Build and Govern Your Agentforce — A Look at the Salesforce Platform Roadmap
Written By Alice Steinglass
Published
Welcome to the latest installment of our Roadmap Preview series, where we share the future of Salesforce’s products. Through these posts on IdeaExchange, we aim to offer transparency and keep our customers closely aligned with our evolving platform — our unified metadata platform that brings together your data, AI, security and privacy, analytics, automation, integration, and low-code development capabilities. In this post, we’ll dive into the exciting roadmap for Agentforce, including building and governing custom agents.
Before we start, I want to sincerely thank our customers, partners, and 21 million Trailblazers across the globe who have built nearly 10 million custom apps with us. For 25 years, your trust in us has fueled our desire to continually improve. And now, with Agentforce, we're at the precipice of unprecedented innovation we can't wait to share with you.
Looking at the technology landscape now, it's true — AI has changed everything. For you, our customers, we see that AI is transforming the apps you're building and how you're building them.
I lead Product for the Salesforce Platform, and I’m more excited at the possibility of what we can build together than I’ve ever been. I look forward to sharing a view into the new products, capabilities, and our vision with you in this blog post.
Responding to Shifting Expectations in the Age of AI
AI is changing how businesses operate and how consumers interact with brands. And it's completely changed customer expectations. They expect zero hold times, hyper-personalized interactions, and empathetic, human-like conversations. These higher customer expectations put immense pressure on workers, who often struggle with increased demand, the need to focus on too many low-value tasks, and having a fixed capacity. In short, worker overwhelm is skyrocketing, and productivity isn't keeping up.
CEOs recognize this pressure — from both customers and employees. Because of this, AI is a top priority for these leaders. Yet 88% of IT leaders admit they cannot meet AI’s full potential safely or effectively. Why? Too many data silos, lack of integration, and overall resource constraints.
What if you could solve these challenges? What if there were no limits on your workforce’s capabilities? What if your employees could focus on high-value tasks while AI took over much of the repetitive, time-consuming work?
This reality was limited in the first wave of AI, which was built around predictive capabilities. In the next wave, the vision of delegating tasks to AI became clearer with bots and copilots. While representing a huge step forward in AI, these bots and copilots lacked specific skills tied to business use cases. They struggled beyond assisting users with simple suggestions and recommendations to help workers complete tasks.
How can businesses use AI to take action and accomplish something without constant human input? How can we really get AI to do the work it's good at so that people can focus more on the work they’re good at?
How do we get AI to do helpful and meaningful work for us — at scale?
Fall & Winter ‘24: The Future of AI is Agents
We have good news — we’re now in the third wave of AI: agents. This is a significant shift for AI, going from assistive to agentic. With agents, what was once visionary is now possible.
What does this mean in practical terms? Agents that are autonomous can perform tasks and do work without detailed instructions for each action. These agents can drive efficiency by taking over routine tasks from Sales and Service teams, like answering customer service questions, creating sales follow-ups, and processing orders. They’ll be able to help IT teams build, test, and deploy faster. They’ll help Legal and Operations departments streamline processes and reduce manual workloads. Ultimately, these AI agents will be crucial for helping businesses across all their departments keep pace with growing customer and employee demands.
Today, agents can handle a high volume of tasks independently or alongside a person, delivering more personalized experiences 24/7, at scale. These AI agents can tackle labor-intensive, oftentimes high-effort tasks from humans that would otherwise strain us and instead free us to focus on more strategic, creative, and high-value work.
Ultimately, your agents — or better said, your Agentforce — allow humans to excel at what they do best, while AI handles the repetitive, data-driven processes they are built for.
We are invested in our customers’ success. Along with you, we see the transformative potential of AI and want you to get more from it. With the Salesforce Platform, you can build and govern custom Agentforce agents for any department — HR, Legal, Finance, Operations — tailored to the specific needs and use cases of your business. The ability to deploy intelligent, autonomous agents can allow companies to scale, meet rising customer expectations, and enhance workforce productivity without limits.
The transition to agentic AI represents a significant leap forward in our vision for the Salesforce Platform, one that will change how businesses operate. It's time to start building your Agentforce and have AI work for you!
