Get Started with Agentforce
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain what Agentforce is.
- Identify the main characteristics of Agentforce.
- List a few use cases for Agentforce.
Before You Start
Before you start this module, consider completing this recommended content.
The Hero of Our Journey
Meet Linda Rosenberg, the Salesforce admin at Cloud Kicks. Cloud Kicks sells stylish and comfortable custom sneakers, and the company is growing fast. Linda is always looking for ways to better serve customers and make work easier for Cloud Kicks employees. She’s heard a lot about Agentforce, and she wants to learn more about building AI agents on the Salesforce Platform.
Linda aims to boost employee productivity by automating time-consuming and repetitive tasks, freeing people up for more strategic activities. She also wants to provide more personalized responses to customers, ensuring they get the help they need.
One day, a customer, Alex, reaches out to Cloud Kicks with a series of questions. After a very long time waiting on hold, here’s how the interaction currently unfolds without Agentforce.
This conversation highlights the challenges of customer service without automation, comprehensive information, and real-time data access. Delays and incomplete answers dampen the customer experience.
Back at Cloud Kicks headquarters, Linda is excited about Agentforce’s potential to transform customer interactions like the one with Alex. With Agentforce, customer service becomes more autonomous while delivering relevant information. Agentforce ensures that interactions are smooth, efficient, and helpful.
Meet Agentforce
Agentforce is a complete, extensible, and open platform, letting you build and deploy AI agents using your existing workflows, data, and integrations. AI agents are goal-oriented AI applications that perform tasks and business interactions. Designed to make intelligent decisions, Agentforce can initiate and complete a sequence of tasks, handle natural language conversations, and securely provide relevant answers drawn from business data. Whether your users are on a desktop or mobile device, Agentforce is there to help across a wide range of workflows and interactions.
Best of all, you don’t need to know a stitch of code to set up an AI agent in Salesforce. All you have to do is enable Agentforce and then create an agent. Here are some actions an AI agent can take out of the box.
- Summarize Salesforce records, such as opportunities, accounts, and cases.
- Draft or revise emails.
- Find and update Salesforce records.
- Aggregate Salesforce data.
- Answer questions with information from your knowledge base.
On top of that, it’s easy to extend your AI agent by using your existing Salesforce Platform. For example, if you already have a flow in Salesforce that makes product recommendations, you can add that capability to an agent with just a few clicks.
Agentforce Characteristics
Let’s take a closer look at each characteristic of Agentforce so you can get more familiar with your new digital companions.
Trusted
At Salesforce, Trust is our #1 value. That’s why we build generative AI tools like Agentforce with Trust at the core.
Your AI agents respect the Salesforce standard access controls, ensuring that agents take action securely. Agentforce integrates with the Einstein Trust Layer, a secure AI architecture built into the Salesforce Platform. You get the benefits of generative AI without compromising customer data, and you can use trusted data to enhance AI responses.
Here’s how it works.
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Data grounding: The Trust Layer grounds and enriches generative prompts with trusted company data.
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Zero-data retention: Your data stays safe; it’s never retained by third-party large language model (LLM) providers.
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AI monitoring: AI interactions are logged, giving you visibility into each user interaction.
But the Trust Layer isn’t the only thing protecting your organization. With Agentforce, you can configure guardrails that guide your agent’s behavior and make sure the agent complies with your business policies and industry regulations. To learn more about Agentforce guardrails, complete the Trusted Agentic AI badge.
Contextual and Accurate
AI models can’t understand your business without context. And without the proper context, AI models tend to generate inaccurate, generic, or unhelpful responses. The advantage of using Agentforce is that AI agents built on the Salesforce platform are wired for deep knowledge about your business.
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Data 360: Data 360 gives agents dynamic access to the data they need to do work. You can create powerful agents that connect to your structured and unstructured data, without having to copy data from existing warehouses. That includes CRM data, Slack data, company knowledge articles, external data lakes, and more.
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Metadata: Metadata allows agents to know the context of your business and the actions available to them. Metadata is a core part of the Agentforce 360 Platform. Every field, label, entry, and automation built on the platform is tagged with relevant metadata that Agentforce can read and understand. This metadata allows the agent to know exactly how to use a flow or what data it needs to pull in.
Using real-time data, Agentforce ensures that agent interactions with your employees and customers are accurate.
Predictable
Although accuracy is important when it comes to AI, reliability is just as critical. Can you guarantee that an AI agent will always generate the same result given a certain prompt? Historically that’s been challenging with generative AI because LLMs are probabilistic systems, which means the output can’t be predicted with 100% certainty. But in a business environment, there are many situations when you want an AI agent to follow your organization’s business rules the exact same way every time.
The good news is that Agentforce gives you explicit control over how your AI agents behave. Agent Script is the language for building agents in Agentforce, and it combines the flexibility of natural language with the reliability of programmatic expressions. That means your AI agents can follow a defined, predictable path when needed.
A Better Experience with Agentforce
Now that you know how Agentforce enhances seamless customer interactions and automates tedious tasks, let’s revisit that initial conversation and see the transformation with Agentforce in action. The first big difference is that the customer doesn’t have to wait on hold. The AI agent immediately joins the conversation and greets the customer, Alex.
Wow, talk about more helpful! Each question was answered with specific details without any pauses or vague responses. That’s exactly the type of interaction that Cloud Kicks wants their customers to have when they contact customer service. Linda is convinced, and eager to start using Agentforce.
Follow along as Linda explores the different components of Agentforce and learns more about how the feature works.