ChatGPT What Is Agentforce? Salesforce AI Agents Explained (2026)
Summary
Key takeaways
- Agentforce is Salesforce’s platform for building and running autonomous AI agents that can reason over CRM and commerce data, execute approved actions, and hand work back to humans when required.
- The key distinction from a chatbot or copilot is action: Agentforce agents can update records, interact with orders, trigger workflows, and operate across connected Salesforce systems rather than only generate responses.
- Agentforce runs across Salesforce products including Sales, Service, Marketing, Field Service, Revenue Management, Slack, and Agentforce Commerce.
- Agentforce Commerce provides three commerce-specific agent roles: Shopper Agent, Buyer Agent, and Merchant Agent.
- Shopper Agent supports consumer-facing discovery and buying workflows, while Buyer Agent is designed for B2B scenarios that depend on account context, contract pricing, and purchasing rules.
- Merchant Agent supports seller-side commerce operations and can act on merchant data and workflows inside the Salesforce environment.
- Agentforce actions can be built from Salesforce Flows, Apex, prompt templates, MuleSoft APIs, External Services, and MCP-connected tools.
- Data 360 provides the data layer, while the Einstein Trust Layer handles model access and security controls around agent interactions.
- For B2B commerce, Agentforce does not remove the need for ERP integration: contract pricing, availability, account hierarchy, credit, and approval logic still need reliable sources of truth.
- Agentforce delivers the strongest fit when Salesforce already holds a substantial share of the company’s customer, commerce, service, and operational context.
When this applies
This applies when a company already operates heavily inside Salesforce and wants AI agents to perform real work across CRM, service, sales, or commerce workflows. It is particularly relevant for Salesforce B2B Commerce and B2C Commerce users that want agents to handle product discovery, order support, reordering, buyer self-service, merchant operations, or other workflows without requiring a person to execute every step manually. Agentforce is also a strong fit when existing Salesforce permissions, Flows, Apex logic, Data 360, and MuleSoft integrations already expose the systems and business rules that agents need to act safely.
When this does not apply
This does not apply when a company expects Agentforce to automatically solve missing integrations, undocumented business rules, or fragmented data outside Salesforce. It is also a weaker fit when Salesforce plays only a minor role in the wider commerce architecture, because much of the implementation effort will shift toward connecting external platforms and systems. Merchants running Adobe Commerce, Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, or another storefront do not automatically gain Agentforce Commerce’s Shopper, Buyer, and Merchant Agents; they need integrations for relevant Salesforce agent use cases.
Checklist
- Define the specific business workflow the Agentforce agent should own.
- Decide whether the use case belongs to service, sales, B2B buying, shopper experience, or merchant operations.
- Identify the Salesforce objects and external systems required for the workflow.
- Confirm which system is authoritative for customer, order, product, pricing, and inventory data.
- Audit Data 360 and CRM data quality before exposing it to agents.
- Define the agent’s role, subagents, instructions, and approved actions.
- Reuse Salesforce Flows and existing business logic where appropriate.
- Connect external ERP, PIM, OMS, or other systems through reliable APIs or MuleSoft integrations.
- Map account-specific B2B pricing, catalogs, permissions, and approval rules.
- Define exactly which actions the agent can execute without human approval.
- Add mandatory escalation for high-risk, ambiguous, or exceptional cases.
- Test order, pricing, inventory, and account actions against production-like data.
- Monitor agent actions, failure cases, costs, and human handoffs after launch.
- Start with a narrow workflow before expanding across multiple Salesforce clouds.
- Scale Agentforce only after data quality, integrations, permissions, and governance prove reliable.
Common pitfalls
- Treating Agentforce as a more advanced chatbot rather than an action-oriented agent platform.
- Assuming Agentforce can infer business rules that have never been documented or implemented.
- Connecting agents to CRM data while leaving ERP pricing and inventory disconnected.
- Giving agents broad actions before defining explicit permissions and escalation rules.
- Attempting B2B Buyer Agent workflows without reliable account hierarchy and contract pricing.
- Assuming Agentforce Commerce works natively on non-Salesforce commerce platforms.
- Building new agent logic when existing Salesforce Flows or Apex already enforce the required rules.
- Ignoring Data 360 quality and expecting the reasoning layer to compensate for inconsistent data.
- Measuring success by conversation volume instead of completed, accurate business outcomes.
- Expanding to multiple agents and clouds before one controlled use case has demonstrated reliable value.
