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Laura Alber
President, CEO & Director, Williams-Sonoma

Elevate Employee Success at Williams-Sonoma with Agentforce

📅 May 05, 2026 Salesforce Events 9 MIN 19 SEGMENTS · 3 SPEAKERS
Join Laura Alber as she explains how the Agentforce 360 Platform elevates every Williams-Sonoma, Inc. customer and employee ...

What Laura Alber said

Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.

Laura Alber, CEO of Williams-Sonoma, discussed the company's 70-year history of customer experience and its recent deployment of Agentforce, an AI agent named Olive, on its website. She noted that 70% of Williams-Sonoma's business is online and emphasized the goal of making the website feel as warm as their stores. Alber highlighted that Olive, which assists with cooking, decorating, gift giving, and entertaining, was built in just 30 days, a stark contrast to previous projects that took much longer. She framed the holidays as their 'Super Bowl' and promised that Agentforce would answer customer questions faster, giving customers the 'gift of time' to enjoy the holidays. Alber expressed excitement about expanding the technology to other brands like Pottery Barn and West Elm, and thanked Salesforce for helping realize their vision.

Key takeaways

  1. Olive, the AI agent, went live on the Williams-Sonoma website in just 30 days.
  2. Alber promised faster, more accurate customer answers during the holidays, calling it the 'gift of time'.
  3. The company plans to deploy similar agents across its other brands, including Pottery Barn and West Elm.
  4. Alber has been with Williams-Sonoma for 30 years, and the company has 70 years of history.

Numbers and commitments

FigureWhat it refers toTypeAt
30 days Time to build and launch the Olive AI agent timeline 7:25
70% Share of Williams-Sonoma business done online metric 6:45
70 years Williams-Sonoma's history of customer experience metric 6:07
30 years Alber's tenure at Williams-Sonoma metric 6:07
15 years Duration of partnership with Salesforce metric 6:45

Chapters

  1. 0:00Introduction and company history
  2. 6:45Online business and website experience
  3. 7:19Building Olive with Agentforce
  4. 7:28Holiday promise and customer benefits

