Employee Agents and Foundations: The Admin Advantage for User Support

If you’re a Salesforce Admin looking for ways to scale support, reduce repetitive work, and make Salesforce easier for your users, employee agents are for you. These built-in artificial intelligence (AI) assistants are now available with Salesforce Foundations (Enterprise Edition or above), and you can get started without extra cost. 

They’re designed to help your internal users get more done in Salesforce—without needing custom builds from you every time. Let’s dive into how employee agents can maximize your internal users’ productivity and how they differ from the Sales or Service agents you might already know.

Employee agents: Your new admin superpower

So, what exactly are employee agents? Think of them as dedicated AI assistants for your internal Salesforce users. These agents operate through natural language chat, directly within a user’s workflow, to help them find information, guide them through processes, and even execute tasks.

What this means for admins:

• Free up your time for high-impact work: Employee agents can handle common internal queries, automate repetitive tasks (like summarizing records or guiding data entry), and reduce the time users spend searching for information. This translates to fewer support requests for admins and less need to build complex one-off solutions for simple needs.
• Cut down on clutter in your org: Instead of building and maintaining numerous custom Lightning web components or complex flows for every minor guidance or information retrieval task, employee agents give you a configurable, AI-powered alternative. That helps keep your org cleaner and easier to maintain.
• Boost user productivity and Salesforce adoption: Using employee agents, admins can create more value from their Salesforce investment by making Salesforce more intuitive and responsive to user needs. Employee agents can significantly improve the employee experience. When users can get answers and assistance quickly, their productivity soars, and they’re more likely to embrace and effectively use the Salesforce Platform. 

Key features: Powering up your internal users

Employee agents, built on Agentforce, come packed with features designed for effective internal support. 

• Context-Aware Assistance: These agents are not generic chatbots. They can be equipped with specialized data and tailored with specific topics and actions. They also leverage context variables, meaning they understand the situation without excessive prompting from the user.
• User-Based Security by Design: A crucial feature for admins is that employee agents execute actions logged in as the user who prompted them. All existing sharing settings, permissions, and user access levels are automatically respected. This ensures employees can only access or do what their Salesforce profile permits, maintaining data security and compliance–and letting admins breathe easy. 
• Specialization and Tailoring: Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, you can create multiple, dedicated employee agents tailored to specific jobs, functions, or processes. This allows for a high degree of specificity and predefined guardrails for each agent.
• Rapid Deployment: Salesforce provides an employee agent template and a library of readily available topics and actions to help you get started quickly. You can then customize and extend these to meet your team’s unique use cases.

Real-world use cases: Employee agents in action 

The beauty of employee agents lies in their versatility. Not sure where to start? These examples can help you identify opportunities in your own org and kick off conversations with teams or stakeholders who could benefit from AI-powered support.

• Sales Agents: Assist sales reps by guiding them through complex deal cycles, helping prepare quotes based on predefined rules, and compiling information for executive briefings.
• Service Agents: Help service reps navigate intricate cases by surfacing relevant Knowledge articles and insights from past similar cases, and offering tailored responses in real time.
• IT Support Agents: Provide first-level IT support, assist with basic troubleshooting steps, log help desk tickets, and manage initial incident reporting.
• HR Agents: Support HR processes by assisting with new employee onboarding, answering common questions about benefits or company policies, and guiding employees through career development resources.
• Marketing Agents: Help marketing teams by suggesting improvements for campaigns, generating initial drafts for content, and assisting in the development of marketing plans.
• Slack Agents: Employee agents aren’t limited to the Salesforce UI. You can deploy them in Slack so users can @ mention their dedicated agent just like any other colleague, without leaving their workflow. Prebuilt Slack Agent templates in Agentforce Builder even offer guided setup for common use cases.

Your action plan: Deploy employee agents

Ready to bring this power to your users? Here’s how admins can get hands-on.

1. Enable Salesforce Foundations.
   • Access to employee agents and other features comes through Salesforce Foundations. This can typically be enabled from the Your Account app.
   • Ensure your org is Sales or Service and Enterprise Edition or above.
   • Find the “Salesforce Foundations – Entitlements – Flex Credits” option. This new Flex Credit model replaces the legacy conversation-based one and is used by employee agents.
2. Explore the employee agent template.
   • Once Foundations is active and Flex Credits are provisioned, navigate to Agentforce Builder (often found via Setup).
   • Click New Agent. You should see the “Employee Agent” template available.
3. Pick a use case that solves a real user problem.
   • Identify High-Volume, Repetitive Needs: What questions do your users frequently ask? Which basic, repeatable tasks take up their time or lead to common errors?
   • Start Simple and Specific: Choose a well-defined use case with a clear benefit. For example, an agent that helps users find specific report links or understand a particular approval process, or guides them through creating a standard opportunity type.
   • Target Quick Wins: Look for areas where an AI assistant can provide immediate value and demonstrate the potential of employee agents.
4. Build and iterate with your users:
   • Leverage the prebuilt topics and actions as a starting point.
   • Customize the agent’s knowledge, actions, and conversational style to fit your specific project.
   • Gather feedback from a pilot group of users and iterate to improve.
5. Monitor usage:
   • Employee agent actions consume Flex Credits. You can monitor this consumption via Digital Wallet in the Your Account app.

Get started with employee agents today

Employee agents via Salesforce Foundations offer a great, no-additional-cost opportunity for Salesforce Admins to deliver significant productivity gains and an enhanced experience for their internal users. By automating tasks, providing instant answers, and guiding users through processes, you can empower your colleagues, free up your own time, and further solidify the value of your Salesforce investment.

Ready to revolutionize your team’s Salesforce experience? Activate Salesforce Foundations today, explore the employee agent template, and start building your first internal AI assistant!

Resources

• Salesforce Help: Simplify Agentforce Credit Consumption with Flex Credits 
• The 360 Blog: Agentforce: 4 Tips to Get Started
• Trailhead: Grow Your Business with Salesforce Foundations