Salesforce, the world’s #1 AI CRM, has officially announced general availability of its Agentforce, which happens to be a new layer on the Salesforce Platform capable of helping companies build and deploy AI agents that can autonomously take action across any business function.
According to certain reports, the stated solution leverages advanced reasoning abilities to make decisions and take action, like resolving customer cases, qualifying sales leads, and optimizing marketing campaigns.
More on the same would reveal how Agentforce includes out-of-the-box agents that are easy to customize and deploy with low-code or no-code tools and that work around the clock across any channel.
In this regard, Salesforce has introduced the first generally available out-of-the-box agent in Agentforce Service Agent, which effectively outperforms traditional chatbots by handling a wide range of tasks, from simple to complex, with pre-built topics and actions for customer support. Furthermore, users can customize pre-built agents to serve any industry and any use case, like retail with order management topics, or financial services with billing and payment support topics.
Beyond that, the company has also launched an Agent Builder, which will allow Salesforce admins and developers to use natural language for creating instructions and guardrails for their agents.
Talk about the new Agentforce Service Agent and Agent Builder on a slightly deeper level, we begin from the former component, which is a customer-facing autonomous AI agent that helps customers deliver self-service with accurate, always-on support across any channel like voice, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and websites.
Markedly enough, the solution can also be set up in minutes with pre-built topics and actions for key service use cases. These potential applications may include case management, reservation management, order inquiries, account management, delivery issues, and general FAQs. Another detail worth a mention here is rooted in how escalations and hand-offs to human reps are seamless, and on top of that, the full context surrounding interactions is instantly shared in the support representative’s service console.
“Agentforce is redefining what’s possible in business and beyond, ushering in a new era of AI abundance and limitless workforces that augment every employee, build deeper customer relationships and drive unprecedented growth and profitability,” said Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO of Salesforce. “Built on Salesforce’s trusted, fully customizable platform — seamlessly integrating enterprise data, metadata, AI models, workflows, security and applications — Agentforce is what AI was meant to be.”
Onto the Agent Builder, it arrives on the scene with an ability to simplify the set-up and activation of an agent. In essence, the stated solution makes it possible for users to customize out-of-the-box agents or build new agents for any role, any industry, or any use case. You see, leveraging low code, or no code, Agent Builder brings in structured and unstructured data from Data Cloud, and at the same time, uses existing tools like Flows, Prompts, Apex, and MuleSoft APIs to configure an agent.
Moving on, there is available an Agent Wizard, which the users can bank upon to avail guidance for the selection and initiation of an agent. While doing that, they can create a job to be done for their agent by defining topics, writing natural language instructions within that topic, and creating a library of actions. Not just that, you can also easily observe an agent’s plan of action and test its responses in Agent Builder.
The new Agentforce is also deeply integrated into the Salesforce Platform, powered by data, AI, and Salesforce’s ecosystem of Customer 360 apps, all built on a trusted foundation.
Apart from that, the launch in question also delivers a rather interesting follow-up to one Salesforce survey, where it was revealed that U.S. consumers can spend up to nine hours interacting with customer service trying to resolve a single issue. The survey also discovered how, on an average, 67% of consumers are frustrated when customer service can’t resolve their issues instantly and choose to walk away from roughly one-third of customer service interactions. Such a gap, like you can guess, presents a huge opportunity to improve the customer experience with agents.
