What platform-native AI gets you
AI inside Salesforce, Agentforce grounded in Data 360, inherits the things enterprises spend years building: the data model, the security model, the audit trail, and the place where your team already works. An agent that opens and closes cases on Service Cloud is operating in the system of record, not beside it.
Proof: connected-asset triage at ASSA ABLOY
That is why connected-asset triage at ASSA ABLOY runs on the platform: device events become platform events, cases open and close themselves, and Field Service dispatches with full context. No synchronisation layer, no second source of truth.
What standalone stacks get you
Standalone AI gives you model choice, custom retrieval pipelines, and reach into the systems Salesforce does not see: the ERP, the operational databases, the long tail of internal tools. If the work spans the whole business, a platform-only view is too narrow.
The trade-off is integration and governance. Every standalone tool needs to be wired into the systems it acts on, and every wire needs ownership, audit, and rollback.
The architecture that usually wins
Grounded agents in your own environment, connected to everything, with Salesforce as the system of engagement where it already runs your process. Prebuilt integrations and MCP servers across 70+ enterprise systems make the connection layer the accelerator instead of the project risk.
The wrong answer is the unconnected pilot: a standalone chatbot that cannot touch the case queue, or a platform agent starved of the data that lives outside the platform.