Category: CRM

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Agentforce: The New AI Wave

Last month, I attended Dreamforce 2024, the world’s largest software conference, in San Francisco. This massive annual event is always a great learning experience. Dreamforce’s 2024 key announcement was a New AI Era with Agentforce.

Agentforce is synonymous with AI Agent. As I explained in my previous blog about AI agents, I will explain Agentforce in the context of Salesforce/MuleSoft.

The study found that 90% of businesses say that their industry has become more competitive in the last three years, and 48% say it has become much more competitive. This led to decreased margins, force to more productivity, and transformed businesses to remain relevant in the market for any industry.

So the question is, how do we close this gap and become relevant to the market for any industry?

We started the AI journey with Predictive analytics as the first wave of AI. Next, we move into the Generative AI wave. Now we are next inflection point as Agentforce or AI agent. So AI Agent is waiting for us to ultimately close this gap and of course, the way that we’re going to do this is to get more time back, more productivity, and have more business growth with AI agents.

agentforce

So here are a few queries, I am trying to explain

What is Agentforce?

The newest Salesforce tool allows customers to build and customize autonomous agents to scale their workforce. It is a UX for customers to leverage with their data sources to deliver more human-like interactions.

How does Agentforce help customers achieve business goals?

Agentforce gives companies a 24/7 agent to engage on their behalf to resolve sales, service, and marketing-related.

topics including customer service cases and prospect engagement.

With Agentforce, companies can drive productivity to deliver higher profitability, while building stronger customer relationships.

How does MuleSoft enhance Agentforce?

Salesforce primarily focuses on the front end “human assistant” type of agents with the Agentforce UX, while MuleSoft primarily focuses on back-end domain expert agents who manage domain complexity (inventory, payroll.) and power other prompts or agents.

MuleSoft expands the actionability of the Agentforce agent by providing API actions and other domain assets for

broader context to the role, knowledge, actions, guardrails, and channel.

How are customers accessing data for Agentforce?

The Agentforce messaging encourages customers to use Data Cloud to bring in their data and ground Agentforce. To add MuleSoft into this conversation, leverage our value prop for MuleSoft + Data Cloud; where MuleSoft accelerates value against four use cases (on-premises, transactional, unstructured, activation):

● On-premise data: MuleSoft can run locally and stream data to Data Cloud, giving Agentforce additional context for improved grounding and better decision making.

● Transactional data: Transactional systems will want queuing, error handling, and delivery controls for ingestion

— functionality MuleSoft can easily deliver so that Agentforce agents aren’t slowed down.

● Unstructured data: MuleSoft offers pre-built accelerators for unstructured data ingestion to Google Drive,

Confluence, and SharePoint as well as OCR for images. Agentforce agents can have immediate access to data

from scanned images like government identification.

● Activation: Use MuleSoft to respond to data events in Data Cloud and drive action in real time to any downstream system for full circle updates.

What is the agent use cases that MuleSoft supports?

● Service Agents: Agentforce needs contextual data from external systems in order to deflect cases faster

● Sales Agents: MuleSoft can upload, and share leads from and with partners without compromising data integrity, securely with your governance rules. Near real-time synchronization with external systems ensures that Agentforce can engage with prospects starting at the moment leads come in.

● Commerce Agents: Setting up and managing storefronts requires data from external systems including product information, inventory levels, and pending vendor shipments. MuleSoft connects to external systems for near real-time updates so Agentforce can respond with accurate information.

● Employee Service Agents (Workday): Automating onboarding and provisioning for new hires requires data from external systems, and in some cases is unstructured data found in pdf, jpg, and png files like scanned government I.D.s and manually filled out forms. MuleSoft’s Intelligent Document Processing makes it easier to upload unstructured data so that you can share it faster with Agentforce.

How is Agentforce different from the MuleSoft AI Chain (MAC) Project?

MAC Project mainly targets a technical person, i.e. MuleSoft users and developers. With the MAC Project, customers can create powerful agents, fully composed in the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform and benefit from its End-to-End Lifecycle Governance and Management capabilities. With API Management, you can sprinkle it on top of LLM specific policies, to further implement the security aspects when interacting with LLMs. MAC Project is an open source project, which is currently being productized. Agentforce is more for non-technical users who wants to build powerful agents directly in Salesforce. It is fully integrated into every Salesforce Cloud and provides out-of-the-box integration to the Salesforce ecosystem.