Agentforce is Salesforce’s platform for building and running autonomous AI agents. An agent reads CRM and commerce data, plans its steps with the Atlas Reasoning Engine, and takes actions such as updating a record, answering a customer, or completing an order. Salesforce launched Agentforce in September 2024. Salesforce sells it today as Agentforce 360, priced per action (Flex Credits) or per conversation.
| Fact | Value |
|---|---|
| Owner | Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) |
| Announced | September 12, 2024, at Dreamforce 2024 |
| General availability | October 25, 2024 (Agentforce for Service and Sales) |
| Current release | Agentforce 360 (October 2025), extended by Headless 360 and Agentforce Vibes 2.0 (spring 2026) |
| Reasoning engine | Atlas Reasoning Engine. Claude is the default reasoning model since August 26, 2026 (Claudeforce) |
| Pricing (US list) | $500 per 100,000 Flex Credits (a standard action is about $0.10), or $2 per conversation. Add-ons $125 to $150 per user per month. Agentforce 1 Editions from $550 per user per month |
| Data layer | Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud) |
| Security layer | Einstein Trust Layer with a zero data retention policy |
| Commerce | Agentforce Commerce (formerly Commerce Cloud) with Shopper, Buyer and Merchant Agents, generally available since June 24, 2026 |
| Scale | Agentforce annual recurring revenue above $1.5 billion; 3.2 billion Agentic Work Units in the quarter ended July 31, 2026 (Salesforce, August 26, 2026) |
| Next milestone | Dreamforce 2026, September 15 to 17, 2026, San Francisco |
1. What is Agentforce?
Agentforce is the AI agent layer of the Salesforce platform. It replaced Einstein Copilot in 2024 and is the successor to Einstein Bots. A copilot waits for a person to ask a question. A bot follows a fixed script. An Agentforce agent receives a goal, plans the steps, runs the tools it is allowed to run, and hands over to a person when a rule says so.
Salesforce describes Agentforce as “a proactive, autonomous AI application that answers questions, takes actions, and improves productivity.” The word that matters is actions. The agent does not only write an answer. It writes to the CRM, the order system or the ticket queue.
Agentforce runs across the Salesforce clouds. That includes Sales, Service, Marketing, Field Service, Revenue Management, IT Service, Slack and Agentforce Commerce, the product formerly named Commerce Cloud. You can start from prebuilt agents such as the Service Agent, the SDR Agent, the Sales Coach or the Shopper Agent. You can also build custom agents in Agentforce Builder with clicks, natural language or Agent Script.
At Elogic Commerce, we explain Agentforce to commerce clients in one sentence: Agentforce is the layer that lets a Salesforce storefront, order system and CRM act on a customer request without a person in the loop, inside limits that you set.
2. How does Agentforce work?
An Agentforce agent has five parts. Salesforce now calls the former “topics” “subagents”, so older guides use the older word for the same thing.
| Building block | What it does | Who sets it up |
|---|---|---|
| Agent | The role. Example: “B2B order support agent”. One agent can serve one or many channels. | Admin or partner |
| Subagent (formerly topic) | A job area with its own instructions and actions. Example: “order status”, “reorder”, “returns”. | Admin, in Agentforce Builder |
| Actions | The tools the agent can run. Actions come from Flows, Apex, prompt templates, MuleSoft APIs, External Services and MCP servers. | Admin or developer |
| Instructions and guardrails | Plain-language rules plus Agent Script rules that limit what the agent may do. Example: “Do not approve a refund above $200.” | Admin, business owner |
| Atlas Reasoning Engine | Reads the request, selects the subagent, plans the actions, checks the result, and answers or escalates. | Salesforce (configurable since Agentforce 360) |
The request flow, step by step
- A customer, buyer or employee sends a request in web chat, voice, WhatsApp, SMS, Slack or a storefront.
- The Atlas Reasoning Engine classifies the request and selects the subagent.
- The agent retrieves context from CRM records, knowledge articles and Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud), including unstructured content through Intelligent Context.
- The Einstein Trust Layer applies secure data retrieval, prompt defense and toxicity detection before and after each model call, under a zero data retention policy.
- Atlas plans one or more actions and runs them. An action can read data, write a record, call an API or trigger a Flow.
- The agent replies, or it hands off to a person with the full transcript and context.
- Every step is logged in Data 360 for audit and shown in Command Center for observability.
Hybrid reasoning and Agent Script
Since Agentforce 360 (October 2025), you can mix fixed rules with model reasoning. Agent Script is a human-readable, portable JSON language for if/then logic, tool use and hand-offs. This is how a returns agent stays inside a refund limit, and how a Shopper Agent never invents a delivery date. The engine reasons where you allow it to and follows the script where you do not.
The tools in the platform
- Agentforce Builder. A conversational studio. You describe the agent, the Builder writes the Agent Script, and you test it with one-click simulations and real-time debugging.
