Create and Ground Your Help Agent

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Enable Agentforce in your Enterprise Edition or Unlimited Edition.
  
• Configure your Help Agent using the guided setup in Salesforce Go.
  
• Ground your AI agent using Salesforce Knowledge, uploaded files, or website sync.
  

Before You Start

Before you start this module, consider completing this recommended content.

• Agentforce: Quick Look
  
• Introduction to Agentforce
  

The Help Agent guided setup is currently available in Enterprise Edition or Unlimited Edition with Agentforce enabled. This feature isn't available in a standard Trailhead Playground. You won’t be tested on specific steps, but follow along to see this configuration in action.

Answer Questions Faster with a Help Agent

Setting up an AI agent on a website used to require a team of developers and complex integrations that could take days or weeks. Now, with the Help Agent guided setup in Enterprise Edition or Unlimited Edition, you can set up a customized, AI-powered agent in a few clicks.

In this unit, you’ll be shown how to initiate the guided setup, give your agent an identity, and configure it to start answering your customers' questions. Here is what you’ll do:

1. Create an AI agent.
   
2. Ground the agent using Salesforce Knowledge, uploaded files, or a website sync.
   
3. Choose a deployment channel, such as a third-party website, help portal, or voice channel.
   

By embedding an AI agent on your existing site, portal, or voice channel, you provide customers with immediate, 24/7 self-service support. This deflects routine cases, frees up human service reps for complex issues, and maximizes the ROI of your existing help documentation.

Enable Agentforce and Start Setup

Before you begin, ensure Agentforce is active in your Enterprise Edition or Unlimited Edition org.

1. To start, select and select Salesforce Go.
   

2. In Search features…, enter Help Agent and select the Help Agent icon.
   

If Data Cloud or Agentforce hasn't been enabled in your org, the Help Agent setup in Salesforce Go displays a warning icon. This warning tells you that prerequisites aren't met and directs you to enable Data Cloud and Agentforce before you can proceed with the Help Agent setup. Complete those prerequisite steps first, then return to the Help Agent setup to continue.

3. Select Get Started on the Help Agent page, then select Turn On.
   
4. To proceed, accept the terms of service. Because you’re using Enhanced Chat on the backend, this is a legal and compliance requirement.
   

After you agree to the terms, the Help Agent guided setup acts as a powerful concierge, building and provisioning these architectural connections for you in the background:

• Prerequisites and licensing: The setup flow seamlessly takes care of Data 360 enablement, Agentforce enablement, and assigns any necessary licenses, such as Community or Contact Center as a Service.
  
• Knowledge storage: The system generates a default Agentforce Data Library (ADL) for your uploaded files or website sync.
  
• Conversation handoff: To ensure customers never hit a dead end, the system configures an Omni-Channel routing setup and an Omni Flow. This allows the AI agent to seamlessly escalate complex conversations to your service reps.
  
• Website chat setup: The system provisions Enhanced Chat and Messaging for In-App and Web, which serves as the visual chat interface that will ultimately live on your website or portal.
  

5. When the backend steps in Salesforce Go show as complete, select Go next to Build a Help Agent. There's no separate notification that provisioning has finished the setup steps update to a completed state and you continue from there.
   
6. Select Get Started.
   

Define Your Agent’s Identity

When you select Get Started, it redirects you to a new tab named Agent Configuration. This is the guided configuration flow. It simplifies the complexity of the full Agent Builder and asks you only for the bare-minimum configuration details needed to get your agent live.

1. Enter an agent name and select a language.
   
2. Provide a welcome greeting for the agent that lets the agent introduce itself to your customers.
   

In Salesforce, trust and security are paramount. When you create a Help Agent, Salesforce automatically creates a dedicated agent user just for that agent. The agent operates as this user, so it respects your org's sharing model and can only view or interact with the Salesforce data that the dedicated user is authorized to access. The agent user is created and applied to the agent for you behind the scenes—there's nothing to configure for it in the guided setup. To review or adjust its access later, manage it like any other user in Setup under Users.

Connect Your Site and Ground Your AI

Your agent needs a home, and it needs a foundation of knowledge to pull from. In this step, you ground the content that will serve as the agent's knowledge base.

1. Select Continue to navigate to the Give Your Agent Context screen.
   
2. You have three options from which to choose your grounding sources for your AI agent. Select one grounding source per agent. You can only ground on a single source at this time.
   
   • Salesforce Knowledge: If you already have Salesforce Knowledge enabled with published articles, you'll see your existing data categories listed. Any articles without a data category appear under an Uncategorized area. All of your data categories are selected by default—deselect any you don't want the agent to use.
     
   • Upload Files: Simply drag and drop your public-facing knowledge documents. This is an ideal option for small to medium sized businesses that don’t have a formal knowledge base. Accepted file types are PDF, Microsoft Word (DOCX), and HTML, and include a capacity of about 300 pages total.
     
   • Website Sync: Enter the URL of your existing help website, for example, https://www.example.com/search?q=support.yourcompany.com. Salesforce indexes the page you provide, one page at a time, to ground the agent. Deeper crawling and full-website sync aren’t available at this time.
     

Uploading documents or using website sync does not publish them to your public website; it strictly grounds the AI agent. However, because the agent will use this data to generate answers for your customers, you must only upload public-facing information. Never upload internal compliance documents, sensitive architecture diagrams, or files containing personally identifiable information.

Currently, each Help Agent supports a single grounding source. If you change your mind after setup (for example, switching from website sync to uploaded files), you can return to the Give Your Agent Context page and select a different source. After you create, ground, and deploy your Help Agent, you can use Data 360 to extend and ground your agent on additional, third-party content.

Up Next

With your agent named and your data uploaded or synced, you're ready to choose a channel for your agent, test its responses, and activate it.

Resources

• Trailhead: Agentforce for Service
• Trailhead: Salesforce Knowledge Basics