Salesforce to release Agentforce 360, Slack agents

Since his company bought Slack in December 2020, Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff has said it would be the "interface for Salesforce," the "digital HQ" for the companies that use it, and the place where users' "digital teammates" will reside. While it will be up to Salesforce customers to decide whether Slack is any of those things, this year's previews and releases at Dreamforce, October 14-16 in San Francisco, will potentially move the collaboration platform one step closer to them. Salesforce showed major Slack updates, Agentforce 360 -- a platform that combines agent authoring, deterministic reasoning with voice channel support and added Google Gemini firepower -- and Data 360, which activates the unstructured data underpinning it all. Data 360, the product formerly known as Data Cloud, formerly Genie, formerly Customer Data Platform, formerly Customer 360 Audiences, is the key to making Agentforce effective, said Liz Miller, analyst for Constellation Research. The more work customers put into integrating Salesforce's data normalization tools, the more complex problems AI agents will be able to solve. "That makes the difference between Agentforce having a cute answer and Agentforce driving business," Miller said. Slack in the spotlight To make Slack more of a workspace that accesses wide-ranging Salesforce capabilities through plain-language statements and queries, Salesforce is rolling out several Slack AI agents. They include Agentforce Sales, Agentforce IT Service, Agentforce HR Service -- which will be integrated with leading HCM systems -- and Agentforce Tableau in Slack. Several other agents are also in the works, including a reincarnation of the popular Slackbot as a personal assistant that, over time, customizes itself to an individual's workstream. Customers at Dreamforce looking into Salesforce's new features should note that some are available now, but many are in preview or beta and are planned for release in the coming weeks and months. One early Agentforce adopter, London's Heathrow Airport, moves more than 83 million passengers annually, with flights to nearly 90 countries on 90 airlines. The facility rolled out its Agentforce agent, named Hallie, last June. It was trained on 800 knowledge articles. The agent resolves customer questions 40% more quickly than before, said Peter Burns, director of marketing, digital and e-commerce at Heathrow. For now, the agent fields information-based passenger queries, but as it matures, Hallie will manage bookings, products and services at Heathrow, he added. "We've launched Hallie as a passenger-facing agent that answers the questions we all want [answered] during our journey," Burns said. "As much as we would want to individually hold all [80 million passengers'] hands through Heathrow, practically, that's not possible. So what Hallie and Agentforce allow us to do is effectively scale personalized customer experience." Salesforce developed Agentforce 360 in the last year, working with a claimed 12,000 customers, building agents. One of the major proving grounds for Agentforce was Salesforce's own internal deployment of the technology, which was a key to evolving it over the past year. AI vs. humans still not settled In the background of all these agentic AI innovations are layoffs. Like many tech companies, Salesforce has laid off thousands of employees, including 4,000 customer service agents who were replaced by AI "digital labor," according to Benioff. With Salesforce customers' post-pandemic belt-tightening and the rise of AI automation, the company projects Dreamforce attendance in person will be around 50,000, down from a peak of about 180,000 in 2019. Many more will stream the conference. Salesforce's other cofounder, chief technology officer Parker Harris, said in a Q&A session with press that digital labor will help Salesforce meet longstanding, aggressive growth targets despite "linear hiring," as company brass referred to it. Besides customer service, Harris said that developers at Salesforce have become 30% more productive with AI because of the abundance of existing code to train AI models. Salesforce will be looking to hire what it calls "forward deployed engineers" to send into the field and help customers create their own agents. "Humans and AI are going to work together," Harris said. "Forty percent of the work will be done by AI, but that doesn't mean that we're going to be less productive. We're going to be more productive….AI is creating new jobs." Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.