Salesforce unveils Agentforce to help create autonomous AI bots

“In the generative phase, you might ask a copilot to write an email for you to a customer. In the agentic phase, you can ask a harder question: ‘What should I do with all of my customers?’ Maybe it’s email, maybe it’s picking up the phone and calling, maybe it’s sending a text message,” Shih said. “That’s really what agents can do: They can take a higher-order question, break it down into a series of steps, and then execute each of those steps.”

Explaining further, the company said its Atlas reasoning engine starts by evaluating user queries and refining them for clarity and relevance, after which it retrieves the most relevant data and builds a plan for execution.

The process then refines the plan further, ensuring it’s accurate, relevant, and grounded in trusted data, according to Salesforce. Based on this process, Agentforce agents are able to reason, make decisions, and complete business tasks autonomously, while delivering factually accurate results.