Salesforce Unveils Agentforce 2.0: A Leap Forward in Enterprise AI and Digital Labor

Salesforce drops Agentforce 2.0, brings reasoning AI to enterprise

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Salesforce unveiled a major upgrade to its artificial intelligence platform on Tuesday, introducing technology that enables AI agents to perform deeper reasoning and take more autonomous actions across enterprise workflows -- part of what the company's CEO frames as an ambitious push into "digital labor." The San Francisco software giant's Agentforce 2.0 represents a significant evolution in how AI assistants operate within businesses, moving beyond simple chatbots to AI agents that can understand complex requests, access relevant company data, and independently complete multi-step tasks. "We're creating a new industry," said Marc Benioff, Salesforce's chief executive, at a press conference announcing the release. "This isn't just about managing and sharing information and data anymore. We're a digital labor provider." How Atlas Reasoning Engine powers next-generation enterprise AI The upgraded platform introduces what Salesforce calls the Atlas Reasoning Engine, which enables AI agents to engage in more sophisticated analysis and decision-making. Unlike traditional AI assistants that provide quick responses based on pattern matching, Atlas employs "System 2" reasoning -- a more deliberative approach inspired by psychologist Daniel Kahneman's research on human thought processes. "The reasoning engine should be one of the first factors enterprise organizations consider when comparing digital labor options," said Claire Cheng, Ph.D., VP of Machine Learning and Engineering at Salesforce. Early results appear promising. In testing, Agentforce 2.0 achieved a 33% improvement in answer accuracy compared to DIY AI solutions, while doubling response relevance, according to Salesforce. The company has already deployed the technology internally. At help.salesforce.com, AI agents now handle 83% of customer support queries independently, with human escalations dropping by 50% since implementation two weeks ago. "Suddenly, as a CEO, I'm not just managing human beings, but I'm also managing agents," said Benioff. "There is an authentic agentic layer around the platform today. It's not some vision fantasy in the future idea, it's what is happening right now." Digital labor: The key to solving global workforce challenges Salesforce's push into "digital labor" comes amid growing labor shortages across industries. With birth rates declining and companies struggling to fill positions, Benioff sees AI agents as a crucial solution for business growth. "To unlock GDP growth, we need breakthrough technology. We have to become a digital labor provider," he said. "This is the new horizon for business -- this idea that a door has opened and business will never be the same." The technology is already finding real-world applications. The Adecco Group, a global staffing firm, is using Agentforce to process millions of resumes and match candidates to opportunities. Digital tablet maker reMarkable deployed it for customer service, while accounting firm 1-800 Accountant expects to deflect 65% of incoming service requests using AI agents. Behind the tech: The innovation powering Salesforce's AI revolution Under the hood, Agentforce 2.0 introduces several technical advances. The Atlas Reasoning Engine creates detailed semantic understanding of company data and processes, enabling more contextual responses. "We're able to associate each data component with contextual metadata information, which allows us to find the mapping between data and the corresponding semantic meaning," explained Silvio Savarese, who leads Salesforce's AI research. "This enables much more relevant, much more aligned responses to user queries." The platform also introduces enhanced integration with Slack, Salesforce's workplace messaging platform, allowing employees to work alongside AI agents directly in their communication flows. "If you want these agents to be used, to be engaged with, and you want them to get better over time, having them where people are already working is critical," said Rob Seaman, who oversees Slack integration. Looking ahead, Salesforce envisions expanding into physical robotics, with Benioff announcing plans for a "robot force partner program" to connect physical robots with the company's AI agent platform. Trust, security, and the ruture: Navigating AI's enterprise integration For Salesforce, the stakes of this initiative are significant. While the company expects $38 billion in revenue this year from its traditional software business, Benioff believes the digital labor market represents a multi-trillion dollar opportunity. However, challenges remain, particularly around trust and security. Salesforce emphasizes its "trust layer" that prevents toxic content and maintains data privacy, while giving customers control over how agents operate within their organizations. "These things act as a user -- they don't have God permissions or admin permissions," noted Seaman. "We don't create any holes for the AI to see things that it should not be able to." As businesses grapple with persistent labor shortages and productivity challenges, Salesforce is betting that AI agents will become an essential part of the modern workforce. The company's vision suggests a future where human employees work alongside AI agents that can handle increasingly complex tasks -- fundamentally changing how businesses operate and scale. "This is the beginning of the beginning," said Benioff. "When you're at the beginning of the beginning, you see these little things, and then you try to extrapolate what this is going to be. This is an incredible moment."

