Aflac Japan turns hours of prep into instant proposals with Agentforce

Hours of required prep left less time for client engagement, slowing growth and limiting outreach

When a serious medical issue like cancer strikes, worrying about treatment costs should be the last thing on a patient’s mind. Aflac Japan has spent decades helping their customers fund the cost of treatment, providing policies that give financial peace of mind so patients can focus on healing and living. Their commitment goes beyond coverage — it’s about ensuring customers feel supported, secure, and confident no matter what life throws their way.

To better serve customers, Aflac has expanded their offerings from traditional cancer and medical insurance to plans that promote healthy living, long-term financial security, and holistic life planning. While this growth allows the company to meet diverse needs, it also makes preparing for customer visits more complex. With around 113,000 insurance agency representatives handling every sale, ensuring each rep has the right information and guidance for high-quality proposals had become a time-intensive process.

To navigate a growing range of offerings, insurance agency representatives had to master the nuances of each policy, understand which coverage best fit different life stages, and figure out how to combine multiple policies. Each customer visit required collecting customer history, policy details, and past interactions from multiple disconnected systems. After visits, reps spent additional hours manually logging engagement histories and compiling follow-up notes. This limited the number of policies reps could sell and reduced the time available for the meaningful, personalized conversations that build long-term customer relationships. The complexity of these different systems also created a steep learning curve, making it difficult for newer reps to get up to speed and work as efficiently as their seasoned colleagues.

Adding urgency to the equation, Japan’s labor population is projected to shrink. “The Japanese population continues to decline each year,” said Tohru Futami, EVP, and Chief Digital Information Officer at Aflac Japan. “Recruiting and retaining skilled insurance agency representatives and coming up with a strategy to address this ongoing workforce gap has been one of our key challenges.”

Aflac saw an opportunity to build a unified, intelligent system that would cut prep time and empower all reps — new and seasoned — to deliver high-quality proposals across an augmented workforce.

Aflac reps prepare customer-optimized insurance plans with assistance from Agentforce

To help insurance agency representatives deliver consistent, high-quality proposals, Aflac launched agentic proposal preparation powered by Agentforce. Acting as a digital partner, the AI agent automates prep work, gathers data across systems, and generates intelligent recommendations — all in Japanese. What once took hours now happens in a fraction of the time, freeing reps to spend more time where it matters most: with their customers.

For example, an insurance agency representative preparing for an upcoming customer visit can start a chat with Agentforce and receive guidance throughout the entire sales process. Agentforce can suggest icebreakers, recommend products based on the customer's needs, surface relevant talking points, and assist with policy illustration preparation. As a result, representatives arrive better prepared, more confident, and equipped to deliver a personalized experience that helps build trust and strengthen customer relationships.

With Agentforce, reps no longer need to piece together information across multiple sources. What once took hours of preparation can now be completed faster and more efficiently. It also suggests the most efficient travel routes enabling every rep to maximize customer time. 

“With Agentforce, even newcomers can make appropriate proposals like veterans,” said Futami. “Conversations can be seamlessly digitized, and insurance plans can be presented instantly.”

After customer visits, Agentforce takes care of the follow-up work that used to detract from selling time. It drafts meeting summaries, logs engagement history, prepares thank-you emails, and suggests next best actions. This means every interaction gets captured properly, giving reps more time to build relationships and help their next customer.

Looking ahead, Aflac plans to expand Agentforce capabilities to include voice interactions so reps can speak naturally with the system, and real-time transcription to convert conversations into written notes instantly. The vision is to give every rep, regardless of experience level, the tools to deliver expert, individualized insurance advice instantly. 

“Agentforce will not be a tool for just a select few. It will be a trusted companion for all employees and insurance agency representatives, helping them meet customers’ diversifying needs,” said Futami.

A unified data foundation gives insurance reps real-time access to customer insights

Looking ahead, Aflac envisions Data 360 serving as a central data hub that enables Agentforce and similar systems to access a diverse range of data sources. Aflac plans to combine their rich internal datasets with external data from sources like AWS using zero-copy technology.

“The advantage of being able to safely utilize a wide range of data both inside and outside the company across multiple platforms via Data 360 is something that only Salesforce can provide,” said Futami.

Across the business, each cloud contributes to this holistic view:

• Service Cloud powers Aflac’s contact center. By capturing every interaction, from phone calls to emails, in a single system, it ensures customer history and context are always at hand.
• Experience Cloud serves as the foundation for both customer and insurance agency representative portals. It’s also the gateway for Agentforce, with secure authentication and permission-based access that allow agency representatives to see the right data in the right context.
• Financial Services Cloud provides insurance agency representatives with a relationship-centric view of customers and equips reps to create tailored proposals and deliver advice that aligns with each customer’s life stage.

“Without Agentforce, our customer services and operations would not be possible,” said Futami. “Salesforce is an extremely important strategic partner for our company.” 

That mission-critical role isn’t just about powering daily operations. It also comes down to trust. Aflac depends on Salesforce for the built-in security controls that keep customer data safe. Sensitive data is masked before it ever leaves Aflac’s environment, ensuring nothing is transmitted to external large language models. Corporate data stays under Aflac’s control, while Agentforce is hosted securely on Salesforce’s platform. 

“With Salesforce, system infrastructure operations and system development become highly efficient and flexible, and we are able to centrally manage data related to many customers,” said Futami. “As a result, our customer-facing services improve, system development speed improves, and system development costs decrease.”

Salesforce also gives Aflac fine-grained control over what Agentforce can do and who can access certain data. For example, an insurance agency representative’s ability to inquire about contract details will depend on their permissions. These guardrails ensure Agentforce refuses requests that fall outside policy or regulatory boundaries. The result is a system that can adapt its tone, scope, and actions based on the user while keeping operations standardized and compliant. Salesforce Professional Services partnered closely with Aflac to design and implement their Agentforce solution, ensuring it integrated seamlessly with existing Salesforce systems. While the full impact of Agentforce is still being realized, Aflac expects this foundation to deliver meaningful, measurable results as the solution continues to mature.

These controls make Salesforce not just the engine behind Aflac’s operations but the trusted foundation that ensures every customer experience is secure. This gives Aflac the confidence to deliver on their mission of supporting their customers in living healthier, fuller lives.