Unlocking Salesforce Agentforce: Essential Insights You Shouldn’t Miss
Salesforce Agentforce made waves following its debut at the Dreamforce conference in September 2024, redefining discussions around artificial intelligence, customer interactions, and service. In light of its rapid adoption, Salesforce quickly revealed plans to recruit over 1,000 staff members to support Agentforce.
Upon unveiling Agentforce, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff referred to it as “the third wave of AI,” emphasizing its evolution from mere copilots to advanced intelligent agents that significantly enhance customer success with high accuracy and minimal errors.
Benioff went so far as to assert that Agentforce represents the company’s core focus, stating, “Our singular priority at Salesforce will be Agentforce.”
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What is Agentforce?
Agentforce functions as an essential platform layer within the Salesforce ecosystem. While these bots leverage generative AI, Salesforce distinguishes Agentforce from other mainstream generative AI solutions such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini by asserting that its bots are fully capable of autonomously executing tasks.
Unlike traditional chatbots that follow static scripts for common questions, these AI agents are designed to respond dynamically, as they are trained on proprietary internal data and supported by a robust large language model (LLM). For instance, Salesforce’s Agentforce AI can harness insights from the Salesforce Data Cloud.
Agentforce integrates three principal Salesforce tools—Agent Builder, Model Builder, and Prompt Builder—to create pre-packaged bots that can function across various sectors. Customizing these bots can be accomplished through low-code solutions that are cost-effective.
Initial deployments of Agentforce comprise:
- Campaign Optimizer: A bot that oversees and executes comprehensive campaign lifecycles.
- Service Agent: Evolving beyond conventional chatbots to enhance customer service capabilities.
- Buyer: Aiding B2B clients in product discovery, purchasing, and order tracking.
- Personal Shopper: Offering product suggestion and search assistance.
- Merchant: Handling all merchandising-related activities, including promotions and product insights.
- Sales Development Representative: Interacting with potential leads around the clock.
- Sales Coach: Assisting in the training of sales teams and facilitating pitch practice.
Agentforce One became generally available on October 25, 2024, with pricing starting at $2 per conversation, alongside bulk usage discounts.
In addition, Salesforce introduced the Agentforce Partner Network alongside the launch, enabling other enterprises to deploy third-party agents or actions while creating custom agents in Agentforce.
Explore more: Enhancing customer experience management in the era of agentic AI
How Agentforce Operates
During the initial presentation of Agentforce at Dreamforce, Benioff emphasized that the platform is tailored for users who are not well-versed in AI or bot development.
“Users won’t need expertise in LLMs or need to grasp intricate technicalities usually required by computer scientists,” he remarked. This is designed as “AI for everyone.”
Agentforce runs on an enhanced version of Salesforce’s Einstein AI named Atlas Reasoning Engine, crafted to mimic human thought processes and planning capabilities.
At the event, Salesforce likened Agentforce to self-driving vehicles, able to interpret data and adjust to changing conditions in real time while acting autonomously within pre-set corporate guidelines.
Benioff claimed that Agentforce boasts the lowest hallucination rate among generative AIs, although he did not disclose the specific percentage.
Upgraded Atlas Reasoning Engine
In December 2024, Salesforce unveiled that its Atlas Reasoning Engine had been enhanced with state-of-the-art reasoning and retrieval augmented generation (RAG), enabling agents to tackle more intricate, multi-step inquiries and deliver precise and accurate outputs.
The advanced RAG features allow users to validate facts by incorporating inline citations within agent responses. This practice fosters trust in AI outputs and assists users in verifying accuracy.
Integration of Agentforce with Other Salesforce Solutions
Data Cloud
The Data Cloud ensures that Agentforce is rooted in customer data, enhancing agents’ contextual awareness and adaptability to user needs. It harmonizes diverse customer data, enabling agents to access vital information to generate informed, contextual responses. This integration allows structured and unstructured data—such as emails, transcripts, and PDFs—to be processed seamlessly by large language models (LLMs). The RAG function also permits users to introduce files and URLs as data sources for their agents.
