Salesforce Launches Agentforce: A New Era of AI-Powered Business Solutions

Salesforce unveils its Agentforce future of AI to the world

Salesforce has made its Agentforce platform open in general availability, bringing what the company says is the next generation of AI for businesses. First unveiled at its Dreamforce 2024 event earlier this year, Agentforce marks a new way for companies to develop and build AI agents. Available as part of the Salesforce platform, the company hopes Agentforce will go beyond current chatbots and copilot tools to offer customers a truly smart and personal experience. "Agentforce is redefining what's possible in business and beyond, ushering in a new era of AI abundance and limitless workforces that augment every employee, build deeper customer relationships and drive unprecedented growth and profitability," said Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO, Salesforce. "Built on Salesforce's trusted, fully customizable platform -- seamlessly integrating enterprise data, metadata, AI models, workflows, security and applications -- Agentforce is what AI was meant to be." Salesforce's initial set of AI agents will focus on roles like sales reps, service agents, personal shoppers and sales coaches, with companies able to quick edit or customize for their specific needs. 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, with Salesforce saying the platform 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. Salesforce confirmed that Agentforce Service Agent pricing starts at $2 per conversation. Alongside the news, the company revealed new research claiming consumers can spend up to nine hours interacting with customer service trying to resolve a single issue, leading to major frustration and abandoned purchases and interactions.

Salesforce launches Agentforce AI agent platform into general availability - SiliconANGLE

Salesforce launches Agentforce AI agent platform into general availability Salesforce Inc. today announced the general availability of Agentforce, its suite of tools for building autonomous artificial intelligence agents to augment work for enterprise employees worldwide. Agentforce allows companies to build and customize AI agents, which can connect to any company data and take actions on behalf of employees across sales, service, marketing and commerce. The platform's agents don't depend on human engagement and can take action based on changes in data, business logic or prebuilt automations following a new trend known as agentic AI. "The agent revolution is real and as exciting as the cloud revolution was, the social revolution, the mobile revolution," said Marc Benioff, founder and chief executive of Salesforce. "It will provide a level of transformation that we've never seen." The company said that it delivers the platform today so that companies don't need to "DIY their AI," meaning that many enterprise businesses have been cobbling together solutions from various tools. To that end, Agentforce is an all-in-one solution designed to put everything together and deliver working agents out-of-the-box that are easy to customize with English prompts and deploy with low-code or no-code tools. Adam Evans, senior vice president of product for the Salesforce AI platform, said many companies building AI copilots face this same issue when trying to get a good return on investment on their applications. "It isn't their primary business to build up software and agents," Evans said. "If you ask our customers, do they want to build a car? Taking all the parts and building a car or do they want to take a Waymo and have their problem solved? Starting today, they don't need to take this DIY approach to AI." Agents launched by users from Agentforce get access to Salesforce's ecosystem of application partners, which provides them a large number of what the company calls "skills," or tooling capabilities. Adam likened adding application programming interfaces and capabilities to agents to the first "The Matrix" movie where characters could just download new skills, such as the ability to fly a helicopter. Through the Salesforce App Exchange, third-party software-as-a-service providers and companies can give users the ability for agents to use their platforms as tools. It could be as simple as additional access to data or external services. For example, an agent could add an external weather service to retrieve real-time data to personalize email or text messages to customers. Another could connect to Google Calendar to retrieve an employee's upcoming schedule to assist them with organizing their time between meetings or preparing a summary at the beginning of the week of what to expect. The company also announced the Agentforce AI Partner Network, which provides enterprises with what they need to add these capabilities and functions from their platforms or deploy partner-built agents for industry-specific roles. Leading global systems integrators, including Accenture plc, Capgemini SE, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Ltd., IBM Corp. and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, also partnered with Salesforce to assist enterprise customers in building and deploying AI agents. Salesforce launched Agentforce into early access last month and several customers have already seen benefits from the platform, the company said. Wiley, a publisher of educational resources, said it saw a 40% boost in self-service and efficiency in case resolution over its previous chatbot. According to the company, the platform is more capable of handling routine inquiries than a rigid query-response bot, allowing human agents to focus on more complex cases. BACA Systems, a manufacturer of robotic systems for stone fabrication, said it started with employee-facing agents saving multiple hours a week. "Agentforce isn't just another AI platform that requires months of customization," said Andrew Russo, a Salesforce architect at BACA Systems. "At BACA Systems, we saw how it enabled us to launch powerful generative AI experiences in days -- no AI engineers needed. For customers with larger admin teams, the impact could be even greater." Now that Agentforce is generally available, Salesforce customers can try the platform tools for free with Salesforce Foundations, a free add-on for Enterprise Edition and higher. To support AI agents, Foundations now includes credits for the first 1,000 conversations with Agentforce Service Agent so that companies can try out the platform before buying.

