salesforce.com Inc.

01/10/2025 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 01/10/2025 07:03

Salesforce Unveils Agentforce for Retail to Boost Productivity with Digital Labor and Retail Cloud to Unite In-Store and Digital Shopping

Agentforce digital labor platform includes new pre-built Agentforce skills for retailers that assist with tasks across order management, guided shopping, appointment scheduling, and loyalty programs

Retail Cloud includes a cloud-based POS, clienteling, endless aisle, omnichannel fulfillment, and more to deliver personalized shopping experiences across physical and digital touchpoints

SharkNinja and Saks are using Salesforce to help boost employee and associate productivity and deliver more impactful shopper interactions

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the world's #1 AI CRM, today unveiled two AI-powered innovations for retailers: Agentforce for Retail and Retail Cloud with Modern POS, helping store associates, customer service representatives, and digital merchants boost productivity and sales, while delivering more personalized shopping experiences.

Agentforce for Retail includes a new library of pre-built agent skills, making it easier for retailers to build AI agents that automate time-consuming tasks, such as order management and appointment scheduling, and deploy rapid shopper personalization at scale.

Salesforce's new Retail Cloud with Modern POS is a cloud-based system bringing online and offline shopping data together on a single platform, giving associates a single entry point to serve shoppers better and faster with mobile POS, clienteling, endless aisle, mixed cart and omnichannel fulfillment, inventory management, and more.

What's New:

Agentforce for Retail includes new pre-built skills for order management, guided shopping, appointment scheduling, and loyalty promotion creation. Agentforce makes trusted, autonomous AI agents part of every team, increasing employee capacity across marketing, commerce, merchandising, and store operations with digital teammates that handle complex tasks with precision, accuracy, and personalization. Scalable digital labor will help retailers reach new levels of productivity - responding to customer questions in real time, modifying orders, issuing returns, managing inventory, scheduling consultations, and even coordinating with shipping providers - all without the need for human intervention.

These new Agentforce skills are designed to unlock more capacity to serve shoppers, drive costs down, and increase shopper conversion. They complement existing skills already available for merchandisers, marketers, and customer service reps. New skills include:

  • Commerce Skills for Order Management bring order servicing to Agentforce, allowing retailers to offer self-service order servicing options that reduce costs and boost customer loyalty. With these new skills, customers can conversationally update order information like payment or shipping details, handle uneven exchanges, or quickly inquire about order status on the channel they prefer.
  • Commerce Skills for Guided Shopping help retailers scale personalized one-to-one concierge services to digital proportions, with new skills for guided shopping. Shoppers can use natural language to get product recommendations from an agent calculated by Agentforce and grounded in shopper, inventory, and operational data. New actions allow customers to search for products, add items to their cart, and checkout conversationally.
  • Field Service Skills for Appointment Scheduling assist service representatives in facilitating appointment bookings for deliveries, installations, or consultations, powered by AI-driven scheduling and real-time availability updates.
  • Marketing Skills for Loyalty Promotion Creation assist marketers in creating and revising loyalty promotions with conversational prompts grounded in shopper, POS, and segmentation data resulting in more personalized email content and subject lines that increase customer engagement.

Salesforce is also introducing Retail Cloud with Modern POS, which arms retailers with a user-friendly, cloud-based POS. This system brings online and offline shopping and inventory data together on a single platform, giving associates a single tool to serve their shoppers better and faster. Features include:

  • Clienteling, Inventory Management, Endless Aisle, and built-in AI powered by real-time shopper and inventory data: Associates can create and modify shopper profiles that capture shopping history, preferences, and loyalty status; view and update inventory across warehouses, commerce channels, and supply chain; action on analytics from omni-channel customer, order, inventory, and sales performance data; and activate AI for voice assistance, return fraud analysis, and personalized product recommendations.
  • Mixed Cart and Omni-channel Fulfillment give shoppers more delivery and exchange options while reducing supply chain costs: An omni-cart architecture allows each line item to have its own fulfillment method, offering a single "mixed cart" with shopper fulfillment preferences including buy-online-pickup-in-store (BOPIS), buy-online-return-in-store, and omni exchange.
  • Mobile-first design and secure offline mode release associates from the checkout counter: Offline-capable software enables checkouts anywhere shoppers are ready. Payment transactions are encrypted and stored, ready to be processed when an associate reconnects, allowing sales to occur during a loss of internet, remote and outdoor activity, or peak shopping activity.
  • Built-in Salesforce integrations and no-code CMS get retailers up and running quickly: Integrations with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Order Management, and Service Cloud let retailers quickly access customer data insights, order management, cart synchronization, product information management, and more. The cloud-based CMS uses intuitive drag-and-drop features to tailor the interface to each store's unique brand.

Retail Cloud and Agentforce increase workforce productivity across front- and back-office teams:

AI agents perform best when grounded in accurate, up-to-date customer and operational data. To unlock this value, retailers require solutions that can unify, action, and scale data from both online and offline shopping activity.

With Salesforce's Modern POS and Data Cloud, retailers can harmonize data and metadata from in-store, commerce, marketing, service, and loyalty systems to give employees and associates a unified, near real-time view of activity across the entire shopper journey. Retailers can now use Agentforce, with enhanced Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), to retrieve and take action on this data and deliver precise answers, tailored engagements, and upsell opportunities with every shopper interaction.

Why it matters: In a Salesforce study, 81% of retail executives say that inefficient processes and technology drain associate productivity. Store associates alone log in to more than 16 different applications and systems each day, leaving nearly 78% of store associates without a single, actionable view of their shoppers - resulting in lost productivity and fragmented shopping experiences.

The Salesforce perspective: "Together, AI-fueled digital labor and a modern POS can unlock a new scale of operational capacity for retailers. With these latest Agentforce skills for retail and a cloud-based, intuitive POS system, Salesforce is helping retailers deliver seamless, unified shopping experiences across both the physical and digital realms of retail that drive productivity advancements and business growth across their entire enterprise." - Nitin Mangtani, SVP & GM, Retail, Salesforce

Customer perspective: "At SharkNinja, our team is driven by a passion for delivering high-performing technology to every consumer. Agentforce will help us scale this mission by handling routine shopper inquiries - like 'Where is my order?' - and enabling seamless self-service. This will allow our team members to focus on innovation and creating meaningful, high-impact interactions." - Velia Carboni, CIO, SharkNinja

Availability:

  • Commerce Skills for Guided Shopping (Product Search, Product Recommendations, Add to Cart, Re-Order, and WISMO) will be generally available in March 2025.
  • Commerce Skills for Order Management will be generally available in March 2025.
  • Field Service Skills for Appointment Scheduling will be generally available in February 2025.
  • Marketing Skills for Loyalty Promotion Creation will be generally available in February 2025.
  • Retail Cloud with Modern POS will be generally available in April 2025.
  • Enhanced reasoning and RAG will be generally available in February 2025.

Learn more:

Any unreleased services or features referenced here are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available.

About Salesforce

Salesforce helps organizations of any size reimagine their business for the world of AI. With Agentforce, Salesforce's trusted platform, organizations can bring humans together with agents to drive customer success - powered by AI, data, and action. Visit www.salesforce.com for more information.

Source: Salesforce