Salesforce announces the launch of Agentforce for Retail as well as Salesforce Retail Cloud with Modern POS. The news comes just ahead of the National Retail Federation conference in New York. This initiative reflects Salesforce’s commitment to deploying agentic AI resources on its platform.
Saks Fifth Avenue and SharkNinja are among the brands testing Agentforce in a retail context.
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Agentforce for retail. Salesforce Agentforce is used to create AI agents that can increase productivity by assisting in a range of routine tasks. The new Agentforce for Retail includes a library of pre-built agent skills relevant to retail, such as order management, appointment scheduling, guided shopping, and loyalty promotion management. The goal is to make it easier for retail brands to create AI agents to provide what Salesforce calls the “digital workforce.”
New skills available include:
Order management. Self-service order management options allow customers to conversationally update order information such as payment or shipping details.
Guided shopping. Using natural language, customers get product recommendations from agents and make purchases through conversation.
Making an appointment. Automated scheduling with real-time availability updates for field services such as deliveries, installations and consultations.
Creation of loyalty promotions. Helping marketers create and optimize loyalty promotions with conversational prompts.
Retail Cloud with modern POS. This new offering brings together online and offline inventory data on a single platform. Abilities include:
Clientele. Associates are able to create profiles capturing purchase history, preferences and loyalty status.
Omnichannel processing of the “mixed basket”. Provides each item in the shopping cart with its own record of the buyer’s processing preferences (like BOPIS).
Mobile-first design. This frees associates from the checkout counter because the point of sale can be anywhere.
Inventory management. Explicit.
There are built-in integrations with Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud and Order Management.
Why we care. That’s quite a list of announcements. We saw a demonstration of conversational engagement with an AI agent at the Agentforce World Tour event last November. It was impressive. This is Salesforce simultaneously making Agentforce a common denominator in its multi-cloud architecture while doubling down on efforts to build cloud capabilities for specific spaces, in this case retail.
“Together, AI-powered digital work and a modern point of sale can unlock a new scale of operational capability for retailers,” said Nitin Mangtani, senior vice president and general manager of Retail at Salesforce, in a press release.
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