Say Hello to Agentforce: Elevating Einstein to the Next Level of AI

Connected relationships drive growth. Up to 76% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs. It is imperative to set your business apart by building strong customer relationships and delivering high-quality support and personalized communications. Salesforce continues to make advancements that revolutionize customer bonding with the announcement of Agentforce at Dreamforce 2024.

Salesforce Customer 360 Evolves into Foundation

Salesforce has revamped Customer 360 into a new platform called Foundation, a new user interface that boasts greater processing power and seamless integrations of all Salesforce acquisitions. This integration enhances data access, resulting in more precise AI capabilities, with customer accuracy and relevancy hitting around 90%, and promoter scores doubling or even tripling.

Foundation unifies comprehensive customer information, enriched by real-time data from Data Cloud. Agents are empowered with a complete view of customer interactions, enabling superior support. Data Cloud ensures that all tools have the most current customer data. These autonomous agent tools deliver connected customer experiences, improved support, and data-driven decision-making across departments. Some key enhancements include:  

• Unified Customer Data: Creates a single, shared view of the customer by unifying data from multiple touchpoints and Salesforce apps.  
• Data Quality and Governance: Ensures data is clean, accurate, and consistently formatted.  
• Customer Identity: Enhances the recognition of customer identity across different systems and interactions through various digital and physical channels to identify and stitch together various customer profiles into one cohesive view.  
• Privacy and Compliance: Includes robust features for managing date privacy and compliance to meet all data regulations and policies.  
• Enhanced Integrations: Offers flexibility and integration capabilities with various systems and platforms to make it easy to bring in data from disparate sources for improved customer profiles.  
• Real-Time Insights: Provides real-time insights and analytics for businesses to act quickly on customer data to ensure relevant customer engagements.  
• Scalability: Handles vast amounts of data that can scale with your business to maintain comprehensive and accurate 360-dgree views of customers.

By moving to Foundation, Salesforce is focusing on providing more robust, unified, and real-time customer data management capabilities, which can significantly improve how businesses engage with their customers, personalize interactions, and drive customer satisfaction and loyalty.

What is Salesforce Agentforce?

Agentforce is what AI was meant to be.

Salesforce Agentforce seamlessly integrates with key Salesforce technologies including Data Cloud, Customer 360, and the Salesforce Platform. This integration ensures continuous, intelligent, and personalized support and service solutions that enhance customer service across multiple channels. Embedded within every Salesforce cloud, Agentforce equips teams with 24/7 agents to address diverse business needs efficiently.

At its core, Salesforce Agentforce is a customizable AI agent platform designed to automate tasks across industries. Empowering organizations to develop intelligent, autonomous agents to handle a range of functions—from customer service and sales to operations and marketing. These agents excel at tasks like answering customer queries, personalizing shopping experiences, optimizing marketing campaigns, and analyzing data.

Agentforce leverages Salesforce's robust tools such as Flow, Apex, and APIs, enabling businesses to configure these agents easily with a low-code interface.

The platform’s heart, the Atlas Reasoning Engine, facilitates decision-making and task execution based on real-time data. Organizations can swiftly deploy AI agents to enhance efficiency, minimize manual effort, and streamline workflows. 

Key Features of Salesforce Agentforce

Salesforce Agentforce provides versatile and comprehensive customer support to stay connected to customers across preferred platforms, ensuring no query goes unanswered. Plus, Agentforce leverages Einstein AI to provide insightful analytics, identify performance bottlenecks, and predict customer needs for proactive service. One company saw case resolution improve 40% in just a few weeks with Agentforce.  

Here are some of the key features:  

• Omnichannel Support: Connect with your audience on their preferred platforms— email, social media, phone, or live chat. Agentforce centralizes all interactions into one cohesive interface, ensuring no query goes unanswered.
• Seamless Case Management: Track and manage customer cases with ease. Agentforce assigns cases to the appropriate agents, ensuring quick and accurate resolutions.
• Comprehensive Knowledge Base: Create a robust repository of FAQs, articles, and guides that your support team can easily search for and find precise answers, enhancing efficiency and reducing response times.
• Advanced Automation Tools: Leverage workflows, macros, and AI-powered bots to automate repetitive tasks, allowing your support agents to focus on more complex and nuanced customer issues.
• Smooth Integrations: Integrate seamlessly with other Salesforce products and third-party applications, giving you a holistic view of customer interactions to enable a more personalized approach.
• Insightful Analytics and Reporting: Gain insights into your customer service operations through detailed analytics and reporting. Identify performance bottlenecks and uncover opportunities for improvement. 

How Agentforce Elevates Salesforce Einstein 

Salesforce Einstein AI is improved with the launch of Agentforce by offering a new suite of AI-driven features that elevate customer service experiences and operations.  

