HR's Best Benefit: Smarter Employee Support with Agentforce

We loved that human touch.

That came through in a really natural way with Agent Force.

That alone sold me on it, where.

Agent Force is the game changer and a big difference for us is the fact that it works 24 7. Having that seamless connection between a human and having Agent Force in the background of that human is really a win win.

Asian Force is embedded into the toolkit that our reps are already using. When you've had that magical moment when you actually get AI to really augment what you're already good at, it really makes you the best version of yourself. You feel empowered and that you're able to do more.

Hey, everyone, thanks for joining today's live event all about HR's best, smarter employee support with AgentForce. I'm your host, Diane Mizotta, along with a couple of AgentForce All Stars. Julian Walker, Senior Director, Product Marketing, and Sharon Sunny, Senior Director, Product Management.

Welcome, you guys.

Thank you. So happy to be here.

Yes, thanks for joining us. Well, we're coming to you from Salesforce headquarters in San Francisco, the home of AgentForce. And over the next hour, you'll learn how to make HR support easier for everyone, everyone with Agent Force. Here's what's coming up. We're going to kick things off with a product announcement that will transform HR for everyone at your organization. We've got expert insights, plus two live demos showcasing how AgentForce supports the HR service experience for employees and HR teams. You'll hear how Salesforce uses agentforce for HR service to improve its own employee support journey. And we know you'll have questions, so go ahead and post them in the chat. Experts are standing by to answer them. All right, let's dive in. Julian Walker, you're going to kick things off. What's the big announcement?

Today we have a big announcement. You're right. And I feel like we just have to get right to it. Right. So I'll just have to say I'm happy to be here today because we are announcing something big for all of you in HR here today. And we're introducing AgentForce for HR service. This is a completely new approach to employee support. We're bringing together AI agents right into the flow of work so you can support your employees even better. So what does this mean for your employees? It means they can simply have a conversation with AgentForce right in Slack, right in their employee portal to get their support needs met. And I'll give you an example. AgentForce is going to help your employees do things like submit PTO requests and get those approvals Right within Slack so they never have to navigate to another another application. And for your HR teams, this is really cool too. Agentforce assists them right inside of their workspace, right alongside that employee data that they need, the support cases that they need, all to help them resolve issues for employees with the most efficiency and ultimately what's making this possible. Agentforce for HR service integrates with any HR system, so that allows them to have that true 360 degree view of every employee.

Awesome. All right, now this is a huge innovation for us here at Salesforce, but let's talk about it from the customer's perspective. How is it going to transform the HR experience?

Absolutely, it's definitely going to help transform that experience. And when we think about these innovations, they're all driven by the voice of our customers. We've talked to a lot of HR leaders over the months and years and know that the employee experience is the top priority for you all. So you might not be super familiar with our customer support solutions Service Cloud, but it's actually the technology that powers many of your favorite customer support experiences. So we thought, if HR leaders want to provide the best employee experiences, why don't we share the best support technology with them? So that's exactly what we've done. We brought Service Cloud together with AgentForce to transform that employee experience. So now employee support can be quick and can be conversational, personalized, and allow for seamless handoffs between AI and humans. So when cases are handed off to your HR reps, they don't have to solve them alone. AgentForce is there to assist them, helping them resolve everything much faster.

Amazing. Okay, so we've talked about these innovations and I'm so, so excited to see them in action in a little bit. But let's talk about the state of HR service and why are these innovations so important right now at this point in time?

Yeah, it's a really important time in the industry right now. So like I said before, we've talked to a lot of HR leaders and one thing is pretty clear. HR teams are stretched super thin. And it doesn't help when HR information is spread across multiple disconnected systems. Ultimately, that has a big impact on employees. When information is hard to find, it leads to a frustrating employee experience and ultimately lost productivity. So that's why AI agents, or as we also like to call them, digital labor, are so important right now. We actually interviewed over 200 HR executives and found that digital labor isn't just a trend. Our research showed that within five years, most workforces will have humans and AI agents working together. And as a result, workforces are going to be 30 more percent, 30% more productive.

I mean, I'd love to be 30% more productive, but just not have to do any more work than I'm already doing.

