Salesforce launches Agentforce, AI-powered customer service

Salesforce has taken the wraps off a new AI-powered customer service product, Agentforce.

Agentforce is an upgraded version of what was formerly known as Einstein Copilot, launched earlier this year. It offers “autonomous AI agents” that can be used for a range of customer service tasks, according to Salesforce. The agents are able to find and query appropriate company data, analyse it, decide on a course of action, and then undertake tasks within parameters set by the company. For example, dealing with customer queries or updating marketing campaigns.

The agents can also hand over details to human agents on their interactions with the customer as well as suggestions on how the human agent might want to approach the problem.

Ready-made agents for Agentforce

The service has a number of ready-made agents that have been set up for specific tasks, including a Buyer agent. This assists B2B shoppers with their transactions by finding the right product or tracking orders after purchase. There’s also a B2C equivalent, Personal Shopper, which makes personalised recommendations to would-be purchasers across websites and messaging apps.

Sales and marketing-focused agents are also available. A Sales Development Representative can chat with prospects and set up meetings, while sales staff can use the Sales Coach agent to practice their pitches. A Campaign Optimizer bot is also available to study marketing data and refine campaigns accordingly.

There’s also a more customisable agent option, just called Agentforce, which can deal with a wider range of scenarios and fit in with companies’ existing workflows.

Users can adapt the out-of-the-box agents or develop new ones using the low-code Agent Builder. Agent Builder allows companies to create jobs for agents to do by writing natural language instructions on the nature of the job and establishing a range of responses for the agent to use.

Early Agentforce customers

Restaurant reservation service OpenTable, high-end department store Saks, and publisher Wiley are among the companies that have already deployed Agentforce.

Wiley is using the agents for customer support, where it can tap into the company’s knowledge base to answer users’ queries and assist with problems around account access or payments. Salesforce said the company had seen case resolution rise by 40% since using the service.

Agentforce runs on Salesforce’s Atlas Reasoning Engine, which the software giant says is “designed to simulate how humans think and plan”. Agentforce also uses the company’s Data Cloud to create a single repository of an enterprise’s data that can be accessed by all Salesforce services, and ties in with other Salesforce automation tools including MuleSoft, Flow, Prompts and Apex.

Agentforce for Service and Sales will be available from 25 October. Agentforce will be priced from $2 per conversation.