Salesforce makes an AI landgrab with Agentforce 2.0

Hard on the heels of Agentforce 1.0, unveiled just three months ago at Dreamforce, comes the 2.0 version. That's the astonishing speed at which technology iterates in this new era of AI. So what's different about Agentforce 2.0? Quite a few things, actually, down in the technology itself, which we'll get to in a moment. But probably the most significant is what's happening outside of those AI innards, both at the user experience layer, where it now integrates deeply into Slack, Salesforce's conversational teamwork app, and most crucially how it links into third-party applications and systems via MuleSoft APIs, connecting all of an enterprise's systems and data into the agent layer. That's key, because whereas Agentforce at Dreamforce was AI for CRM, customers came back and said they wanted it to do much more. As Sanjna Parulekar, VP of Product Marketing at Salesforce, puts it: We got feedback on the use cases that they wanted to use Agentforce for. Of course, CRM is our bread and butter -- sales, service, marketing and commerce. But our customers really wanted to go beyond those use cases to things like recruiting, finance, all sorts of other use cases that we couldn't have dreamed of before. This is why Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, was talking about a Total Addressable Market (TAM) in the trillions of dollars at yesterday's launch. Salesforce has always been a CRM platform, focused on customer-facing business processes and a TAM in the billions. Yesterday saw a repositioning of the vendor as a Digital Labor platform, focused on any business process that can be automated by Agentforce, and a TAM that one chart suggested could be as much as $7 trillion. Is Agentforce capable of satisfying this much bigger goal? Yesterday's event was inevitably short on the detail it could drill into in just a two-hour session. But from what was said, it's clear that there have been some major advances in capability, particularly in what Salesforce calls the Atlas reasoning engine that runs at its heart -- or 'brain', if you prefer. Salesforce is betting that the next big advances in applying Large Language Models (LLMs) -- especially as it pertains to enterprise applications -- revolve around innovations in how they generate responses -- known as inference. According to this line of thought, there are diminishing returns available from throwing more training data at LLMs, or from fine-tuning how the data is labeled at instruction time, and inference is the next frontier where the technology can rapidly scale up performance. Phil Mui, SVP Technology, Head of Products & Architecture, AI Research, at Salesforce, explains: Scaling is now really at the inference time. In many ways that is essentially what the Atlas reasoning engine and Salesforce is going after. How do we utilize basically more or less commodity language models that are out there? All of them are pretty good, some are a little bit better than others -- but really, to get the next 10x in performance, we really need that inference-time, compound system reasoning in order to get that next level of accuracy, next level of faithfulness in. The reason this is very important for Salesforce is -- I want to be a little bit humble here -- unlike the Googles and Microsofts of the world, we operate in a very narrow swim lane. Our swim lane is called enterprise. That's all we do. We don't have gaming platforms. We don't have consumer plays. We are in the enterprise space. So it is in our interest to focus on the scaling law that would increase accuracy, faithfulness and answer relevance, because those are characteristics that enterprises really want from our reasoning systems and our AI systems, and we work very hard on that, at Agentforce. The most significant feature in Agentforce 2.0 that relates to this goal is something that Mui describes as 'System 2' thinking, borrowing from Daniel Kahneman's thesis that people think on one of two levels -- system 1 thinking gives quick, intuitive answers with little reflection, whereas system 2 thinking applies more consideration and typically refines the answer. What this means is that Atlas doesn't necessarily accept the first answer that it produces. Instead, it re-examines it and identifies whether it should add more contextually relevant information to fully respond to the initial query. In a demo yesterday, this was shown in the example of a wealth manager seeking input on whether a client should re-evaluate their investment strategy in the light of falling interest rates. An Agentforce 1.0 response would be a quick response to that question, essentially saying, 'Yes, you should review her holding.' An Agentforce 2.0 response goes on to identify which specific funds in her portfolio would be affected, and why, giving the wealth manager a much more rounded answer, backed up by source material. It can even go on to recommend a suitable specialist to join a client meeting to provide further advice on the topic. Three more technologies in Atlas that are new in Agentforce 2.0 help ensure the reliability of responses. First of all there is enriched indexing. This is particularly relevant when bringing in content from external systems, because it helps to add metadata around chunks of content so that the system can do a better job of finding the most relevant answer. Here again, context is crucial, and Salesforce also applies context derived from its historic data. Jayesh Govindarajan, EVP, Salesforce AI, explains: For answers and actions to be trustworthy, it's important to be grounded in reality, and that comes from being able to do a lot of pre-processing of data, being able to look at data and actually glean context out of the data and ensure that the agentic layer has access to that context. That context is then, of course, applied to the task at hand, which is again, on the Salesforce platform, because we have a sense of what a successful job to be done, what a successful outcome looks like, we are able to encode all of that in the Salesforce metadata. Secondly there is what is called a recursive hierarchical tree, or metadata-enhanced RAPTOR, which checks the end-to-end accuracy to ensure that answers drawn from various sources are not only relevant but also correct. Finally there is a check for faithfulness, which establishes that the response is grounded in something that's traceable in the curated data, and ideally referenceable -- Agentforce 2.0 is tuned to provide links to the source material from which it produces its answers, so that its human teammates can drill down if they need to. Miu sums up Atlas as "an inference-time, graph-based workflow, system 2 reasoning engine," but also provides another definition without the technospeak: At the heart of it is, how do we provide enterprise-scale trust, accuracy and faithfulness, without sacrificing the overall performance of the overall system? So that we can do it deliberatively, reflectively, and yet do it within a reasonable response time. Surfacing all of this capability in Slack makes it more accessible to the average user and allows them to connect agents together, both within the Salesforce platform and beyond. Rob Seaman, Chief Product Officer at Slack, comments: Software that is put in Slack is more highly adopted than software that is not in Slack. Period. That is proven out in the data. I think it's also going to foster a lot of creativity amongst your employee bases. Put your employee-facing agents in Slack, let people engage with them, learn from it, and then figure out what the next set of things are. Start with menial tasks. Look at approvals that are happening in multiple systems. Look at quick actions that need to be taken where a user might have to context switch and go to a different application. Those are the types of things agents can very easily reason through and act on your behalf. It's not possible to do justice to the full scope of yesterday's announcement in such a brief write-up, and much of the detail is still to be revealed over the coming weeks and months, with the TrailblazerDX developer event coming up in March, and Agentforce 3.0 already being touted for an unveiling in May. But I have three immediate takeaways. The first is that Salesforce has harnessed some powerful technology to create Agentforce 2.0. This isn't just a branding exercise (it is that too, of course!), it's a significant step forward in capabilities that is highly tuned to providing robust automations for enterprise purposes. There's still abundant need for caution and testing, but demos based on customers such as Adecco, Royal Bank of Canada and Accenture show that real-world use cases exist. My second observation is that there has been a significant change in positioning since Dreamforce. In the past, I've asked about whether Salesforce wants to expand into automating other enterprise functions and the answer has always been that Salesforce is solely focused on CRM. Now that seems to have changed. The capabilities of the technology, along with the customer response to it, seem to have persuaded Salesforce that it now has an opening to make a huge AI-powered market landgrab to become the platform for automating every form of knowledge work across the enterprise, not only the customer-facing ones, but also internal processes such as employee onboarding, recruitment and no doubt others too. If Salesforce were a startup, you would call this a big pivot, and CEO Benioff was emphatic that Salesforce is now thinking of itself as a startup, targeting a new TAM as a purveyor of digital labor to the enterprise. Pivot is the wrong word, of course, because Salesforce still wants to serve its core market, but the scope to expand beyond that is clear. And what makes it particularly compelling is that the Salesforce platform also encompasses the user experience layer, with Slack, as well as the API connectivity layer, with MuleSoft. Maybe those acquisitions look even smarter now in retrospect. Still, how much of this rhetoric about AI-fueled growth potential is aimed at Wall Street and how much of it really will become real for enterprise customers remains to be seen. My final observation is a note of caution, which I already sounded the other week -- the risk of using AI to prematurely automate processes that don't actually add value. There is low-hanging fruit that enterprises should seize to achieve quick wins from the application of AI. But assuming that simply automating existing processes will necessarily deliver huge benefits depends massively on how efficient those processes were in the first place. AI will bring far better ways of doing many things that we now routinely waste effort, whether human or robot, to get done. Adopting the technology doesn't obviate the need to apply common sense to evaluating where the true value lies in your processes and data.

Introducing Agentforce 2.0: The Digital Labor Platform for Building a Limitless Workforce

