Agentforce 2.0 - Champ or Chump?

The News

On December 17, 2024, Salesforce announced Agentforce 2.0 after introducing Agentforce 1.0 during the company’s Dreamforce event. With it, it repositions Agentforce as a “Digital Labor Platform” that is capable of supplying businesses with an infinite workforce. This way, they shall be able to address internal challenges like labor shortages, fixed capacity, stalled productivity, or burnout. In addition, they increase their ability to work with increasing customer demands like no patience, their wish for personalization and empathy and with a knowledgeable expert, etc. 

“Agentforce 2.0 is the newest version of Agentforce and the first digital labor platform for enterprises — a complete AI system for augmenting teams with trusted, autonomous AI agents in the flow of work. This new release introduces a new library of pre-built skills and workflow integrations for rapid customization, the ability to deploy AI agents in Slack, and advancements in agentic reasoning and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) - enabling teams to scale their workforce with a custom Agentforce capable of handling complex, multi-step tasks with even more precision and accuracy.”

Agentforce 2.0 comes with a library of prebuilt skills, which are jobs that digital agents can perform. These skills do not only cover Salesforce software but also cover partner software and, with the help of Mulesoft, any other system. The agent builder, that is part of Agentforce 2.0 enables the building of new agents/skills using natural language. New agents can be built using the skill library or custom logic.

Agentforce 2.0 is live and will get additional capabilities throughout Q1/2025.

The Bigger Picture

AI has hit an inflection point. We came from rule-based chat bots, added assistants and are now focusing on agency. This is possible because technology improved, the ability of grounding inferences into company data improved and furthermore, the ability of technology to show empathy by also employing what I would call world knowledge (after all, this is what an LLM is trained on) can be combined into responses to queries. Add to that the increasing desire of (business) users to not be forced into a machine-enforced user interface but to interact in a human way, and there is something that is very exciting. I am a technologist, after all. 

At the same time, there is undoubtedly a need for more automation in business operations. Customer demands are increasing – shareholder demands are, too. So is the pressure on employees. Pretty much every senior manager (and their dog) is talking about a shortage of skilled labor, which is a notion that I do not fully buy into as there is also a still substantial unemployment. Given that, saying that there is a skill shortage is akin to saying that who is unemployed is unskilled or lazy. There are also many lay-off rounds which cause a drain of skills from companies. So, these people cannot be re-skilled as well?

To me, this dichotomy sounds to me like we are in the need of having some deep ethical discussions about the value of (human) labor vs. digital labor. 

But back to Agentforce.

My PoV and Analysis

Agentforce 2.0 is BIG. Big not only, because it promises to deliver a whole new level of automation to businesses, but also because it is the way for Salesforce to extend its reach out of the “CRM” niche and to support the whole enterprise. Salesforce wants to achieve this by essentially making Agentforce the user interface to all business applications, not only Salesforce applications. The vehicle to achieve this is Slack, supported by MuleSoft. 

At the same time, Salesforce boldly creates a new market category. No other significant company has taken a stance like this before.

This is a significant repositioning, or should I say pivot, including a direct attack on all other enterprise software vendors and I am now waiting to see their responses. 

Salesforce itself uses Agentforce to power its customer service and to improve its customer service efficiency. According to its own data, this already now results in an automated handling of more than 80 per cent of all inquiries and into a reduction of escalations to humans by 50 per cent. Zendesk already during its Relate event last May predicted customer service automation rates of 80 per cent and above. Looks llike there is an increasing number of instances where this prediction has become reality. 

What neither the article about the success of Agentforce in Salesforce customer service nor Mark Benioff said during the announcement is what happened to the human agents to which cases are no more escalated. Are they tasked with “more valuable” work or did they get replaced by Agentforce. I hope for the former, but my fear is the latter. 

Agentforce, undoubtedly, hits a nerve. In the short time since Dreamforce, Salesforce signed up more than 1,000 customers of which several hundred are already live. I’d count this as a huge success although I’d love to hear more about the use cases that these customers deployed, what their success metrics are and how they fare along these metrics.

Let me put this into a bigger context here again. Whether skilled labor shortage is a perceived or a real problem, Agentforce allows businesses to focus on shareholder value by replacing humans with Agents. And I think that they will. The term “Digital Labor Platform” already strongly hints into this direction although Benioff repeatedly emphasized on “humans supported by agents”. Still, the conversation moves into the direction of agency fast. And, the vast majority of the announcement is about efficiency, I did not hear much about businesses being able to do entirely new things, offer entirely new services that they couldn’t offer before. 

In summary, it is hard to overestimate the potential impact that a technology like Agentforce has, especially in the light of Agentforce being a work in progress. Why is this? Because Salesforce managed to combine a set of powerful technologies into a coherent whole. 

Still, I’d really like to err on the side of caution and would like to see the business metrics and successes used by Agentforce customers.

Lastly, as said above, I see a high need for a strong ethics discussion. Agentforce invites businesses ta automate business processes instead of rethinking them. I strongly urge potential buyers to not fall into this trap. Low hanging fruit are just that: low hanging. Identify where the real value lies in processes and data, and apply AI from there. Remember the adage that a fool with a tool remains a fool.

Congrats to Salesforce for bringing a bold vision to life. It is now up to all of us to use this sensibly.