Salesforce Unveils AgentforceWhat AI Was Meant to Be
Business Wire 12-Sep-2024 4:30 PM
Agentforce is how humans with AI drive customer success together, equips organizations with autonomous agents that boost scale, efficiency, and satisfaction across service, sales, marketing, commerce, and more
New Agentforce Atlas Reasoning Engine autonomously analyzes data, makes decisions, and completes tasks, providing reliable and accurate results
With Agentforce, any organization can build, customize, and deploy their own agents quickly and easily, with low-code tools
New Agentforce Partner Network allows customers to deploy pre-built agents and use agent actions from partners like Amazon Web Services, Google, IBM, Workday, and more
Customers like OpenTable, Saks, and Wiley are turning to Agentforce because it is integrated with their apps, works across customer channels, augments their employees, and scales capacity for business needs
Salesforce (NYSE:CRM), the world's #1 AI CRM, today unveiled Agentforce, a groundbreaking suite of autonomous AI agents that augment employees and handle tasks in service, sales, marketing, and commerce, driving unprecedented efficiency and customer satisfaction. Agentforce enables companies to scale their workforces on demand with a few clicks. Agentforce's limitless digital workforce of AI agents can analyze data, make decisions, and take action on tasks like answering customer service inquiries, qualifying sales leads, and optimizing marketing campaigns. With Agentforce, any organization can easily build, customize, and deploy their own agents for any use case across any industry. The future of AI is agents, and it's here.
"Agentforce represents the Third Wave of AI—advancing beyond copilots to a new era of highly accurate, low-hallucination intelligent agents that actively drive customer success. Unlike other platforms, Agentforce is a revolutionary and trusted solution that seamlessly integrates AI across every workflow, embedding itself deeply into the heart of the customer journey. This means anticipating needs, strengthening relationships, driving growth, and taking proactive action at every touchpoint," said Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO, Salesforce. "While others require you to DIY your AI, Agentforce offers a fully tailored, enterprise-ready platform designed for immediate impact and scalability. With advanced security features, compliance with industry standards, and unmatched flexibility. Our vision is bold: to empower one billion agents with Agentforce by the end of 2025. This is what AI is meant to be."
In contrast to now-outdated copilots and chatbots that rely on human requests and struggle with complex or multi-step tasks, Agentforce offers a new level of sophistication by operating autonomously, retrieving the right data on demand, building action plans for any task, and executing these plans without requiring human intervention. Like a self-driving car, Agentforce uses real-time data to adapt to changing conditions and operates independently within an organization's customized guardrails, ensuring every customer interaction is informed, relevant, and valuable. And when desired, Agentforce seamlessly hands off to human employees with a summary of the interaction, an overview of the customer's details, and recommendations for what to do next.
Industry leaders like OpenTable, Saks, and Wiley are already experiencing the transformative power of Agentforce. For example, Agentforce is helping organizations like Wiley provide customers with dynamic, conversational self-service. Agentforce is configured to answer questions using Wiley's knowledge base already built into Salesforce so it can automatically resolve account access. It also triages registration and payment issues, directing customers to the appropriate resources.
With Agentforce handling routine inquiries, Wiley has seen an over 40% increase in case resolution, outperforming their old chatbot and giving their human agents more time to focus on complex cases.
Why it Matters
An estimated 41% of employee time is spent on repetitive, low-impact work, and 65% of desk workers believe generative AI will allow them to be more strategic, according to the Salesforce Trends in AI Report. Every company has more jobs to be done than the resources available to do them. As a result, many jobs go unaddressed or uncompleted. Agentforce provides relief to overstretched teams with its ability to scale capacity on demand so humans can focus on higher-touch, higher-value, and more strategic outcomes. The future of work is a hybrid workforce composed of humans with agents, enabling companies to compete in an ever-changing world.
