We are living in the artificial intelligence (AI) era, currently in the third wave of the AI revolution focused on contextual and generative AI and characterized by prompt-based generative AI, real-time AI applications, and autonomous agents. Agentforce is the suite of both assistive and autonomous agents built on the Salesforce platform. Agents are designed to execute specialized tasks for your organization based on user input or environmental conditions, making life easier for your customers and users. Agents reason, plan, and act to complete tasks or achieve goals. If there are tasks your users consistently need to do in Salesforce, why not put an agent to work instead?
The best part of using agents is that they can be set up to use your company’s brand and voice, and are grounded on CRM and external data using Data Cloud.
While other companies have launched copilots and agents, Agentforce is different because it’s guided by the Atlas Reasoning Engine. You can think of this as the brain of the agent using key features such as multi-turn chat, topic classification, instructions, and actions; knowledge retrieval using advanced retrieval augmentation generation (RAG); and searchable public data accessible through the Einstein Trust Layer.
In Salesforce, Agentforce can help with and perform tasks for users and customers, saving them time. There are several out-of-the-box (OOTB) agents you can customize and put to work right away. Here are some examples.
Service Agents are designed to provide a better service experience by providing accurate, instant, around-the-clock customer service vs. traditional chatbots.
Sales Development Representative (SDR) Agents help your sales team focus on relationship management by nurturing your prospects.
Sales Coach Agents assist your sales team by providing personalized role-play sessions to practice pitches and handle objections specific to the deal, based on data in Salesforce.
You can work with these OOTB agents or create your own in Agent Builder—a visual workspace where you can create custom actions and add them to your agents.
Agent Builder gives you insight into the various actions associated with the agent, as well as a space to preview the conversation between your customer/user and the agent, and the logic or Atlas Reasoning Engine that takes place to fuel this conversation.
We are the product owners of our Salesforce instances and tend to have the best understanding of our users’ needs. That means we are at the front lines of creating and deploying agents. Agentforce OOTB Agents are declarative, easy to edit and launch with clicks instead of code. The best part is that we’re using skills we already know, including prompt engineering from building prompt templates and using flows for custom actions.
Agentforce offers both standard and custom actions, and as admins, it’s our job to determine which to use. We’re often focused on how to create a more streamlined and better user experience so that we can increase CRM adoption. Setting up agents is a big win for your users because you can create conversational AI assistants to answer questions or help with common tasks for them, or create autonomous agents to manage automation and simplify your business processes.
There are a couple ways you can get hands-on with Agentforce. The quickest way is to Build Your First Agent with Agentforce on Trailhead. This Quick Start project gives you access to a demo org with Agentforce enabled so that you can try out the power of assistive and autonomous agents firsthand.
Another option for accessing Agentforce is to use Salesforce Foundations. This is a new, no-cost addition to your individual Salesforce instances that allows Enterprise, Unlimited, and Einstein 1 Editions the chance to expand their reach and turn on new features when they’re ready—Agentforce included.
As with any new Salesforce product release, we encourage admins to work with both IT and stakeholders to gather different perspectives, ensure a successful rollout, and to gain buy-in. This partnership will support better adoption upon go-live. Agentforce (really any AI product) can feel a little scary and overwhelming to stakeholders that don’t have hands on the technology. A great way to secure this support is to demo Agentforce functionality to your stakeholders to set the stage for a collaborative discussion on how the technology can successfully go to work in your organization, saving time for users.
A tactic we’ve found to be successful is to show a quick demo that captures the power of Agentforce as a jumping-off point for your brainstorming. Rather than spending tons of time creating an organization- or industry-specific demo for your stakeholders, focus on showing them how the technology works and giving a more general demo of the features. Then, you can have a whiteboarding session together to brainstorm ways this can affect your custom business use cases. That will give you tangible takeaways to go build your company’s first agent based on your mission and priorities. It also gives your stakeholders something to be excited about. They can be your advocates when you launch Agentforce, so that you’re set up for success on user adoption.
Get hands-on! Dive into Agentforce and see how it could revolutionize the flow of work and completion of tasks in Salesforce. If you’re brand new to AI and Agentforce, Trailhead is your first stop. We’ve included some recommended modules in the Resources section. Once you’ve got the basics, get creative in an AI-enabled dev org. Use each learning experience as an opportunity to brainstorm how agents could work in your own Salesforce instance.
To connect with Salesforce experts and hear how others are using Agentforce, join the Agentblazer Community Group, and meet up with us at an Agentforce World Tour near you.
Agentforce advancements are coming quickly, so stay on top of them by following our Agentforce resources for admins.
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