Agentforce Operations tackles workflow orchestration

Salesforce today released Agentforce Operations, a bundle of agents designed to automate back-office tasks across multiple applications, including spreadsheets and email.

Agentforce Operations includes out-of-the-box agents that perform tasks such as extracting data from complex documents or identifying compliance gaps. Also, it comes with workflow orchestration based on a "blueprint" metaphor that ingests documents such as lists, tables and spreadsheets that describe manual processes and -- with generative AI interpreting plain language -- devises automations that take on tasks such as acquiring data and getting approvals to move a task along and sidestep bottlenecks when they were done manually.

The features are built from Regrello, a startup Salesforce acquired late last year. While Regrello came from -- and continues to specialize in -- manufacturing ERP integrations and automations, Salesforce plans to cross-pollinate Agentforce Operations across industries, with some prebuilt agentic blueprints for common supply chain processes -- and potentially more to come -- for verticals such as insurance, healthcare and financial services.

Salesforce has workflow automation already through MuleSoft RPA and features such as Salesforce Flow. But those last-generation tools, in theory, require more maintenance and developer bandwidth to keep up to date than new agentic AI features.

Furthermore, said Sanjna Parulekar, senior vice president of product marketing at Salesforce, Agentforce Operations can take on more complex workflows that might be broken down into more steps than those optimized with current tools.

"You might go from a 10-step process to a 50-step process, but it's more efficient because you have agents working for you," Parulekar said.

A host of other companies currently are enticing Salesforce users to automate mixed deterministic and probabilistic workflows with generative AI, including Zapier and OpenClaw, which are often used together. Pegasystems has an AI workflow builder product, also named Blueprint, that enables line-of-business users to create apps by applying business rules to agentic AI outputs.

It also did not escape the notice of Rebecca Wettemann, founder of independent research firm Valoir, that Salesforce dropped Agentforce Operations prior to ServiceNow’s user conference, ServiceNow Knowledge, being held May 5-7 in Las Vegas. ServiceNow might be Salesforce's biggest competitor of all for enterprise technology buyers' workflow automation budgets; the two are battling on multiple fronts, including customer service, ITSM, CRM and agentic orchestration.

"As ServiceNow talks more and more about 'CRM being broken' and going to head-to-head with Salesforce, Salesforce needs a stronger back-office story," Wettemann said. "This gives them that."

The Regrello acquisition also gives Salesforce users agentic AI hooks into ERP data. It can be done with the original Agentforce tools -- but can be a struggle for many customers, Wettemann added. Regrello's technology can potentially speed time-to-value for Salesforce customers working with agents that integrate with ERP systems.

Agentforce Operations is available today and was released in conjunction with the Salesforce Agentforce World Tour New York marketing event.

Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.