If Dreamforce 2024 could be summed up in one word, it would be this: Agentforce. What Salesforce has dubbed the “next wave of AI”, Agentforce will allow organizations to build and manage autonomous agents for tasks across business departments.
In simplest terms, Agentforce is Salesforce’s latest effort to create generative AI bots that can take action on their own, within established limits. Think of Agentforce as having your very own Service Agent, Sales Agent, or Marketing Agent that can help you with tasks such as resolving customer service cases, qualifying sales leads, or assisting you with your marketing campaigns.
You can even ask Agentforce questions right in Slack, and receive accurate answers based on your CRM data in Salesforce and your conversational data in Slack.
Atlas, the "brain" behind Agentforce, is Salesforce's upgraded version of copilot engine and works by evaluating and then refining a query. Atlas can then gather and analyze data, ensuring the insights are accurate, relevant, and grounded in your safe and trusted data. Atlas is designed to “simulate how humans think and plan” and allows Agentforce to autonomously reason, make decisions, and complete tasks.
Let’s take a closer look at the use cases for Agentforce, and how they can be deployed in minutes using clicks, not code.
An AI agent is a software entity that autonomously performs tasks on behalf of a user or system by perceiving its environment, processing data, and taking actions to achieve specific goals. AI agents typically have these core capabilities:
Perception: They gather information from the environment through sensors or data inputs, which can include text, images, audio, or other signals.
Decision-making: Based on the data they perceive, AI agents apply algorithms to analyze the situation and decide the next steps.
Action: After processing the data and making decisions, the AI agent performs actions. These actions could be interacting with software systems, responding to users, or triggering other processes.
Learning: Many AI agents are designed to improve their performance over time through machine learning, adapting their behavior based on new data or outcomes.
AI agents are used in various applications, such as virtual assistants, customer service chatbots, recommendation systems, and more.
In September, Salesforce unveiled Agentforce — a suite of autonomous AI agents that assist employees and handle tasks in service, sales, marketing, and commerce. Unlike other copilots and chatbots that require human requests, Agentforce operates autonomously and can complete tasks without human intervention by using real-time data to adapt to changing conditions.
These AI agents operate independently within your organization’s customized guardrails so you can ensure that tasks and customer interactions are completed accurately, securely, and in alignment with your business processes.
There are a variety of out-of-the-box agents that can be quickly built, customized, and deployed using low-code tools, eliminating the need for complex and expensive AI model training.
Agentforce Service Agent – Service Agents can autonomously engage customers 24/7 across channels in natural language, providing quick and accurate resolutions grounded in trusted data. Easily set up your agent in minutes with prebuilt templates or quickly customize it using low-code tools. Service Agents allow your service team to focus on more complex support cases and can seamlessly handoff conversation history and case summaries to human agents when needed.
Agentforce Sales Development Representative (SDR) – Can engage with prospects 24/7, answer questions, handle objections, and schedule meetings using CRM and external data. SDR agents allow your sales teams to improve the effectiveness of calls, automate intro emails, and increase the number of touches while focusing on higher-value activities.
Agentforce Sales Coach – Provides your sales team with personalized role-playing sessions, leveraging Salesforce data and generative AI. This helps sellers practice pitches and handle objections specific to their deals.
Agentforce Merchant – Helps ecommerce teams with site setup, goal setting, personalized promotions, product descriptions, and data-driven insights.
Agentforce Buyer – Helps buyers discover products, make purchases, and track orders through chat or within sales portals.
Agentforce Personal Shopper – Acts as a digital concierge on ecommerce platforms or messaging apps, providing tailored product recommendations and assisting with search queries.
Agentforce Campaign Optimizer – Automates the entire campaign lifecycle, using AI to analyze, generate, personalize, and optimize marketing campaigns to help you achieve your business goals.
Agentforce (formerly Einstein Copilot) – Einstein Copilot is now an agent that can retrieve data, reason and build a plan, and take action. Think of Agentforce as a new embedded (and personalized) assistive agent that supports employees in the flow of their work.
The Agentforce Partner Network consists of top partners like Amazon Web Services, Box, Certinia, Copado, Coupa, Google, Honeywell, IBM, Workday, Zoom, and more. Together, they have developed over 20 agents and agent actions, which will be available on the Salesforce AppExchange.
Customers can use these specialized actions in Agent Builder to customize out-of-the-box agents, create new agents with unique capabilities, and deploy partner-built agents to plan and execute tasks across multiple systems and channels (even beyond Salesforce).
Starting at $2 per conversation, Agentforce for Service and Sales will be generally available on October 25, 2024 with some components of the Atlas Reasoning Engine launching in February 2025.
As a Salesforce Summit Partner, we’ve helped companies across industries implement AI solutions that boost employee productivity and enhance customer experiences.
From partnering with a high-tech company to implement Einstein Service Replies for email, to assisting an organization with the deployment of Einstein Next Best Action and advanced Sales Cloud features, we’re proud to deliver AI-powered solutions that streamline operations, enhance customer interactions, and drive smarter decision-making.
Want to learn more about Agentforce and how it can benefit your organization? Get in touch with our team and let’s chat!
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