Editor’s Note: This article was updated on December 20 to reflect the latest.

Last month, Salesforce announced the general availability of Agentforce, marking a significant milestone in the creation of autonomous agents for business. Agentforce is an integrated AI solution on the Salesforce Platform designed to build, deploy, and scale AI agents. Agentforce goes beyond chatbots and copilots, using advanced reasoning abilities to make decisions and take action, like resolving customer cases, qualifying sales leads, and optimizing marketing campaigns. Data, however, is the lifeblood that fuels AI. Clean, integrated, and contextual data is what deepens Agentforce’s understanding of our customers.

Salesforce Data Cloud is the heart of Agentforce’s next-generation capabilities. A hyperscale data engine on the Salesforce Platform, it provides all of the data and metadata Agentforce needs to produce actionable insights that are grounded in customer records. This simply isn’t possible with other agents or copilots because they cannot access the data needed to provide a complete view of a customer. More importantly, Data Cloud overcomes many of the issues enterprise customers face when trying to integrate their agents and customer data, including: 

• Data Silos: Businesses struggle to create seamless customer experiences with data distributed across different systems, with much of this data stored in unstructured formats — like customer and employee interactions in Slack, PDF, Google documents, videos, and support tickets. Retrieving relevant information quickly and effectively has been particularly difficult, limiting the ability of support teams to respond to customer needs in real time. 
• Lack of Trusted Context: To make more informed decisions, agents need a thorough understanding of the customer journey, interactions, and preferences, which requires a unified data foundation. Unstructured data is growing at a rate of 55% to 65% each year. According to IDC, in 2022, 90% of data generated by organizations was unstructured, yet only 18% of organizations can take advantage of unstructured data. Scattered enterprise data and knowledge that can’t be integrated and governed results in disjointed insights. This makes it nearly impossible to generate contextually aware and trusted intelligence that understands business and customer needs. 
• Poor Actionability: Insights are valuable, but being able to quickly do something with them is what makes them priceless. Many organizations face delays and bottlenecks in moving from insights to action, preventing them from responding to market demands as well as employee and customer needs. For AI to generate reliable insights, it needs trustworthy and governed data. Without precision, context, accuracy, and regulatory compliance, do-it-yourself (DIY) AI models and copilots end up producing incomplete or unreliable results that ultimately erode user trust. 

The Data Cloud advantage for Agentforce

With Data Cloud, Agentforce not only has access to every relevant piece of trusted enterprise knowledge (files, videos, images, websites, tickets) and data (across systems, lakes, warehouses, and Customer 360), but also understands its context, enabling it to make intelligent, actionable, and trusted recommendations in real time. That’s where Agentforce becomes incredibly powerful.

Data Cloud is central to Agentforce’s capabilities, bringing together structured and unstructured data from a multitude of sources in real time. By providing Customer 360 with deep platform integration, trusted contextual data for Agentforce, and autonomous actions in the flow of work, Data Cloud ensures Agentforce has access to the most comprehensive customer view.

Customer 360 with deep platform integration

Data Cloud enables this by going beyond traditional CDPs to address challenges with data integration, contextual intelligence, and automated actions in real time. As a hyperscale engine native to the Salesforce Platform, it serves as the trusted data foundation for Agentforce and the broader Salesforce Platform. Data Cloud drives hyperpersonalized experiences across the entire Customer 360 by seamlessly integrating structured and unstructured data, data lakes, warehouses, and CRM data. An open and extensible platform, it’s also integrated with Salesforce’s Zero Copy Partner Network ecosystem, so data can be actioned in Agentforce and across the Salesforce Platform. FedEx, for instance, is creating customer journeys to improve customer experiences and grow revenue by connecting all Salesforce clouds with Data Cloud. FedEx trusts Salesforce’s end-to-end data platform to seamlessly integrate with its existing data lakes — without duplicating data — thanks to zero copy. 

Salesforce believes in an open ecosystem and extensibility at every layer. For years, it has fostered an ISV and customer development ecosystem via the AppExchange. Now, this work is going even further with bringing your own (BYO) AI models and zero copy. Customers and partners have ultimate flexibility — whether choosing your own model to future proof your AI investments to building a custom connector to ingest a particular data source through to feature extensibility and beyond.

Data Cloud represents an ambitious vision to provide a centralized data asset encompassing data management, warehousing, workflow, and AI capabilities that connect the federated Salesforce ecosystem.