Key highlights include:

• Einstein Copilot: Copilot has been upgraded to Agentforce providing real-time, AI-powered guidance during customer interactions, suggesting next-best actions, and automating routine tasks.
• Einstein GPT for Service: This enhancement allows agents to leverage generative AI to respond to customer queries more efficiently, offering personalized, contextually relevant responses.
• Automated Workflows: Through Einstein, workflows are further automated, freeing up agent time and improving response times. AI detects patterns in customer inquiries and automates repetitive tasks or cases.
• Service Cloud Voice: Agentforce integrates with Service Cloud Voice, using Einstein to analyze voice calls and offer immediate insights and suggestions to agents during calls.
• Predictive Insights: Einstein AI enhances case management by predicting customer needs and issues, agents will proactively resolve problems or escalate issues efficiently.

Einstein + Agentforce boosts customer service capabilities with smarter, more predictive, and automated processes, enabling agents to focus on more complex tasks while improving overall customer satisfaction.

Agentforce in Core Clouds

The Salesforce Core encompasses essential components integral to Salesforce's CRM ecosystem, providing comprehensive solutions for managing various business functions. Agentforce enhances Salesforce's core clouds—Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Commerce Cloud and Marketing Cloud—by integrating advanced Einstein AI automation capabilities.

• Sales Cloud
  • Sales Development: Agents engage with prospects as autonomous Sales Development Representatives (SDR) to handle prospect outreach, answer product questions, handle objections, and book meetings for sales representatives. Plus, you can decide how often your agent will engage before briefing sellers for handoffs, allowing your sales representatives to concentrate on building customer relationships.
  • Sales Coaching: Sales reps can practice pitching, objection handling, and negotiation practice with realistic roles tailored for each deal. Agentforce will provide consistent feedback on seller strengths, where they can improve, actionable steps to advance deals grounded in your CRM data. This allows for easy ROI assessments from Einstein to analyze deal win/loss rates.
  • Agentforce for Sales will be generally available starting late October 2024.
• Service Cloud
  • AI-Powered Customer Service: Agentforce replaces traditional chatbots with intelligent service agents capable of autonomously handling a wider variety of like resolving inquiries, tracking customer issues, and escalating to a human service representative when necessary. Agents can be set up in minutes using pre-built templates or customized with low-code builds with defined guardrails for specific business needs.
  • 24/7 Availability: Agents are always available to respond to customers leading to reduced response times and increased customer satisfaction.
  • Agentforce for Service will be generally available starting late October 2024.
• Marketing Cloud
  • Campaign Management: Agentforce can autonomously generate campaign briefs, target audience segments, marketing campaigns, content, and customer journeys in Flow. With Einstein, campaign performance is continuously analyzed against KPIs and will provide proactive feedback and recommendations for campaign improvement.
  • Agentforce Campaigns is generally available now. Agentforce Personalization is expected to be generally available in summer 2025.  
• Commerce Cloud
  • Personalized Shopping Assistance: Agentforce Personal Shopper works as a digital concierge. Powering personalized conversations directly on your commerce site or within preferred messaging apps to help shoppers easily find products and convert faster by guiding them through search queries and personalized product recommendations.
  • Build and Manage Commerce Sites: Agentforce Merchant helps ecommerce merchandisers build and manage sites with ease. It automates tasks like generating promotions and writing product descriptions, enhancing efficiency. Using data, it recommends ways to boost product performance, move slow inventory, and increase conversions.
  • Improved B2B Shopping: Agentforce Buyer offers an autonomous shopping experience for B2B buyers, simplifying product searches and orders with pre-negotiated pricing via chat or messaging. Linked to Sales, Service, and Order Management data, it tracks orders and provides post-purchase support, managing tasks like “Where is My Order (WISMO)” requests to reduce customer service interactions.
  • Agentforce Merchant will be generally available in October 2024. Agentforce Personal Shopper and Buyer will be available in beta in October 2024.
• Overall Platform Enhancements
  • Data Cloud Integration: Agentforce leverages Data Cloud to pull in real-time data across systems, ensuring that AI agents can act with full context and precision. This increases the effectiveness of automated processes.
  • Automation and Customization: Tools like Flow, Apex, and MuleSoft, can extend business automations within the core clouds. This makes Agentforce a powerful tool for scaling automation without needing to build new integrations from scratch

Agentforce improves Salesforce's core clouds by embedding intelligent Einstein AI agents that streamline workflows, enhance customer interactions, and automate tasks more effectively, making businesses more efficient and responsive. To learn more about Salesforce Core Cloud AI, read “Unlocking Salesforce Core Cloud Product Potential with Einstein AI.”

Agents and Einstein AI are Transforming Businesses

As customer expectations soar to unprecedented levels, agents are poised to integrate into every facet of our lives. These agents can reason, orchestrate tasks, and take action, providing personalized experiences on a large scale. Investing in robust support solutions like Salesforce Agentforce, powered by Salesforce Einstein, is no longer just an option—it’s imperative for fostering lasting customer relationships and securing your business's long-term success.