Build Your Agentforce
AI agents can change the way your business operates and how you engage with your customers. But for many, the process of building agents may seem intimidating — especially if they’re thinking they’ll have to do this with the older tools they’ve been using or simply are unsure about new ones. But creating intelligent agents shouldn't be intimidating. From low-code to pro-code, individuals and teams across your organization should have the tools they need to start building your Agentforce.
Low-Code Tools
That's why we’ve introduced a suite of low-code tools that anyone can use to develop your Agentforce — no CS degree required. These tools empower users to build agents for various functions across departments, truly putting the power of AI in your hands.
- Agent Builder allows users to build Agentforce agents capable of performing tasks right in the flow of work, across channels such as email, chat, and voice. With Agent Builder, you can define what jobs an agent should and shouldn’t do, specify data access permissions, connect agents to existing prompts, flows, Apex, and APIs, and control what actions the agent can take within your systems. This new low-code builder for Agentforce is now GA!
- Retriever Builder helps your agents do retrieval augmented generation (RAG) in Data Cloud on structured and unstructured proprietary data across your business, producing better AI outputs. Whether answering customer queries or providing internal data insights, with Retriever Builder, you can build agents that deliver contextually relevant information quickly and accurately. Retriever Builder is also now GA.
- Prompt Builder, also GA, simplifies the creation of custom agent responses through custom prompts grounded in your data and workflows. Whether generating personalized content for customer interactions or drafting contextually relevant responses based on business logic, Prompt Builder allows you to define the exact language, tone, and data the AI should use. And with new additions, such as Field-Based Masking, customers can ensure that if data used to ground a prompt is of a certain classification or sensitivity level — or if that data is currently encrypted using Platform Encryption — that data will be masked before it is sent through the Einstein Trust Layer to the model of your choosing.
These builders allow teams across different business units to deploy custom agents for a range of use cases without requiring deep technical expertise.
Developer Tools
Low-code tools will accelerate your ability to build agents for your business. But what about the advanced work your developers are doing? We understand the crucial role they play and want to improve their development experience. And that’s where Agentforce for Developers comes in.
Agentforce for Developers supercharges developer productivity. This tool helps developers accelerate coding, scan for vulnerabilities, and automate testing processes with AI — making it easier than ever to build robust, secure Agentforce agents.
- Generative AI for Coding: Developers will be able to code faster and with greater accuracy using AI-generated code, which can assist in everything from writing initial drafts of code to fixing bugs.
- Vulnerability Scanning: Integrated tools will scan code for vulnerabilities, ensuring that applications are secure from day one.
- Automated Testing: Developers can test the functionality of their applications, catching potential issues early in the development process and reducing time spent on troubleshooting later.
With Agentforce for Developers, developers can innovate faster while ensuring their applications remain secure and scalable. Agentforce for Developers is now GA.
Another crucial part of our roadmap is providing you with cost-effective ways to scale your business. Platform Login and Dev Credits, now GA, allow companies to assign access to custom agents without requiring seat-based licenses. This pay-per-unique-login model is ideal for users who need occasional access, giving businesses a more flexible and cost-effective way to provide internal access to their custom Salesforce agents.
Test and Deploy Your Agentforce at Scale
But planning and then building an agent isn't the end. Testing, deploying, and observing — the entire development lifecycle — is critical to the success of your Agentforce. And to do so at scale is a game changer. With the Salesforce Platform, we have tools and AI to help you at every stage.
- Sandboxes and Scratch Orgs: Replicate your production environment to make quick and safe changes or develop and test new agents without impacting live data. In our latest round of enhancements, we introduced Quick Create for Sandboxes on Hyperforce, which allows you to create new Sandboxes 4x faster, allowing for more efficient development and testing. And with Data Cloud in Sandboxes, GA on November 5th, you can build and test Data Cloud-powered agents in sandbox environments before you ship them.
- DevOps Center: Easily keep track of projects at every stage of the custom agent development process. With built-in version control integrations (now including BitBucket), DevOps Center ensures that releases follow best practices for streamlined deployments. DevOps Center will also soon support the migration of Data Kits for Data Cloud in Sandboxes and metadata for Agentforce. To allow you to fully automate testing across your entire DevOps pipeline and help you identify and fix problems earlier, we’re launching DevOps Testing. DevOps Testing is deeply integrated with DevOps Center and will provide a unified view of tests and test executions across Salesforce and leading partner tools.
