The last few months have seen Salesforce delivering significant innovation across the platform, with a focus on making Agentforce, as well as other functionality, easily accessible for more customers to deliver value fast. What if you could kickstart your organization’s agentic journey at no additional cost, directly within the Salesforce platform?
Let’s dive into how Salesforce’s Foundations offering can help you and your team deliver personalized support experiences and save time to be better spent on high-touch scenarios, all while making use of your data and the processes you already have within your org!
Getting Started With Salesforce Foundations
Trying out new products can often entail a lengthy process for businesses of all sizes, from trials with short time constraints to separate instances, and overall quite a few hoops to go through. Salesforce Foundations is a $0 offering which existing Salesforce Sales and/or Service customers on Enterprise editions and above can activate themselves, directly within the Your Account App.
You can add the products in your cart and check out – there’s no need for additional interactions, promo codes, or any back and forth. Your Account App is only available in production instances, so these steps will have to be completed there first, prior to exploring any features or starting to build in sandboxes.
Salesforce Foundations includes multi-cloud features which any Salesforce customer can explore, regardless of their use case – varying from Agentforce credits, Sales and Service features, Marketing, Commerce and even Data Cloud or Platform licenses. While in this article, we will focus specifically on Agentforce and Service Cloud, you should definitely explore how the other items included can contribute to your business’ other initiatives across Salesforce.
- Agentforce: 100,000 Flex Credits, Agentforce and Prompt Builder, Sales, Service and Employee Agents.
- Service: Service Console, Case Management, Knowledge, Chat, and Help Center.
- Sales: Sales Console, deal management, quoting, meetings.
- Marketing: 2,000 monthly email sends, drag-and-drop email builder, built-in analytics.
- Commerce: One D2C Digital Storefront (for US only), managed checkout, merchandising tools, Pay Now secure payment link, Commerce Cloud analytics.
- Data Cloud: Unified profiles, data services, and storage credits, 10,000 annual segmentation credits.
- Salesforce Platform: Salesforce Platform login license, 600 annual logins with 30,000 credits, Agentforce extended to occasional users.
Enhance Customer Support With Service Cloud
If you are already an Enterprise Edition Sales Cloud customer looking forward to transforming your support team’s process just like you did for your sellers, then luckily, you don’t have to look any further than Salesforce Foundations! From the possibility of enhancing cross-team collaboration directly within your CRM, to providing highly personalized support experiences and automating repetitive tasks for your service reps, to insightful analytics and a sleek experience – Service Cloud features can do it all.
In a small business context, where team members often wear many hats, tapping into Salesforce Foundations to try out Service Cloud for free is a game-changer. Users who already have a Salesforce license can access more features and continue adding value across all areas, including answering customer emails, handling high-priority tickets, or collaborating on documentation for processes, products, and known issues.
In other words, all of the capabilities above translate into dedicated Salesforce functionality available for free directly with Salesforce Foundations. These include:
- Case Management and access to the Service Console to rapidly review and take action on any requests.
- Knowledge Management to create insightful articles for both internal users and customers.
- Macros to complete repetitive tasks with one click.
- Omni-Channel routing to ensure that cases reach the right service rep at the right time.
- Chat to engage with customers in real time.
- Help Site so they can find answers on their own.
Together, these features create a strong service foundation and are often the starting point for businesses looking to introduce Agentforce to their service experiences.
In addition to the guided experiences you can create for both service reps, management, and end customers, Salesforce Service Cloud is one of the most widely used and well-known Salesforce products. This means that there is a wide variety of online training available, on-demand webinars and Trailhead modules to answer all of your questions.
Agentforce and GenAI Functionality
Curious to find out how Agentforce for Service can instantly handle low-touch interactions, boost service rep productivity, and free up your team? Whether you’re just getting started or scaling fast, this is your chance to deliver smarter, faster, more personalized service – all without added cost.
Agentforce for Service
Nowadays, the ‘AI agent’ terminology is used in reference to the Agentforce autonomous agents, be them conversational or headless. Human team members on the other hand will start being referred to as ‘service reps’ instead to avoid any confusion or overlap.
Agentforce is Salesforce’s flagship AI offering, which enables customers to build agents who seamlessly interact with their data from Salesforce or external sources, across various channels. Agentforce for Service has been the first of its kind, and is continuously enhanced with additional out of the box functionality with every release. Its goal is to provide a curated support experience with zero wasted time.
