Skip to main content

Agentforce 3 - finally ready for the enterprise?

Agentforce is eying the enterprise - created by Thomas Wieberneit with a little help of ChatGPT
The news

On June 23, 2025, Salesforce announced Agentforce 3, the third iteration of its Agentforce platform. Agentforce 3 is a major upgrade to Salesforce’s digital labor platform. It gives customers the visibility and control that is needed to scale AI agents that already have proven useful at many companies. The release covers several additional capabilities.

Salesforce has introduced the Agentforce Command Center, an observability console designed for managing AI agents. This tool allows businesses to track and scale AI agent activities. It is built into Agentforce Studio and includes features for monitoring performance metrics such as latency and error rates through live analytics.

The update also brings native support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which enables Agentforce to connect with any MCP-compliant server without requiring custom coding. The platform's Atlas architecture has been enhanced to improve latency, accuracy, and resiliency. Support for additional Large Language Models has been added, including Anthropic's Claude Sonnet via Amazon Bedrock, with future support planned for Google Gemini.

Agentforce 3 includes over 200 pre-built industry actions, with half of these being new additions. The agents are now capable of performing web searches and providing citations for the information they retrieve. The platform's availability has been expanded to Canada, the U.K., India, Japan, and Brazil, adding support for six new languages.

More than 30 new partners have been added to the AgentExchange marketplace. These include companies such as AWS, Box, Cisco, Google Cloud, IBM, PayPal, and Stripe. Salesforce has also introduced new pricing options, including per-user plans for its Sales, Service, and Industry Clouds that provide unlimited usage of actions for employee-facing agents.

The bigger picture

Agentic solutions are the biggest thing since sliced bread in the industry right now. They are even more overhyped than Metaverse and Blockchain have ever been. Still, the number of case studies and use cases that get published is rising fast. This is a sign of buyer interest, increasing adoption and ultimately shows that agentic AI is not a solution in search of a problem but can address actual business challenges. However, these solutions need to be implemented in a thoughtful and planned approach to harvest their benefits. This expressively also requires a hard look at pricing, which can easily dig deep into the gains achieved by productivity increases, increased efficiency, or other gains. The other hugely important topic is the change management that is required. The implementation of agentic AI has the smell of impending lay-offs. This is bad for employee morale and therefore a topic that needs to be actively addressed by vendors as well as by buyers.

My PoV and analysis

With this release, Agentforce has arrived in the Enterprise. The main missing link is the still emerging A2A support. After focusing on the agents themselves, followed by their development and deployment in the previous releases, this release is about agent management and scalability, including scaled development through the Salesforce ecosystem.

Without a good, if not complete, built-in observability, Agentforce was still more or less a tool for rapid prototyping of and experimentation with AI agents. This is not bad in itself, but not enough for an enterprise scale product. Still, it helped tremendously by getting mindshare and establishing Salesforce as a category leader, which deserves kudos. In puncto interoperability, SAP has beaten Salesforce to the punch with its Joule Everywhere announcement during the yearly Sapphire event. Interoperability and A2A capabilities will be the next battleground for platform domination in which the business applications behemoths, including Microsoft, find themselves.

What I find quite notable, even laudable, is how strong Salesforce (or SAP for that matter), emphasize upon agents cooperating with humans, both “sides” working on what they are doing best, instead of agents replacing humans. Unluckily, especially Salesforce sends mixed signals with CEO Marc Benioff making statements like “up to 50% of the work at his enterprise software company is now being done by AI” during an interview with Bloomberg. In the light of Salesforce (and other tech companies) laying off employees in the thousands or tens of thousands because of efficiency gains through the use of AI and AI agents, this is more than just a bit contradictory. This clearly suggests that the messaging should be cleared. Words must match actions, especially with a topic that is as sensitive as this and considering the huge visibility that Salesforce has.

Using Agentforce as customer zero certainly helps with proving that the product works and with gaining more credibility. This is especially in the light of the fast deployment of the system. As time to value is important, this proof point and the fast delivery of prebuilt industry specific agents plus the Agent marketplace are crucial for continued success in a market that moves extremely fast.

Last, but not least, I am looking forward to seeing two particular sets of functionalities. The first one is a true agent to agent workflow that includes external systems and agents, not only Salesforce provided ones. The second one is even more interesting in the light of the need to move fast. It is one thing to offer a Command Center that helps administrators and users to understand what is going on, what is more important is the ability to immediately suggest and generate solutions for identified problems. This is where the real efficiency gains can be harvested.

As usual, a good part of the announcement is for functionality that is still in pilot or beta stage, in particular the MCP andA2A support as well as the Command Center.  

