In this Salesforce customer‑zero presentation, directors Christine Sofasti and Neal Brady explain how they tackled the problem of fragmented employee tools and rising support costs by building AgentForce, an intelligent, consolidated employee portal. They outline the initial pain points—over 850 disconnected applications, multiple Salesforce orgs, and low self‑service adoption—then describe their strategic goals of improving self‑service, consolidating back‑end development, and cutting third‑party costs. The talk details the technical architecture: an integration/extraction layer that abstracts eight‑nine orgs into a single personalized portal, with AI‑enhanced knowledge search, Slack‑based conversational agents, and future capabilities like meeting transcript summarization via Gemini. Change management is highlighted as a critical factor, including decisive shutdown of legacy portals and governance to prevent agent proliferation. Early results after 90 days show strong adoption, a reduction in case volume despite higher query numbers, and measurable support‑cost savings. The presenters conclude with practical lessons—start with small POCs, iterate rapidly, measure metrics, and secure business‑partner buy‑in—to guide other enterprises seeking similar productivity gains.
Chapters
My name is Christine Sofasti. I am a director here of our portfolio management as well as our technical program managers within a group that we call our digital employee experience. That's a little bit of what we're going to talk about today. And here my fellow partner is Neil.
Hi everyone. My name is Neal Brady and I'm a director of product here internally for Salesforce. Definitely focused highly on our customer zero story and we're talking through a number of different products and how we've done that in terms of saving costs.
Today what we were able to do with agentforce really was beyond what we could have imagined. And today we're gonna talk a little bit about where we started. Cause we didn't start here, this is kind of where we got to. But it was a long process to get here and we had to have a very clear strategy on what we needed to do for us. You know, customer demands. The industry is changing and at this point you can't continue to hire more and more and more employees. The more employees you have, the more your costs go up, employee support goes up. So AgentForce really gave us that opportunity to find a balance between continuing to improve that employee experience, getting greater productivity out of it, but actually cutting our support costs. That's what we're gonna talk to you guys about today. So let's talk about where we were. This shouldn't be a surprise. I think the average enterprise, they say, has over 850 disconnected applications. That's a lot for one person, one employee to try to figure out where to go, what they need to do. And Salesforce is no exception. We suffer from the same. We have portals and orgs and knowledge articles, thousands, all sorts of different tools. There was a time where we felt the more technology you provide your employees, the better it is. And then we started seeing in our annual employee surveys, our employees were actually saying, hey, can y' all consolidate, give me less, tell me one place that I could go where I could get access to everything. And when AI was coming about, they were more hungry for more AI bring AI into my workflow, into my day to day. So we sat down and said, okay, if we're going to tackle this, what are those key metrics and things that we want to make sure that we're going after to make this successful.
And for us, we were really looking at the key goals that were consistent across all of those different business lines. And the key one for us has always been that self service. So we want to make sure that when people come in and ask questions. Ideally, they're able to actually get those answers from the knowledge base that's available and they don't have to go and create a case. So that was going to be very, very important for us to maintain. Even while we look to expand the knowledge base that was available for employees, we also wanted to make sure it was useful for them. So were they actually adopting it at a different rate or a better rate than all those other portals before? We were of course, then looking at the consolidation. So the hidden costs that were behind all of these different portals is that they each had development teams behind them. So as they continue to do their development, not only would they have to work on their portal, but they'd also have to do all the work in the back end to make sure that they have their routing rules, their apex code, all good, their trust and security done. And they were now splitting time between those things. So an area of opportunity to grab some of that hidden cost to focus deeper into their business lines. And then of course, actually looking for real cost savings. We had a third party provider that we were looking to be able to actually remove because we no longer needed the services if we were able to bring these situations together. Now, if you're very familiar with the setup within Salesforce, you might be thinking, okay, well why don't you just use an experience cloud site over on top of your service cloud? That would make it pretty easy. And it would until we get to the reality that, that our architecture was a little bit more complicated because we have not just the four orgs that you see here, but we have at least eight or nine different Salesforce orgs. And each of those have their own queuing systems, routing rules, ways that they're set up for their operations. They have different case fields. The way that they use their objects are different. All that complexity makes it really difficult for our employees to be able to navigate. So you aren't able to just pull that in altogether into one experience cloud that over that sits on one service cloud Org. What you need to do is have this kind of integration layer, this extraction layer, and that's exactly what we built, an intelligent portal that was able to bring the complexity abstracted away, make it very easy for our employees to navigate. We also could leverage personalization, some of the things that do come out of the box with those orgs, permission sets, user things. So that way as a manager you get additional access. As a salesperson you could get additional access. If you're on the legal team, you could get additional access. All great things. That are out of the box. We also had our first example of AI, the summarization of Einstein search answers. So not only would people get responses back from their knowledge articles, but they would actually get direct answers. And this is kind of our first foray. But of course it's lacking some of that conversational interface that you get from agents. And of course, we were looking at the ability to use our two kind of key areas of working. We have the website, the web experience, and then also within Slack, being able to merge those together so that way employees could find it whether they're working in their org or out within the Slack sphere. But ultimately, our path to create this was a journey. So we really had to think about the change management aspect as well and start that conversation really early, being able to understand, hey, how do we meet them where they are? So that way we can best leverage and really hit our adoption numbers that we're looking at at the very beginning of our journey.
