Seven Requirements for Effective Agents

Ajay Kumar Kambadkone Suresh Senior Director, AI Product Management, Agentforce
Dec. 2025

Want to be an early adopter of agentic AI? You’re right on time. Research from McKinsey shows that 62% of organizations are still in the “experimenting” or “piloting” stages. That means there’s still time to get ahead of the curve, get it right, and become an AI leader in your industry.

But you need to be prepared before you go all-in. This checklist breaks down the seven essential items that ensure your agents actually work to deliver business value. Use it to evaluate platforms and quiz your sales reps before you invest.

Here’s what you’ll need to build an agent that demonstrates real value to your business.

❑ 1. Start with a strategy.
Define a clear, strategic, measurable goal from the start. Focus on a high-impact use case that delivers demonstrable value.

❑ 2. Build on a foundation of trust.
Ensure your agent operates safely and securely. Honor data privacy, mitigate bias, and prevent hallucinations, so every interaction is reliable.

❑ 3. Ground agents in your business data.
Agents should provide hyper-personalized and accurate responses based on a complete view of the customer and your business.

❑ 4. Give everyone tools to build agents.
Make agent creation accessible to everyone, with or without code.

❑ 5. Balance creativity with full control and predictability.
Choose an agentic platform with hybrid reasoning to get both creative problem-solving and specify predictable, deterministic actions when needed.

❑ 6. Deliver an orchestrated, omni-channel experience.
The best agents uphold your brand while working easily and reliably with other agents, people, and across tools and systems.

❑ 7. Ensure complete agent supervision, continuous learning, and feedback loops.
Go beyond basic tracking. Manage, measure, and improve all your agents in one place to boost their impact and ROI.

Let’s unpack each item on the checklist. Notice how Agentforce features thoroughly address each requirement. With Agentforce, you don’t have to attempt to DIY what our experts built and continue to hone.

First, define a strategic business outcome. Name a clear, measurable, and strategic goal from the start.

Focus on a high-impact use case that delivers demonstrable value.

We recommend you start with a use case that will win over an influencer team, like sales or service teams, by removing a common, time-consuming obstacle for them.

For example, you might start with an agent that creates and manages cases related to a top FAQ. Your service team will gain time for more strategic cases as they offload high-volume, repetitive customer inquiries.

As you win over internal thought leaders who benefit from using agents, you’ll gain momentum to build more agents.

Here’s how Agentforce supports your goals and planning:

• Get ideas in our AI use case library.
• Get inspired by how real Salesforce customers are using Agentforce.
• Deploy agents faster via AgentExchange , our Agentforce marketplace with hundreds of prebuilt actions, topics, and agent templates.

Ensure your agent operates safely and securely. Use a platform with a built-in trust layer to handle data privacy, mitigate bias, and prevent hallucinations, so every interaction is reliable.

Salesforce's deeply unified Agentforce 360 platform includes everything you’ll need. It offers a robust solution for securing agentic AI, going way beyond the capabilities of DIY systems. A key component, the Agentforce Trust Layer, ensures responsible AI with comprehensive data safeguards. Salesforce Shield provides advanced protection for both data and AI agents through encryption, audits, and continuous monitoring.

Reliable agents don’t just need data: They need context for that data. Effective agents need to see how data connects to your systems, tools, and customer touchpoints. Your agents should correctly infer who’s asking what, their role, and what they’re trying to accomplish.

So build agents on a platform that lets you ground your agents in your unique business data and context. With Agentforce, you connect your agents to the heart of your business.

Agentforce runs on Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud) to provide essential context and governance. Using the full context of Data 360 and your CRM, agents can provide hyperpersonalized and accurate responses based on a complete view of your customer.

The Atlas Reasoning Engine acts as the intelligent foundation that connects your Agentforce agents to your business data, ensuring they provide accurate, contextually relevant responses grounded in your organization’s specific information.

Instead of relying on generic knowledge, Atlas analyzes and processes your Salesforce data‌. It looks at customer records, case histories, product information, and business processes, and uses all that information to help agents understand the unique context of each interaction. Then it delivers personalized, data-driven solutions that reflect your company’s actual operations and customer relationships.

