Salesforce launches Agentforce 2.0

Salesforce has announced Agentforce 2.0, the newest version of the first digital labour platform for enterprises. Salesforce describes Agentforce as a complete AI system for augmenting teams with trusted, autonomous AI agents in the flow of work. 

This release introduces a new library of prebuilt skills and workflow integrations for rapid customisation, the ability to deploy Agentforce in Slack, and advancements in agentic reasoning and retrieval augmented generation (RAG). The advances will enable companies to scale their workforce with customised agents capable of handling complex, multi-step tasks with even more precision and accuracy, the company said.

When teams typically have more work to do than resources available, poorer customer interactions and lengthy backlogs can happen. Organisations are turning to AI to help, but have a low tolerance for inadequate solutions that provide generic responses. According to Salesforce research:

• Two out of three consumers (67%) are frustrated when customer service can’t resolve their issues instantly.
• Customers walk away from nearly one-third of their customer service interactions without getting what they need.
• Over a third (34%) of consumers would work with an AI agent instead of a person to avoid repeating themselves.

Existing solutions such as copilots struggle to provide accurate, trusted responses to complex requests — such as personalised guidance on a job application — and cannot take action on their own — like nurturing a lead with product recommendations. Organisations need a new type of platform designed to supply digital labour in the form of autonomous AI agents that can reason over data and tap into workflows to take action on behalf of overwhelmed teams, Salesforce said.

“Agentforce 2.0 takes our revolutionary Salesforce digital labour platform to another level, with new reasoning, integration and customisation features that supercharge autonomous agents with unprecedented levels of intelligence, precision and accuracy,” said Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO, Salesforce. 

“The demand for Agentforce has been amazing — no other company comes close to offering this complete AI solution for enterprises. We’re seamlessly bringing together AI, data, apps, and automation with humans to reshape how work gets done. Agentforce 2.0 cements our position as the leader in digital labour solutions, allowing any company to build a limitless workforce that can truly transform their business.”

Adecco Group: scaling personalised recruiting with digital labour

"At the Adecco Group, we are committed to creating meaningful connections between candidates and opportunities. By centralising data across over 40 systems with Salesforce's Data Cloud and leveraging Agentforce, we’re transforming the candidate experience. Agentforce will help prequalify candidates, enhance CVs, and ensure faster job placements. Agentforce agents also operate 24x7, freeing recruiters to focus on meaningful connections while delivering speed and personalisation at scale," commented Greg Shewmaker, Senior VP of Global Operations and AI, The Adecco Group.

New library of skills

Time and integration challenges make it difficult to build customised agents for individual business teams or departments. Agentforce 2.0 eliminates these barriers with a new library of prebuilt agent skills‌ — ‌tasks Agentforce can perform‌ — ‌spanning customer relationship management (CRM), Slack, Tableau, and partner-developed skills on the AppExchange.  

This latest release empowers customers to extend Agentforce to any system or workflow using MuleSoft. It also features an enhanced Agent Builder capable of interpreting natural language instructions, such as Onboard New Product Managers, to autogenerate new agents. These agents seamlessly combine premade skills with custom logic built in Salesforce.

New CRM skills 

New skills for sales teams such as Sales Development and Sales Coaching enable the creation of autonomous AI agents that can nurture leads based on a company's rules of engagement, as well as agents that can join prospecting calls and provide instant feedback on interactions with customers. 

Additional skills include Marketing Campaign and Commerce Merchant skills, scheduling skills for service engagements, and new skills for field service workers.

Take action with MuleSoft

With MuleSoft for Flow, it’s easier than ever to create low-code workflows that span any system, with prebuilt connectors for building multisystem workflows fast. As teams look to turn their APIs into Agentforce actions, the new MuleSoft API Catalog enables builders and Salesforce admins to view, discover, and manage APIs across Salesforce, MuleSoft, Heroku, and any external services from one central location for rapid reuse. 

The new MuleSoft Topic Center expands on this by enabling teams to infuse Agentforce metadata into every API they build, ensuring that any point of connectivity can be automatically turned into an Agentforce skill or action,. 

Tableau skills for analytics and insights

New Tableau topics and Actions deliver data visualisations and predictions for deeper understanding of agent responses and accurate, business context-rich answers using Tableau Semantics. This unlocks new conversational analytics use cases.

Slack skills 

With Slack Actions now available in Agent Builder, a team can enhance Agentforce with, for example, the ability to send a direct message (DM) to provide a summary of what’s happening with a project, or update a Slack Canvas when a customer asks for changes to an ongoing project.

Partner skills 

Agentforce is backed by the first-ever enterprise ecosystem of agent skills through the AppExchange — enabling customers to extend Agentforce with custom topics and actions ranging from new agent types such as the AI Employee Service Agent with Workday, to new, partner-built actions from Asymbl, Docusign, and Neuron 7.

Create new agents in seconds using natural language descriptions. Agent Builder now uses Agentforce to compose new agents for the work you need done by autogenerating relevant topics and instructions while pulling from the library of skills and actions already available.

Accenture scales sales productivity with digital labour

“At Accenture, we embrace emerging technologies first so we can help our clients go fast. Our sales team within Accenture’s Salesforce Business Group and Accenture Song are starting to use Agentforce to automate contact and close plan creation, surface insights through enterprise search, and keep teams aligned with dynamic updates. 

