{"id":88328,"date":"2025-07-03T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-07-03T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.salesforce.com\/?p=88328"},"modified":"2025-08-21T15:16:00","modified_gmt":"2025-08-21T22:16:00","slug":"how-salesforce-built-better-ai-agents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salesforce.com\/news\/stories\/how-salesforce-built-better-ai-agents\/","title":{"rendered":"What Salesforce Has Learned About Building Better Agents"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Editor\u2019s Note: <\/em><\/strong>This excerpt is adapted from <\/em>Agentforce: Harnessing the Agency of AI to Scale, Grow, and Lead Any Industry<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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When Salesforce unveiled Agentforce<\/a> in October 2024, we started getting candid reports from the field. Customers and partners were excited and optimistic about AI and the agentic<\/a> future, but there were challenges. One of the most common questions was: Can I really get this to work?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some reluctance was understandable. Even the iPhone was mistrusted at first. To address this challenge, product and engineering teams set to work building a portfolio of off-the-shelf agents that could be powered up quickly and adapted without too much angst. They focused on a handful of the most common, agent-ready workflow problems in the enterprise. Much like human labor, agentic labor was divided into functional areas where Salesforce customers and customer intelligence said they\u2019d be the most useful. These areas were service, sales, marketing, commerce, and HR.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first prebuilt agent<\/a> was called Agentforce for Service. It was designed to engage with customers and complete customer-facing support tasks \u2014 24 hours a day and in natural language, guided by brand policies and even tone of voice. In sales, we offered two prebuilt agents: Sales Development, which would nurture inbound leads 24\/7, and Sales Coaching, which gave every rep a dedicated coach to improve productivity. In marketing, we developed a couple of prebuilt agents to support campaign creation and loyalty program management. We offered three types of prebuilt agents for commerce: Agentforce Merchant, which sets up online stores; Agentforce Personal Shopper, a 24\/7 personal shopping assistant; and Agentforce Buyer, which helps B2B buyers locate products and check order status. And we teamed up with Workday to create a joint prebuilt agent to handle common employee HR tasks like onboarding and personalized self-development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was just the beginning. Salesforce now offers more than 200 prebuilt agents tackling everything from deep research to appointment scheduling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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That was just the beginning. Salesforce now offers more than 200 prebuilt agents tackling everything from deep research to appointment scheduling.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

But most of these prebuilt agents are intended to be a start, a relatively easy way for Salesforce customers to get over any initial reluctance and envision what a custom AI agent could do for them. And it quickly became clear that, once our customers became comfortable with the idea, there was no limit to the creativity they could apply and the business problems they could address. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

From prebuilt to custom<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

By talking to customers and observing early adopters, the Agentforce team pretty quickly saw some themes emerge: areas where AI agents were being actively used and proving useful in real situations. They were as follows:<\/p>\n\n\n\n