Salesforce unveils autonomous agents for sales teams

Benioff teased Salesforce’s first fully autonomous agent, Einstein Service Agent, in June, promising, “intelligent customer support with seamless collaboration between digital and human workers for rapid case resolution.” Service Agent is intended to make conventional chatbots obsolete by understanding and taking action on a broad range of service issues without preprogrammed scenarios. With SDR Agent and Sales Coach Agent, Salesforce is aiming to bring that power to sales teams.

Whereas chatbots can only answer specific, programmed questions, SDR Agent uses retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to access trusted business data (such as product FAQs, sales plays, and case studies) to interpret and process information, enabling it to have personalized, intelligent conversations with inbound prospects.

Pipeline expander

“There is barely any sales team in the world that will tell you they have enough pipeline,” said Ketan Karkhanis, EVP and GM for Sales Cloud at Salesforce. “Everybody needs more tools to qualify the pipeline and engage with the right customers at the right time. What we are doing with Einstein SDR is launching an autonomous agent that is going to help you qualify the pipeline, answer the questions of your prospects, give them contextually relevant, personalized engagement, and even schedule a meeting, handing it off to you as a human seller.”