Salesforce on Tuesday announced the general availability of its AI agent development platform called Agentforce. The service is essentially a low-code or no-code way to deploy chatbots for your employees and customers.
Salesforce says its new platform is already being used by companies such as OpenTable, Saks, and Wiley.
“Agentforce doesn’t rely on human interaction to get the job done,” Salesforce wrote in a release associated with the news. “These agents can be triggered by changes in data, business rules, or pre-built automation.” Meanwhile, the company's site notes that the new service is a human-bot symbiosis. “Humans and agents work together to drive customer success.''
“Agentforce is more than a chatbot or a co-pilot,” Salesforce continues in the release. “Co-pilot” is a common term in the world of AI chatbots, but it could be taken as a satire at Microsoft, which released 10 new AI agents for Dynamics 365 just a week ago. CEO Marc Benioff explicitly named the company's main competitors.
That's a shame considering how Copilot was delivered to customers. It doesn't work at all and doesn't provide any level of accuracy. Gartner says data is leaking everywhere and customers need to clean up the mess. To add insult to injury, customers…
— Marc Benioff (@Benioff) October 17, 2024
The executive recently called Microsoft's tool “Clippy 2.0” and likened Copilot to the polarizing anthropomorphic Clippy of Word. Benioff accused the AI of inaccuracies and “leaks” in its recommendations.[ing] Corporate data. ” Note that Agentforce is the successor to Salesforce’s own similarly branded Einstein Copilot.
AI, like countless other systems in the enterprise space, is central to Salesforce's strategy.
Slack CEO Dennis Dresser (who joined TechCrunch on stage at Disrupt on Tuesday) is putting his parent company's AI products at the center of his efforts to turn Slack into more than just a work chat platform. Agentforce is a big part of what Dresser calls a “business operating system.”
Tuesday's general availability includes Agentforce Service Agent, a type of self-service product for customers. This service starts at $2 per conversation. Agent Builder, on the other hand, is essentially what it sounds like, allowing users to create custom agents built on templates.