Right. Oh, yeah. I'm on the same page as you. Absolutely. And that's exactly what AgentForce provides. It's able to get employees that relevant and up to date answers to their questions all in real time. Because the agents are grounded in a company's knowledge base, those HR policies, those documents. So that means its responses can also be personalized. Personalized to that employee and their role in the company. But I want to make one thing very clear. This isn't about replacing humans. It's about augmenting your teams so they can focus on more complex initiatives. Think strategic talent management. Interactions that call for empathy and nuance. And ultimately, blended workforces with AI and humans are the future. And they're already revolutionizing the way we do employee support. Yeah.

And we're already seeing a blended workforce here at Salesforce. Can you tell our audience a little bit more about that?

Oh, yeah. We're doing a lot of things here at Salesforce for sure. We're proud to be an agent first company. We're using those agentic innovations and we've actually deployed AgentForce to our customer service teams. And today AgentForce is actually handling 30,000 conversations weekly, which is a lot. And even more so, it's indexing over 700,000 articles to resolve conversations. And you can actually try that out today. You can go to help.salesforce.com and try that out for yourselves. On the other end of the spectrum, our sales teams are using AgentForce as well. They are activating 25,000, not 250,000. I was like, I almost said the wrong number. 25,000 sellers with a dedicated sales coach.

Amazing. All right, well, let's dive deeper into Salesforce's HR for service solution. Let's just start by talking about it. What is it? At a very high level.

Yeah, absolutely. So HR service is a really great innovation and we've been talking about AgentForce here a lot today because AgentForce is built directly into our HR service solution. And HR service is the Salesforce solution that equips companies to deliver fast and efficient employee support. It's fully built on service cloud and it consists of really two main elements. The first is the employee portal, and the second is the HR service console. So the employee portal is how companies can easily scale HR support. It gives employees a personalized Self service experience and acts as that centralized hub where they can manage their cases that access personal information, complete tasks, get AI generated answers. They can even chat with AgentForce or with a live specialist at any point too.

All right, now let's say I'm on an HR team. What's in it for me when it comes to AgentForce?

Oh yeah, you're going to be helped out too. On the HR team we have that HR service console that's tailor made for HR teams. So this is a true comprehensive workspace like you see here on your screen that gives you that 360 degree view of every employee. Their profile information, the employment history, their engagement timeline, their cases, key milestones. And there are also a lot of assistive AI tools built right into that experience as well, like AI generated replies, case summarization knowledge, article recommendations and so forth.

All right, so you mentioned Agent Force is built into the employee experience and also the HR facing tools. Let's double down on that and go back to the employee support experience.

Absolutely. When we think of the employee support experience, agents really help in a variety of HR related tasks like think tracking employee programs like onboarding when somebody new starts, or managing HR support cases, updating employee details, managing time off request, updating direct deposit details, submitting expenses, and it can even escalate to a human rep for those more highly complex, highly personal cases. The reason this is all possible is because of Data Cloud. Data Cloud unifies that data that lives in and out of Salesforce. Like those things that live outside, like the employee details for instance, that are in your HRIS or HCM systems. This all ensures that AgentForce can provide accurate responses to all of your employee inquiries. And from there the Atlas reasoning engine gets to work analyzing this data and executes the relevant action to quickly resolve employee issues. Now you can really think about Atlas as the brain behind agentforce. It thinks and tells agentforce how and when to act.

Awesome.

Awesome.

Thank you for that overview, Julian. I appreciate that. Now that we've heard from, now that we've heard what AgentForce for HR service can do, it's time to see it in action. We have two great demos for you and I want to bring back in Sharon Sunny, Senior Director, Product Management. Now Sharon, you've been building this with the engineering team. What's your perspective on it?

Yeah, so we've been hearing loud and clear from our customers that they want to give their employees the same support experience that they give to their customers. So we want the same customer grade experience and whether this could be for A new joinee who is getting started in the organization or applying for a PTO or maybe enrolling into benefits, et cetera. And given the power of agentforce, it felt like a no brainer to do an agent first HR service experience.

All right, well let's see this first demo. What's it all about?

