Introduced in October 2024, Agentforce offers a suite of preconfigured autonomous AI agents and the tools for businesses to build their own.
Salesforce – the vendor behind Agentforce – believes the platform represents the “third wave of AI” – going beyond “copilots” to introduce a new era of accurate, multifunctional AI agents.
These agents integrate AI across customer-facing functions and beyond into the broader enterprise.
In doing so, they automate specific tasks but can collaborate to mechanize multi-step flows.
For instance, one may anticipate customer needs and work with another that takes proactive actions based on that intelligence.
That’s the big differentiator of agentic AI platforms like Agentforce. They don’t just surface insight; they trigger actions on the back of that insight.
Additionally, Agentforce empowers anyone to create custom agents with a no-/low-code user interface.
But that’s just the beginning. Here’s everything you need to know about Agentforce.
What Is Agentforce?
Agentforce is Salesforce’s agentic AI platform. It allows users to build, customize, and deploy autonomous AI Agents capable of supporting employees and customers.
Organizations can use Agentforce to deploy pre-built agents or create their own with out-of-the-box templates and familiar Salesforce tools, such as Flows, Prompt Templates, Apex, and the Data Cloud.
Agentforce agents come with the Einstein Trust Layer for data protection, offer access to customizable guardrails for enhanced controls, and – if integrated with Data Cloud – are grounded in the business’s data.
Additionally, agents don’t require pre-determined conversational flows (like Einstein Copilots). Instead, they can adapt in real time to changing requirements, using intuitive, cutting-edge language models and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).
At the heart of Agentforce is the all-new “Atlas Reasoning Engine”. Built on a proprietary system designed to simulate how human beings think, Atlas reasons through problems.
Additionally, this engine dynamically evaluates user queries, refines them, and retrieves only the most relevant data for more reliable performance.
Lastly, since Agentforce integrates seamlessly with all of Salesforce’s apps, including its Customer 360 apps, MuleSoft, Apex, and Salesforce Flow, customers can extend the functionality of each agent with pre-optimized workflows and actions.
How Agentforce Works: The Basics
Companies can leverage preconfigured agents within Agentforce or create their own within the Agent Builder inside Agentforce Studio.
To do so, a business may use natural language – which simply means “describing” what it wants the agent to do.
So, the user may first describe the agent’s purpose and define the knowledge and data sources it can access.
Businesses may group these sources by “topic” to make this simpler. For example, if a creator builds an agent for customer service, it can tag the agent with all topics relevant to customer service.
These topics may have specific actions tied to them for inspiration. Yet, brands can also create new actions based on Apex data, Flows, Mulesoft APIs, and prompts to fully customize their agents.
Once they’ve created an agent, a user can test-drive it, learn, optimize, and then embed the agent within their tech ecosystem.
When deploying an agent, it will automatically function across the Salesforce apps listed in its description, such as in the Service or Sales Cloud.
If connected to Data Cloud, Agentforce agents will dynamically update themselves too, as new data enters the ecosystem.
The Preconfigured Agentforce Agents
The great thing about Agentforce is that a user doesn’t need to be an AI expert to create a custom agent.
Indeed – alongside all the necessary building blocks to design sales, service, and other types of agents – are agent prototypes that businesses can customize without writing code.
Salesforce released 100 of these preconfigured agents when launching the solution. Some of the standout out-of-the-box agent options include:
- Service Agents: These agents can autonomously engage with and support customers across multiple channels using natural language. They can solve issues quickly because they respond to queries using the business’s existing data. Companies like Saks and OpenTable use Service Agents to support service reps at scale.
- Agentforce SDRs: Sales development representative (SDR) agents can autonomously answer product questions, book meetings, and nurture leads on behalf of sales reps. They may also interact with customers across multiple channels (including WhatsApp and SMS) in any language. Finally, the business can define when they pass a lead over to a human agent.
- Sales Coaches: These agents coach sales professionals by offering real-time advice as they practice pitching, handling objections, and managing negotiations. Via these role plays, they may also offer immediate feedback on seller strengths and weaknesses, providing actionable guidance for success based on CRM data and previous interactions.
