Agentforce IT Service vs. Legacy ITSM: How to Migrate and Build an Agentic Enterprise

You’re trying to guide your business through today’s digital challenges with tools built for a different era. It feels like navigating a storm with a compass when everyone else has a global positioning system (GPS) and real-time weather updates. That’s the reality of legacy Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) — it brought discipline when IT was about servers and tickets, but now it leaves you stuck with slow and disconnected processes.

This is where Agentforce IT Service transforms the journey. With artificial intelligence (AI) that anticipates issues, predictive insights that prevent risks, and human-centered experiences that your teams actually enjoy, you can move from reactive firefighting to proactive innovation. More than just IT efficiency, it’s a step toward building an agentic enterprise — a business that thinks and acts with intelligence, agility, resilience, and heart.

Agentforce IT Service is an AI-powered approach to ITSM that helps businesses predict and prevent problems before they happen. Instead of waiting for problems to happen, it uses AI agents, predictive intelligence, seamless collaboration, and human-centered design to keep your business running smoothly. Where legacy ITSM focused on managing tickets, Agentforce IT Service focuses on empowering people — both your employees and your IT staff — to solve challenges faster and with less friction.

Salesforce’s Agentforce sits at the heart of this shift. Imagine having digital teammates — requestor agents that guide your employees, fulfiller agents that support your IT staff, and proactive agents that work in the background. Plus, you get predictive AI that spots risks before they become incidents. Together, these agents make IT feel less like a back-office function and more like a trusted partner in your growth. This is what it means to move toward the agentic enterprise: an environment where your technology doesn’t just keep up, but helps you stay one step ahead.

Legacy ITSM gave businesses a much-needed foundation. It brought structure when IT was chaotic, helped track incidents, ensured processes were followed, and gave leaders some visibility into operations.

But today’s modern problems need more advanced solutions. Legacy ITSM often leaves you with manual ticket logging, siloed tools, reactive problem-solving, and limited insights. Instead of empowering your employees, it can frustrate them with slow processes and rigid portals. Forget helping your IT staff innovate. It burdens them with repetitive tasks. In short, legacy ITSM keeps the lights on, but it doesn’t help you light the way forward — and that gap is exactly why businesses are looking to migrate to Agentforce IT Service.

When you compare legacy ITSM with Agentforce IT Service, the difference is striking — like navigating with a paper map versus using a GPS that guides you, predicts traffic, and suggests alternate routes. Both keep your IT running, but only one helps you move forward intelligently, efficiently, and proactively.

Legacy ITSM relies on manual incident creation and long resolution cycles. Salesforce’s Agentforce IT Service flips this model. With omni-channel incident creation, incidents can be auto-generated from chat, voice, email, or portals. AI-assisted creation via Agentforce drafts incidents and fills in details, reducing manual effort. Dashboards and views provide real-time insights for managers and fulfillers, while intelligent triage and on-call management ensures the right teams handle issues quickly. Instead of reacting, your IT team stays ahead.

Legacy systems often delay root-cause analysis and slow down change approvals. Agentforce IT Service brings AI-powered root cause analysis (RCA) and recommendations, accelerating problem resolution. Teams collaborate faster using Slack swarming and action plans, while change management with AI risk scoring predicts potential issues before implementation. Dynamic stage management and change calendars provide clear visibility into schedules and approvals, turning reactive firefighting into strategic operations.

Traditional ITSM often frustrates employees with rigid portals and disconnected communication, leading to low adoption. Agentforce IT Service meets users where they work. Slack and Teams employee hubs allow staff to manage requests directly, while fulfiller hubs let IT teams triage and resolve issues within chat apps. Agentforce integration provides AI assistance in real time, and swarming enables cross-team collaboration to solve complex problems quickly. The result is a more intuitive, engaging experience for everyone.

Legacy knowledge bases are static and offer limited value. Salesforce’s Agentforce IT Service transforms this with AI-assisted article creation, generating and improving content automatically. Einstein article recommendations provide proactive, context-aware suggestions, while the unified service catalog with automated fulfillment manages both simple and complex workflows, like employee onboarding. Knowledge becomes alive and actionable.

