Salesforce Agentforce Is Generally Available: Here’s How to Get Started Today

Since August, Salesforce has been buzzing about its new Agent product, built on the Agentforce Platform. Today, they officially announced its general availability.

This launch marks a major milestone for the cloud AI landscape, the Salesforce ecosystem, and the company itself, as Salesforce doubles down on this release like no other rebrand we’ve seen before.

Salesforce Agentforce Is Here

Although Agentforce was quietly released towards the end of last week (as you might have noticed through many LinkedIn posts), Salesforce is officially announcing its general availability to the world today.

Details of this new platform have been shared extensively since its announcement by Marc Benioff on the August quarterly earnings call. Benioff and his team have been building up maximum hype, which reached a peak at Dreamforce ‘24 and has carried on throughout October.

So much so that we have already published five detailed posts on the inner workings of Agentforce:

• Agentforce: The Next Evolution in Salesforce’s AI Story
• Salesforce Agentforce: All Hype or Will It Make History?
• How Does Salesforce’s Agentforce Work?
• 10 Questions Ahead of Agentforce General Availability
• Salesforce Agentforce AI Tools Are Free for Salesforce Customers

But as a quick recap, Agentforce is “what AI was meant to be”, says Marc Benioff. Forget Microsoft Copilot, which he has been comparing to Clippy 2.0 – autonomous agents that work within guardrails are the future of AI.

Salesforce’s announcement today includes two main elements: the Agent Builder, which works alongside Prompt and Model Builder to allow users to build custom agents or customize out-of-the-box agents, and the Agentforce Service Agent, a turnkey customer-facing AI agent designed to help customers deliver self-service with a knowledge search capability and accurate support across multiple channels, such as voice, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and websites.

Salesforce has launched with an agent designed to solve many customer support issues. Customers are frustrated with long wait times and a lack of proper self-service, while customer support reps are overwhelmed, spending 66% of their time on non-customer-facing tasks.

If Salesforce cracks the autonomous customer service bot, one of the biggest initial use cases for AI could be won by the Cloud pioneer.

One of the biggest adjacent announcements that has come out of Agentforce is the fact that Salesforce’s AI tools are available for free via Salesforce Foundations.

Of course, it’s not really free – it’s freemium. However, this completely opens up the platform for Salesforce community members to start experimenting with the software, ensuring that it can work for their use cases. This is a slight risk for Salesforce as if customers do not see ROI, their new usage-based pricing won’t work.

But perhaps this is a show of Salesforce’s confidence…

How to Get Started with Agentforce

Provisioning the Agentforce and Foundations SKU is just a matter of a few minutes, as you can do so from the comfort of your own Salesforce org through “Your Account”. Before getting started, make sure you have the necessary permissions to access it. After navigating to the “Product Catalog”, ensure that the following products are added to your cart:

• Salesforce Foundations – Agentforce Service Agent
• Salesforce Foundations
• Data Cloud Provisioning (This is optional, depending on whether your org already has Data Cloud.)
• Salesforce Foundations – Data Cloud Segmentation and Activation

Once the Agentforce Service Agent SKU is added to the cart, the other SKUs should be added automatically. However, if they are not, you can add them individually, as demonstrated step by step in the video below.

Following the provisioning, you need to make sure that prerequisites are met, respectively turning on Einstein as well as Einstein Copilot for Salesforce to begin with. To get you started with no impact on your actual org, Salesforce has launched a fun new #BuildWithAgentforce Quest on Trailhead, where you can not only build your very first Service Agent and celebrate with the community but also win an Agentforce t-shirt if you’re within the first 1000 to complete it.

Considering that through the Trailhead quest you will gain access to an org you can interact with, you can test the agent’s behavior in detail, observe how it executes all of the actions according to the instructions provided, modify them, add new ones, and generally discover its full potential!

Not only that but once you complete the agent setup and determine its topics and actions, you can also experience the customer side of the fence by exposing and testing how your agent behaves directly within a digital experience. Whether you choose to simply follow the instructions provided in the module or build some additional use cases of your own, you get to see both sides of the fence and familiarize yourself with all the components involved.

Summary

The general availability of Agentforce marks a significant milestone for Salesforce. While some skepticism from the Salesforce ecosystem is understandable, the potential of this new technology is undeniably exciting.

One of the most important aspects of this announcement is the fact that Salesforce removed the paywall for their AI tools, allowing more members of the ecosystem to skill up on AI, and increase company adoption of Agents and AI.