A Slack UI of an Agentforce agent next to the Agentforce Astro icon
News

Agentforce Is Here: Turn AI Agents into Teammates, with Slack

Unlock agentic productivity with Agentforce and Slack.

By the team at Slack29th October 2024

Salesforce has announced the general availability of Agentforce, a platform that lets companies build and deploy autonomous AI agents across all business areas, including sales, customer service, marketing, IT, finance and commerce.

Agentforce agents go beyond just fetching data and insights—they offer fully customisable, autonomous AI capabilities that can connect to any enterprise data and take action on your behalf. And thanks to advanced reasoning abilities, Agentforce can make decisions and perform tasks such as resolving customer cases, qualifying sales leads, and optimizing marketing campaigns.

Customers like the Adecco Group, BACA Systems, OpenTable, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Wiley have already been piloting Agentforce Service Agents. The results? Faster, more personalised responses to customers and efficiencies across their business. Wiley, for example, has seen a more than 40% increase in case resolution with its agent.

We are sprinting toward a future of work where there will be an agent to fulfil every business need—even ones we can’t envision today. There’s no better place for agents to exist than Slack. We now have a platform that makes work interoperable between people, apps, data, and agents.

Rob SeamanChief Product Officer, Slack

How Slack unlocks agentic productivity

For more than a decade, Slack has served as the work operating system that unites people, projects, apps and data to move work forward and increase employee productivity by up to 47%. With Agentforce, we welcome a powerful new teammate into the mix: intelligent agents.

Agents in Slack have the potential to transform employee productivity at a scale rarely observed in history. In time, everyday roles and tasks we do as workers could be supported by agents—ready to search, collaborate, and act on our behalf.

Here are three reasons why Slack is the best place for your employee-facing agents:

1. Context from Slack conversations makes your agents even more intelligent

Humans and agents might seem different, but we have one basic thing in common: we all become smarter through conversation.

There are over 700 million messages sent daily in Slack. For AI to be most useful, it benefits from access to data—not just the data in one app or system, but across all your systems—including the unstructured data in team conversations. This contextual conversational data is critical to high-quality, relevant AI outputs that can adjust to new contextual clues in real time.

Your company’s untapped, unstructured data—including user-generated content, natural-language text, and audio and video files—enhances agent reasoning and decision-making for better relevance. When you add agents to Slack, customers can give them permission to tap into the public conversational data in your organisation’s Slack instance, making them precise and powerful. Because your data is never our product, customers control what data agents can access in Slack. We never train any LLMs on customer data; instead, we use advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques on the unstructured conversational data to give agents the context they need, just at the moment they need it, to support their human counterparts.

Onboarding is a great use case. New hires often lack the institutional knowledge they need to create impact early on. Enter Ember, an Agentforce agent trained to help new hires create connections and surface relevant information.

In the demo below, we see Ben working on an audience segmentation plan, and Sara, his (human) teammate share an idea that worked for her in the past. Another teammate, Bryan, asks Ember, his (agent) colleague for related educational materials for the team.

Ember understands the context of the conversation and can pull from unstructured data located in Slack. The agent provides a robust response that includes a calendar invite to an upcoming event, as well as a relevant marketing contact and Slack channel to continue the discussion.

2. Bringing agents into Slack turns them into teammates

Forget having to sign in to another AI application: Slack lets you bring agents into the flow of your team’s existing work, empowering users to engage with agents as they would with another teammate. Today, there are more than 2,600 enterprise applications in the Slack Marketplace. Slack is the preferred deployment platform for reaching your employee base, with 94% of all enterprise companies deploying their employee-facing enterprise apps into Slack.

In Slack, you’ll be able to see and access agents just like teammates. You’ll be able to look up details on the agents, such as what skills they have or actions they can perform. You can @mention an agent and bring them into a channel or DM just like any other teammate. You’ll also have the ability to look up all the agents available to you—like an agent directory, right in Slack.

For example, at Dreamforce we showed how a sales team consults an RFP Agent to shorten their sales cycles. Below you see a sales BDR team collaborating in a Salesforce channel, a Slack channel connected to your Salesforce CRM. Whenever a BDR creates a Salesforce opportunity directly in this channel, an RFP Agent not only notifies the team of the new opportunity but takes actions such as identifying and pulling in the right group of stakeholders, conducting competitive intelligence, creating a pricing strategy based on historical win rates, and much more. Agentforce in Slack empowers sellers to offload administrative tasks so they can focus on building customer relationships and closing deals.

3. Giving your agents Slack actions

Create a canvas, start a project list, or open a new channel. Agentforce enables your employee-facing agents to have Slack-specific actions so they can do the same things your employees do in Slack, autonomously. Giving your agents Slack action capabilities is like multiplying your employee workforce, driving productivity and freeing up your employees to focus on higher-value tasks.

For example, a personal Agentforce assistant in Slack has all the context you’d usually expect of a personal assistant: what you’re working on, who you work with, and what your priorities are.

In the demo below, we see a sales manager who has just attended a team meeting. Her action item is to relay information from a future leads meeting back to her team. She direct-messages Agentforce in Slack: ‘Create a reminder [on Monday] to write the executive summary and schedule a meeting with the team to review the proposal on Tuesday.’ The agent adds this task to her to-do list, creates a meeting invite for her team, and generates a template for the exec summary—all in a matter of seconds.

Slack is your home for humans and agents working together

Slack is building toward a future where humans and all agents can work securely side by side, augmenting one another, so that you can focus on the work that matters most.

Talk with an expert to learn more about how Agentforce will work in Slack, or watch Discover Agentforce on Salesforce+.

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