AI has become a top priority for organizations all across the tech industry, so excitement was high around what AI innovations Salesforce had in store for Dreamforce this year. The big reveal? Agentforce, the next generation of autonomous AI Agents ushering in a new age of the hybrid workforce. Agentforce is poised to transform how businesses automate tasks and engage with customers, combining advanced AI capabilities with Salesforce’s trusted platform.
Employees across industries are partnering with Agentforce’s AI Agents to take on all of the tedious, leftover pieces of work that prevent them from responding to more complex challenges. Agentforce customers have seen remarkable results right out of the box, with increased productivity and efficiency. On the Dreamforce floor, hundreds of customers were able to build an Agent in just five minutes, showcasing the platform’s user-friendly interface and rapid deployment capabilities.
Here’s what you need to know about Agentforce to start considering how AI Agents can enhance your organization.
What is Agentforce?
Agentforce is Salesforce’s groundbreaking low-code platform for building, customizing, and deploying autonomous Agents to support employees and customers. With Agentforce, organizations can quickly build autonomous AI Agents using out-of-the-box templates tailored to their business needs. This empowers teams without extensive coding experience to create sophisticated AI Agents, transforming their access to AI technology.
These Agents can be customized with familiar Salesforce tools like Flows, Apex, and prompt templates, leveraging LLM’s language and reasoning abilities. They can execute tasks using CRM data, external sources, and metadata while adhering to privacy/security standards, ensuring compliance with industry regulations. Agents can escalate complex queries to human Agents, maintaining a seamless customer experience.
Agentforce is built with the Einstein Trust Layer for secure data protection, using Salesforce’s metadata, permissions, and sharing models. Agents are dynamic and do not require predetermined conversational flows, unlike Einstein Copilots. They offer more autonomy by being triggered by data changes or automation, allowing them to adapt in real-time to customer interactions and internal processes.
Agentforce shifts away from the pre-scripted interactions that can make manual set up of chatbots so tedious. You have to teach your chatbots language like pricing questions and support questions, then create dialogue trees with a conversational designer that can write sentences.
Agentforce uses the cutting-edge AI models available to automatically understand what the customer wants to do, figure out what to do next, and write a response in the language you need. If you want to teach the Agent a new skill, just add a new action. If you’re launching a new product, simply update your knowledge base, and Agentforce will immediately be able to handle inquiries related to it without additional programming.
The different types of AI Agents
Agentforce Agents are engineered to complete a wide variety of tasks, with the initial rollout focusing on Sales and Service Agents. Agents fall into two main categories: assistive and autonomous. Assistive Agents work with humans to enhance capabilities, and often require human input and feedback to refine suggestions or actions. These include Sales Coach Agents that can onboard and train salespeople and CRM Assistant Agents that answer questions and take actions across Customer 360, providing instant access to customer data and insights.
Autonomous Agents operate independently and do not need direct human supervision, completing repetitive menial tasks while handing off more complex cases to human Agents. For those bottom of the barrel leads that you can’t quite staff, SDR Agents enable you to qualify them and start the next phase of the conversation, ensuring no opportunity is missed. Service Agents replace traditional chatbots, enhancing case deflection with support for a wide range of service issues without needing preprogrammed flows. Common support requests like password reset or questions about the status of an order can be handed off to Agents, giving your staff the opportunity to respond to more complex concerns.
Industry use cases for Agentforce
Dreamforce gave us the opportunity to learn a lot about how AI Agents can be deployed across different industries. One of the biggest announcements was the partnership between Salesforce and IBM, whose pre-built Agent templates will allow businesses in heavily regulated industries like financial services and healthcare to use AI in their own IT environments while adhering to strict security and compliance policies. Here are the industry-specific benefits that we can’t wait to bring to our clients:
Financial services: Banking Agents analyze data, proactively manage client requests, and provide personalized service across retail, commercial, and investment banking. They can help bankers stay informed about market trends and customer portfolio changes in real-time. Finance Agents can share insights on financial reporting and risk assessments, act on fraud detection by identifying suspicious activities instantly, and resolve compliance-related queries by accessing up-to-date regulatory information.
Advisor Agents can identify when you have portfolio drift against a set of asset classes and create a recommendation to a human advisor to reach out proactively to the customer, enhancing client relationships and satisfaction. Claims Agents can help insurance companies automate the straight-through processing of claims, reducing processing time from days to minutes.
Healthcare and life sciences: Health Agents engage with patients, providers, and payers to resolve inquiries, provide summaries, and take action across multiple channels. They can schedule procedures and visits, send appointment reminders, and answer basic questions about lab results, freeing up doctors’ time to focus on less menial tasks. A care coordinator can have a Health Agent produce a comprehensive medical history of the patient so that they have the context they need when they are trying to close gaps in care. These Agents also ensure that patient data is handled securely, complying with HIPAA regulations.
Media and entertainment: SDR Agents can prospect on your behalf for accounts that aren’t ready to buy yet, freeing your sellers to focus on the opportunities that will drive revenue today. They can analyze social media trends and audience engagement to tailor outreach efforts. Sales Coaches give your sellers real-time feedback on their pitches, making them great for onboarding new sellers, especially those who are selling into regulated industries and need to adhere to a specific talk track. Service Agents ensure that no customer question goes unanswered, leveraging your unified data to deliver great service to your customers so your service reps have the time to manage more complex cases. Agents can handle high volumes of customer interactions during peak times, such as during product launches or major events.
Start your Agentforce journey with Mphasis Silverline
With all the excitement around Agentforce, we’re eager to show our clients what this technology can do for their specific use cases. We are proud to be one of the 44 Service Implementation Partners that are part of the Agentforce Partner Network, helping customers develop innovative Agentforce solutions with our breadth of experience and industry expertise. Our team is equipped to guide you through the entire process, from initial strategy to deployment and optimization.
By working with partners, organizations see a 31% faster adoption rate of emerging technologies (2023 Salesforce Partner Value / AppExchange Customer Success Survey), and we can help our clients create an Agentforce strategy, connect data, customize and implement Agents tailored to business needs, and drive faster outcomes. Find out what our team can do for your organization.
