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The Salesforce agentic AI world tour continued this week in Davos, with CEO Marc Benioff telling the World Economic Forum audience on Thursday: "From this point forward… we will be managing not only human workers but also digital workers."
Benioff has been on a media blitz since the unveiling of Agentforce, described as the first enterprise-grade digital labor platform, at Dreamforce in September. The company quickly followed up with the announcement of Agentforce 2.0 in December, at the time teasing its upcoming integration with Slack.
As promised, the Agentforce 2.0 — Slack integration went into general availability earlier this month, with claims that the integration would transform workplace productivity by reimagining how teams interact with artificial intelligence within their collaborative spaces. As Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller told Reworked, "You have to meet people where they work."
By merging Agentforce’s capabilities with Slack, Salesforce is aiming to turn what was once a workplace communication tool into a “workplace operating system” where employees can interact with these intelligent agents directly within their daily workflows.
How Salesforce Positions Slack's Integration with Agentforce
"Slack is your home for humans and agents working together," Slack product marketing director Evan Stowers said on a webinar covering the release and road map for the next three months.
Slack research from January 2024 found employees spend up to 41% of their time on mundane tasks that could be automated by intelligent agents. The inefficiency hampers productivity and contributes to the employee overwhelm that results from managing multiple disconnected applications.
"The way we’re working isn’t necessarily optimized for employees to do their best," Stowers added.
The Slack–Agentforce integration aims to create a new paradigm for "agentic productivity." Slackforce — and other vendors — position the shift from AI assistants and copilots to AI agents as an opportunity to unlock a "limitless workforce." The agentic wave coincides with increasing pressure on businesses to optimize workforce costs, with 60% of Fortune 500 companies allocating 50%-60% of their budgets to workforce expenses.
"We’re moving beyond the era of assistants and copilots into an age of AI agents that unlock the idea of a limitless workforce — digital labor that maximizes employee potential," Stowers said. This collaborative framework positions Slack as a central hub for enhancing productivity through the synergy of human and AI efforts.
Build Your Own Agent
The concept behind Agentforce is simple, according to Stowers: if you can describe what you need, you can build it.
Employees can use Agentforce to create agents equipped with a variety of pre-built skills tailored for specific roles and industries. The platform's key features include:
- Deployment of Agents with Pre-Built Skills: Organizations can quickly deploy agents that are ready to perform specific tasks across different roles and industries.
- Integration with Existing Workplaces: Agents can take action using existing code and APIs, ensuring smooth integration into current workflows.
- Access to Enterprise Data: Users can connect their agents to any enterprise data source without the need for extensive training on AI models.
- Accurate Action Delivery: Powered by the Atlas Reasoning Engine, Agentforce ensures that agents deliver precise actions based on real-time data and insights.
The conversational interface supports the effective scaling of the capabilities. Humans collaborate with agents through the conversational interface, which is connected to data, workflows and applications on the back end, making search, action and collaboration more efficient.
The Atlas Reasoning Engine at the core of Agentforce further enhances its functionality in Slack by simulating human-like reasoning processes. With it, agents respond more accurately and adapt dynamically to changing requirements in real-time.
The end goal is Slack will become an operating system for work, that brings all of this together in a single command center. When you have all of your communications, your projects and your collaboration happening in Slack, you build a repository of institutional knowledge that enriches search capabilities as well as generative AI. This makes Slack the perfect home for Agentforce.
What's New and What's on the Slack-Agentforce Horizon
Slack VP of product management William Gradin highlighted a number of other significant features during the webinar:
- Slack Admin Experience: This feature allows Slack administrators to connect their workspace to a Salesforce organization. Once linked, all defined agents within that organization become accessible within Slack. This means that any agent from that organization or others can be deployed into Slack and accessed through the new Agentforce User Hub.
- Agentforce Hub: The Hub serves as a central repository of existing agents, where users can discover agents based on focus, learn about their skills, activate and interact with them directly.
- Custom Agentforce Actions: With this, employees can update and retrieve information from various systems directly through Agentforce. By automating these processes, employees can focus on more strategic tasks rather than getting bogged down by manual data entry.
Looking ahead, Gradin said Salesforce plans to enhance Agentforce’s Slack capabilities further with new features due with the February release cycle.
He singled out Slack’s upcoming enhanced search functionality, which will allow Agentforce to access and synthesize insights from both structured CRM data and unstructured conversational data within Slack. This improvement will provide real-time, contextually relevant responses to employee queries.
Pre-built Slack actions are also on the horizon, such as writing responses directly to canvases for collaboration, along with prepackaged agent skills designed to simplify onboarding and support common business use cases.
Gradin said by March, Agentforce will expand its actions to include creating and updating lists and posting updates directly to Slack channels, opening doors for use across IT, legal, engineering, and product development teams.
Data security is clearly a concern when setting loose autonomous agents, but it's a problem Slack believes it has solved with Einstein. Built on Salesforce’s Einstein Trust Layer, the platform ensures that all data access adheres to organizational security parameters. Agentforce can natively access data from Salesforce, Data Cloud and Slack, as well as external systems integrated into the platform. Role-based permissions further control access to information, and all interactions prioritize security and privacy.
Trying to Make Sense of Agentforce in Slack Pricing
Access to Agentforce in Slack requires a paid Slack plan — either Pro, Business+ or Enterprise Grid — as well as a separate Agentforce license. Salesforce is offering Einstein credits through March as an added incentive to businesses to get started with the platform before regular charges apply.
Pricing for Agentforce isn’t straightforward to calculate globally, as it depends on your license. The company is also adopting the pay per use approach which is quickly becoming the norm among tech vendors. The Salesforce website reads that when using Agentforce Service Agent within Slack, the cost is $2 per conversation. A further exchange with the Agentforce bot clarified that users will be charged $2 for each complete conversation that takes place through the Agentforce service. A conversation refers to the series of interactions between a user and the AI agent, which begins when the interaction is initiated and continues until the issue is resolved or the conversation is officially closed.
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It’s important to note that the $2 fee applies to the entire conversation, not to individual queries. For example, even if a conversation involves multiple back-and-forth exchanges between the user and the AI agent, the user will still only pay $2 for that single session. The $2 pricing extends to access and use of an out-of-the-box service agent, an agent builder and prompt builder.
Gradin's summary of Salesforce's current direction carried echoes of Benioff's Davos statement: “We’re moving beyond the era of assistants and copilots into an age of AI agents that unlock the idea of a limitless workforce — digital labor that maximizes employee potential.” With additional updates on the way, Agentforce is set to redefine how teams work together in Slack and underscores the company’s claim that it is gone beyond being a communication tool for the workplace to being an operating system for the workplace.
Read More About Agentic AI:
- Salesforce Brings an End to 'Work of Work' — With Agentforce 2.0, Salesforce envisions a future of work where thousands of agents pick up the slack in Slack and beyond.
- Will Your Next Hire Be an AI Agent? — Autonomous AI agents are making their way into every corner of the workplace. A look at where we are and where we're headed.
- Microsoft's Magentic-One Coordinates Task Completion Across Multiple AI Agents — Microsoft's new multi-agent framework aims to make AI agents more efficient in the digital workplace. Here's how.