Salesforce launches new, ‘more trustworthy’ generation of AI bots

Yesterday, Salesforce launched Agentforce — generative AI bots the company says can be trusted to take action on their own. 

Agentforce is “the third wave of AI — advancing beyond copilots to a new era of highly accurate, low-hallucination intelligent agents that actively drive customer success,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said during the press conference.

The company said that, unlike chatbots, Agentforce bots are capable of taking actions on their own. Combining three major Salesforce tools — Agent Builder, Model Builder and Prompt Builder — Agentforce provides out-of-the-box bots that can be used across industries and customized using inexpensive, low-code tools.

Those agents are:

• Campaign Optimizer manages and executes full campaign lifecycles. 
• Service Agent replaces chatbots in handling customer service and replaces chatbots.
• Buyer helps B2B customers find products, make purchases and track orders.
• Personal Shopper recommends products and helps with search.
• Merchant does all the site-related tasks for merchandisers, including promotions, product descriptions and insights.
• Sales Development Representative engages with potential leads 24/7.
• Sales Coach helps train sales teams and lets sellers practice pitching.

Benioff said the tool is designed for customers who don’t know much about AI or building bots. “They are not going to have to be an expert in an LLM, they are not going to have to understand all of these deep capabilities that you would need to know to be a computer scientist,” he said. This is “AI for the rest of us.”

Benioff said the company will put all its focus on the new product: “The only thing we’re going to do at Salesforce is Agentforce.”

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Agentforce is powered by an upgraded version of Salesforce’s Einstein AI called Atlas Reasoning Engine, which is “designed to simulate how humans think and plan.” 

The company compared the new technology to that of self-driving cars in that it can interpret data to adapt to conditions in real time and can act independently within a company’s guardrails. 

Benioff said Agentforce has the lowest hallucination rate of any generative AI but did not say what that rate is. 

Benioff said customers will launch 1,000 of the bots at next week’s Dreamforce conference. These are what the company is calling Agentforce One. Agentforce Two, with some Atlas Reasoning Engine components, is expected to launch in February. 

General availability for Agentforce One is slated for October 25, pricing starts at $2 per conversation, with discounts available to large users

Salesforce also announced the Agentforce Partner Network, which lets other organizations deploy third-party agents or use third-party actions when designing custom agents in Agentforce.