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Salesforce announced Agentforce 2dx today, a major update to its digital labor platform that enables autonomous AI agents to work proactively behind the scenes across enterprise systems without constant human supervision.
The announcement marks a substantial evolution from the company’s previous approach, where agents primarily operated within chat interfaces and required explicit user prompts. The new system aims to embed AI agents that can anticipate needs, monitor data changes, and take action autonomously across any business process.
“Companies today have more work than workers, and Agentforce is stepping in to fill the gap,” said Adam Evans, EVP and GM of Salesforce’s AI Platform, in a statement sent to VentureBeat. “By extending digital labor beyond CRM, we’re making it easier than ever for businesses to embed agentic AI into any workflow or application.”
Autonomous AI agents now work without human prompting
The most transformative aspect of today’s announcement is the shift from purely reactive AI interactions to proactive agents that can operate autonomously in the background. This change allows companies to deploy AI labor that doesn’t just wait for user commands but actively monitors systems and initiates processes when needed.
“What surprised me the most is the pace — the speed of creation and speed of iteration,” said Rob Seaman, SVP and GM of Slack, in a recent interview with VentureBeat. “The number of people now that can create technology that can help solve employee or customer problems has dramatically expanded because it’s topics and instructions, not C++, Java, Python, or Hack.”
The announcement comes at a critical moment in the evolution of AI agents, as enterprises move beyond experimentation toward deploying autonomous systems that can handle increasingly complex workflows without human intervention.
Digital assistants will soon negotiate with each other on your behalf
Salesforce is particularly focused on creating what it calls a “multi-agent framework” where personal AI assistants will interact with enterprise agents to complete tasks.
“You’ll see very interesting situations where our personal agents will be interacting with enterprise agents,” said Silvio Savarese, Salesforce’s Chief Scientist, in a recent interview with VentureBeat. “For example, I want to rent a car for a certain trip. I’ll ask my personal agent to find the best options. My personal agent knows my calendar and preferences, then reaches out to the car company’s agent to negotiate the time, schedule, price, options, and insurance.”
This vision suggests a future where AI agents increasingly talk to each other, with humans providing final approval rather than managing every step of business processes.
To accelerate the adoption of its agent technology, Salesforce is introducing a suite of new tools aimed at both developers and administrators. These include a free Agentforce Developer Edition environment for creating prototypes, AI assistance in Agent Builder to help configure agents more quickly, and a Testing Center for automated evaluation of agent configurations at scale.
The company is also launching AgentExchange, a marketplace with over 200 initial partners and hundreds of pre-built agent components, alongside new capabilities to embed agents in various contexts through the Agentforce API, MuleSoft integration, and Agentforce Steps in Slack Workflow Builder.
“If you look at Slack today, our customers have created over 21 million custom apps on the slack platform,” Seaman noted. “Now Agent Force is giving customers a way to build these agents themselves, grounded in their CRM data, calling actions in Slack and deployed in Slack.”
Healthcare industry targeted for major administrative relief
Salesforce is also targeting specialized industries, particularly healthcare, with Agentforce for Health, which aims to reduce the administrative burden on healthcare providers.
“Around 87% of people in healthcare say they work late each night to finish administrative tasks,” said Amit Khanna, SVP and GM for Salesforce Health. “Our goal is to reduce that number by providing care, which is what doctors and caregivers should be focusing on.”
Khanna described specific applications like automating benefits verification, summarizing patient records for care coordinators, and simplifying appointment booking. The healthcare-specific agents are designed to understand medical workflows and comply with privacy regulations.
Early Adopters Report Millions In Cost Savings From AI Implementation
Early adopters of Agentforce include companies across various industries. The Adecco Group is using the technology to transform recruitment by automating resume screening and candidate engagement. Engine, a travel platform, is automating customer service tasks and estimates nearly $1.9 million in annualized benefits.
Precina, a healthcare company for type 2 diabetes patients, reports an estimated $80,000 in annual savings for every 5,000 patients, while OpenTable reports that its implementation is handling 73% of restaurant web queries.
“With Agentforce, we’ve built multiple AI agents that power various parts of our business, addressing every stage of the customer lifecycle,” said Elia Wallen, Founder and CEO at Engine.
Implementation requires anticipating AI failure points
Despite the optimism, Salesforce acknowledges implementation challenges. “People don’t spend enough time thinking about dead ends or negative instructions,” Seaman noted about common issues with agent deployment. “It’s just as important to give topics and instructions as it is to give instructions on what to do if it doesn’t know what to do.”
Security and privacy concerns also remain paramount, particularly in regulated industries like healthcare. “We apply the same sharing and security model to agents that we do to humans,” explained Khanna. “When we send data to LLMs, we remove all protected health information, then replace those tags with actual names before presenting to the user.”
Salesforce’s vision suggests that by 2026, many companies will operate with a combined human and digital workforce, with autonomous agents handling an increasing share of routine operations while humans focus on higher-value activities.
The Agentforce 2dx platform will be generally available in April 2025, with some features releasing earlier, starting today. The Agentforce Developer Edition and AgentExchange are available immediately.
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