- Testing Center and Command Center. Batch testing before launch, and observability, cost and health after launch.
- Agentforce Vibes. An AI coding partner that knows your Salesforce project context. Vibes 2.0 arrived in spring 2026 alongside Headless 360.
- Headless 360. Every Salesforce capability exposed as an API, an MCP tool or a CLI command, so coding agents and external agents can use the platform (TrailblazerDX 2026).
- Agentforce Coworker. The employee-facing agent for people who work in Salesforce and Slack.
- Agentforce Voice. A native voice layer for IVR replacement, generally available since October 2025, with native connections to NiCE, Genesys, Amazon Connect, Five9 and Vonage.
- Industry editions. Prebuilt agents and actions for financial services, health and life sciences, manufacturing, consumer goods, energy and utilities, communications, media and the public sector, sold as Industries add-ons.
Which LLM does Agentforce use?
Agentforce is model-agnostic. Salesforce routes calls through the Einstein Trust Layer to hosted models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, and you can bring your own model through the LLM Open Connector. On August 26, 2026, Salesforce made Claude the default reasoning model behind the Atlas Reasoning Engine, Agentforce Vibes and Agentforce Coworker, and made the model selectable in Agent Builder. See section 8.
How Agentforce protects data
The Einstein Trust Layer sits between the agent and the model. It retrieves only the data the user is allowed to see, grounds the prompt in that data, defends against prompt injection, scans responses for toxicity, and logs every prompt and response for audit. Salesforce applies a zero data retention policy, so model providers do not store prompts or use them for training. One detail matters for compliance teams: Salesforce documentation states that PII data masking is disabled for Agentforce agents to keep answers accurate. PII is protected in transit and is not retained, but it is not tokenised before the model sees it. Plan your data classification with that in mind.
3. When did Agentforce launch? The release timeline
Salesforce announced Agentforce on September 12, 2024, and made it generally available on October 25, 2024. Since then it has shipped a major release about every three to four months.
| Date | Release | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| September 12, 2024 | Agentforce announced (Dreamforce 2024) | Autonomous agents for Service and Sales. Atlas Reasoning Engine. Price set at $2 per conversation. |
| October 25, 2024 | Agentforce generally available | Agentforce for Service and Sales. Agentforce Merchant for Commerce Cloud generally available in the same month. |
| December 17, 2024 | Agentforce 2.0 | Library of prebuilt skills. Agentforce in Slack. MuleSoft integration. Improved Atlas. Full release February 2025. |
| March 2025 | Agentforce 2dx (TrailblazerDX) | Agents embedded in any workflow. Proactive and triggered agents. |
| May 15, 2025 | Flex Credits | Pay per action, about $0.10, as the alternative to $2 per conversation. |
| June 2025 | Agentforce 3 | Command Center, Model Context Protocol (MCP) support, AgentExchange marketplace, more than 100 industry actions. |
| October 2025 | Agentforce 360 (Dreamforce 2025) | Agentforce Builder, Agent Script, hybrid reasoning, Agentforce Voice, Agentforce Vibes, Intelligent Context. Data Cloud renamed Data 360. |
| Spring 2026 | Headless 360 and Vibes 2.0 (TrailblazerDX 2026) | Every capability as an API, MCP tool or CLI command. Richer experience layer from Slack to voice. |
| June 24, 2026 | Agentforce Commerce release | Shopper, Buyer and Merchant Agents generally available. Native ChatGPT channel through the Agentic Commerce Protocol. Google channels through the Universal Commerce Protocol. |
| August 26, 2026 | Claudeforce | Claude is the default reasoning model. Salesforce in Claude plugin with 37 sales skills. Claude runs inside the Salesforce trust boundary. |
| September 15 to 17, 2026 | Dreamforce 2026 | Next release expected. See section 11 for the update. |
4. How much does Agentforce cost in 2026?
Agentforce has no single price. Salesforce lists eight options on its US pricing page. Two of them are consumption meters, and the rest are licences that sit on top of a Salesforce cloud licence.
