Salesforce unveils Agentforce: autonomous AI for productivity

Salesforce has announced the introduction of Agentforce, a new suite of autonomous AI agents aimed at enhancing employee productivity and handling tasks across various domains, including service, sales, marketing, and commerce.

This initiative seeks to significantly drive customer satisfaction by automating routine and complex tasks without human intervention.

"Agentforce represents the Third Wave of AI—advancing beyond copilots to a new era of highly accurate, low-hallucination intelligent agents that actively drive customer success," said Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO of Salesforce. According to Benioff, Agentforce is unique due to its seamless integration with existing workflows and its ability to anticipate needs, strengthen relationships, and drive growth. He expressed his bold vision, stating, "Our goal is to empower one billion agents with Agentforce by the end of 2025."

The technology behind Agentforce is powered by the Atlas Reasoning Engine, a proprietary system designed to simulate human thinking and planning. This engine enables the AI agents to autonomously analyse data, make decisions, and execute tasks. This distinguishes them from traditional chatbots and copilots that rely on human input and struggle with multi-step or complex tasks.

Agentforce offers several pre-built agents, including Service Agent, Sales Development Representative (SDR), and Sales Coach. These out-of-the-box agents can be customised and deployed quickly using low-code tools, making it easier for organisations to implement AI solutions without the complexity and cost associated with traditional AI projects.

The new suite is already being adopted by industry leaders in hospitality, retail, and publishing. For instance, Wiley has reported a significant improvement in case resolution rates since implementing Agentforce. "Piloting Agentforce has made a noticeable difference during one of our busiest periods — back-to-school season. It's been exciting to go live with our first agent thanks to the no-code builder, and we've seen a more than 40% increase in case resolution, outperforming our old bot," said Kevin Quigley, Senior Manager, Continuous Improvement at Wiley.

Agentforce integrates into existing systems through the Salesforce Platform, which includes Data Cloud capabilities that enable seamless, real-time data integration. This ensures that the AI agents operate with complete context and precision, leveraging unified and harmonised customer data.

George Pokorny, SVP of Customer Success at OpenTable, shared his optimism about the potential of Agentforce: "Every interaction that restaurants and diners have with our support team must be accurate, fast, and reflective of the hospitality that restaurants show their guests. Agentforce has incredible potential to help us deliver that high touch attentiveness and support while significantly freeing up our team to address more complex needs."

Salesforce has also introduced the Agentforce Partner Network, which allows organisations to deploy third-party agents or use third-party actions when building custom agents. Partners such as Amazon Web Services, Google, and IBM are contributing specialised actions that can be integrated into Agentforce, providing additional capabilities across multiple systems and channels.

Mike Hite, Chief Technology Officer at Saks Global, highlighted the impact of Agentforce on their personalisation strategy: "As we advance our personalisation strategy, we believe Agentforce and its AI-powered capabilities have the potential to make a real impact on our approach to customer engagement. Agentforce will improve our effectiveness across customer touchpoints, empowering our employees and augmenting their ability to deliver more individualised shopping experiences for which Saks is known."

With Agentforce, Salesforce aims to address the common challenge of repetitive, low-impact work that occupies a significant portion of employee time. By providing a scalable, autonomous solution, Agentforce allows human workers to focus on higher-value, strategic tasks, thus enhancing overall efficiency and productivity.

Agentforce is expected to be generally available on 25th October 2024, with some components of the Atlas Reasoning Engine launching in February 2025. The pricing for the service starts at USD $2 per conversation, with standard volume discounts available. Salesforce advises customers to make purchasing decisions based on features currently available.