The promise and the invoice
Every Salesforce customer has heard the pitch: AI agents that qualify leads, keep data clean, and answer questions about your pipeline. The promise is real. What the pitch skips is the invoice.
Platform-native AI stacks three cost layers: metered usage (~$2 per conversation, or ~$0.10 per action), the Data Cloud prerequisite (its own SKU, its own consumption pricing), and implementation — routinely five to six figures in year one once partner hours are counted.
For a 50-person B2B SaaS company, the realistic year-one number lands between $40,000 and $150,000 — for capabilities that, underneath the branding, are automation and language-model calls against your CRM data.
What most teams actually need
A 40-person company doesn't need an enterprise agent platform. It needs five jobs done reliably: pipeline kept clean, forecasts summarized Monday morning, leads routed in minutes, fields maintained, and someone told when something breaks. None of those require Data Cloud, new SKUs, or a meter…