Build Businesses with Agentforce 360

Hi, this is Jason Tanz. I'm the VP of Editorial at Salesforce and I'm really excited to be here today talking about the evolution of our partner ecosystem with some great partners. So to start with, we've got some new innovations to announce. Brian, why don't you kick us off? What are we here to talk about?

Well, we're here to talk about the next iteration or the next generation of the Salesforce platform for our partners. You know, we've been in market with a platform for building software businesses for over 20 years and you've built an enormous amount of depth into that platform. We're bringing together all of the new innovations that Salesforce has brought forth into the market in the last six months. So our Data360 product and agent force in particular to our ISVs to both build on and OEM into their product. And we're also going to share some updates on our roadmap, really the intention to share as much of our product suite as we are able to do through our ecosystem to allow partners to build or incorporate elements of our SaaS portfolio into their offerings.

That's great. Thanks, Brian. So why don't I ask the whole group? Maybe we can go through one by one. I'm curious, what was your path to building products on the new AgentForce360 platform? How did you, you know, what have you built? How did you think to build it? What was the process like? Maybe we can start with you, Tom.

Okay, thanks, Jason. Well, so our path was actually a long one. We started back in 2016 and building on the platform for our own family business. And that family business was a cattle ranch and we were starting a beef company to run alongside that. And what we realized is that we had to track a lot of information. And that started over an argument over how many cows we had. And so to settle that argument, I basically told the family that I had, you know, I knew how to, how to track data and manage these kinds of things. And so over an eight year span, we built several applications for managing livestock meat processing, sales, order management, all of these kinds of things. But then when we, when we realized we had a package or something that, that we could sell to other companies like us, we actually kind of looked at what the platform, the new advancements in the platform, and then we redid it from the ground up with all of the latest and greatest that's in the platform.

Well, I want to come back to that, but before we do, Lauren, why don't you tell me a little bit about what what you're up to at Litify?

Yeah, so actually really similar to Harvest Path, Litify is.

The platform of action for leading law firms all over the United States. And we were born out of a law firm. So born from one law firm and then spread across hundreds and now we also serve corporate legal departments. We chose to build something called a conflict check agent for our law firms. So a conflict check, if you're unfamiliar as a law firm is in taking a new case and qualifying that case, deciding if it's the right fit for them to take on. They also have to decide or check if there's any conflict of interest. And if there is, they cannot take the case. If there's not, they can. Really crucial step in your pipeline as a law firm. Because if you get it wrong, the consequences could range from just sinking costs into a case that ends up having a conflict and you can't get that money back, all the way to being disbarred.

All right, Atulya, over to you.

We were a.

Salesforce users and then we had an opportunity to build an industry specific solution. At that time we wanted to focus on the business problem and not worry about the platform side of it, all the infrastructure and then database and compliance and all that stuff. So we picked Salesforce to build our first set of solutions which is all around quality management for really regulated manufacturing companies and life sciences, med devices, heavy industries. So but then we, you know, because of Salesforce we're able to add on sort of spanned into sort of the ehs, the safety, safety management, employee safety management aspect. Then we added product management with product lifecycle management which also include design, supplier management. And then now we're bringing manufacturing. So when we are looking at it, the speed of innovation is what Salesforce really helped us accelerate.

I'm curious, Lauren. Tom, you know, how have you seen that? What have you been able to do because, because the infrastructure was taken care of.

Well, we've actually built some AI solutions using mostly bedrock and anthropic as quad models, setting up our own infrastructure. And I can say for certain that we were able to kind of leapfrog over all of the architectural setup and infrastructure building and even like honestly some throttling issues that you hit when you build directly with LLM and their infrastructure partners. By building on agent Force, we were able to get right over that and skip straight to developing like hands and keyboard, the actual functionality so we could quickly commercialize it and get it to market.

That's an excellent example. Tom, how about you?

Yeah, we, we had A similar experience in that. Well, and for us, we're building several applications that encompasses an entire supply chain. You know, from, from growing the raw material to delivering a finished good on the complete opposite end of a, of a very long supply chain. And so in order to do that, if you had to build the infrastructure, the data infrastructure, the permissions, the security and, and all these different things, you know, we'd be 10 million in and barely have a product. And so what was great about, you know, within a few months we had multiple applications, right? And we're running, we're helping customers run entire supply chains that span all sorts of, you know, 3, 4, 5, 7 different vendors and data flowing back and forth. And because of the APIs and the data loading tools and all these different things that are just available and you have to configure them, you know, we're, we're delivering a huge amount of functionality, industry specific functionality, because I don't have to worry about building an account or contacts or whatever.

You know, I, I get a lot.

Of those things out of the platform.

Can y' all talk to me a little bit about how this platform helped you commercialize these products? Maybe unlock, you know, again, this is IP that some of you were building for your own purposes and then realized, oh, I can actually sell this.

Talk about that.

Not just that realization, but like, how does the platform help with that? Part of the process.

Part of the beauty of being a platform built on Salesforce is the configurability and customizability. Every one of our instances for every one of our clients is different from the next. And we've been able to take advantage of that now with AI features as well. So when we roll out a feature in AgentForce, like the conflict Check Agent email, each of our clients wants to customize it and configure it into the flows and the setup of their custom Org and they've been able to adopt it and change triggers and change where it sits in the process and change the type of report that it spits out and whether that gets sent to an email or an alert directly within Litify. So in realizing really quickly that every client was going to want to customize and configure in their own way. So I'm very happy with the way that the package has shaped up and our clients seem to be very happy as well because they are actively buying it, that's great.