Agentforce 2.0 is the digital labor platform for enterprises, enabling a limitless workforce through AI agents for any department, assembled using a new library of pre-built skills, and that can take action across any system or workflow Agentforce 2.0 makes autonomous AI part of every team, empowering every employee to collaborate with Agentforce in Slack Agentforce 2.0 features enhanced reasoning and data retrieval to deliver precise answers and orchestrate actions in response to complex, multi-step questions Customers like Accenture, The Adecco Group, Finnair, Heathrow Airport, IBM, Indeed, Saks Global, and SharkNinja are embracing Agentforce to augment their teams with digital labor -- streamlining business operations and unlocking new capacity for growth Salesforce, the world's #1 AI CRM, today announced Agentforce 2.0: the newest version of Agentforce, the first digital labor platform for enterprises -- a complete AI system for augmenting teams with trusted, autonomous AI agents in the flow of work. This release introduces a new library of pre-built skills and workflow integrations for rapid customization, the ability to deploy Agentforce in Slack, and advancements in agentic reasoning and retrieval augmented generation (RAG). These advances will enable companies to scale their workforce with customized agents capable of handling complex, multi-step tasks with even more precision and accuracy. Why it's relevant: Every team has more work to do than resources available, leading to poorer customer interactions and lengthy backlogs. Organizations are turning to AI to help, but have a low tolerance for inadequate solutions that provide generic responses. Existing solutions such as copilots struggle to provide accurate, trusted responses to complex requests -- such as personalized guidance on a job application -- and cannot take action on their own -- like nurturing a lead with product recommendations. Organizations need a new type of platform designed to supply digital labor in the form of autonomous AI agents that can reason over data and tap into workflows to take action on behalf of overwhelmed teams. "Agentforce 2.0 takes our revolutionary Salesforce digital labor platform to another level, with new reasoning, integration and customization features that supercharge autonomous agents with unprecedented levels of intelligence, precision and accuracy," said Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO, Salesforce. "The demand for Agentforce has been amazing -- no other company comes close to offering this complete AI solution for enterprises. We're seamlessly bringing together AI, data, apps, and automation with humans to reshape how work gets done. Agentforce 2.0 cements our position as the leader in digital labor solutions, allowing any company to build a limitless workforce that can truly transform their business." How the Adecco Group Uses Agentforce to Scale Personalized Recruiting with Digital Labor: "At the Adecco Group, we are committed to creating meaningful connections between candidates and opportunities. By centralizing data across over 40 systems with Salesforce's Data Cloud and leveraging Agentforce, we're transforming the candidate experience. Agentforce will help prequalify candidates, enhance CVs, and ensure faster job placements. Agentforce agents also operate 24/7, freeing recruiters to focus on meaningful connections while delivering speed and personalization at scale." - Greg Shewmaker, Senior Vice President of Global Operations and AI, The Adecco Group New Library of Skills Brings Agentforce to Every Team and Workflow: Time and integration challenges make it difficult to build customized agents for individual business teams or departments. Agentforce 2.0 eliminates these barriers with a new library of pre-built agent skills -- tasks Agentforce can perform -- spanning CRM, Slack, Tableau, and partner-developed skills on the AppExchange. This latest release empowers customers to extend Agentforce to any system or workflow using MuleSoft. It also features an enhanced Agent Builder capable of interpreting natural language instructions, such as 'Onboard New Product Managers,' to auto-generate new agents. These agents seamlessly combine pre-made skills with custom logic built in Salesforce, offering unparalleled flexibility and speed. New CRM Skills for Agent-First Customer Experiences: New skills for sales teams such as Sales Development and Sales Coaching enable the creation of autonomous AI agents that can nurture leads based on your rules of engagement, as well as agents that can join your prospecting calls and provide instant feedback on interactions with customers, helping reps do their best work at massive scale. Additional skills include Marketing Campaign and Commerce Merchant skills, scheduling skills for service engagements, and new skills for field service workers.Take Action Across Any App or Workflow with MuleSoft: MuleSoft now enables Agentforce to get work done across your business. With MuleSoft for Flow, it's easier than ever to create low-code workflows that span any system, with pre-built connectors for building multi-system workflows fast. As teams look to turn their APIs into Agentforce actions, the new MuleSoft API Catalog enables builders and Salesforce Admins to view, discover, and manage APIs across Salesforce, MuleSoft, Heroku, and any external services from one central location for rapid reuse. And the new MuleSoft Topic Center expands on this by enabling teams to infuse Agentforce metadata into every API they build, ensuring that any point of connectivity can be automatically turned into an Agentforce skill or action, making every API "agent-first" by default.Tableau Skills for Analytics and Insights: New Tableau Topics and Actions deliver data visualizations and predictions for deeper understanding of agent responses and accurate, business context-rich answers using Tableau Semantics. This unlocks new conversational analytics use cases, further lowering the barrier to data access for everyone.Slack Skills for Engaging in Channels and Conversations: With Slack Actions now available in Agent Builder, a team can enhance Agentforce with, for example, the ability to send a DM to provide a summary of what's happening with a project, or update a Slack Canvas when a customer asks for changes to an ongoing project.Partner Skills Through the AppExchange: Agentforce is backed by the first-ever enterprise ecosystem of agent skills -- enabling customers to extend their Agentforce with custom Topics and Actions ranging from new agent types such as the AI Employee Service Agent with Workday, to new, partner-built actions from Asymbl, Docusign, and Neuron 7.Agentforce Now Recommends Skills for the Work You Need Done: Create new agents in seconds using natural language descriptions. Agent Builder now uses Agentforce to compose new agents for the work you need done by auto-generating relevant topics and instructions while pulling from the library of skills and actions already available to you, ensuring teams can go live with new digital labor fast. How Accenture Uses Agentforce to Scale Sales Productivity with Digital Labor: "At Accenture, we embrace emerging technologies first so we can help our clients go fast. Our sales team within Accenture's Salesforce Business Group and Accenture Song are starting to use Agentforce to automate contact and close plan creation, surface insights through enterprise search, and keep teams aligned with dynamic updates. It's helping to increase time-to-effectiveness, accelerate decision-making, and is allowing them to focus on delivering innovative solutions for their clients." - Stephanie Sadowski, Salesforce Business Group lead at Accenture Agentforce in Slack -- Humans with Agents Working Together Where Work Happens: As organizations look to unlock value from AI agents, they need solutions that are embedded where their employees already are. Agentforce 2.0 is deployable in Slack, bringing customizable digital labor into the messages (DMs) and channels where work happens. Bring Agentforce to any Message or Channel: Agentforce 2.0 enables teams to easily bring Agentforce into any Slack conversation. Slack users can start a conversation directly from the Agentforce Hub, or @ mention Agentforce agents through DMs or in channels, tapping into their digital labor force directly in the flow of work.New Slack Actions in Agent Builder: Agent Builder now features pre-built Slack Actions such as "Create Canvas" or "Message Channel" that enable teams to rapidly enhance existing agents or create new ones that can effortlessly engage with your teams in Slack.Unlock conversational context with Enterprise Search: Slack contains a wealth of domain knowledge across DMs, channels, and Canvases that reflect the unique nature of your business. With Slack Enterprise Search, Agentforce can draw from conversational data -- enhancing the relevancy of responses and actions by drawing from public and permissioned information in Slack. How Indeed Uses Agentforce to Scale Personalized Job Seeker Engagement with Digital Labor: "Indeed is the world's leading job site, with three people hired every second through its platform. At the heart of Indeed's success is its ability to match the 580 million profiles created by job seekers with over 3 million hiring employers. By harnessing the power of Data Cloud, Indeed has enhanced its data architecture, creating a solid foundation for its go-to-market strategies and enhancing connections to its rich job seeker profiles," said Indeed CIO Anthony Moisant. "By leveraging Agentforce, Indeed can stay focused on its mission to help people find jobs while advancing its goals, including reducing time-to-hire by 50% and helping 30 million individuals facing barriers to employment secure jobs by fiscal year 2030." - Anthony