Agentforce helps Prudential’s retirement sales team focus on customer and advisor connections.

Prudential Financial is a global financial services leader and investment manager with $1.5 trillion in assets under management as of 31 March 2025. Their iconic Rock symbol has stood for strength and stability for 150 years.

Prudential wanted a way to give their wholesalers more time to build relationships.

With a history spanning 150 years, Prudential is one of the most well-known financial institutions today. Their vision is to be a global leader in expanding access to investing, insurance and retirement security. With more Americans turning 65 than ever before, the need for innovative retirement strategies is growing fast. 

“The customer is at the heart of everything we do,” said Carolynn Smith, Vice President, head of U.S. Service at Prudential. “We must continue to innovate to meet customers’ broad and evolving needs.”

To do that, Prudential knew they needed to become even more efficient. That meant giving their people tools that would allow them to spend less time on routine tasks and more time building relationships and guiding customers and financial advisors through financial decisions.

Take Prudential’s Retirement Strategies business, for example. Prudential’s U.S. individual annuity sales professionals, called wholesalers, sell to financial professionals, not directly to customers. These aren’t just sales conversations — they’re trust-based relationships, often built over shared stories about families, hobbies and life outside of work. But after a day of meetings, wholesalers then had to manually enter notes into Sales Cloud, taking time away from follow-ups and pursuing new opportunities.

Already a longtime Salesforce customer, Prudential saw an opportunity to build on their foundation of Sales Cloud and Service Cloud by adding AI and automation. By enabling their dedicated employees with a strong data strategy and the right technology, they can move faster and continue showing up for customers and advisors in the moments that matter most. 

Data Cloud unifies Prudential’s data into a real-time, 360-degree view of each customer.

Prudential has spent years building a strong foundation on Salesforce. They run their sales and service operation on Financial Services Cloud — a single platform purpose-built for the industry that unifies Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, CRM Analytics and OmniStudio.

“Wholesalers are in Salesforce all day,” said Sandeep Ajith, Vice President of Data and Analytics and Prudential’s Chief Product Owner of the Salesforce Platform. “Our sales lifecycle runs on Financial Services Cloud. From managing a lead, to prepping for meetings, to closing an opportunity, it helps us to strengthen our customer relationships.”

Now, Prudential is going even further. With Data Cloud, they’ll create a real-time, 360-degree view of every customer — layering in even more data sources to unlock smarter, faster service and deeper personalisation across their business.

Data Cloud will bring together everything inside Financial Services Cloud, plus real-time signals from Tableau, internal domains and massive data lakes like AWS S3, Snowflake and Microsoft Fabric. It will even pull in knowledge from their vector database — which turns unstructured content like FAQs and help articles into semantically searchable insights. That means teams will be able to use natural language to ask a question in any connected Salesforce app and get the most relevant answer, instantly.

The result: One connected platform that powers efficiency. Rather than bouncing between systems or digging through databases, Prudential’s teams will have the information they need directly in the apps they already use. For example, wholesalers can quickly prepare for meetings with all of a financial professional’s info in one place.

“Anything that can make our wholesalers more efficient makes a difference,” Ajith said. “Salesforce can play a huge role in so much more than recordkeeping. It’s not a tool, it’s a partner.”

This unified data foundation is more than just a backend upgrade — it’s the launchpad for further innovation.

Agentforce will help wholesalers move faster.

Prudential is piloting Agentforce — the agentic layer of the Salesforce Platform. For their Retirement Strategies sales teams, Prudential expects agentic AI to be a game changer: No more juggling meeting recaps, client details or to-do lists. Instead, Agentforce will act like a smart assistant that captures, organises and helps act on information instantly — saving valuable time.

For example, after a meeting with a financial professional who’s interested in retirement income products for a customer, wholesalers will be able to tap the Agentforce voice capture feature on their Salesforce mobile app and speak conversationally: “She’s working with a couple retiring next year, looking for guaranteed income options. She mentioned they’re expecting a baby granddaughter in August.”

Within seconds, Agentforce will transcribe the wholesaler's voice note, extract key insights — like names, products and values — and log them into Financial Services Cloud. It’ll automatically create follow-up tasks, like “Send product materials” and even suggest a personal touch: “Schedule baby gift for August.”

No typing. No tabs. Just more time to build customer and client relationships, that ultimately help expand access to retirement security.

“Agentforce is going to allow us to give our teams superpowers,” said Bob Bastian, Prudential’s Chief Information and Technology Officer for Global Retirement and Insurance. “We can automate back-end work, allowing employees to focus on what matters most — keeping customer promises and driving profitable growth.”

Prudential anticipates that each wholesaler will gain back hours each week — time they can use to deepen advisor relationships, accelerate follow-up and get more meetings on the calendar. 

By combining trusted Salesforce tools with the power of AI, Prudential is helping wholesalers work faster and spend more time making human connections with financial professionals.

“We thought about creating our own agentic AI, but the technology with Agentforce is ready, today,” said Ajith. “We can build more and more powerfully, within the Salesforce platform.” 

Prudential already has a single platform anchored by Financial Services Cloud and in the future, Data Cloud. With real-time data streaming in from internal and external sources — including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and third-party data lakes — Agentforce can act instantly on complete customer profiles. That means AI-generated insights, summaries and follow-ups are not just fast — they’re deeply informed and context-aware.

The Einstein Trust Layer ensures Agentforce keeps sensitive customer information secure, with permission controls, field-level masking, zero data retention and a full audit trail for every interaction. That means Prudential’s teams can move fast — without ever compromising on security or compliance.

And because Agentforce runs directly inside their existing Salesforce workflows, Prudential can scale AI quickly across teams and use cases — no new tools, no extra overhead.  

“Within Sales and Service, we’ll leverage innovative technology, such as AI, to equip our incredibly talented, dedicated employees with the tools they need to be there for our customers in the moments that matter most,” said Carolynn Smith, vice president, head of U.S. Service at Prudential.