Salesforce has launched Agentforce, a suite of autonomous AI agents designed to augment employees and handle tasks across service, sales, marketing, and commerce sectors. The company claims Agentforce equips organisations with autonomous agents that enhance scale, efficiency, and satisfaction across various sectors and for use cases stretching marketing to service.

The new Agentforce Atlas Reasoning Engine autonomously analyses data, makes decisions, and completes tasks, then allows organisations to build, customise, and deploy their own agents quickly and easily, using low-code tools. The Agentforce Partner Network enables customers to deploy pre-built agents and use agent actions from partners like Amazon Web Services, Google, IBM, Workday, and more.

Salesforce said customers such as OpenTable, Saks, and Wiley are using Agentforce integrated with their apps and working across customer channels, to augment their employees, and scale capacity for business needs. Agentforce operates autonomously, retrieving the right data on demand, building action plans for any task, and executing these plans without requiring human intervention. Agentforce can hand off to human employees when desired, providing a summary of the interaction, an overview of the customer's details, and recommendations for what to do next.

Salesforce aims to empower one billion agents with Agentforce by the end of 2025. An estimated 41% of employee time is spent on repetitive, low-impact work, and 65% of desk workers believe generative AI will allow them to be more strategic, according to the Salesforce Trends in AI Report.

"Agentforce represents the Third Wave of AI-advancing beyond copilots to a new era of highly accurate, low-hallucination intelligent agents that actively drive customer success. Unlike other platforms, Agentforce is a revolutionary and trusted solution that seamlessly integrates AI across every workflow, embedding itself deeply into the heart of the customer journey. This means anticipating needs, strengthening relationships, driving growth, and taking proactive action at every touchpoint," said Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO, Salesforce.

"While others require you to DIY your AI, Agentforce offers a fully tailored, enterprise-ready platform designed for immediate impact and scalability. With advanced security features, compliance with industry standards, and unmatched flexibility. Our vision is bold: to empower one billion agents with Agentforce by the end of 2025. This is what AI is meant to be," Benioff added.

Wiley has reported an over 40% increase in case resolution with Agentforce handling routine inquiries, outperforming its old bot.

"Piloting Agentforce has made a noticeable difference during one of our busiest periods - back-to-school season. Agentforce helps to manage routine responsibilities and free up our service teams for more complex cases," said Kevin Quigley, Senior Manager, Continuous Improvement, Wiley.

At OpenTable, the tech is expected to help free up the team to address more complex needs, said George Pokorny, SVP Customer Success. "Every interaction that restaurants and diners have with our support team must be accurate, fast, and reflective of the hospitality that restaurants show their guests. Agentforce has incredible potential to help us deliver that high touch attentiveness and support."

"As we advance our personalisation strategy, we believe Agentforce and its AI-powered capabilities have the potential to make a real impact on our approach to customer engagement, raising the bar in luxury retail. Agentforce will improve our effectiveness across customer touchpoints, empowering our employees and augmenting their ability to deliver the elevated and more individualised shopping experiences for which Saks is known," said Mike Hite, Chief Technology Officer, Saks Global.