Moisant, CIO, Indeed Expert Answers to Complex Questions and Execute Actions with Agentforce 2.0: The Atlas Reasoning Engine is the brain behind Agentforce, enabling it to retrieve relevant data, then reason and act. With Agentforce 2.0, Salesforce is introducing enhanced reasoning and retrieval to handle deeply nuanced questions, powered by new capabilities in Data Cloud that fuel Agentforce with greater context -- complementing structured and unstructured data with business-specific metadata for greater accuracy across the most complex, multi-faceted requests. Enhanced Reasoning with Advanced Retrievers: Agentforce's Atlas Reasoning Engine can now handle a wider variety of interactions, including those with multiple layers that require deeper thought. For example, a question that is straightforward, such as "what is the status of my portfolio?" will employ basic reasoning for rapid responses. A deeper question, such as "What would be the right investment vehicle for my child's college fund based on my current income and risk preferences?" would use enhanced reasoning with advanced data retrievers -- improving the answer by refining the query before pulling both relevant data and context-specific metadata in Data Cloud. The Atlas Reasoning Engine assesses its own response and loops through a variety of tools and sources in what's known as an 'agentic loop,' enabling it to provide a trusted, well-researched response or action to nuanced and more complex requests, and do so without writing custom code.Enhanced RAG with Enriched Indexing: RAG enables Agentforce to quickly find relevant information in unstructured content. To power enhanced reasoning in the Atlas Reasoning Engine, Data Cloud can now enrich RAG chunks -- the snippets of retrieved data -- with metadata from the Salesforce Platform. Enriching RAG indexes with metadata context adapts Agentforce 2.0 to the unique conventions of your business without additional work, improving accuracy and relevancy for even the most intricate requests, while increasing trust through inline citations that point to the exact sources Agentforce pulled from to answer a given question. How Salesforce provides faster, more personalized customer support with Agentforce: The Salesforce Help page receives more than 60 million visits a year from customers who need assistance with product support and account queries. Agentforce on help.salesforce.com provides customers with personalized, 24/7 service, while seamlessly escalating to human reps with the full case history and context when needed. Since launching in October, Agentforce is now solving 83% of customer queries without a human, has halved the number of issues that require human intervention, and has nearly doubled its average number of weekly conversations. Customer Perspectives: "At 1-800 Accountant, we're using Agentforce to manage service inquiries, especially during tax season. With Agentforce now managing up to 90% of incoming requests, we can automate responses to common questions like tax return statuses, freeing up our team to focus on more complex tasks. This boosts efficiency, improves customer satisfaction, and ensures fast, secure, personalized support. Plus, Agentforce adheres to strict data security standards, keeping sensitive tax information safe and accessible only to authorized personnel. It's a game-changer, helping us scale and serve our clients better during peak times." - Ryan Teeples, CTO, 1-800 Accountant "Embracing autonomous agents is a game-changer for Bionic. We're on a mission to make life radically easier for Britain's small businesses by combining smart technology with expert human service. With agentic AI, we're streamlining tasks like meter readings and switch tracking to deliver 24/7 support. This innovation empowers our 200,000 SME customers to save time and hassle so they can focus on growing their business." - James Lomas, Chief Technology Officer, Bionic "With Agentforce, we want to transform Capita's recruitment process into a fast, seamless and autonomous experience that benefits candidates, our people, and our clients. With autonomous agents providing 24/7 support, our goal is to enable candidates to complete the entire recruitment journey within days as opposed to what has historically taken weeks. At Capita, we give time back to our clients so they can focus on what they do best - and Agentforce will improve our ability to do just that. This is just the start of our agentic journey with Salesforce, where we believe an Agentic Economy can drive big growth potential for UK businesses." - Adolfo Hernandez. Chief Executive Officer, Capita "At Finnair, we will use Agentforce to transform our customer service operations, enabling us to efficiently handle routine inquiries and improve response times. With Agentforce automating a significant share of standard inquiries, our team can focus on more complex issues, ensuring faster and more accurate support. This allows us to provide a seamless experience for both customers and customer service personnel, reducing onboarding times for our contact center teams with quicker access to vital information." - Tiina Vesterinen, Vice President, Commerce & CX Solutions, Finnair "With Salesforce's Agentforce, SharkNinja will be able to transform customer support across more than 30 markets, empowering our agents to deliver personalized, 24/7 service. By unifying data and addressing common inquiries like 'where is my order?', we can streamline agent workloads, enabling them to focus on meaningful, high-impact interactions. This integration will ensure a seamless shopper experience, offering tailored product support, FAQs, and personalized responses that meet consumers' unique needs - helping us to create extraordinary experiences at every touch point." - Velia Carboni, CIO, SharkNinja "The travel industry is a 24/7 business, often involving unique and urgent requests. As our website, which offers luxury travel deals, continues to grow and attract new customers, we wanted a solution that could deliver a personalized service efficiently to our 60 million European members. Agentforce uses our unified data to automate routine tasks like processing cancellations, updating booking information, or even answering common travel questions about luggage, flight information, and much more, freeing up our customer service agents to handle more complex and last-minute travel needs to better serve our members." - Kate Donaghy, Head of Business Technology, Secret Escapes "Unity Environmental University is leveraging Salesforce's Agentforce to expand our support beyond routine inquiries, allowing our employees to focus on learners who need more personalized guidance. By integrating agentic AI into our workflows, we can quickly address standard questions like financial aid details or class registration while freeing our team to engage more deeply with students. This balanced approach ensures that every conversation is more meaningful, as some learners can rely solely on the AI for immediate answers, while others benefit from the combined efforts of both the AI and our dedicated staff. In doing so, we're not only scaling from 10,000 to 50,000 students, but also enhancing the quality and impact of every interaction along the way and reducing our cost of acquisition per student." - Dr. Melik Khoury, President & CEO, Unity Environmental University "At Wellness Extract, we're excited about all of the new possibilities Agentforce can bring to our business. As we continue to grow, scaling customer support is key, and Agentforce offers the potential to automate inquiries across all our channels while still delivering personalized, seamless experiences for all of our buyers. With Salesforce's Data Cloud, we'll gain deeper insights into our customers, helping us boost website conversions, strengthen connections, and reduce costs. It's an opportunity to not just streamline our business operations, but to elevate our brand and set the stage for even greater innovation in health and wellness." - Arvind Madakan, Program Manager, Wellness Extract Availability: The full release of Agentforce 2.0 will be generally available in February 2025, with specific features being released in advance beginning today.Skills for Sales Development and Sales Coaching are generally available today. Pricing for these skills starts at $2 per conversation.Tableau Semantic Layer is generally available today, while skills for Tableau will be generally available December 18.Agentforce in Slack, Slack Actions in Agent Builder, and Slack Enterprise Search will be generally available in January 2025.Natural language creation of agents in Agent Builder will be generally available in January 2025.MuleSoft for Flow, MuleSoft API Catalog, and Topic Center will be generally available in February 2025.Enhanced reasoning and RAG will be generally available in February 2025. Learn more: Get started for free with Salesforce FoundationsJoin us at TrailblazerDX in San Francisco, March 5-6, 2025Explore how the Atlas Reasoning Engine powers well-researched answers to complex questionsDive deeper inside the evolving brain of AgentforceExplore how Agentforce is redefining the customer experienceLearn more about Agentforce in SlackExplore Agentforce and Data Cloud customer storiesEstimate your ROI with AgentforceSee new AI agent statistics for 2025Join the new Agentblazer and Datablazer communities Any unreleased services or features referenced here are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. About Salesforce Salesforce helps organizations of any size reimagine their business for the world of AI. With Agentforce, Salesforce's trusted platform, organizations can bring humans together with agents to drive customer success -- powered by AI, data, and action. Visit www.salesforce.com for more information.

