Dec 17 (Reuters) - Salesforce ( CRM ) has closed more

than 1,000 paid deals for "Agentforce," its platform for

creating virtual representatives powered by artificial

intelligence, its CEO Marc Benioff said on Tuesday.

At a company event in San Francisco, Salesforce ( CRM ) previewed

improvements for how businesses could build bots for recruiting,

customer service and other specific tasks on its platform and in

its messaging app Slack.

Salesforce ( CRM ) has done as much for its own operations, said

Benioff. He said his company now needed half the number of

humans to resolve simple customer queries, though he still wants

to increase the company's headcount in sales by 10% or more.

Since ChatGPT's launch in 2022, many companies have piloted

AI without yet deriving major savings or revenue from it.

For Benioff, who in recent months has focused his cloud

company on agents, "digital labor" is poised to augment humans

and expand the economy. Further out, Salesforce ( CRM ) will start a

"robot force partner program" that can connect real-world

machines with virtual ones, he told reporters.

Benioff cited hotel chains as an example. They could handle

back- and front-office work with an army of focused digital

assistants, while robots could clean guests' rooms, he said.

The Salesforce ( CRM ) co-founder and Time magazine owner said he

hoped President-elect Donald Trump's administration would engage

CEOs on the topic of digital labor. Trump appeared on a recent

Time cover as the magazine's "Person of the Year."

Asked if he expected to donate to Trump's inaugural fund as

others have done, Benioff said: "I think we just donated the

photo. He can use the Time cover at no charge."