At Dreamforce, Salesforce has announced the Agentforce Partner Network. Following the announcement around Agentforce, its latest iteration of AI technology, the firm has wasted no time in building an ecosystem of vendors to support the new Agentic AI capabilities.
Salesforce has already worked with several ISVs and SIs to create Agentforce solutions. These will assist customers in creating agents that can augment the human workforce in the future. Many of these new agents will be available on the AppExchange as add-on solutions. One of the new partners, GoMeddo, already has a solution available on the AppExchange.
The network has more than fifteen inaugural partners. Many more are waiting to join, and Enterprise Times has been talking to some of them this week. The network will include a broad range of third-party systems and agents.
Firms already working with Salesforce include global cloud vendors, such as Google, Global System integrators, such as Accenture and Global ISVs, such as Workday. On stage at Dreamforce, Benioff commented, “This will provide a whole new generation of Apps on the platform.”
Customers such as Wiley, Disney, OpenTable and Saks are already using Agentforce agents to augment their workforce.
Brian Millham, President and Chief Operating Officer at Salesforce, commented, “Agentforce represents a monumental shift in the industry, enabling humans with AI to redefine how businesses achieve customer success. Over the next year, our bold vision is to enable customers with a billion AI agents.
“The Agentforce Partner Network, the world’s first agent ecosystem, plays a crucial role in helping our customers realize this vision by providing a vast catalog of trusted and ready-to-deploy partner agents and agent actions.”
Agents in context
The partner network members have each built agents in the context of clients’ businesses or their applications. Each Agent is able to automate a task or sequence of tasks to execute a business process from end to end within the context of a Salesforce application, ecosystem application or third-party solution.
Agentforce enables organisations to build or leverage agents that interact with applications. They perform actions underpinned by the data they can access from the underlying data cloud platform.
Agentforce leverages data from within the Salesforce Data Cloud, including third-party data platforms through the Mulesoft integration platform. Importantly, these data flows are underpinned by the Einstein trust layer, ensuring that data privacy and security is maintained.
An Agent can understand user intent, prompt or system event. It will then retrieve data, analyse it and then build and execute a multistep plan to realise a positive outcome. As agents gain more skills and are able to access wider data sets, the decision-making they make improves. Initially, there may be exceptions that require human interactions over time. Agents will learn and develop new data and skills to automate more processes and make their abilities more complete.
There are wider societal concerns around the deployment of Agentic AI. This is not just about the impact on jobs but also how organisational knowledge will be maintained in the workforce as the current workforce ages and retires.
The former is a concern, not just for Salesforce but for other technology vendors looking at Agentic AI. It is also a concern of business leaders who have a responsibility not just to profits but also to their employees and customers.
Salesforce Introduces Agentforce Partner Network – The
Salesforce expects these autonomous agents to become widespread across the ecosystem. During the keynote, Marc Benioff, CEO and Chairman of Salesforce, stated, “This will provide a whole new generation of Apps on the platform.”
Once on the Appechange, customers will be able to download and install new agents to take advantage of these new solutions. Ultimately, this will provide a new revenue source for ISVs and Salesforce.
For customers, there are potentially huge benefits. While Salesforce provides the technology to help them run their business, could Agentforce agents replace Workforce Agents within their organisations?
Partners have already created two types of solutions:
- Agent actions bring new skills or integrations with third-party apps and agents to Agentforce
- Agent templates to support specialized industries or lines of business use cases.
Agent Actions will enable organisations to automate tasks using agents which are constrained by guardrails which could be compliance or business related. For example, adhering to privacy legislation or best practices within marketing communication.
Salesforce has already built over 100 actions that customers can leverage immediately across every industry cloud and Salesforce Cloud. Examples include:
- Communications: Serviceability Analysis
- Education: Student Summaries
- Energy & Utilities: Service Chat Summaries
- Healthcare: Patient Medical History
- Net Zero: ESG Report Accuracy Assessment
- Public Sector: Application Version Comparison
Partner Solutions
Launch partner solutions include:
Content creation and management
- Google Workspace: Create, find, and share Google Docs and Slides based on CRM data.
- Docusign: Generate partnership document, route for signature, and track doc and signature status.
- Honeywell: Assemble compliant training materials for life sciences workers based on complex regulatory standards.
Sales and customer insights
- Zoom: Access analytics and key insights from calls, meetings, and other productivity solutions from Zoom Workplace.
- Moody’s: Compile customer insights from company overviews, news articles, and financial filings.
- Korn Ferry: Suggest personalized seller actions and schedule coaching to improve.
- Sprout Social: Summarize customer cases with social data to understand what drives their satisfaction.
- Tribble: Increase sales team productivity by automating RFPs and speeding up rep onboarding.
Industry automation
- Copado: Generate developer and testing materials to deliver Salesforce Platform apps faster.
- Coupa: Optimize budget spend, monitor compliance, and find budget efficiencies.
- GoMeddo: Optimize appointments across patient, doctor, technician, and exam room calendars.
- Asymbl: Identify candidates based on job needs and schedule interviews with top prospects.
- Certinia: A customer service rep can evaluate a client’s probability for success, create a QBR project brief, and identify upsell opportunities for upcoming meetings.
Salesforce has also brought on board several GSIs and implementation specialists to help customers transform their businesses with Agentforce. Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte Digital, IBM Consulting, PwC, and Slalom are the partners that can already work with customers to drive better outcomes using Agentforce. Salesforce estimates that Agentforce will help customers drive 93% faster outcomes,
Certinia offers new agents
Certinia is one of the launch partners. Raju Malhotra, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Certinia, shared what it has delivered in a blog. Malhotra wrote, “Partnering with Salesforce means that Certinia’s customers will be amongst the first to benefit from the productivity boost that Agentforce promises.
“Our early partnership is a reflection of our relationship with Salesforce as a top Independent Software Vendor, native to Salesforce’s platform, and will ensure our customers’ needs are influencing the direction of Agentforce from day one.”
Certinia has already developed agents using Agentforce and will continue to deploy AI capabilities across its solutions. Malhotra revealed what has been developed to date.
He said, “As a first-mover on the Agentforce Partner Network, we are developing several use cases to help transform the potential of Customer Success organizations, including a Certinia Customer Success Agent—an AI-powered assistant designed to empower Customer Success Managers (CSMs) to automate complex processes and make more strategic, data-driven decisions.
“AI-powered agents can help to proactively monitor customer health across the account, spot and prioritize potential risks, and suggest actions based on best practices. We also anticipate that the Customer Success Agent will directly assist CSMs in summarizing data, drafting customer-facing material, and coaching on the right step to take next based on best practices.“
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
Salesforce has hit the ground running with Agentforce. It has already committed to switching on Agents for over 1,000 customers at Dreamforce. The partner ecosystem is leading the way with new applications that customers can leverage.
Steve White, IDC, commented, “With the Agentforce Partner Network, Salesforce is cultivating an open ecosystem and bringing together industry-leading partners to empower Agentforce Agents with data, skills, and expertise to get work done – increasing productivity across many different complex systems and workflows. Thus enabling partners and their customers to show faster results from the AI and autonomous agent pilots.”
It is still very early days for Agentforce, and there are a lot of questions around administration, pricing and how quickly partners will rollout these new solutions. So far, there is a cautious excitement about what Agentforce offers, and Salesforce appears to be ahead of most rivals with this Agentic AI announcement. What will be interesting to see Is how the deployment develops over the next 12 months.
