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Salesforce on Tuesday announced the general availability of its AI agent development platform called Agentforce. The offering is, in essence, a low- or no-code method for deploying chatbots for employees or customers.
Salesforce says the new platform is already being used by firms including OpenTable, Saks, and Wiley
“Agentforce doesn’t depend on human engagement to get work done,” Salesforce writes in a release tied to the news. “These agents can be triggered by changes in data, business rules, or pre-built automations.” The company’s site, on the other hand, highlights the new offering as more of a symbiosis between people and bots, stating, “humans with Agents drive customer success together.”
Salesforce goes on to note in the release that, “Agentforce goes beyond chatbots and copilots.” While “copilot” is common parlance in the world of AI chatbots, it might be read as a dig at Microsoft, which released 10 new AI agents for Dynamics 365 just over a week ago. CEO Marc Benioff explicitly called out its chief enterprise competitor.
When you look at how Copilot has been delivered to customers, it’s disappointing. It just doesn’t work, and it doesn’t deliver any level of accuracy. Gartner says it’s spilling data everywhere, and customers are left cleaning up the mess. To add insult to injury, customers are…
— Marc Benioff (@Benioff) October 17, 2024The executive recently referred to Microsoft’s tools as “Clippy 2.0,” comparing Copilot to Word’s polarizing anthropomorphic paperclip. Benioff accused the AI offers of inaccuracies and “spill[ing] corporate data.” Agentforce, it should be noted, is the successor to Salesforce’s own similarly branded Einstein Copilot.
AI has become central to Salesforce’s strategy, like countless others in the enterprise space.
Slack CEO Denise Dresser — who joins TechCrunch on stage at Disrupt on Tuesday — has positioned her parent company’s AI offerings as the centerpiece of a bid to transform Slack into more than just a work chat platform. Agentforce is a big piece of what Dresser has taken to calling a “work operating system.”
Included in Tuesday’s general availability is Agentforce Service Agent, a kind of self-service offering for customers. That offering starts at $2 per conversation. Agent Builder, meanwhile, is essentially what it sounds like, letting users create custom agents built atop templates.
Brian Heater is the Hardware Editor at TechCrunch. He worked for a number of leading tech publications, including Engadget, PCMag, Laptop, and Tech Times, where he served as the Managing Editor. His writing has appeared in Spin, Wired, Playboy, Entertainment Weekly, The Onion, Boing Boing, Publishers Weekly, The Daily Beast and various other publications. He hosts the weekly Boing Boing interview podcast RiYL, has appeared as a regular NPR contributor and shares his Queens apartment with a rabbit named Juniper.
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