Agentforce World Tour NYC: Demonstrating the ‘How’ of Digital Labor 

The conversation around digital labor — and more of the activity — is shifting from “What?” to “How?”

A few months ago, many businesses were getting their first experiences with AI agents, often in a testbed or as an early use case. Now, a growing number are expanding from phase one adoption to wider implementations, deploying agents alongside their human workforces and in customer-facing environments. 

And there’s this new development: Organizations are increasingly implementing agents that have the skills and know-how for lines of business and industries, making it faster and easier to realize the benefits of digital labor in areas like Retail, Health, Field Service, and HR. 

Salesforce is the platform enabling this exciting transition for customers.

Salesforce is the platform enabling this exciting transition for customers. Data Cloud melds all the structured and unstructured data and metadata into a single customer profile. This unified data grounds agents built with Agentforce, enabling more relevant, accurate output and actions. Agentforce includes a complete set of tools to create and customize agents, and a library of ready-to-use skills for use cases to manage the complexities of putting digital labor to work in the real world. What’s more, hundreds of ready-made and tested actions, topics, and templates for agents are available from industry partners on the AgentExchange marketplace.

Data Cloud and Agentforce are embedded in every Salesforce app. This means every app has the same trusted 360-degree view of customers and the ability to easily create and deploy autonomous agents for almost any use case. This is the power of deeply integrating the apps, data, agents, and metadata on a single platform.

Agentforce comes to New York City

At Agentforce World Tour NYC, the focus moves beyond the conceptual to highlight concrete examples of how companies across industries and lines of business are adopting Agentforce to solve critical challenges and achieve significant gains. Customers like Indeed, 1-800Accountant, and OpenTable are at the forefront, deploying Agentforce to streamline complex processes, free up employee time, accelerate revenue opportunities, and enhance service quality.

Delivering this kind of tangible value requires a platform that is not only powerful but also practical and trustworthy. New flexible pricing options, including a Flex Credits model, make it easier for organizations to align investment with business outcomes generated by AI agents. Meanwhile, innovations in governance, trust, and security ensure that digital labor can be implemented with confidence, leveraging the Salesforce Platform’s robust security features and compliance controls.

Industry leaders can tailor Agentforce to their operational needs. At World Tour NYC, Salesforce is showcasing new agent templates, including Agentforce for Financial Services, providing pre-built, role-based agents that support industry-specific workflows and compliance requirements. Salesforce partners deeply with business to ensure they can implement digital labor strategically and achieve time to value ASAP. 

Strengthening the business case with ROI and proof points

Agentforce gives businesses virtually limitless scale and capacity in the form of digital labor. 

Some organizations are moving ahead by expanding their initial use cases to more users or bigger workloads, while others are advancing to a second or a third use case. Case in point: Goodyear is using agents to reduce the administrative tasks required of its sales reps. After that, Goodyear technologists see the potential to use agents for personalized recommendations and customer service and support. 

With Agentforce, the business case is getting stronger with every implementation. The return on investment (ROI) includes productivity improvements, faster time to resolution, improved sales, and cost savings. CIOs and business managers can use the Agentforce ROI Calculator to get an estimate of savings in areas such as customer support and sales development. 

Customer examples include:   

• Indeed is using Agentforce to provide trusted, 24/7 support for employers onboarding to the Indeed platform for the first time, as well as those already using it. Agentforce will be able to autonomously answer verification questions, resolve issues, and handle administrative tasks — drastically improving efficiency and productivity. 
• 1-800Accountant is using Agentforce to help resolve up to 50% of incoming requests to securely address responses to questions like tax return status, freeing the team to focus on more complex tasks while ensuring fast, secure, personalized support.
• OpenTable is using Agentforce to provide faster, more personalized customer support with autonomous AI agents, giving the company’s human teams more time to focus on more time consuming, complicated tasks. 

As more customers move from toe-in-the-water AI agent pilot projects to “Day 2” implementations, Salesforce works side-by-side with customers to guide them through the implementation and scaling of agents. 

Flexible pricing for a more versatile way of working

Salesforce is introducing licensing terms that reflect this versatile way of working. A licensing model called Flex Credits, which is more granular than flat-rate pricing, extends across other consumption services. That means customers have the flexibility to swap user licenses to Agentforce within a contract term as priorities change.

That means customers have the flexibility to swap user licenses to Agentforce within a contract term as priorities change.

