Introducing Agentforce 2.0: The Digital Labor Platform for Building a Limitless Workforce – CRN

Salesforce,announced Agentforce 2.0: the newest version of Agentforce, the first digital labor platform for enterprises — a complete AI system for augmenting teams with trusted, autonomous AI agents in the flow of work. This release introduces a new library of pre-built skills and workflow integrations for rapid customisation, the ability to deploy Agentforce in Slack, and advancements in agentic reasoning and retrieval augmented generation (RAG). These advances will enable companies to scale their workforce with customised agents capable of handling complex, multi-step tasks with even more precision and accuracy.

Why it’s relevant: Every team has more work to do than resources available, leading to poorer customer interactions and lengthy backlogs. Organisations are turning to AI to help, but have a low tolerance for inadequate solutions that provide generic responses. Existing solutions such as copilots struggle to provide accurate, trusted responses to complex requests — such as personalised guidance on a job application — and cannot take action on their own — like nurturing a lead with product recommendations. Organisations need a new type of platform designed to supply digital labor in the form of autonomous AI agents that can reason over data and tap into workflows to take action on behalf of overwhelmed teams.

“Agentforce 2.0 takes our revolutionary Salesforce digital labor platform to another level, with new reasoning, integration and customisation features that supercharge autonomous agents with unprecedented levels of intelligence, precision and accuracy,” said Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO, Salesforce. “The demand for Agentforce has been amazing — no other company comes close to offering this complete AI solution for enterprises. We’re seamlessly bringing together AI, data, apps, and automation with humans to reshape how work gets done. Agentforce 2.0 cements our position as the leader in digital labor solutions, allowing any company to build a limitless workforce that can truly transform their business.”

How the Adecco Group Uses Agentforce to Scale Personalised Recruiting with Digital Labor:
“At the Adecco Group, we are committed to creating meaningful connections between candidates and opportunities. By centralising data across over 40 systems with Salesforce’s Data Cloud and leveraging Agentforce, we’re transforming the candidate experience. Agentforce will help prequalify candidates, enhance CVs, and ensure faster job placements. Agentforce agents also operate 24/7, freeing recruiters to focus on meaningful connections while delivering speed and personalisation at scale.” – Greg Shewmaker, Senior Vice President of Global Operations and AI, The Adecco Group.

New Library of Skills Brings Agentforce to Every Team and Workflow:
Time and integration challenges make it difficult to build customised agents for individual business teams or departments. Agentforce 2.0 eliminates these barriers with a new library of pre-built agent skills— tasks Agentforce can perform— CRM, Slack, Tableau, and partner-developed skills on the AppExchange. This latest release empowers customers to extend Agentforce to any system or workflow using MuleSoft. It also features an enhanced Agent Builder capable of interpreting natural language instructions, such as ‘Onboard New Product Managers,’ to auto-generate new agents. These agents seamlessly combine pre-made skills with custom logic built in Salesforce, offering unparalleled flexibility and speed.
⦁ New CRM Skills for Agent-First Customer Experiences: New skills for sales teams such as Sales Development and Sales Coaching enable the creation of autonomous AI agents that can nurture leads based on your rules of engagement, as well as agents that can join your prospecting calls and provide instant feedback on interactions with customers, helping reps do their best work at massive scale. Additional skills include Marketing Campaign and Commerce Merchant skills, scheduling skills for service engagements, and new skills for field service workers.
⦁ Take Action Across Any App or Workflow with MuleSoft: MuleSoft now enables Agentforce to get work done across your business. With MuleSoft for Flow, it’s easier than ever to create low-code workflows that span any system, with pre-built connectors for building multi-system workflows fast. As teams look to turn their APIs into Agentforce actions, the new MuleSoft API Catalog enables builders and Salesforce Admins to view, discover, and manage APIs across Salesforce, MuleSoft, Heroku, and any external services from one central location for rapid reuse. And the new MuleSoft Topic Center expands on this by enabling teams to infuse Agentforce metadata into every API they build, ensuring that any point of connectivity can be automatically turned into an Agentforce skill or action, making every API “agent-first” by default.
⦁ Tableau Skills for Analytics and Insights: New Tableau Topics and Actions deliver data visualisations and predictions for deeper understanding of agent responses and accurate, business context-rich answers using Tableau Semantics. This unlocks new conversational analytics use cases, further lowering the barrier to data access for everyone.
⦁ Slack Skills for Engaging in Channels and Conversations: With Slack Actions now available in Agent Builder, a team can enhance Agentforce with, for example, the ability to send a DM to provide a summary of what’s happening with a project, or update a Slack Canvas when a customer asks for changes to an ongoing project.
⦁ Partner Skills Through the AppExchange: Agentforce is backed by the first-ever enterprise ecosystem of agent skills — enabling customers to extend their Agentforce with custom Topics and Actions ranging from new agent types such as the AI Employee Service Agent with ⦁ Workday, to new, partner-built actions from ⦁ Asymbl, ⦁ Docusign, and ⦁ Neuron 7.
⦁ Agentforce Now Recommends Skills for the Work You Need Done: Create new agents in seconds using natural language descriptions. Agent Builder now uses Agentforce to compose new agents for the work you need done by auto-generating relevant topics and instructions while pulling from the library of skills and actions already available to you, ensuring teams can go live with new digital labor fast.

How Accenture Uses Agentforce to Scale Sales Productivity with Digital Labor:
“At Accenture, we embrace emerging technologies first so we can help our clients go fast. Our sales team within Accenture’s Salesforce Business Group and Accenture Song are starting to use Agentforce to automate contact and close plan creation, surface insights through enterprise search, and keep teams aligned with dynamic updates. It’s helping to increase time-to-effectiveness, accelerate decision-making, and is allowing them to focus on delivering innovative solutions for their clients.” – Stephanie Sadowski, Salesforce Business Group lead at Accenture.

