Salesforce wants to empower a billion agents with Agentforce by end-2025

Salesforce, the world’s No. 1 AI customer relationship management (CRM), has unveiled Agentforce, a suite of autonomous AI agents that augment employees and handle tasks in service, sales, marketing, and commerce. 

Agentforce enables companies to scale their workforces on demand with a few clicks. Agentforce’s limitless digital workforce of AI agents can analyse data, make decisions, and take action on tasks like answering customer service inquiries, qualifying sales leads, and optimising marketing campaigns.

“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 1 billion agents with Agentforce by the end of 2025. This is what AI is meant to be.”

In contrast to what Salesforce says are now-outdated copilots and chatbots that rely on human requests and struggle with complex or multistep tasks, Agentforce operates autonomously, retrieving the right data on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 organisation’s customised guardrails, ensuring every customer interaction is informed, relevant, and valuable, Salesforce said. 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.

Salesforce's customers are already experiencing the transformative power of Agentforce. For example, Agentforce is helping organisations like the publisher 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.

Every company has more jobs to be done than the resources available to do them, Salesforce explained. As a result, many jobs go unaddressed or uncompleted. Agentforce provides relief to overstretched teams so humans can focus on higher-touch, higher-value, and more strategic outcomes. 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.

"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," said 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,” said George Pokorny, SVP Customer Success, OpenTable, which is active in over 80 countries and is known for its restaurant bookings and reviews.

“As we advance our personalisation 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 individualised shopping experiences for which Saks is known,” added Mike Hite, CTO, Saks Global. The retailer ships internationally, including to the Asia Pacific and Middle East.

To deliver this breakthrough technology, Agentforce represents significant innovation in the Salesforce Platform; several highly-capable, out-of-the-box autonomous agents; a rich set of low-code tools for building, customising, and deploying agents quickly, easily, and without the complexity and costliness of AI model training or DIY AI projects; and has support from 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.

Data

The Salesforce Platform, with Data Cloud at its centre, enables Agentforce and every Salesforce app to deliver seamless, AI-powered experiences across every touchpoint. Data Cloud unifies and harmonises 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 organisations have already made in data lakes by providing a Zero Copy capability. This 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 analyse 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 optimised. They can also use these familiar building blocks to create new automations for Agentforce. This means organisations can capitalise on their existing investments in automation while scaling new capabilities.

Out-of-the-box agents

Agentforce’s agents are easy to customise 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 24x7, 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 personalised 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 e-commerce merchandisers with site setup, goal setting, personalised 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 e-commerce sites or messaging apps, offering personalised product recommendations and assisting with search queries. 

Source: Salesforce. Campaign Optimiser automates the full campaign lifecycle, using AI to analyse, generate, personalise, and optimise marketing campaigns based on business goals.

Campaign Optimiser

Automates the full campaign lifecycle, using AI to analyse, generate, personalise, and optimise 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 personalised assistive agent that supports employees in the flow of their work with specific tasks by searching and analysing data, creating action plans, and executing them to increase workplace efficiency.

Agent Builder

A low-code builder that makes it easy to customise 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 organisations 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 large language models (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 customise 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.

The Agentforce Partner Network

The Agentforce Partner Network includes 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 specialised actions in Agent Builder to customise 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 organisation 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.

"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 organisations in a competitive environment," said Ritu Jyoti, GVP/GM AI and Data Market Research and Advisory, IDC.

Details

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 US$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.