- Personal Shoppers: Personal Shopper Agents can help customers find relevant products for their needs, deliver personalized recommendations, and guide search queries. They can also guide customers toward sales reps for extra support.
- Campaign Agents: Intended to support marketing teams, Campaign Agents can generate briefs, highlight target audience segments, create content, and even build customer journeys in Flow. They also constantly analyze the performance of campaigns against critical KPIs, recommending proactive improvements.
Additional Customization Options
As noted, Agentforce customers have significant potential to customize and deploy agents for specific requirements.
The Agent Builder allows users to customize out-of-the-box agents and put them to work within the Salesforce ecosystem.
Additionally, the platform offers access to builders for resting custom AI models and optimizing prompts.
Indeed, the prompt builder includes a broad selection of prompt templates that users can customize with Data Cloud and CRM insights.
On top of that, Salesforce is building its “Agentforce partner network” to provide users with access to agents pre-built by companies like Google, AWS, IBM, Zoom, Workday, and more.
That will allow customers to – for instance – deploy partner agents for Google Workspace that create slide presentations and various other documents.
Lastly, Salesforce has already highlighted examples of industry-specific autonomous agents built for banking, healthcare, retail, finance, and even IT support. Businesses can customize these, too!
What Is Agentforce Going to Do for Enterprise Tech?
On a broad scale, Agentforce delivers many benefits for enterprises. First, it’s deeply integrated with Data Cloud, making it simpler for companies to ground agents in all the data they have stored in the customer data platform (CDP).
That doesn’t just include Salesforce ecosystem data. Businesses may also pull data from external environments into Data Cloud using native zero-copy technology and MuleSoft connectors.
Moreover, Data Cloud can surface insights from text, video, PDFs, and more, and the solution leverages RAG to constantly learn more about the business over time.
As a result, when teams update their CRM, they don’t have to “retrain” their agent; it will access new insights automatically. That’s so long as their businesses leverage Data Cloud alongside Agentforce, of course.
In addition, Agentforce is easy to use, with pre-built agents and flexible customization and deployment tools that don’t require any prior technical knowledge.
However, perhaps most importantly, Salesforce designed Agentforce with a focus on AI governance, security, and compliance.
Beyond taking advantage of the Einstein Trust Layer to protect sensitive customer data, companies can set up their own guardrails to minimize the risk of AI bias and hallucinations.
Additionally, Agentforce offers “audit trail” features, which make it easy to track agent actions and understand the reasoning behind certain outputs, boosting AI explainability.
The Future of Agentic AI
Salesforce describes Agentforce as the definition of what “AI was meant to be.” According to its CEO Marc Benioff, this enterprise-ready platform enables companies from all industries to unlock the potential of agentic AI without compromising on industry standards, flexibility, or security.
Already, numerous companies, such as Wiley, OpenTable, and Saks, say that Agentforce has made a noticeable difference in their workplace processes, customer experiences, and team productivity.
Moreover, analysts from IDC say that Agentforce has the potential to take businesses into the next era of AI, going beyond the already transformative impact of copilots.
Nevertheless, there are still challenges to overcome. For instance, Agentforce agents are still only as good as the data they can ingest. That means companies need to invest in building out Data Cloud.
Additionally, Salesforce has struggled to deliver truly revolutionary AI tools in the past, with the Einstein Copilot builder struggling to achieve exceptional adoption throughout 2024.
On top of that, there’s the pricing factor to consider. Usage-based pricing starts at $2 per conversation. Some companies have questioned whether this pricing is really cost-effective, particularly for large-scale agents who might have thousands of conversations per day.
Despite all that, there’s definitely potential for Agentforce. If Salesforce can deliver on its promises with this ecosystem – delivering scalable, customizable, and more accurate agents to companies without complexity, the opportunities are limitless.
Wish to capture more insight into what Agentforce could do in the enteprise? Check out our list of the top Agentforce case studies.