Agentforce in Slack — Humans with Agents Working Together Where Work Happens: As organisations look to unlock value from AI agents, they need solutions that are embedded where their employees already are. Agentforce 2.0 is deployable in Slack, bringing customisable digital labor into the messages (DMs) and channels where work happens.
⦁ Bring Agentforce to any Message or Channel: Agentforce 2.0 enables teams to easily bring Agentforce into any Slack conversation. Slack users can start a conversation directly from the Agentforce Hub, or @ mention Agentforce agents through DMs or in channels, tapping into their digital labor force directly in the flow of work.
⦁ New Slack Actions in Agent Builder: Agent Builder now features pre-built Slack Actions such as “Create Canvas” or “Message Channel” that enable teams to rapidly enhance existing agents or create new ones that can effortlessly engage with your teams in Slack.
⦁ Unlock conversational context with Enterprise Search: Slack contains a wealth of domain knowledge across DMs, channels, and Canvases that reflect the unique nature of your business. With Slack Enterprise Search, Agentforce can draw from conversational data — enhancing the relevancy of responses and actions by drawing from public and permissioned information in Slack.

How Indeed Uses Agentforce to Scale Personalised Job Seeker Engagement with Digital Labor:
“Indeed is the world’s leading job site, with three people hired every second through its platform. At the heart of Indeed’s success is its ability to match the 580 million profiles created by job seekers with over 3 million hiring employers. By harnessing the power of Data Cloud, Indeed has enhanced its data architecture, creating a solid foundation for its go-to-market strategies and enhancing connections to its rich job seeker profiles,” said Indeed CIO Anthony Moisant. “By leveraging Agentforce, Indeed can stay focused on its mission to help people find jobs while advancing its goals, including reducing time-to-hire by 50% and helping 30 million individuals facing barriers to employment secure jobs by fiscal year 2030.” – Anthony Moisant, CIO, Indeed

Expert Answers to Complex Questions and Execute Actions with Agentforce 2.0: The Atlas Reasoning Engine is the brain behind Agentforce, enabling it to retrieve relevant data, then reason and act. With Agentforce 2.0, Salesforce is introducing enhanced reasoning and retrieval to handle deeply nuanced questions, powered by new capabilities in Data Cloud that fuel Agentforce with greater context — complementing structured and unstructured data with business-specific metadata for greater accuracy across the most complex, multi-faceted requests.
⦁ Enhanced Reasoning with Advanced Retrievers: Agentforce’s Atlas Reasoning Engine can now handle a wider variety of interactions, including those with multiple layers that require deeper thought. For example, a question that is straightforward, such as “what is the status of my portfolio?” will employ basic reasoning for rapid responses. A deeper question, such as “What would be the right investment vehicle for my child’s college fund based on my current income and risk preferences?” would use enhanced reasoning with advanced data retrievers — improving the answer by refining the query before pulling both relevant data and context-specific metadata in Data Cloud. The Atlas Reasoning Engine assesses its own response and loops through a variety of tools and sources in what’s known as an ‘agentic loop,’ enabling it to provide a trusted, well-researched response or action to nuanced and more complex requests, and do so without writing custom code.
⦁ Enhanced RAG with Enriched Indexing: RAG enables Agentforce to quickly find relevant information in unstructured content. To power enhanced reasoning in the Atlas Reasoning Engine, Data Cloud can now enrich RAG chunks — the snippets of retrieved data — with metadata from the ⦁ Salesforce Platform. Enriching RAG indexes with metadata context adapts Agentforce 2.0 to the unique conventions of your business without additional work, improving accuracy and relevancy for even the most intricate requests, while increasing trust through inline citations that point to the exact sources Agentforce pulled from to answer a given question.

How Salesforce provides faster, more personalised customer support with Agentforce:
The Salesforce Help page receives more than 60 million visits a year from customers who need assistance with product support and account queries. Agentforce on help.salesforce.com provides customers with personalised, 24/7 service, while seamlessly escalating to human reps with the full case history and context when needed. Since launching in October, Agentforce is now solving 83% of customer queries without a human, has halved the number of issues that require human intervention, and has nearly doubled its average number of weekly conversations.

Customer Perspectives:

“At 1-800 Accountant, we’re using Agentforce to manage service inquiries, especially during tax season. With Agentforce now managing up to 90% of incoming requests, we can automate responses to common questions like tax return statuses, freeing up our team to focus on more complex tasks. This boosts efficiency, improves customer satisfaction, and ensures fast, secure, personalised support. Plus, Agentforce adheres to strict data security standards, keeping sensitive tax information safe and accessible only to authorised personnel. It’s a game-changer, helping us scale and serve our clients better during peak times.” – Ryan Teeples, CTO, 1-800 Accountant

“Embracing autonomous agents is a game-changer for Bionic. We’re on a mission to make life radically easier for Britain’s small businesses by combining smart technology with expert human service. With agentic AI, we’re streamlining tasks like meter readings and switch tracking to deliver 24/7 support. This innovation empowers our 200,000 SME customers to save time and hassle so they can focus on growing their business.” – James Lomas, Chief Technology Officer, Bionic

“With Agentforce, we want to transform Capita’s recruitment process into a fast, seamless and autonomous experience that benefits candidates, our people, and our clients. With autonomous agents providing 24/7 support, our goal is to enable candidates to complete the entire recruitment journey within days as opposed to what has historically taken weeks. At Capita, we give time back to our clients so they can focus on what they do best – and Agentforce will improve our ability to do just that. This is just the start of our agentic journey with Salesforce, where we believe an Agentic Economy can drive big growth potential for UK businesses.” – Adolfo Hernandez. Chief Executive Officer, Capital