From Zero to Agentic Enterprise: A Startup’s Guide to Salesforce AI

If you want your startup or small business to grow fast – and who doesn’t? – then you need three things: speed, personalization, and efficiency. Luckily, Salesforce has you covered. Salesforce’s unified Agentforce 360 platform, combining customer relationship management (CRM), artificial intelligence (AI) agents, data, and trust, is key for companies that are beginning their growth journey.

So how does a smaller business become an agentic enterprise? We are here to show you to go from zero to superhero with the right tools. This is what startups are doing to scale. Let’s get into it.

An agentic enterprise is a business model where AI is no longer just a tool for generating content or answering questions, but an active participant in operations. In this model, autonomous AI agents — which can reason, plan, and take action — are integrated into the core workflows of the company.

While traditional automation follows a rigid “if-this-then-that” logic, an agentic enterprise uses trained AI that can achieve complex goals with minimal human intervention.

What sets an agentic enterprise apart from a traditional “AI-enabled” company is the shift from reactive tools to proactive partners. AI agents don’t just execute a single command; they break down high-level goals into a series of logical steps.

Agents are connected to enterprise systems (like your CRM) and have the authority to execute tasks, like processing a refund for a customer. And, different specialized agents communicate with each other to solve cross-team problems.

Unlike static software, agentic systems can pivot their strategy if they encounter an unexpected roadblock, such as a shipping delay or a change in regulation.

At its core, an agentic enterprise is a business that uses the power of AI agents to assist the work of its employees with data-driven technology. These agents work across all business functions autonomously, proactively, designed to execute specialized tasks to help teams and customers scale.

With the help of large language models (LLMs) to analyze context, reason through decisions, and autonomously take the next steps, the agents become the thread that weaves together the agentic enterprise.

Agentforce 360 is Salesforce’s AI agent platform, providing always-on digital labor that empowers every business to improve customer experiences (and yes, we will say, so much more). Agentforce can be trained to proactively support your employees and customers 24/7. Your AI agents are trained on your company’s data in Data 360, and can access accurate business knowledge, reason through complex requests, and take action to scale across teams. All trained and trusted by you and your team.

Achieving the status of an agentic enterprise for small business starts with a connected, unified platform that contains a complete view of every customer. Salesforce offers AI-powered CRM solutions designed to scale your business at any stage:

• Free Suite: Start out with a simple CRM suite including sales, service, marketing, and Slack for a maximum of two users.
• Starter Suite: The smart CRM suite for small business including unlimited users, providing sales, service, marketing, commerce and Slack basics.
• Pro Suite: Progress to the flexible CRM suite designed for growing businesses that require deeper customization across sales, service, marketing, and commerce, plus Slack for team collaboration.

For existing Salesforce customers, you can try out Agentforce 360 by activating Salesforce Foundations. See value from day one with solutions built for quick setup, guided onboarding, and seamless access to customer support.

Agentforce 360 integrates seamlessly across your entire business — sales, service, marketing, commerce, and productivity — to bring all your customer interactions together, so you can take action with confidence. Here’s what that looks like for every business function.

From zero to sales 360: Boosting pipeline with AI

Agentforce Sales and its sales agents can help boost pipeline, win rate, and revenue. Agents handle the routine tasks like engaging leads, researching accounts, and updating sales data.

For example, a sales development representative (SDR) agent can engage with prospects 24/7, autonomously answering product questions, handling objections, and scheduling meetings, allowing human sellers to focus on building deeper relationships. Sales AI also provides real-time predictions and helps generate concise summaries of sales calls or compose data-enriched emails. 

Meanwhile, your team can focus on the more revenue-driving activities like upselling, cross-selling, and handling sensitive customer asks. AI support for sales has never been better.

From zero to 24/7 service: Agentic customer support

Agentforce Service allows businesses to keep costs in check by augmenting human teams on one platform. Agentforce Service enables humans and agents to collaborate at every step of the customer journey.

A service agent can replace traditional, more limited chatbots with AI that handles a wide range of issues without preprogrammed scenarios. These autonomous agents provide 24/7 support for answering questions, resolving cases, managing orders, and troubleshooting issues, resulting in reduced response times and cost savings. Human service agents now have their time freed up to focus on building knowledge bases and becoming more proactive.

From zero to marketing success: Personalization and campaign optimization

Agentforce Marketing offers AI agents that personalize every touchpoint across the customer lifecycle using actionable data and workflows. The campaign optimizer agent can automate the full campaign lifecycle, using AI to analyze, generate, personalize, and optimize marketing campaigns based on your business goals.

This drives personalization and productivity at scale, customizing outreach based on insights. With AI agents running campaigns, marketers can now focus on high-level strategic initiatives, creative and brand development, and deep customer understanding.

From zero to ecommerce wins: Driving revenue across channels

Agentforce Commerce helps store owners increase revenue and deliver consistent customer experiences across online, in-store, and mobile channels with the help of agents. Agents can automatically generate product descriptions, recommend relevant products, and create seamless buying experiences.

A merchandiser agent can assist ecommerce teams with site setup, personalized promotions, and product descriptions, while a personal shopper agent acts as a digital concierge, offering personalized product recommendations on your ecommerce sites. With all this busy work off their plates, store owners and sellers can dedicate their attention to expanding inventory, marketing, and holiday promotions.

From zero to team Slack: Where work happens

Agentforce and Slack allow you to bring your people, agents, business data, and apps to where work happens in Slack, the team communication platform that does more than just let you communicate. Agentforce 360 supports employees in the flow of their work by performing specific tasks like searching for documents, summarizing long chat threads, and connecting colleagues through voice chat (huddles), video, and short videos (Clips).

Agents can create workflows to handle everyday tasks across sales, service, and marketing, handling the busywork so your team can focus on what matters, like onboarding new clients and closing deals.

Salesforce believes that the future of work is rooted in trust and founded in CRM, AI, and data. For startups concerned about deploying new technology, Salesforce provides built-in guardrails and security.

1. Trust architecture: The foundation of Agentforce 360 is the Einstein Trust Layer, a comprehensive set of features and guardrails that protect data privacy and security, and promote the responsible use of AI. This layer includes features like dynamic grounding, zero data retention, and toxicity detection, allowing you to use generative AI without compromising data safety or security.
2. Hybrid reasoning: Agentforce uses the Atlas Reasoning Engine to break down prompts into smaller tasks, decide on necessary data and actions, and autonomously execute them. And, Agent Script pairs deterministic workflows with flexible LLM reasoning, giving enterprises hybrid reasoning agents that are both precise and adaptable.
3. Low-code building: Businesses can build agents using the low-code Agent Builder. The Agentforce Builder unifies drafting, testing, and deployment into a single conversational workspace. Users can customize out-of-the-box agents or build new ones using existing tools like Prompts, Flows, MuleSoft API connectors, and Apex and Javascript code.

Your startup or small business is ready for digital labor with Agentforce 360 and Salesforce CRM. You can join the Agentblazer Community and even earn Agentblazer Status, which highlights your skills and hands-on experience building autonomous agents. Wherever you are on the journey — you can let AI and CRM support you.

Start your journey with the Free or Starter Suite today. Looking for more customization? Explore Pro Suite. Already a Salesforce customer? Activate Foundations to try out Agentforce 360 today.

AI supported the writers and editors who created this article.