5 Characteristics of an Agentforce Company: The Agent-First Blueprint

A finance team streamlines operations, thanks to an AI agent that reconciles transactions, flags discrepancies, and generates reports in seconds. A product manager accelerates go-to-market strategies via an AI agent that instantly analyzes customer feedback and predicts trends. A salesperson, once drowning in paperwork, now spends their time closing deals, armed with AI-driven insights that anticipate customer needs. 

In agent-first companies like this — and especially those using Agentforce, the agentic AI layer of the Salesforce platform — AI isn’t just fixing problems. It’s turning customer frustration into loyalty, inefficiency into innovation, and work into something truly meaningful. Agentforce companies embrace AI agents to scale digital labor. They’re pioneers in a new era where technology and human ingenuity converge to create unparalleled value, scale, and innovation. 

This is more than AI-driven automation: It’s a fundamental rethinking of how work gets done. For business and IT leaders, inspiring teams to embrace agentic AI means shifting the conversation from fear of job displacement to excitement about job transformation. 

What does an Agentforce company look like?

Agent-first companies will have an enormous impact on the economy. Global GDP is expected to be 14% higher in 2030 — the equivalent of $15.7 trillion — driven in large part by productivity gains from augmenting human labor with artificial intelligence (AI). Digital labor will help companies optimize budgets and do much more without adding huge operating costs. 

So, why would you want to become an Agentforce company? For starters, companies that use Agentforce aren’t just adapting: They’re dominating and disrupting. Unlike traditional businesses, they don’t rely on small gains. They leap ahead with digital labor that works 24/7, learns continuously, and autonomously executes complex tasks. 

They use Agentforce to drastically speed up product development cycles. Their customer service operations provide round-the-clock, personalized support that can scale at a moment’s notice. And their decisions are based on AI-driven analytics that deliver deep insights into market trends and customer behavior. The result: lower costs, faster innovation, and a competitive edge that others can’t match.

How do you get there? Here are five key characteristics of an Agentforce company. 

1. Agentforce companies have unlimited capacity to scale with digital labor

In many companies, the workload exceeds the workforce. Business demands constantly grow even when head count cannot or does not grow. Agentforce can help your company augment your workforce, taking routine work off employees’ plates and empowering them to drive more impact while scaling to meet customer demands. Agentforce automates tasks, analyzes data, takes action, and assists in decision-making 24/7. This boosts productivity while keeping costs in check, since businesses can scale work without scaling head count at the same rate.

While AI can handle customer support through autonomous agents, freeing up team members to focus on more complex issues, Agentforce takes this a step further: By understanding a customer’s profile, it can serve up not just information from a knowledge article but personalize the response and even take action to address the issue. Agentforce can process and analyze large datasets quickly, offering insights that would otherwise require a team of data analysts. In short, Agentforce allows a team of two to operate like a team of 20, taking on more projects, responding faster to market changes, and maintaining high productivity levels.

Precina Health is a great example of Agentforce in action. The company, which aims to transform diabetes care, is enrolling patients in three U.S. states, with plans to expand to all 50. To do so, it deployed an Agentforce-based digital workforce to automate tasks and scale its impact without expanding head count. Precina can now increase outreach, accelerate processes, and improve care at scale while maintaining the highest level of attention to each patient. Check out more of Precina’s story below. 

“We probably never would have hired a thousand-person sales team,” said Precina CEO John Oberg. “But with this type of AI — much like a calculator or a computer — we can multiply our effectiveness exponentially.”

2. Agentforce companies stay ahead with intelligent workflows that adapt in real time

Agentforce companies don’t just deploy new technology. They rethink how AI agents can solve business problems, putting Agentforce at the core of workflows that continuously learn, adapt, and act — with little to no human intervention. 

With Agentforce, developers no longer have to hard code static workflows. Rather, they embed AI agents into workflows that don’t follow a predetermined script. The agents reason, adapt, and decide what to do next, making them not just more flexible, but fundamentally more intelligent than traditional automation.

Consider a B2B sales team using an agentic workflow to manage follow-ups with prospective customers. A prospect takes an action, like downloading a white paper. Using agentic reasoning, Agentforce evaluates and decides next steps. Instead of the old, fixed way of doing things — send an email, wait a few days, call the prospect — Agentforce instantly determines and executes the next best action based on past interactions, website behavior, sentiment analysis, and more. 

For example, if a high-value prospect browses a product page multiple times but doesn’t convert, Agentforce proactively tailors an outreach strategy based on this data. Finally, unlike AI copilots or chat tools, Agentforce doesn’t just suggest actions — it takes them, continuously learning and improving every step of the way.

