Salesforce is adding voice to its Agentforce software, letting clients go beyond text when using artificial intelligence agents to respond to customer questions.

With Agentforce Voice, companies can customize the tone and speed of voices and adjust the pronunciation of specific terms, Salesforce said Monday, ahead of its Dreamforce conference in San Francisco this week. The feature also allows people to interrupt the AI agent during phone calls.

Voice is becoming a bigger part of the generative AI boom, which started with text-based prompts in late 2022, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT. In the past year, OpenAI and Anthropic have enabled their chatbots to conduct spoken conversations without sounding overly robotic. Now that capability is taking hold inside business software.

Agentforce Voice will integrate with corporate phone systems from Amazon, Five9, Genesys, Nice and Ericsson’s Vonage.

Former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor is also trying his hand in the market. Taylor helped start Sierra in 2023, and last year the startup announced that its AI agents “can now pick up the phone.” Sierra has been valued at $10 billion, and has a client list that includes ADT, SiriusXM and SoFi.

Salesforce has been under pressure this year in part due to investor concern that software companies could lose business as AI moves deeper into coding. The stock is down about 28% so far in 2025, while the Nasdaq has gained around 15% over that stretch.

Anthropic told reporters in September that its Claude Sonnet 4.5 model built a chat app similar to Salesforce’s Slack in 30 hours. In Salesforce’s latest earnings report, the company warned that new AI products “may disrupt workforce needs and negatively impact demand for our offerings.”

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has downplayed the risk to this company.

“When we get into this kind of zero-sum game, well, all this is going to get wiped out, or all this is going to change, then, you know, you’re not dealing with somebody who actually runs a company, because that’s not the way business works,” Benioff told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan last month. “Business is incremental, it’s evolutionary, it’s growing, it’s evolving, and we don’t see that kind of change.”

Salesforce launched Agentforce last year as a service that could respond to customer requests over text chats with help from generative AI models. Agentforce now has more than 12,000 implementations, according to a statement. But there’s some skepticism about its popularity.

“Investor enthusiasm around Agentforce has moderated as adoption has lagged expectations,” RBC Capital Markets analysts, who recommend holding the stock, wrote in a note to clients last week.

In November, Salesforce will provide early access to Agent Script software, which organizations can use to customize what agents say and do.

WATCH: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on what the market is getting wrong about AI

Chip stocks bounced on Monday, clawing back losses from Friday’s market rout as OpenAI announced another computing deal with a major chipmaker and U.S.-China tensions eased.

OpenAI and Broadcom announced a deal to develop custom artificial intelligence chips. The Sam Altman-led startup has recently inked agreements with Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices.

Broadcom shares bounced 9% on the news.

Over the weekend, President Donald Trump tried to calm worries about China in a post on Truth Social, saying it “will all be fine.”

The VanEck Semiconductor ETF jumped nearly 4%, while Nvidia and AMD rallied more than 3% each. Taiwan Semiconductor and On Semiconductor jumped about 6% each, while Micron Technology rose over 4%.

Trump sent markets into a selloff on Friday after he threatened massive tariffs on China in response to the country’s latest clampdown on rare earths. He later pledged to levy new tariffs of 100% on China imports starting on Nov. 1 and would also impose export controls on “any and all critical software.”

The tech megacaps lost $770 billion in market cap on Friday.

Broadcom and OpenAI have made their partnership official.

OpenAI and Broadcom said Monday that they’re jointly building and deploying 10 gigawatts of custom artificial intelligence accelerators as part of a broader effort across the industry to scale AI infrastructure.

Broadcom shares climbed 9% following news of the deal.

The companies didn’t disclose financial terms.

While the companies have been working together for 18 months, they’re now going public with plans to develop and deploy racks of OpenAI-designed chips starting late next year. OpenAI has announced massive deals in recent weeks with Nvidia, Oracle and Advanced Micro Devices, as it tries to secure the capital and compute needs necessary for its historically ambitious AI buildout plans.

“These things have gotten so complex you need the whole thing,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a podcast with OpenAI and Broadcom executives that the companies released along with the news.

The systems include networking, memory and compute — all customized for OpenAI’s workloads and built on Broadcom’s Ethernet stack. By designing its own chips, OpenAI can bring compute costs down and stretch its infrastructure dollars further. Industry estimates peg the cost of a 1-gigawatt data center at roughly $50 billion, with $35 billion of that typically allocated to chips — based on Nvidia’s current pricing.

The Broadcom deal provides “a gigantic amount of computing infrastructure to serve the needs of the world to use advanced intelligence,” Altman said. “We can get huge efficiency gains, and that will lead to much better performance, faster models, cheaper models — all of that.”

Broadcom has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the generative AI boom, as hyperscalers have been snapping up its custom AI chips, which the company calls XPUs. Broadcom doesn’t name its large web-scale customers, but analysts have said dating back to last year that its first three clients were Google, Meta and TikTok parent ByteDance.

Shares of Broadcom are up 40% this year after more than doubling in 2024, and the company’s market cap has surpassed $1.5 trillion.

OpenAI President Greg Brockman said the company used its own models to accelerate chip design and improve efficiency.

“We’ve been able to get massive area reductions,” he said in the podcast. “You take components that humans have already optimized and just pour compute into it, and the model comes out with its own optimizations.”

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said in the same conversation that OpenAI is the company building “the most-advanced” frontier models.

“You continue to need compute capacity — the best, latest compute capacity — as you progress in a road map towards a better and better frontier model and towards superintelligence,” he said. “If you do your own chips, you control your destiny.”

Altman indicated that 10 gigawatts is just the beginning.

“Even though it’s vastly more than the world has today, we expect that very high-quality intelligence delivered very fast and at a very low price — the world will absorb it super fast and just find incredible new things to use it for,” he said.

OpenAI today operates on just over 2 gigawatts of compute capacity.

Altman said that’s been enough to scale ChatGPT to where it is today, as well as develop and launch video creation service Sora and do a lot of AI research. But demand is soaring.

OpenAI has announced roughly 33 gigawatts of compute commitments over the past three weeks across partnerships with Nvidia, Oracle, AMD and Broadcom.

“If we had 30 gigawatts today with today’s quality of models,” he added, “I think you would still saturate that relatively quickly in terms of what people would do.”

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