Introducing Agentforce 2.0: The Digital Labor Platform for Building a Limitless Workforce

Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the world's #1 AI CRM, today announced Agentforce 2.0: the newest version of Agentforce, the first digital labor platform for enterprises -- a complete AI system for augmenting teams with trusted, autonomous AI agents in the flow of work. This release introduces a new library of pre-built skills and workflow integrations for rapid customization, the ability to deploy Agentforce in Slack, and advancements in agentic reasoning and retrieval augmented generation (RAG). These advances will enable companies to scale their workforce with customized agents capable of handling complex, multi-step tasks with even more precision and accuracy. Why it's relevant: Every team has more work to do than resources available, leading to poorer customer interactions and lengthy backlogs. Organizations are turning to AI to help, but have a low tolerance for inadequate solutions that provide generic responses. Existing solutions such as copilots struggle to provide accurate, trusted responses to complex requests -- such as personalized guidance on a job application -- and cannot take action on their own -- like nurturing a lead with product recommendations. Organizations need a new type of platform designed to supply digital labor in the form of autonomous AI agents that can reason over data and tap into workflows to take action on behalf of overwhelmed teams. "Agentforce 2.0 takes our revolutionary Salesforce digital labor platform to another level, with new reasoning, integration and customization features that supercharge autonomous agents with unprecedented levels of intelligence, precision and accuracy," said Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO, Salesforce. "The demand for Agentforce has been amazing -- no other company comes close to offering this complete AI solution for enterprises. We're seamlessly bringing together AI, data, apps, and automation with humans to reshape how work gets done. Agentforce 2.0 cements our position as the leader in digital labor solutions, allowing any company to build a limitless workforce that can truly transform their business." How the Adecco Group Uses Agentforce to Scale Personalized Recruiting with Digital Labor: "At the Adecco Group, we are committed to creating meaningful connections between candidates and opportunities. By centralizing data across over 40 systems with Salesforce's Data Cloud and leveraging Agentforce, we're transforming the candidate experience. Agentforce will help prequalify candidates, enhance CVs, and ensure faster job placements. Agentforce agents also operate 24/7, freeing recruiters to focus on meaningful connections while delivering speed and personalization at scale." - Greg Shewmaker, Senior Vice President of Global Operations and AI, The Adecco Group New Library of Skills Brings Agentforce to Every Team and Workflow: Time and integration challenges make it difficult to build customized agents for individual business teams or departments. Agentforce 2.0 eliminates these barriers with a new library of pre-built agent skills -- tasks Agentforce can perform -- spanning CRM, Slack, Tableau, and partner-developed skills on the AppExchange. This latest release empowers customers to extend Agentforce to any system or workflow using MuleSoft. It also features an enhanced Agent Builder capable of interpreting natural language instructions, such as 'Onboard New Product Managers,' to auto-generate new agents. These agents seamlessly combine pre-made skills with custom logic built in Salesforce, offering unparalleled flexibility and speed. How Accenture Uses Agentforce to Scale Sales Productivity with Digital Labor: "At Accenture, we embrace emerging technologies first so we can help our clients go fast. Our sales team within Accenture's Salesforce Business Group and Accenture Song are starting to use Agentforce to automate contact and close plan creation, surface insights through enterprise search, and keep teams aligned with dynamic updates. It's helping to increase time-to-effectiveness, accelerate decision-making, and is allowing them to focus on delivering innovative solutions for their clients." - Stephanie Sadowski, Salesforce Business Group lead at Accenture Agentforce in Slack -- Humans with Agents Working Together Where Work Happens: As organizations look to unlock value from AI agents, they need solutions that are embedded where their employees already are. Agentforce 2.0 is deployable in Slack, bringing customizable digital labor into the messages (DMs) and channels where work happens. How Indeed Uses Agentforce to Scale Personalized Job Seeker Engagement with Digital Labor: "Indeed is the world's leading job site, with three people hired every second through its platform. At the heart of Indeed's success is its ability to match the 580 million profiles created by job seekers with over 3 million hiring employers. By harnessing the power of Data Cloud, Indeed has enhanced its data architecture, creating a solid foundation for its go-to-market strategies and enhancing connections to its rich job seeker profiles," said Indeed CIO Anthony Moisant. "By leveraging Agentforce, Indeed can stay focused on its mission to help people find jobs while advancing its goals, including reducing time-to-hire by 50% and helping 30 million individuals facing barriers to employment secure jobs by fiscal year 2030." - Anthony Moisant, CIO, Indeed Expert Answers to Complex Questions and Execute Actions with Agentforce 2.0: The Atlas Reasoning Engine is the brain behind Agentforce, enabling it to retrieve relevant data, then reason and act. With Agentforce 2.0, Salesforce is introducing enhanced reasoning and retrieval to handle deeply nuanced questions, powered by new capabilities in Data Cloud that fuel Agentforce with greater context -- complementing structured and unstructured data with business-specific metadata for greater accuracy across the most complex, multi-faceted requests. How Salesforce provides faster, more personalized customer support with Agentforce: The Salesforce Help page receives more than 60 million visits a year from customers who need assistance with product support and account queries. Agentforce on help.salesforce.com provides customers with personalized, 24/7 service, while seamlessly escalating to human reps with the full case history and context when needed. Since launching in October, Agentforce is now solving 83% of customer queries without a human, has halved the number of issues that require human intervention, and has nearly doubled its average number of weekly conversations. Customer Perspectives: "At 1-800 Accountant, we're using Agentforce to manage service inquiries, especially during tax season. With Agentforce now managing up to 90% of incoming requests, we can automate responses to common questions like tax return statuses, freeing up our team to focus on more complex tasks. This boosts efficiency, improves customer satisfaction, and ensures fast, secure, personalized support. Plus, Agentforce adheres to strict data security standards, keeping sensitive tax information safe and accessible only to authorized personnel. It's a game-changer, helping us scale and serve our clients better during peak times." - Ryan Teeples, CTO, 1-800 Accountant "Embracing autonomous agents is a game-changer for Bionic. We're on a mission to make life radically easier for Britain's small businesses by combining smart technology with expert human service. With agentic AI, we're streamlining tasks like meter readings and switch tracking to deliver 24/7 support. This innovation empowers our 200,000 SME customers to save time and hassle so they can focus on growing their business."- James Lomas, Chief Technology Officer, Bionic "With Agentforce, we want to transform Capita's recruitment process into a fast, seamless and autonomous experience that benefits candidates, our people, and our clients. With autonomous agents providing 24/7 support, our goal is to enable candidates to complete the entire recruitment journey within days as opposed to what has historically taken weeks. At Capita, we give time back to our clients so they can focus on what they do best - and Agentforce will improve our ability to do just that. This is just the start of our agentic journey with Salesforce, where we believe an Agentic Economy can drive big growth potential for UK businesses." - Adolfo Hernandez. Chief Executive Officer, Capita "At Finnair, we will use Agentforce to transform our customer service operations, enabling us to efficiently handle routine inquiries and improve response times. With Agentforce automating a significant share of standard inquiries, our team can focus on more complex issues, ensuring faster and more accurate support. This allows us to provide a seamless experience for both customers and customer service personnel, reducing onboarding times for our contact center teams with quicker access to vital information." -Tiina Vesterinen, Vice President, Commerce & CX Solutions, Finnair "With Salesforce's Agentforce, SharkNinja will be able to transform customer support across more than 30 markets, empowering our agents to deliver personalized, 24/7 service. By unifying data and addressing common inquiries like 'where is my order?', we can streamline agent workloads, enabling them to focus on meaningful, high-impact interactions. This integration will ensure a seamless shopper experience, offering tailored product support, FAQs, and personalized responses that meet consumers' unique needs - helping us to create extraordinary experiences at every touch point."- Velia Carboni, CIO, SharkNinja "The travel industry is a 24/7 business, often involving unique and urgent requests. As our website, which offers luxury travel deals, continues to grow and attract new customers, we wanted a solution that could deliver a personalized service efficiently to our 60 million European members. Agentforce uses our unified data to automate routine tasks like processing cancellations, updating booking information, or even answering common travel questions about luggage, flight information, and much more, freeing up our customer service agents to handle more complex and last-minute travel needs to better serve our members." - Kate Donaghy, Head of Business Technology, Secret Escapes "Unity Environmental University is leveraging Salesforce's Agentforce to expand our support beyond routine inquiries, allowing our employees to focus on learners who need more personalized guidance. By integrating agentic AI into our workflows, we can quickly address standard questions like financial aid details or class registration while freeing our team to engage more deeply with students. This balanced approach ensures that every conversation is more meaningful, as some learners can rely solely on the AI for immediate answers, while others benefit from the combined efforts of both the AI and our dedicated staff. In doing so, we're not only scaling from 10,000 to 50,000 students, but also enhancing the quality and impact of every interaction along the way and reducing our cost of acquisition per student." - Dr. Melik Khoury, President & CEO, Unity Environmental University "At Wellness Extract, we're excited about all of the new possibilities Agentforce can bring to our business. As we continue to grow, scaling customer support is key, and Agentforce offers the potential to automate inquiries across all our channels while still delivering personalized, seamless experiences for all of our buyers. With Salesforce's Data Cloud, we'll gain deeper insights into our customers, helping us boost website conversions, strengthen connections, and reduce costs. It's an opportunity to not just streamline our business operations, but to elevate our brand and set the stage for even greater innovation in health and wellness." - Arvind Madakan, Program Manager, Wellness Extract Any unreleased services or features referenced here are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. About Salesforce Salesforce helps organizations of any size reimagine their business for the world of AI. With Agentforce, Salesforce's trusted platform, organizations can bring humans together with agents to drive customer success -- powered by AI, data, and action. Visit www.salesforce.com for more information.

