Agentforce for Human Services: The Crucial First Step to Harness Salesforce's New Autonomous AI
Dreamforce 2024 was perhaps the most impactful yet of Salesforce’s largest annual gathering. CEO Mark Benioff announced the rollout of Agentforce – the company’s new AI assistants which can handle tasks completely unsupervised. This is an enormous step in the AI revolution. For human services organizations, the question now is this: “How would Agentforce help us?”
What is Agentforce?
Agentforce uses your organization’s data to power autonomous AI agents, which can handle a wide range of tasks across all Salesforce applications. You can custom-build each agent with a low-code process by simply defining the scope of their capabilities using natural language. You then create a library of actions for it to choose from. Organizations can also use natural language, instead of coding, to set guardrails for the agents. This governance tool ensures agents hand off certain tasks to a human that they cannot, or should not, complete.
Since these agents can handle tedious, time-consuming tasks without supervision, staffers are freed to handle more high value tasks. The AI agents work as a team with the humans in your organization to streamline operations and ease workflow burdens. Considering how little work it takes to actually build an agent, that’s a pretty incredible payoff.
Possible Use Cases for Nonprofits & Government Agencies
Agentforce’s most prevalent use case at the moment is autonomously handling complex queries from clients and constituents. Think of it like a chatbot that does not require programming of an if/then decision tree, because instead it generates the answers itself using your data. Beyond that, it will actually take steps to resolve the issue by performing tasks that are within the set guardrails. Here are a few examples of requests that Agentforce could solve all on its own.
“I need help getting a referral.”
“What services do I qualify for?
“I’d like to schedule an appointment.”
“Where is a food pantry near me?”
“Where is a homeless shelter that has room available?”
“How do I tell the city about the crack in the sidewalk that’s a tripping hazard?”
Data Strategy: The Backbone of Agentforce
A free-thinking chatbot that can actually take action to resolve issues will really take a load off of nonprofits and government agencies, and there will be many more Agentforce possibilities to come for human services as Salesforce makes further advancements. However, you cannot begin to harness this powerful AI unless you take the all-important first step of modernizing and harmonizing your data. That requires a comprehensive data strategy molded by the people, processes, and technology at the heart of your organization.
Provisio digs deep to learn the pain points of all three of these factors and how they interact with each other. As the largest Salesforce consultancy focused solely on human services, Provisio is uniquely positioned to prepare nonprofits and the public-sector with the data infrastructure needed for Agentforce – and whatever amazing AI advances Salesforce will surely make in the future.