Salesforce unleashes its first AI agents
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Agentforce on the Wiley website. Credit: Salesforce
Salesforce on Thursday officially debuted Agentforce, its effort to create generative AI bots capable of taking action on their own, within established limits.
Why it matters: Removing the need for direct human supervision opens up the potential for more significant productivity gains, but also introduces significant new risks.
Driving the news: The first wave of Salesforce's AI agents focus on sales, marketing, commerce and customer service.
- Out of the box, Salesforce is offering a handful of agents that can handle tasks such as sales rep, service agent, personal shopper and sales coach.
- Agentforce also includes a low-code option to build additional agents and options to bring in agents and models from others.
- Salesforce says Agentforce starts at $2 per conversation, with volume discounts for larger customers.
How it works: A key part of Agentforce is Atlas, a new reasoning engine that Salesforce said aims to simulate how humans think and plan.
- According to Salesforce, Atlas starts by evaluating and then refining a query. From there, it retrieves data and analyzes the results to ensure they're accurate, relevant, and grounded in trusted data.
What they're saying: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff positioned Agentforce as "AI as it was meant to be," saying that most companies have been oversold on AI-assisted copilots that don't deliver enough value.
- "They found the technology was not ready for prime time," Benioff said during a briefing with reporters and editors.
- "We've seen an over 40% increase in our case resolution when you compare the agent to our old chatbot," said Kevin Quigley, a senior manager at Wiley, one of the customers who got early access to Agentforce.
The big picture: The effort to move generative AI beyond an aid to humans and into so-called "agents" that can take action on their own is seen as the next big shift, as Axios highlighted in February.
- It was the animating principle behind Sierra, the company co-founded by OpenAI chairman (and former Salesforce exec Bret Taylor.)
- However, autonomous agents are a significant leap, especially for a technology that is known to get its facts wrong and to answer the same question differently.
- One means for mitigating these risks is to combine generative AI with other types of rules and limits. For example, a business could create a customer service bot empowered to offer refunds, but only up to a set dollar amount.
