Meet Salesforce Agentforce: The AI Platform You’ll Wish You Had Sooner

It’s no longer classified information: There’s a new agent on the case. Or rather, a whole crew of agents, ready to transform your business. Shortly before Dreamforce 2024, Salesforce unveiled its next-gen AI suite: Agentforce. With the mission to create “What AI was meant to be”, the world’s number one CRM provider is doubling down on its AI vision.

In the Agentforce announcement from a couple of months ago, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was quoted saying:

“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”

The key word here is “agent”. Unlike the AI assistants we are familiar with, Agentforce agents can go beyond suggestions and predictive capabilities and actually carry out tasks on a user’s behalf.

But in case Agentforce has slipped past you undetected, we’re going to take a closer look at what exactly it is, how it works, and what it means for your business.

AI Boom: Separating the Helpful From the Hyped

We’re right in the midst of the artificial intelligence boom – and everyone is jumping on the bandwagon. We’ve seen a whole host of unusual AI products, from AI-inspired soft drinks to AI dog bowls. And if you’ve spent even a few minutes on LinkedIn recently, you’ll have noticed countless profiles offering AI-powered solutions and consulting services.

Amid all this fanfare, it can be hard to distinguish the genuine innovations from the marketing buzz. As we move past the peak of the AI hype cycle, we need use-case driven AI that can actually generate value and make a difference in our lives.

With that in mind, is the latest Salesforce AI innovation the real deal?

We certainly think so. Why? Because Salesforce isn’t new to the AI game and it isn’t merely following the crowd.

So What Is Agentforce?

You may already be familiar with Einstein Copilot, which was the previous iteration of conversational AI on the Salesforce platform. Einstein Copilot already stood apart from other AI assistants thanks to its ability to use an organization’s own unique data to make tailored recommendations and generate meaningful insights. Part of Salesforce’s Einstein 1 platform, Einstein Copilot is connected to Data Cloud, ensuring that it is trained on trusted data for better quality output.

Similarly, Agentforce is centered on Data Cloud, giving it access to unified customer data and metadata in real-time. However, Agentforce makes some important advances:

• Faster Setup: While Einstein bots require users to manually train natural language models (NLMs), Agentforce’s AI agents can be set up in minutes. Powered by generative AI and large language models (LLMs), Agentforce is more effective and flexible than its previous iteration.
• Easier Maintenance: Agentforce provides a range of out-of-the-box agents for various scenarios and use cases. Thanks to its low-code Agent Builder, users can customize their agents depending on role and industry. More on that later.
• Enhanced Understanding: Einstein bots, while effective, are not able to understand the content of an entire conversation, limiting them to answering only the most recent question. Agentforce agents, on the other hand, have a better understanding of human language, enabling them to provide contextual responses to follow-up queries and exceptions.

60% of consumers say advances in AI make trust even more important.

Source: Salesforce, State of the AI Connected Customer

A Rundown of Agentforce’s Key Functionality

Let’s take a closer look at how Agentforce works and examine some of the main developments you can look forward to.

Automation and Integration

The good news for Salesforce customers: Agentforce builds on the CRM platform’s existing capabilities. It seamlessly integrates with Salesforce flows, MuleSoft APIs, and Apex, giving users the ability to create new automations that build on workflows and actions that are already in their system.

Agent Builder

Perhaps one of the most exciting developments is the Agent Builder. This low-code tool brings the power of autonomous AI agents to a wider audience by making them easy to customize and deploy. Starting with a selection of out-of-the-box agents, you can define roles, topics, actions, and guardrails to configure your agent to your business needs.

The out-of-the-box agents include:

• Service Agent: An Agentforce Service Agent provides smart, detailed responses to customer inquiries, without the extensive, preprogrammed scenarios that traditional chatbots require.
• Sales Development Representative (SDR): Agentforce SDRs relieve some of the burden on your sales teams by answering queries, handling objections, and scheduling meetings.
• Sales Coach: Another useful tool for sales teams, the Sales Coach helps your reps practice their pitches and master objections with realistic, AI-powered role-play scenarios tailored to your team.
• Personal Shopper: This agent enhances the customer experience on e-commerce websites by providing highly personalized product recommendations.

81% of sales teams are investing in AI (40% are experimenting with it and 41% have fully implemented it in their operations).

Source: Salesforce, State of Sales

Atlas Reasoning Engine

The brain behind all of this is the Atlas Reasoning Engine. The engine takes data, either structured or unstructured, and analyzes and interprets it to decide on the best course of action. It classifies requests under specific topics, each with its own defined scope and rules to determine what actions an agent can and can’t take.

The result is a reasoning process that mimics a human’s thought process, allowing Agentforce agents to make informed decisions and provide reliable answers.

Prompt Builder

The Agentforce Prompt Builder is where your autonomous agents really start to come together. Prompts give agents the trusted data they need, and they can use existing Salesforce data such as flows, merge fields, and related lists.

With Prompt Builder, you can create reusable templates to inform your agent which actions to take. To create a prompt template, you write instructions in natural language and select resources from your records to provide the AI agent with the information and context it needs. You can then configure the output fields, i.e. which information will be included in the response, and finally test the prompt.

Einstein Trust Layer

Of course, there are many justified concerns about the use of AI in businesses. Ensuring secure, ethical, and responsible use of data is paramount for businesses looking to benefit from AI models.

54% of AI users don’t trust the data used to train it.

Source: Salesforce – Your Data, Your AI

The Einstein Trust Layer is the trusted foundation for AI across the Salesforce ecosystem. It combines security features, such as data masking, prompt defense, toxicity detection, and zero data retention to ensure that Agentforce safeguards data privacy while producing safe, accurate responses.

