Salesforce is pioneering a new era of AI innovation with the release of Agentforce, a new layer of the Salesforce Platform that helps companies build, customize and deploy AI agents that can autonomously take action across any business function.

• The basics: Unlike outdated assistants and copilots that are limited to generating recommendations or answers to questions, AI agents can autonomously reason and act, tackling multifaceted tasks — like resolving customer cases, qualifying sales leads and optimizing marketing campaigns — alongside and on behalf of humans.

💡 Why it's important: New Salesforce research shows that U.S. consumers can spend up to nine hours interacting with customer service trying to resolve a single issue.

On average, 67% of consumers are frustrated when customer service can't resolve their issues instantly and choose to walk away from roughly one-third of customer service interactions, according to the research. This presents a significant opportunity to improve customer experience with agents.

• Salesforce's AI agent for customer service can respond intelligently to customer questions 24/7, on the channel and at the time most convenient for the customer.
• Where traditional chatbots can only answer a limited subset of questions or requests before needing a human agent's support, Agentforce Service Agent can ask intelligent follow-up questions to get the context it needs, and then seamlessly handoff to a live agent for more complex issues.

Companies like Wiley are already seeing value from agents.

• Wiley uses Agentforce to scale its customer service operations, configuring agents to answer questions using Wiley's knowledge base, automatically resolve account access issues and reset passwords, and direct students to the appropriate resources rather than flooding service reps with requests.

With Agentforce, any company can quickly build and deploy a customer service agent that can solve more complex problems than before — from troubleshooting issues with personalized advice to automatically scheduling field service appointments.

The background: The first wave of AI innovation began with predictive AI, which was used across industries for forecasting things like fraudulent activities, customer behavior and the weather.

• Copilots, which were adopted for a range of simple tasks, such as drafting content or software code, represented the second wave of AI innovation.

In the third wave, AI agents autonomously retrieve the right data in real time, building action plans for any task and executing on those plans without requiring human intervention.

• This means that they can not only suggest email responses and draft FAQs, but also analyze a request and determine what steps to take to fulfill the request.
• An example: To support a sales representative with lead engagement, a Sales Development Representative (SDR) Agent will automatically create and send personalized emails to prospects based on criteria set by the sales rep, address questions, schedule meetings with account executives, and seamlessly hand off leads to human sellers with relevant context if needed.

🧠 What you need to know: The Atlas Reasoning Engine is the brains of Salesforce Agentforce. Built on a proprietary system designed to simulate how humans think and plan, it uses multiple techniques, including advanced retrieval augmentation generation (RAG), to analyze information and determine the next-best actions for completing simple or complex‌ tasks.

• No agent can be trusted, accurate, and reliable without the right data — Salesforce's Data Cloud brings together a company's structured and unstructured data, and data from any other relevant source, to give the LLMs the context it needs to limit hallucinations and deliver reliable and accurate results. In addition, security and compliance guardrails are built in to protect proprietary company data and privacy.
• Many companies are spending heavily on training their own models and assembling the pieces needed to build their own AI platforms. Agentforce, built on the Salesforce Platform, enables companies to avoid the cost and complexity of building AI agents themselves and quickly deploy agents across sales, service, marketing commerce and other use cases customized to their needs.

The takeaway: "AI agents are here now, and the breakthroughs are undeniable‌. These agents aren't just productivity tools. They're taking action, reasoning through complex tasks and helping businesses operate more efficiently," said Adam Evans, SVP of Salesforce AI Platform.

"Agentforce is leading the way," Evans said. "This transformative technology is reshaping how businesses streamline operations, how customers experience personalized service, and how employees are empowered to focus on higher-value work while AI agents handle repetitive tasks, automate business process at unprecedented scale and drive innovation."

Learn how Agentforce can benefit your company.