It has been a while since Salesforce prepared the Agentblazer ranks and over the summer they publish the last one – Legend. It took me a while to pass those 20 hours of fantastic learning, a handful of superbadges (which I feel went really down in their toughness and are easy to pass), some videos and plenty of other learning.
Now I should be the expert and lightning torch for Agentforce implementation. Sadly I’m still not 100% convinced I do have the customers for this technology.
The benefits
Let’s start with the benefits and ideal customer. If you already have an Experience Cloud site for your customers and partners, it makes a lot of sense to extend it with Agentforce. The conversational interface should be awesome for them and way better than trying to navigate the system and find what they are looking for.
Bonus points if you have knowledge base. Not necessarily the Salesforce KnowledgeBase, it is absolutely fine if you have just a documents with all the text and everything which Agentforce can index, act on it or takes answers from it. Extend the Experience Cloud with agents is pretty straightforward and you have a lot to offer to customers.
If you don’t have anything external looking and if you don’t have any written knowledge to share it is way harder to find some great use-cases. You can obviously provide it to internal users as a tool to summarize records and do some automated actions, but as a user I would prefer to click a button rather than having a dialog with some tool.
why would internal people constantly write to an agent rather than clicking a button?
The Prompt Templates are – from my point of view – perfect use-case for internal people. While I originally hated the idea that every single email will have different wording and I need to check what it generated before sending it to customer, now I can see the benefits. I would still hesitate to use it for „transactional“ emails, such as confirmation of order, thank you email for your donation or things like that, but for all those „soft“ email as „Hi Martin, long time no see, what happened after our last meeting about opportunity XYZ“ I can see how it can save the work for users. And having an Apex action calling prompt template to summarize account info all of that in a button I can click = wonderful!
Also the whole SDR topic, something we cover before with marketing automation/journey builder/cadence builder can be automated with Agentforce but again it means that you have the process described somewhere. If you just hope the people will figure out how to do their jobs you won’t be able to use Agentforce.
I’m absolutely amazed by the language processing capabilities – in bots we had to prepare some placeholders, in email parsing we had to rely on specific anchors to get the right values. Here you just say „the user need to provide their email and customer number“ and the user can reply with any sentence, any order, don’t use specific words and it will correctly take the right values.
The lows
We should also speak about the lows or drawbacks. Agentforce is organized around Topics, Actions and Instructions and it doesn’t give you a blank sheet to do anything. Meaning if you want to integrate with some external system you need to create such an action.
If you want it to do anything in the system you need to create a Topic and Instruction for it and add at least some default Actions.
The interesting/good part about Instructions is that they can be quiet general and the system gets the meaning of it and even though users are using different words it recognize it is the same intent.
Admin point of view
Speaking about admin point of view that’s the major change where enablement needs to be strong.
Historically admins (and consultants) didn’t really have to understand the business process, it was enough when the business told us „do XYZ when ABC“. Obviously the more you understood why the better the solution, but we could survive.
With Agentforce you need to really understand what is behind as you need to:
- prepare topics, which group actions together
- write scope what each topic is about, how it should behave, what tone it should use, where are the boundaries, etc.
- prepare the actions (read flows) which should be as granular as possible so the agents can combine them together – forget about huge flows doing the whole action as we are used now – screen to get data, find related records, do updates, etc -> it all has to be in separated flows so agents can reuse them. This will lead to hundreds of flows (naming structure!) and admins will need to think a lot where to make the cut.
- write specific instructions – if you want this you need to have this info and call this flow then this flow, if they want this you need to reply in this way. If you don’t really understand the business process you have no chance to write proper instructions. Business can still provide them, but …
Tomas Cupr wrote a great article about the change in AI and how we are/should be moving from simple instructions to more complex assignments to the agents, setting the whole context and all info we have available. And that’s precisely it – simple sentence as an instruction won’t really make it, you need to explain everything to it as you would do to junior. Easy for business, hard for admins who are missing the context as well.
Licenses?
I feel this wasn’t covered in the learning at all. I have no idea what you need to buy or how much it will cost. I know the Salesforce Foundation is here, which you can enable for free and it will give you some kind of access to it but besides that I’m lost.
3rd party apps? Oh my, there are so many of them and maybe they are better suited/easier to deploy/cheaper. Propose the right solution in this area is tough as there are hundreds of them, each with their own capabilities perfectly suited for their purpose, so it is all about the company’s vision where to go and how to handle it. The best CTA topic of build versus buy which is hard to decide especially at the beginning of some trend/project. Realm or Qualified are just two examples I saw this week
Go or no-go?
The choice is obviously yours. I can see the power of Prompt Templates as a starter and I’m curious about all the use-cases I’ll see for Agentforce. At the same time I would slow you down with implementing it just because it looks fancy. Proper planning is a must and you need to involve all the relevant stakeholders, which needs some extra thinking as the group can be wider than you originally thought.