All right, so this first demo talks will help you understand a little more how HR service is able to improve your employee productivity while reducing cost to serve from the lens of Sharon, who is a new employee who has just joined Freightland AirNC. Now, because Sharon is a new employee, she has been assigned an onboarding enablement program. And this onboarding enablement program is is essentially a step by step set of tasks that Net Sharer needs to complete to effectively get onboarded in the first 90 days. And these steps could be as simple as watching a video or have an action item to get your company ID badge or reviewing your employee benefits via knowledge article, all the way to requesting a corporate credit card. But taking a step back, an enablement program is essentially a tool in your HR admin's arsenal to guide your employees through the step by step tasks or actions that they need to do in order to achieve a goal or a milestone. So whether it be an annual security training or enrolling in employee benefits, et cetera. Now, let's say that Sharon has now been in the organization for about two to three months and she's finished her onboarding and she's been loving her time at Freightlander and Sea. And so she decides that she wants to refer a colleague from a previous organization in order to find all the referral details. All Sharon needs to do is search for employee referral. And unlike just giving you a sea of like link of blue links on your search results page with search answers, we actually give you a snippet from the Knowledge article with the curated set of information that Sharon needs such that she doesn't even need to go to the knowledge article. She's able to get all the information that she needs right from the snippet. Now this is great. She's finished her referral program and she's decided, wait, she wants to actually refinance her loan in the current economic condition and she actually wants to take a day off in order to do all her research. So in the past what Sharon would have had to do was either go to an HRIA system or log a case. But in the world of agent force, all Sharon needs to do is invoke the HR service agent. Now of course, Sharon will Start the conversation with the HR Service agent.

Wow.

It's a live demo and we are having issues with connectivity, so I am going to throw it back to do that. Back to you, Dan. Okay.

All right, so it is a live demo and we will check in on that later. But Julian, from the employee perspective, why is this such a game changer with AgentForce? From what we've seen already, it seems to streamline the experience, save time, and it's very efficient.

Oh, yeah, it definitely is a game changer for employees because it's meeting employees where they are like, they basically have a couple options. It's going to the portal to get everything that they need. But also, as you'll also see in a little bit, they can even go to Slack and get that information too. But Sharon, how are things looking?

Yeah, I think we've got the demo backup.

We've got the demo backup.

Yay.

So now you know this is a real demo because things did not go as planned. All right, so going back to Sharon's situation, she wants to first understand how much leave balance does she have before she applies for a pto? Because of our integration with the backend HRIA system, we are able to pull her leave balance right here on the HR Service Agent. Great. So she has enough leave balance. She wants to submit a PTO request. And this is where the magic starts happening. All Shara needs to do is enter the information, and because of that integration with the HRIA system, she never has to leave the HR Service agent. She's able to execute everything that she needs to get done right from this one single place. Now, we have seen the HR service agent in action on the portal. Let's next see it on Slack.

Yeah, I am really excited to see it on Slack because we at Salesforce, we love using our HR agents in Slack. It makes it so much easier to get things done. So let's go ahead and take a look at that.

Yeah. So like I said, Sharon has realized that Slack is that single place of collaboration for her, whether it be chatting with her colleagues or interacting with the IT teams and HR teams. And again in the past, getting this employment verification letter during a very, very busy day would require her to go to a portal or go to an HRIS system. But because HR Service Agent is now available on Slack, she is able to quickly invoke the HR Service agent. Click on the common action here, which is the employment verification letter. Enter the email id, give a couple of details, like who the letter is addressed to, and just like that, the employment Verification letter gets generated. So hopefully this demo gives you a sense of how Salesforce is imagining HR service with an agent. First experience.

Great job. So cool. Way to hang with the live demo too. Good job. We appreciate that, but it's great. You can see how easy it is in Slack. But let's move on to the second demo. What's that one all about?

