Editor’s note: This post was updated on November 15, 2024, with the latest information and resources.
As Salesforce continues to revolutionize how users interact with the Einstein 1 Platform, Agentforce is poised to provide a new and exciting layer of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered conversations for your users.
Agentforce is your trusted AI assistant for CRM — built into the flow of work for any application, employee, and department. With Agentforce, Salesforce Admins will empower users with AI in the flow of work, configuring and deploying agents to increase productivity. Once the agent is activated, users can engage their agent with questions and instructions, which are sent to the large language model (LLM) to identify and execute the most relevant business actions. Out-of-the-box actions, such as summarizing records and answering questions with Knowledge, help to complete business tasks faster and generate trusted, natural language responses grounded in your CRM data. Out of the box, Agentforce can:
In the upcoming months, Salesforce and our partners will continue to deliver more actions, so that Trailblazers can quickly embrace this new technology and realize a rapid return on their investment.
As admins, you’ll be able to not only utilize the standard actions provided by Salesforce but also create custom ones. Agent custom actions allow users to tailor the AI assistant’s capabilities to their unique business needs, enhancing its effectiveness and usability. From updating multiple fields on records to calling external systems to retrieve information, custom actions can significantly enhance business productivity and efficiency.
As admins remain at the forefront of new features, including AI, understanding how they work and how to best implement them for your users continues to be important. By enabling features like Agentforce and Prompt Builder for your users, you can lead AI transformations at your company. This post provides an overview of how to utilize Agentforce to best suit your organization’s needs.
As the technology behind Agentforce evolves and customers continue to explore its capabilities, we can expect a plethora of use cases to emerge. Currently, the use cases it covers best include:
While Agentforce is a powerful tool designed to enhance productivity, it’s important to understand the scenarios where it may not be the best fit.
Agentforce accesses and processes data to provide intelligent assistance. However, if your organization deals with highly sensitive or regulated data, there might be concerns about data privacy and security. It’s crucial to ensure that data handling complies with all relevant laws and regulations.
The real-time accuracy and response time of AI-powered agents may not meet the stringent requirements of performance-critical tasks. In scenarios where every millisecond counts, such as real-time control systems, Agentforce might not be the best fit.
Tasks requiring advanced scientific computing or highly specialized analytical capabilities might be beyond the scope of Agentforce. The precision, accuracy, or specialized computational capabilities required for such tasks may not be within Agentforce’s capabilities.
While Agentforce offers some level of data interaction and analysis, it might not be suited for complex data analytics tasks that require sophisticated statistical analysis or predictive modeling. For these tasks, specialized analytics platforms like Tableau are more appropriate.
The true power of Agentforce is in agent custom actions, as Trailblazers can adapt the agent to work with autolaunched flows, invocable actions, and custom prompt templates. This unlocks an infinite number of use cases for you to explore at your company, ranging from updating multiple fields on records to calling external systems to retrieve information.
Agentforce does the heavy lifting of giving access to an LLM on the Einstein 1 Platform. There are three ways that you can build agent custom actions: flows, prompts, and Apex. You can begin customizing by utilizing the automation skills you’ve learned by building out flows. Agentforce has a revolutionary means of interacting with an autolaunched flow that allows users to use natural language to kick off the process.
Agent custom actions can also be paired with prompt templates created via Prompt Builder to generate results, meaning the new talents of prompt engineering will have an all-new angle to it. Prompt Builder allows our customers to create prompts that are grounded with CRM data residing inside Salesforce or brought from external sources using Data Cloud. This grounding means that more context will automatically be added to the prompt when sent to the LLM which will directly lead to an improvement in response quality and accuracy.
Finally, developers can use Apex to provide functionality not included in Flow or Prompt Builder. Indeed, agent custom actions can launch invocable actions which can be extremely powerful in terms of use case coverage.
Creating a custom action is very simple. In Salesforce Setup, navigate to Agent Actions, click Create A New Action, and simply select which flow, Apex, or prompt template you would like to use. Focus particularly on accurately describing the action, along with its inputs and outputs. Ultimately, this will become the most intricate aspect of developing a custom action, as the language model will depend on these descriptions to determine when to initiate and carry out the action.
So, why is it essential to accurately describe a custom action, as well as its inputs and outputs? Because the LLM that powers Agentforce, such as OpenAI GPT-4, uses text to understand context, generate output, and execute actions. So, the more structured and precise your instructions, the better the LLM performs.
When writing your descriptions, keep these six things in mind:
Remember, it’s crucial to evaluate how Agentforce responds to various requests using the Agent Builder. Introducing a custom action enhances Agentforce’s capabilities and offers it more choices. Therefore, ensuring that Agentforce selects the appropriate actions after adding more custom actions is essential. If it doesn’t make the right choices, there’s no need for concern — simply refine your descriptions to modify its behavior. Generally, we advise our customers to evaluate Agentforce’s performance with approximately 30 utterances per action to determine whether it aligns with their business requirements.
Before diving into creating agent custom actions, it’s advisable to use the Agent Standard Actions that Salesforce provides. These standard actions are built by Salesforce’s Platform team and will save you time on testing. They’re designed to cover a wide range of common tasks and may suit your needs without requiring customization.
Before creating a custom action, consider whether Agentforce would make for a better, faster, or simpler experience. Ask if the action fits in the Agentforce interface and if it’s best facilitated in a conversational interface. Also, consider whether the agent custom action requires turn-based interactions and how it would chain with other actions.
When designing your agent custom action, pay close attention to entry points, inputs, outputs, and turn-taking. Your entry points should consider both user utterances and additional entry points such as buttons on a page, where the user will be (record page, etc.). The inputs should clearly define what information is required for your agent custom action to run, while the outputs should specify what Agentforce will execute and display back to the user. If your agent custom action includes turn-taking interactions, document the steps carefully. You might even consider reusing the output of an agent custom action as an input for the same action, for instance, if you wish for Agentforce to further refine the output.
Think about what a user might say to trigger your action and craft strong descriptions to help Agentforce’s services identify when to execute your action. This will drastically help you to test if your action is being picked up correctly by Agentforce. Again, it’s recommended to test with 30 diverse utterances, using different linguistic styles, alternating between formal and informal language, employing abbreviations, and varying date formats, among other tactics.
When it comes to creating custom actions, focus on quality over quantity. A well-designed and thought-out action is more valuable than numerous poorly designed ones.
Agentforce is a conversational experience that lives inside the Salesforce user interface (UI). Agent custom actions can unlock its full potential and allow you to cover many of your uses cases by reusing powerful Salesforce automation technologies that you know and love (invocable actions, autolaunched flows, prompt templates, and more).
Agent custom actions give Trailblazers the flexibility to customize their Salesforce experience to suit their unique needs. By following the best practices outlined in this post, you can unlock the full potential of this innovative feature and drive efficiency in your operations — and truly make Agentforce yours.
We encourage you to explore these features in your own businesses. For further inquiries or a demo request, contact us and meet us at our various events. Harness the power of Salesforce Agent Custom Actions today and take your business to the next level.
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