{"id":81148,"date":"2024-09-12T13:30:00","date_gmt":"2024-09-12T20:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.salesforce.com\/?p=81148"},"modified":"2024-12-17T12:08:29","modified_gmt":"2024-12-17T20:08:29","slug":"building-business-ai-agents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salesforce.com\/news\/stories\/building-business-ai-agents\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside Agentforce: Creating AI Agents That Will Change Everything at Work"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to include new examples of how agents will impact the workplace<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Quick take: <\/em><\/strong>Salesforce is ushering in the third wave of the AI revolution, helping businesses deploy AI agents alongside human workers across the enterprise. Working together, these customizable agents can autonomously take action on tasks and free up workers to focus on the jobs only they can do.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every driver knows they should keep their hands on the steering wheel at 10 and 2 o\u2019clock. But as cars have become smarter, autonomous vehicle drivers have \u2014 gradually, carefully, and apprehensively \u2014 begun to turn control over to their vehicles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s where business is headed with autonomous artificial intelligence (AI)<\/a>, said Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI. With the rise of autonomous AI agents \u2014 advanced digital colleagues that can take action without human intervention \u2014 that is starting to change. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn the autonomous driving world,\u201d Shih said, \u201cyou have a range of assistance. At level zero, for example, you might have zero assistance. Level one might give you light assistance. And at level five you might have full assistance or autonomy. You can think of autonomous AI for the enterprise in much the same way.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Waves of autonomy<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The AI revolution can be broken down into waves. The first wave is predictive AI where AI models forecast the future based on patterns or historical data. For example, predictive AI can suggest the next best action for a sales professional to take with a prospect based on previous engagement. Such technology is also common in streaming services that monitor subscribers\u2019 viewing habits to recommend other content they might like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second wave is generative AI<\/a>. Powered by large language models (LLMs)<\/a>, which can understand and generate humanlike text, generative AI models can create new content \u2014 from marketing copy and campaign images to sales emails and customer service. This wave led to the creation of consumer bots like ChatGPT. While automated in nature, they still require human input, through prompts, to get a job done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, we are entering the third wave where autonomous AI agents<\/a>, or agentic systems<\/a>, not only recommend actions but can reason and tackle multi-faceted projects without requiring human oversight at every step. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Agentforce is here.<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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\"Agentforce<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Introducing Agentforce 2.0: The Digital Labor Platform for Building a Limitless Workforce
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How an Advanced Reasoning Engine Is Powering the Next Generation of AI Agents<\/a><\/h4>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Marc Benioff Weighs In On The AI-Powered Future<\/a><\/h4>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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How Agentforce Is Redefining Productivity and Customer Experience in the AI Era
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Unlike traditional chatbots<\/a>, which can only handle specific queries that have been explicitly programmed into their system and don\u2019t understand context or nuance, AI agents are intelligent and dynamic. Salesforce, for example, has released a series of autonomous AI agents<\/a>, built on the Salesforce Platform, that interact with LLMs by analyzing the full context of the customer\u2019s message, the customer\u2019s previous interactions and preferences, and then autonomously decide the next actions to take. They use generative AI to create conversational responses \u2014 grounded in a company\u2019s owned trusted business data and metadata through Data Cloud<\/a> \u2014 to deliver relevant, contextual, and conversational responses to inquiries. Moreover, they perform tasks proactively while operating within clear guardrails that companies define in Salesforce. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We’re going from content generation and analysis to automating actions<\/em>.”<\/span><\/p>\nClara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe’re going from content generation and analysis to automating actions,\u201d Shih said. \u201cIn the generative phase, you might ask a copilot to write an email for you to a customer. In the agentic phase, you can ask a harder question: \u2018What should I do<\/em> with all of my customers?\u2019 Maybe it’s email, maybe it’s picking up the phone and calling, maybe it’s sending a text message. That’s really what agents can do: They can take a higher order question, break it down into a series of steps, and then execute each of those steps.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What will it be like to work with AI agents? <\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The leap from generative to agentic AI will transform how humans work, said Paula Goldman, Salesforce\u2019s Chief Ethical and Humane Use Officer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe’re really at the precipice where AI is becoming increasingly capable, not just of creating content, for example, but of taking action,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd that is a sea change for how we do work. The opportunities are limitless to make our jobs more fun, more creative, and more productive.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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