Yeah. So for HR service and are, the critical Persona is your HR service rep. And so I want to show again how the HR service rep can be more efficient with HR service. Let's do this from the lens of Chris, who is an HR service agent. Admin. Sorry, representative. Now, remember Sharon, who we were just hanging out with a while back? She's now been in the organization for 90 plus days and so of course she's a pro. She is very comfortable using HR service agent. But she has a question about medical insurance that she feels the need to speak to a human about. And so she requests HR service agent to transfer her to a human. And it does this seamlessly. So let's look at how Chris, who gets this request from Sharon, is able to handle this interaction. So Freight, Land, Air and Sea uses Omni, which is the reason why this particular interaction has landed on Chris's plate. Right? We know he's available. He's in the right geographic location and has the right skill set. Now, Chris accepts the messaging request from Sharon and once he does that, I want you to pay attention to this component here which gives Chris a 360 degree view of Sharon. It tells her information about her employee number, her employment type, the start date, et cetera. Again, this is possible because of our integration with backend HRIS systems. I also want you to pay attention to the timeline component here which gives Chris a sense of all the interactions Sharon has had in the past with the HR service team. Now, with this complete 360 degree view, Chris essentially uses quick text in order to send a quick greeting to Sharon. He essentially wants to know how he can help her further. Now, as he is hearing back from Sharon, I want you to understand the innovation here that's enabling Chris to take the next steps. For instance, the next best action here is telling Chris what he needs to do next with respect to educating the employee about the enrollment dates and policies. But the service replies here essentially give Chris the exact snippet of information that he needs to send to Sharon. So this snippet is generated from a knowledge article which is there in your organization. So it's grounded in knowledge article. And that is the reason we know that this information is authentic. But if Chris wants to check this information, he can always go to the knowledge article and double check, make any edits if the need be. But more often than not, just click on post. Just like that, without typing anything, Chris is able to respond back to Sharon. What I also want you to notice is that the service replies change based on Chris's interaction with Sharon. So we see that the service replied has been updated to reflect the new message from Sharon. Now, once all this is done and the messaging session has been completed under regular circumstances, Chris would have to spend quite a bit of time to wrap up this case, generate the case summary, the resolution, the contact reason, et cetera. But again, with our case wrap up functionality, Chris does not have to do any of that anymore. And he's able to essentially use AI to wrap up his case, which really reduces the amount of administrative load that he needs to do in order to wrap up his case. That's not all. In the future, if the organization wants to update a knowledge article or create a new knowledge article based on this interaction with Chris that Chris has had with Sharon, they can easily do that. And that's also possible because of our amazing innovation with AI. So hopefully this demo gives you a sense of how Salesforce is thinking about augmenting humans with agents to not only give you the best customer experience, but also a great employee experience.

So awesome. Great job, Sharon. So good to see it from both perspectives, right, Julian?

No, it was awesome to see. I love how everything comes together from both the employee side and the HR rep side. So thanks, Sharon.

It's a win win all the way around. So, Sharon, Sunny Director, Senior Director of Product Management. Thank you so much. If you have questions, questions for Sharon, just drop them in the chat. She'll be back at the end of the show for Q and A. Agentforce for HR service is already transforming the way we work at Salesforce. We didn't just build the technology, we're also customer zero. Earlier, I had the opportunity to speak with one of Salesforce's incredible HR leaders, Jen Galbraith, about the transition to an agent first HR service experience. Hi Jen, thank you so much for joining us. Now you're a VP of Employee Success here at Salesforce. You're very familiar with the HR landscape. What would you say is the biggest challenge that companies are facing when it comes to HR these days?

Well, I think companies broadly are all just trying to keep up with the ever evolving technology landscape with AI and agents kind of rapidly coming at us. But I think within hr, we're the backbone of the organization. And it's where an employee experience starts in the recruiting process. It's, you know, ultimately when an employee decides to move on, it's where it ends. But it's everything in between, the day to day, whether it's a payroll inquiry, a question on a policy, we're just really constantly trying to balance that volume while also trying to, you know, provide the best possible employee experience, all while, you know, serving as a cost center to the company, doing that with operational efficiency. Right. We don't have the luxury of endless budgets in most cases or most HR organizations. And so trying to strike that balance between, you know, moving quickly, being productive, getting employees what they need so they can get on their way and do their best work, it's a lot, it's overwhelming. And the traditional ways of supporting our employees are just, you know, leading to frustration within HR because we can't keep up and ultimately employee frustration too, because they're not getting what they need currently.

Yeah, it's no wonder that employees are feeling overwhelmed. How is digital labor going to help HR teams and the employee experience as a whole?