Forrester, The Forrester Wave™: Customer Data Platforms For B2C, Q3 2024, September 2024, authored by Joe Stanhope

Beyond ingestion of structured data, Salesforce Data Cloud provides a native vector database that converts various unstructured data formats‌ that are often trapped in 90% of customer data‌ — ‌into readily usable data and harmonizes it with structured data to create comprehensive customer profiles that are stored as metadata (data about data, such as area codes or loyalty program numbers) in a unified data foundation. Because it’s fully integrated in the Salesforce Platform, this metadata can flow seamlessly into any Salesforce application based on set governance policies. This gives every team a 360-degree view of the customer to power trusted AI and drive automation and analytics across every touchpoint without compromising data security.

“Data Cloud has been instrumental in helping us streamline operations across all of our [different] divisions to help inform strategic decision-making in one simple system, instead of switching between technology platforms,” said Tony Gondick, Senior Manager, IT Business Strategy, Kawasaki Motors Corp., U.S.A., Engines Division. “We see firsthand the value of Data Cloud in surfacing insights [from] our unstructured data. So much so that we became an Agentforce pilot customer to ensure our [team members] were powered with rich, contextual information to help solve problems faster, uncover more opportunities, and integrate more seamlessly with third-party systems to ensure we are more responsive to customer needs and can predict customer behavior.”

To further augment unstructured data integration and fuel next-generation enterprise knowledge for Agentforce, Salesforce recently acquired Zoomin, a leading data management provider whose technology now augments unstructured content capabilities in Data Cloud. Augmenting enterprise knowledge in Data Cloud can power new use cases for customers across multiple touchpoints and contextual enterprise knowledge by grounding agents in all enterprise unstructured data, such as Google Drive, Microsoft SharePoint, YouTube video, website, and content management system files. This integration accelerates how customers unlock unstructured data to maximize the potential of Agentforce and gives service teams a more contextually-aware understanding of their customers.

“In the testing environment, we drastically cut down the time needed to pull together information for service responses, for the ads side of our business,” said Amir Weingrod, Senior Manager, Business Systems, Unity Technologies. “The main challenge we faced was having to search across multiple sources and knowledge articles, then tailoring the response for each customer. With Zoomin and Salesforce, our knowledge is now centralized and will be directly available to Agentforce, bringing relevant, personalized answers right in front of the user. This integration has transformed our knowledge into a powerful productivity boost and a key driver of revenue.”

With Zoomin and Salesforce, all our corporate knowledge is now centralized and will be directly available to Agentforce, bringing relevant, personalized answers right in front of the user. This integration has transformed our knowledge into a powerful productivity boost and a key driver of revenue.

Amir Weingrod, Senior Manager, Business Systems, Unity Technologies

Trusted, contextual data for Agentforce

Data Cloud maximizes the potential of Agentforce by safely grounding agents in an organization’s proprietary customer data using industry-leading Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and hybrid search capabilities. RAG retrieves the right data from the appropriate source, augments user prompts, and extracts value from the large language model (LLM). With industry-leading RAG, users can search both structured and unstructured enterprise data ingested into Data Cloud. Data Cloud’s built-in RAG capabilities add real-time insights and context from unstructured data like past emails, support tickets, product photos, voicemails, and other sources, while its hybrid search identifies the right knowledge article based on customer context to help Agentforce resolve issues accurately. With hybrid search, organizations can find the most relevant information in the company’s knowledge base by combining the semantic capabilities of vector search with the exact match capabilities of keyword search, a critical capability for dealing with specific domain terms like product names or acronyms. Finally, with Data Cloud, teams can build trust with customers through a governed and secure platform that natively manages data and AI access, security, and compliance.  Data Cloud ensures Agentforce has access to search and summarize valuable contextual insights.

Now generally available, Data Cloud’s no-code retrievers also empower admins and business users to implement customized RAG capabilities for both structured and unstructured data with a simple, click-based setup. Once data is ingested and indexed in Data Cloud, no-code retrievers bring the data directly into Prompt Templates and Flow automations, enabling Agentforce to access essential details from unstructured data sources like PDFs, knowledge articles, and call transcripts. This makes it easy for Agentforce to ground on specific use cases through filters — like articles within a specific category and firmware updates — without writing vector query code. Despite being no-code, users can still tailor the retrieval process by defining filters, ranking algorithms, and specifying the desired level of detail for the retrieved data. Data Cloud no-code retrievers provide a next-generation experience unlocking accessibility, faster development time, and improved data quality.

