Salesforce has unveiled two AI-powered innovations for retailers: Agentforce for Retail and Retail Cloud with Modern POS. They aim to help store associates, customer service representatives, and digital merchants boost productivity and sales, while delivering more personalised shopping experiences.
Agentforce for Retail includes a new library of pre-built agent skills, making it easier for retailers to build AI agents that automate time-consuming tasks, such as order management and appointment scheduling, and deploy rapid shopper personalisation at scale.
Scalable digital labor aims to help retailers reach new levels of productivity — responding to customer questions in real-time, modifying orders, issuing returns, managing inventory, scheduling consultations, and even coordinating with shipping providers — all without the need for human intervention.
“Together, AI-fueled digital labor and a modern POS can unlock a new scale of operational capacity for retailers. With these latest Agentforce skills for retail and a cloud-based, intuitive POS system, Salesforce is helping retailers deliver seamless, unified shopping experiences across both the physical and digital realms of retail that drive productivity advancements and business growth across their entire enterprise,” Nitin Mangtani, SVP & GM, retail, Salesforce said.
These new Agentforce skills are designed to unlock more capacity to serve shoppers, drive costs down, and increase shopper conversion. They complement existing skills already available for merchandisers, marketers, and customer service reps. New skills include:
- Commerce Skills for Order Management. These bring order servicing to Agentforce, allowing retailers to offer self-service order servicing options that reduce costs and boost customer loyalty. With these new skills, customers can conversationally update order information like payment or shipping details, handle uneven exchanges, or quickly inquire about order status on the channel they prefer.
- Commerce Skills for Guided Shopping. This skill helps retailers scale personalised one-to-one concierge services to digital proportions, with new skills for guided shopping. Shoppers can use natural language to get product recommendations from an agent calculated by Agentforce and grounded in shopper, inventory, and operational data. New actions allow customers to search for products, add items to their cart, and checkout conversationally.
- Field Service Skills for Appointment Scheduling assist service representatives in facilitating appointment bookings for deliveries, installations, or consultations, powered by AI-driven scheduling and real-time availability updates.
- Marketing Skills for Loyalty Promotion Creation assists marketers in creating and revising loyalty promotions with conversational prompts grounded in shopper, POS, and segmentation data resulting in more personalised email content and subject lines that increase customer engagement.
Salesforce’s new Retail Cloud with Modern POS is a cloud-based system bringing online and offline shopping data together on a single platform, giving associates a single entry point to serve shoppers better and faster with mobile POS, clienteling, endless aisle, mixed cart and omnichannel fulfillment, inventory management, and more. This system brings online and offline shopping and inventory data together on a single platform, giving associates a single tool to serve their shoppers better and faster.
With Salesforce’s Modern POS and Data Cloud, retailers can harmonise data and metadata from in-store, commerce, marketing, service, and loyalty systems to give employees and associates a unified, near real-time view of activity across the entire shopper journey. Retailers can now use Agentforce, with enhanced Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), to retrieve and take action on this data and deliver precise answers, tailored engagements, and upsell opportunities with every shopper interaction.
In a Salesforce study, 81 per cent of retail executives say that inefficient processes and technology drain associate productivity. Store associates alone log in to more than 16 different applications and systems each day, leaving nearly 78 per cent of store associates without a single, actionable view of their shoppers — resulting in lost productivity and fragmented shopping experiences.
A Salesforce spokesperson said that the new features are available in most APAC, EMEA and South American regions.
