Salesforce Inc. today announced the launch of Agentforce for HR Service, a new set of artificial intelligence-powered capabilities aimed at making employee support and human resources solutions more intuitive.

Although AI is transforming productivity and how people work, it can also reshape how employees interact with their company. Salesforce already has a human resources platform called HR Services that provides employee services through a portal for workers and HR teams to handle common issues such as onboarding, training, benefits, records updates and vacation requests.

HR holds an important task for keeping a company’s workforce up to date and fostering high morale. But according to a 2024 report from the Society for Human Resource Management that surveyed over 2,000 HR professionals, 57% said they were working over capacity.

Using Agentforce, a platform that provides agentic AI capabilities, HR teams can deliver broad topics and actions directly to employees to self-serve on their own and work alongside HR for common tasks conversationally, while passing more nuanced and complex tasks along to humans. The AI agents work inside the business messaging app Slack or the Employee Portal, right where employees already go to find help.

“Eight in 10 HR chiefs say the workforce will be made up of humans and agents in the next five years,” said Kishan Chetan, executive vice president and general manager of Service Cloud at Salesforce. “Salesforce is leading this digital labor revolution across industries, and now, we’re bringing Agentforce skills and actions to HR Service so companies can expedite requests and scale employee support when resources are limited.”

Using direct access to company information and employee files, Agentforce can tailor personalized answers to each worker and help them manage their records or special requests. It can handle time-off requests, leaves of absence, payroll discrepancies, direct-deposit details updating and expense tracking.

In the case when the AI agent cannot handle something complex, or a case that is highly personal – for example a loss in the family or a pregnancy – the agent can hand off the conversation to a human representative. When it does so, the full context of the conversation goes with it. If the agent detects language in the conversation that it deems sensitive and in need of a human touch, it will summarize the conversation, provide a transcript and all the records needed and pass the chat along, just as if it had started with the human.

Salesforce said that it uses its own technology and has been at ground zero of using Agentforce agents, including Agentforce for HR. According to the company, workers have used the Employee Portal with Agentforce for nearly 10 million searches and it has resolved almost 96% of all inquiries without HR intervention since it was implemented.

“The future of work is humans and agents working together,” said Nathalie Scardino, president and chief people officer at Salesforce. “We are leading our customers into the future by demonstrating how to leverage Agentforce to unlock an era of unlimited potential.”

The company said HR is a perfect place for agentic AI to become a standard to assist beleaguered support staff and adoption is already taking place. In one use case, Salesforce customer Indeed Inc. is already using Agentforce to ease the employee hiring process.

“HR, like every other business unit, is being asked to do more with less,” said Rebecca Wettemann, principal analyst at the research firm Valoir. “Agentforce with HR Service will allow HR teams to scale support by ensuring HR specialists have all the employee data and case information in one place.”

Salesforce said Agentforce for HR is available now through the Agentforce Platform, HR Service Console and Employee Portal. It will roll out for Slack in June.

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