Exclusive: Salesforce 'Agentforce 3' assists SMBs with AI adoption
Salesforce's Agentforce 3 tool is enabling small and medium-sized businesses with the visibility and control to scale AI agents within their enterprise. The updated tool comes as artificial intelligence has become increasingly integrated into business operations within Salesforce and across the industry.
94% of Canadian SMB leaders report revenue growth from AI use. "Driving that success is cutting-edge technology, forward-thinking mindset, and thoughtful execution. Agentforce represents a new era of productivity, where AI-driven digital workers collaborate seamlessly with human teams to drive 24/7 operations," said Adam Alfano, Executive Vice President, Global SMB & Emerging Products at Salesforce.
He says that AI agents are very beneficial to SMBs as they have always had to "do more with less." More businesses are shifting to AI Agents for faster, real-time service, allowing employees to focus on more intuitive work tasks.
"The emergence of digital workers, capable of operating 24/7, is transformative. By leveraging digital workers to manage high volumes of inquiries and drive go-to-market initiatives, SMBs can significantly amplify their capacity, scale their operations, and project a more substantial presence, effectively addressing the long-standing challenge of appearing larger and handling increased demands," said Alfano.
Businesses must adopt an "AI first" mentality while adapting to streamline workflows, increase efficiency and competitiveness. This was represented by 1-800Accountant, which utilises Agentforce to manage 70% of inbound inquiries from outlets, such as administrative chats, allowing their human workers to focus on critical tasks and strategic initiatives. Alfano says this is particularly efficient during peak business times, such as tax season.
More than half of Canadians (55 per cent) are indifferent to how they interact with companies, as long as their issues are resolved quickly, according to a Salesforce survey. Additionally, 39 per cent of Canadians are willing to interact with an AI agent if it reduces hold times and eliminates having to wait for customer service representatives.
Salesforce says AI Agent usage is up 233 per cent in the past six months, with over 8,000 users signing up for Agentforce in the same period. Agentforce 3 closes the governance and observational gap needed to scale enterprise-wide.
Agentforce offers an expanded partner network with easy integration from Google Cloud's database organisation to Stripe payment integration. Enhanced features include an expanded selection of LLMs, faster performance streaming, increased web search accuracy, and support for additional languages (French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, and Portuguese), while enabling automatic, latency-based failover.
Last month, at the Agentforce World Tour Toronto, Salesforce team members and clients gathered at the Enercare Centre to discuss the innovations AI is bringing to businesses of all sizes. Alfano says one standout SMB-specific innovation sparking interest is recognising that Data Cloud has the power to unify data sources and create a harmonised profile that drives useful insights.
He added that the misconception of adopting agentic AI as a costly and complex process can draw some SMBs away from increasing efficiency.
"A massive IT overhaul isn't required to achieve the promise of AI. It's about finding the right solution so you don't have to DIY your AI, and you can activate quickly. Agentforce offers hundreds of prebuilt topics and predefined actions spanning all industries so that customers can easily customize and deploy their agents, and reap the benefits in less time," said Alfano.