Rowena Westphalen, SVP Innovation, AI, and Customer Advisory for Salesforce, APAC reflects on the rise of autonomous AI agents and the announcement of Agentforce at the recent Dreamforce event.
AI innovation is happening faster than ever. Hot on the heels of predictive AI and generative AI, we’re now witnessing the third wave of the AI revolution, where businesses are deploying accurate and low-hallucination autonomous agents alongside human workers.
Moving beyond just predictions and content generation to actively helping employee efforts, AI agents are proving to further boost productivity, enhance employee work at scale, and improve customer relationships.
For smaller businesses, from local shops to startups and everyone in-between, connected data and AI, are integral to growth, scale, and success.
With many smaller businesses striving to do more with less, AI agents can take action on tasks like answering customer service inquiries, qualifying sales leads, and improving marketing campaigns. By helping shoulder some of these tasks, employees can concentrate on more strategic and creative work, driving the business forward.
Before we go out and start building agents, we need to start at their foundation, data.
AI is built on high-quality, connected data. That’s why we’ve created Salesforce Foundations, which will give Sales and Service customers access to Marketing, Commerce and Data Cloud capabilities, with Agentforce, a groundbreaking suite of autonomous AI agents automatically built in. Coming later this year, Salesforce Foundations means small businesses will have the tools they need to leverage AI agents effectively.
In contrast to copilots and chatbots that rely on human requests and struggle with complex or multi-step tasks, agents offer a new level of sophistication by operating autonomously, retrieving the right data on demand, building action plans for any task, and executing these plans without requiring human intervention.
Like a self-driving car, AI agents use data to adapt to changing conditions and operate independently within a business’ guardrails, ensuring every customer interaction is well-informed, pertinent, and valuable.
And when desired, Agentforce seamlessly hands off to human employees with a summary of the interaction, an overview of the customer’s details, and recommendations for what to do next.
We like to think of AI not as a tool, but as an agent, and these agents go beyond a basic bot, using the data of your business to reach every possible customer with exactly the right message and the right experience.
This is why agents are such an important next step for enterprise AI. But we also don’t think customers should DIY this type of AI; businesses want a managed, secure platform, with the ability to deploy agents across all the different customer experience touch points.
We saw at Dreamforce last week that there are already significant use cases in play for AI agents, across every industry.
Take academic publisher Wiley, which is using Agentforce to handle the seasonal surge of back-to-school day in North America. It’s enabling them to resolve 40% more customer cases, with Agenforce handling the routine queries so their reps can focus on more complex requests.
Then there’s OpenTable, the online restaurant reservation service, which is using Agentforce to provide 24/7 support and helping its service reps to be more productive.
Fisher & Paykel was the talk of the event, with its Chief Digital Officer Rudi Khoury sharing a compelling vision for how AI agents will transform their business. For Rudi,, AI isn’t about replacing people; it’s about how they can enhance employee experience to deliver better customer experiences.
It’s important to think about the role of AI agents at work as a partnership between people and AI. Complementing skills and intelligence will bring better business outcomes. While agents can orchestrate complex actions on behalf of the user, they require those skills to be configured and need a degree of hand-holding to perform at their best.
Every business has more jobs to be done than the resources available to do them. As a result, many jobs either don’t get done or could be done better.. AI agents provide relief to overstretched teams with its ability to scale capacity on demand so employees can focus on higher-touch, higher-value, and more strategic outcomes.
The future of work is a hybrid workforce composed of humans with agents, enabling companies to compete in an ever-changing world.
Read now: How AI, automation, and trusted data are shaping next-generation customer service
Salesforce, the global leader in customer relationship management (CRM), empowers companies to connect with their customers in a whole new way.