Here’s how Flex Credits work: Each Action — a specific function that an AI agent executes on the platform, such as updating a record or answering a product inquiry — draws from a pool of Flex Credits. Customers can begin using Flex Credits for free with Salesforce Foundations, which includes 100,000 Flex Credits at no cost. 

Also, licensing terms will change from pre-purchase for consumption services to pre-committed and pay-as-you-go options. This allows for experimentation as business leaders introduce agent test beds and pilot projects before moving to enterprise-wide deployments. 

Secure agent deployments

Many businesses took their early steps in AI with large language models (LLM) and GenAI chatbots. Those served as good starter experiences, but security and governance were generally not enterprise-class. 

That’s a top-of-mind issue for security pros. Consider that only 47% of 2,000 IT security leaders surveyed are fully confident they can deploy AI agents in compliance with regulations and standards, according to Salesforce’s newly-released State of IT: Security research. 

Salesforce is responding to these requirements with a wide and powerful set of new governance, security, and compliance capabilities that help enterprises deploy trusted AI with confidence. Through the integration of Own Company’s solutions, Salesforce has beefed up data resilience with Backup & Recover, Archive, Data Mask & Seed, Shield 2.0, and Security Center 2.0 for across-the-board advances. 

There’s new and improved governance via Data Cloud, as well. The innovations include AI-based Tagging and Classification, Policy-based Governance, Data Spaces (to segregate data and metadata), and Dynamic Data Masking Policies. 

And, because AI agents rely on APIs to query systems and take actions, Salesforce is adding support for the Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A) and Model Context Protocol (MCP) to MuleSoft Flex Gateway. 

The promise of AI for the enterprise is immense, but realizing it requires a foundation of trusted data and secure development.

Rahul Auradkar, EVP and GM of Data Cloud

That adds up to a lot of new features in security and governance, but they’re the kind of robust capabilities that must be in place for trusted, policy-compliant agentic AI. “The promise of AI for the enterprise is immense, but realizing it requires a foundation of trusted data and secure development,” said Rahul Auradkar, EVP and GM of Data Cloud. 

Role-specific agents like well-trained professionals

The latest Agentforce advances being shared at World Tour NYC include pre-built, role-based agents designed for industry-specific workflows and compliance. Like well-trained professionals, these specialized digital workers are making their way into business processes with skills that augment their human counterparts. 

Agentforce now incorporates more than 100 industry-specific AI features and solutions in sectors such as Retail, Health, Field Service, and HR. In New York, the financial capital of the world, Salesforce is introducing Agentforce for Financial Services, a set of pre-built, role-based AI agent templates that augment financial services teams and let them focus more of their time and energies on deepening client relationships and growing the business.  

Examples of Agentforce for Financial Services roles and tasks: 

• Financial Advisor and Banker Agents that automate meeting prep, surface client insights and generate meeting summaries and follow-ups 
• Banking and Insurance Service Agents that handle routine service requests like reversing fees, canceling credit cards or explaining insurance options 
• A Digital Loan Officer Agent that guides borrowers through loan products, answering questions 24/7 

Importantly, Agentforce is grounded in a firm’s compliance controls so every action conforms with internal policies and regulatory requirements. And because Agentforce is natively embedded in Financial Services Cloud, human and digital workers operate from the same unified platform in a way that’s intuitive and trustworthy.

Agents and humans working together

Role-based agents are so helpful that any employee in any industry can potentially benefit from working in concert with them. That’s possible with Agentforce, which lets users build task-specific digital teammates and deploy them across Salesforce applications, including Slack. 

Tight integration between Agentforce and Slack means that agents can participate side by side with human workers, adding context, taking action, and keeping conversations moving along. 

It’s easier than ever to get started quickly with Slack Employee Agent Templates, which come pre-loaded with topics, actions and workflows. There are templates for customer insights, onboarding, and employee help.

This kind of human-agent collaboration promises to not only boost productivity but improve employee and customer experiences. “AI and human agents work best in tandem,” noted Bernard Slowey, SVP of Digital Customer Success at Salesforce. “The two really go hand-in-hand.” 

It’s only been eight months since Agentforce was unveiled at Dreamforce 2024, and the pace of progress shows no signs of slowing. The latest developments include flexible licensing, refined governance and security, and new task-specific agents for industries and employees. That means the opportunities are accelerating too. 

Go deeper:

• Find customer news from World Tour New York and more on the Salesforce Newsroom
• Read about task-specific, context-aware agents in Slack
• Read the Agentforce for Financial Services announcement
• Learn more about Salesforce’s approach to data governance in the agentic AI era
• Check out the Agentforce Flexible Pricing news