NHS Shared Business Services and Salesforce Deploy AI-powered Platform to Transform Corporate Services across the NHS

Working with Salesforce, NHS Shared Business Services (NHS SBS) is transforming the experience of NHS staff and suppliers

With a Salesforce platform powering a seamless digital help centre, NHS SBS is at the forefront of integrated AI for shared services, leveraging economies of scale and freeing up frontline staff and resources which can be put back into patient care

LONDON, UK, 20 May 2026 – NHS Shared Business Services, England’s leading provider of corporate services to the health service, plays a central role in supporting the country’s critical national infrastructure. Processing £395bn of NHS funding each year, it keeps money flowing through the system, ensuring the people, products and services that patients need are paid for efficiently.

Through its strategic partnership with Salesforce, the world’s #1 AI CRM, NHS SBS is now combining its shared services expertise, processing model and investment with Salesforce’s AI, data and cloud capabilities. 

The result is a better experience for users, swifter resolutions, and a platform designed for pace and scale, resulting in essential goods and services reaching the NHS faster.

As part of NHS SBS’s multi-million pound investment into its new unified finance and procurement service, it has created SBS One, a new AI powered digital help centre that changes the way it interacts with customers. By automating repetitive tasks, streamlining workflows, and simplifying processes, the platform helps employees focus on higher-value work, supporting a more sustainable and resilient operating model. Over time, this unified platform improves the experience of every user group: NHS colleagues, their suppliers and shared service teams.

At the centre of SBS One is a modern Help Centre that brings together self-service, automation and human expertise in one seamless service, so NHS staff and suppliers can raise, track, and resolve invoice queries in real time. 

Built on Agentforce 360 for Public Sector, the platform reduces friction and improves accessibility, meaning help is easier to find, easier to use and available where and when it’s needed.

A key innovation is “Agent Murphy”, an intelligent AI agent capable of understanding and responding to natural language queries instantly. Routine enquiries are resolved immediately, while more complex issues are automatically routed to human specialists with full context and data-driven insights, delivering a faster, consistent, and more intuitive user experience. 

We’ve shown something unexpected: that a contact centre can be a harmonised service that suits everyone whilst driving AI transformation across an entire organisation. Innovation can come from anywhere.

John Murphy, Head of Customer Excellence at NHS SBS

The impact has been significant. 84% of queries from NHS staff are now initiated through the platform, reducing reliance on phone-based support and enabling teams to operate more efficiently. Average handling times have fallen by 20%, with most queries now resolved within 24 hours. The average time to raise a query has fallen from 12 minutes to three, thanks to inbuilt security checks.

Just as importantly, the new model reinforces the strength of NHS SBS’s service operation: only 6% of invoices processed by NHS SBS result in a query and the query experience is now simpler, quicker and more transparent, helping suppliers get clarity sooner and NHS teams keep finance processes moving. 

Looking ahead, NHS SBS is continuing to expand its use of AI, with ambitions to further automate service areas including email handling, supplier queries, and case management. The AI agent is expected to handle up to 50% of service demand in future, unlocking additional efficiency and scalability while maintaining high-quality support. 

This transformation reflects NHS SBS’s broader mission to deliver best-in-class shared services that drive efficiency, resilience, and value across the NHS. Aligning technology innovation with clear operational outcomes, the partnership is helping NHS teams work more effectively, ultimately supporting better patient care. 

“People love the platform and they’re enjoying working on it,” said John Murphy, Head of Customer Excellence at NHS SBS, and Agent Murphy’s namesake. “We’ve shown something unexpected: that a contact centre can be a harmonised service that suits everyone whilst driving AI transformation across an entire organisation. Innovation can come from anywhere.

“With most cases now resolved within 24 hours, we are vastly exceeding our service level agreements. It’s a return on investment that is absolutely huge.”

Our work with NHS Shared Business Services represents a pivotal shift in how UK critical national infrastructure achieves productivity, moving from experimentation to real, measurable impact at scale.

Zahra Bahrololoumi CBE, CEO, Salesforce UKI

Zahra Bahrololoumi CBE, CEO, Salesforce UKI said: “Our work with NHS Shared Business Services represents a pivotal shift in how UK critical national infrastructure achieves productivity, moving from experimentation to real, measurable impact at scale.

By bringing together data, automation, and AI agents on a unified platform, NHS SBS is not just optimising workflows—they are unlocking fiscal capacity, strengthening supply chain resilience, and proving that trusted AI can deliver profound economic value back to frontline public services.”

Facing unprecedented demand, leaders across the public and private sectors cannot rely on incremental gains; they require structural modernisation. 

Learn more:

• Learn more about Agentforce and Data 360
• Read about the opening of Salesforce’s AI Centre in London