salesforce.com Inc.

01/16/2025 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 01/16/2025 07:52

The World’s Largest Agentic AI Deployment? Salesforce is Running it on Itself

The World's Largest Agentic AI Deployment? Salesforce Is Running It on Itself

Company's 'customer zero' approach with innovations like Agentforce enabling it to use its own technology and put it through its paces for widespread adoption

Misty Fierro knows the grind of searching for answers.

As the consulting practice lead at Yudrio, an IT solutions provider, she's built a career helping government clients make the most of Salesforce technology. But for years, across several Salesforce-related jobs, she sometimes struggled to get complete or relevant support information for her clients on help.salesforce.com.

"You'd have to comb through a ton of content and links to get what you needed," said the former U.S. Army tech expert.

That all changed late last year when Salesforce began using its own technology, Agentforce, to power its support site. A 24/7 AI concierge, Agentforce is providing fast, accurate, and more actionable responses to thousands of customer inquiries every week. For Fierro, the difference the AI agents provided was like night and day.

"Now, I can type in a question and get exactly what I need - complete, actionable, and trustworthy information - almost instantly," she said. "Agentforce is the new tool in my toolbox. I use it everywhere I can because it's so helpful."

Agentforce is the new tool in my toolbox. I use it everywhere I can because it's so helpful.

Misty Fierro, Consulting Practice Lead at Yudrio

What's more, Fierro is so enamored with her ability to get fast answers to the dozens of questions she asks on the site every week - freeing her to focus on other important work - that she urges her clients to try it as well. She also uses it to show that the guidance she provides to clients is correct. For example, Fierro recently asked Agentforce to detail the different types of integration patterns available to her clients on Salesforce. She received details from the company's "Integration Patterns and Practices" guide that directly answered her question, explained which products they pertained to, and asked if she'd like to dig further into any particular patterns.

"I tell clients, 'hey, if you don't believe me, go look at Agentforce, it'll tell you the truth. You can validate what I'm telling you with Salesforce's own tools,'" said Fierro. "When they see how easy it is to verify information, it makes them trust both the technology and me. That's the hardest part of what I do - getting them to trust you."

Agentforce: The Digital Labor Platform.

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Fierro's experience is just one example of why Salesforce is "Customer Zero" for many of its products. By piloting its own technology, it gains immediate benefits from tools like Agentforce while gathering valuable insights to refine its offerings and showcase their potential for broader adoption. In fact, by rolling out Agentforce to support its own massive customer base, Salesforce may be in the midst of the world's largest agentic AI rollout to date.

Embracing digital labor

This focus on "eating its own dogfood," as the tech industry refers to such programs, has never been more important, with Agentforce serving as a digital labor platform for enterprises. Indeed, Agentforce is a transformative, agentic system that will completely alter how organizations staff up and how people do their jobs.

Eventually, every enterprise will embrace an "agent-first" approach, with humans and agents working together to drive customer success. Salesforce is leading the way, starting with its own service and support - ‌and soon expanding to sales, marketing, and many other critical areas - to show how Agentforce's bold vision for digital labor can transform businesses. "We have to be Customer Zero," said Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO of Salesforce, when announcing Agentforce 2.0 in December. "If we can't show that we're going to do it, it's not really going to happen."

"Right now there are thousands of customers working with thousands of agents working with thousands of humans, all in tandem," he added. "As a CEO, I'm not just managing human beings, but I'm also managing agents. There is an agentic layer around support today at Salesforce."

Right now there are thousands of customers working with thousands of agents working with thousands of humans, all in tandem. As a CEO, I'm not just managing human beings, but I'm also managing agents. There is an agentic layer around support today at Salesforce.

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce

Immediate payoffs

Salesforce is already seeing significant value from its Agentforce deployment. The company is now handling about 32,000 customer conversations per week with a resolution rate of 83%. Importantly, costly escalations to humans have been cut in half, with only 1% of customers needing to speak to a human. Routine tasks like password resets and generic product questions are now autonomously handled by Agentforce.

