Salesforce hasbarely launched Agentforce, or the company already feels the time is right for version 2.0. Improvements are incremental, but the decission allows the marketing department to continue to claim an edge over competitors’ agent implementations.
At Dreamforce, Salesforce announced Agentforce and general availability dated Oct. 30, 2024. In other words, customers have had less than two months to get up and running with Agentforce in large numbers, yet Salesforce thinks now is a good time to announce Agentforce 2.0.
Agentforce
Agentforce is a Salesforce platform in which users can deploy AI-driven agents. Agents, in turn, are a type of AI bot, which can work with data from the Salesforce Data Cloud and have integrations with other applications via APIs. In fact, agents are an evolution of the first AI copilots, where users can ask a question in natural language to an LLM-based system, not only getting an answer back but also triggering an action.
Important to Agentforce is the so-called Atlas Reasoning Engine. That reasons over users’ prompts, breaks them down into ppieces,and adds relevant data via retreival augmented generation (RAG). The engine works on top of the Einstein Trust Layer, which should keep Agentforce from starting to hallucinate.
Agentforce 2.0 is no different.
Improvements
Salesforce adds 2.0 to the name because of incremental expansion of the brand-new platform. For example, in the enhanced version, agents can combine different skills. Think of a service agent who can also add to a customer’s marketing profile. It is this ability to mix skills that Salesforce considers sufficient to speak of a revolution. Moreover, for Agentforce 2.0, Salesforce has added a lot of templates for skills. Those are available through the Salesforce AppExchange.
Salesforce addds 2.0 to the name because of incremental expansion of the brand-new platform.
Somewhat surprisingly (but no less rightly so), the company notes that agents are still in their infancy. To achieve the best results, it is best for users not to assign too many skills to a single agent. The more focus an agent has, the more consistently correct it will be.
Slack and MuleSoft
Salesforce is opting for deeper integration of Agentforce into Slack. After all, according to the CRM specialist, employees use the platform’s AI capabilities primarily through that collaboration tool. Among other things, agents in Agentforce will be able to update a Slack Canvas, or send a summary per Slack message. Integration with Slack is not new, and was already mentioned at Dreamforce.
Salesforce also notes that RAG works better, and the Atlas Reasoning Engine can parse more complex queries. The proposed capabilities are very similar to those at the September launch, so it’s not so clear what impact those upgrades under the hood will really have.
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Finally, Salesforce points to API integration via MuleSoft with the launch of Agentforce 2.0. The combination of MuleSoft, agents and existing flows was also a crucial part of the launch of the first version of Agentforce on Dreamforce.
Competition
A few months after its launch, Salesforce is incrementally adding to its Agentforce platform. Salesforce is building on the Agentforce promise from Dreamforce, tinkering with capabilities that were announced back then. That’s good, but also completely expected.
Why the company is launching version 2.0 with much fanfare is less clear. Either we’ll see the version number go up with every minor improvement from now on and we’ll be at Agentforce 7.0 by this time next year, or the engineers have handed the version numbering off to the marketing department.
We suspect the latter. Agentforce 2.0 comes at a time when all of Salesforce’s competitors are also launching agent-based solutions. For example, Google recently launched Agentspace. By taking the opportunity to put “2.0” after the name, Salesforce presumably hopes that users will get the impression that the solution is a generation ahead of the rest. As such, Team Benioff is not shy about highlighting its own supposed leadership position on AI during the announcement.
On to Agentforce 532.0?
Agent has become a buzzword, as has AI. Although AI and the promise of autonomous AI bots can provide enormous productivity gains, (the marketing departments of) large companies are doing everything they can to give the whole revolution the vibe of cheap hype.
Salesforce took over all of San Francisco as recently as December to share Agentforce’s revolution with the world. Less than three months later, we have to believe that version 2.0 is out. If everyone numbered like that, we’d be on Windows 56, Android 112 and Mac OS XCVIII today.
Potential customers can better appreciate innovation when technology giants remain somewhat serious. Version numbers for software follow conventions, with the first digit indicating a major release, the second an improvement therein and the third a patch (version 1.2.1, for example). To ingore that that after barely three months negatively impacts the quality of the discussion around AI. We wonder wether Agentforce 3.0 is scheduled for January, upgraded with a new color theme, perhaps.