Imagine calling customer service, and instead of navigating a traditional IVR system filled with menu options, you directly connect with a live agent. This not only eliminates long wait times but also spares you the frustration of pressing multiple keys. The agent can swiftly access your purchase history and understand the assistance you need. They can provide immediate solutions, whether it’s facilitating a return or exchange, offering product details, recommending the correct size, checking inventory for availability, or giving you options for shipping or in-store pickup.
At the recent Salesforce Dreamforce 2024 event in San Francisco, Patrick Stokes, EVP of Product & Industries Marketing at Salesforce, showcased a live demonstration of one such agent named Sophie, deployed at Saks Fifth Avenue. Sophie is an autonomous AI agent capable of conversing with customers in natural language. It leverages Salesforce Customer 360 to gather insights from customer profiles and order histories available on Data Cloud. It can also make recommendations and execute actions thanks to the newly introduced autonomous AI agent, Agentforce.
It has been quite an evolution from bots, which used to predict what the next action should be based on the data one feeds in, to copilots, which respond to prompts by checking proprietary and publicly available data sets on the web, to agents who not only do all these activities, including predict and generate responses but also take actions. During the event, Salesforce’s Co-founder, Chair, and CEO Marc Benioff and his team demonstrated how Agentforce automates every customer interaction, integrating seamlessly across platforms like Slack as an upgrade from its Einstein Copilot.
To assist developers, Salesforce introduced Agent Builder, a low-code tool that helps create custom autonomous agents using tools such as Flows, Prompts, Apex, and MuleSoft APIs. In the demo, Stokes showcased how Sophie’s capabilities were expanded to include inventory features through Agent Builder, which supports natural language processing. By selecting topics related to order management and actions such as “Change Delivery Method,” “Locate Nearby Stores,” “Schedule In-Store Pickup,” and “Store Inventory,” Sophie was able to identify nearby stores and offer options for in-store pickup or shipping.
Saks Fifth Avenue managed to develop Sophie in just a week, and Benioff’s team highlighted prebuilt agents designed for organizations that may not have the resources to create their own AI solutions, particularly small and midsized businesses. These prebuilt agents span the entire CRM life cycle, covering areas like sales, service, marketing, and commerce, and include specific roles in health, banking, product management, operations, analytics, and HR.
With the launch of Agentforce, Salesforce has firmly established its position in the generative AI (Gen AI) market, but competitors are quickly catching up. Around the same time Salesforce announced Agentforce in September 2024, HubSpot introduced its Gen AI-based Breeze™ agents aimed at four main CRM functions: customer query resolution, marketing content creation, social media management, and sales outreach. Oracle also announced plans to integrate about 50 Gen AI agents within its Oracle Fusion Applications suite, including CRM solutions. Furthermore, SAP plans to incorporate Gen AI agents into its offerings soon.
The competition is heating up, with major cloud service providers like Microsoft, Google, and AWS introducing AI agent development capabilities within their Gen AI application development platforms, namely Microsoft Copilot Studio, Google Vertex, and Amazon Bedrock. These developments empower enterprises to create custom Gen AI agents tailored to specific business challenges, utilizing their existing data and applications hosted on these cloud platforms.
As Gen AI rapidly evolves, enterprises stand to gain from the innovations and advancements made by leading platform vendors. According to our recently published Avasant Cloud Customer Relationship Management Suites 2024 Market Insights™, enterprises are increasingly leveraging CRM suites to enhance sales team productivity and improve customer service efficiency.
Certainly, enterprises aim to prioritize seamless operations, integration with their existing systems, and, most importantly, the integrity of their data, metadata, and workflows—ensuring they are free from hallucinations and maintain a high level of accuracy—when searching for Gen AI-based CRM solutions.
In this context, Salesforce not only complies with over 40 regulations, including SOC, FedRAMP, and HIPAA but also offers robust data security and governance features to protect operations and prevent unauthorized data exposure. While we anticipate similar announcements from other major providers, Salesforce currently leads the way in agentic AI and is well-positioned to capitalize on this advantage.
By Gaurav Dewan, Research Director and Vibhanshu Agarwal, Senior Research Analyst
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