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Agentforce 3 - finally ready for the enterprise?

Agentforce is eying the enterprise - created by Thomas Wieberneit with a little help of ChatGPT
The news

On June 23, 2025, Salesforce announced Agentforce 3, the third iteration of its Agentforce platform. Agentforce 3 is a major upgrade to Salesforce’s digital labor platform. It gives customers the visibility and control that is needed to scale AI agents that already have proven useful at many companies. The release covers several additional capabilities.

Salesforce has introduced the Agentforce Command Center, an observability console designed for managing AI agents. This tool allows businesses to track and scale AI agent activities. It is built into Agentforce Studio and includes features for monitoring performance metrics such as latency and error rates through live analytics.

The update also brings native support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which enables Agentforce to connect with any MCP-compliant server without requiring custom coding. The platform's Atlas architecture has been enhanced to improve latency, accuracy, and resiliency. Support for additional Large Language Models has been added, including Anthropic's Claude Sonnet via Amazon Bedrock, with future support planned for Google Gemini.

Agentforce 3 includes over 200 pre-built industry actions, with half of these being new additions. The agents are now capable of performing web searches and providing citations for the information they retrieve. The platform's availability has been expanded to Canada, the U.K., India, Japan, and Brazil, adding support for six new languages.

More than 30 new partners have been added to the AgentExchange marketplace. These include companies such as AWS, Box, Cisco, Google Cloud, IBM, PayPal, and Stripe. Salesforce has also introduced new pricing options, including per-user plans for its Sales, Service, and Industry Clouds that provide unlimited usage of actions for employee-facing agents.

The bigger picture

Agentic solutions are the biggest thing since sliced bread in the industry right now. They are even more overhyped than Metaverse and Blockchain have ever been. Still, the number of case studies and use cases that get published is rising fast. This is a sign of buyer interest, increasing adoption and ultimately shows that agentic AI is not a solution in search of a problem but can address actual business challenges. However, these solutions need to be implemented in a thoughtful and planned approach to harvest their benefits. This expressively also requires a hard look at pricing, which can easily dig deep into the gains achieved by productivity increases, increased efficiency, or other gains. The other hugely important topic is the change management that is required. The implementation of agentic AI has the smell of impending lay-offs. This is bad for employee morale and therefore a topic that needs to be actively addressed by vendors as well as by buyers.

My PoV and analysis

With this release, Agentforce has arrived in the Enterprise. The main missing link is the still emerging A2A support. After focusing on the agents themselves, followed by their development and deployment in the previous releases, this release is about agent management and scalability, including scaled development through the Salesforce ecosystem.

Without a good, if not complete, built-in observability, Agentforce was still more or less a tool for rapid prototyping of and experimentation with AI agents. This is not bad in itself, but not enough for an enterprise scale product. Still, it helped tremendously by getting mindshare and establishing Salesforce as a category leader, which deserves kudos. In puncto interoperability, SAP has beaten Salesforce to the punch with its Joule Everywhere announcement during the yearly Sapphire event. Interoperability and A2A capabilities will be the next battleground for platform domination in which the business applications behemoths, including Microsoft, find themselves.

What I find quite notable, even laudable, is how strong Salesforce (or SAP for that matter), emphasize upon agents cooperating with humans, both “sides” working on what they are doing best, instead of agents replacing humans. Unluckily, especially Salesforce sends mixed signals with CEO Marc Benioff making statements like “up to 50% of the work at his enterprise software company is now being done by AI” during an interview with Bloomberg. In the light of Salesforce (and other tech companies) laying off employees in the thousands or tens of thousands because of efficiency gains through the use of AI and AI agents, this is more than just a bit contradictory. This clearly suggests that the messaging should be cleared. Words must match actions, especially with a topic that is as sensitive as this and considering the huge visibility that Salesforce has.

Using Agentforce as customer zero certainly helps with proving that the product works and with gaining more credibility. This is especially in the light of the fast deployment of the system. As time to value is important, this proof point and the fast delivery of prebuilt industry specific agents plus the Agent marketplace are crucial for continued success in a market that moves extremely fast.

Last, but not least, I am looking forward to seeing two particular sets of functionalities. The first one is a true agent to agent workflow that includes external systems and agents, not only Salesforce provided ones. The second one is even more interesting in the light of the need to move fast. It is one thing to offer a Command Center that helps administrators and users to understand what is going on, what is more important is the ability to immediately suggest and generate solutions for identified problems. This is where the real efficiency gains can be harvested.

As usual, a good part of the announcement is for functionality that is still in pilot or beta stage, in particular the MCP andA2A support as well as the Command Center.  

Having said all this, Salesforce has done it again. The company evolved a solution to become enterprise ready from its first humble days during Dreamforce. Congratulations for this. And let’s see how the competition changes the playing field


 

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