Yeah, that change management piece is key. Right. If we're going to combine and consolidate all of this stuff, then you also need to shut something down. And so that was where the business partners were like, wait, you're getting rid of what I already have? What I love. We're aligned with you, but can we spread it out? Can we maybe keep both portals for a while? Let's make sure people are using yours before we shut ours down. Like, no, we shut it down on day one and you force everyone into this and then we start continuing to build upon it. Right. It's not going to be perfect on day one, but that was huge.
Absolutely. And you can see just looking at the initial results. So this is even before agents start coming around. But we have within that 90 days, we're already hitting our adoption metric, where people in the company are excited and starting to use this portal experience.
So that's where Agent Force came in. As soon as AgentForce came, we said, oh, wow, okay, this is going to really help us unlock a lot of that, that productivity, continuing to bring things together. But it also was a little bit of a disruption because now every single one of our business partners and every single person at the company wanted to create their own agent. Let me create my own sales agent. Let me create my own legal agent. We're like, oh, no. So agent proliferation, that idea again, that an employee is going to have 300 agents and they're not going to know where to go or how to get to it. So again, we had to start those conversations and we had to rethink okay, what are we trying to accomplish here? So we did a little bit of a realignment. We said, okay, all of support, all of that in place, great. But AgentForce is also going to give us that opportunity to be able to run those actions and have a certain level of skills built in to the system. So if an employee has to do something every single day, if we build it into the agent and we're able to continue to build that out, it is going to unlock a tremendous amount of productivity for them and we're gonna continue to drive towards some of those metrics. So we started small, really, just that foundation of what we had already had building it in, right. And we continue to kind of test, tune and refine. And the biggest thing here was those POCs. What were those POCs that we were gonna identify that provided the largest amount of value for our employees? And we really were going to be able to help drive adoption and brand that support cost down. So we reassessed, reassessed, added some more metrics to measure ourselves by.
And I think it's really important for everyone who's trying to build out agents to understand is that the way that you measure your success is going to be a little bit different than you may have with past experience and support sites where agents really unlock some specificity that you can leverage for your business partners. So then the question becomes, okay, so what do you build? You have a ton of different teams building different agents, different skill sets. But we really wanted to focus on the holistic picture of the employee. So if we're thinking about an employee broadly, what are some of the core aspects that they need to have and is consistent across the 80,000 employees that we have instead of zooming in too far within a single business unit. And for us, of course, we had the support and knowledge model that was a given, but we also now had this access to productivity, being able to take actions on their behalf, understanding them more, and then also within their career goals. So we started out with the first one with the knowledge search. We already had millions of searches every single month in our support knowledge base. So we wanted to make sure that we could include that experience really nicely where they were. So we had our employee agent sitting within Slack so people could actually ask questions and have that really great rich conversational interface within Slack to be able to have that back and forth with the agent. It also was able to be provided on the site as well, where you no longer just have the summarization that Einstein provided us in the beginning, but actually having that Live back and forth, being able to dive down into deeper answers. Then a big piece for us was also looking into what's that next layer of opportunity that we can give our employees. And it's like, well, we are connected to the knowledge support base. We can also connect to their calendar. We can understand what meetings are coming in. We can send them notes from their Gemini transcriptions. We're a Google shop, so that's why we, we use those. And then we also can leverage the view of the meetings themselves. So you can say, hey, I had a meeting last week. I can't really remember what it was about but I talked, I think to Christine and can you tell me what it was? And I'll be able to spit back an answer and say hey, also have a transcript for you. These are your next action items. So being able to just provide time back and I think that's been a huge unlock especially if you are taking pto. You missed a meeting, you come back and you're like oh what happened?
You're a dreamforce for a week and you show up with 1,000 Slack messages and about 20 meetings you've missed. Yeah, it's a great way to summarize it.
But then the real question is well what? Did we save any money? And I would say absolutely we saved some money because if we look at where we were a year ago in the same month we had about a million queries in our portal, which is great. And then we also had a good chunk of those end up in the cases. And since that time we had not only more queries, we had more people which would have told you that you should have more cases. However, with the power of agentforce we've been able to cut not only our cost to support in general with our save and licenses, but we also see a reduction in the actual case rate that is coming back. So we think about our self service rate in this combined experience where you can have that conversational interface. It's a really great opportunity and I can't wait to see this number continue to climb because if you notice this agent's only been live since August for our employees. So super excited about these initial numbers that we're seeing continuing to adjust our accuracy measures and provide a really nice experience for our employees.
And with that you'll see, right, we're going towards our targets, but we still have space. And that's the whole amazing thing around AgentForce is we are continuing to build, continuing to iterate, continuing to identify those new opportunities. But we wanted to leave you guys with just a couple of things that we've really kind of learned, right. We talked about that. Start small, identify those POCs you want to do, and just move quickly. That was really, really, really important for us to get that foundational piece in, and we continue to build upon it. That test, tune, repeat, measure, value, identify the metrics, identify what you want to go after. Was really, really important for us to actually be able to show also the impact that it's making across the enterprise and continue to get that support from our business partners. And additionally, you know, it's a new way of working. It's going to be hard. Change management's important, adoption is important. But if you start somewhere, you see some level of success, people are going to jump on board and it'll just kind of start to capture on as quick as it did for us. So thank you all for your time today. If you want to see the agent live a demo and hear more about the customer zero stories. We are actually literally going from here to the keynote in Moscone west right now because our leaders are all about to talk about some of the main agents that we've built at Salesforce. So I encourage you guys to come follow us. You'll also get to see the employee agent live. Thank you all.