Customer 360
Agentforce is thoroughly integrated with Salesforce Customer 360, utilizing applications across sales, service, marketing, and commerce, ensuring that customer transitions to human agents are smooth and accompanied by comprehensive conversation histories.
MuleSoft
MuleSoft extends Agentforce’s capabilities by providing integration, automation, and API management, allowing Salesforce developers and administrators to utilize their APIs and assimilate third-party data.
Slack
Slack serves as the primary interaction hub for employees engaging with Agentforce, enabling them to retrieve information, trigger workflows, and manage tasks without needing to navigate multiple applications.
Agentforce leverages Slack Enterprise Search to analyze conversations occurring in channels and direct messages, enabling agents to provide more relevant responses and actions based on conversational context.
Tableau
With Tableau Einstein, an AI-driven visual analytics tool, Agentforce is designed to intelligently embed data and insights throughout work processes, encouraging teams to utilize data for actionable outcomes.
Learn more: Four major features in Salesforce’s Agentforce 2.0
Agentforce Testing Hub
Salesforce introduced The Testing Hub in December 2024, allowing organizations to pilot their AI agents pre-launch. This facility offers Agentforce users a chance to ensure that agents follow protocols, remain factual, and work at optimal speed. It helps mitigate risks and guarantees agents perform reliably and consistently, also providing tools to facilitate testing, auditing, and scaling.
Skill and Integration Library
Also launched in December 2024, this library covers essential business applications like CRM, Slack, and Tableau, alongside integrations from AppExchange partners. These ready-to-use skills streamline the creation of customized AI agents. The library includes pre-built Slack Actions such as Create Canvas and Message Channel, allowing teams to establish agents for their Slack workflows.
Here are a few examples:
- CRM Skills: Create agents that automate and enhance customer interactions. These agents can facilitate lead nurturing, sales coaching, and service engagement scheduling, among other tasks.
- Sales Development Skill: Develop agents that nurture leads based on pre-defined criteria.
- Sales Coaching Skill: Have agents actively assist during sales calls, providing real-time feedback to improve representative performance.
- MuleSoft Integrations: Enable businesses to use Agentforce throughout their broader ecosystem. For example, it can link Agentforce with ERP systems for automating order fulfillment and connect with marketing automation tools to trigger personalized email campaigns based on customer interactions.
- AppExchange: Expands Agentforce’s functionalities by granting access to specialized skills crafted by partners.
Agentforce for Retail Launch
Salesforce revealed Agentforce for Retail in January 2025 during the National Retail Federation (NRF) conference. This version includes a curated library of agent skills tailored for the retail sector, designed to equip retail brands with what Salesforce terms “digital labor.”
The newly introduced skills available in Agentforce for Retail encompass:
- Order Management: Self-service options for customers to conversationally update order details such as payment or shipping information.
- Guided Shopping: Customers receive product recommendations through natural language interactions and can complete purchases in a conversational manner.
- Appointment Scheduling: Automated scheduling, providing real-time availability for services like delivery, installation, and consultations.
- Loyalty Promotion Creation: Assistance for marketers in crafting and optimizing loyalty promotions through conversational prompts.
Additionally, Salesforce introduced Retail Cloud with Modern POS, a new offering that integrates online and offline inventory data into a single platform.
Explore more: MarTech introduces Agentforce for Retail
Companies Utilizing Agentforce
Salesforce itself employs Agentforce internally, reporting that agents at help.salesforce.com manage 83% of customer support inquiries autonomously, with human intervention decreasing by 50% within two weeks of implementation.
RBC leverages Atlas and Data Cloud alongside Agentforce to support its financial advisors. The integration of Salesforce Data Cloud centralizes all client data, providing advisors with a unified view, while Atlas processes intricate client inquiries with multistep logic, drawing on RBC’s data for precise answers.
Accenture has adopted Agentforce to streamline its employee access to critical account updates. It automates document retrieval, offers solutions for business challenges, and enhances proposal generation and team collaboration with real-time updates.
Other notable companies recognized by Salesforce as users of Agentforce include:
- The Adecco Group
- BACA Systems
- OpenTable
- Saks
- SharkNinja
- Wiley
Discover more: SharkNinja’s journey into Salesforce AI
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