And Brian, it sounds like that kind of flexibility is part of what's new about the platform today. Can you talk a little bit about how you thought about, you know, how you wanted to help these businesses become entrepreneurs.

I think like many software businesses, Salesforces, you know, has sold in a very traditional way. We sold a license to a user or we sold an org to a developer. Potentially we are moving from a pure license based C based model to more of a hybrid of a C plus outcomes or C plus usage or C plus consumption depending on how you use our product type of a model. And I think, you know, when I started my role working with the ecosystem, one thing that struck me and I heard in feedback from a lot of our ISEs was that our commercial model was limiting to them. They were sort of unable to go through their own pricing transformation without sort of waiting on us to move and changing building on the platform. And so what we've done with Data360 and Agent Force for the partners is we've made it far simpler. We've really allowed it, allowed them to charge however they want to their customers and we really, you know, giving them the same business model our customers are getting.

What differences do you see now with this new platform that didn't exist before? What are you able to do now maybe that you weren't able to do before?

Well, there's a lot but yeah, it's, we're one of those leading edge partners or whatever Salesforce turns out we're like on it. So yes, we, you know, as you from, from an overall platform, the, the from pro code to low code transition with a lot of, lot of that stuff has come out and then there's a, a lot of support added to really allow us to sort of coexist with other apps and work well in that one ecosystem. Right. So those are all the things that have sort of been evolving and then even from a model of looking at, with the Agent Force, of course, as Brian said, yeah, it does open up our ability to do more without really having to wait for Salesforce to say yeah you can do this or yeah you can do that.

Right.

So that's really what makes a big difference in terms of how we use it.

Right? Yeah, that's great.

Tom, you mentioned people are surprised to learn that, you know, you can keep track of your cows on Salesforce which they think of as a CRM app. But obviously this extends way beyond CRM. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, how this extends beyond what we normally think of as like what Salesforce does?

Well, I think the CRM thing is the biggest where, where they hear the name and the name has been synonymous with, you know, sales. And so in our industry, it's a deconstruction process and then a construction process. So a lot of manufacturing is not based that way. And so the fact that we've built this thing to manage it, specifically the way the industry works, people kind of, once they see it, then they understand. And that's what enables us to do what we think is our unique thing is enable this full supply chain where, you know, a customer can sell an animal, they can sell a carcass, they can sell a boxed, you know, what we call boxed beef, or they can sell finished, you know, ground beef. Right. And at every stage of the manufacturing process, we've enabled a sale. So if you think about it, it's kind of like we built this ERP with CRM sprinkled through the whole thing as you go through the process. So for us, it was kind of like it wasn't so much convincing people that Salesforce, the platform, didn't have the capabilities. It was kind of educating them on how we've sprinkled the core kind of CRM stuff into this manufacturing platform, if that makes sense.

When you are in a business where all of your customers want to be able to configure and customize their environment, having that Salesforce toolkit, like being able to. Once you have the data point in Salesforce, set up any alert report, dashboard workflow automation you could dream of. It's extremely valuable. So if you look at where our business is now, we're in. We're in legal tech. Legal is a hotbed for investment for AI. I tell our clients, like, if AI is a gold rush, you are California. Like, like, the legal industry is so hot right now and there's just hundreds of millions and billions of dollars being poured into these AI startups in our industry. And many of them, we're partnering with them, but they are, you know, approaching our clients and, and we are competing with them as well. Our ability to, once we've delivered an AI tool through agent force or through other means to then offer like customized signals or alerts reports to dashboards. Like, these are pieces of functionality that have to be a roadmap item with capacity set against them for another company. But for us, it's something that we can bring to life in 10 to 15 minutes for our customers. Choosing to build with a platform like Salesforce, it gives you this, like, acceleration and latitude and bringing new features to market. Sometimes the feature doesn't even have to go on your roadmap. It is an incredible superpower that we have.

Brian, I want to come back to you. You've just heard about these three amazing businesses being built on the new Salesforce platform. What do you take away from this and where do you see this going in the future?

Well, I think what you're hearing is the unique value that Salesforce has that we sort of make available to anyone with a good idea and anybody from particularly with a good business idea. I think that really makes the Salesforce platform different than a lot of developer platforms where many cases, developers are looking for the right tool to build, they're looking for the right platform to develop an application, they're not necessarily looking for the right place to build a business. And Salesforce has consistently been the best place for ISPs to build a business. These are all examples of great partners that we've seen even just showing up recently and starting to build on the platform. So we're just really excited about the future. We also think if the cost of development of software wasn't already helped by the strength of the Salesforce platform, the AI coding tools and some of the ones that are actually offered by Salesforce actually make it even easier to start. That's why we're really saying today that we're relaunching this platform. We are really launching it into a new world and world that has AI everywhere. A world that's going to lead to explosion of incredible tools for small businesses and very specific verticals and very specific industries in different regions, in different segments, in different parts of the world. And so we're just, we're thrilled and partners like Tom, Lauren, Atulia are just such great examples of what it means to be a great Salesforce partner.

That's great. That seems like actually a great place to, to close.

So thank you all for, for, for, for joining me today. I, this was a really great conversation. Really excited to see what you all keep, keep building and see how the platform develops. Thanks so much.