Salesforce launches Agentforce AI agent platform into general availability – SiliconANGLE

Salesforce Inc. today announced the general availability of Agentforce, its suite of tools for building autonomous artificial intelligence agents to augment work for enterprise employees worldwide.

Agentforce allows companies to build and customize AI agents, which can connect to any company data and take actions on behalf of employees across sales, service, marketing and commerce. The platform’s agents don’t depend on human engagement and can take action based on changes in data, business logic or prebuilt automations following a new trend known as agentic AI.

“The agent revolution is real and as exciting as the cloud revolution was, the social revolution, the mobile revolution,” said Marc Benioff, founder and chief executive of Salesforce. “It will provide a level of transformation that we’ve never seen.”

The company said that it delivers the platform today so that companies don’t need to “DIY their AI,” meaning that many enterprise businesses have been cobbling together solutions from various tools. To that end, Agentforce is an all-in-one solution designed to put everything together and deliver working agents out-of-the-box that are easy to customize with English prompts and deploy with low-code or no-code tools.

Adam Evans, senior vice president of product for the Salesforce AI platform, said many companies building AI copilots face this same issue when trying to get a good return on investment on their applications.

“It isn’t their primary business to build up software and agents,” Evans said. “If you ask our customers, do they want to build a car? Taking all the parts and building a car or do they want to take a Waymo and have their problem solved? Starting today, they don’t need to take this DIY approach to AI.”

Agents launched by users from Agentforce get access to Salesforce’s ecosystem of application partners, which provides them a large number of what the company calls “skills,” or tooling capabilities.

Adam likened adding application programming interfaces and capabilities to agents to the first “The Matrix” movie where characters could just download new skills, such as the ability to fly a helicopter. Through the Salesforce App Exchange, third-party software-as-a-service providers and companies can give users the ability for agents to use their platforms as tools. It could be as simple as additional access to data or external services.

For example, an agent could add an external weather service to retrieve real-time data to personalize email or text messages to customers. Another could connect to Google Calendar to retrieve an employee’s upcoming schedule to assist them with organizing their time between meetings or preparing a summary at the beginning of the week of what to expect.

The company also announced the Agentforce AI Partner Network, which provides enterprises with what they need to add these capabilities and functions from their platforms or deploy partner-built agents for industry-specific roles. Leading global systems integrators, including Accenture plc, Capgemini SE, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Ltd., IBM Corp. and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, also partnered with Salesforce to assist enterprise customers in building and deploying AI agents.

Salesforce launched Agentforce into early access last month and several customers have already seen benefits from the platform, the company said. Wiley, a publisher of educational resources, said it saw a 40% boost in self-service and efficiency in case resolution over its previous chatbot. According to the company, the platform is more capable of handling routine inquiries than a rigid query-response bot, allowing human agents to focus on more complex cases.

BACA Systems, a manufacturer of robotic systems for stone fabrication, said it started with employee-facing agents saving multiple hours a week.

“Agentforce isn’t just another AI platform that requires months of customization,” said Andrew Russo, a Salesforce architect at BACA Systems. “At BACA Systems, we saw how it enabled us to launch powerful generative AI experiences in days — no AI engineers needed. For customers with larger admin teams, the impact could be even greater.”

Now that Agentforce is generally available, Salesforce customers can try the platform tools for free with Salesforce Foundations, a free add-on for Enterprise Edition and higher. To support AI agents, Foundations now includes credits for the first 1,000 conversations with Agentforce Service Agent so that companies can try out the platform before buying.

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