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It\u2019s so hard for big businesses to get AI tools working reliably that whole new organizations of forward-deployed engineers<\/a> or FDEs\u2014 specialists who drop into a company to get its AI systems up and running \u2014 are springing up to help them.<\/p>\n \u201cAI, paradoxically, increases the demand for professional services,\u201d says Efrat Rapoport, a former Salesforce executive whose new company, June, emerged from stealth Monday morning. \u201cThe industry\u2019s answer to AI implementation is, \u2018let\u2019s hire more and more and more people.\u201d<\/p>\n Rapoport and her three cofounders \u2014 Ohad Hen, Barak Goldstein, and Idan Tsitiat \u2014 have a different idea about how to bring AI into broader use. To pursue it, the company raised $20 million in pre-seed funding led by Marc Benioff\u2019s Time Ventures, with additional backing from tech luminaries like Michael Dell, Aaron Levie and George Kurtz. The company declined to share its valuation.<\/p>\n The four founders previously started Bonobo AI<\/a>, a pre-transformer language model company that launched a voice-to-text service in 2017. Bonobo AI was snapped up two years later by Salesforce, and the team worked for several years on the tech giant\u2019s AI initiatives before setting out on their own again after watching customers struggle to bring AI into their existing platforms.<\/p>\n Their potential was clear enough to their investors, Rapoport says, that \u201cwe didn\u2019t even have a deck for this raise.\u201d<\/p>\n While the so-called SaaSpocalypse has software firms fearing that AI might replace them, thus far no one is vibe-coding a CRM for a Fortune 500 company. Any AI model brought into a corporate setting still has to work with Salesforce, ServiceNow, DataBricks, Workday, or any of a dozen other data-management platforms.<\/p>\n \u201cBefore AI can create value, someone has to deal with legacy systems,\u201d Rapoport says. \u201cYou have fragmented data across these platforms. You have complex workflows. You have years of technical debt.\u201d<\/p>\n Building an agent template is the easy part, she says. The hard part is getting it to work with the mess underneath. \u201cHow does an agent know how to operate when you have 10 duplicate [database] fields that say the same thing, and different teams are using them?\u201d<\/p>\n June\u2019s platform scans a company\u2019s existing systems to understand its business processes, find bottlenecks, and then build more optimized, agent-powered processes to replace them, automatically notifying teams through the company\u2019s comms channels.<\/p>\n \u201cWe give you the full roadmap automatically of what needs to happen step by step for you to actually implement this agent successfully in an enterprise environment, which is often very complex,\u201d Rapoport said. \u201cWe give you a step by step guide. \u2018Remove these duplicates. Connect to this data source.\u2019 And then you click on \u2018build\u2019 on each task, and June starts building it for you in the organization.\u201d<\/p>\n Paul Akinmade, chief strategy officer at CMG, a major U.S. mortgage lender, moved his company\u2019s software engineering over to Claude Code quickly, but hit roadblocks trying to integrate it with Salesforce. That was a problem since he\u2019d promised at Salesforce\u2019s annual conference the year before that he\u2019d return with 100 agents running, and it wasn\u2019t looking like he\u2019d hit that target. <\/p>\n Akinmade says his team spent weeks hitting a wall \u2014 meeting with architects, talking to forward-deployed engineers, consulting everybody they could \u2014 without making progress. June changed that, he says, giving his team a clear view of where to deploy agents and letting them do so safely, even before the official kickoff call between the two companies<\/p>\n Rapoport sees June as a tool that complements FDEs and consultants, but her customers may be drawn to it for the opposite reason: it lets them avoid FDEs altogether.<\/p>\n When Akinmade was first considering piloting the tool at CMG, he says he told her: \u201cIf your product requires FDEs, I don\u2019t want your product. I\u2019ve already I\u2019ve already done that and I\u2019m getting annoyed by it. I don\u2019t want a black box. I don\u2019t want something only certain people can figure out. I want an easy-to-use tool.\u201d<\/p>\n Evidently, June cleared the bar.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/em><\/p>\n