Dreamforce 2024: Salesforce assembles Agentforce

Ahead of Dreamforce, one of the world’s largest annual technology conferences, the CRM giant Salesforce has unveiled a new AI platform called Agentforce. 

The suite of autonomous agents augments employees and handles tasks in service, sales, marketing, and commerce. It enables companies to scale their workforce, as AI agents can analyse data, make decisions, and complete tasks like answering inquiries and optimising campaigns. Organisations can build, customise, and deploy agents for any industry.

“Agentforce represents the Third Wave of AI—advancing beyond copilots to a new era of highly accurate, low-hallucination intelligent agents that actively drive customer success,” says Marc Benioff, chair and CEO of Salesforce.

“Unlike other platforms, Agentforce is a revolutionary and trusted solution that seamlessly integrates AI across every workflow, embedding itself deeply into the heart of the customer journey. This means anticipating needs, strengthening relationships, driving growth, and taking proactive action at every touchpoint.

“While others require you to DIY your AI, Agentforce offers a fully tailored, enterprise-ready platform designed for immediate impact and scalability. With advanced security features, compliance with industry standards, and unmatched flexibility. Our vision is bold: to empower one billion agents with Agentforce by the end of 2025. This is what AI is meant to be.”

In contrast to copilots and chatbots that rely on human requests and struggle with complex or multi-step tasks, Agentforce operates autonomously, retrieving the right data on demand, building action plans for tasks, and executing these plans without requiring human intervention.

Agentforce uses real-time data to adapt to changing conditions and operates independently within an organisations’ customised guardrails, ensuring customer interactions are informed, relevant, and valuable. The platform hands off to human employees with a summary of the interaction, an overview of the customer’s details, and recommendations.

Companies like OpenTable, Saks, and Wiley are using Agentforce. For example, the platform is helping organisations like Wiley provide customers with dynamic, conversational self-service. It is configured to answer questions using Wiley’s knowledge base already built into Salesforce so it can automatically resolve account access. It triages registration and payment issues, directing customers to the appropriate resources.

Wiley has seen an over 40% increase in case resolution, outperforming their old chatbot and giving their human agents more time to focus on complex cases.

An estimated 41% of employee time is spent on repetitive, low-impact work, and 65% of desk workers believe generative AI will allow them to be more strategic, according to the Salesforce Trends in AI Report. Every company has more jobs to be done than the resources available to do them. As a result, many jobs go unaddressed or uncompleted. Agentforce provides relief to overstretched teams with its ability to scale capacity on demand so humans can focus on higher-touch, higher-value, and more strategic outcomes.

* Visit the Agentforce website here.