Salesforce Consultant

5-ian-cosgrove

Ian Cosgrove

for-everyone

For Everyone

AI is inescapable in 2026. Everyone is betting on it, and Salesforce certainly is with [Agentforce](https://www.salesforce.com/agentforce/). Salesforce first launched Agentforce at [Dreamforce](https://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/) 24 to much fanfare, with integrations in Salesforce, Slack, and Mulesoft products. One of the big promises was adding autonomous AI to the platform, allowing it to work without input from staff, serving customers.

Since then, they have introduced 2.0, and at Dreamforce 25, Salesforce announced their newest version of Agentforce, with even more intelligence, better guardrails, and a [new voice mode](https://www.salesforce.com/agentforce/what-is-new/). In this article, we’ll take a look at how Agentforce has changed in the short time that it has been alive, and how realistic the promises Salesforce makes actually are.

## From Einstein to Agentforce: A Quick History

Agentforce isn’t Salesforce’s first venture into artificial intelligence. Salesforce’s first foray into AI was with the launch of Einstein in 2016. In its early days, Einstein offered limited but powerful capabilities, including predictive analytics, Lead Scoring, Opportunity Insights, and Forecasting.

By 2017, Salesforce expanded its AI offerings with Einstein Bots for Service Cloud, enabling automated responses to basic inquiries, intelligent escalation of complex cases, and record updates. The following year, 2018, saw the introduction of Einstein Prediction Builder, empowering administrators to create predictive models without coding, allowing them to forecast churn, identify upsell opportunities, and predict payment delays.

Salesforce leveled up its AI integration in 2023 with the introduction of Einstein GPT. This innovation combined the power of public LLMs with proprietary Salesforce CRM data, enabling users to generate custom and personalized emails, call summaries, marketing copy, and knowledge articles. This shift from purely predictive to generative AI was a significant game-changer.

However, generative AI’s true potential is unlocked through interaction, which is where Einstein Copilot, released in 2024, came into play. Copilot serves as the conversational layer, allowing users to interact with the AI, such as asking it to display opportunities based on specific criteria or generate comprehensive reports. Essentially, Einstein GPT acts as the brain, while Copilot provides the voice and hands, making it accessible and actionable.

Now, Agentforce is core to the Salesforce strategy. It is a key part of their messaging, even renaming the platform to Agentforce 360 and embedding Agentforce in everything from developer tools to user-specific solutions, as well as letting people build their own agents. If you’re confused by what Agentforce “is,” you are not alone, since the name is now on many of the Salesforce products. When determining your agent strategy, make sure you’re clear on your business goals, *then* choose the right set of tools.

### **Salesforce AI Evolution at a Glance**

| Layer | Einstein GPT | Einstein Copilot | Agentforce |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Role | Generative AI | Conversation Assistant | Autonomous Agent Platform. |
| Launch | 2023 | 2024 | 2024 (1.0) |
| Focus | Produces content, predictions, insights | Natural-langauge, Q&amp;A, guided actions | Executes workflows, resolves cases, orchestrates across systems |
| User Interaction | Mostly behind the scenes | Direct, user-facing | Often background, monitored via Command Center |
| Strength | The brain | The interface | The operators |
| Example | Drafts a personalized sales email | Allows a rep to ask “draft a thank-you email” | Agent sends the email, updates the record, schedules a follow-up |

Yet, Salesforce wasn’t content with the user still being actively involved in every step. The vision was to go further: to have AI act autonomously, within defined guardrails, to execute insights automatically.

## **Inside the Agent Builder: How Agentforce Actually Works**

This ambition is precisely where Agentforce steps in, leveraging all the data within an organization to power its actions. So how do these agents actually work? The process begins in the Agentforce Builder, where the first step is to define the agent’s purpose. For instance, let’s consider creating a Sales agent to assist customers in purchasing generators at our hypothetical solar company. To get started, we would build a new topic, which we’ll simply call “Sales.”

![](/uploads/wordpress/2026/02/image-8-1024x785.png)

The Agent Builder is a fully-featured environment, allowing for the setting of detailed descriptions and precise scoping of the agent’s operational boundaries. In the initial setup, simply providing “Sales” as the topic prompted Agentforce to automatically complete almost all of the information needed. We can then add specific training data, such as details about generators, to further enhance its understanding.

Every step of this process is customizable, enabling you to fine-tune the agent to perform only what you define and to adhere to specified parameters strictly. This level of granular control is a core strength of Agentforce, ensuring that the autonomous AI functions not as an opaque “black box,” but as a carefully calibrated extension of your business logic.

The ability to customize every detail, from topics to the data it is trained on, to the actions it is allowed to take, is what makes it so powerful. With this new “Sales” Agent we have created, it can interact with a customer, taking their shipping information, answering product-based questions, and processing payments all from a chat window. This enables sales teams to increase volume and allows the highly skilled salespeople to maximize their productivity and profits in ways never seen before.

