Agentforce Goes Industry-Specific as Salesforce Releases an Agent Skills Library for Retailers

The vendor also announced Retail Cloud with Modern POS

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Published: January 13, 2025

Rhys Fisher

Salesforce has confirmed the release of Agentforce for Retail, a skills library for industry-specific AI agents.   

With these new skills, retailers can develop AI agents that support their customer service workers, store associates, and customers in new ways.  

For instance, they may build AI agents that enhance and automate order management processes, guided shopping experiences, and appointment scheduling. 

In doing so, retailers can develop AI agents that meet their specific needs. 

While Salesforce had previously released 100 preconfigured, industry-specific AI Agents for its core Agentforce offering, the new release signals a shift to provide certain sectors with new agent skills that allow them to better build their own. 

In discussing the release of Agentforce for Retail, Nitin Mangtani, SVP & GM of Retail at Salesforce, commented: 

Salesforce is helping retailers deliver seamless, unified shopping experiences across both the physical and digital realms of retail that drive productivity advancements and business growth across their entire enterprise.

Yet, ultimately, this move signals Salesforce’s drive to deliver sector-specific agentic AI innovation.

While it had previously released Agentforce skills for merchandisers, marketers, and customer service reps, this latest move underlines this goal, which will likely spread into other industries.

Agentforce for Retail: What’s Included?

Here are some of the skills that come part and parcel with Agentforce for Retail.

Commerce Skills for Order Management

By enabling retailers to provide self-service order support, Salesforce claims that users will be able to lower costs and improve customer loyalty.  

These skills also allow customers to update payment and shipping details, manage uneven exchanges, and check order status in a conversational manner on their preferred channels. 

Commerce Skills for Guided Shopping

Shoppers can use natural language to receive product recommendations based on shopper behavior, inventory, and operational data.  

Customers can also use the skills to search for products, add items to their cart, and complete purchases through conversational interactions – helping users to deliver a concierge-like level of personalization.  

Field Service Skills for Appointment Scheduling

The skills enable service representatives to coordinate deliveries, installations, or consultations.  

In addition, the AI-powered tools leverage real-time availability updates to streamline the scheduling process, enhancing efficiency and customer satisfaction. 

Marketing Skills for Loyalty Promotion Creation

Salesforce believes that this skill will empower marketers to develop and refine loyalty campaigns using conversational prompts informed by shoppers, point-of-sale (POS), and segmentation data.  

This results in more personalized email content and subject lines that drive greater customer engagement.  

Salesforce Doubles Down on Retail

As well as Agentforce for Retail, Salesforce also announced the launch of Retail Cloud with Modern POS. 

Described by the vendor as a “user-friendly, cloud-based POS”, the tool is designed to unify online and offline shopping experiences.  

By integrating inventory and shopper data on a single platform, the solution provides retail associates with the capabilities to serve customers more efficiently and effectively. 

Key features include clienteling, inventory management, and endless aisle capabilities – all of which are powered by real-time data and AI.  

Associates can manage shopper profiles, track and update inventory across channels, and utilize AI for voice assistance, return fraud detection, and personalized recommendations. 

The system also supports mixed cart and omni-channel fulfillment, enabling shoppers to choose flexible delivery and exchange options like buy-online-pickup-in-store (BOPIS) or omni-exchanges.  

Its architecture allows each item in a cart to have unique fulfillment methods, reducing supply chain costs and boosting shopper convenience. 

For Mangtani, the combination of the two features will allow Salesforce to help retailers provide a different level of support: 

Together, AI-fueled digital labor and a modern POS can unlock a new scale of operational capacity for retailers.  

More on Agentforce

In December of last year, Salesforce introduced Agentforce 2.0, branding it as “The Digital Labor Platform”. 

Agentforce 2.0 brings an expanded vision alongside enhanced capabilities, which Salesforce believes positions the offering as a key tool for businesses looking to streamline operations and embrace AI-driven automation. 

 

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