Salesforce launches Agentforce AI platform to the public

Salesforce Inc. Today announced general availability Agentforcea set of tools for creating autonomous artificial intelligence agents to improve the work experience of enterprise employees around the world.

Agentforce allows companies to create and customize artificial intelligence agentswhich can connect to any company data and perform actions on behalf of employees in sales, service, marketing and commerce. Platform agents are independent of human participation and can act based on changes in data and business logic. or ready-made automation tools following a new trend known as agent AI.

“The agent revolution is real and as exciting as the cloud revolution, the social revolution, the mobile revolution,” said Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce. “This will provide a level of transformation what do we have never seen.”

The company said it is providing the platform today so companies don’t have to “build their AI themselves,” meaning many enterprise businesses have been getting together solutions from various tools. To that end, Agentforce is an end-to-end solution designed to bring everything together and provide working agents out of the box that are easy to configure with English prompts and deploy with low or no-code tools.

Adam Evans, senior vice president of product for the AI ​​platform at Salesforce, said many companies building second AI pilots are facing the same challenge in trying to get a good return on investment in their applications.

“Software and agent development is not their core business,” Evans said. “If you ask our customers, do they want to build a car? Do they take all the parts and build a car, or do they want to take Waymo and solve their problem? Starting today, they don’t have to take this DIY approach to artificial intelligence.”

Agents launched by users from Agentforce gain access to an ecosystem of Salesforce application partners, giving them a wealth of what the company calls “skills,” or tooling capabilities.

Adam compared adding interfaces and application programming capabilities to agents to the first Matrix movie, where characters could simply download new skills, such as the ability to fly a helicopter. Through the Salesforce App Exchange, third-party software-as-a-service providers and companies can enable agents to use their platforms as tools. This could simply be additional access to data or external services.

For example, an agent can add an external weather service to receive real-time data and personalize email or text messages for clients. Another might connect to Google Calendar to get upcoming employees’ schedules, to help them organize their time between meetings, or to prepare a summary at the beginning of the week of what to expect.

The company also announced Agentforce AI Partner Networkwhich provides enterprises with everything they need to add these capabilities and functionality from their platforms or deploy agents built by partners to fill industry roles. The world’s leading system integrators, including Accenture plc, Capgemini SE, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Ltd., IBM Corp. and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, also partnered with Salesforce to help enterprise clients build and deploy artificial intelligence agents.

Salesforce launched Agentforce into early access last month, and several customers have already seen the benefits of the platform, the company said. Wiley, a publisher of educational resources, said it saw a 40% increase in self-service and case resolution efficiency compared to its previous chatbot. According to the company, the platform is more capable of handling routine requests than a rigid request-and-response bot, allowing human agents to focus on more complex cases.

BACA Systems, a maker of robotic stone processing systems, said it started with employees saving a few hours a week.

“Agentforce is not just another AI platform that requires months of setup,” said Andrew Russo, Salesforce Architect at BACA Systems. “At BACA Systems, we saw how this allowed us to launch powerful generative AI experiences in a matter of days—no AI engineers needed. For clients with larger administrative teams, the impact can be even greater.”

Now that Agentforce is generally available, Salesforce customers can try the platform’s tools for free with Salesforce Foundations, a free add-on for Enterprise Edition and later. To support AI agents, Foundations now includes credits for the first 1,000 calls with Agentforce Service Agent so companies can try the platform before purchasing.

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