Setting up an Agent seems incredibly straightforward and downright, almost foolproof, but how do they perform in the real world? Let’s go ahead and use Salesforce’s example to see if an agent provided with the proper information can book me a dinner for two.

![](blob:https://cloudanswers.com/1f032f83-70e2-462b-9efb-3548a58ab1dc)

This agent is going to help our user Jim Halpert book a farm-to-table cooking class.

![](/uploads/wordpress/2026/02/image-9-1024x767.png)

As you can see, the agent is following its instructions by asking for both the member Id and email before proceeding with the conversation. Once I provided that information and said yes, it booked the class for me. However, as you can see, it is not perfect; it failed to provide the cost information to me after explicitly asking for it. The booking does successfully show on the customer record.

On the customer record, we are able to specify the Experience Interests, which Agentforce can use to recommend related events that it thinks the user will like.

![](/uploads/wordpress/2026/02/image-7-1024x920.png)

Using this information, let’s try another test with the Agent, seeing if it can recommend an experience for the customer and book it, using the customer’s interests.

![](/uploads/wordpress/2026/02/image-10-1024x675.png)

As you can see here, the Agent knows that the customer enjoys Cultural Tours and Workshops, Dining Experiences, and Spa &amp; Wellness. Using this information, it was able to suggest a handful of experiences that the customer would be interested in. Once I selected the Spa Retreat, it booked it for me and added that booking to the contact record.

Agentforce Agents are capable, but not perfect; they still need a lot of guidelines and training. As you saw from the first example, it did not pull in the price data, even though I had asked it to.

The reason it failed was that in the instructions, I did not tell it that it had to share pricing information if asked. It’s a great start; ideally, it would be smart enough to do that on its own, but situations like that are things to consider when building out and deploying your own autonomous agents. Another thing to consider is the cost of the agents.

Agentforce’s advertised cost is $125-$550 per user per month, on top of the Data Cloud and implementation costs, which puts you at 50k on the low end for existing users, and well into the 6 figures for new users.

Compare that to the possible cost of implementing your own solution, using APIs and prompt engineering to send data back and forth to an external LLM, and it makes you stop to think about whether the value is really there yet, and if it aligns with the cost.

## **The Verdict: Powerful, Promising, and Still Maturing**

Agentforce represents a genuine leap forward in what’s possible with autonomous AI in the enterprise. The Agent Builder is intuitive, the customization options are extensive, and when properly configured, agents can deliver impressive results.

But “properly configured” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. These agents don’t think for themselves—they execute what you explicitly define. Miss an instruction, and you’ll have gaps in functionality and a poor user experience.

The pricing model has improved with Flex Credits, but costs can still climb quickly for enterprise deployments. Make sure you model realistic usage scenarios before committing.

Is Agentforce worth the hype? For the right use cases, absolutely. For others, it might still be an expensive work in progress. The key is understanding exactly what you need and testing thoroughly before going live.

Whether you’re evaluating Agentforce, optimizing your existing Salesforce environment, or need help building out automation,[CloudAnswers can help](/contact). We’ve been a Salesforce partner since 2008, helping clients get more out of their platform through[consulting, apps, and custom development](/products).


Salesforce’s vision for autonomous AI has been years in the making, but Agentforce 360 represents its boldest step yet. From defining agent behavior in the Buil

agentforce-worth-all-of-the-fanfare

Agentforce: Worth all of the Fanfare?

cloudanswers

CloudAnswers

Following gut feeling is not the way to measure organization performance and it takes a lot more than that to run a successful business. What you need is a deep analysis of the sales, marketing, support, and financial results. And the only way to achieve it is to track **relevant operational metrics**.

The three departments that are most associated with the influence of [**CRM systems,**](https://www.salesforce.com/) utilize a whole range of different operational metrics to measure their related performance. By department, these include:

## SALES

- Number of prospects
- Number of new customers
- Number of retained customers
- Close rate
- Renewal rate
- Number of sales calls made
- Number of sales calls per opportunity
- Amount of new revenue
- Number of open opportunities
- Sales stage duration
- Sales cycle duration
- Number of proposals given

## MARKETING

- Number of campaigns
- Number of campaign responses
- Number of campaign purchases
- Revenue generated by the campaign
- Number of new customers acquired by campaign
- Number of customer referrals
- Number of web page views
- User goal completion rate on the web
- Time per website visit
- Customer lifetime value
- Cross-sell ratio
- Up-sell ratio
- Email list growth rate

## SERVICE

- Number of cases handled
- Number of cases closed the same day
- Average time to resolution
- The average number of service calls per day
- Complaint time to resolution
- Number of customer callbacks
- Average service cost per service interaction
- Percentage compliance with SLAs
- Calls lost before being answered
- Average call handling time

### **Operational metrics** are worth implementing in all areas.

In addition, to these more traditional operational metrics, recent years have seen businesses expand their measurements outside of the strict business metrics. These are specifically incorporating Voice of the Customer feedback like customer satisfaction net promoter score, customer loyalty, social media metrics like sentiment, influence, reach but also Project Management, Innovation and Leadership.