| Option | List price | What you get | Buying model |
|---|---|---|---|
| Salesforce Foundations | $0 | Agentforce Builder, Prompt Builder, Agent Script, Agentforce Coworker and Agentforce Vibes, plus a starter allotment of Flex Credits for eligible editions | Included |
| Flex Credits | $500 per 100,000 credits | Pay per action. A standard action is 20 credits (about $0.10). A voice action is 30 credits ($0.15). One minute of Agentforce Voice is 60 credits. Covers customer, employee and voice use. | Pre-purchase, pre-commit or pay-as-you-go |
| Conversations | $2 per conversation | Flat rate for customer-facing agents. A conversation runs until the issue closes or for up to 24 hours, depending on the channel. | Pre-purchase only |
| Agentforce User License | $5 per user per month | Company-wide employee access to a limited set of CRM objects. Requires an active Flex Credits subscription. | Pre-purchase |
| Agentforce add-ons (Sales, Service, Field Service) | $125 per user per month | Unmetered employee-facing usage for licensed users. | Pre-purchase |
| Agentforce Industries add-ons | $150 per user per month | Unmetered usage plus industry-specific agents and actions. | Pre-purchase |
| Agentforce 1 Editions | From $550 per user per month | The add-on plus 2.5 million Flex Credits per org per year, bundled with the cloud licence. | Pre-purchase |
| Help Agent Resolutions | $2 per resolution | Only with the Help Agent product. | Pay per resolution |
Five rules that change the bill
- An org uses Flex Credits or Conversations, not both. This is a contract decision. Decide before you sign.
- One standard action covers up to about 10,000 tokens. A larger step counts as two or more actions.
- Flex Credits are sold for a term. Unused credits do not roll over.
- Sandbox testing consumes credits. Budget for the test phase.
- Agentforce sits on a Salesforce cloud licence and, for most production deployments, on Data 360 credits. Budget both separately.
The break-even: 20 actions per conversation
| Actions per conversation | Flex Credits cost | Conversation model cost | Cheaper option |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 (simple FAQ) | $0.10 | $2.00 | Flex Credits |
| 5 | $0.50 | $2.00 | Flex Credits |
| 10 (order lookup with two updates) | $1.00 | $2.00 | Flex Credits |
| 20 | $2.00 | $2.00 | Break-even |
| 30 (long guided selling session) | $3.00 | $2.00 | Conversations |
A monthly illustration at list price, excluding Data 360, platform licences and volume discounts: 10,000 customer conversations with 8 actions each is 80,000 actions, or 1.6 million credits, or $8,000 on Flex Credits, against $20,000 on the conversation model. At 50,000 conversations the figures are $40,000 against $100,000.
Elogic Commerce note for storefronts: a Shopper Agent uses more actions than a support FAQ bot. Product search, inventory check, delivery date, cart update and order lookup are separate actions. Measure real action counts in a four-week pilot before you choose a model. In our experience, guided selling sessions on a large catalog pass 20 actions more often than service teams expect.
5. Agentforce for commerce: Shopper, Buyer and Merchant Agents
This is the part of Agentforce that most explainers skip. Salesforce Commerce Cloud, now Agentforce Commerce, is the commerce platform inside the Salesforce stack. If you are new to the topic, read what agentic commerce is first. On June 24, 2026, Salesforce shipped what it calls its biggest commerce release in five years and made three agents generally available.
| Agent | Who it serves | What it does | Channels |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shopper Agent | B2C shoppers on your own storefront and app | Guided discovery, product questions, live inventory and delivery date checks, checkout in the conversation, post-purchase service with full order context | Storefront, mobile app, messaging |
| Buyer Agent | B2B buyers and procurement teams | Finds products, reorders at pre-negotiated prices, tracks orders, answers “where is my order”, connected to Sales, Service and Order Management data | WhatsApp, SMS, buyer portal |
| Merchant Agent | Merchandisers and site managers | Natural-language merchandising, promotions, catalog and site tasks. Generally available since October 2024 | Business Manager and Salesforce |
Selling inside ChatGPT and Google without losing the customer
- ChatGPT. Agentforce Commerce syncs the product catalog to ChatGPT and supports native checkout through the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) with Stripe, live since July 2026.
- Google Search AI Mode and the Gemini app. Product discovery and native checkout through Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), rolled out in summer 2026. The AP2 side is covered in our guide to agentic payments.
- Merchant of record. In both channels the brand stays the merchant of record and keeps the customer record. That is the design goal Salesforce states, and it is the point that matters for a CFO.
- Agentic Commerce Search. An AI-native search engine trained on catalog data and shopper behaviour, shipped in the July 2026 B2C release and built on the Cimulate acquisition (February 2026).
- Agentic Order Management and Modern POS. Inventory unified across 7,000 locations and 250 million records, cost-based routing, and a new point of sale on iOS with Android and Windows following in August 2026.
- Headless B2B Commerce. Salesforce B2B Commerce development now runs fully headless. You can use the templated Lightning Web Runtime storefront or build your own front end, a WhatsApp channel or an agent on the same catalog, pricing and account back end.
