What you should know

Since its launch on the Dreamforce convention in September 2024, Salesforce Agentforce modified the dialog round AI, buyer expertise and customer support. Shortly after the launch, Salesforce introduced it was hiring greater than 1,000 workers to fulfill the demand for Agentforce. 

On the time of the Agentforce announcement, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff known as Agentforce “the third wave of AI — advancing past copilots to a brand new period of extremely correct, low-hallucination clever brokers that actively drive buyer success.”

The platform is so essential to Salesforce that Benioff declared on the Agentforce launch, “The one factor we’re going to do at Salesforce is Agentforce.”

What’s Agentforce?

Agentforce is basically a platform layer within the Salesforce ecosystem. Agentforce bots are generative AI bots, however in contrast to fashionable genAI platforms like ChatGPT and Google Gemini, Salesforce says its Agentforce bots could be trusted to take motion on their very own.   

In contrast to earlier chatbots, AI brokers don’t observe a prescribed sample of solutions to frequent queries, however are able to responding extra flexibly to questions or points as a result of they’re skilled on inner knowledge and are able to drawing on the assist of a big language mannequin (LLM). Salesforce’s agentic AI, for instance, could be skilled on knowledge in Salesforce Knowledge Cloud.

Agentforce combines three main Salesforce instruments — Agent Builder, Mannequin Builder and Immediate Builder — to ship out-of-the-box bots that work throughout industries. The bots are custom-made utilizing cheap, low-code instruments.

The preliminary brokers created with Agentforce embrace:

• Marketing campaign Optimizer, which manages and executes full marketing campaign lifecycles. 
• Service Agent, which replaces chatbots in dealing with customer support.
• Purchaser, which helps B2B clients discover merchandise, make purchases and monitor orders.
• Private Shopper, which recommends merchandise and helps with search.
• Service provider, which does all of the site-related duties for merchandisers, together with promotions, product descriptions and insights.
• Gross sales Growth Consultant, which engages with potential leads 24/7.
• Gross sales Coach, which helps practice gross sales groups and lets sellers apply pitching.

Basic availability for Agentforce One started on Oct. 25, 2024, with pricing beginning at $2 per dialog, with reductions out there to massive customers

Salesforce additionally introduced the Agentforce Associate Community on the launch. It lets different organizations deploy third-party brokers or use third-party actions when designing customized brokers in Agentforce.

Dig deeper: Buyer expertise administration within the age of agentic AI

How does Agentforce work?

Through the preliminary Agentforce announcement at Dreamforce, Benioff mentioned Agentforce is designed for purchasers who don’t know a lot about AI or constructing bots.

“They aren’t going to should be an professional in an LLM, they aren’t going to have to know all of those deep capabilities that you’d have to know to be a pc scientist,” he mentioned. That is “AI for the remainder of us.”

Agentforce is powered by an upgraded model of Salesforce’s Einstein AI known as Atlas Reasoning Engine, which is “designed to simulate how people assume and plan.” 

On the announcement, Salesforce drew a comparability to self-driving vehicles. Agentforce can interpret knowledge to adapt to circumstances in actual time and may act independently inside an organization’s guardrails. 

Benioff mentioned Agentforce has the bottom hallucination fee of any generative AI however didn’t say what that fee is. 

Enhanced Atlas Reasoning Engine

Salesforce introduced in December 2024 that its Atlas Reasoning Engine was improved with superior reasoning and retrieval augmented era (RAG), permitting brokers to deal with extra complicated, multistep questions and supply extra correct and exact solutions.

The improved RAG capabilities let customers confirm data by giving inline citations with agent responses. Citing the precise sources builds belief within the AI’s output. It additionally helps customers test for accuracy. 

Knowledge Cloud

Knowledge Cloud offers the shopper knowledge that grounds Agentforce, making brokers extra contextually conscious, educated and adaptable to buyer wants. Knowledge Cloud connects, unifies and harmonizes buyer knowledge and metadata, giving brokers entry to the precise data they should ship exact, contextual responses. It makes structured and unstructured knowledge – together with emails, transcripts and PDFs – simply digestible by massive language fashions (LLMs). The RAG performance permits customers to add recordsdata and URLs as knowledge sources for his or her agent. 

Buyer 360

Agentforce is deeply built-in with Salesforce Buyer 360, leveraging purposes like gross sales, service, advertising and marketing and commerce. An entire view of the shopper is vital to seamless hand-offs to human brokers with the complete dialog historical past.

MuleSoft

MuleSoft is an integration, automation and API administration platform. It extends Agentforce capabilities by enabling Salesforce builders and admins to leverage their APIs and usher in third-party knowledge.

Slack

Slack is a central level for workers to work together with Agentforce. They’ll entry data, set off workflows and handle duties immediately inside Slack, which suggests they don’t have to leap between purposes.