- Scale Test and Data Seeding: Test your agents and applications under high transaction volumes while maintaining data privacy through features like data masking and AI-generated synthetic data for testing environments. Now, with Data Seeding, you can easily load high-quality data from any environment into your sandbox or use AI to generate data similar to your production data. With this tool, you can develop and test against more meaningful data. Data Seeding is now available as a pilot.
At Salesforce, Trust is our number one value. When it comes to AI, customer trust must be earned. With these tools, you can test and validate outputs yourself before sending them to customers, ensuring accuracy and transparency while delivering AI-driven solutions that uphold the highest standards of reliability, privacy, and security.
Secure and Govern Your Agentforce
And speaking of trust, security and governance have never been more important than they are in today’s AI-driven world. Secure and protected data must be top-of-mind for every business. As online threats increase in sophistication and frequency, we've built tools to help you protect your businesses and customers.
- Platform Encryption: Encrypt sensitive data and manage your own key lifecycle. With our latest enhancements, you can now encrypt your Data Cloud data with customer-managed keys.
- Database Encryption: Add an additional layer of encryption, allowing you to transparently encrypt data without compromising business functionality. Database Encryption will be GA in January 2025.
- Event Monitoring and Field Audit Trail: Get detailed insights into security events and data history, helping you monitor access and ensure compliance with industry regulations. Now, with Event Log Objects, you can access logs in low latencies and have more extensibility and access to improved analytics. With these latest features, you can improve security, optimize performance, and gain a deeper understanding of user behavior within your Salesforce instance, quickly. Event Monitoring, Field Audit Trail, and all mentioned enhancements are now GA.
- Security Center: View your security posture in real time and proactively manage permissions and configurations, working with innovations like Agentforce and Data Cloud. Security Center and all the latest enhancements are GA.
- Data Mask: Provide realistic data for your teams to test while protecting sensitive data. We’re excited to share that Data Mask has received a huge upgrade and is now 10x faster. It also has a new UI that makes configuration much easier.
- Salesforce Archive: Archive unneeded data that you want to move out of production but may want to keep for reporting purposes later on. This will ensure that your agents run fast and that you aren’t paying for unnecessary storage. Salesforce Archive will be GA in December 2024.
Our commitment to security extends beyond simply providing the tools. We’re committed to working with our customers to ensure that security is baked into every step of the development process. As always, we welcome your feedback and thoughts along the way.
Beyond ‘24
Looking ahead, we’re building a future where you won’t just create agents, but where agents can partner with you to help build other agents. And, your Agentforce will collaborate with each other to help your business grow. Agents building agents and agents working together are some of the most exciting frontiers in AI development. How businesses operate and automate repetitive or complex workflows will continue to change dramatically. As we press forward, we’ll continue to enhance the Agentforce developer experience to accelerate your productivity.
Agents will continue to grow in complexity. As they do, so does the importance of integrating security into every phase of the development lifecycle. This is why we’re continuing to invest in DevSecOps, a framework that blends security, development, and operations to reduce the risk of vulnerabilities — and ensure you can safeguard your trusted relationships with your customers.
With DevSecOps, you can address security early in the development process and reduce the cost of security errors while speeding up delivery. Automation plays a vital role in this too. Integrating security tools into the development pipeline is critical, and we continue to look for ways to reduce the manual effort needed to ensure security and compliance.
Our roadmap for 2024 and beyond is a testament to our commitment to empowering your businesses with cutting-edge AI tools that scale, secure, and transform your operations, all built into the Salesforce Platform. From our low-code AI agent builders to advanced developer tools, we’re equipping teams to leverage AI more effectively than ever before.
As we continue to innovate and enhance the Salesforce Platform, we remain dedicated to helping you thrive in an increasingly AI-driven world. The future of AI is humans with agents driving customer success together — and we’re here to help you lead the way.
Resources
If you’re ready to dive deeper and want to check out our newest capabilities and latest demos, watch the Platform Keynote at Dreamforce 2024. You can also dive into our resources guide, where you’ll find guides, trails, demos, and more to help you get started on building your own Agentforce.
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Alice Steinglass
VP & GM, Platform
Salesforce