Agentforce 2.0 – Champ or Chump?
The News On December 17, 2024, Salesforce announced Agentforce 2.0 after introducing Agentforce 1.0 during the company’s Dreamforce event. With it, it repositions Agentforce as a “Digital Labor Platform” that is capable of supplying businesses with an infinite workforce. This way, they shall be able to address internal challenges like labor shortages, fixed capacity, stalled productivity, or burnout. In addition, they increase their ability to work with increasing customer demands like no patience, their wish for personalization and empathy and with a knowledgeable expert, etc. “Agentforce 2.0 is the newest version of Agentforce and the first digital labor platform for enterprises — a complete AI system for augmenting teams with trusted, autonomous AI agents in the flow of work. This new release introduces a new library of pre-built skills and workflow integrations for rapid customization, the ability to deploy AI agents in Slack, and advancements in agentic reasoning and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) – enabling teams to scale their workforce with a custom Agentforce capable of handling complex, multi-step tasks with even more precision and accuracy.” Agentforce 2.0 comes with a library of prebuilt skills, which are jobs that digital agents can perform. These skills do not only cover Salesforce software but also cover partner software and, with the help of Mulesoft, any other system. The agent builder, that is part of Agentforce 2.0 enables the building of new agents/skills using natural language. New agents can be built using the skill library or custom logic. Agentforce 2.0 is live and will get additional capabilities throughout Q1/2025. The Bigger Picture AI has hit an inflection point. We came from rule-based...
From Hype to ROI: Navigating Generative AI, CRM, and CX in 2025
It is hard to believe but another year just flew by. It was a year that was defined by considerable hope and hype about generative technologies. It also means that another year lies ahead of us, a year that may or may not bring change. It also means that I get asked again for my outlook for CRM, CX and AI, and what are relevant industry trends to observe. As said, last year everything revolved around generative AI and I consequently looked at what’s going to happen on the front of CX and generative AI. Let’s look at how good my glass ball did work before looking at 2025. In summary, I postulated that there will be More success stories (partly right) more sophisticated use cases (partly right, although I didn’t really look at agentic AI) a flurry of more specialized models (yep) more companies starting to look at the ROI of implementations (partly right again, as there is still a lot of experimentation going on) a strong platform play going on (spot on, but this, frankly, wasn’t too hard to postulate) But what will come in 2025? What do some of the big dogs say about gen AI? As a little side note to the adoption and ROI topics, there are two interesting studies, one from the Wharton School and the Forrester Research predictions. The Wharton study basically indicates that 2024 has been a year of experimentation while 2025 will more be a year of adoption and deployment, with rather slowing growth of investment. The study authors suspect that this is a sign that companies are still looking...Salesforce, Agentic AI, and You
Salesforce told us its agents were coming, and it was still a surprise when the agents arrived.If you’ve been conscious for the past year, you know how much news (or noise) there has been about artificial intelligence. Salesforce billed Dreamforce24 as “the largest AI event in the world.” It caught me a bit off guard when I heard Marc Benioff say it, but it probably shouldn’t have; Salesforce has invested heavily in AI for the past few years, ever since it introduced Salesforce Einstein (now Tableau CRM) in 2016. Its latest effort is Agentforce, and the company is really leaning into it.The topic of AI erputed in 2023 once ChatGPT was unleashed upon the general populace, and it’s only fair that a business would leverage the popularity of the topic. While 2024 seemed poised to be “the Year of the Copilot,” since a number of vendors introduced AI copilot apps—digital assistants that automate routine tasks—the fanfare was to be short-lived. Today, the talk is about agents, or agentic AI—AI that acts on its own to accomplish tasks and achieve goals, reaching into the knowledge stored in linked apps as necessary.Marc Benioff declared, “Agents are the third wave of AI.” It’s hard to argue against this. AI agents have great potential to increase productivity and customer satisfaction, and mark a leap forward in AI capabilities. Benioff stated that one of the goals of this year’s Dreamforce was to get 1,000 customers to deploy Agentforce, a goal which I believe they achieved. It’s too soon for there to be any tangible results that anybody can talk about, so we’ll have to...