Salesforce Unveils Agentforce: AI Transforms IT Support to Conversation-First Model

Exclusive: Salesforce announces agents with voice and hybrid reasoning

Why it matters: Salesforce faces growing competition from tech giants with their own large language models and startups focused on AI customer service. Zoom in: Salesforce agents will now have the power of speech and new hybrid reasoning skills. * The upgrades aim to make them sound more human while following clear rules for key decisions, like giving refunds. Driving the news: The features will be part of a flurry of announcements that Salesforce will make at its annual Dreamforce event next week. * Agentforce Voice works across phone systems, websites and apps, and will be widely available on Oct. 21. * Hybrid reasoning will debut as part of a feature called Agent Script, now in pilot, with a customer beta coming in November. What they're saying: Both features reflect that there's no one-size-fits-all approach to AI agents, Salesforce Executive VP Adam Evans told Axios Wednesday. * "You can have the creativity and fluidity when you want it, or you can have the rigidity, consistency and scale when you don't," he said. "It's your choice on a job-by-job basis." * Companies appreciate that bots don't sound like bots, but they also need them to stick to a consistent approach, Evans said. * "If you're doing 100,000 transactions with the customer and some of them are different than the others, that's not a feature," Evans said. "That's a bug, right?" Salesforce said it's spent about a year developing the new voice features, focusing on understanding speech and detecting nuance and emotion to respond appropriately. * The voice system can also pull data from various systems and seamlessly hand off to a human worker when needed. * "There's not very many companies that can do that," Evans said. Enterprise agents for customer service is a saturated space with fierce competition from tech companies like ServiceNow and startups like Sierra, which was co-founded by Bret Taylor, a former top Salesforce executive.

Salesforce aims to shake up IT service delivery with AI agents - SiliconANGLE

Salesforce aims to shake up IT service delivery with AI agents Salesforce Inc. is imbuing its 16-year-old Service Cloud with artificial intelligence agents in a new suite designed to deliver what executives described as a "conversation-first, agent-first" experience. The company is positioning Agentforce IT Service as an evolution from ticket-based information technology service management to an interactive dialogue with autonomous resolution built into widely used collaboration tools such as its Slack platform and Microsoft Corp.'s Teams. The new cloud application provides an agentic IT service desk with the ability to answer common questions, generate service tickets and even remotely diagnose and repair some problems. All functions are compatible with the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, a global framework of best practices for IT service delivery. Multiple AI agents can work together as subject-matter experts to support employees and IT teams in resolving complex problems. Connectors, integrations and workflows help integrate with an organization's existing IT portfolio. The new product grew out of customer demand for a more employee-centric approach to service, said Kishan Chetan, executive vice president and general manager of Salesforce Service Cloud. "We've consistently heard that our customers want the same experience that we enable them to provide to their customers to their employees," he said. " They want to engage with employees in a personalized, proactive manner." Salesforce cited recent research by WalkMe Inc. that found that the average enterprise wastes more than $1 million a week in lost productivity due to IT support inefficiencies. Chetan said traditional ITSM systems have struggled to meet modern expectations. "Teams have spent a lot of money trying to automate IT service," he said, "but most of the time, questions are translated into a form and a ticket." The outcome, he added, is a slower response and more work for IT teams. "As you create tickets and more issues for the IT team, you slow them down," he said. Salesforce said its Agentforce IT Service reimagines support around a conversational interface and delivery through the applications employees prefer. "Whether they're in Slack, Teams, email or wherever, employees have the ability to get the right information right there," Chetan said. Instead of submitting tickets and waiting for responses, employees can ask questions such as whether they qualify for a laptop upgrade. The system automatically checks individual profiles and company policies to provide tailored answers without IT intervention. The platform also takes a proactive approach to managing some problems. During widespread issues, such as an email server outage, Agentforce can alert affected employees, deliver live status updates and track incidents through to resolution. For complex or sensitive situations, Agentforce can route requests to IT personnel along with relevant context and diagnostic insights. Salesforce said these capabilities together move IT support from a reactive, ticket-based model to a conversational, predictive and collaborative approach. Agentforce IT Service builds on Salesforce's existing Service Cloud, which about 70,000 customers use. Asked if the company intends to leverage its large installed base to challenge category leader ServiceNow Inc., Chetan said the strategy is broader than that. "There's a lot of unfulfilled demand in the market," he said. "I'm sure we'll run into ServiceNow, but we're very confident of our continued innovation." Muddu Sudhakar, Salesforce's senior vice president and general manager of IT and HR service, echoed that sentiment. "I think the world will be much bigger where we'll coexist," he said. With concerns about the trustworthiness of generative and agentic systems topping the agendas of enterprise leaders, Sudhakar said keeping humans in the loop was a core design principle. "It's very important that every step of the way, humans are involved," he said. "Live agent escalations provide guardrails so AI agents don't deviate and become rogue. The employee has the option at any point to go from talking to an agent to a live human IT team member." Omar Baig, chief information officer at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, called Salesforce "a mission-critical app platform" and expects to deploy the new service to support more than 60 offices worldwide. "The key challenge that I'm facing is how to deliver more with less," he said. "We need the tools and platforms to [provide support] with zero downtime." Chetan said Salesforce expects agents to spur a large-scale replacement of legacy help test systems. "The industry is going through a rapid transformation with agents and conversation first," he said. "There's a fundamental shift that's going on in the market."

