AI Agents For Business and Application Development
AI agents are set to become ubiquitous in our daily lives. Here's how they work and how they are transforming business and application development alike.
Christophe Coenraets
AI agents are set to become ubiquitous in our daily lives. Here's how they work and how they are transforming business and application development alike.
Christophe Coenraets
Agents are assistive and autonomous software systems. Based on user input or environmental conditions, they reason, plan, and take action to achieve given tasks or goals. They are like intelligent digital assistants, equipped with the aggregated knowledge and experience of human experts, and access to all relevant data.
Agents are set to become ubiquitous across every area of our lives, and to profoundly transform how businesses operate and interact with customers. For example, a service agent can act as your company’s most knowledgeable technical support representative, available 24/7 to handle every request. A marketing agent, much like a self-driving car, can use “sensors” (real-time data) to detect changing business conditions and respond proactively (adjust pricing, launch a campaign, and so on).
This article covers the AI innovations driving the emergence of agents, and explores how agents are not only transforming businesses but also reshaping software and software development.
Find out how much time and money you can save with a team of AI-powered agents working side by side with your employees and workforce. Just answer four simple questions to see what's possible with Agentforce.
AI agents are made possible through the emergence of large language models (LLMs). LLMs provide two essential capabilities required to implement highly effective agents:
But LLMs alone are not sufficient to implement agents. They have a number of limitations, including:
Agents bridge the gap between the powerful language and reasoning capabilities of LLMs and the practical demands of business use cases, such as private data access and action execution, paving the way for a new software paradigm.
With this new paradigm, software is no longer built as full-fledged applications but as a collection of granular building blocks that encapsulate specific capabilities and that can be orchestrated by agents using the LLM’s reasoning capabilities. At Salesforce, these building blocks are referred to as actions (for example, “Locate Order” and “Change Order Address”) and are organized under functional areas called topics (for example, “Order Management”).
In other words, an agent is a software system that uses an LLM’s language and reasoning abilities to orchestrate a collection of actions within a specific domain. At a high level, an agent works as follows:
Connect with Agentblazers from around the world to skill up on AI, discover use cases, hear from product experts, and more. Grow your AI expertise — and your career.
The most transformative aspect of this new software paradigm is that it enables agents to handle unanticipated requests without predefined requirements. Imagine an agent equipped with dozens or even hundreds of actions. It could compose them in a virtually infinite number of ways, including in ways never anticipated, enabling it to solve new problems on the fly. This is the ultimate form of application composition.
For example, at Salesforce, our industry-leading applications (including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and Industries) are broken down into granular actions that can instantly enable Salesforce’s Agentforce Agents with a wealth of capabilities across various topics. Agentforce Agents can compose and orchestrate these actions in any number of ways, providing users with a seamless and unified experience across the business. In addition, developers can extend the standard Agentforce Agents’ capabilities with custom actions powered by code, APIs, Salesforce flows, or prompt templates.
Actions empower agents with the following essential capabilities:
Agents can have different levels of autonomy. For example:
Regardless of an agent’s autonomy level, establishing appropriate guardrails is crucial to ensure reliability, adherence to business practices, and data security and privacy, as well as to prevent hallucinations, toxicity, and harmful content.
Agentforce Agents use a multilayered approach to enforce guardrails:
Salesforce recently announced agents for Sales and Service:
You can use these agents out-of-the box, but Agentforce also enables you to customize them, extend them, and create your own agents.
Salesforce Agentforce brings humans together with autonomous agents powered by AI, data, and action. It provides the features and tools you need to create, customize, and deploy trusted agents and other innovative AI applications, complete with the right guardrails and supervision. Let’s take a closer look and walk through the key components.
When it comes to the potential of AI, experts from the business and AI fields are thoughtful, inspired, and hopeful. Subscribe to the Ask More of AI newsletter on LinkedIn to stay up to date with the latest on AI .
Salesforce metadata establishes universal rules that are enforced regardless of whether the data is accessed from traditional applications or agents. This includes permissions, sharing models, validation rules, and workflow automation to ensure data security and adherence to business practices. Metadata also allows LLMs to better understand the context and meaning of the data, which can lead to more accurate responses. For example, an LLM could use metadata to present CRM data to the user in a more useful and actionable way (ad hoc UI).
To get good AI you need high-quality and unified data. Salesforce Data Cloud brings together and unifies all your data — Salesforce and external, structured and unstructured — to ground AI with high-quality, relevant, and actionable information. With over 200 available connectors and the ability to easily create custom ones, Data Cloud provides unparalleled connectivity.
Once your data is connected, unified, and harmonized, Data Cloud enables you to activate it at scale in AI agents, analytics, and other applications, delivering valuable insights and personalized experiences. The days of siloed experiences limited by siloed data are over. Users, whether they are employees or customers, expect connected experiences that bring together and make sense of all relevant data.
Agentforce provides a configurable model architecture that enables you to easily plug in and compose models. A hosted foundation model often provides you with the fastest path to AI innovation, but you can also use fine-tuned models or your own models built with your own data.
The Agentforce Service Agent lets you use existing models in a trusted way, without compromising your company data. Here’s how it works:
Actions provide agents with the ability to execute logic and integrate with external systems. Standard Agentforce actions can act on sales, service, marketing, commerce, and industries. In addition, developers can build custom actions that can act on Salesforce or external systems using custom code, APIs, flows, and prompt templates.
A topic is a logical grouping of actions representing a specific area of focus that an agent is designed to understand, process, or respond to. Examples include order management, warranty, pricing, FAQ, and so on.
Agentforce Agents are autonomous software systems that can analyze user or environmental inputs, identify tasks, reason through solutions, and orchestrate actions to complete them. Agents have different levels of autonomy. Assistive (partially autonomous) agents collaborate with humans to perform the task at hand. Autonomous agents operate independently without direct human supervision but with the robust guardrails described earlier in this post, and the ability to hand off tasks to humans as needed.
Agentforce provides a variety of low-code tools to build agents and other AI applications.
Prompt Builder is a Salesforce builder that enables you to create reusable prompt templates in a graphical environment, and ground them with dynamic data made available through record page data, Data Cloud, API calls, flows, and Apex.
Agent Builder is another visual builder that enables you to configure agents and copilots. You can select the actions available to your agent and try out your agent in a playground environment.
Agents are set to become ubiquitous in every area of our lives. They can reason, orchestrate tasks, and take action, delivering personalized experiences at scale. By combining the language and reasoning capabilities of LLMs with software building blocks, they are transforming how businesses operate and how software is built.
Agentforce Agents are leading this transformation with key differentiating characteristics, including:
Take a closer look at how agent building works in our library.
Work with Professional Services experts to quickly build agents and see value.
Tell us about your business needs, and we’ll help you find answers.