AI Agents Get Down To Work at AIforce Sydney
Agents are now doing real work inside Australian businesses, and the hype has started to give way to results
For much of the past year, the popular view has been that a powerful enough model could simply run a company. In reality, models can reason and interpret, but they don’t know the unbreakable rules of your business. Enterprises run on data, permissions and workflows that behave the same way every time. The value comes when the model works inside the CRM, with its data and permissions.
That gap is what local agentic enterprises are closing, with more than 1600 Trailblazers attending AIforce World Tour Essentials Sydney today to see what this looks like first hand. Customers like Gumtree Group, Lawpath and pay.com.au are putting trusted AI to work on the data and rules they already have, sharing the impact it’s having on their organisations and the lessons learned.
“The question for Australian businesses is no longer whether to adopt AI, but whether they can trust it to act. The leaders on our stages today have answered that by pairing the reasoning of agents with the data and guardrails of their business,” said Leandro Perez, SVP and CMO, Salesforce ANZ.
The shift comes as new research released today points the same way. Salesforce’s CFO Priorities Report, a global survey of finance leaders, found the scope and function of the CFO role are being rapidly reshaped by AI, with workforces keen to use agents to help automate common tasks, even as themes such as governance and security continue to be front of mind.
At Gumtree Group, an Agentforce service agent went live on help.gumtree.com.au in late September, replacing its Einstein Bots. Interactions and deflections have grown every week since, and the next target is for the agent to solve 25% of cases. Head of Business Operations Terence Wood said: “The historical, repetitive classified questions we often receive can be answered immediately by the service agent because we have very detailed knowledge articles, catering to users who expect instant answers while mobile browsing.”
On the sales side, Lawpath is using agents to stretch a small team across a large inbound pipeline. The company supports more than 650,000 Australian businesses through an entirely inbound model, with a sales team of around 25. That’s more leads than people can work by hand.
But with Agentforce SDR agents, the team can now run membership win-backs and follow up enquiries left uncontacted for five days. Voice agents are in testing, because roughly a third of business setups happen outside 9 to 5, with co-Founder and CMO Tom Willis noting at the event that voice and custom AI are an important fit into the future of small business support.
For the team at pay.com.au, unifying payment, sales and marketing data through Data 360 has delivered measurable results Customer onboarding has dropped from days to hours, same-day account verifications are up 68 per cent, and agent-assisted insights are ready to personalise content for about 19 per cent of contacts.
“An agent is only as good as what it can see. Once we brought payments, sales and marketing into one view, Agentforce could act on real customer behaviour, and that’s what lets us serve more customers, more personally, without adding headcount at the same pace,” said Theo Kanellopoulos, Head of Revenue Operations.
“Every business has heard what AI might do. Our customers on stage today are showing what AI can be trusted to do, every time, on the data and rules they already run on. That’s the difference between an experiment and a transformation, and it’s why the conversation in Australia has moved from possibility to execution,” concluded Perez.
More information
- See the full agenda from AIforce Essentials Sydney
- Read how pay.com.au is using Agentforce
- Hear from Leandro Perez about how ANZ organisations are overcoming the AI execution gap