Supporting Customer Quotes
"Piloting Agentforce has made a noticeable difference during one of our busiest periods — back-to-school season. It's been exciting to go live with our first agent thanks to the no-code builder, and we've seen a more than 40% increase in case resolution, outperforming our old bot. Agentforce helps to manage routine responsibilities and free up our service teams for more complex cases." - Kevin Quigley, Senior Manager, Continuous Improvement, Wiley
"Every interaction that restaurants and diners have with our support team must be accurate, fast, and reflective of the hospitality that restaurants show their guests. Agentforce has incredible potential to help us deliver that high touch attentiveness and support while significantly freeing up our team to address more complex needs." - George Pokorny, SVP Customer Success, OpenTable
"As we advance our personalization strategy, we believe Agentforce and its AI-powered capabilities have the potential to make a real impact on our approach to customer engagement, raising the bar in luxury retail. Agentforce will improve our effectiveness across customer touchpoints, empowering our employees and augmenting their ability to deliver the elevated and more individualized shopping experiences for which Saks is known." - Mike Hite, Chief Technology Officer, Saks Global
Zoom In & How it Works
To deliver this breakthrough technology, Agentforce represents (1) significant innovation in Salesforce Platform; (2) several highly capable, out-of-the-box autonomous agents; (3) a rich set of low-code tools for building, customizing, and deploying agents quickly, easily, and without the complexity and costliness of AI model training or DIY AI projects; and (4) the Agentforce Partner Network to deploy third-party agents or use third-party actions when using Agentforce's low-code tools to build custom agents.
1. Salesforce Platform Innovation
Data
The Salesforce Platform, with Data Cloud at its center, enables Agentforce and every Salesforce app to deliver seamless, AI-powered experiences across every touchpoint. Data Cloud unifies and harmonizes all customer data and metadata across systems in real time, enabling Agentforce to operate with complete context and precision. Data Cloud improves the investment many organizations have already made in data lakes by providing a "Zero Copy" capability, which enables Salesforce customers to connect structured and unstructured data from external systems without having to copy it. This makes enterprise data quickly and easily retrievable by Agentforce to analyze and act on.
AI
The all-new Atlas Reasoning Engine is the brain behind Agentforce. It is built on a proprietary system designed to simulate how humans think and plan. It starts by evaluating user queries, refining them for clarity and relevance. Next, it retrieves the most relevant data and builds a plan for execution. The process then refines the plan further, ensuring it's accurate, relevant, and grounded in trusted data. This reasoning process allows Agentforce to autonomously reason, make decisions, and complete business tasks, all while delivering precise, factually accurate results.
Automation
Agentforce seamlessly integrates with Salesforce's existing automation capabilities including deep integration with MuleSoft. With Salesforce Flow, MuleSoft, and Apex methods, customers can easily extend the functionality of Agentforce by tapping into workflows and actions that are already built and optimized. They can also use these familiar building blocks to create new automations for Agentforce. Whether it's automating complex processes, or triggering specific actions across the enterprise, Agentforce can execute these automations effortlessly. This means organizations can capitalize on their existing investments in automation while scaling new capabilities, allowing Agentforce to act autonomously within a trusted framework, delivering faster outcomes without the need to build new automations or integrations from scratch.
2. Out-of-the-Box Agents
Agentforce's out-of-the-box agents are easy to customize and deploy with clicks, not code. They can be set up in minutes, are easily scalable, and work around the clock across any channel.
Service Agent
Replaces traditional chatbots with AI that can handle a wide range of service issues without preprogrammed scenarios, improving customer service efficiency.
Sales Development Representative (SDR)
Engages with prospects 24/7, answering questions, managing objections, and scheduling meetings based on CRM and external data, allowing sellers to focus on building deeper customer relationships.
Sales Coach
Provides personalized role-play sessions for sales teams, using Salesforce data and generative AI to help sellers practice pitches and objections tailored to specific deals.
Merchant
Assists ecommerce merchandisers with site setup, goal setting, personalized promotions, product descriptions, and data-driven insights, simplifying daily tasks.