The numbers Salesforce puts behind it
Salesforce reports that AI influenced 20% of global online sales, or $262 billion, in the 2025 holiday season. Salesforce also reports that retailers running their own shopper agent grew sales 59% faster than retailers without one, that AI-referred traffic converts at eight times the rate of social traffic, and that agentic search, meaning purchase journeys that start in an AI chat, grew 200% year over year (July 28, 2026). These are vendor figures from Salesforce’s own shopper data. Treat them as direction, not as a forecast for your store.
What this means for a merchant: the Elogic Commerce view
Three things follow from the release. First, the Shopper Agent, the Buyer Agent and the Merchant Agent run on Salesforce B2C Commerce and Salesforce B2B Commerce. A storefront on Adobe Commerce, Shopify Plus or BigCommerce does not get them. Those storefronts connect to Agentforce for service and sales agents through integrations (section 7), and they reach ChatGPT and Google through their own platform protocols.
Second, the agent is only as good as the catalog, inventory and order data underneath it. A Shopper Agent that cannot see live stock will promise a date it cannot keep.
Third, a B2B Buyer Agent needs the same contract pricing, account hierarchy and approval logic that your storefront already has. Our Salesforce B2B Commerce development work is mostly that logic, plus the ERP link that feeds it. If you need a Salesforce Commerce Cloud development team that has built those integrations before, that is what Elogic Commerce does.
6. What results do companies report?
Reported results range from 25% to 95%, and the definitions differ. Some companies count case deflection, some count customer-confirmed resolution, and some count sessions where no ticket was created. Read the source type column before you compare.
| Company | Reported result | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Salesforce (help.salesforce.com) | More than 84% of customer questions resolved across 500,000+ conversations in the first six months; about 5% escalated to a human engineer | Salesforce, July 2025 |
| 1-800Accountant | 70% of chat engagements resolved autonomously during tax week 2025; up to 50% of incoming requests at launch | Salesforce customer story and joint press release, 2025 |
| Datasite | 70% of day-to-day chat questions resolved accurately, 24/7 | Salesforce customer story |
| Engine | Handle time reduced 15%, more than $2 million saved per year | Salesforce investor release, October 2025 |
| OpenTable | About 70% of inquiries resolved | Third-party reporting |
| 46% case deflection for advertiser support | Third-party reporting | |
| Pandora | 60% deflection | Third-party reporting |
| Heathrow | About 95% response accuracy | Third-party reporting |
| GE Appliances | 25% deflection | Third-party reporting |
Two figures frame the range. Salesforce reported on August 26, 2026 that Agentforce annual recurring revenue passed $1.5 billion, up more than 240% year over year, that customers ran 3.2 billion Agentic Work Units in the quarter, and that half of Agentforce bookings came from customers refilling credits. The metric now includes Slackbot and Headless 360. On the other side, Salesforce AI Research’s CRMArena-Pro benchmark found that leading LLM agents complete only about 35% of multi-turn CRM tasks without tuning. The strong customer numbers above come from configured agents with clean data, not from the default setup.
7. How do you connect Agentforce to other systems?
Every month, people search “how to connect SAP to Agentforce”, “how to connect Shopify to Agentforce” and about 40 similar questions. The answer is the same pattern each time. Agentforce has six connection paths. You choose the path by asking two questions: does the agent need to read data or do something, and does a connector already exist?
- Native Salesforce actions. Flows, Apex, prompt templates and Slack actions. Use these when the data is already in Salesforce.
- MuleSoft connectors and APIs. MuleSoft has connectors for ERPs, HR, finance and ticketing systems. Expose a MuleSoft API and it appears as an action.
- MuleSoft MCP servers. Since 2026 you can register MuleSoft integrations as Model Context Protocol servers in the Salesforce API Catalog. Agentforce has a native MCP client and discovers the tools without custom wiring.
- Data 360 connectors and zero-copy. For reading large data sets, Data 360 connects to warehouses and lakehouses without moving the data.
- External Services. Give Salesforce an OpenAPI specification and it generates invocable actions for Flow and Agentforce. Good for any vendor REST API.
