Salesforce has unveiled its new “groundbreaking” suite of autonomous AI agents, Agentforce, intending to enhance the customer experience and bolster business efficiency.
Salesforce CEO and Chair Marc Benioff teased Agentforce’s reveal earlier this week as its “next big transformation” and company-wide “hard pivot”. The solution is pitched as a suite of autonomous AI agents designed to enhance employee productivity and manage tasks across service, sales, marketing, and commerce business arms.
Salesforce says the offering can analyse data, make informed decisions, and execute tasks such as responding to customer service inquiries, qualifying sales leads, and optimising marketing campaigns.
Agentforce intends to enable companies to scale their workforces on demand by driving efficiency and improving customer satisfaction. Additionally, Salesforce outlines that organisations can build, customise, and deploy their own AI agents for distinct use cases across myriad industries through the Agentforce solution by using Salesforce’s low-code build toolset.
“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,” commented Benioff.
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.”
In addition to the set of low-code tools for building and customising agents rapidly, Salesforce is also launching the Agentforce Partner Network, enabling partner organisations to deploy third-party agents or leverage third-party actions when utilising Agentforce’s toolset to design custom agents.
More Specifics On How Agentforce Precisely Works
Salesforce suggests that, in contrast to the chatbots or “copilots” that can sometimes struggle with the complexity of language or tasks, Agentforce is a sophisticated next step in customer experience AI.
Salesforce conveys that Agentforce (powered by Salesforce’s new and advanced Atlas Reasoning Engine AI) functions autonomously, retrieving the necessary data on demand, creating action plans for the task, and executing these plans without human intervention.
Salesforce compares the solution to a self-driving car, where Agentforce leverages real-time data to adapt to changing conditions and functions independently within an organisation’s customised parameters. Salesforce adds that, when needed, Agentforce can transition tasks to human employees, providing a summary of the interaction, an overview of the customer’s details, and recommendations for the next steps.
The Salesforce Platform is bolstered by the company’s Data Cloud, which powers Agentforce and all Salesforce apps to deliver AI-driven experiences across every touchpoint. The Data Cloud unifies and harmonises customer data and metadata in real time, intending to allow Agentforce to operate with thorough context and precision.
Agentforce integrates with Salesforce’s automation capabilities, including MuleSoft and Salesforce Flow, aiming to enable customers to extend its functionality.
Meanwhile, out-of-the-box agents can be customisable and deployed with clicks, not code, boosting efficiency across different roles, business arms and industries. These include service agents instead of traditional chatbots, 24/7 “Sales Development Representatives”, “Merchants”, which support e-commerce merchandisers, and “Campaign Optimisers”, which automate the entire campaign lifecycle.
“In the generative phase, you might ask a copilot to write an email for you to a customer,” said Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI. “In the agentic phase, you can ask a harder question: ‘What should I do with all of my customers?’ Maybe it’s email, maybe it’s picking up the phone and calling, maybe it’s sending a text message. That’s really what agents can do: They can take a higher order question, break it down into a series of steps, and then execute each of those steps.”
Salesforce to Acquire Own Company for $1.9BN, Biggest Acquisition Since Slack
Earlier this month, Salesforce entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Own Company for $1.9 billion.
Own Company, a leading provider of SaaS data backup, management, and recovery solutions, has long been a close partner of Salesforce, which previously held a ten percent stake in the company. Salesforce is highly familiar with Own Company’s portfolio and team, as the business has been part of the AppExchange marketplace since 2012. This acquisition aligns with Salesforce’s “try before you buy” strategy.
Salesforce has recently accelerated this approach, marking its third acquisition in just over a month, following the purchases of Tenyx and PredictSpring. However, the $1.9 billion price tag makes this deal significantly larger, reportedly the biggest since Salesforce acquired Slack in 2020.
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