Salesforce Introduces AgentForce: AI-Powered Autonomous Agents for Business Operations

Salesforce unveils its vision of AI agents to help every business

Agentforce is the next generation of AI service tools, Salesforce claims Salesforce has launched Agentforce, a suite of artificial intelligence-powered agents designed to improve productivity and efficiency across sales, marketing, commerce and customer service. The generative AI bots will be able to carry out tasks independently, reducing the need for human supervision and improving overall business output. The company says Agentforce marks a major milestone in artificial intelligence developments, progressing from human aids to more powerful tools. 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," noted Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. Benioff distanced Agentforce from now-familiar artificial intelligence tools, referring to copilots and chatbots as outdated because they rely on human requests. Salesforce's initial set of AI agents will focus on roles like sales reps, service agents, personal shoppers and sales coaches. Agentforce is designed to carry out many of the early stages of an interaction before producing a summary for a human agent to review and take further steps. Despite the apparent threat, Salesforce believes Agentforce will free up human workers to focus on more rewarding workloads. Besides a series of out-of-the-box agents based on Salesforce's Atlas Reasoning Engine, customers can also customize and deploy their own agents with a low-code builder. General availability for Agentforce for Service and Sales is slated for October 25, with some Atlas Reasoning Engine components arriving in February 2025. Salesforce confirmed that Agentforce pricing starts at $2 per conversation.

Salesforce announces Agentforce autonomous AI agent builder platform - SiliconANGLE

Salesforce announces Agentforce autonomous AI agent builder platform Salesforce Inc. today unveiled Agentforce, a new artificial intelligence autonomous agent platform designed to augment work for employees and handle tasks across service, sales, marketing and commerce. Using Agentforce, companies can build customizable AI agents that can scale according to workforce demands which can analyze data, make decisions, understand customer needs and take actions on their behalf. According to Salesforce, any organization can easily build, set up and deploy these agents for any use case right now. "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," said Marc Benioff, chair and chief executive of Salesforce. "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." The platform launched with out-of-the-box agents that customers can easily customize for their own needs in a few clicks and without the need to write any code. The agents are designed to be set up and deployed in minutes. The different available roles include a service agent that can replace a traditional chatbot and can handle a large range of service issues without preprogrammed rote scenarios, a sales development representative that can engage prospects and a sales coach that can perform role-play for sales teams. E-commerce merchandizers can also spin up and launch a merchant agent that can assist with site setup, goals, personalized promotions, product descriptions and daily tasks. Agents have five attributes that allow them to act autonomously: role, data, actions, guardrails and channels. This means that they have a job that they do, what knowledge they access, their capabilities, their rules and guidelines, and the areas that they're set to work within. Salesforce already brings all of this together in its platform through its platform with Data Cloud for data, application programming interfaces and partner tools for capabilities, as well as built-in security, filters and management. All of this comes together with a new reasoning engine called Atlas, which uses the role to evaluate what actions and data it has available to generate an automated series of tasks. The company said Atlas can simulate how humans think and plan, allowing it to make decisions and complete business tasks based on data and software tools. For example, a service agent could provide personalized support for a customer by reasoning around things such as completing orders, returns or other customer service operations. These actions can take place over text and voice - and on voice, they feel almost as natural as talking to a human with the AI mimicking normal conversation. And, if the agent cannot handle the user needs it can always escalate to a human operator. As mentioned above, customization and building agents is made easy using the Agent Builder, where users don't need to worry about understanding AI prompts but can define the role and then assign actions and capabilities with a low-code interface. For advanced users, there is a Model Builder that allows customers to assign large language models of their choice to agents, test them in a playground and activate them and a Prompt Builder to test out specialized actions. "As AI continues to evolve, I'm seeing a fundamental shift in how work is done, with the emergence of agents playing a central role in driving efficiency and scale," said Ritu Jyoti, group vice president for AI and data market research and advisory at International Data Corp. "Salesforce's new Agentforce stands out as a promising suite of tools, offering businesses a comprehensive platform of intelligent agents designed to automate and streamline tasks across a wide range of industries."