### **Because using data to evaluate what is working and what isn’t is a very valuable management process.**

And it is still a habit that is used too less. It can play a giant role in identifying and tracking the progress of organizational goals and identifying opportunities for improvement. That is an important step in formulating business direction and reducing declines in business performance.

Check also:

[How to calculate Annual Recurring Revenue and Monthly Recurring Revenue](https://cloudanswers.com/how-to-calculate-annual-reporting-revenue-and-monthly-reporting-revenue/)

#### Trusted and reliable Salesforce partner. Your support and help in Salesforce CRM implementation with all functions that your business requires. **Get in touch!**

Operational metrics are key performance indicators that display a measurable value that shows what's going on in the business in real-time.

what-operational-metrics-should-you-measure

What operational metrics should you measure?


## 3 fundamental sales KPIs that can be automated

It’s hard when the whole business doesn’t use Salesforce because they don’t have access to the same rich data that you do. It’s even harder when they are looking for insight on the performance of your sales department. If you are a sales manager in a company where Salesforce is a silo (or island) or you are running a company and feel like you don’t get the right KPIs out of your Salesforce system, read on.

The best way for independent teams to gain visibility into their each other’s activity is to collect and measure performance through KPIs that are aligned with the company’s vision. Luckily for us consultants, your company’s vision probably includes increasing the number of people that are benefiting from your solution (aka “sales”). There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to sales strategy, but there are certainly 3 fundamentals activities of sales: generating opportunities where relevant, communicating value, and showing prospective customers how benefits can start today.

### 1\. New Opportunities

Without a question, this number is already presented at board meetings and executive staff reviews. Opportunities are items which sit within the sales funnel, which is the domain of sales. You won’t see leads mentioned in this post since it’s not a marketing KPI article, this is just about sales.

If your salespeople have been given training and your CRM is configured with appropriate validation rules to ensure data quality, then your new opportunities metric can be sliced to tell you about the health of many parts of the sales organization:

- Group by Opportunity Source: Is marketing appropriately fueling the sales engine?
- Group by Month: Is there a yearly cyclical pattern being observed that we can overcome?
- Group by Owner/Team & Created Date: Monitor for an individual contributor or group issues
- Group by Account Type: Are we encountering a new market segment and are we prepared for it?

![](/uploads/kpi-example-chart.jpg)

As you can see, grouping a simple KPI by other attributes can tell you a lot. Our suggestion is to add this number into a dashboard and copies of this KPI with filters until you feel like you know everything about top of the funnel health.

**Automation tips:**

Ensure that duplicates are managed with Salesforce built-in duplicate management and our lightning component for “[Potential Duplicates Component](https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxListingDetail?listingId=a0N3A00000EcyysUAB&utm_source=cloudanswers_website&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=3_fundamental_sales_kpis&utm_content=potential_duplicates_component)”

![](/uploads/screenshot_no_duplictaes.jpg)

Use report-sender to make sure partners always know what you have in your pipeline for them.

![](/uploads/screenshot_report_sender.jpg)


Learn how to get the right KPIs out of Salesforce. Get to know everything about the top of the funnel health and use it to...

3-fundamental-sales-kpis-that-can-be-automated-new-opportunities

3 fundamental sales KPIs that can be automated - new opportunities


#### Lead Rotator added to PowerPack

Cloudanswers is proud to announce the addition of our latest exciting feature to our PowerPack. **Lead Rotator** is here!

Lead rotator makes managing your leads easier than ever by automatically rotating lead assignments between each member of your lead queues.

![Lead Rotator PowerPack](/uploads/leadrotatoradmin-1.png)

#### [](https://github.com/cloudanswers/cloudanswers-site/blob/gh-pages/_posts/2017-02-01-lead-rotator-added-to-powerpack.md#cloudanswers-powerpack)Cloudanswers PowerPack

Cloudanswers PowerPack is available for free on the Salesforce AppExchange and has an integrated suite of products that you and your team will wish you've had all along, including apps that can be very expensive from other vendors.

[Contact Us](https://github.com/cloudanswers/cloudanswers-site/blob/gh-pages/contact.html) today to learn how the [Cloudanswers PowerPack](https://github.com/cloudanswers/cloudanswers-site/blob/gh-pages/power-pack.html) can help you succeed on the Salesforce platform. We can't wait to hear from you!


#### Lead Rotator added to PowerPack Cloudan...

lead-rotator-added-to-powerpack

Lead Rotator Added to PowerPack

Salesforce apps, powerful components, development and consulting. Our experienced team helps you to create and modify workflow processes in salesforce.

Sales

Agentforce: Worth all of the Fanfare?

What operational metrics should you measure?

3 fundamental sales KPIs that can be automated - new opportunities

Lead Rotator Added to PowerPack

Partners

Company

Get in touch