How Manufacturers Can Use AI Agents to Improve Ecommerce

How Manufacturers Can Use AI Agents to Improve Ecommerce

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For manufacturers, ecommerce comes with added complexity. Highly technical product details, bulk reorders, and pre-negotiated pricing and entitlements have historically made it difficult to provide cohesive, consumer-like ecommerce experiences for B2B buyers. With Agentforce, it's a lot easier to manage all the operational aspects and moving parts of B2B ecommerce. This is critical at a time when 85% of manufacturers believe they must transform their day-to-day operations to remain competitive.

How does Agentforce help, exactly? You can think of it as a limitless workforce that serves your customers 24/7. This is made possible through the use of autonomous AI agents that can perform tasks independently, make decisions, and even negotiate with other agents. The best part: These AI agents are easy to build and deploy, which unlocks massive capacity.

Imagine what your teams could accomplish if their work was augmented by AI agents. Sales teams could use AI to automate more of the reordering process, or task AI with automatically updating pricing depending on preset rules. Your teams could also use AI to quickly check inventory or lead time for certain products, and customers could engage with AI to check order status. Workflows that were once dependent on time-consuming approval and review processes are now smooth as butter. Here's everything you need to know about Agentforce and how it can help manufacturers streamline operations and grow sales, orders, and revenue.

What sets Agentforce apart?

Rather than past eras of AI that required continual human involvement, Agentforce tools have the ability to autonomously pursue goals, make decisions, and dynamically adapt to changing conditions without human intervention. Commerce agents can anticipate needs, make sense of large data sets, and act on insights.

For manufacturers, that's a gamechanger. AI agents can analyze large amounts of data, like the purchase history of your most loyal customers or the details of your entire B2B catalog. Then, agents can take action on all that information. Want to create personalized promotions for ideal target audiences or write product descriptions that inspire buyers to purchase? Agentforce can help. This new innovation brings machine learning and natural language processing to the next level and helps manufacturers gain a significant competitive advantage.

According to Becky Wright, EVP of CloudGaia, "Agentforce takes customer experience interactions to the next level by enabling hyper-personalized, faster and more human-like content. With our Agentforce use cases, we help our customers get closer to people, delivering exactly what they need, when they need it. It's more than technology - it's real connection."

How does Agentforce work in manufacturing?

Your sales, service, and merchandising teams can utilize Agentforce to scale their work, automate repetitive or tedious tasks, and simplify business processes. For example, a member of your merchandising team might create an AI agent to turn hyper-technical product details and specifications into richer product descriptions that will be easily understood by less technical or experienced buyers. Here's how it works:

1. Using natural language descriptions, a merchandiser would detail a list of instructions and provide a scope for the job. You can be ultra prescriptive about how you want each job to be done.

2. After the merchandiser sets a scope for the job, they'll write a prompt. This will provide the AI agent with instruction clarity and access to any resources or context necessary. The instructions will also define the expected format of the agent's response. For example, does the merchandiser want the output from the agent to be a list, a paragraph, a code snippet, or something else?

3. Last, the merchandiser will enter specific actions. You can think of actions as the tools supplied to an AI agent to accomplish a task. This is what allows you to limit agents to only use relevant tools for any given job-to-be-done.

How Agentforce improves ecommerce outcomes for manufacturers

If you can describe it, Agentforce can do it. Here are a few examples of how this new innovation can solve even the most complex ecommerce issues manufacturers face.

Simplify reorders: The high level of customization, complexity in pricing and fulfillment, and highly technical product specifications can be a thorn in the side for manufacturers, especially when it comes to creating an efficient and simple reordering experience. Manufacturers need to account for diverse customer needs, varying production and inventory processes, complex pricing models, and the logistics of managing bulk orders and specialized products. Addressing these challenges requires not only sophisticated technology but also a deep understanding of customer requirements and the manufacturing process itself. And that's where Agentforce comes in.

With Agentforce, you can automatically recapture all of the details from a previous order and add it back into a customer's cart. You can configure an AI agent with the skills to proactively contact customers at specific intervals to check on supply levels and send reorder reminders. This takes redundant tasks out of your sales teams' workload so they can focus on more strategic work. It also means your customers have a better buying experience - and gives you a leg up on your competition.

Communicate complex product specifications: Agentforce can reliably pull documentation about complex products to ensure that any product details shared with buyers are accurate and thorough. The ability to reliably scale communication with your buyers can significantly impact your bottom line. Your sales and service times can focus on more strategic work, and you can rest assured that customers will receive accurate, timely responses.

With digital as the preferred channel for B2B buyers, organizations across industries need to increase operational efficiency and scale to meet even the most complex buyers needs. AI enables you to simplify this work. That's why Lesley Porter, Senior Director of Digital Product and Engineering from CONA intends to champion the use of Agentforce for tasks like "AI generated close notes, AI agents for FAQ, and AI generated responses to customer inquiries via chat."

Bolster your SEO efforts: Want to get your products discovered on search engines? AI agents can help with that, too. Your marketing and content teams can create agents to analyze product data and suggest SEO keywords. With the right SEO metadata in hand, your marketing teams can create product description pages, blog posts, and other content to ensure your products get seen and gain traction online. This is crucial as business buyers perform research on search engines.

Enhance product search for buyers: Historically, buyers spent significant time sifting through massive aftermarket parts catalogs to find what they needed. With AI, this process is much faster (and much more enjoyable). Buyers can enter natural language text describing the products and specifications they need, and let an AI agent do the heavy lifting.

Get started with Agentforce for manufacturing

Time is money - and Agentforce can help manufacturers make more of both. By analyzing large data sets (both structured and unstructured), automating tedious tasks, and augmenting your workforce, Agentforce enables you to drive unprecedented growth and profitability. Ready to get started? Watch the demo and learn more about how Agentforce can improve your ecommerce.

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Ally Herrick is an associate product marketing manager for Commerce Cloud. Herrick leveraged more than five years of experience in commerce to launch the Salesforce Order Management product. She also oversees new feature rollouts by specializing in product positioning and messaging, creating... Read More impactful go-to-market plans, and showcasing customer success.

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