Introducing Agentforce 2.0: The Digital Labor Platform for Building a Limitless Workforce By Investing.com

Agentforce 2.0 is the digital labor platform for enterprises, enabling a limitless workforce through AI agents for any department, assembled using a new library of pre-built skills, and that can take action across any system or workflow Agentforce 2.0 makes autonomous AI part of every team, empowering every employee to collaborate with Agentforce in Slack Agentforce 2.0 features enhanced reasoning and data retrieval to deliver precise answers and orchestrate actions in response to complex, multi-step questions Customers like Accenture (NYSE:ACN), The Adecco (SIX:ADEN) Group, Finnair, Heathrow Airport, IBM (NYSE:IBM), Indeed, Saks Global, and SharkNinja are embracing Agentforce to augment their teams with digital labor " streamlining business operations and unlocking new capacity for growth SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the world's #1 AI CRM, today announced Agentforce 2.0: the newest version of Agentforce, the first digital labor platform for enterprises " a complete AI system for augmenting teams with trusted, autonomous AI agents in the flow of work. This release introduces a new library of pre-built skills and workflow integrations for rapid customization, the ability to deploy Agentforce in Slack, and advancements in agentic reasoning and retrieval augmented generation (RAG). These advances will enable companies to scale their workforce with customized agents capable of handling complex, multi-step tasks with even more precision and accuracy. Why it's relevant: Every team has more work to do than resources available, leading to poorer customer interactions and lengthy backlogs. Organizations are turning to AI to help, but have a low tolerance for inadequate solutions that provide generic responses. Existing solutions such as copilots struggle to provide accurate, trusted responses to complex requests " such as personalized guidance on a job application " and cannot take action on their own " like nurturing a lead with product recommendations. Organizations need a new type of platform designed to supply digital labor in the form of autonomous AI agents that can reason over data and tap into workflows to take action on behalf of overwhelmed teams. Agentforce 2.0 takes our revolutionary Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) digital labor platform to another level, with new reasoning, integration and customization features that supercharge autonomous agents with unprecedented levels of intelligence, precision and accuracy, said Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO, Salesforce. The demand for Agentforce has been amazing " no other company comes close to offering this complete AI solution for enterprises. We're seamlessly bringing together AI, data, apps, and automation with humans to reshape how work gets done. Agentforce 2.0 cements our position as the leader in digital labor solutions, allowing any company to build a limitless workforce that can truly transform their business. How the Adecco Group Uses Agentforce to Scale Personalized Recruiting with Digital Labor: "At the Adecco Group, we are committed to creating meaningful connections between candidates and opportunities. By centralizing data across over 40 systems with Salesforce's Data Cloud and leveraging Agentforce, we're transforming the candidate experience. Agentforce will help prequalify candidates, enhance CVs, and ensure faster job placements. Agentforce agents also operate 24/7, freeing recruiters to focus on meaningful connections while delivering speed and personalization at scale." " Greg Shewmaker, Senior Vice President of Global Operations and AI, The Adecco Group New Library of Skills Brings Agentforce to Every Team and Workflow: Time and integration challenges make it difficult to build customized agents for individual business teams or departments. Agentforce 2.0 eliminates these barriers with a new library of pre-built agent skills " tasks Agentforce can perform " spanning CRM, Slack, Tableau, and partner-developed skills on the AppExchange. This latest release empowers customers to extend Agentforce to any system or workflow using MuleSoft. It also features an enhanced Agent Builder capable of interpreting natural language instructions, such as 'Onboard New Product Managers,' to auto-generate new agents. These agents seamlessly combine pre-made skills with custom logic built in Salesforce, offering unparalleled flexibility and speed. How Accenture Uses Agentforce to Scale Sales Productivity with Digital Labor: At Accenture, we embrace emerging technologies first so we can help our clients go fast. Our sales team within Accenture's Salesforce Business Group and Accenture Song are starting to use Agentforce to automate contact and close plan creation, surface insights through enterprise search, and keep teams aligned with dynamic updates. It's helping to increase time-to-effectiveness, accelerate decision-making, and is allowing them to focus on delivering innovative solutions for their clients. " Stephanie Sadowski, Salesforce Business Group lead at Accenture Agentforce in Slack " Humans with Agents Working Together Where Work Happens: As organizations look to unlock value from AI agents, they need solutions that are embedded where their employees already are. Agentforce 2.0 is deployable in Slack, bringing customizable digital labor into the messages (DMs) and channels where work happens. How Indeed Uses Agentforce to Scale Personalized Job Seeker Engagement with Digital Labor: Indeed is the world's leading job site, with three people hired every second through its platform. At the heart of Indeed's success is its ability to match the 580 million profiles created by job seekers with over 3 million hiring employers. By harnessing the power of Data Cloud, Indeed has enhanced its data architecture, creating a solid foundation for its go-to-market strategies and enhancing connections to its rich job seeker profiles, said Indeed CIO Anthony Moisant. By leveraging Agentforce, Indeed can stay focused on its mission to help people find jobs while advancing its goals, including reducing time-to-hire by 50% and helping 30 million individuals facing barriers to employment secure jobs by fiscal year 2030. - Anthony Moisant, CIO, Indeed Expert Answers to Complex Questions and Execute Actions with Agentforce 2.0: The Atlas (NYSE:ATCO) Reasoning Engine is the brain behind Agentforce, enabling it to retrieve relevant data, then reason and act. With Agentforce 2.0, Salesforce is introducing enhanced reasoning and retrieval to handle deeply nuanced questions, powered by new capabilities in Data Cloud that fuel Agentforce with greater context " complementing structured and unstructured data with business-specific metadata for greater accuracy across the most complex, multi-faceted requests. How Salesforce provides faster, more personalized customer support with Agentforce: The Salesforce Help page receives more than 60 million visits a year from customers who need assistance with product support and account queries. Agentforce on help.salesforce.com provides customers with personalized, 24/7 service, while seamlessly escalating to human reps with the full case history and context when needed. Since launching in October, Agentforce is now solving 83% of customer queries without a human, has halved the number of issues that require human intervention, and has nearly doubled its average number of weekly conversations. Customer Perspectives: At 1-800 Accountant, we're using Agentforce to manage service inquiries, especially during tax season. With Agentforce now managing up to 90% of incoming requests, we can automate responses to common questions like tax return statuses, freeing up our team to focus on more complex tasks. This boosts efficiency, improves customer satisfaction, and ensures fast, secure, personalized support. Plus, Agentforce adheres to strict data security standards, keeping sensitive tax information safe and accessible only to authorized personnel. It's a game-changer, helping us scale and serve our clients better during peak times. " Ryan Teeples, CTO, 1-800 Accountant Embracing autonomous agents is a game-changer for Bionic. We're on a mission to make life radically easier for Britain's small businesses by combining smart technology with expert human service. With agentic AI, we're streamlining tasks like meter readings and switch tracking to deliver 24/7 support. This innovation empowers our 200,000 SME customers to save time and hassle so they can focus on growing their business. " James Lomas, Chief Technology Officer, Bionic With Agentforce, we want to transform Capita's recruitment process into a fast, seamless and autonomous experience that benefits candidates, our people, and our clients. With autonomous agents providing 24/7 support, our goal is to enable candidates to complete the entire recruitment journey within days as opposed to what has historically taken weeks. At Capita, we give time back to our clients so they can focus on what they do best " and Agentforce will improve our ability to do just that. This is just the start of our agentic journey with Salesforce, where we believe an Agentic Economy can drive big growth potential for UK businesses. " Adolfo Hernandez. Chief Executive Officer, Capita At Finnair, we will use Agentforce to transform our customer service operations, enabling us to efficiently handle routine inquiries and improve response times. With Agentforce automating a significant share of standard inquiries, our team can focus on more complex issues, ensuring faster and more accurate support. This allows us to provide a seamless experience for both customers and customer service personnel, reducing onboarding times for our contact center teams with quicker access to vital information. " Tiina Vesterinen, Vice President, Commerce & CX Solutions, Finnair "With Salesforce's Agentforce, SharkNinja will be able to transform customer support across more than 30 markets, empowering our agents to deliver personalized, 24/7 service. By unifying data and addressing common inquiries like 'where is my order?', we can streamline agent workloads, enabling them to focus on meaningful, high-impact interactions. This integration will ensure a seamless shopper experience, offering tailored product support, FAQs, and personalized responses that meet consumers' unique needs " helping us to create extraordinary experiences at every touch point." " Velia Carboni, CIO, SharkNinja "The travel industry is a 24/7 business, often involving unique and urgent requests. As our website, which offers luxury travel deals, continues to grow and attract new customers, we wanted a solution that could deliver a personalized service efficiently to our 60 million European members. Agentforce uses our unified data to automate routine tasks like processing cancellations, updating booking information, or even answering common travel questions about luggage, flight information, and much more, freeing up our customer service agents to handle more complex and last-minute travel needs to better serve our members. " Kate Donaghy, Head of Business Technology, Secret Escapes Unity Environmental University is leveraging Salesforce's Agentforce to expand our support beyond routine inquiries, allowing our employees to focus on learners who need more personalized guidance. By integrating agentic AI into our workflows, we can quickly address standard questions like financial aid details or class registration while freeing our team to engage more deeply with students. This balanced approach ensures that every conversation is more meaningful, as some learners can rely solely on the AI for immediate answers, while others benefit from the combined efforts of both the AI and our dedicated staff. In doing so, we're not only scaling from 10,000 to 50,000 students, but also enhancing the quality and impact of every interaction along the way and reducing our cost of acquisition per student. " Dr. Melik Khoury, President & CEO, Unity Environmental University "At Wellness Extract, we're excited about all of the new possibilities Agentforce can bring to our business. As we continue to grow, scaling customer support is key, and Agentforce offers the potential to automate inquiries across all our channels while still delivering personalized, seamless experiences for all of our buyers. With Salesforce's Data Cloud, we'll gain deeper insights into our customers, helping us boost website conversions, strengthen connections, and reduce costs. It's an opportunity to not just streamline our business operations, but to elevate our brand and set the stage for even greater innovation in health and wellness. " Arvind (NS:ARVN) Madakan, Program Manager, Wellness Extract Any unreleased services or features referenced here are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. About Salesforce Salesforce helps organizations of any size reimagine their business for the world of AI. With Agentforce, Salesforce's trusted platform, organizations can bring humans together with agents to drive customer success"powered by AI, data, and action. Visit www.salesforce.com for more information. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20241217795822/en/

