Salesforce Announces Agentforce Partner Network
IT News Online Staff
2024-09-19
Salesforce has announced the Agentforce Partner Network, a global ecosystem of partners building new third-party AI agents and agent actions for Agentforce. Customers can easily install these trusted third-party extensions from the Salesforce AppExchange to customize Agentforce's out-of-the-box agents, build new agents with specific skills, or deploy partner-built agents for specialized industry, line of business, or functional use cases. This ecosystem extends Agentforce's ability to plan and reason across a broad network of technology and data providers to accomplish complex tasks and get more done on behalf of users.
"Agentforce represents a monumental shift in the industry, enabling humans with AI to redefine how businesses achieve customer success," said Brian Millham, President and Chief Operating Officer, Salesforce. "Over the next year, our bold vision is to enable customers with a billion AI agents. The Agentforce Partner Network, the world's first agent ecosystem, plays a crucial role in helping our customers realize this vision by providing a vast catalog of trusted and ready-to-deploy partner agents and agent actions."
To successfully and autonomously automate a task or sequence of tasks, an AI agent needs to reason through a prompt, user intent, or system event, retrieve data, build a multi-step plan and take action to execute the plan. The more actions an agent can perform, the more capable at certain tasks it will be. But, what if that action requires the agent to interface with another system or agent?
With the average enterprise managing nearly 1,000 different applications, autonomous AI agents will need the skills, data and domain expertise to navigate across multiple systems, databases and other agents to get work done. With the Agentforce Partner Network, customers can now access a catalog of third-party skills, actions and agents directly in the Salesforce Platform to make AI agents even more capable and unleash a limitless digital workforce.
Whether it's answering customer service inquiries, qualifying sales leads, or optimizing marketing campaigns, customers can use partner capabilities to augment out-of-the-box agents with specialized skills to interact with the products they need to accomplish a task or bring partner agents right into the flow of work. With the Agentforce Partner Network, customers will be able to leverage these agents and actions that seamlessly connect their existing technology investments to make sure that AI agents have the proper context and access needed to execute complex work and get more done on their behalf. The future of AI is agents, working together alongside humans, and the future is here.
The Agentforce Partner Network includes launch partners such as Amazon Web Services, Appiphony, Asymbl, Box, Certinia, Copado, Coupa, Docusign, GoMeddo, Google Cloud, Honeywell, IBM, Korn Ferry, Moody's, OpenText, Sprout Social, TerraSky, Workday, Zoom and more. These partners are building 1) agent actions to bring new skills or integration with third-party apps and agents to Agentforce and/or 2) agent templates to support specialized industries or line of business use cases. Customers can install these actions and agent templates directly in the Salesforce Platform through AppExchange and use them in Agent Builder to customize out-of-the-box agents, build new agents with unique skills, or deploy new agents based on pre-defined templates.
1. Partner-built agent actions and topics:
Using Agent Builder, organizations can add or configure jobs to be done for their agent in the form of topics and actions. Topics define the guardrails, in natural language, and the set of actions that can be used within those guardrails. Agentforce includes a library of standard actions, like "Summarize Record," "Plan My Day," or "Process Return," with more being added all the time. And, Salesforce partners are building additional tailored and specialized actions to extend this library. These actions can be simple sets of secure API calls, actions engineered for a specific industry, complex multi-step workflows, or secure integrations to third-party agents. Partners can also ship topics to group their actions into jobs to be done with predefined guardrails. Customers will soon have access to dozens of specialized partner agent actions for:
Content creation and management
Google Workspace: Create, find and share Google Docs and Slides, based on CRM data.
Box: Surface the right Box content for an account, lead, or opportunity and use natural language to interact with documents.
Docusign: Generate partnership document, route for signature, and track doc and signature status.
Honeywell: Assemble compliant training materials for life sciences workers based on complex regulatory standards.
Sales and customer insights
Zoom: Access analytics and key insights from calls, meetings and other productivity solutions from Zoom Workplace.
Moody's: Compile customer insights from company overviews, news articles and financial filings.
Korn Ferry: Suggest personalized seller actions and schedule coaching to improve.
Sprout Social: Summarize customer cases with social data to understand what drives their satisfaction.
Tribble: Increase sales team productivity by automating RFPs and speeding up rep onboarding.
Industry automation
Copado: Generate developer and testing materials to deliver Salesforce Platform apps faster.
Coupa: Optimize budget spend, monitor compliance and find budget efficiencies.
OpenText: Enable insurance adjusters to verify claim-specialist findings and expedite a claim.
GoMeddo: Optimize appointments across patient, doctor, technician and exam room calendars.
Asymbl: Identify candidates based on job needs and schedule interviews with top prospects.
2. Partner-built agents and agent templates
Beyond actions and topics, partners will also be able to build and distribute pre-built agents and agent templates. These templates assemble a set of actions and topics together into a pre-tested agent for specialized industry, line of business, or functional use cases. These partner-built out-of-the-box agents are easy to deploy from the AppExchange, can be set up in minutes with clicks, not code, and work just like the Salesorce provided out-of-the-box-agents.
For example: Organizations across highly regulated industries will be able to use pre-built agents from IBM to get work done without having to move data across systems, which would add more time and cost to customers' AI deployments. Banking advisors will be able to streamline loan approvals by engaging autonomous partner agents to handle credit checks, ensure compliance with local laws, engage with clients directly and generate loan origination documents. Customers will also be able to use pre-built agents from Workday to streamline employee services like onboarding, health benefit changes and career development, and Certinia to identify customer adoption risks and drive contextual engagement to proactively resolve issues and improve account health and value realization.
Implementation partners increase readiness and ROI
Systems integrators (SIs) support enterprises in defining, building and deploying AI agents and actions using Agentforce, tapping their domain and platform expertise. The Agentforce Partner Network amplifies these collaboratively created agents and actions, unlocking more advanced agent functionality and specialization.
Salesforce has committed to joint investments to strengthen this collaborative effort, supporting its partners in delivering seamless Agentforce solutions. SIs possess a deep understanding of Salesforce technology and the technologies from ISVs and other partners, enabling them to create a unified strategy tailored to customer needs, driving better results across the board.
Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte Digital, IBM, PwC, Slalom and more are invested in helping customers across industries begin their journey and realize the value of Agentforce. Customers unsure of where to start can partner with trusted experts to create a strategy, connect data, customize and implement agents tailored to business needs, and on average, report 31 percent faster adoption of emerging technologies when using a consulting partner.
"With the Agentforce Partner Network, Salesforce is cultivating an open ecosystem and bringing together industry-leading partners to empower Agentforce Agents with data, skills, and expertise to get work done – increasing productivity across many different complex systems and workflows. Thus enabling partners and their customers to show faster results from the AI and autonomous agent pilots," said Steve White, IDC.
For available agent actions and demos, please visit AppExchange.
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