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Recession: Impact in Software as a Service(SaaS) 

Global uncertainties continue to dominate headlines. Inflation is expected to reach the highest levels of ~3.5% in the US and Europe by the end of 2023. To ease inflation, Central Banks need to dampen demand, by making it expensive (for financial institutions, businesses and households) to borrow by increasing Federal Reserve interest rates . We are expecting a federal rate hike of 4.75% – 5.0% by the end of 2023. These are all data showing we are heading toward recession. The US labor market was robust last quarter but this quarter it is not very promising. Everyday we are hearing layoff news from different sectors.

IMF inflation forecast

These inflation and layoff news are impacting our tech market. Many companies have a growth challenge: They expect to get as much as 50 percent of their revenue from new businesses and products by 2026 but are not on a path that will take them there. Current economic conditions are forcing high-growth yet unprofitable tech startups to tighten their financial belts.

There are few realities, software companies are facing for their growth.

US-based Venture capitalists backed software startups slowed down – VC are very clear of high valuation and demanding that companies spend less, improve profit margin and high output. Unicorn creation also slowed in 2022 Q4. This is one of the lowest quarterly count since the first quarter of 2020.

Depressed company valuations – Private company valuations are cooling down. Over the last 4 quarters, we have seen public valuations compressing.

 Software companies have three critical revenue streams.

  1. License / Subscription Revenue – When the customer pays for the right to own and use a copy of the software/hardware product or subscribe/access  software platform
  2. software or hardware product – Customer pays for ongoing support or premium support.
  3. Cloud based licensed software – Customer pays the software provider for specific deliverables such as software implementation or technical training.

In the current world all these 3 revenue streams are shrinking. Companies are using only essential services to run their business. This is directly impacting software revenue, which is leading these companies into low valuation.

Infrastructure Maintenance –  SaaS companies are providing the software as a service. This means the customer does not have to purchase hardware to run the software—that cost is transferred to the SaaS provider. This is implying continuous software running coast. This cost is not going anywhere.So due to inflation this SaaS running cost increases tremendously.

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APIs Integration with IOT and CRM improves Customer Service

APIs integration helping IOT and CRM to enable better customer experience

IOT (Internet of things) is revolutionizing our lives. As per Gartner report by 2025 IOT market will expand a 58-billion-dollar opportunity. It is affecting all parts of our life. In our pandemic era we found more use of IOT device to maintain social distancing.

IOT is also one of the main disruptive technologies in our businesses. It is affecting all business domain including healthcare, retail, automotive, security.

There are wide range of IOT benefits in business.

  • Enhanced productivity
  • Better customer experience
  • Cost-effectiveness

CRM system is keeping all your customer relationship like data, notes, metrics and more – in one place. CRM is helping small business to take off all burden from the IT management team by automating the business process. It is also helping employee to keep the focus on the critical business areas.

API is helping to integrate these two unrelated systems. APIs are enabling this system to optimize process and streamline whole business process. API is the main communication channel to build robust process and keeping real time update to these systems. APIs are allowing to build context-based application with IOT and CRM to interact with the physical world.

Now here are few areas where IOT is helping CRM system with help of APIs to optimize business process.

  1. Optimize customer service – Before your customer finds any error in your service/product you proactively acting on error and fixing those error. This will help to build relationship with customer.
  2. Increase sales – With help of IOT and CRM system you are finding untouched opportunity and using those opportunity to increase your sale.
  3. Personalize customer experience – You are analyzing data provided by IOT and CRM system and building user based predictive model to enable personalize experience to user.
  4. Customer retention – CRM provide customer data and relationship. IOT data providing customer behavior. This will help any business to personalize and target marketing for their customer.
  5. Omnichannel instore experience – IOT and CRM is helping business to enable 360 omnichannel customer experience. This process will help and suggest the products which the customer might purchase.

APIs  integration with IOT and CRM helping business to enable higher degree of personalization, target marketing, optimize price model, higher revenue and enhance customer satisfaction.