Salesforce Unveils Agentforce: AI Agents to Enhance Business Operations

Salesforce introduced Agentforce on Thursday, an AI-powered suite aimed at augmenting human workers across various business operations.

The company positions this offering as the “third wave” of AI, moving beyond predictive models and generative AI to autonomous agents.

Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO of Salesforce, highlighted the transformative potential of AgentForce during a press conference ahead of the global launch.

“We’re about to enter this third wave of AI—and this third wave of AI, we’re going to know it as agents, and at Salesforce, we’re going to know it as Agentforce,” he said. “And yes, we’re very excited [about] the fourth wave. We can kind of start to start to see it, the wave of droids that’s coming, maybe this mythical fifth wave of AGI will come one day as well. But right now, in the here and now, we’re excited about agents.”

![Salesforce’s new Agent Builder interface, showcasing the data management and knowledge configuration tools for the Einstein Service Agent. This low-code platform allows businesses to customize AI agents without extensive technical expertise.

AI Agents: Salesforce’s solution for enterprise automation challenges

Agentforce builds on Salesforce’s existing platform, leveraging the company’s vast troves of customer data and its recently developed Data Cloud.

Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI, explained the platform approach: “The power of Agentforce is that it’s built from within. It is now part of every Salesforce cloud, every industry cloud, from financial services cloud to Health Cloud to government cloud and media cloud,” she said.

The company introduces several out-of-the-box agents for various roles, including service, sales development, and marketing campaign optimization. These agents can be customized using low-code tools, allowing businesses to tailor the AI to their specific needs without extensive technical expertise.

Clara Shih, Salesforce AI CEO, outlines the “5 Attributes of an Agent,” highlighting Salesforce’s approach to ethical and functional AI deployment.

Benioff highlighted the importance of this platform approach: “What you need to be using is a platform that is doing all of those things for you and our platform, just as it’s managed your data for you and kept it safe and secure in a trusted way, is also going to give you the best artificial intelligence experience you could possibly have,” he said. “The most accurate, the most capable, the easiest and the lowest cost, and no other AI will be able to deliver that, because only we are delivering this platform approach, these autonomous agents that are learning and are taking action.”

Early adopters report significant gains with Agentforce implementation

Source: https://venturebeat.com/ai/salesforces-agentforce-the-ai-assistants-that-want-to-run-your-entire-business