- AppExchange and AgentExchange. Partner-built actions, agents and templates. Check here before you build.
| System type | Systems people ask about | Usual connection path |
|---|---|---|
| ERP | SAP S/4HANA, SAP HANA, SAP Business One, Oracle ERP, Oracle NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Odoo | Data: Data 360 connector or zero-copy where supported. Actions: MuleSoft connector or MCP server. SAP Business One and Odoo: vendor REST API through External Services or a MuleSoft HTTP flow. |
| Finance and accounting | Xero, QuickBooks Online, Sage Intacct, Stripe | MuleSoft connector or External Services on the vendor REST API. Stripe also carries ACP checkout for ChatGPT. |
| HR and people | Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, Oracle HCM | MuleSoft connector exposed as actions or MCP tools. |
| IT service and work management | ServiceNow, Jira, Zendesk, monday.com | MuleSoft connector or MCP server. Check AgentExchange first for prebuilt actions. |
| Databases and warehouses | Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Databricks, Amazon Redshift, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, MongoDB | Data 360 zero-copy for Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks and Redshift. MuleSoft Database connector for the rest. |
| Storefronts and marketplaces | Shopify, Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce, Amazon | MuleSoft connector or platform API through External Services. Typical actions: order lookup, return start, stock check. Salesforce B2C and B2B Commerce are native. |
| Productivity and collaboration | Slack, Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Google Sheets, Google Analytics, Google Ads, LinkedIn, Facebook | Slack is native. Microsoft and Google systems through MuleSoft connectors or External Services. |
| Signatures and documents | DocuSign | AppExchange actions. Use for quote and contract steps in a Sales or Buyer Agent. |
| CRM and marketing | HubSpot, Zoho CRM, another Salesforce org | MuleSoft connector or Data 360 connector. Salesforce-to-Salesforce through Data 360. |
The six-step procedure
- Decide if the agent needs to read data, take an action, or both.
- For data, connect the source to Data 360 with a connector or zero-copy, and build a retriever.
- For actions, build or reuse a MuleSoft API or an External Service, or register an MCP server in the API Catalog.
- Add the action to the right subagent in Agentforce Builder and write the instruction that tells the agent when to use it.
- Test in Testing Center with real requests. Check the reasoning trace, not only the answer.
- Go live with Command Center and the Digital Wallet open, and watch the actions per conversation for the first four weeks.
8. Agentforce and Claude: what Claudeforce changes
On August 26, 2026, Salesforce and Anthropic announced Claudeforce, an expanded partnership. Four things changed for Agentforce users.
- Claude is the default reasoning model behind the Atlas Reasoning Engine, Agentforce Vibes and Agentforce Coworker, and you can select it in Agent Builder.
- Claude is the first LLM provider fully integrated inside the Salesforce trust boundary, running through Amazon Bedrock in Salesforce’s own cloud. That matters for regulated industries.
- Salesforce in Claude is a plugin with 37 prebuilt sales skills, such as meeting prep, deal health review and pipeline updates, in pilot now and in open beta from September 2026.
- Claude is the default AI in Slack, and Salesforce gives Claude Code and Claude Enterprise to its own developers and knowledge workers.
For commerce teams, this sits next to the Claude Commerce Agents blueprint that Anthropic published with Visa and Mastercard. Agentforce is how a Salesforce merchant runs an agent on owned channels. Claude Commerce is one of the external agent channels that will bring buyers to it.
9. Agentforce compared with Microsoft Copilot Studio and ServiceNow AI Agents
The three platforms start from different systems of record. Pick the one that owns the data your agent needs most.
| Platform | Centre of gravity | Best fit | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Salesforce Agentforce | CRM, commerce and service data in Salesforce; Data 360; MuleSoft | Customer-facing service, guided selling, B2B buying and storefront agents where Salesforce is the system of record | Consumption pricing needs measurement. Data 360 is a second budget line. |
| Microsoft Copilot Studio | Microsoft 365, Teams, Dataverse, Power Platform connectors | Employee productivity, document and meeting workflows, internal agents for Microsoft-first companies | Weaker outside the Microsoft estate. Customer-facing commerce needs extra build. |
| ServiceNow AI Agents | ITSM, HR and workflow data in ServiceNow | IT and employee service desks, workflow automation across ServiceNow | Narrow outside service operations. Not a commerce platform. |
Other alternatives people evaluate: HubSpot Breeze, Oracle AI Agent Studio, Google Gemini Enterprise, Zendesk AI, Creatio, and standalone service agents such as Sierra and Decagon. On the question “which is easier to set up, Agentforce or Copilot”, the answer is the one that already holds your data. Set-up time is mostly integration time.
10. Is your Salesforce org ready for Agentforce? The Elogic Commerce checklist
Use this list before you buy credits. Each item is a yes or no.
- The CRM data the agent will read is clean. Duplicate accounts and stale cases are fixed.
- Knowledge articles exist for the top 50 customer questions and are current.
- The order, inventory and pricing data the agent needs is in Salesforce or reachable through Data 360.
- Each planned agent has a written job description with subagents, allowed actions and hand-off rules.
- Refund, discount and approval limits are defined as Agent Script rules, not as suggestions.