Having said all this, Salesforce has done it again. The company evolved a solution to become enterprise ready from its first humble days during Dreamforce. Congratulations for this. And let’s see how the competition changes the playing field


 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Last Year's Top 5 Popular Posts

You are only as good as your customer remembers

As you know, I am very interested in how organizations are using business applications, which problems they do address, and how they review their success. In a next instance of these customer interviews, I had the opportunity to talk with Melissa Gordon , Executive Vice President, Enterprise Solutions at Tidal Basin about their journey with Zoho. You can watch the full interview on YouTube. Tidal Basin is a government contractor that provides various services throughout the government space, including disaster response, technology and financial services, and contact centers. Tidal Basin started with Zoho CRM and was searching for a project management tool in 2019. This was prompted by mainly two drivers. First, employees were asking for tools to help them running their projects. Second, with a focus on organizational growth and bigger projects that involved more people, Tidal Basin wanted to reduce its risk exposure and increase the efficiency of project delivery. This way, the compa...
Post a Comment
Read more

Data Wars: SAP Vs. Salesforce In The AI-Driven Enterprise Future

The past weeks certainly brought a lot of news, with SAP Sapphire and Salesforce's surely strategically timed announcement of acquiring Informatica , ranging at the top. I have covered both in recent articles. The enterprise software landscape is crackling with energy, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is certainly the star of the show. It isn't anymore about AI as a mere feature; it's about AI as the strategic core of enterprise software. Two recent announcements underscored this shift: SAP's ambitious AI-centric vision that was unveiled at its Sapphire 2025 conference, and, arriving hot on its heels, Salesforce's agreement to acquire data management titan Informatica for $8 billion. Both signal an intensified battle for AI supremacy, where trusted, enterprise-wide data is the undisputed new monarch. Of course, SAP and Salesforce are not the only ones duking this one out. SAP's Sapphire Vision: An AI-Powered, Integrated Enterprise At its Sapphire 2025 event in ...
Post a Comment
Read more

CPQ, Meet Price Optimization: Your Revenue Lifecycle Just Got Serious

The news On October 1, 2025, Conga announced its intent to acquire the B2B business of PROS , following PRO’s acquisition by Thomas Bravo . At the same time, ThomaBravo and PROS announced that PRO’s travel business segment will be run as a standalone business . The bigger picture Revenue operations, revenue management and revenue lifecycle management have become a thing in the past years, as evidenced by the number of specialized companies that solve parts of the overall problem of optimizing revenue. It also got abused to some extent (e.g., surge pricing models) when the users of the corresponding capabilities consider optimizing being the same as maximizing. Reality check: It is not. While optimizing involves a bit of identifying how much a customer is willing to pay, it also involves the thought of repeat business, or in other words customer loyalty, even without a formal loyalty program. And that involves the customer experience, part of which the speed of creating a quote with mat...
Post a Comment
Read more

The CDP is dead – long live the CDP!

In the past few years, I have written about CDPs, what they are and what their value is – or rather can be. My definition of a CDP that I laid out in one of my column articles on CustomerThink is:  A Customer Data Platform is a software that creates persistent, unified customer records that enable business processes that have the customers’ interests and objectives in mind. It is a good thing that CDPs evolved from its origins of being a packaged software owned by marketers, serving marketers. Having looked at CDP’s as a band aid that fixes the proliferation of data silos that emerged for a number of reasons, I have ultimately come to the conclusion and am here to say that the customer data platform as an entity is increasingly becoming irrelevant – or in the typical marketing hyperbole – dead.  Why is that? There are mainly four reasons for it.  For one, many an application has its own CDP variant already embedded as part of enabling its core functionality. Any engageme...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sweet Transformation: Inside SugarCRM’s New Direction

Fresh from the 2025 SugarCRM Analyst Summit, waiting for my plane home, it is time to sort my thoughts. From Monday, 1/27 evening to Wednesday 1/29 in the morning we had some time jam packed with information and good conversations with SugarCRM execs, customers, and in between analysts. The main summit started with a bang, namely the announcement that industry icon Bob Stutz joins the SugarCRM board of directors , which is something that few of us, if any, had foreseen. This is exciting news.  With David Roberts , who succeeded Craig Charlton in September 2024, SugarCRM itself has a new CEO with a long time CRM pedigree.  As with every leadership change, this promises some change. Every new CEO evaluates what they see vs. where they want their company to go and then, together with the team, establishes and executes a plan to get there. Usually, this involves some change in the structure of the executive leadership team, too.  This is what happened and happens with SugarCR...
Post a Comment
Read more