Reporting in legacy ITSM is reactive and limited, like checking the rearview mirror while driving forward. Agentforce IT Service gives you predictive foresight. Predictive AI flags potential service level agreement (SLA) breaches and calculates change risk scores. Tableau Einstein analytics delivers deep insights into incidents, problems, changes, and releases. And AI-driven governance (GRC) automates compliance assessments and policy checks, ensuring your IT operations stay both efficient and secure.

If you’ve ever waited for a delayed train while watching other passengers breeze past, you know the cost of standing still. Legacy ITSM keeps your IT operations running, but it can’t help you move faster or more proactively. That’s why migrating to an Agentforce IT Service isn’t just an upgrade — it’s a step toward transforming your IT into a strategic, forward-looking partner.

There are four clear reasons to make the move today:

• Faster resolution with AI-driven assistance: Agentforce reduces manual work, auto-fills incidents, suggests resolutions, and accelerates problem-solving, so your IT staff can focus on what truly matters.
• Higher employee adoption through collaboration tools: With self-service portals and AI-guided requests, teams can get help where they already work, reducing frustration and increasing satisfaction.
• Proactive service stability with predictive AI: Instead of reacting after incidents occur, predictive capabilities alert you to potential SLA breaches, major incidents, or high-risk changes before they happen, keeping your systems resilient.
• Foundation for the agentic enterprise: Migrating isn’t just about IT. It’s about creating an environment where your teams and technology act intelligently and respond quickly — forming the backbone of an agentic enterprise.

Migrating to Agentforce IT Service doesn’t have to feel overwhelming. Start with the foundation, add intelligence step by step, and soon everything works together seamlessly. Here’s a clear path to guide your journey:

Before making any move, understand where your legacy processes slow you down. Identify manual tasks and areas where incidents or requests take too long to resolve. This gives you a clear map of where Agentforce IT Service will have the most impact.

Implement incident, problem, and request management first. Use AI-assisted logging and intelligent triage to reduce manual effort and improve visibility. Introduce the unified service catalog so employees can request services quickly and easily.

Introduce change management with AI-based risk scoring and dynamic stage management. Use release management to plan and track deployments efficiently. Integrate your knowledge management system (KMS) with AI-assisted article creation and proactive recommendations to empower employees and reduce repetitive tickets.

Activate the three types of agents:

• Requestor Agent: It guides employees and creates tickets automatically.
• Fulfiller Agent: It helps IT staff resolve incidents, analyze root causes, and summarize resolutions.
• Proactive Agent: It works behind the scenes to automate workflows and reduce manual effort.

Set up a Slack hub for employees and fulfillers. Encourage swarming to solve complex issues quickly, and make AI agents accessible directly within collaboration tools to support faster decision-making.

Incorporate IT asset management (ITAM) for end-to-end hardware and software visibility. Use service configuration management with automated discovery. Activate SLA and omni-channel routing to prioritize tasks intelligently, giving IT teams more time to focus on strategy.

Use Tableau Einstein analytics and predictive AI to monitor performance and identify improvement opportunities. Use AI-driven governance tools to ensure compliance and policy alignment. Regularly review insights and feedback to refine workflows and strengthen your agentic enterprise.

The world of IT is evolving fast, and your business can’t afford to stay stuck in reactive, manual processes. Legacy ITSM gave you stability, but Salesforce Agentforce IT Service adds agility and foresight — transforming IT from a back-office function into a true growth driver.

Built on the power of Customer 360, it connects your data and processes in one place. With Slack for real-time collaboration and Agentforce for trusted AI, your IT teams get AI agents and proactive workflows that prevent problems before they happen. Teams get faster support, leaders gain visibility, and your whole business operates with more intelligence and heart.

You’re not just upgrading IT — you’re building an agentic enterprise. Start your journey with Salesforce Agentforce IT Service today.