- Your data classification policy accounts for the fact that PII masking is disabled for Agentforce agents.
- You have chosen Flex Credits or Conversations on measured action counts from a pilot.
- Data 360 credits and platform licences are in the budget next to Agentforce credits.
- Command Center owners and an escalation queue are named before launch.
- You have engineers who have connected Salesforce commerce to an ERP before, in-house or from a partner. If you need to hire Salesforce Commerce Cloud developers for the integration work, plan that four weeks before the agent build starts.
If you want a wider view of where your company stands, the Elogic Commerce Agentic Commerce Readiness Index benchmarks readiness across platforms, not only Salesforce.
11. Dreamforce 2026 update (September 15 to 17, 2026)
Placeholder, replace by September 18, 2026
Dreamforce 2026 runs September 15 to 17 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Salesforce has used each Dreamforce since 2024 to launch a new Agentforce generation. This section will hold the release name, the announcement date, the three main changes, availability dates, and any pricing change. Check back after September 17, 2026.
12. Frequently asked questions
What is Agentforce in simple terms?
Agentforce is Salesforce’s platform for AI agents that do work inside your CRM and commerce systems. An agent receives a request, plans the steps with the Atlas Reasoning Engine, runs approved actions such as updating an order, and hands off to a person when a rule says so. Salesforce launched it in September 2024 and now sells it as Agentforce 360.
How much does Agentforce cost?
There is no single price. At US list price, Flex Credits cost $500 per 100,000 credits, and a standard action uses 20 credits, about $0.10. The alternative is $2 per customer conversation. Employee add-ons cost $125 to $150 per user per month, and Agentforce 1 Editions start at $550 per user per month. Data 360 and the cloud licence are extra.
When was Agentforce launched?
Salesforce announced Agentforce on September 12, 2024, at Dreamforce 2024. Agentforce for Service and Sales became generally available on October 25, 2024. Agentforce 2.0 followed on December 17, 2024, Agentforce 3 in June 2025, and Agentforce 360 in October 2025. Agentforce Commerce agents became generally available on June 24, 2026.
How does Agentforce work?
An agent has subagents (job areas), actions (tools) and instructions (rules). The Atlas Reasoning Engine reads the request, picks the subagent, retrieves data from the CRM and Data 360, plans the actions, runs them, and answers or escalates. The Einstein Trust Layer checks every model call. Agent Script adds fixed if/then rules where you need certainty.
What LLM does Agentforce use?
Agentforce is model-agnostic. It routes calls through the Einstein Trust Layer to hosted models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, and you can add your own model through the LLM Open Connector. Since August 26, 2026, Claude is the default reasoning model for the Atlas Reasoning Engine, Agentforce Vibes and Agentforce Coworker, and the model is selectable in Agent Builder.
How does Agentforce protect PII?
The Einstein Trust Layer retrieves only data the user may see, defends against prompt injection, scans for toxicity, and logs every call. Model providers operate under a zero data retention policy, so prompts are not stored or used for training. Salesforce documentation states that PII masking is disabled for Agentforce agents to keep answers accurate, so PII is protected in transit but not tokenised.
Is Data Cloud required for Agentforce?
Not for every agent, but for most production deployments. Data Cloud is now Data 360. Agents that only use CRM records, Flows and Apex can run without it. Retrievers, unstructured knowledge, Intelligent Context, zero-copy access to warehouses, and the audit trail all rely on Data 360. Agentforce 1 Editions bundle Data 360 credits for that reason.
How do I connect SAP, Shopify or another system to Agentforce?
Use one of six paths: native Salesforce actions, MuleSoft connectors, MuleSoft MCP servers registered in the API Catalog, Data 360 connectors or zero-copy, External Services built from an OpenAPI specification, or AppExchange and AgentExchange actions. For SAP, use a MuleSoft connector or Data 360 zero-copy. For Shopify, use the MuleSoft connector or the Shopify API through External Services. Then add the action to a subagent in Agentforce Builder.
What is Agentforce Vibes?
Agentforce Vibes is Salesforce’s AI coding partner for the Salesforce platform. It works like a pair programmer that knows your org’s metadata and project context, and it can write and execute code on your behalf, including in VS Code. Salesforce introduced it at Dreamforce 2025 and shipped Vibes 2.0 at TrailblazerDX 2026. It is included in Salesforce Foundations.
What is Agentforce 360?
Agentforce 360 is the name of the Agentforce platform release announced at Dreamforce in October 2025. It added Agentforce Builder, Agent Script, hybrid reasoning in the Atlas Reasoning Engine, Agentforce Voice, Agentforce Vibes and Intelligent Context, and it renamed Data Cloud to Data 360. Salesforce now uses “Agentforce 360” for the whole platform.