Salesforce AI chatbot Agentforce hits general availability

Salesforce on Tuesday announced the general availability of its AI agent development platform called Agentforce. The offering is, in essence, a low- or no-code method for deploying chatbots for employees or customers. Salesforce says the new platform is already being used by firms including OpenTable, Saks, and Wiley "Agentforce doesn't depend on human engagement to get work done," Salesforce writes in a release tied to the news. "These agents can be triggered by changes in data, business rules, or pre-built automations." The company's site, on the other hand, highlights the new offering as more of a symbiosis between people and bots, stating, "humans with Agents drive customer success together." Salesforce goes on to note in the release that, "Agentforce goes beyond chatbots and copilots." While "copilot" is common parlance in the world of AI chatbots, it might be read as a dig at Microsoft, which released 10 new AI agents for Dynamics 365 just over a week ago. CEO Marc Benioff explicitly called out its chief enterprise competitor. The executive recently referred to Microsoft's tools as "Clippy 2.0," comparing Copilot to Word's polarizing anthropomorphic paperclip. Benioff accused the AI offers of inaccuracies and "spill[ing] corporate data." Agentforce, it should be noted, is the successor to Salesforce's own similarly branded Einstein Copilot. AI has become central to Salesforce's strategy, like countless others in the enterprise space. Slack CEO Denise Dresser -- who joins TechCrunch on stage at Disrupt on Tuesday -- has positioned her parent company's AI offerings as the centerpiece of a bid to transform Slack into more than just a work chat platform. Agentforce is a big piece of what Dresser has taken to calling a "work operating system." Included in Tuesday's general availability is Agentforce Service Agent, a kind of self-service offering for customers. That offering starts at $2 per conversation. Agent Builder, meanwhile, is essentially what it sounds like, letting users create custom agents built atop templates.

Salesforce Launches Agentforce, Redefining AI In Business With Autonomous Solutions - Salesforce (NYSE:CRM)

Integrated into Salesforce's platform, Agentforce enhances productivity with customizable, scalable agents, improving customer experience. Salesforce, Inc. CRM shares are trading higher on Tuesday. The company introduced Agentforce, which is a new feature that enables companies to develop AI agents capable of autonomously performing tasks across various business functions. Agentforce uses advanced reasoning to make decisions and execute actions, such as resolving customer inquiries and optimizing marketing campaigns. These agents operate independently, triggered by data changes, business rules, or API signals. Agentforce includes customizable out-of-the-box agents that are easily deployed using low-code or no-code tools, operating continuously across all channels. The first available agent, the Agentforce Service Agent, outperforms traditional chatbots by handling a broad range of tasks, from simple inquiries to complex issues, with pre-built topics and actions for customer support. Users can tailor these agents for different industries, such as retail for order management or financial services for billing and payment support. The Agentforce layer is seamlessly integrated into the Salesforce Platform, leveraging data, AI, and Salesforce's Customer 360 ecosystem, all built on a reliable foundation. This integration enhances the capabilities of agents, allowing for unlimited scalability, proactive actions across various roles and channels, and contextual awareness of every customer interaction. Read: 'Copilot's A Flop Because Microsoft Lacks The Data,' Salesforce CEO Slams Rebranding Of AI Tool To 'Agents:' 'That's Panic Mode' Investors can gain exposure to the stock via iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF IGV and First Trust DJ Internet Index Fund FDN. Price Action: CRM shares are up 1.87% at $299.26 at the last check Tuesday. Image via Shutterstock Read Next: Marc Benioff Warns Microsoft's Copilot 'Spills Corporate Data,' Emphasizes Security Gaps Ahead Of Salesforce Agentforce Launch This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs