Salesforce this week previewed a bundle of generative AI features it named Agentforce 2.0. Many of them are embedded in Slack, which reinforces the collaboration platform as the base for Salesforce work.
Agentforce 2.0 has some parts live now, some going live early next year and others to come in pilot in 2025. It is the first version to employ Salesforce's Atlas Reasoning Engine.
Reasoning engines simulate human logic and are the cloud services that enable AI autonomy by assembling business rules, data, and generative AI search and summary. In the CX realm, such decision-making is embedded into workflows such as customer service or sales processes.
In the case of Atlas, Salesforce admins and developers can build agents in Slack without code. The process begins with defining the agent's role, what data it can access and what actions the agent can take. It then defines boundaries and restrictions on those actions and controls the channels to which the output is sent, such as Slack, email and WhatsApp. Agentforce 2.0 comes with hundreds of prebuilt "skills" across CRM, Slack and Tableau to get users started.
Agents search and summarize a Salesforce user's CRM data, the company's knowledge documents, Slack and the web to assist humans in more quickly closing sales deals, creating marketing campaigns and personalized e-commerce web content, or solving customer service tickets. Salesforce is betting that CRM data fed into Atlas will be the secret sauce that drives more effective one-to-one CX interactions and, in turn, positive business results.
The Slack connection to Agentforce 2.0 might look like a play to sell more Slack at the expense of Teams, especially considering Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff's harsh words for Microsoft earlier this year, which continued through the Agentforce 2.0 preview.
Instead, making Slack a launchpad for Agentforce is a developer play, said Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst and founder of independent research firm Valoir. Slack developers have been given new skills and capabilities in the Salesforce realm that more tightly integrate Salesforce and Slack, which Salesforce bought for $27.7 billion during the COVID-19 pandemic.
"There's not a lot of Slack customers that are not on Salesforce today, and vice versa," Wettemann said. "So it's the idea of bringing these two together. Now we have a developer that's not just a Slack developer but both a Slack and Agentforce developer."
Agentforce Skills Library Builder lets Salesforce users tap into Agentforce capabilities in Slack to customize agents.
'Digital labor' the future of AI
Salesforce's help site handles more than 32,000 interactions with customers each week. The company claims that Agentforce 2.0 has reduced by half the number of conversations its contact center agents must field since its implementation went live earlier this fall.
"Salesforce is a company today that doesn't just put on the outside of Moscone [Center in San Francisco], 'Humans with agents driving customer success together.' That's actually what's happening inside Salesforce right now: humans with agents driving customer success together," Benioff said.
Part of the appeal of Slack moving forward is that I give a task to somebody and don't necessarily know or care if it's a human or a digital worker doing it.
Rebecca WettemannAnalyst and founder, Valoir
"At the end of the day, we have to deliver customer success; it's one of our core values. … So we have to reconceptualize our entire business. We're thinking about how AI is transforming Salesforce and what … this [means] for our company and also for the industry."
Salesforce characterized Agentforce 2.0's capabilities in sum as "digital humans" and co-workers that would blend in with the human workforce to get more work done, like how a research assistant or a customer service agent might. The company even referred to itself as a "digital labor platform."
Looking through the fog of Salesforce hype, Wettemann said that there is some truth to the idea that bots embedded on collaboration platforms like Slack can be seen as accomplishing real work. In the end, humans won't care if it's a digital research assistant or a human one scouring documents and returning summaries as long as they're right.
"Part of the appeal of Slack moving forward is that I give a task to somebody and don't necessarily know or care if it's a human or a digital worker doing it," Wettemann said. "I might have a bunch of digital workers in a Slack channel that just know [that] when I assign something to them, they're the ones that pick it up, and it doesn't matter to me."
Salesforce users that have experience and knowledge of Salesforce Flow and that have their corporate and CRM data in order will likely be able to quickly set up agents at first and lead adoption, she added.
Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.