Salesforce reveals Agentforce 2.0, smarter and more effective agents on the way

Salesforce has revealed the second generation of its AI agent platform in the latest sign of the technology becoming a truly transformational change for businesses everywhere. The launch of Agentforce 2.0, just three months after the platform's initial launch in September 2024, promises even more tools and services for companies looking to get to grips with growing AI demand. Set to be available in February 2025, although some tools will get an earlier release, Agentforce 2.0 offers more customization options for enterprises eyeing up the next step in their AI journey. The launch of Agentforce 2.0 forms part of what Salesforce calls its "digital labor platform", which looks to augment and boost worker experiences and productivity. The release will include a new library of customizable pre-built skills and workflow integrations for Salesforce's entire portfolio, covering its CRM, Slack, Tableau, MuleSoft and more, alongside advancements in agentic reasoning and retrieval augmented generation (RAG), greatly improving the response time and accuracy of agents. There's also new CRM skills to make agents smarter and more effective, such as helping sales teams nurture leads and even join calls to provide instant feedback on interactions with customers. There will also be the ability to deploy Agentforce in Slack, with Slack Actions now available in Agent Builder, meaning the platform could send a direct message providing a summary of a project's status. Agent Builder has also been give a major upgrade that will let users create a new agent in seconds using natural language descriptions, and can even auto-generate relevant topics and instructions from its skills library to get your work up and running. "Agentforce 2.0 takes our revolutionary Salesforce digital labor platform to another level, with new reasoning, integration and customization features that supercharge autonomous agents with unprecedented levels of intelligence, precision and accuracy," said Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO, Salesforce. "The demand for Agentforce has been amazing -- no other company comes close to offering this complete AI solution for enterprises. We're seamlessly bringing together AI, data, apps, and automation with humans to reshape how work gets done. Agentforce 2.0 cements our position as the leader in digital labor solutions, allowing any company to build a limitless workforce that can truly transform their business."

Dawn of digital labor: Salesforce's Marc Benioff envisions a multitrillion-dollar opportunity for AI agents - SiliconANGLE

Dawn of digital labor: Salesforce's Marc Benioff envisions a multitrillion-dollar opportunity for AI agents Following the highly publicized launch of Agentforce by Salesforce Inc. in September, the customer relationship management giant unveiled several enhancements for its AI offering today. During a presentation for media and analysts in San Francisco, company executives emphasized how an ability to build and customize generative artificial intelligence agents will transform workflows across the enterprise. A key element in this approach will be the rise of digital labor, a trend at the core of the company's strategy, according to Marc Benioff (pictured), chairman and chief executive officer of Salesforce. "There is a vision that humans with agents can drive customer success together," said Benioff during the media and analysts event today. "When you have digital labor, you have a level of flexibility that you did not have before. This is different and what is happening is really different. This is what AI was meant to be." This week's announcements from Salesforce built on the company's initial launch which included out-of-the-box agentic capabilities or skills. The company is adding a new library of prebuilt skills that can take action across any system or workflow. This latter point formed a central element in Salesforce's message: The company is moving its AI platform beyond the CRM arena. "Agentforce 2.0 can now cross the boundaries of CRM," Adam Evans, executive vice president and general manager of Salesforce AI, said in a presentation during the gathering in San Francisco. "It's beyond CRM, it's about every team and every workflow. This is about the entire enterprise." Agentforce 2.0 also includes enhanced reasoning and retrieval to handle nuanced questions powered by the firm's Data Cloud and Atlas Reasoning Engine. This capability has already shown results for the company, according to metrics offered by Benioff, based on its implementation in the Salesforce online customer support portal. The company released data today that showed it was having 32,000 agent-driven conversations per week, resolving 83% of its customer support cases with 50% fewer escalations to humans. "After a couple of months of pretty hard work, we're live," Benioff said. "Right now, there are thousands of humans working with thousands of agents working with thousands of customers. I believe that is helping to change our company. We have to be customer zero. If we can't show that we can do it, it's never going to happen." Part of making it happen will require trust on the part of users that AI agents can accurately and reliably perform the tasks required. Agents created through the Salesforce engine can be launched into a testing center for validation. "We've opened up the entire state of what's happening inside of Agentforce so you can audit every part of it," Evans said. During an impromptu gathering with members of the press following his formal remarks, Benioff expressed confidence that his company's major bet on Agentforce will pay off. He noted that Salesforce has been acquiring AI businesses over the past decade in preparation for today's agentic opportunity. "Ten years ago, I had this existential freakout that AI was going to take over everything," Benioff said. "Now we are on another wave of AI. Digital labor is a multitrillion-dollar opportunity." Salesforce's CEO was quick to note his belief that the company was separating itself from the mass of companies with AI technology. The CRM provider has built its agent into a readily accessible screen on its customer support website. "Just because you use the word 'agent' doesn't mean you can deliver agents," Benioff told the press. "Show me your site and where it's running. It's like the emperor has no clothes for a lot of these companies. My biggest surprise is how quickly we've been able to reach this level of success." Salesforce's press materials listed Accenture plc, Finnair plc and IBM Corp. as major enterprise names among its current Agentforce clients. In the three months since unveiling the agentic technology at Dreamforce, the company appears determined to lift itself above the noise surrounding enterprise AI. "This is a crazy moment for Salesforce," Benioff said. "There's only one company delivering autonomous agents at scale and that's us. We're creating a new industry."