“Salesforce Data Cloud has seen tremendous growth and now powers Agentforce. Our new no-code retrievers and the integration of  Zoomin’s unstructured content capabilities represent a breakthrough for our customers,” said Rahul Auradkar, EVP and GM of Salesforce Data Cloud. “By removing the technical barriers to building and deploying contextually-aware insights for Agentforce, we are enabling enterprises to harness the complete set of enterprise data with unprecedented ease. Now, teams can quickly create context-rich, intelligent Agentforce interactions that deliver real impact — all while significantly reducing the costs associated with data integration and retrieval.”

Now, teams can quickly create context-rich, intelligent Agentforce interactions that deliver real impact — all while significantly reducing the costs associated with data integration and retrieval.

Rahul Auradkar, EVP and GM of Salesforce Data Cloud

Data Cloud transformation, indexing, search, and semantic capabilities are deeply integrated with the Atlas Reasoning Engine. Through the power of Data Cloud and the Atlas Reasoning Engine, agents can also decipher insights through nuanced questions married with complex unstructured data to return simple, successful, and relevant answers to customers. The Atlas Reasoning Engine can produce contextual richness that other DIY AI bots and copilots cannot because they do not have a complete view of customer data. For example, Agentforce can use part numbers found in customer-sent photos to pull up relevant knowledge articles for that product category and help support representatives resolve customer issues faster.

The ability to work with unstructured data is one of Data Cloud’s most significant differentiators, and it’s critical for equipping agents with the knowledge they need to deliver effective responses and outcomes. 

Autonomous actions in the flow of work

Data Cloud enables automation through data-triggered workflows, advanced analytics, and AI-powered applications built on trusted data. With both low-code and pro-code tools, it empowers everyone in the organization to access and act on data, fostering self-service, informed decision-making, and innovation across teams. Data Cloud can also activate data for AI, automation, and analytics, driving actions seamlessly within the flow of work. Delivering timely and personalized customer experiences means ensuring that business users, data teams, and technical users have easy access to actionable data. Data Cloud unifies customer profiles, enabling sales teams to identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities, service teams to proactively address customer needs, and marketing teams to personalize campaigns based on customer behavior and preferences. By democratizing data, Salesforce empowers every team to harness insights that drive smarter, more targeted customer interactions across the organization.  

Data Cloud enables organizations to transform insights into autonomous actions. With integrated analytics and action layers, insights are no longer passive but serve as immediate calls to action, whether through automation, analytics or real-time suggestions to Agentforce. With our sub-second real-time layer, enterprises can ingest, transform, index, perform hybrid search, RAG, and govern data in real time across Salesforce. This powers Einstein Personalization, now built on Data Cloud, along with real-time AI recommendations, analytics, and automations to enable faster decision-making and instant personalization across customer touchpoints. Agentforce uses machine learning (ML) and generative AI insights from Data Cloud to deliver personalized recommendations. From tailored in-store promotions to cross-channel offers, Agentforce delivers real-time engagement backed by sub-second data ingestion and harmonization, with instant notifications in Slack and insights available in Tableau. Wyndham Hotels and Resorts improved handle times, revenue per agent, and customer satisfaction by giving service teams a unified view of guest profiles, thanks to connected reservation, loyalty, and CRM data in Data Cloud.

Salesforce made a compelling case for elevating Data Cloud as the critical component for building agents. Whether Agentforce retrieves context, accurate information; evaluates user queries for clarity and relevance; DC ensures that the action plan is grounded on trusted data & is critical to its success.

Tapan Patel, IDC, Dreamforce 2024: Salesforce Data Cloud Lays the Data Strategy Foundation Needed for Agentforce, October 2024

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Getting started with Data Cloud and Agentforce

Data Cloud powers Agentforce by uniting structured and unstructured data from diverse sources in real time. With seamless Customer 360 integration, trusted contextual data, and autonomous workflows, it delivers the most complete and actionable customer view, driving Agentforce’s unmatched capabilities. Agents are most successful when they’re able to tap the power of data, AI, automation, and humans. Data Cloud, as the foundation of the Salesforce Platform and Agentforce, brings all of those elements together so businesses can build intelligent, responsive agents that address diverse needs‌ — ‌from streamlining customer support to empowering employee workflows‌ — ‌creating more personalized, efficient, and effective interactions. 

More information:

• To unlock the full potential of your data, explore how Salesforce Data Cloud can elevate AI and Agentforce capabilities to create customer and employee experiences that truly set you apart. 
• Join Salesforce at Agentforce World Tour to learn more