Agentforce – AI’s New Role in Sales and Service

From Science Fiction to Reality: AI’s Game-Changing Role in Service and Sales

AI for service and sales has reached a critical tipping point, driving rapid innovation. At Dreamforce in San Francisco, hosted by Salesforce we explored how Salesforce clients are leveraging CRM, Data Cloud, and AI to extract real business value from their Salesforce investments.

In previous years, AI features branded under “Einstein” had been met with skepticism. These features, such as lead scoring, next-best-action suggestions for service agents, and cross-sell/upsell recommendations, often required substantial quality data in the CRM and knowledge base to be effective. However, customer data was frequently unreliable, with duplicate records and missing information, and the Salesforce knowledge base was underused. Building self-service capabilities with chatbots was also challenging, requiring accurate predictions of customer queries and well-structured decision trees.

This year’s Dreamforce revealed a transformative shift. The advancements in AI, especially for customer service and sales, have become exceptionally powerful. Companies now need to take notice of Salesforce’s capabilities, which have expanded significantly.

Agentforce – AI’s New Role in Sales and Service

Some standout Salesforce features include:

Agentforce functionality (formerly Co-Pilot): Enables the creation of AI agents that can assist humans or provide customer self-service via web chat or apps.
Ingestion of unstructured data (PDFs, HTML, Word documents) into a vector database with searchable indexes.
Zero-copy data ingestion from data warehouses into Data Cloud.
Prompt Builder for refining large language model (LLM) prompts.

At Dreamforce, we participated in a workshop where they built an AI agent capable of responding to customer cases using product sheets and company knowledge within 90 minutes. This experience demonstrated how accessible AI solutions have become, no longer requiring developers or LLM experts to set up. The key challenge lies in mapping external data sources to a unified data model in Data Cloud, but once achieved, the potential for customer service and sales is immense.

How AI and Data Integrate to Transform Service and Sales

Businesses can harness the following integrated components to build a comprehensive solution:

CRM (Sales/Service Cloud): Stores key customer and account information, case histories, sales opportunities, and marketing interactions.
Data Cloud: Acts as a unified profile for customers, integrating data from various databases, data warehouses, and external sources.
Data Warehouses and Data Lakes: Provides data integration from platforms like Amazon Redshift, Databricks, Google Cloud BigQuery, and Snowflake.
Unstructured Data: Incorporates documents like product sheets, contracts, and service agreements into a vector database with searchable indexes.
LLM Integration: Supports generative AI models to assist with customer queries, enhanced by Salesforce’s Trust Layer for secure responses.
Platform Automation: Salesforce flows automate tasks based on data, reducing manual intervention and improving efficiency.
AI Agents: These agents assist human service reps or function as self-service chatbots, handling tasks such as responding to customer queries or automating processes like order returns.

Real-World Success and AI Implementation

OpenTable shared a successful example of building an AI agent for its app in just two months, using a small team of four. This was a marked improvement from the company’s previous chatbot projects, highlighting the efficiency of the latest AI tools.

Most CEOs of large enterprises are exploring AI strategies, whether by developing their own LLMs or using pre-existing models. However, many of these efforts are siloed, and engineering costs are high, leading to clunky transitions between AI and human agents.

Tectonic is well-positioned to help our clients quickly deploy AI-powered solutions that integrate seamlessly with their existing CRM and ERP systems. By leveraging AI agents to streamline customer interactions, enhance sales opportunities, and provide smooth handoffs to human agents, businesses can significantly improve customer experiences and drive growth.

Tectonic is ready to help businesses achieve similar success with AI-driven innovation.