Salesforce continues to develop and launch Agentic AI Agents powered by Agentforce. The latest is Agentforce for Net Zero Cloud. The intent is to use digital agents to automate many of the mundane tasks that sustainability teams face. With the lack of budget to expand headcount and the growing volume and complexity of reporting requirements, especially in Europe, the timing of this announcement is opportune for many organisations.
The most notable of these is the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), which will affect around 50,000 organisations worldwide.
Prashanthi Sudhakar, Head of Product for Net Zero Cloud at Salesforce, commented, “Net Zero Cloud, now harnessing the power of Agentforce and Data Cloud, represents a significant advancement in how organisations can approach sustainability.
“We empower customers to move from manual environmental reporting to proactive, AI-driven insights and unified data, enabling impactful change and business value. This transforms sustainability into a strategic asset that drives efficiency, fosters innovation, and ensures long-term resilience.”
Salesforce Research found that 75% of companies feel unprepared for the growing complexity and cannot turn sustainability data into insights. The new digital agents are designed to assist organisations with a range of tasks.
Customers see the advantage with Dan Connors, CEO, Green Impact, saying, “With Agentforce for Net Zero Cloud, we’re empowering our customers’ sustainability teams to operate at the speed of business. Instead of spending hours manually sorting through data, they’re now making real-time, data-driven decisions that drive immediate action.
“We anticipate this shift will help them cut operational costs by quickly identifying inefficiencies while also accelerating progress toward their sustainability goals.”
These tasks include:
Insights Gathering
The digital agent can answer natural language queries about data held within the organisation. The agent can also analyse and extract insights, saving time that would otherwise be spent on reports, Excel spreadsheets, and pivot tables.
One example query that Agentforce could answer is, “Show me the top three facilities with the highest energy consumption per unit of production and their associated procurement costs over the last quarter.”
The results enable organisations to extract insights, accelerate decisions, and improve sustainability metrics in a shorter timescale. Organisations can identify inefficient equipment, either to replace or repair, and negotiate better energy contracts as they compare contracts across the organisation. The result is lower costs, both monetary and carbon, leading to a more sustainable organisation.
Disclosure Assistance
The digital agent immediately understands the different reporting requirements for major frameworks such as CSRD, SASB, and CDP. Drawing on the information stored in the Net Zero Cloud and other sources, it can present reports in the correct format, saving significant time when completing compliance requirements.
The natural language interface also enables users to extract specific information when required. For example, the agent could be asked, “Generate a summary of our progress on reducing Scope 3 emissions related to purchased goods and services, including any associated cost savings from supplier engagement initiatives.”
Custom Agents
Organisations can also use the Agentforce Agent Builder to create their no-code custom agents to address their specific sustainability requirements. For example, an organisation that uses a high volume of water during its manufacturing process could create an agent that autonomously monitors water usage in its operating processes and triggers alerts for any anomalies.
The agent would inform a user of the anomaly, its location and potential cause based on historical information and potentially the corrective action. This could save both water and the bottom line by enabling the organisation to take corrective action quickly. Furthermore, it would prevent wastage and potential regulatory fines if the water were contaminated.
Salesforce Platform
The new feature is based on the Agentforce platform capabilities and Net Zero Cloud. Specifically, the Net Zero Cloud Intelligent Information Library provides a centralised, auditable hub that stores data and disparate documents of various types relating to sustainability.
The Salesforce AI can extract information from multiple formats, and the Agentic AI can parse and understand that data to surface as requested by users. Agentforce for Net Zero Cloud, the custom Agent Builder for Net Zero Cloud, and Data Cloud integration with Net Zero Cloud are available now.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
With this announcement, Salesforce has brought a practical set of AI Agents that sustainability and compliance teams can take advantage of as their workload increases. It will be interesting to see how organisations make use of these new agents and what quantitative results they can achieve in terms of hours saved, carbon costs reduced and financial metrics.
Also, as customers leverage custom agents, what will they create? In addition will some of the partners within the Salesforce ecosystem will create more agents that others can take advantage of. There are a wide variety of potential use cases, especially for organisations that are carbon conscious, such as the med tech industry.
