Although artificial intelligence (AI) seems to headline every article about business trends these days, the technology has been around for quite a while. Salesforce introduced its AI-powered Einstein tools eight years ago, in 2016. 

What’s new about AI since then, though, is its ability to do more than enable predictive analytics. Now, AI can automate customer service and sales development tasks that have traditionally been a drain on a company’s time and human resources. 

Salesforce introduced a new AI tool, Agentforce, in a recent earnings call. Agentforce is a low-code, AI-driven platform that allows businesses to create custom AI agents. These agents are NOT the chatbots we all remember in the early days of this technology. Think about much smarter “bots” that are trained on extensive real-world data sets, far beyond simple if/then programming. These AI agents take a proactive approach and operate autonomously within the Salesforce ecosystem. Agentforce’s agents can anticipate customer needs before they escalate, resulting in faster, more accurate responses to customers’ concerns. Here’s what you need to know about Agentforce and how it can make life for your business much easier.

The evolution of AI at Salesforce

Before Agentforce, Salesforce’s “intelligent” features were limited. There was Einstein, which embedded AI into the Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) platform.  Einstein bots were easy to- use but simplistic, offering fixed, pre-designed decision trees that required substantial up-front effort to define and implement. While the bots can query info, they cannot understand customer intent. Although they provide some value, they are essentially enhanced versions of the interactive voice response phone menus we’ve all dreaded for years, deflecting cases instead of resolving customer issues.

Other Salesforce “AI”  tools like Lead Scoring and Opportunity Insights have been useful but are, again, limited. Both require large sets of your own data to derive insights because they are statistical models using pre-identified fields. They cannot analyze emails or call transcripts to understand a customer’s sentiment or a salesperson’s approach and how those can affect lead quality or opportunity outcome.

The building blocks of Agentforce 

Salesforce has been building its AI capabilities, initially focusing on predictive analytics for data-driven decisions. As AI technology evolved, Salesforce’s approach changed. They introduced advanced AI-driven solutions, including generative and autonomous AI. Recently, they acquired Airkit, which brought a data-driven generative AI approach to customer service.

Until now, predictive AI has worked to find patterns in historical data to forecast future outcomes and aid in decision-making. Generative AI, on the other hand, creates entirely new and original content – whether it’s text, images, or other media – by learning from existing data patterns. This enables it to handle complex tasks without human intervention. For businesses, generative AI brings significant benefits by automating creative and cognitive tasks that previously required manual effort. It can dynamically generate tailored responses, marketing materials, or even proposals based on customer interactions and company data. 

This capability powers Agentforce, which operates similarly to ChatGPT but is specifically trained on your company’s unique data. Agentforce’s generative AI allows it to interact directly with customers and prospects in a highly personalized way. Unlike older AI models that relied on extensive pre-programming or training, these agents don’t need to be manually set up with templates or scripted responses. They generate personalized replies in real time, ensuring fast, efficient customer service that feels natural and conversational. 

Using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), these AI agents access trusted business data—such as product FAQs, sales plays, and case studies—to provide accurate, contextually relevant answers. This makes them more versatile than traditional chatbots, which are limited to responding to pre-programmed questions. In fact, these agents can be trained on scripts from your best customer service agent or sales representative, allowing them to engage in conversations that mirror those interactions. They can interpret and process this information, enabling intelligent, personalized conversations that reflect the expertise and style of your top-performing employees.

What makes Agentforce different?

Agentforce represents a significant leap in how Salesforce can help businesses leverage AI to enhance customer service and sales processes.

Consider a customer service scenario where an AI agent autonomously manages a customer’s journey—from initial contact to resolution—without human intervention. The agent can access previous interactions, understand the context, and provide real-time assistance. This service improves the customer experience and frees up human agents for more complex tasks.

Agentforce enhances the sales process by providing tools to close deals faster. Sales Development Representative (SDR) Agent, for example, supports sellers by autonomously answering questions from inbound leads, handling objections, and booking meetings. Sales Coach Agent helps sellers develop skills by simulating a buyer during discovery, pitch, or negotiation calls. These AI-driven agents analyze customer data, predict buying behavior, and tailor interactions to maximize conversion rates.

Agentforce uses predictive analytics to identify potential sales opportunities and recommend the best approach by analyzing customer data. This includes suggesting the right product to upsell, timing to follow up with a lead, or predicting a customer’s purchase. Agentforce also automates routine tasks for sales teams, like data entry, lead scoring, and follow-up emails, allowing them to focus on building relationships and closing deals.

Agentforce’s key tools

Agentforce has a variety of powerful components, including:

1. Generative AI for Customer Support: This is how Agentforce can generate personalized responses to customer inquiries. It understands the context of a query and crafts a human-like reply efficiently and quickly using advanced natural language processing.
2. Predictive Analytics and Insights: Agentforce predicts customer needs and suggests actions, from recommending the next best offer to proactively addressing potential issues, building on Einstein’s predictive capabilities.
3. Omni-Channel Support: Agentforce works across email, chat, social media, or phone, ensuring customers receive a consistent experience across interaction methods.
4. Automated Workflows: Businesses can create automated workflows for routine tasks like ticket routing, follow-up emails, and data entry, saving time and reducing the likelihood of human error. 
5. Real-Time Customer Insights: Real-time insights into customer behavior Agentforce agents to make informed decisions quickly. Agents have the data they need to upsell a product or resolve an issue.
6. Scalability and Flexibility: Like all Salesforce products, Agentforce is scalable to fit businesses of any size.  You can tailor Agentforce to meet your needs, whether you’re a small startup or a large enterprise.
7. Data Security: Agentforce uses Salesforce’s Einstein Trust Layer, which provides guardrails for the use of AI technology. The Einstein Trust Layer ensures the ethical and secure use of AI within Salesforce, including data protection, regulatory compliance, and transparency in all AI decisions. This means that customer information is shared securely, but not retained.

 Applying Agentforce to serve your needs

Agentforce can simplify many of a business’ most important tasks, including:

1. Autonomous Operation: AI agents can function independently to handle routine customer service tasks, such as answering inquiries, troubleshooting issues, and processing sales orders. This frees up human staff to handle bigger, more complex issues.
2. Customizable AI Agents: Agentforce’s agents can be customized based on a business’ unique workflows, ensuring the AI works seamlessly within their existing systems.
3. Seamless Salesforce Integration: Because Agentforce integrates directly with Salesforce, its AI agents can access and utilize all of a business’ Salesforce CRM data, providing a more informed and effective customer interaction experience.
4. Multimodal Capabilities: Agentforce agents can understand and process text, images, and video content, making Agentforce a versatile tool for businesses, handling complex customer interactions across multiple channels.

This is just the beginning for Agentforce

With Salesforce consistently investing in the expansion of its AI capabilities, you can bet that Agentforce’s power and use cases will increase over time. Already, Salesforce is working on agents designed for the healthcare, finance, and retail sectors. These sectors will provide Agentforce with a deeper understanding of industry-specific regulations and customer needs. In addition, Salesforce is focused on enhancing the accuracy of its AI agents by refining Agentforce’s underlying AI models, which will benefit businesses in all sectors

With Agentforce, businesses can transform how they approach customer service and sales. They can improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance service quality through a powerful, customizable, and scalable solution.

Whether you’re a small business or a large enterprise, now is the time to explore Agentforce to automate and optimize your business’s most cumbersome customer support and sales processes. As we at DCS learn more about Agentforce and how it’s benefiting our clients, we’ll share many of those lessons here on our Insights page. But if you’re ready to jump in now, we’re on board: Contact us today to start transforming your business through Salesforce Agentforce!