Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual user conference in San Francisco, is a big deal. This year, an estimated 45,000 attendees converged to hear the latest Salesforce developments and learn how best to utilize the platform to make impactful business decisions.
As always, the Dreamforce announcements came fast and furious. However, for this analysis, we’ll focus on one in particular, the launch of the Agentforce Partner Network. First, let’s explain Agentforce.
Autonomous AI Agents
Described as “What AI was meant to be,” Agentforce was launched a few days before the start of Dreamforce 2024. In short, Agentforce is a suite of autonomous AI agents that support users across service, sales, marketing, and commerce tasks. Ultimately, these agents are positioned as a “digital workforce” that can be scaled at will.
The agents can be used for a wide range of functions including data analysis, automated decision-making, campaign optimization, lead qualification, and answering customer queries. “Our vision is bold: to empower one billion agents with Agentforce by the end of 2025,” said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.
The introduction of Agentforce is a significant step in developing AI technologies. They advance the capabilities of copilots by scrapping the requirement for human guidance by operating autonomously.
First Agent Ecosystem
During Dreamforce, Salesforce announced the launch of the Agentforce Partner Network. The network is a global ecosystem of Salesforce partners that will build AI agents and procedures for the Agentforce platform. By accessing the Agentforce Partner Network, users can install third-party extensions through the Salesforce AppExchange.
Using these extensions, Salesforce customers can then customize pre-configured agents, build new ones, or deploy agents built by partners for specific use cases. “Agentforce represents a monumental shift in the industry, enabling humans with AI to redefine how businesses achieve customer success,” said Brian Millham, president and chief operating officer at Salesforce.
“Over the next year, our bold vision is to enable customers with a billion AI agents. The Agentforce Partner Network, the world’s first agent ecosystem, plays a crucial role in helping our customers realize this vision by providing a vast catalog of trusted and ready-to-deploy partner agents and agent actions,” Millham added.
Salesforce’s ambitious plans for the advanced capabilities of Agentforce will require AI agents to navigate a multitude of systems, databases, and other working agents. By enabling third-party connectivity in Salesforce through the Agentforce Partner Network, Agentforce agents can better realize their potential in the workplace.
One of the first organizations to join Salesforce’s Agentforce Partner Network is the cloud Professional Service Automation and ERP software provider Certinia.
“As a first-mover on the Agentforce Partner Network, we are developing several use cases to help transform the potential of Customer Success organizations, including a Certinia Customer Success Agent—an AI-powered assistant designed to empower Customer Success Managers (CSMs) to automate complex processes and make more strategic, data-driven decisions,” said Raju Malhotra, Certinia Chief Product and Technology Officer, in a blog post.
Other launch partners include AWS, Google Cloud, Honeywell, IBM, and Workday.
Closing thoughts
As Salesforce moves forward and explores new opportunities for AI, I am reminded of the initial and ongoing concern that AI will replace the human workforce. However, the launch of Agentforce is all about augmentation
— improving and enhancing the experience of human workers while supercharging productivity. Isn’t this the fundamental principle of modern business?
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