Buyer
Enhances the B2B buying experience, helping buyers find products, make purchases, and track orders via chat or within sales portals.
Personal Shopper
Acts as a digital concierge on ecommerce sites or messaging apps, offering personalized product recommendations and assisting with search queries.
Campaign Optimizer
Automates the full campaign lifecycle, using AI to analyze, generate, personalize, and optimize marketing campaigns based on business goals.
Agentforce (formerly Einstein Copilot)
Einstein Copilot has been upgraded to an agent now capable of retrieving data, reasoning and building a plan, and taking action. It is now an embedded personalized assistive agent that supports employees in the flow of their work with specific tasks by searching and analyzing data, creating action plans, and executing them to increase workplace efficiency.
3. Customize and Deploy Agents Quickly
Agent Builder
A low-code builder that makes it easy to customize out-of-the-box agents or build new agents for any role, any industry, or any use case using existing tools like Flows, Prompts, Apex, and MuleSoft APIs to configure their agents. Using Agent Builder, organizations can create a job to be done for their agent by defining topics, writing natural language instructions within that topic, and creating a library of actions for it to choose from. Users can also easily observe an agent's plan of action and test their responses in Agent Builder.
Model Builder
A low-code builder and control plane for registering, testing, and activating custom AI models and LLMs across Salesforce. Customers can use Model Builder to bring the API keys of LLMs of their choice, test them in a playground, and activate them for use in Prompt Builder.
Prompt Builder
Behind every generative experience is a prompt. Prompt Builder allows users to easily customize out-of-the-box prompt templates with their own CRM or Data Cloud data to enhance the output of the generated results. It embeds the generative experience in the flow of work, whether it's within an automated workflow, Lightning record page, or even within actions of an agent.
4. The Agentforce Partner Network
The Agentforce Partner Network is a group of leading partners, including Amazon Web Services, Box, Certinia, Copado, Coupa, Google, Honeywell, IBM, Workday, Zoom and more. These partners have built more than 20 agents and agent actions that will be available through the Salesforce AppExchange. Customers can leverage these specialized actions in Agent Builder to customize the out-of-the-box agents, build new agents with unique skills, and deploy partner-built agents to plan and take action on behalf of any organization across multiple systems and channels, even outside of Salesforce.
For example, IBM plans to provide customers with an outbound sales development agent enabling customers to find new leads by orchestrating insights across various applications and custom data sources. Workday's agents will allow customers to deliver user-friendly, powerful employee services. Customers will also be able to use partner agent actions, like Google Workspace actions, to create Google Docs or Slides presentations or Box actions to intelligently surface the right content for an account, lead, or opportunity.
These integrations build on the momentum of the Salesforce Zero Copy Partner Network, which enables seamless data connectivity from partners within Data Cloud. Salesforce implementation partners also play a pivotal role in accelerating complex deployments and improving time to value for customers.
Additional Information and Resources
Analyst's Take
"As AI continues to evolve, I'm seeing a fundamental shift in how work is done, with the emergence of agents playing a central role in driving efficiency and scale. Salesforce's new Agentforce stands out as a promising suite of tools, offering businesses a comprehensive platform of intelligent agents designed to automate and streamline tasks across a wide range of industries. It is crucial for companies, at any point on their AI implementation journeys, to comprehend the advanced abilities of these modern agents, which can perform a wide range of tasks beyond those of standard chatbots or even copilots. The latest agents integrated into Salesforce's Agentforce suite are capable of not just conversing but also taking action. Implementing these solutions can boost efficiency and ensure the longevity of organizations in a competitive environment." - Ritu Jyoti, GVP/GM AI and Data Market Research and Advisory, IDC
How Customers Get Agentforce
Agentforce for Service and Sales will be generally available on October 25, 2024. Some components of the Atlas Reasoning Engine launch in February 2025. Agentforce pricing starts at $2 per conversation; standard volume discounts apply.
Any unreleased services or features referenced here are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available.
Resources
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