Creating the AI agent after enabling Salesforce Foundations implies just a few straightforward steps, where you will be asked to input details about its goal, role, and share relevant information about your company. You can choose to use Data Cloud resources too if you have them available, as these will continue to enrich the agents with meaningful information, just as you would share documentation with a human service rep.
Note that the agent also needs a running user, more specifically an Agent User, who will drive the conversation with the customer and will need permissions to conduct the tasks that you will decide to enable the agent for in the next steps.
At a minimum, each AI agent will need to have one Topic, but depending on how exactly it will be used within your org it can be much more than that. Topics should be seen as jobs to be done, while Actions related to each Topic are the tools in the agent’s arsenal that will enable it to deliver the tailored experience.
This step is where most time should be spent, to construct the Topics and their respective instructions, accounting for each possible scenario, as they will guide the agent in choosing the appropriate action based on the customer’s prompt. For example, it is a best practice for one of the agent’s topics to be a fallback or an escalation handling one, to ensure that even if the customer’s request can’t be directly met by the agent, it will be accounted for and routed properly.
Agentforce Builder allows you to tailor the agent and add the guardrails as needed, but also test it, all in one place. When conversing with the agent in the Conversation Preview panel, the middle section will surface the steps taken to reach the response provided, as well as what actions have been executed, if any, and what the output was.
The answer to each question you or external users could ask the AI agent will be an output powered by Salesforce’s Atlas Reasoning Engine.
As soon as the agent is invoked, be it manually or automatically, the reasoning engine comes into play behind the scenes. It selects the most appropriate topic and determines if an action is to be executed or not prior to providing a response. The flow below is a visual representation of what you could see above when testing the agent.
Once the appropriate Topics, Actions, and underlying Flows, Prompt Templates, or Apex actions are created, added to the agent, and appropriately tested, it’s all about deploying the agent to the appropriate channels to interact with the customers.
Currently, the available messaging channels include WhatsApp, SMS, Web, InApp, and, most recently, added in the Summer ’25 release, Email. Practically, once the AI agent is functional, it can start supporting your customers exactly where they prefer, around the clock.
Prompt Builder
Trying out generative AI within your Salesforce org as part of the $0 Foundations SKU could be a fully fledged autonomous agent to handle the simple and repetitive customer inquiries. Why not also transform your users’ experience even more, directly in their workflow, making changes as they go through their daily tasks?
Access to Prompt Builder is included within Salesforce Foundations, and you can use Prompt Templates combined with Flows or Apex to power up your Agentforce actions and better control the output, which will be presented to the customer when interacting with the service agent.
Prompt Templates can bring value in other ways to transform the service experience for internal users as well. For example, this can be embedded on Salesforce records for them to generate meaningful descriptions for their Cases, or within Salesforce Flows to automate output for already existing background processes, or even Screen Flows if needed.
To cater for more complex scenarios when using a Field Generation Template Type, having users click the button themselves on the Record Page is not enough. You can also explore the newer Create Case With Enhanced Data Prompt Template Type to generate a more robust description based on the communication that the customer had with the Agentforce Service Agent. Ultimately, the sky’s the limit when it comes to possible approaches.
Consumption
Balancing innovation with cost control is a must in the age of consumption based pricing, and this is why Salesforce has recently introduced the new flexible Agentforce pricing. For Salesforce Foundations, this translates in a shift from the 1,000 Agentforce conversations to 100,000 flex credits, which customers can use for free to supercharge the processes of their choice.
Both Data Cloud and Agentforce functionality consume credits when used, and Foundations grants enough credits to get started with simple yet scalable use cases. On top of the Agentforce credits, the offering also includes 10,000 Data Cloud Segmentation and Activation credits and 200,000 Einstein Requests.
When it comes to tracking the credits, Salesforce has got you covered with Digital Wallet and the readily available Consumption Cards, which can be found within Your Account App. Even more so, consumption threshold alerts can be set up to ensure that you are always up to speed with the usage.
Summary
Equipping your teams with the latest Salesforce innovation across both Agentforce and Service Cloud at no additional cost is sure to transform their experience, but most importantly, ensure a timely, optimized, and personalized approach towards customer inquiries. See for yourself how Salesforce Foundations, Agentforce, and must-have Service Cloud features like Case Management, Knowledge, and Chat can elevate your customer service experience. You can explore what’s included and get started today by heading to the Your Account App.
Have you already unlocked the power of Service Cloud and Agentforce through Foundations? Share your experience in the comments section below!
