by Chris Taylor 
It is difficult to find many conversations about technology without AI coming up. Many businesses have been tasked with ‘using AI’. However, this can be more challenging for many than they initially thought. At Dreamforce this year, Salesforce announced Agentforce as their answer to the question, ‘How can I use AI in my business?’
What is Agentforce?
Agentforce is Salesforce’s newest AI-driven tool designed to work seamlessly with your teams. Think of Agentforce agents as “digital employees” who live within Salesforce. Each agent is set up with specific tasks within a department. Just like human employees, they can be assigned various jobs to complete, and they need to be trained on how to complete them according to your business processes.
Unlike traditional chatbots that use a decision tree approach, Agentforce is powered by the Atlas Reasoning Engine, which enables agents to respond naturally and adapt to situations. This means that they are faster and more capable, which will cause less frustration for users as they are less likely to get stuck on questions and reduce the number of times a query needs to be assigned to your support team.
Agents built using Agentforce can perform an assistive role, where they help you perform tasks or autonomously operate independently and hand tasks over to humans as needed. However, they are unable to perform tasks outside their remit. This means that your data is safe in their hands, and they will not go rogue performing tasks they should not be doing or saying things they should not.
Why Agentforce?
In this boom of AI tools, every platform you use has started to boast about its AI capabilities, and many also have their own agents or copilots, so why should you consider Agentforce?
Simply put, Agentforce is engrained into the Salesforce platform, meaning it can handle employee and customer facing use cases across Sales, Marketing, Service, and beyond. Not only that, agents are treated like standard Salesforce users. They are granted access to your data in the same way as any other user, keeping your customer data secure and ensuring agents can only interact with the information you authorise.
If you are already familiar with tools like Flow, Prompt Builder or Data Cloud, you will be up and running with Agentforce in no time. Flow will allow you to search and process your data for the agent to use and perform actions such as creating a support case. Data Cloud will allow your agents to access all your data from your CRM and beyond, including unstructured data. This helps to answer those more complex questions and allows the agents to have as much context as their human counterparts (possibly even more). This means that the learning curve of customising your own agents is simplified as it builds on the skill sets you already have.
One of the most common concerns with AI technology is the ability to trust it with your data. This is where the Einstein Trust Layer comes into play. The trust layer allows agents to use large language models (LLMs) safely and securely by masking your sensitive data, ensuring no data is retained by the LLM, and detecting toxicity. It provides you with the confidence that your data is safe in the hands of agents.
What is available today?
Agentforce became Generally Available (GA) on 25th October 2024 with the ability to build their agents or utilise out-of-the-box agents, which currently include:
- Service Agent – The 1st line of support for your customers, handling customer queries, taking action on data and handing over to your service team if required.
- SDR Agent: This agent automatically engages with your leads, helping to answer questions, handle objections, and schedule meetings with your sales team.
- Sales Coach: Help keep your sales team in top form by allowing them to simulate customer interactions during the discovery, pitching, and negotiating phases.
Agentforce is included as part of Salesforce Foundations which is available for free to Salesforce customers with Enterprise edition or above. This means that you can get up and running with minimal cost.
What benefits will I gain?
There are a variety of benefits that Agentforce can bring to your business, and these are not only related to cost-savings. Agentforce pricing is based on a consumption-based model. This means you only get charged for the conversations your agents have. If your AI agents can handle a certain level of work, you will not need to increase your headcount to handle customer demands. On top of this, AI agents don’t sleep. This means that you can offer a level of support for your customers 24/7, allowing them to resolve any issues they may have any time of the day. This will help improve customer satisfaction and close more sales without the additional overhead of support teams.
As agents are not only designed for customers, you can improve the productivity of your teams by reducing the work that is stopping them from doing their full job. Think about how a salesperson might ask an agent to gather all the information required for an account review instead of manually compiling it from multiple systems and documents each time, allowing them to focus on closing more deals.
For service-based use cases, Salesforce has created an ROI calculator, which can help you get an understanding of how much money you will save if agents can start taking work away from your workforce and reduce the number of cases your team need to work on.
The future of Salesforce with AI
At Nebula, we believe that the future of your customers interacting with your business will be through autonomous agents that work for you, not against you. So, if you are looking to better understand Agentforce, how it could benefit your business, or the steps you need to take to be ready for this digital future, get in touch with us today.