"It’s helping to increase time-to-effectiveness, accelerate decision-making, and is allowing them to focus on delivering innovative solutions for their clients,” stated Stephanie Sadowski, Salesforce Business Group lead at Accenture.

Agentforce in Slack

As organisations look to unlock value from AI agents, they need solutions that are embedded where their employees already are. Agentforce 2.0 is deployable in Slack, bringing customisable digital labour into the messages (DMs) and channels where work happens.

Agentforce 2.0 enables teams to easily bring Agentforce into any Slack conversation. Slack users can start a conversation directly from the Agentforce Hub, or @ mention Agentforce agents through DMs or in channels.

New Slack actions in Agent Builder

Agent Builder now features prebuilt Slack actions such as Create Canvas or Message Channel that enable teams to rapidly enhance existing agents or create new ones that can effortlessly engage with teams in Slack.

Unlock conversational context 

Slack contains a wealth of domain knowledge across DMs, channels, and xanvases that reflect the unique nature of a business. With Slack Enterprise Search, Agentforce can draw from conversational data — enhancing the relevancy of responses and actions by drawing from public and permissioned information in Slack. 

Indeed uses Agentforce to scale personalised job seeker engagement

“Indeed is the world’s leading job site, with three people hired every second through its platform. At the heart of Indeed’s success is its ability to match the 580 million profiles created by job seekers with over 3 million hiring employers. By harnessing the power of Data Cloud, Indeed has enhanced its data architecture, creating a solid foundation for its go-to-market strategies and enhancing connections to its rich job seeker profiles,” said Indeed CIO Anthony Moisant. 

“By leveraging Agentforce, Indeed can stay focused on its mission to help people find jobs while advancing its goals, including reducing time-to-hire by 50% and helping 30 million individuals facing barriers to employment secure jobs by fiscal year 2030.”

Expert answers and executed actions 

The Atlas Reasoning Engine is the brain behind Agentforce, enabling it to retrieve relevant data, then reason and act. With Agentforce 2.0, Salesforce is introducing enhanced reasoning and retrieval to handle deeply nuanced questions, powered by new capabilities in Data Cloud that fuel Agentforce with greater context — complementing structured and unstructured data with business-specific metadata for greater accuracy. 

Enhanced reasoning 

Agentforce’s Atlas Reasoning Engine can now handle a wider variety of interactions, including those with multiple layers that require deeper thought. For example, a question that is straightforward, such as “what is the status of my portfolio?” will employ basic reasoning for rapid responses. 

A deeper question, such as “What would be the right investment vehicle for my child’s college fund based on my current income and risk preferences?” would use enhanced reasoning with advanced data retrievers — improving the answer by refining the query before pulling both relevant data and context-specific metadata in Data Cloud. The Atlas Reasoning Engine assesses its own response and loops through a variety of tools and sources in what's known as an 'agentic loop,’ enabling it to provide a trusted, well-researched response or action to nuanced and more complex requests, and do so without writing custom code, Salesforce said.

Enhanced RAG with Enriched Indexing

Retrieval augmented generation or RAG enables Agentforce to quickly find relevant information in unstructured content. To power enhanced reasoning in the Atlas Reasoning Engine, Data Cloud can now enrich RAG chunks — the snippets of retrieved data — with metadata from the Salesforce Platform. Enriching RAG indexes with metadata context adapts Agentforce 2.0 to the unique conventions of a business without additional work, improving accuracy and relevancy while increasing trust through inline citations that point to the exact sources Agentforce pulled from to answer a given question.

The Salesforce Help page receives more than 60 million visits a year from customers who need assistance with product support and account queries. Agentforce on help.salesforce.com provides customers with personalised, 24x7 service, while escalating to human reps with the full case history and context when needed. Agentforce, launched only in October, is now solving 83% of customer queries without a human, has halved the number of issues that require human intervention, and has nearly doubled its average number of weekly conversations.

Finnair: Customer experience transformation

“At Finnair, we will use Agentforce to transform our customer service operations, enabling us to efficiently handle routine inquiries and improve response times. With Agentforce automating a significant share of standard enquiries, our team can focus on more complex issues, ensuring faster and more accurate support. This allows us to provide a seamless experience for both customers and customer service personnel, reducing onboarding times for our contact centre teams with quicker access to vital information,” said Tiina Vesterinen, VP, Commerce & CX Solutions, Finnair.

SharkNinja: empowering agents

"With Salesforce's Agentforce, SharkNinja will be able to transform customer support across more than 30 markets, empowering our agents to deliver personalised, 24x7 service. By unifying data and addressing common enquiries like 'where is my order?', we can streamline agent workloads, enabling them to focus on meaningful, high-impact interactions. 

"This integration will ensure a seamless shopper experience, offering tailored product support, FAQs, and personalised responses that meet consumers’ unique needs – helping us to create extraordinary experiences at every touchpoint," said Velia Carboni, CIO, SharkNinja.

Details

• The full release of Agentforce 2.0 will be generally available in February 2025, with specific features being released in advance.
• Skills for sales development and sales coaching are generally available with pricing starting at US$2 per conversation.
• Agentforce in Slack, Slack Actions in Agent Builder, and Slack Enterprise Search will be generally available in January 2025.
• Natural language creation of agents in Agent Builder will be generally available in January 2025.
• MuleSoft for Flow, MuleSoft API Catalog, and Topic Center will be generally available in February 2025.
• Enhanced reasoning and RAG will be generally available in February 2025.