Salesforce's AgentForce: The AI assistants that want to run your entire business

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Salesforce unveiled Agentforce on Thursday, a suite of AI-powered autonomous agents designed to augment human workers across various business functions. The company positions this as the "third wave" of AI, moving beyond predictive models and generative AI to what it calls "agentic systems." Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO of Salesforce, emphasized the transformative potential of AgentForce during a press conference ahead of the global launch. "We're about to enter this third wave of AI -- and this third wave of AI, we're going to know it as agents, and at Salesforce, we're going to know it as Agentforce," he said. "And yes, we're very excited [about] the fourth wave. We can kind of start to start to see it, the wave of droids that's coming, maybe this mythical fifth wave of AGI will come one day as well. But right now, in the here and now, we're excited about agents." AI Agents: Salesforce's answer to enterprise automation challenges Agentforce builds on Salesforce's existing platform, leveraging the company's vast troves of customer data and its recently developed Data Cloud. Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI, explained the platform approach: "The power of Agentforce is that it's built from within. It is now part of every Salesforce cloud, every industry cloud, from financial services cloud to Health Cloud to government cloud and media cloud," she said. The company introduces several out-of-the-box agents for various roles, including service, sales development, and marketing campaign optimization. These agents can be customized using low-code tools, allowing businesses to tailor the AI to their specific needs without extensive technical expertise. Benioff highlighted the importance of this platform approach: "What you need to be using is a platform that is doing all of those things for you and our platform, just as it's managed your data for you and kept it safe and secure in a trusted way, is also going to give you the best artificial intelligence experience you could possibly have," he said. "The most accurate, the most capable, the easiest and the lowest cost, and no other AI will be able to deliver that, because only we are delivering this platform approach, these autonomous agents that are learning and are taking action." Early adopters report significant gains with Agentforce implementation Early adopters report significant productivity gains. Wiley, the educational publishing giant, has seen a 40-70% autonomous resolution rate for customer inquiries during its busy back-to-school season. Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest healthcare providers in the U.S., is using Agentforce to handle patient inquiries with over 90% resolution rates, according to Benioff. Benioff shared an example from Disney. "When Disney benchmarked Atlas, they said it was giving them twice the accuracy of the AI that they were already using, which came from one of the extremely large vendors," he said. "That idea that we were able to augment that employee and... give them more productivity, or help fundamentally, give that customer more revenue or more efficiency." However, the move comes at a time when concerns about AI's impact on jobs and data privacy are at an all-time high. Salesforce emphasizes its commitment to ethical AI use, with Shih noting that Agentforce includes "ethical guardrails, like our toxicity filters, also built by Salesforce research," she said. Navigating the AI arms race: Salesforce's strategic play in enterprise software The announcement represents a significant strategic shift for Salesforce, which has been under pressure to demonstrate the value of its hefty investments in AI technology. By integrating AI agents deeply into its existing platform, the company bets that it can deliver more immediate and tangible benefits to its vast customer base than standalone AI solutions. Industry analysts express cautious optimism but note that the real test will come as more customers adopt the technology. Salesforce's platform approach could give them a significant edge in enterprise AI adoption, especially given their vast existing customer base and deep integration with business processes across industries. However, the company faces several challenges. They'll need to prove that these agents can deliver consistent value across diverse business scenarios while maintaining data security and ethical standards. This is particularly crucial given the increasing scrutiny on AI ethics and data privacy. Moreover, Salesforce will need to differentiate Agentforce from other AI offerings in the market, including those from AI leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic, who are also heavily investing in AI for enterprise. The company's emphasis on low-code development and seamless integration with existing Salesforce products could be a key differentiator, but it remains to be seen how this will play out in practice. Another critical factor will be the performance and reliability of the Atlas Reasoning Engine. If it can consistently outperform other AI models in terms of accuracy and relevance, as claimed with the Disney example, it could give Salesforce a significant competitive advantage. Salesforce plans to showcase Agentforce at its annual Dreamforce conference next week, where it aims to onboard at least 1,000 customers to the new platform. This aggressive rollout strategy underscores the company's confidence in the technology and its potential to drive future growth. As the AI arms race in enterprise software intensifies, Salesforce's Agentforce launch marks a significant milestone. Benioff concluded, "This is going to be the most important thing we have ever done at Salesforce." Whether it will live up to its promise of being "what AI was meant to be" remains to be seen, but the company clearly goes all-in on its vision of AI-augmented workforces.