This New Salesforce AI Service Could Cut IT Helpdesk Calls at Your Company

Workplace software services giant Salesforce just revealed its Agentforce IT Service product -- an AI agents-based system that offers always on, always available IT support and helplines for its client companies. In a Thursday press release, Salesforce reiterated some of the same arguments made by AI evangelists, promising its use could allow workers and IT staff alike to "spend less time on manual tickets, forms, portals, and searching through knowledge articles, and more time on high-value, strategic work." Even if your company isn't one of Salesforce's myriad clients, this system is a little sample of the future, and yet another example of how AI is encroaching on diverse sectors of everyday work life. There's one caveat to the new tool, though. It still relies on people. We've all been there: sending a "help!" email to the IT team because some important piece of software or hardware has gone kaput, only to receive a ticket number or case number from an automated system, usually accompanied by a note saying the team will respond "soon," or, worse, describing a longish wait window like "by tomorrow." Depending on the setup, and the nature of the problem someone will then show up in your office, or send suggested fixes (which may read like a foreign language to a non-technical worker) by email or a messaging app, or take over someone's computer via remote access to fix the problem. The Salesforce tool, the company insists, is unique because it's "conversation-first," and "agent-first." Essentially the idea is to dump the "ticket" system, and allow someone to make an IT help request via pretty much any platform they're using, from chat systems like Slack or Teams to email. In a demonstration press event, one example featured a new employee who needed to go through their IT onboarding. They began a chat in Slack with an AI "conversation agent," which verified a few details with the worker, then set to work sending them the relevant documents and guidelines, as well as actually working behind the scenes to, for example, give the worker access to file systems, GitHub code repositories and other information for their onboarding. It's able to do this because unlike a query-then-response AI chatbot, agent AIs have a degree of autonomy and can perform some digital tasks automatically. It sounds like magic, and unlike, say, having a long wait for an IT operative in a remote call center, the system is effectively on 24/7/365. Salesforce also demonstrated that the AI agent system also works in a similar way for IT support people as well, offering answers to technical problems via a chat interface. IT-savvy readers, or perhaps IT-wary ones, may have some worries at this point. It's one thing to trust a human expert with your computer when, say, an important Excel file you've worked on for hours gets corrupted. But AI systems aren't human, and we know that they can hallucinate fake or incorrect outputs and pass them off as true or reliable. When Inc. asked Salesforce about this during a press conference about the new agentic AI IT service, Muddu Sudhakar, Salesforce's senior vice president and general manager of IT Service and HR Service agreed this was the "most important" question concerning AI deployments today. Then he said the company's multiple AI agents were trained carefully, and operated within "guardrails" that should keep them in line, and prevent serious errors occurring if, for example, the AI suggested a fix for a user's computer that actually makes things worse. Salesforce also noted that there's always a "human in the loop" as part of this AI-centric system. Someone who should be able to spot if an AI has made an error, or to whom you can "escalate" the issue if you're not confident the AI can fix your problem. What can you take away from this for your company? First, this is a hint of the future. Not just for IT services, but for many business support systems that are likely to operate like this as AI chatbots and AI agents get more powerful. If you contract out to third-party companies for, say, IT or financial service support, then it's likely that you'll be interacting with AI agent-based systems soon, instead of humans first. Salesforce has previously released an AI agent product that can work like a sales rep -- so you see which way the wind is blowing. Second, Salesforce's human-in-the-loop model is a reminder that while AI tools can boost worker efficiency, they are not perfect and they can make mistakes. (The Salesforce IT model speeds the process, so, the IT team may be able to deal with incoming user queries faster after AI tools do a big share of the initial work.) If you've rolled out AI at your business, you should remind your workers that every AI output needs to be checked for veracity and relevance before it's built into any product -- that way you can avoid problematic, or even legal, expensive, AI-induced mistakes.