Empower everyone to build agents with flexible, low-code building.

Many agent builders require coding skills to succeed. Choose a platform that democratizes agent creation so that even non-coders can build powerful agents.

Agentforce empowers users with flexible options to build: no-code, low-code, or pro-code. Intuitive, low-code tools like flows and conversational authoring help admins build, test, and deploy powerful agents quickly.

Any admin can build in an intuitive no-code canvas, where the builder converts your natural language instructions to code. Our authoring assistant helps you build agents faster by offering guidance from AI.

Developers may prefer the script view, our pro-code way to build.

After you build an agent, test it! With interaction summary, you get a play-by-play of exactly how Agentforce reasons through a request to understand the details behind it.

Agents you build with Agentforce have the power of LLMs and the context of your data. They also have adaptive reasoning capabilities, giving you more deterministic controls inside of your agent.

Give Agentforce a spin in this interactive demo!

You need agents that can be both creative and predictable, often within the same agentic workflow.

For example, a customer service AI agent might first address a customer problem with a creative, generative response, and then follow a precise, deterministic script to ensure compliance in processing a financial transaction for the same customer.

The Agentforce authoring experience is built on hybrid reasoning to blend creativity and control.

You can easily define where an agent must follow a precise, predictable script and where it can use generative, creative problem-solving. This balance is managed through features like the Agentforce scripting language to provide deterministic control over actions and logic. Set the right balance between controlled, predictable actions and generative, creative problem-solving to match your business and compliance needs.

Engage customers with a consistent brand voice everywhere. Ensure your agent works flawlessly across all touchpoints and can intelligently hand off to human colleagues without losing context.

This is another massive undertaking if you’re trying to do it by yourself.

You’d have to build custom integrations for every channel, develop your own AI capabilities, and create complex handoff systems from scratch.

Or, let Agentforce do it for you.

Agentforce delivers orchestrated, omni-channel experiences that engage customers with a consistent brand voice across all touchpoints — including voice, Slack, chat, websites, mobile apps, and phone lines — while ensuring intelligent handoffs to human colleagues without losing context.

A key feature is Agentforce Voice , which allows service agents to speak with customers, understand intent from spoken language, and resolve queries through vocal interactions.

For clean interoperability and multi-agent orchestration , Salesforce uses two open standards.

• Model Context Protocol (MCP) allows AI agents to access resources, tools, and prompts from internal and external sources.
• Agent-to-Agent (A2A) Protocol serves as a universal language for agents to communicate and collaborate across organizations.

The platform also supports:

• Single-Org Multi-Agent (SOMA) for orchestrating agents within one Salesforce org
• Multi-Org Multi-Agent (MOMA) for cross-org collaboration
• Future third-party integrations will enable orchestration with external agents through the AgentExchange

Finally, as you create more agents, you need a way to guide, coordinate, and improve them. This means moving beyond just monitoring and measuring agent activity. You need tools to easily supervise, manage, and optimize your agents.

Embrace continuous learning and feedback loops. Effective agents aren't static; they use performance data to constantly improve. Customers ask us, “How does my agent get smarter after we launch?” We must capture analytics, identify what fails and why, and have a clear path to improve the agent’s logic.

Again here, Agentforce bakes this right in. It lets you manage and optimize your agents with intelligent supervision. Centralized Agentforce Observability lets you orchestrate all your agents, capture analytics, track performance against business goals, and continuously improve agent logic to boost their impact and ROI.

And with Agentforce Observability , you will:

• Gain dynamic insights with Agentforce Analytics, powered by Tableau Next
• Explore insights and optimize agent effectiveness with Agentforce Optimization
• Monitor your agents more easily with Agentforce Studio
• Gain visibility into agent behavior with Agentforce Session Tracing

Agentforce has everything you need to get ahead of the curve with AI agents — and stay ahead.

Agentforce's newest innovations address the core challenges of building performant AI agents. By choosing a tool that centralizes agent security, context, authoring, deterministic control, orchestration, and management you can create and deploy reliable, production-grade agents that deliver real business value.