Meet Agentforce, Salesforce's autonomous AI answer to employee burnout

The company says the new tool will make good on the promises of AI in business, many of which have yet to come to fruition at scale. Autonomous artificial intelligence (AI), or agents that can complete tasks without human supervision, is steadily becoming a part of many enterprises' daily operations. Salesforce is pitching its contribution to the space with a new feature. On Thursday, the global CRM platform launched Agentforce, a "suite of autonomous AI agents" designed to take on various tasks across departments like sales, commerce, marketing, and more to scale employee productivity. Formerly called Einstein Copilot, the team of agents, which Salesforce describes as "limitless" in the release, can analyze data and act on customer service concerns, sales leads, and marketing campaign edits. Also: IBM will train you in AI fundamentals for free, and give you a skill credential - in 10 hours Citing its own Trends in AI Report, Salesforce noted a now-familiar area of statistics: employees spend an estimated 41% of their time on "repetitive, low-impact work." The same report found that 65% of desk workers "believe generative AI will allow them to be more strategic." Agentforce is intended to be an out-of-the-box feature that can be used across industries and use cases and customized using inexpensive, low-code tools. During a press conference for the release, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff framed the tool as being accessible for customers who aren't already familiar with the ins and outs of AI technology, calling it "AI for the rest of us." "In contrast to now-outdated copilots and chatbots that rely on human requests and struggle with complex or multi-step tasks, Agentforce offers a new level of sophistication by operating autonomously, retrieving the right data on demand, building action plans for any task, and executing these plans without requiring human intervention," the company said in the release. Benioff positioned Agentforce as proof of AI's potential, in contrast to the billions of dollars businesses have spent on AI thus far without a tangible payoff. He also discussed how Agentforce will address employee burnout -- especially among doctors and nurses -- by providing much-needed support for lower-lift tasks while delivering a reliable customer experience. Benioff mentioned the initial release is Agentforce One, with a second generation coming in the future. He added that he hopes to get 1,000 Salesforce customers using Agentforce by next week during the company's Dreamforce conference. Also: The data suggests gen AI boosts software productivity - for these developers The release compares Agentforce's tech to that of self-driving cars and explains how Agentforce interprets data to adapt to conditions in real time and can act independently within a company's guardrails. The tool can hand tasks off to humans with summaries of what it's completed so far and recommended next steps. Specifically, there are seven types of Agentforce agents: In practice, Agentforce can provide organizations with conversational self-service, answer customer questions using a company database, and direct those with issues to the right resources. According to Salesforce, some customers already using Agentforce, including textbook publisher Wiley, say it outperforms their current chatbots. The company says Agentforce is powered by Atlas Reasoning Engine, which is "designed to simulate how humans think and plan." It added that Agentforce demonstrates low hallucination rates and comes programmed with toxicity guardrails, which are becoming standard practice in the industry. Also: How VR and digital twins are streamlining remote work in technical professions As part of the launch, Salesforce also introduced Agent Builder, an interface that allows users to customize their Agentforce agents to perform certain tasks. During a demo, Salesforce showed how Saks Fifth Avenue's Agentforce agent, Sophie, made exchanging a sweater more seamless and conversational and how Saks could improve the agent's capabilities even more in the builder. "As AI continues to evolve, I'm seeing a fundamental shift in how work is done, with the emergence of agents playing a central role in driving efficiency and scale," said Ritu Jyoti, group vice president and general manager of worldwide AI at IDC, in the release. "Implementing these solutions can boost efficiency and ensure the longevity of organizations in a competitive environment." "The only thing we're going to do at Salesforce is Agentforce," Benioff said. Agentforce "for Service and Sales," the company clarifies, will be generally available on October 25, with some elements of Atlas Reasoning Engine arriving in February 2025. Pricing begins at $2 per conversation.

Salesforce launches autonomous customer service bots

Why it matters: Removing the need for direct human supervision opens up the potential for more significant productivity gains, but also introduces significant new risks. Driving the news: The first wave of Salesforce's AI agents focus on sales, marketing, commerce and customer service. How it works: A key part of Agentforce is Atlas, a new reasoning engine that Salesforce said aims to simulate how humans think and plan. What they're saying: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff positioned Agentforce as "AI as it was meant to be," saying that most companies have been oversold on AI-assisted copilots that don't deliver enough value. The big picture: The effort to move generative AI beyond an aid to humans and into so-called "agents" that can take action on their own is seen as the next big shift, as Axios highlighted in February.