Explore Agentforce
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Define what subagents and actions are.
- Explain the difference between standard versus custom subagents and actions.
How Agentforce Works
Before Linda sets up Agentforce, she wants to learn what makes it tick. Agentforce has four basic components: the agent, its subagents and actions, and the reasoning engine.
The Agent
Previously, you learned that Agentforce helps you create, customize, and test AI agents that perform tasks and business interactions. Currently, you can build and launch agents for your employees and customers. See Agent Types and Considerations to learn about the different agent types and default templates for specific clouds and use cases. Here are a few examples.
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Agentforce Employee Agent: Help your employees across a wide range of workflows and tasks by giving them access to the Employee Agent, which is seamlessly built into the Salesforce interface.
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Agentforce Sales Coach: Offer personalized coaching to help your sales reps handle challenging conversations and improve performance.
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Agentforce for Service: Support your customers intelligently by resolving common inquiries autonomously and processing incoming cases.
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Agentforce SDR: Scale your sales team and make the most of your pipeline by handling new or updated leads, sending customized intro emails, responding to replies, and connecting qualified leads with sales reps.
These AI agents are goal-oriented and autonomous, and they can perform business tasks and make data-driven decisions. But how exactly does that happen? That’s where subagents and actions come in.
Subagents and Actions
Agents are made up of subagents, which define the different jobs an agent can do. Subagents include instructions that tell the agent how to make decisions and what it should and shouldn’t do. When you define subagents, you set clear boundaries and context that control the agent’s behavior.
Subagents also contain a set of actions, which the agent uses to do its job. For example, an Order Management subagent might include these actions.
- Get Order by Order ID
- Get Order by Email Address
- Look Up Return Status
- Create Return Label
When a user asks a question or makes a request, your agent picks the right subagent and launches the appropriate actions within that subagent. This focuses your agent on the most relevant tasks and data for the current conversation.
Like subagents, actions also include a set of instructions. Action instructions are crucial because they tell the agent what the action does. The names, descriptions, inputs, and outputs for agent actions determine when and how an action is used. The better the instructions, the more predictably the action performs, which leads to more reliable interactions.
Standard and Custom Agents
Salesforce provides some standard subagents and actions for Agentforce out of the box, so you can get up and running quickly. But you can also create custom subagents and actions to give your AI agent the ability to perform tasks specific to your business. Let’s look at both, so you can decide when to use standard versus custom subagents and actions.
First, let’s go over standard and custom subagents.
Standard Subagents
Salesforce offers a library of standard subagents for common use cases. Standard subagents are predefined and come with a set of commonly used actions for various business scenarios. They’re a great starting point for many organizations: They cover a wide range of tasks and are perfect for quick implementation.
Here are a few examples of subagents provided by Salesforce, along with a brief description.
Subagent Name |
What It Does |
|---|---|
General CRM |
Handles user requests that are related to Salesforce CRM data, such as identifying, summarizing, or updating records, drafting or refining emails, aggregating data, and finding Salesforce objects. |
Close Deals |
Provides sellers with recommendations to close deals based on past deals won, conversation signals, and customer sentiment. Sellers also get answers to product-related pricing questions and suggestions for plans to help them close deals. |
Marketing Campaigns |
Drafts compelling, branded briefs and campaigns in Marketing Cloud. |
Keep in mind that some subagents are designed for specific clouds or licenses, so they might need additional permissions or licenses.
Custom Subagents
Custom subagents help you tailor an agent to meet specific business needs. Define the subagent, actions, and instructions that align with your unique processes and requirements.
Let’s check back in with Linda to see how Cloud Kicks might use custom subagents. Cloud Kicks offers a wide range of custom sneakers, and the order fulfillment process is quite complex. Linda has a hunch that a Shipping Management custom subagent could help customers with inventory and shipping questions.
For example, a customer might ask, “Do you have the blue sneakers in stock? And can I get them next week?”
The custom subagent and its assigned actions guide the agent to check the inventory, review shipping options, and confirm the delivery date.
To learn more about custom subagents, see the Resources section.
Standard and Custom Actions
Now that you’re an expert on subagents, let’s dive into standard and custom actions.
Standard Actions
Standard actions handle general use cases and perform a variety of functional tasks from simple queries to complex operations. Similar to standard subagents, Salesforce offers a library of standard actions. Some are available to all users with Agentforce access, while others require additional licenses for specific clouds or products.
The table shows a few standard actions provided by Salesforce, along with a brief description. Some of these actions are system actions, which are critical and can’t be removed.
Action Name |
What It Does |
|---|---|
Query Records |
Finds and retrieves Salesforce records based on the user’s request and specific conditions, such as the values of fields. For example: “Find all open opportunities set to close this quarter sorted by created date.” |
Summarize Record |
Summarizes a single Salesforce CRM record. For example: “Create a summary for the Acme deal.” |
Draft or Revise Email |
Creates an email draft or revises the latest version of a generated email based on the user’s input. For example: “Help me write an intro email to Steve from Acme.” |
Answer Questions with Knowledge |
Answers a question from a user based on information from relevant knowledge articles. For example: “What is the policy for returns over 30 days?” (Requires a Knowledge license.) |
To see all the available standard actions, check out the documentation.
Custom Actions
If you need to customize your agent for business-specific processes and workflows, create custom actions for your subagents. The best part? You don’t have to start from scratch. Custom actions use Salesforce technologies you already know and love.
When you create a custom action, you build it on top of existing platform features, like invocable and REST Apex classes, autolaunched flows, prompt templates, and external services.
For example, you can use flows to connect to MuleSoft APIs or Apex and flows to connect to third-party APIs. You can also use Apex or flows to access engagement data, website data, or third-party data through Data 360. By making this functionality available in Agentforce, you unlock a ton of value and use cases.
If you want to get hands on with agent actions, check out the Quick Start: Agent Actions badge.
The Final Building Block of Agentforce
Now that Linda understands how subagents and actions work, it’s time to introduce the powerful component of Agentforce that orchestrates everything behind the scenes: the reasoning engine.