Salesforce unveils Agentforce Partner Network to delivery specialised AI agents

Salesforce has announced the debut of the Agentforce Partner Network. The network includes industry leaders such as Amazon Web Services, Google, IBM, and Workday. These partners will deliver specialised agents and intelligent agent actions that organisations can embed across their apps, customer channels, and employee productivity tools.

The open ecosystem aims to enable a company's Agentforce to perform complex tasks by chaining together actions across Salesforce and a broad range of third-party systems and agents. "Agentforce represents a monumental shift in the industry, enabling humans with AI to redefine how businesses achieve customer success," said Brian Millham, President and Chief Operating Officer at Salesforce. "Over the next year, our bold vision is to enable customers with a billion AI agents. The Agentforce Partner Network, the world's first agent ecosystem, plays a crucial role in helping our customers realise this vision by providing a vast catalogue of trusted and ready-to-deploy partner agents and agent actions," he added.

The Agentforce Partner Network will be extended with new agent actions, pre-built agent templates, and partner agents that can plan and take action across multiple systems on behalf of users and businesses. These partner-built agent actions and templates will be available to customers via Salesforce's AppExchange, allowing quick and easy customisation of out-of-the-box agents or the creation of new agents with specialised skills.

Global system integrators like Accenture, Deloitte Digital, Capgemini, IBM Consulting, PwC, and Slalom will support the initiative by bringing Agentforce to life for customers, thereby accelerating AI-driven transformations for businesses worldwide. The Agentforce Partner Network includes launch partners such as Appiphony, Asymbl, Box, Certinia, Copado, Coupa, Docusign, GoMeddo, Honeywell, Korn Ferry, Moody's, OpenText, Sprout Social, TerraSky, Zoom, and more. These partners will build agent actions to bring new skills or integrate with third-party apps, and develop agent templates to support specialised industries or use cases.

Organisations can utilise the Agent Builder to add or configure jobs for their agent in the form of topics and actions. Topics define the guardrails in natural language, and the set of actions that can be used within those guardrails. Standard actions include "Summarise Record," "Plan My Day," and "Process Return," with more being added regularly. Furthermore, Salesforce partners are building additional tailored actions to extend this library, according to the specific needs of various industries.

The ability to install these actions and agent templates directly in the Salesforce Platform means customers can use them to customise out-of-the-box agents, build new agents with unique skills, or deploy new agents based on pre-defined templates. Partners like IBM and Workday will offer pre-built agents to help various sectors streamline tasks such as loan approvals, onboarding, and career development without moving data across systems, thereby reducing deployment time and cost.

System integrators will support enterprises in defining, building, and deploying AI agents and actions using Agentforce, leveraging their expertise in both Salesforce technology and integrations. Joint investments have been committed to strengthening this effort. "The Agentforce Partner Network amplifies collaboratively created agents and actions, unlocking more advanced agent functionality and specialisation," according to a statement from Salesforce.

Analysts have noted the potential benefits of this network. "With the Agentforce Partner Network, Salesforce is cultivating an open ecosystem and bringing together industry-leading partners to empower Agentforce Agents with data, skills, and expertise to get work done – increasing productivity across many different complex systems and workflows," said Steve White from IDC.

For access to available agent actions and demos, customers can visit the AppExchange platform.