For example, the Einstein Trust Layer ensures that Agentforce agents do not generate false or toxic responses and only share data with authorized users. These guardrails are essential for building autonomous agents that you can trust and rely on.

For a more in-depth look at how Agentforce works, including UI screenshots, check out this article.

Why Agentforce Matters To Your Team

There is a huge number of use cases for Agentforce, spanning many roles and industries. From CX agents that analyze customer feedback to suggest improvements, to healthcare agents that interact with patients to answer queries or schedule appointments – there’s something for almost any business need.

According to one-third of company executives, the most valuable aspect of AI is its ability to enable higher-quality work.

Source: Mercer Global Talent Trends 2024

Customer Service

One of the areas that can most benefit from autonomous agents is customer service. Many businesses are already benefitting from service chatbots that can answer simple customer queries and deflect service tickets. However, while chatbots are meant to provide faster answers, their inability to understand context leads to many limitations. This can be a frustrating experience for customers with more complex questions.

Agentforce Service Agents represent a leap forward in AI-powered customer service. Pulling data from Service Cloud to get a detailed history of the customer, Service Agents are capable of much more personalized customer interactions. From answering order status queries to autonomously executing refunds, Service Agents can reduce ticket resolution time while increasing customer satisfaction.

For situations that require more personal attention, you can configure the Service Agent to escalate certain requests to a human agent. This ensures that cases are resolved accurately while minimizing the number of routine tickets your customer success team has to deal with.

Sales Support

Sales reps have lots of reasons to be excited about Agentforce. For starters, the Sales Development Representative (SDR) agent is available out of the box and can use your business data to automate repetitive sales tasks, such as answering queries, dealing with objections, and scheduling meetings. But it can also suggest products and services that a customer might be interested in, helping your team to identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Agentforce SDR can even help build your sales pipeline, giving your sales reps more time to focus on nurturing their leads and sealing deals.

What’s more, the Agentforce Sales Coach can improve the effectiveness of your sales teams at every stage, from discovery to pitch to negotiation. Using realistic role plays based on correspondence and buyer personas, Sales Coach helps reps practice and refine their skills in certain scenarios. It then provides personalized feedback based on consistent standards.

Marketing

The Agentforce Campaign Optimizer is Salesforce’s latest AI-powered tool for marketing teams. Starting with a campaign brief and marketing goals, an autonomous agent can help marketers segment audiences, create content, and design a customer journey using the Flow Builder.

A major benefit for marketers is that the agent can constantly monitor campaign performance and optimize campaigns where necessary. This can remove much of the legwork involved in large-scale marketing campaigns, giving marketing teams a chance to focus on valuable creative work.

What Could Agentforce Do for HR Teams?

When it comes to AI adoption, HR has been lagging behind in comparison to other departments like customer service and marketing. However, as a vendor of Salesforce-native HR software, we see plenty of untapped potential and use cases for Agentforce in HR.

Streamlined Recruitment

Many companies are already using AI to refine their talent search and hiring processes. With flair Recruiting, for example, you can use AI to automatically generate professional job descriptions for open roles and pre-screen candidates. These features help to speed up crucial phases of the recruiting process.

With Agentforce, it could be possible to go a step further and automatically flag high-potential candidates. With an autonomous agent or recruitment, companies could automatically assign labels to candidates and generate summaries of applicants for an open position. An AI agent could even schedule interviews automatically, saving time for both recruiters and candidates.

Onboarding Assistance

A smooth onboarding process can be a strong factor in employee retention. However, setting up a welcoming, personalized onboarding journey can be very time-intensive for HR managers and team leaders. It’s difficult to find the balance between personal, face-to-face onboarding and a more streamlined, automated approach.

Agentforce could reduce the workload for HR professionals by responding to questions from new hires. Onboarding agents can be integrated into Slack, giving employees a constant point of contact to guide them through the early days of their new job.

Analyzing Workforce Data

Autonomous agents are adept at analyzing data and identifying trends a human might miss. In an HR context, this could mean alerting managers when there has been a noticeable change in key metrics, such as absence rates or employee turnover.

Agentforce agents could also help prepare data for HR managers to present to executives. In addition to saving time, this can help give companies the insights they need to optimize their HR departments.

Performance Reviews

Performance management is tricky to get right. Studies show that just 14% of employees strongly believe their performance reviews motivate them to improve. Common problems include bias, lack of data and documentation, and poor review practice.

There is hope though. By including autonomous AI agents in the performance management process, managers can assess employees on objective, unbiased criteria. They could also generate a performance summary of employee development. Finally, the AI agent could suggest some effective next steps to follow up on the appraisal, such as learning resources and training courses.

Mission Possible: Will Agentforce Change How We Do Business?

In the coming year, we will surely start to see more businesses using Agentforce in exciting ways. The keynote from Dreamforce 2024 already gives us a taste of things to come with insights into how a couple of Salesforce customers are using the innovation.

One thing is for sure: we’re excited about Agentforce. Its ability to not only recommend actions but actually execute them could be a game changer for organizations in the Salesforce ecosystem.

HR teams might be considered relative latecomers to the world of artificial intelligence, but surveys show that AI adoption is picking up in HR-related activities. As with many other innovations, it’s vital not to get left behind in this respect. HR departments that are already informing themselves, learning relevant skills, and implementing AI in their processes are better positioned to outperform their counterparts.

Introduce flair AI to Your HR

As we continue to build on our software’s AI capabilities, there’s never been a better time to switch to flair. Book a call with us to see how your business could benefit from Salesforce-powered HR.

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