Questions asked in this interview

1
  1. 5:48What's your vision for how this goes forward?
Saga 0:05 ↗
Thank you so much, Mark. There are as many seats in this keynote room as customers that we have using Agent Force to transform their entire companies. Today, over 12,000 of you have partnered with us to bring your agentic enterprise vision to life. And you've given us your feedback. And all of it has culminated in our latest release, the Agentforce 360 platform. And it all starts with intelligent context. You've told us that your data is complicated. You have tables, you have workflow diagrams, you have all sorts of stuff in your enterprise and you need your agents to have all of that context available. Now you can with Agent Force 360.
You also want these agents to speak. You want them available on your most available channel, which is voice. And now with Agent Force Voice, you have the power of agents directly in your contact center. Now, I can't wait to show you this next piece, our new Agent Force Builder. You're going to be able to build agents faster than ever before across your organization. And you've also told us that sometimes AI doesn't really behave the way that you want it to. You need a little bit more predictability in your business. And that's why with Agent Script, you're going to be able to have the reliability of code with each and every one of these agents.
And as Mark said, we have completely reimagined the entire Customer 360 as the Agent Force 360. Now everything is agent. So I'm going to show you how Agent Force Service also plays a critical role in Williams-Sonoma's vision. So why don't we go ahead and see this in a live demo with the folks over here at the demo desk. We got Kristen and Rusha. Let's give them a hand.
Now, Williams-Sonoma has the simple mission of having their customers fall in love with hosting and cooking in their home. So, when they decided to deploy Agent Force, they wanted their agent to embody that same mission. Now, meet Olive, the AI Sous Chef. And I want to call out this agent went live on the Williams-Sonoma website just this weekend. You got to check it out after the keynote. Now, if I want Olive's help in hosting a fall dinner party, it's as easy as asking a question. And immediately, I get recipes served up just for me. And I'm not much of a cook myself, so I need some video tutorials to help me with this recipe. And just like that, when I ask that question to the AI Sous Chef, it's assisting me right there, right inside of this experience.
Now, I know what you're thinking. We all have thousands of ways that we like to find recipes and recipe tutorials. I get it. But pay close attention to this entire conversation. This isn't just some set of random recommendations and tutorials. This is just for me. Every single recipe, every single video is based off a product that I just purchased from Williams-Sonoma. This new Dutch oven. Now, Williams-Sonoma cares deeply about making this experience predictable for every single customer. And so, I want to show you exactly how they built it using the brand new Agent Force 360 platform.
So, here we are inside of the brand new Agent Force Builder. Agent Force Builder has had a huge makeover since the last time you saw it. This is AI assisted development where I have an agent here to help me build faster than ever before.
Now, I want to show you why this is so critical and important. Now, you can have each and every one of your employees building agents in natural language. But there's a problem here too because when you start building in natural language, it gets a little messy. And you might have instructions that look a little something like this. And imagine taking any new colleague in your organization through instructions that look like this. Before you do this, do that, if this, then that. It gets really confusing for a human. Imagine what it's like for an LLM. So, I'm going to go ahead and use the power of this new builder to completely transform these instructions.
And what we're doing behind the scenes here is we're transforming this unpredictable natural language into deterministic code. So this is Agent Script and this is going to play a critical role in how each and every one of you build agents that you can predict in the flow of work and for your customers.
Now the story doesn't stop here because while Agent Script can help make your agents more predictable, Williams-Sonoma wanted more. They wanted each of their humans when they had those cases escalated to them to have all of this context available for them about every single customer. So when I call a service rep at Williams-Sonoma, they know everything about me. They know my recent purchases. They know my customer lifetime value score. And this isn't just any old Service Cloud. This is Agent Force Service. So you have Agent Force available here in the flow of work ready to assist every single service representative. Now everything that I've shown you here today is just the tip of the iceberg. Join me in the Agent Force keynote tomorrow to see a more complete version of their agentic enterprise vision. Back to you, Mark.
Mark Benioff 5:39 ↗
Great job, Saga. And we have one of the world's great CEOs right here, Williams-Sonoma CEO Laura Alber. Please welcome Laura Alber.
Welcome, Laura. Great to have you back at Dreamforce. Amazing what is happening on your site across all your different brands. I love Williams-Sonoma. Every chair in my house is from Pottery Barn. I love that they all swivel. Fantastic. Laura, how is this changing Williams-Sonoma? What's your vision for how this goes forward?
Laura Alber 6:07 ↗
Yeah, first of all, it's great to be here with all of you innovators and people who are dedicated to their customer experience. And I've been lucky enough to be at Williams-Sonoma for 30 years, but for 70 years, Williams-Sonoma has been providing unparalleled customer experiences with the best products in the market and incredible stores and incredible websites. And when you guys think about Williams-Sonoma, what do you think about? Do you start to salivate? Do you, you know, want that peppermint bark that we're serving in the stores? Do you see our beautiful trees at Pottery Barn or West Elm? I hope.
Mark Benioff 6:44 ↗
I'm going to need my pumpkin carving tools.
Laura Alber 6:45 ↗
And your pumpkin carving tools, which is coming up. But you think about that and you know how incredible our stores are. And we have great websites, too. And actually, we do 70% of our business online. But can you imagine if the websites give you that same warm feeling that our stores give you when you go on them? What a difference maker that will be. We've been working with Salesforce for I think 15 years, Mark. Believe it or not, 15 years building all sorts of things, some of which have taken a very long time.

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Cite this transcript

APA, MLA, BibTeX
APA

Alber, L. (2026, May 5). Elevate Employee Success at Williams-Sonoma with Agentforce [Interview transcript]. Salesforce Events. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/957617/

MLA

Laura Alber. "Elevate Employee Success at Williams-Sonoma with Agentforce." Salesforce Events, 5 May. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/957617/.

BibTeX
@misc{alber2026_957617,
  author       = {Laura Alber},
  title        = {Elevate Employee Success at Williams-Sonoma with Agentforce},
  howpublished = {Interview transcript, Salesforce Events. CEOInterviews.AI},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {may},
  url          = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/957617/},
  note         = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}