"We expect that to keep improving, further reducing the need to transfer cases to humans," said Salesforce EVP of Customer Success Sanjeev Balakrishnan, who leads the company's global support engineers team.

With the added bandwidth agents provide, team members will have more time to focus on high-touch customer engagements and expand their professional skillsets, he said. For example, employees with strong customer relations skills could move into new, career-advancing business or sales development roles.

Agentforce customers like Vivint and Adecco Group are thinking in similar ways. Vivint, the leading provider of smart home and security solutions, is augmenting its customer service teams with Agentforce agents working autonomously 24/7 to handle basic customer problems. As a result, it expects its human representatives to be able to focus on more complex and critical customer concerns. The Adecco Group, a leading talent company, is using Agentforce to help recruiters engage with customers 24/7, review resumes, and effectively match job seekers with ideal career opportunities. The company expects this will free up time for recruiters to foster stronger and more personal relationships with a larger number of clients.

Lessons from the trenches

Building and deploying agents with Agentforce can be quick and easy, but rollouts are most successful when all of an organization's data and metadata are unified, secured, and accessible to the large language models (LLMs) that agents use to reason and plan. Agents need content and context to do their job effectively. Balakrishnan said that's one of the key learnings from his team's work - the importance of thinking about ‌relevant content early and often and getting it all in one place via Data Cloud.

Data Cloud is the hyperscale data engine within Salesforce that brings together structured and unstructured data from any source and harmonizes it to create unified customer profiles. These profiles are the trusted data source that powers every agent action, automation, and insight across the Salesforce Platform.

Of course, Salesforce was far along the path of unifying its data through Data Cloud when it launched Agentforce in September 2024. For other customers just beginning the data migration journey, Balakrishan recommends starting gradually.

"Don't wait to get everything done at the same time," he said. "Start with what you have - knowledge articles, product documentation - and build from there."

Similarly, he suggests identifying priority service and support projects and then moving related business and customer data into Data Cloud over several months.

Customers can get their data together quickly with Data Cloud's Zero Copy Partner Network, which enables companies to integrate data from more than 200 data providers - such as Snowflake, Google, Amazon, and DataBricks - all in real time, and without complex, costly data pipelines.

"The more you use Data Cloud to integrate your structured and unstructured data, the more powerful Agentforce becomes - there's no question about it," said Bernard Slowey, VP of Digital Customer Success at Salesforce. "High-quality, relevant content is essential for training an effective agent."

The more you use Data Cloud to integrate your structured and unstructured data, the more powerful Agentforce becomes - there's no question about it. High-quality, relevant content is essential for training an effective agent.

Bernard Slowey, VP of Digital Customer Success, Salesforce

A second takeaway from Salesforce's Customer Zero program is the importance of prioritizing user experience when deploying agents. Initially, the interface for Agentforce looked like just another chatbot, and users didn't initially realize they were using something more unique, Slowey said. To address this, engineers revamped help.salesforce.com with a search-engine-like user interface and removed the "contact support" button from English-language sites. Now, most customers engage with Agentforce first when they have service and support questions.

Finally, Salesforce learned the importance of educating users on what agents can do and how they differ from traditional AI assistants, Slowey noted.

"When customers see Agentforce, they think about the terrible chatbot experiences they've had," Slowey said. "So, you have to show them how agents are different, how they're trained on vast content, how they have more human-like intelligence and how they deliver better answers faster."

Just the beginning

Even with its progress, Salesforce is just beginning to unlock the vast potential of Agentforce to revolutionize customer service and support.

Because the agentic layer of the Salesforce Platform is available for every part of its business, the company is moving to deploy agents to augment the work that its sales, marketing, human resources, and other employees perform every day.

"This isn't just hype," Benioff said recently. "This is real technology that can lower your costs, make things easier, and deliver the vision of digital labor to you and your company - now."

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Dave Berkowitz Salesforce Newsroom
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