All this makes Agentforce companies faster, smarter, and more competitive. Since Agentforce can analyze data, detect changes, generate insights, and take action automatically, there’s less need for manual oversight. This shift from static automation to intelligent action frees businesses to focus on strategy, not execution. The results are threefold: Agentforce companies are adaptable, intelligent, and automated, leading to faster decisions, increased revenue, and more satisfied, loyal customers. 

This transformation isn’t just about efficiency — it’s about creating a competitive advantage where workflows evolve as fast as the business does. By investing in agentic workflows, Agentforce companies empower developers to move beyond order takers to become strategic enablers of the technology. The result? A workforce that builds adaptable, intelligent systems capable of continuous learning, improvement, and innovation — keeping businesses ahead in an ever-changing world.

3. Agentforce companies give employees and customers instant access to digital experts

Agentforce can provide real-time, data-driven answers to employee and customer requests, saving time and increasing the accuracy and relevancy of responses. Consider a bank evaluating a new mortgage client. Instead of an employee manually reviewing mountains of financial documents for prospective borrowers, Agentforce quickly analyzes bank statements, credit scores, and loan history, identifying the best options based on lending criteria and interest rates. It suggests strategies to improve approval chances, allowing the lender to make faster, more informed decisions.  

Imagine a couple applying for that mortgage, overwhelmed by the complexity of loan options, interest rates, and approvals. Instead of waiting days for a loan officer’s response or struggling to understand financial jargon, they turn to a customer-facing AI agent on the bank’s site. 

With instant access to their financial history, credit score, and real-time market data, Agentforce breaks down their best loan options, explains monthly payments, and even simulates different scenarios, like how a bigger down payment could lower their interest rate. Instead of feeling lost, the couple has clear, personalized guidance. For financial institutions, Agentforce can process loans faster and with fewer manual errors. 

A key enabler is access to troves of data. With Agentforce, this is made possible with Data Cloud, a platform that gives agents instant access to all the data across your organization, regardless of its type or location. 

4. Agentforce companies augment employees with agents, helping them work smarter and faster

Agentforce provides tireless, intelligent digital labor partners that can pick up the busywork so your employees can focus on more creative and strategic tasks. 

In customer service, Agentforce analyzes past interactions and sentiment to suggest the best responses, helping human agents resolve issues faster and with more confidence. In sales, Agentforce prioritizes leads based on buying signals, so reps can focus on high-potential prospects with tailored insights. HR teams can use Agentforce to help automate resume screening and surface top candidates, freeing up time for meaningful candidate engagement. Engineering teams can use Agentforce to write better code, faster. 

Wiley, a global publisher and trusted leader in research and learning, is improving the efficiency of its customer service with Agentforce. Customers receive accurate, context-aware responses based on Wiley’s knowledge base and trusted CRM data. This reduces time spent searching for information, which helps Agentforce resolve cases faster and helps new hires ramp up quickly. Check out more of Wiley’s story below. 

1-800Accountant is another good example. The company, which provides tax services for small businesses, is in its busy season. Its accountants were stretched thin, spending the majority of their time on basic inquiries that could be handled by Agentforce. It needed to scale its ranks, but there just weren’t enough accountants to hire. 

“We have to look to automation, to a digital workforce, in order to grow,” said CTO Ryan Teeples. “Agentforce allows us to scale at a pace we didn’t previously think was possible.”

Now, accountants can help customers with more strategic issues, like buying vs. leasing equipment, or establishing an S-Corp.

5. Agentforce companies provide 24/7 support that feels human and empathetic

We’ve all been there: waiting on hold for what feels like hours, or dealing with a chatbot that fails to grasp context and struggles with complex issues that require nuance. We all want to feel heard. But bots, which are hard coded to provide prewritten answers, fall short in emotionally charged situations — after a car accident or layoff, for example — where human intuition, flexibility, and empathy are crucial.

The best AI can deliver a human touch, and is infinitely patient across any volume of tasks. Agentforce can do this because it has access to the right data, metadata, large language models (LLMs), and a reasoning engine, which lets it contextualize responses. So, it can instantly recall previous interactions and use that data to show that it understands customer problems. 

Further, since Data Cloud unifies data from across your organization, Agentforce can be more proactive in how it helps. For example, a marketing agent would have access to service data and see that a customer had a problem with a particular product. 

Agentforce companies set the standard for the future of work

The future belongs to businesses that embrace AI agents not as mere tools, but as transformative partners in their growth and innovation. An Agentforce company realizes and champions agents as an empowering force, not a threat. The companies that seize this moment will redefine their industries, outpace competitors, and set the standard for the future of work.