Get Started with Agentforce for Employees
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Differentiate between employee agents and customer-facing agents.
- Describe how to engage with employee agents in Salesforce and Slack.
Before you start this module, consider completing this recommended content.
Meet Agentforce for Employees
Your organization has a workforce of valuable employees who do the important work of keeping your business running. Every job also comes with tasks or complicated workflows that take employees’ focus away from what really needs to get done.
Now, imagine giving all of your employees digital sidekicks who are smart, capable, and always available. That’s exactly what Agentforce can do for your business. In this module, you explore agents designed specifically to help your employees in their day-to-day work.
What Is an Agent?
Before we go further, let’s make sure we all have the same understanding of what an agent is and the kinds of things it can do. An agent is a piece of software that uses generative AI to do a job or to assist you with a job. When you enter input into an agent, like a question or a request, it determines what needs to be done. Then it chooses the right topics (jobs to be done) and actions (tasks) to initiate the work. The agent then follows instructions and accesses data it’s been given to get the job done.
These instructions help the agent handle different kinds of requests and also act as guardrails so the agent stays on task and doesn’t hallucinate (present false or misleading information as fact). The reasoning engine is the generative AI behind Agentforce that allows it to make decisions about what to do next and how to do it. Agentforce agents use the Agentforce reasoning engine.
What Are Employee Agents?
Imagine a crew of friendly helpers that are eager to take on some of your routine tasks or help you with complex ones so you can focus on the important stuff. Employee agents do just that. They can help with a variety of tasks, like creating account summaries before a client meeting, writing a batch of sales emails, or even provisioning a laptop for your new hire. Other employee agents can quickly surface the benefits information you need for an upcoming dental appointment, or help you with a problem with your laptop. And these agents are embedded where you already spend your day–in Salesforce, Slack channels, and direct messages, or on your mobile device.
How Do Employee Agents Work?
Employee agents come preconfigured with topics and actions for many use cases. The employee agent uses the General FAQ topic and the Answer Questions with Knowledge action to draw information from your business’s knowledge base and other data to return accurate responses. Customize employee agents in Agentforce Builder to include additional topics and actions for different use cases.
Employee agents also have user-specific context. This means that they’re logged in as the person they’re helping and follow the same permissions and org security settings to unlock actions based on each user’s role. For example, a manager can use the same agent as an employee, but they’ll each see only the level of data and org details permitted by their role. This ensures that the employee agent won’t violate security and trust boundaries.
Salesforce administrators can configure multiple employee agents and deploy them across Salesforce, Slack, and mobile to help with all sorts of role-based tasks using your structured and unstructured business data. Here are examples of how you engage with employee agents in Salesforce and in Slack.
Salesforce
Employees have access to agents in the Salesforce app they’re using. For example, in Sales Cloud, employees access the agents available to them by clicking the Agentforce icon to open a menu of agents (1), and toggling between their agents for instant assistance with different types of tasks in their daily work (2).
Slack
Slack is the ideal environment for deploying employee-facing agents because it unites conversations, apps, and data in a single, context-rich workspace where agents can collaborate naturally with any team. Any employee can use Agentforce in Slack and can conversationally summon the agent with a simple @mention from any channel. And with Salesforce identity licenses, even non-CRM users can benefit from Agentforce in Slack—no additional Salesforce license required.
What Are Use Cases for Employee Agents?
Employee agents can be configured to assist with just about any role-based task you can dream up. Here are some ways your business might deploy employee agents in Salesforce and Slack to simplify and automate work across your departments.
-
HR agents can assist with onboarding new employees, answering questions about benefits, and guiding career development.
-
IT agents can handle tasks like resolving help-desk tickets and managing incident communications.
-
Service agents can find experts and use past knowledge to help employees resolve customer issues.
-
Sales agents can help with preparing executive briefings, and creating proposals and quotes.
-
Marketing agents can improve campaigns, produce content, and develop marketing plans.
-
Legal agents can simplify compliance processes and automate approvals.
-
Product and engineering agents can support planning, design, development, and quality assurance efforts.
-
Supply chain management agents can oversee supplier relationships, automate warehouse tasks, and improve demand forecasting.
Do I Need Agentforce for Employees?
So, what if you already have Agentforce for Sales and Agentforce for Service? Is Agentforce for employees something different? The answer to that is yes, it is different.
Features of Agentforce for Sales and Agentforce for Service, like SDR agents, Sales Coach, and Agentforce Service Agent are designed out of the box for their own specific use cases, while Agentforce for employees lets you customize agents to meet specific internal needs of your business. You configure Agentforce for employees agents to work with your employees as role-based peers and collaborators who can access the same kinds of data and org settings each employee uses every day. This provides a much more personalized and contextually accurate level of engagement.
Can I Trust Employee Agents?
Yes, absolutely! Trust is at the core of Salesforce values, so it’s baked into every AI tool, product, and assistant Salesforce provides. In addition to user-specific context, Agentforce employee agents rely on the Einstein Trust Layer to provide additional guardrails and a secure large language model (LLM) gateway to ensure your data and employee information are never shared. The Einstein Trust Layer’s zero-data retention policy means that requests and responses are forgotten immediately, so there’s no chance of your sensitive information being exposed. AI monitoring and toxicity scoring analyzes and detects harmful language so you can be sure the responses your agents return are both safe and accurate.
How Do I Get Employee Agents for My Business?
Employee agents consume Flex Credits, which are flexible, usage-based units of payment that let your workforce use employee agents across products your company already licenses. Your Salesforce account executive can share the details your business needs to start using Agentforce for your employees.
Wrap Up
Employee agents are an engaging and convenient way for your organization to improve productivity and efficiency across many of your business use cases. These permissions-aware employee agents can be deployed in channels like Salesforce, Slack, and mobile devices to increase engagement right where your users spend their days. For more information about deploying customer and employee agents in Slack, visit the Connect Your Agentforce Org with Slack module and the Agentforce Configuration for Slack Deployment project.