Build powerful AI Agents in minutes, not months

AI has captured the imagination of companies around the world, inspiring a host of new and fresh possibilities. At the recent Agentforce World Tour Sydney event, attendees at the Agentforce: The Agentic Layer for your Business session were given a chance to hear from local customers who have already transformed their businesses using Agentforce. 

Companies like Fisher & Paykel and Magentus have embraced Agentforce since its release in late 2024, with Kev Doyle, Regional Vice President at Salesforce, noting that “Aussies and Kiwis are leading the world with this.”

“Agentforce brings you the speed to get this into your business,” Kev explained, “and these human and digital counterparts are working together to drive that next part of transformation for your organisation.”

AI agents use the data you already have

When it comes to AI, doing it yourself is incredibly complex.

Despite the fact that there are plenty of “do-it-yourself” AI toolkits available and a host of commercial and open-source platforms to choose from, once you download the technology it’s up to your developers, data scientists, marketing executives and other specialists to build AI technology that matches your business needs. 

“I’ve worked with CIOs who have been trying to DIY AI for the last couple of years,” Kevin said. “Fast forward 18 months and you have nothing to show for it but a huge expense bill and a roadmap.”

Agentforce is Salesforce’s answer – an expansive platform for AI agents that helps companies benefit from AI without having to DIY the technology.

With Agentforce, companies can quickly begin generating insights and servicing customers by leveraging the full breadth of Salesforce’s functionality, using the same code base, workflows, data and metadata already running in Data Cloud.

“The reason why DIY AI doesn’t work and the reason why Agentforce does,” Kevin said, “is because Agentforce is built on the Salesforce platform that you know and love and use on a daily basis.”

Salesforce is already enjoying the benefits

Not only did Salesforce develop Agentforce, but we are using it extensively inside our own business.

As ‘customer zero’ for Agentforce, we have already adopted more than 40 agents that form a digital labour workforce supporting marketing, sales, service, e-commerce and other employees.

“It’s everywhere,” Kevin said, “and the real secret is that it’s integrated into the flow of work. With AI-assisted development and testing, users can quickly progress from ideas to configuration, testing, deployment and iteration.”

“Because of this, the adoption rate goes through the roof: We can get from ‘ideate’ to ‘observe’ in a matter of moments.”

Agentforce runs Salesforce’s entire help site, handling more than 30,000 conversations per week and resolving 85% of conversations, only bringing in a human when an interaction calls for it. 

Build your own AI agents in minutes

AI has become a rallying call for executives across Australia and New Zealand, with 96% of executives in a recent YouGov survey naming it as a priority for the success of their business over the next 12 months.

In fact, 45% of executives are experimenting with or piloting the technology this year but as Salesforce AI-Driven Solution Engineering Leader Stephanie (Steph) Snedden explained, turning those projects into business success requires something more.

“We need our enterprise agents to be both trusted and accurate – but the challenge with this is that most businesses are still DIY-ing their AI and as a result 93% of workers do not trust your current solution,” she said.

Building reliable AI agents with Agentforce is so easy that Steph was not only able to create a working party planner agent on stage in a matter of minutes but also used testing tools to actively optimise its performance in real time.

As Steph demonstrated, Agentforce’s Assist and Testing Centre capabilities help business leaders verify and tweak an agent’s operation, evaluating it against hundreds of known test cases in an instant and recommending changes that could help it work even better.

“This is all possible with tools you’re already familiar with and it’s so quick to deploy that it takes weeks, if not days, to get this live and running,” Steph said. “I now challenge business leaders to start thinking about other possibilities, which are truly endless.”

Putting AI agents in everybody’s reach

As the audience at the Agentforce: The Agentic Layer for your Business session saw firsthand, AI agents can help customer service staff build new capabilities in no time.

But it’s not just for customer service: as Avanthika Ramesh, Senior Director for Product Management at Salesforce demonstrated, agents work seamlessly across every part of a company’s environment.

AI agents “are no longer confined to the chat window” and can be embedded “everywhere, across any workflow,” she said, including applications, websites, workflows and digital channels.

Because the agents are tightly integrated with corporate data, they can be invoked from flows, events and real time Data Cloud updates to help customers build digital labour workforces that engage with customers as effectively as people do.

“Whether you prefer pro code or no code, every single person in this room can create and customise these agents,” Avanthika said, “which means every business can now have agents operating in the background 24/7” that support employees “to have more meaningful interactions and close more deals.”

Building One NZ’s Digital Labour workforce

New Zealand’s largest telecommunications provider, One NZ, is using Agentforce to continue delivering industry leading service to its almost three million customers without requiring DIY AI development.

Speaking onstage at Agentforce World Tour in Sydney, One NZ Chief AI & Data Director Summer Collins explained how the company tapped Agentforce and, using its AI agents’ native access to existing customer databases, rapidly found opportunities to improve its service. Discover how Agentforce and Data Cloud are helping One NZ scale, watch their full story here: 

“We’ve already done one agent, which is awesome and it’s given us the confidence to go even harder,” Summer said, adding that One NZ has identified more than 80 other possible uses for the technology and aims to have 50 AI agents live by the end of 2025. 

One NZ CEO Jason Paris sees agentic AI capabilities as transformational: “The connectivity we provide is an essential service to so many people,” he said, “and we’ve got more ideas about how to do this than we know what to do with.

“Agentforce is going to enable us to do more. It’s going to allow us to rethink how we work together and how we engage with our customers. Agentforce is what AI was meant to be.”

One NZ and many other ANZ companies are already seeing firsthand how Agentforce overcomes obstacles, improves workflows and efficiency, and unlocks trapped value. When you can easily build and integrate powerful AI agents into your everyday workflow, you rapidly gain the powerful support of a digital labour workforce that will help you make better use of your data and applications than ever before.