Agentforce 101: build custom AI agents tailored to your business needs

AI is disrupting entire industries, from healthcare and education to manufacturing. For example, Salesforce’s Agentforce enables enterprises to automate nearly every business function. Users can build, customise, and deploy AI agents that act autonomously and assist employees with their daily activities, leading to higher efficiency across the board. 

Launched in October 2024, Agentforce is part of the third wave of AI, marking a new step toward human-like cognition. Its autonomous agents work seamlessly with the Salesforce ecosystem, learning from data and taking action on tasks like sales prospecting, customer support, and campaign management. 

“Agentforce is what AI was meant to be,” said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. Here’s what you should know about it. 

What is Agentforce?

Agentforce is a low-code platform for building and deploying custom AI agents. These are capable of working on their own by retrieving data from your systems, the Salesforce platform, and external sources. 

Enterprises can also deploy autonomous agents for specific tasks, such as customer service or sales. The agents can be configured to operate based on your business needs and follow predefined rules. 

Agentforce agents fall into two categories: autonomous and assistive. The former will do the work on your behalf, automating business processes. They’re capable of advanced reasoning, which allows them to make decisions and handle complex processes without human intervention. 

Assistive agents, on the other hand, will help you get things done by providing guidance, recommendations, or data-driven insights. 

For example, they can summarise customer conversations and highlight the topics discussed. This kind of data allows you to better understand consumers’ needs, deliver hyper-personalised experiences, and identify bottlenecks in marketing, sales, or customer support processes. 

Key features and capabilities 

Salesforce Agentforce uses real-time data to automate or streamline workflows across the entire enterprise. Depending on your business needs, you can use it to build AI agents for service, marketing, sales, or commerce teams—just to name a few. 

What sets it apart is its ability to act autonomously by leveraging Salesforce’s capabilities, such as the Atlas Reasoning Engine. Plus, it’s a part of your Salesforce ecosystem. This means you can use the framework you have already built in your Sales, Service, or Marketing cloud and related Salesforce cloud services for a unified experience across departments. 

Without further ado, let’s take a closer look at its key features:

• Powered by Salesforce: Organisations have been using Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and other Salesforce products for decades. These apps and services form the foundation of Agentforce agents, allowing them to work autonomously. They also ensure the agents have access to current, relevant data, which further contributes to their efficiency. 

• Secure AI architecture: Like other Salesforce products, Agentforce safeguards your data through the Einstein Trust Layer. This system masks sensitive information, such as names and other personally identifiable details, before sending it to the large language model (LLM). At the same time, it prevents your data from being stored by third-party LLMs through Zero Retention, a process that allows data access without duplication. 

• Knowledge management: In a 2024 survey, only 8% of business leaders said they deployed at least half of their generative AI experiments. The challenges they face are largely due to data silos and disconnected systems. Since Agentforce is an integral part of the Salesforce ecosystem, it brings all your data into one place. Plus, it can pull data from external sources via Salesforce Data Cloud or Mulesoft. This vast knowledge base allows it to provide fast, accurate, and personalised responses to user enquiries. 

• Task automation: Enterprises can use Agentforce to automate customer service, ticket creation, order management, and other processes. For example, its autonomous AI agents can schedule automated follow-up emails after responding to a customer. This allows them to measure customer satisfaction, make further recommendations, and collect feedback. 

• Custom agents: Custom agents: With Salesforce’s Agent Builder, companies can create and deploy custom AI agents with specific roles. For instance, you can build an agent that acts as a sales rep in charge of prospecting and lead generation. Or one that handles customer enquiries across multiple channels, responding in your brand’s voice. 

• Clearly defined operational boundaries: When deploying an Agentforce agent, you can set up guardrails to outline what it can and cannot do. Guardrails are instructions that define the agent’s operational boundaries. If, say, you want the AI agent to escalate certain tickets to human agents, you may establish rules based on predefined criteria, such as the nature of the request or keywords in the inquiry. 

To unlock the full benefits of Agentforce, you must customise it to your business needs. Also, it’s necessary to deploy it in an environment with good data and established processes. That’s where an experienced Salesforce partner like Fluido can help. 

How Agentforce is transforming industries 

By now, you should have a better understanding of how Agentforce works. This technology has applications in nearly every industry, driving growth and innovation. Some of its key benefits include:

• Enhanced human agent productivity
• Data-driven decision-making
• Personalised customer experiences
• Increased customer satisfaction
• Reduced overhead and operational costs
• Seamless collaboration across departments
• Multi-channel integration

For example, universities can build and deploy recruitment services agents with Salesforce’s Agentforce. The agents can assist students around the clock, replying to their questions about specific majors, tuition fees, accommodation, and more. 

Similarly, sales teams can deploy AI agents to automatically qualify leads based on specific criteria, schedule reminders for follow-ups with prospects, and identify cross-sell or upsell opportunities. They can also set up guardrails to ensure the agent will route high-priority leads to the appropriate salesperson. 

Financial institutions, on the other hand, can use Agentforce to monitor transactions, detect and prevent fraud, or automate credit decisioning and other business processes. The agent could also assist clients with financial planning, loan applications, and routine queries. 

The autonomous agents deployed in the manufacturing industry can monitor inventory levels, track and manage orders, or predict equipment maintenance. You can train them to flag potential delays in the supply chain or defects in production processes. 

No matter your industry, Agentforce can streamline core business operations and act as an extension of your team. With the right customisations, its agents can handle 90% to 99% of customer enquiries and route complex cases to the right teams or departments. 

Choose Fluido as your Agentforce partner

Agentforce can have significant benefits for your business, but to get the most out of it, you will need:

• High-quality data
• Well-defined processes
• A well-thought-out strategy
• An organisational culture open to AI
• Technical know-how

Fluido can guide you every step of the way, from advice on strategy to implementation, testing, and maintenance. Its experts will analyse your needs, devise an action plan, and recommend the best uses for Agentforce. Next, they will build, customise, and configure AI agents based on your goals. 

The professionals at Fluido will help you deploy this technology across key business functions, ensuring it works as expected. They will also train and upskill your team as needed and help you measure the ROI of AI agents. 

Founded in 2010, Fluido is a leading Salesforce consulting partner in Europe, serving more than 300 enterprises. Its team consists of 500+ professionals with expertise in Service Cloud, Experience Cloud, and other Salesforce solutions. 

Ready to start your Agentforce journey? Contact Fluido to learn more, or check out the AI Readiness episode in the Fluido Moments podcast for further insights.