Agents need three things to get work done: data, reasoning, and actions. With Agentforce, agents can connect to any data source and use it in real time to plan, reason, and evaluate. And Agentforce agents can leverage any workflow, automation, or API to complete tasks. Read on to learn how it all works.
Agentforce agents operate autonomously by retrieving the right data on demand, building action plans for any task, and executing these plans without needing human intervention. Using real-time data to adapt to changing conditions, they operate independently within your organization’s specific guardrails to ensure every customer interaction is accurate.
Data Cloud gives agents real-time access to the data they need to do work, without the need to copy data from existing warehouses. Create powerful agents that refer to your connected structured and unstructured data. That includes company knowledge articles, CRM data, external data lakes, and more.
Metadata allows agents to know the context of your business and the actions available to them. Metadata is a core part of the Salesforce Platform: Every field, label, entry, and automation built on the platform is tagged with relevant metadata that Agentforce can read and understand. This metadata allows the agent to know exactly how to use a flow or what data it needs to pull in.
Prompt Builder lets you build repeatable, tailored prompts that can deliver the exact data an agent needs to do work. These prompts can be used by agents to find and retrieve structured and unstructured data in real time through Retrieval Augmented Generation.
The Atlas Reasoning Engine uses advanced techniques like ensemble retrieval augmented generation (RAG), which combines the strengths of several RAG models, to find highly specific, accurate data for agents. Agents can search across structured and unstructured data to find similar language to the initial task, giving them the knowledge they need to respond and act with precision.
The Atlas Reasoning Engine breaks down the initial prompt into smaller tasks, evaluating at each step and proposing a plan for how to proceed. For example, if an agent is handling a customer inquiry, it identifies the intent, searches for relevant data, creates a plan of action, and evaluates the effectiveness of the action. If unsatifactory, the agent continues to adapt and refine the plan by asking for additional information. This ensures that the initial prompt can be completed accurately.
The Atlas Reasoning Engine evaluates a user request against all of the topics available to an agent, and then selects the most appropriate one to accomplish the task.
Agentforce is natively integrated with the entire Salesforce Customer 360. From Sales and Service to Commerce and Marketing, agents can use complete customer context from your CRM applications and take action directly within the flow of work for your employees. For example, an agent can use engagement data to identify an opportunity to upsell and generate a personalized email to a prospect.
Agentforce can be embedded across web and mobile chat, email, SMS, and Slack to meet your customers wherever they are. Agents can reply natively, and also seamlessly handoff to human employees across any channel. For example, a customer can log onto your website and have a conversation with an agent to troubleshoot a broken item. The agent replies with best practices and trouble shooting instructions to close out the case.
Agents can take advantage of prebuilt Flows to automate business processes. Agents can be configured to run Flows and use their output to help respond to the intial prompt. Agents can also be embedded within a Flow to help automate even more work. For example, an agent can run a flow to automatically elevate the priority of a customer case ticket based on certain criteria.
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An AI agent is an intelligent system that can get work done proactively and autonomously, meaning it doesn't require human input. Agents can be triggered by changes in data and automations. They can understand and respond to human conversation dynamically. And they rely on machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to reason and handle a wide range of tasks, from answering simple questions to resolving complex issues.
Traditional chatbots require pre-determined conversation trees to respond to inquiries. In contrast, agents are dynamic. They can adapt to human language and conversation, and they have the ability to reason. They make sense of the conversation, build a plan to address it, understand the tools available to them, and then take the best course of action.
You can customize an AI agent to fit any use case and any industry. Salesforce offers a range of out-of-the-box agents for service, sales, marketing, and commerce, so you can get started in minutes. These are just some examples of how agents can support your business:
The Einstein Trust Layer protects customer data through robust security features and guardrails, like zero data retention, toxicity detection, secure data retrieval, and dynamic grounding. It improves the safety and accuracy of outputs while ensuring the responsible use of AI agents across the Salesforce ecosystem.
For example, the Audit Trail feature provides the data you need to track AI agent actions and outputs, ensuring AI usage complies with your organization’s security, privacy, regulatory, and AI governance policies.
While other agent platforms require complex data integration and custom automation builds, Agentforce is already built into the Salesforce Platform. You can instantly turn your existing workflows, prompt templates, Apex, and APIs into agent actions — with the added power of native tools, like Data Cloud, Slack, and MuleSoft. Agent Builder enables Salesforce admins and developers to use natural language to create jobs to be done, instructions, actions, and guardrails for their agents.
Agentforce is deeply integrated with the Salesforce Platform, which brings together all the data and context agents need from internal and external sources, with the Einstein Trust Layer built in. This enables agents to take accurate, relevant actions, which are faster to implement thanks to our low-code framework. You can reuse Platform tools like flows and Apex, and build your agent on top of them.
Agentforce also connects to all the channels where your employees and customers already interact, including CRM, WhatsApp, Messenger, and your website. There’s no need to go to another application to talk to an agent because they're bringing value to the existing flow of work.
Agentforce is suitable for businesses of any size. Salesforce customers can now try Agentforce for free with Salesforce Foundations, a $0 add-on for Enterprise Edition and higher.
Foundations helps businesses get ready for AI by extending their CRM with additional key features from Agentforce, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and Data Cloud. Foundations now includes credits to power the first 1,000 conversations with Agentforce Service Agent, allowing your company to try its capabilities before buying.
