Last year, Salesforce launched its ‘agentic AI’ product Agentforce that it said would revolutionise how marketing, sales and customer services functions operate. At its Salesforce World Tour event in Sydney yesterday, B&T caught up with VP and APAC CMO Leandro Perez to find out more about Agentforce, how clients are using the tech and whether it is proving transformative.
B&T: You launched Agentforce 2.0 in December. Although it is early days, how has the take up been from clients in this market?
Leandro Perez (LP): Globally the uptake has been incredible, the Australia and New Zealand market is one of the leading regions of customers that have not only wanted to pilot, but actually purchased and gone into production. The reason is that people have tried some of the other AI solutions that do it yourself approach. They’ve also been on this journey with us, where they’ve seen that we’ve innovated, and now they’re ready for that next step. When we brought out Agentforce, and showed them how easily they could get it going and leverage their existing investments on the platform, the take up has been incredible.
B&T: What are some of the brands that have come on board?
LP: Fisher & Paykel, Open Table, Norths Collective, hipages, Urban Rest and the New Zealand telco One are some of the early adopters. What I love about it is that it’s not just your large and your tech companies, smaller businesses like hipages are also diving in. For them it’s being used to get their tradies faster onto the platform with the certifications.
I would also add ourselves to that list because we are customer zero. so we deployed it on our own website, so we’re using the sales development agent to be able to qualify conversations before they go to our staff. And then we’re also actually brought it internally in Slack. So you’ve probably seen there’s a lot of people here, including our staff. They’ve asked all these questions all week long. We have an agent that’s helping answer all their questions.
B&T: What are the most common use cases clients are using it for?
LP: Customer services is a natural starting point, because there’s just simply not enough people to do the things that are needed. So it’s not necessarily about adding more work, it’s about how you just handle what’s now. Norths Collective is a good example. They’re trying to sell corporate hospitality. Most of the people that call their call centres are trying to do simple things, like, I want to change the time or the date or who’s my point of contact. What they want to do is they want to maximise their venue sell. So rather than customer services deflecting and containing the volume of enquiries, Agentforce allows them to handle them. It is also being used to handle large amounts of information served to someone. So with Fisher & Paykel, for example, they have customer service, but are using AI Agents to brief technicians about jobs in real time.
B&T: What are some of the more interesting marketing examples?
LP: Campaign creation is a great one, because in marketing, we kind of do the same thing over and over again, and it’s quite tedious. So you look at a data segment, who you’re trying to target, you might pull that together. You might create a campaign brief for an agency you’re working in, an agent can do all of that now.
Another one would be on your website, like I mentioned, where you’re triaging inquiries around products and pricing. They’re usually pretty standard questions, so you can answer the product question, and then you can help book and pass along to a sales representative that might be able to follow up.
We ourselves have customer service. So help.salesforce.com has 30,000 inquiries per week. These are technical questions. These are developers coming answering questions. Now in marketing we’re not necessarily experts across all those products. Agent force is now deployed and answering those questions, and only 2 per cent are going to the reps, which means they can take longer on solving the more complicated cases.
B&T: How is this reshaping your team in terms of what they are focused on.
LP: I’ve been telling the team for many years that in marketing, we have to get more technical, because marketing technology has evolved. I think what with agents and AI, it’s only compressed that timeline.
So what does that mean is you take some basic learning on how you can create an agent or how you can leverage the technology for your job.
The real goal would be that if you can move away from some of the menial tasks, they can focus on being more strategic. I think we have way more than 41 per cent of our workload are menial tasks.
I’ll give you an example. Before, when you did a media campaign, you might have one advert in market. Today my digital team will have 50 variations of a campaign for a certain day, which means we’ve actually created a lot more work for them, where Agentforce and agentic AI can help them do that at scale.
What I’m also seeing is, when you get rid of some of these menial elements, people can be more creative to come up with new ideas, it’s not always strategic.
B&T: Has using Agentforce led to any redundancies at Salesforce?
LP: Definitely not, in fact it’s led to greater productivity. We heard this this morning from the co-founder of Canva that it’s not about removing jobs, it’s about getting people to do more. We can’t keep growing brands in such a tight labour market when there is not enough capacity and talent in the market. So being able to get rid of some of those tasks can help people focus on more valuable work.