It's going to be a huge unlock. I think digital labor is this kind of probably a once in a lifetime opportunity. I say that as someone who's been in the HR technology or just broader technology space for, you know, for over well over two decades now. And it's just this opportunity for us to really rethink how we work, to take some of those mundane, repeatable tasks, the common questions that we get asked off of our plate in HR and really start to focus on more strategic work, the work that really counts, the work where we actually want to be spending our time directly with employees, which we don't necessarily have the luxury to do today because we're so busy with those repeatable tasks. So I think that's really the huge unlock. It's where we can kind of have agents working alongside employees to bring the value for all. You know, I think when you, when you talk to a lot of HR leaders, a recent study said that 80% of them believe that in the next five years that, you know, most organizations will actually be made up of digital labor and human workers and that those, the digital labor is going to drive 30% increased productivity. So if you think about that, a third of our time being unlocked to really start doing different, more value added work, bringing our employees along in this kind of digital agentic era, the skill upskilling and the reskilling that's going to Be needed, the time unlocked there is going to be hugely powerful.

Love that.

I love that phrasing that as an unlock. Now we often hear that customers want to test out agents in sales or customer service scenarios. So why should organizations look to HR as one of the first places to try agents?

That is such a great question and I would say kind of a common misconception. You know, hr, again, as I mentioned earlier, it's the backbone of the organization. Employees are experiencing some level of HR day in and day out. And so if you think about agentic technology and this opportunity, you know, where there's, there's, you know, training the AI and training the agents, when you have the volume that HR has and you think about it's touching every employee in the company, right. So if you pick sales, right, that's a, that's a segment of your employee base, but not all you have this opportunity to get high volume of, you know, engagement, lots of testing and training of the agents to make them better. But more importantly, in my opinion, you also get that you really get to start kind of initiating that culture change. Right. We know that there's a spectrum of people who, you know, in terms of their interests and their willingness to engage with agents, but when you get to go to the entire employee base, it's this opportunity to get them comfortable, to get them used to working with agents, to get them thinking about how agents might even help them in their day to day, you know, functional work. And so it starts that culture shift. It really starts to kind of, you know, get them embracing that change and, and driving adoption so that when you do start bringing on some of those additional agents, they're ready and they're, you know, they're, they're ready to work alongside them.

Yeah, I can speak to that level of comfort myself, just using the agent force here at Salesforce. So how do you think the new agent force for HR service innovations are going to impact the HR service experience?

It's going to ultimately provide a better employee experience. Right. If we think about employees, you know, they, they're coming into work every day, they have a lot of things to get done, they're in a lot of meetings, they're to get, you know, hit, hit deadlines or, you know, you know, get big milestones delivered, but they have an HR question or there's some HR milestone activity going on that they need support with. And this is this opportunity for us to be able to quickly serve them, you know, quick, you know, get their questions answered quickly and let them get back to the most important work that they need to do.

Yeah, I love that. Well, Salesforce is always customer zero when it comes to its own, its biggest innovation. So how is Salesforce HR utilizing HR for HR service to improve its own employee service experience?

Yes, we do pride ourselves on being customer zero. We really want to make sure that we're testing our technology and really kind of, you know, figuring out what works and what doesn't work so that we can also share those, those learnings with our customers. And we are using AgentForce directly in our service experience so our employees can go to our employee, they can go to Slack and they can ask questions directly to agents. Today, one of the first use cases we did was actually our well being eligibility program. And that's a program we have at Salesforce where we really encourage well being across the organization. But there's a lot of questions in terms of like what qualifies and what doesn't in terms of that, that, that well being allowance and we use data, right. So we, we knew that was a very commonly asked question or a high case volume area and we said, hey, that's a very, you know, that's, that's something we could quickly train an agent on. Let's start with that being that first use case. And what we saw was 90 over 90% reduction in case question in cases with questions around that well being eligibility. So huge opportunity, huge win and kind of that again, as I referenced earlier, that, that early learning for all of our employees. But we don't just stop there, right? So there's, they can ask questions, they can get, you know, different information there. But we're also using Agent Force for our HR specialists. So the folks that actually do respond to the employ cases when they are logged, they're also using Agent Force. So directly in the service console when they get a case, they're able to actually engage with Agent Force that can look across all of our case history and say, hey, what other cases have been logged in the past and how do we answer those? And then that is served up to the specialist so that they can quickly resolve this employee's case. And if you think about that, that's helping HR be more efficient, but it's also getting that employee's question answered more quickly, which ultimately improves their satisfact.

Sounds like a win all the way around. As we look ahead to the future, how do you see agents proactively helping employees?