Coda or prologue? Salesforce closes off 2024 with Agentforce 2.0 as paid deals top 1,000 customers

We have to be Customer Zero. If we can't show that we're going to do it, it's not really going to happen. No-one can accuse Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff of not 'eating his own dog food' when it comes to the firm's agentic AI push. Since the formal launch of Agentforce at the Dreamforce conference in September, all company efforts - engineering, marketing, PR, sales etc - have pivoted to that one cause. This isn't just another product release; it's a revolution, a mindset shift akin to the firm's original mission statement of replacing the traditional software model with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) a quarter of a century ago. In San Francisco yesterday, only a few weeks after Agentforce went into general availability mode, Salesforce put the spotlight firmly on Agentforce 2.0. In reality this was being name-dropped into the conversations and presentations at Dreamforce before version 1.0 was even out the door for most users, but this was the first in-depth breakdown of what's in this updated iteration, slipped into the schedule at the tail end of a busy year. (Holidays? What Holidays?) Of course, being a SaaS provider, Salesforce's operating model is built around regular updates to its product offerings across the year, but even by the firm's own standards, this has appeared to be a remarkably fast delivery of a new version of something that the majority of Salesforce customers won't even have switched on in its original form. (That said, it is the most wonderful time of the year as Jillian Bruce, Slack Director of Developer Marketing, alluded to at the start of yesterday's proceedings: It is the Holiday season, and what better Holiday season gift experience than for everybody to get hands on with their first ever agent-building experience with Agentforce? Personally, I'm not entirely convinced that waking up on Christmas Day to find Santa's big present isn't a new iPhone but turning on Agentforce instead would work for me, but I'm an old Grinch at the best of times...) However, there are many customers who have begun to experiment with Agentforce to a greater or lesser degree. These range from the heavily-publicised early adopters, such as Saks and Adecco, through to individual users tinkering with producing their own agents to see what all the fuss about. (Actually there are 1,000 paid Agentforce deals as of Monday night, according to a text update from COO Brian Millham.) As Benioff's comment above suggests, Salesforce has been putting its own messaging into practice on the customer front line and it's on full view for all to see. Benioff told his audience: There's so many things that have happened, but perhaps the biggest thing that has happened happened, about a week ago or maybe it's two weeks ago - I've lost track of time completely - and that's when we hit the switch on our own site, help.salesforce.com. Help.salesforce.com has always been our primary customer support site. It's where our customers go to get help on Salesforce answers. Run by our Service Cloud, it does about 32,000 interactions with customers every single week. And behind help.salesforce.com are of course, our thousand of support agents that provide them the kind of quality support that's needed, that help.salesforce.com was not able to provide. That combination of humans and tech working together was an underlying theme throughout Dreamforce and that's what's now being delivered as reality, said Benioff: Humans with agents drive customer success together. It's kind of a fantastical idea, and yet, when we hit that switch two weeks ago, [that is what] is happening right now, in our current moment. Right now, there are thousands of customers, working with thousands of agents, working with thousands of humans, all in tandem, right now. You can go to help.salesforce.com and see it actually play out. He explained: I go to help.salesforce.com and I log in. Now I'm grounded into my information, which means it's looking at my data, it's looking at my metadata. The Data Cloud is federated to my other data sources and, all of a sudden, what I can do is start to work with that agent to resolve my customer service and support needs. The impact has been significant to date. As noted above, help.salesforce.com typically fields approximately 32,000 conversations a week, with an 83% resolution rate. Prior to Agentforce, around 10,000 conversations would be escalated to human agents, but that total has been halved, with only 5,000 conversations now requiring human involvement while AI agents sort out the remaining queries. As well as the functional enhancements on offer with Agentforce 2.0 - which Phil Wainewright is picking up separately - the other difference with yesterday's launch to that which we saw in September is the use of the phrase, Digital Labor Market. Benioff observed: There's this new opportunity that we all are still getting our head around to the point that, even at Dreamforce, I didn't use these words - Digital Labor. That's all changed, he added, with Agentforce 2.0 carrying a strapline proclaiming it to be The Digital Labor Platform. There's no turning back from here, said Benioff: There's no way that Dreamforce 2025 will look like Dreamforce 2024. We've already crossed the bridge. And what the bridge is, is this bridge to this new world of Digital Labor. I'm not sure that when we started this journey, even we fully understand where we were going, because when you look at the Digital Labor TAM (Total Addressable Market), it's not in the billions or tens of billions or hundreds of billions; It's in the trillions. And in fact, it's so new and so avant garde that many of the analyst firms that we have the highest respect for and work with every day haven't even fully sized it yet. But it does change the way companies will be run, he noted: As we've been deploying this to customers, because I've been using it myself, I'm like, 'Wow, I'm the CEO of a company that is managing agents and humans', and I have a Digital Labor platform at my disposal to augment my support, my sales, my service, my marketing. I'm doing already 32,000 conversations per week. 83% of these are being resolved, and then 50% of non-resolved escalations to humans...we have knocked this down [to] where we would have deployed, let's say, maybe 10,000 humans before Agentforce, 5000 are now getting deployed. We really start here. If we're not eating our own dog food, we can't really get at this point on another podcast, or have another meeting with another analyst or a reporter, or even show our face with a customer and say 'This is a great product, you should use this'. So this has been a huge priority that, number one, we're using this. A sentiment that we at diginomica thoroughly endorse. I'll admit I was slightly skeptical about the need for another big Agentforce launch in San Francisco only months after the Dreamforce original, especially as the Holiday season is in full flow and frankly it's time to wind down. But yesterday's event was an interesting step forward in what's clearly going to be a long term journey through the agentic story in 2025 and beyond. The Digital Labor Platform idea is a strong message that should resonate across industries and around the world and its articulation, while clearly still evolving, is compelling enough to demand attention and consideration. Once the Gartners et al start doing their 'think of a number and double it' calculations on market size - and now that Benioff has laid down the gauntlet to them, that's a dare that they'll all be racing to take on first - this is a conversation that we'll all be engaging with in the months ahead as it rises up the C-Suite agenda. Meanwhile the opportunity is there right now for Salesforce to get on with defining the concept and stamping its own spoor on it for others to play catch-up against. In the end, yesterday's session was less a coda to a busy year that's seen Salesforce re-invent itself and pivot its business model in a bold new direction and more a prologue to what's yet to come. As Benioff put it in an off-the-cuff closing remark:

Salesforce closes 1,000 paid 'Agentforce' deals, looks to robot future

(Reuters) - Salesforce has closed more than 1,000 paid deals for "Agentforce," its platform for creating virtual representatives powered by artificial intelligence, its CEO Marc Benioff said on Tuesday. At a company event in San Francisco, Salesforce previewed improvements for how businesses could build bots for recruiting, customer service and other specific tasks on its platform and in its messaging app Slack. Salesforce has done as much for its own operations, said Benioff. He said his company now needed half the number of humans to resolve simple customer queries, though he still wants to increase the company's headcount in sales by 10% or more. Since ChatGPT's launch in 2022, many companies have piloted AI without yet deriving major savings or revenue from it. For Benioff, who in recent months has focused his cloud company on agents, "digital labor" is poised to augment humans and expand the economy. Further out, Salesforce will start a "robot force partner program" that can connect real-world machines with virtual ones, he told reporters. Benioff cited hotel chains as an example. They could handle back- and front-office work with an army of focused digital assistants, while robots could clean guests' rooms, he said. The Salesforce co-founder and Time magazine owner said he hoped President-elect Donald Trump's administration would engage CEOs on the topic of digital labor. Trump appeared on a recent Time cover as the magazine's "Person of the Year." Asked if he expected to donate to Trump's inaugural fund as others have done, Benioff said: "I think we just donated the photo. He can use the Time cover at no charge." (Reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco; Editing by Matthew Lewis)

Salesforce Launches AI Agent That Handles Complex Questions

Salesforce unveiled the latest version of its AI agents product, called Agentforce, which comes with new reasoning abilities that let it handle complex questions and can now be accessed from within the company's other products, such as Slack. The new version, which comes less than two months after Salesforce started selling Agentforce, shows how quickly the software provider is moving to