Meet Agentforce: Your Workforce Without Limits
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain what Agentforce is and how Salesforce agents are different from other AI tools.
- Describe how Agentforce can expand your workforce while assisting employees.
- List the five components that make agents work.
What’s Agentforce?
Imagine having a digital labor force of dedicated autonomous and assistive agents working alongside your team to move your business forward. Well, imagine no further—Agentforce is here!
Agents are a new type of software that are capable of thinking, acting, and making decisions with the help of AI within safe, predefined boundaries. Think of them as your digital assistants, always ready to lend a hand. From supercharging employee productivity to tackling tasks independently, agents expand your team’s capacity and capabilities.
Agentforce is a suite of customizable agents and tools to help you create your own autonomous agents to support your employees and customers 24/7.
With Agentforce you can:
- Execute repetitive and multistep tasks autonomously at any time and across any channel, using the power of AI that is grounded in your trusted data.
- Seamlessly hand off tasks to your employees when needed, creating a harmonious blend of human touch and automation.
- Create and customize agents with natural language instructions and easy to use low-code tools.
So how does that translate to actions that agents can take for your employees and customers? Here are some of Agentforce’s prebuilt skills that are ready to use and easily customizable.
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Service Agent replaces traditional chatbots with AI that can handle a wide range of service issues without having to hard-code responses. This leads to dynamic and natural conversations between the agent and your customers that improve customer service efficiency.
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Sales Development Representative (SDR) engages with prospects 24/7, answering questions, managing objections, and scheduling meetings based on CRM and external data so your sellers can focus on building deeper customer relationships.
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Sales Coach provides personalized role-play sessions for your sales team, using CRM data and generative AI to help sellers practice pitches and objections tailored to specific deals.
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Merchandiser assists your ecommerce merchandisers with site setup, goal setting, personalized promotions, product descriptions, and data-driven insights, simplifying daily tasks.
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Buyer Agent enhances the B2B buying experience, helping your buyers find products, make purchases, and track orders via chat or within sales portals.
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Personal Shopper acts as a digital concierge on your ecommerce sites or messaging apps, offering personalized product recommendations and assisting with search queries.
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Campaign Optimizer automates the full campaign lifecycle by using AI to analyze, generate, personalize, and improve marketing campaigns based on business goals.
How Are Salesforce Agents Different from Other AI Tools?
Many organizations attempt to build AI on their own but are often surprised by the hidden costs of training their models so that they’re relevant to their business. Additionally, there’s the not-so-hidden risk of compromising sensitive data when using public-facing AI tools. The good news is that businesses don’t need to build out their AI infrastructure on their own. Salesforce has already built all of the components for trusted and effective AI for the enterprise with Agentforce!
Here are the top three reasons Agentforce is more powerful for business use cases than other AI tools:
Security and Compliance
Agentforce respects access controls and includes guardrails designed to meet ethical standards, integrated with the Einstein Trust Layer. The Einstein Trust Layer is a security framework designed to protect sensitive customer and business data and ensure that AI interactions and responses are safe and compliant.
Using public AI tools can pose security risks such as data breaches, exposure to malicious content, and potential misuse of sensitive information.
Conversational Flexibility and Context
Agentforce connects to all your trusted data and your business processes, so it can use your specific business and your customers’ contexts to inform its responses and its actions. This means that every response and every action that Agentforce takes is relevant and helpful to your customers and your business.
Other AI tools that are not connected to your data might not offer the same level of relevancy and adaptability—because they do not understand your business or your customers’ needs in context.
Setup and Training
Salesforce agents require minimal setup and training. They use existing Salesforce best-practices and platform functionality, so you can customize and adapt your agents for your specific business needs with low–code tools. Other AI tools often require extensive setup and training, especially those based on hard-coded dialogs.
How Do Agents Work?
We won’t go too deep into the technicalities in this trail, but there are some basics we should lay out.
An Agentforce agent is made up of five key parts.
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Role: Think of this as the agent’s job on your team. It can assist employees and ask for permission before acting, or it can be autonomous, completing tasks in the background or directly with customers.
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Knowledge: This is the data the agent needs to succeed. Thanks to Data Cloud, this data can come from anywhere, along with CRM data like customer cases or leads.
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Actions: These are the specific tasks the agent can perform—like its job description. It outlines what the agent is expected to do.
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Guardrails: These are the rules that keep the agent in check. They prevent the agent from going beyond its scope or knowledge and dictate when it should hand off tasks to a human for more complex or nuanced issues.
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Channels: This is where the agent gets things done. It could be CRM apps, Slack, partner apps like WhatsApp, or any custom app you build on the Agentforce Action platform.
Pretty cool, right? These components work together to make your agents super effective and helpful!