Dreamforce 2024 Keynote Recap: Meet Agentforce

Did you know almost half (41%) of an employee’s time is spent on repetitive, low-impact tasks? So it’s no surprise that 82% of global companies worldwide are either using or exploring the use of AI in their organization.

With 65% of desk workers believing generative AI can help them become more strategic, the launch of Salesforce Agentforce during Dreamforce 2024 was highly anticipated. 

More than 45,000 Trailblazers and attendees from over 140 countries, including members of the Fullcast team, gathered together at Dreamforce 2024 in San Francisco, and millions of viewers tuned in via Salesforce+ to hear more about what Salesforce calls “a new era of AI.” 

It’s called Agentforce. Salesforce Agentforce, that is. 

This suite of autonomous AI agents augment workers (key word: augment) and handle tasks in service, sales, marketing, and commerce. While more features emerge, here is what we’ve learned about this exciting new AI offering so far.  

What is Agentforce?

“Agentforce is a revolutionary and trusted solution that seamlessly integrates AI across every workflow, embedding itself deeply into the heart of the customer journey,” Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO, Salesforce, said. “This means anticipating needs, strengthening relationships, driving growth, and taking proactive action at every touchpoint.” 

Agentforce doesn’t depend on human prompts like copilots or chatbots. Instead, Agentforce Agents can analyze data, make decisions, and take action on necessary but often mundane tasks like answering customer service inquiries, qualifying sales leads, and optimizing marketing campaigns. With Agentforce, any organization can easily build, customize, and deploy their own agents for any use case across any industry. With a simple click of a button, Agentforce retrieves the right data on demand, creates action plans for any task, and executes these plans without human intervention.

When needed, Agentforce can seamlessly transition tasks to human employees for personalized service, and provides a summary of the customer’s interaction, an overview of the customer’s details, and recommendations for next steps. 

Why is Agentforce a Gamechanger?

With workload and workplace stress being an ongoing problem for some employees, Salesforce Agentforce offers a solution for overburdened teams by scaling capacity on demand, which allows teams to focus on high-value, strategic outcomes. 

“While others require you to DIY your AI, Agentforce offers a fully tailored, enterprise-ready platform designed for immediate impact and scalability. With advanced security features, compliance with industry standards, and unmatched flexibility,” Benioff said. 

Built directly on the Salesforce platform, and sustained by Data Cloud, which unifies customer data and metadata across systems in real time, Agentforce can deliver AI-backed experiences at every touch point of the customer journey. 

How Will This Boost RevOps?

Here’s how your sales team could benefit from this new form of AI: By replacing chatbots (which require preprogramming) with Agentforce, your Sales Development team can leverage CRM and external data to engage with prospected customers all day, every day by answering questions, addressineg concerns, scheduling meetings, and seamlessly handle a wide range of service issues using one CRM platform with a Customer 360 view. 

Agentforce also introduces several key features:

Atlas Reasoning Engine: The “brain” behind Agentforce. Designed to simulate how humans think and plan, this agentic system can evaluate queries, refine them for clarity, retrieve relevant data and build an execution plan. 

Agent Builder: Agentforce’s out-of-the-box agents are easy to customize and deploy with clicks, not code, and can be set up in minutes. This tool can create and customize agents to perform a job defined by topics and natural language instructions within that topic. 

Agentforce Partner Network: Salesforce has partnered with leading software vendors, such as Amazon Web Services, Copado, Google, IBM, Workday, Zoom, among others, to enhance agent-building capabilities, ensuring adherence to ethical standards, data sharing, and coordinated actions.

Is Agentforce Available Now?

Agentforce for Service and Sales industries will be available near the end of October 2024. Salesforce plans to launch some components of Atlas Reasoning Engine in February 2025. 

“Our vision is bold: to empower one billion agents with Agentforce by the end of 2025. This is what AI is meant to be.” Benioff said. 

[Images courtesy of Salesforce]