Salesforce Inc. is going all-in on artificial intelligence agents with this week’s announcement of Agentforce 360, an enterprise-wide platform that infuses agents into nearly every application the company delivers.

Salesforce calls the platform an attempt to reimagine how AI and humans work together. “It’s probably the biggest transition in technology I’ve ever experienced in my career,” said Parker Harris, Salesforce’s co-founder and chief technology officer.

Agentforce 360 is a bet that every enterprise will want to have a fleet of AI agents working with humans. Agents will reason, take actions and adapt to a company’s culture, voice and business logic.

The platform introduces a new generation of AI agents with hybrid reasoning, voice interaction and deep hooks into Salesforce’s data and workflows. The company positions it as a full-stack framework for building agents that can not just answer questions but get work done.

At the heart of the platform is Agent Script, a JavaScript Object Notation-based language that enterprises can use to define complex, deterministic workflows, such as following refund policies or qualifying leads.

Predictable results

The release also unlocks new capabilities in the Atlas Reasoning Engine, the Agentforce component that enables agents to understand human intent, plan and autonomously execute tasks. Atla is described as a hybrid system that combines the probabilistic thinking of LLMs with the precision of business rules. That means it can interpret requests phrased differently while still behaving predictably.

“Imagine asking your bank for your balance and getting a different answer each time,” Harris said. “That won’t work. You need structure, memory, and governance.”

Voice is a critical element of the new release. Salesforce’s “eVerse” framework promises low-latency, high-fidelity and relevant voice experiences that eliminate customers’ frustration at waiting on hold or hunting for a key that summons a human operator.

Slack, the collaboration platform that Salesforce acquired nearly five years ago, will be the principal interface for the agentic experience the company envisions. “Slack is becoming your agentic operating system,” Harris said.

Slack is where agents will talk to each other, escalate issues to humans and pull in data from around the company. Slack is also getting some new AI features, including natural language search and a new agent called Slackbot. The company plans to support Microsoft Corp.’s Teams, but executives made it clear that Slack is the preferred interface. “We want Slack to be like water; just part of the Salesforce experience,” Harris said.

Safe agent development

To make it easier for customers to build their own agents, Salesforce is also rolling out Agentforce Builder, a conversational development environment with a document-style canvas, real-time simulations and support for “vibe coding,” a popular new software development approach in which a developer describes a project to a large language model and it generates the code. The company says it will protect against some of the security and quality issues with vibe coding by ensuring that agents adhere to the same standards as those defined by Salesforce.

“Every agent is versioned, testable, portable and governed out of the box,” said Srinivas Tallapragada, Salesforce’s president of engineering and customer success.

The platform is capable of turning unstructured documents like contracts and catalogs into structured, queryable records. It’s Salesforce’s way to fix what Tallapragada calls the “prompt doom loop, where you’re writing prompts and getting frustrated because the context is not there.”

Salesforce will use context indexing and a feature it calls Data 360 to short-circuit that loop by grounding agents in governed, up-to-date, role-specific knowledge. Data 360 unifies all of a company’s structured and unstructured data and metadata, while context indexing automatically extracts and structures business-specific information so agents can deliver relevant outcomes. Salesforce said the index inherits the same security, privacy and compliance controls as the rest of an enterprise’s data.

Proactive service

The company said it has deployed Agentforce across its own service teams and now uses agents to handle over 1.8 million conversations each week. It said the results have been fewer repetitive tasks, more proactive outreach and up to a 40% increase in proactive service activity.

The sales organization uses AI-driven representatives to follow up on thousands of long-tail leads that previously fell through the cracks. “That’s what we mean by an agentic enterprise,” Tallapragada said. “It’s not just turning on a tool; it’s rethinking how you do sales and deliver service.”

Heathrow Airport has deployed an agent called “Hally” to field real-time requests ranging from wait times at security to automatically extending parking limits. “It pulls in complex back-end data into a simple, human-like interface,” said Heathrow’s Peter Burns, Heathrow’s director of marketing and digital. “It lets us scale personalized experiences.”

Williams-Sonoma Inc. is using interior design agents to help customers avoid decorating mistakes. In the process,  average order value has increased.

“This isn’t just about automation,” said Williams-Sonoma CTO Sameer Hassan. “It’s about augmenting creativity. When you equip brilliant people with this kind of tech, you get better outcomes, strategically, creatively and financially.”

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