Artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly evolved from a futuristic concept to a transformative technology reshaping industries. While consumer-facing AI applications often grab headlines, the B2B sector is quietly witnessing a revolution of its own. At the forefront of this revolution is Salesforce, a company renowned for its innovative solutions. Their latest offering, Agentforce AI, is poised to redefine B2B operations, process management and data strategies.
Launched at Dreamforce 2024, Agentforce AI aims to streamline processes, boost efficiency, and elevate customer experiences. Let’s delve deeper into this groundbreaking technology and explore how it’s set to empower businesses across the globe. But what is Agentforce AI technology in simple terms?
Agentforce is a powerful platform that enables businesses to create and deploy autonomous AI agents to handle various business functions, from customer service to sales. These AI agents perform tasks that were once manual, freeing employees to focus on more complex work. Built on Salesforce’s Lightning Platform, Agentforce integrates seamlessly with existing Salesforce data, giving AI agents the ability to interact naturally with customers through chat, email, and voice channels.
Agentforce Autonomous AI agents can understand and interpret customers’ questions using natural language, with minimal human intervention. It operates within the Salesforce ecosystem, which enables it to access data directly from contacts, leads, cases, and other objects.
Customers or Consultants can use an agent builder, like Agentforce, and rely on machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to handle a wide range of tasks. These intelligent agents can include anything from answering simple questions to resolving complex issues — even multi-tasking. Most importantly, AI agents can continuously improve their own performance through self-learning. This is distinct from traditional AI, which requires human input for specific tasks.
As you can see below, agents can be built for almost any team across Sales, Support, Customer Success, Operations and HR. Since AI is only as powerful as the data model and knowledge center it has access to, Agentforce requires access to Salesforce 360’s cloud infrastructure.
Agentforce’s autonomous agents can operate independently, reducing the need for human intervention and helping teams focus on high-value work. It offers several standout features:
Imagine having a team of AI assistants that can handle routine tasks, freeing up your team to focus on more strategic work. That’s what Agentforce AI does. While it is early on in the lifecycle of autonomous agents, the hype cycle is very real.
For example, TaskRay provides varying levels of agents to help project managers complete tasks. Here is a diagram of how TaskRay agents work within the Salesforce ecosystem across products and technologies. A TaskRay customer can prompt an Agent with a question regarding any action or question that they have about a project. This is called a prompt. The agent then generates a response based on the planning documentation, project data, and historical work. The answer is then shared with contextual support and is communicated back to the end user.
Since Agentforce is built right into Salesforce it can easily access all your customer data safely and securely. Your data never leaves Salesforce but you can harness the power of your data for generative AI use cases, like routing emails, assigning cases, curating next best actions, helping plan priorities, scheduling meetings, or even qualifying leads.
You can create and customize AI agents for time intensive, mundane tasks like building and launching repetitive project templates or assigning resources to projects based on capacity or skill requirements.
While AI offers incredible potential, it’s important to use it responsibly. We need to be mindful of potential biases in AI models and ensure that they’re used in a way that benefits everyone.
As AI continues to evolve, we can expect to see even more innovative applications in the B2B world. Salesforce’s Agentforce AI is just the beginning.