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What Are Autonomous Agents & What Do They Do?
Feb 28, 2025 • 3 Minute Read • Elizabeth Spranzani, Directrice de la technologie
What if your business could scale customer service operations without sacrificing quality? Traditional bots and support tools have made strides, but they still lack true autonomy.
Enter Salesforce’s Agentforce, an artificial intelligence tool that's changing the game. With autonomous agents that never sleep, businesses now have an always-on support team that adapts to both employees and customers 24/7.
Curious about how this cutting-edge technology works and what it can do for you? Keep reading to find out.
New Autonomous Agents: Specialized Support
Autonomous agents are proactive, always-on applications designed to provide specialized support. Powered by generative AI, these agents can reason and execute tasks based on business knowledge tailored to specific roles.
Unlike traditional bots, which rely on robotic, declarative logic, or copilots that extend productivity through ask-and-response reactive conversation interactions, autonomous agents are designed to be proactive and autonomous. They can anticipate needs and take action without direct input.
The Role of Data in Autonomous Agents
For these agents to function effectively, they rely on preconfigured instructions and data. They need topics (instructions + actions) to guide their behavior. These instructions are written in natural language, which is an important difference compared to traditional bots. The key concept here is that knowledge of organizational data is combined with the agents' instructions and actions, reasoning is applied, and tasks are executed accordingly.
Controlling Data Access in Agentforce
When configuring your agents in Agentforce, you define their scope and data access. You can give them access to your own CRM data or external data using Data Cloud, but you control exactly what data they can access. This ensures that confidential or private information remains protected, and agents won't have visibility into data they aren't explicitly granted access to. Even if internal or external users attempt to extract restricted data, that agent simply cannot retrieve or reveal what it doesn't have access to.
Data Privacy with the Einstein Trust Layer
Agentforce leverages the Einstein Trust Layer to further safeguard data privacy when sending prompts and communicating with the underlying Large Language Model (LLM). The Einstein Trust Layer automatically masks sensitive data, including company names, customer records, and personally identifiable information (PII). This means that even if the underlying LLM learns from interactions, it does not store or expose real business data, ensuring that proprietary or sensitive information remains secure and inaccessible to unauthorized users.
Powering Autonomous Agents with Atlas Reasoning Engine
Salesforce's Atlas Reasoning Engine, an advanced LLM, powers these agents. Atlas applies conditions, rules, and data to ensure that agents deliver the right answers and take the appropriate actions. It can make assumptions, fill in the gaps, and apply fuzzy logic.
A Suite of Out-of-the-Box Agents
Salesforce offers a growing suite of pre-built agents that span various industries, including service, sales, marketing, commerce, healthcare, manufacturing, and more. These agents integrate with Salesforce cloud products, enabling businesses to customize and extend them to fit their specific needs:
- Customer Service – Handling inquiries and resolving issues in real-time
- Sales & Marketing – Personalizing outreach and automating follow-ups
- Commerce – Managing orders, inventory, and customer interactions
- Healthcare – Assisting with patient scheduling and support
- Manufacturing – Streamlining supply chain and operational workflows
The idea is that you can take these agents to build upon and apply them to your preconfigured Salesforce flows, Apex code, and more to enhance efficiency across your organization.
Configuring an Agent: Simple and Natural
Configuring an agent is pretty simple with natural language. Rather than relying on complex “if-then” statements, you can enter instructions in plain language. Here’s how it works:
- Define the topic: Specify what the agent’s role is, its scope, and its purpose.
- Set up instructions: Enter instructions in natural language that guide the agent’s behavior.
For example, a college admissions agent might first ask if a prospect is a high school graduate, transfer student, or homeschool applicant. Based on the answer, it then provides the relevant admissions criteria.
The beauty of this system is that if an agent doesn’t know the answer, it will ask questions and follow the rules you’ve set before delivering information to the user.
Additionally, these agents can perform a wide variety of actions, such as booking appointments during service windows, by leveraging the data and endpoints it has access to.
Easy Integration, Powerful Results
What sets Salesforce’s autonomous agents apart is the ease of configuration. Using natural language to write instructions makes the process faster and more intuitive, eliminating the need for complicated logic.
Salesforce's autonomous agents, powered by Atlas and integrated into its cloud platforms, represent the future of customer service. It's one where businesses can scale efficiently without sacrificing the quality of customer interactions.
How Can You Prepare to Integrate Autonomous Agents?
As a certified Salesforce partner, our agency has the expertise to implement autonomous agents. The tool is ideal for industries like manufacturing, healthcare, retail, and fintech, which can benefit from improving operations and customer service.
Autonomous agents are also ideal for organizations using Salesforce or those interested in AI-driven solutions but may not already be using Salesforce. If you're interested in implementing an AI solution, contact us to discuss your goals and how we can help.