concerned that the human-AI working relationship will be less utopian than advertised and could in fact lead to mass unemployment.
At the Agentforce World Tour event in London this month, Salesforce’s CEO for the UK & Ireland, Zahra Bahrololoumi, addressed these concerns head on.
“Our whole ethos, our whole philosophy, is about humans and agents driving success together,” she said.
“Our whole reason for being is to improve the productivity of humans, not to replace humans.
“There’ll be things we want humans to do and there’ll be things we don’t want agents to handle on our behalf.”
Will PepsiCo’s adoption of Agentforce set the tone for the industry?
PepsiCo’s adoption of Agentforce is something of a milestone for the consumer goods industries, pointing to a wider acceptance of AI in core operations.
PepsiCo products are consumed more than one billion times every day, reaching across more than 200 countries and territories worldwide.
This tells us that Agentforce is a serious proposition, ready to be deployed at the largest of scales.
It will also be the truest proving ground for Salesforce’s technology yet. If Agentforce passes this test, the world will take notice.
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