Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

Written by: Martin Dale Bolima, Tech Journalist, AOPG.

Salesforce has kicked off its flagship event, Dreamforce 2024, in San Francisco with the grand launch of Agentforce, an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered agent that provides specialised, always-on support to employees and customers. A new solution within the robust, feature-filled Salesforce platform, Agentforce is a proactive, autonomous application equipped with the necessary business knowledge to execute tasks according to their specific roles.

Marc Benioff, Co-Founder and CEO at Salesforce, officially announced Agentforce in his opening keynote for Dreamforce 2024, where he called the AI agent the company’s “biggest breakthrough.”

“Agentforce has to be the biggest breakthrough that we have ever had in technology. And I think it’s the biggest breakthrough that I’ve seen in a long time in artificial intelligence. It’s about humans with agents driving customer success together on the Salesforce platform,” Benioff told the packed in-house Dreamforce 2024 audience.

“One of the cool things about Salesforce is, that we’re not just tossing you another model, or tossing you a hyperscaler, or tossing you an AI engineer, or tossing you something else. We’re just saying, on the platform that you already love and use every day, the Salesforce platform, right inside the configurator, right inside the system that you already love and know, you’re gonna start to find this incredible new functionality.”

Agentforce, the Trustworthy, Low Hallucinogenic AI

Benioff also guaranteed that Agentforce will be both reliable and accurate—hallmarks of the Salesforce platform for over two decades already—because it will have everything it needs to ensure reliability and accuracy.

“Just like every other Salesforce platform, we’re gonna be able to just have instant scalability, but a very high level of accuracy. In fact, you’re gonna find [that] these agents are gonna be some of the lowest hallucination agents you have ever experienced,” Benioff promised. “And why is that? Why would our agents be so low hallucinogenic and so accurate? It has to do with the platform. It’s because we have the data and the metadata and the workflow and the business process and the security model and the sharing model and all those things that we love and have used and are deeply wedded to for 25 years. It turns out those things make a more accurate AI.”

Clara Shih, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Salesforce AI, at Salesforce, doubled down on Benioff’s point on Agentforce being a reliable, accurate, and trustworthy AI since it is anchored on a strong foundation of trust and security.

“The very first thing we built when we started on this journey was our Einstein trust layer. Every single Agentforce interaction runs through that trust layer, which means that you can rest assured that it has data security, like prompt injection defence. It has data privacy, like zero retention prompts and data masking. It has ethical guardrails, like our toxicity filter. It has guardrails to define what agents aren’t allowed to do versus what they can. It has observability and monitoring,” Shih explained.

With this trust and security layer—one of five pillars to launch Agentforce, according to Shih—in place, Salesforce customers already have the other four:

• Role (what the agent will do).
• Data (what information the agent will learn from).
• Actions (what systems and workflows the agent will have access to).
• Channels (where agents and customers will interact).

A Product of Everything Salesforce Customers Are Doing

In other words, Agentforce, according to Shih, is but a culmination of what Salesforce customers have been doing with the platform in the years prior.

“If you take a step back and look, everything that you’ve ever done has led you to AgentForce, because every role, every piece of metadata, every flow, every channel, all of that becomes the guide and the guardrails for your autonomous AgentForce,” Shih noted.

With all these five things firmly in place, all Agentforce needs is a brain—the Atlas Reasoning Engine.

“Atlas is the brain of AgentForce, and it takes your goal, it takes your role, and it loops, it creates a plan, it evaluates the plan, it refines the plan, and it keeps looping until it’s confident it can achieve your goal,” Shih explained. “It uses Advanced Retrieval Augmented Generation, or RAG, to pull in the structured and unstructured data that it needs from Data Cloud, and then it takes action for you across the Customer 360 . . . All of that comes together, and if it ever gets stuck, Atlas knows to seamlessly escalate to one of your team members using Sales, Service, Marketing, or Commerce Cloud.”

And, like the human brain, the Atlas Reasoning Agent also learns—but not in the traditional way conventional agents “learn,” which is through human feedback. According to Shih, the more customers use this engine, the smarter it gets thanks to “pioneered reinforcement learning from customer outcomes” stored right in Salesforce’s Customer 360. These could be marketing conversion rates, sales deal wins, or service resolutions and all of them could be used by the Atlas Reasoning Agent “to continuously tune and improve Agentforce.”

Salesforce Reimagined

The launch of Agentforce at Dreamforce 2024, according to Benioff has fundamentally changed the Salesforce architecture, adding an evolutionary layer that ties together the platform’s different products—including the hugely popular Customer 360 and Data Cloud.

“We had a different vision of the future,” Benioff admitted. “Customer 360 and Data Cloud were our bestselling, most exciting new products ever. But agents are really changing us. They’re transforming us . . . They’re giving you that ability to have something that’s trusted and secure and scalable and accurate and easy to customise with this built-in AI . . .”

Indeed, Agentforce looks revolutionary, and if the demonstrations followed Benioff’s and Shih’s keynotes, Salesforce customers worldwide will potentially have a game-changing agent to supercharge workplace productivity and enhance that all-important customer experience.

Dreamforce 2024 officially kicked off on Wednesday, 18 September 2024 (Malaysia time), and will conclude on Friday, 20 September 2024.

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