Agentforce or Microsoft Copilot Studio: which is easier to set up?
The one that already holds your data. Agentforce is faster when your customer, order and service data live in Salesforce, because the actions and permissions already exist. Copilot Studio is faster for Microsoft 365 and Teams workflows. Set-up time in both is mostly integration time, so count the systems the agent must reach.
What companies use Agentforce?
Salesforce reported on August 26, 2026 that it added about 2,000 paying customers with agents in production in one quarter, and that accounts with agents in production grew 70% quarter over quarter. Published customer examples include 1-800Accountant, Datasite, Engine, OpenTable, Reddit, Pandora, Heathrow, GE Appliances, Finnair and Grupo Falabella. Salesforce also runs it on help.salesforce.com.
Can Agentforce replace SDRs?
The Agentforce SDR Agent qualifies inbound leads, answers product questions and books meetings around the clock. In most deployments it replaces the first-touch and follow-up work, not the human seller. Companies keep people for discovery calls, negotiation and accounts that need judgement. Measure meetings booked and lead response time in a pilot before you change headcount.
Does Agentforce work with Adobe Commerce or Shopify Plus storefronts?
Partly. The Shopper, Buyer and Merchant Agents run only on Salesforce B2C Commerce and Salesforce B2B Commerce. A store on Adobe Commerce, Shopify Plus or BigCommerce can still use Agentforce for service and sales agents by connecting the storefront through MuleSoft, External Services or Data 360. Those platforms reach ChatGPT and Google through their own agentic commerce protocols.
Is there an Agentforce certification?
Yes. Salesforce offers the Agentforce Specialist certification for admins and consultants who build and deploy agents. It covers Agentforce Builder, subagents, actions, prompt templates, Data 360 grounding and the Einstein Trust Layer.
Sources
- Salesforce, “Salesforce Unveils Agentforce”, press release, September 12, 2024. Salesforce Unveils Agentforce.
- Salesforce, Agentforce product page. Agentforce.
- Salesforce, Agentforce pricing page (US). Agentforce pricing.
- Salesforce, “Trust and Agentforce”, Help documentation. Trust and Agentforce.
- Salesforce, “Dive into our Agentforce 360 Announcements”. Agentforce 360 announcements.
- Salesforce, “Welcome to the Agentic Enterprise: With Agentforce 360…”, investor release, October 2025. Salesforce Investor Relations.
- Salesforce, “As AI Agents Transform Commerce, Salesforce Unleashes Its Biggest Agentforce Commerce Release Yet”, June 24, 2026. Agentforce Commerce announcement.
- Salesforce, “Salesforce Announces Support for Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol”. Google Universal Commerce Protocol support announcement.
- Salesforce, “Shopping’s New First Step: Agentic Search Grows 200%”, July 28, 2026. Agentic Search Grows 200%.
- Salesforce, “Salesforce Delivers Record Second Quarter Fiscal 2027 Results”, August 26, 2026. FY27 Q2 earnings.
- Salesforce, “Salesforce and Anthropic Announce Claudeforce”, August 26, 2026. Salesforce and Anthropic announce Claudeforce.
- Salesforce, “Lessons from 500,000 Agentforce Customer Conversations”, 2025. Agentforce customer support lessons learned.
- Salesforce, “Agentforce in Action: Customer Success Stories”. Agentforce customer success stories.
- MuleSoft, “Connect Agentforce to Any System With MuleSoft MCP Servers”, 2026. Connect Agentforce to Any System With MuleSoft MCP Servers.
- Salesforce Developers, “Extending Agentforce with External MCP Tools via MuleSoft”, August 2026. Extending Agentforce with External MCP Tools via MuleSoft.
- Salesforce Ben, “Salesforce Unveils Agentforce 360 at Dreamforce ’25” and “Salesforce Headless 360 and Agentforce Vibes 2.0 Revealed at TDX 2026”. Agentforce 360 at Dreamforce ’25; Headless 360 and Agentforce Vibes 2.0 at TDX 2026.
- CX Today, “Salesforce Makes Agentforce Commerce Generally Available Ahead of Peak Season”, June 29, 2026. Salesforce Makes Agentforce Commerce Generally Available.
- Business Wire, “1-800Accountant Adopts Salesforce’s Agentforce…”, March 2025. 1-800Accountant Adopts Salesforce’s Agentforce.
- Salesforce AI Research, CRMArena-Pro benchmark, 2025. CRMArena-Pro.
- Salesforce, Dreamforce 2026 registration page. Dreamforce 2026.
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