Since its launch at the Dreamforce conference in September 2024, Salesforce Agentforce has changed the conversation around AI, customer experience and customer service. Shortly after launch, Salesforce announced the hiring of over 1,000 employees to meet demand for Agentforce.
At the time of Agentforce’s announcement, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff called Agentforce “the third wave of AI — moving beyond co-pilots to a new era of highly precise, low-hallucination intelligent agents that actively drive customer success.”
The platform is so important to Salesforce that Benioff said at the Agentforce launch: “The only thing we’re going to do at Salesforce is Agentforce. »
What is Agentforce?
Agentforce is essentially a platform layer in the Salesforce ecosystem. Agentforce bots are generative AI bots, but unlike popular genAI platforms like ChatGPT and Google Gemini, Salesforce says its Agentforce bots can be trusted to act autonomously.
Unlike previous chatbots, AI agents do not follow a prescribed pattern of responses to common queries, but are able to respond more flexibly to questions or issues because they are trained on internal data and are able to rely on a broad language model (LLM). Salesforce’s agentic AI, for example, can be trained on data in Salesforce Data Cloud.
Agentforce combines three major Salesforce tools (Agent Builder, Model Builder, and Prompt Builder) to deliver ready-to-use bots that work across industries. Bots are customized using inexpensive low-code tools.
Initial agents created with Agentforce include:
Campaign optimizer, which manages and executes complete campaign lifecycles.
Service agentwhich replaces chatbots in customer service management.
Buyer, which helps B2B customers find products, make purchases, and track orders.
Personal buyerwho recommends products and helps with research.
Merchantwho performs all site-related tasks for merchandisers, including promotions, product descriptions, and information.
Sales Development Representativewho interacts with potential prospects 24/7.
Sales coachwhich helps train sales teams and allows salespeople to practice pitching.
General availability of Agentforce One began on October 25, 2024, with pricing starting at $2 per conversation, with discounts available for heavy users.
Salesforce also announced the Agentforce Partner Network at launch. It allows other organizations to deploy third-party agents or use third-party actions when designing custom agents in Agentforce.
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How does Agentforce work?
When Agentforce was initially announced at Dreamforce, Benioff said Agentforce was designed for customers who don’t know much about AI or creating bots.
“They won’t need to be an expert in an LLM, they won’t need to understand all these in-depth capabilities that one would need to know to become a computer scientist,” he said. It’s “AI for the rest of us.”
Agentforce is powered by an enhanced version of Salesforce’s Einstein AI called Atlas Reasoning Engine, which is “designed to simulate the way humans think and plan.”
During this announcement, Salesforce made a comparison with self-driving cars. Agentforce can interpret data to adapt to real-time conditions and act independently within an organization’s safeguards.
Benioff said that Agentforce had the lowest rate of hallucinations of any generative AI, but did not specify what that rate was.
Improved Atlas reasoning engine
Salesforce announced in December 2024 that its Atlas reasoning engine had been enhanced with advanced reasoning and augmented retrieval (RAG) generation, allowing agents to handle more complex questions in multiple steps and provide more precise answers.
Enhanced RAG features allow users to verify information by providing in-line citations with agent responses. Citing accurate sources builds confidence in AI results. It also helps users check for accuracy.
Data cloud
Data Cloud provides the customer data that powers Agentforce, making agents more context-aware, better informed, and adaptable to customer needs. Data Cloud connects, unifies and harmonizes customer data and metadata, giving agents access to the exact information they need to provide accurate, contextual responses. It makes structured and unstructured data – including emails, transcripts and PDFs – easily digestible by large language models (LLM). The RAG feature allows users to upload files and URLs as data sources for their agent.
Customer 360
Agentforce is deeply integrated with Salesforce Customer 360, leveraging applications such as sales, service, marketing, and commerce. A complete view of the customer is essential for a smooth handoff to human agents with full conversation history.
MuleSoft
MuleSoft is an API integration, automation and management platform. It extends Agentforce’s capabilities by allowing Salesforce developers and administrators to leverage their APIs and import third-party data.
Soft
Slack is a central point for employees to interact with Agentforce. They can access information, trigger workflows, and manage tasks directly in Slack, meaning they don’t need to switch between apps.
Agentforce also uses Slack Enterprise Search to learn from conversations in Slack channels and direct messages. This helps agents provide more relevant responses and actions based on the context of conversations.
Painting
Tableau Einstein is an AI-powered visual analytics platform that includes Agentforce. It is designed to intelligently integrate data and insights into workflow and encourages employees to use data to drive action.
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Agentforce Test Center
In December 2024, Salesforce announced The Testing Center, which allows companies to test their AI agents before deployment. The Test Center gives Agentforce users the ability to ensure agents follow instructions, remain factual, and work quickly. This helps mitigate risk and ensure agents operate consistently and reliably. It also provides tools that make it easier to test, audit, and scale agents.
Skills and Integrations Library
Also announced in December 2024, this library covers key business applications such as CRM, Slack, and Tableau, as well as AppExchange partner integrations. These out-of-the-box skills simplify the process of creating bespoke AI agents. The library offers predefined Slack actions such as Create Canvas and Message Channel, which allow teams to create agents for their Slack workflows.
Here are some examples:
CRM skills allow you to create agents to automate and improve customer experiences. These agents can perform tasks such as lead nurturing, sales coaching, and planning service assignments, among other functions.
The Sales Development skill creates agents that nurture leads based on predefined rules.
The Commercial Coaching skill allows agents to actively participate in sales calls, providing real-time feedback to reps and improving their performance.
MuleSoft integrations enable businesses to use Agentforce across their entire business ecosystem. For example, it can connect Agentforce to its ERP system to automate order fulfillment processes. It can also integrate with marketing automation platforms to trigger personalized email campaigns based on customer interactions.
The AppExchange strengthens Agentforce’s capabilities by giving users access to specialized skills created by partners.
Which companies use Agentforce?
Salesforce itself uses Agentforce internally. It says help.salesforce.com agents now handle 83% of customer support requests independently, with human escalations decreasing by 50% within two weeks of implementing the system.
RBC uses Atlas and Data Cloud with Agentforce to support its financial advisors. Salesforce Data Cloud integrates all of RBC’s client data into a unified system, giving advisors a complete view of their clients. Atlas can answer complex customer questions using multi-step reasoning. It also leverages RBC data and business logic to provide a reliable response.
Accenture uses Agentforce to provide employees with timely updates on important accounts. It helps automate document retrieval and provides recommendations to resolve business issues. It also streamlines proposal creation and viewing and improves employee collaboration by providing real-time updates, retrieving documents, providing proactive recommendations, and creating proposals.
Other companies publicly identified by Salesforce as Agentfore customers include:
The Adecco Group BACA Systems OpenTable Saks Wiley
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