Oh, there's so many opportunities. We have a very significant roadmap that we are working and we really see Agents being, you know, kind of working alongside humans across the employee life cycle. So whether you're a candidate looking for the right opportunity and you're, you know, and we're helping kind of, you know, point you to the right roles based on your skill sets and interests. Once you get started, how can agents actually guide you through all the very many different onboarding tasks that you need to think about, you know, as a new employee, setting your annual objectives and making sure that those are aligned with different key groups across the organization? You know, you've been here for a while, and you're thinking about what's next in your career. Agents can help you think about, you know, where your skills and interests fit for that next role. And then if you think about, you know, macro and micro. Right. So also skilling, how can agents actually look at your experience and your interest and say, hey, you know, for you to get to this next place in your career, you know, progression, you need these skills, and how is the agent actually maybe even serving up skilling opportunities for you? And then ultimately, you know, when you sunset, how is an agent even potentially helping offboard you from the organization in a pleasant way? Right. We're big on boomerangs here at Salesforce. We know folks, you know, might eventually choose to leave the organization, but we love when they come back at a certain point. And so we want to make sure that not only is your hiring and onboarding experience great, but also your offboarding experience. So again, we see agents across the entire lifecycle.

Thanks. Well, you're in a unique role where you get to build these support experiences for employees. What tips or advice do you have for other HR teams when it comes to rolling out their own AI agents?

Yeah, it can be overwhelming of, like, where do you get started? And I think whether it's agents or maybe even other technology, I think my first tip is always just be very intentional. Really think about what are those problems that you need to solve and how can agents help? I think it can get, you know, sometimes it can get exciting, and you're like, oh, let's just put agents here and there. But if you don't actually clearly understand what you're solving for, I think you can, you know, kind of have missteps or maybe not see the value that you want. So I would say, first, it's that intention, I think, second, don't feel pressure to start big. As I mentioned earlier, we started with just one specific question that our employees were commonly asking around, well, building, well being eligibility. And so you can start small get kind of, you know, get yourself sorted, do some learning, get folks used to it and then start to expand as you kind of start that continuous improvement cycle as well. And then the last suggestion I would have is really just bring your employees along. We know that folks, again have different levels of interest and willingness and readiness to work with agents. And so helping them understand the value, helping them understand the unlock for them in terms of what it's going to ultimately bring them is a really great way to kind of drive adoption and drive engagement.

Jen, thank you so much for breaking it down with us today.

We appreciate it.

Thank you.

It was great hearing Jen's expertise. AgentForce for HR service delivers seamless employee support 24. 7 from anywhere. So whether you're in the office, on the road or working from home. Earlier I chatted with Deborah Strusenberg, VP Product Management about how AgentForce for HR service translates to a day in the life of an employee. Deborah, thanks so much for joining us. Now what has made your support experience at Salesforce so different from traditional HR support?

Yeah, great. Great to be here. I really enjoy using the Basecamp app both in our employee portal and the agent in Slack. It is amazing. It is my go to for anytime I have a question or need some information. It's a complete game changer having the agent in Slack. It is so helpful to just be able to access it right where I'm already doing my work every day.

Sounds amazing.

Now can you give us an example of how you've used the Basecamp agent?

Yeah, one example is just last week I had some questions about our dental health insurance programs and instead of having to dig around and try to figure out if there was a website to look at or finding certain documents, I was able to just type my question right into the base camp agent right in Slack and it gave me the exact answer I was looking for. It was so fast and easy I didn't have to hunt around. It was just a really great experience. And then it also cited the article that it took the information from in case I wanted to reference that later, which was also really helpful.

So convenient. Such a time saver. And that is available 24 7. Amazing. Now you manage a big team. Are there specific benefits that you see as a manager?

Yeah, I'll give you one great example is that I recently needed to get some information like role specific manager specific information for year end merit discussions with my team and I was able to go to the Agent Force agent ask it a question and I know that it gave me the right information for me as a manager and it was, you know, gave me the exact answer that I needed. But also I knew that it was the appropriate information for me as a manager to be able to help me.

Awesome. Now can you share an example of how automation is built into your Slack and Agent Force experience as a manager?

Yeah, I will tell you my favorite is having approvals right in slack and through AgentForce. The other day I needed to approve a travel for one of my team members urgently and I got a notification right in Slack and was able to use AgentForce to guide me through the process. It surfaced the information I needed right there and I was able to take action on that without having to leave and go to another system. It was so fast and it just, you know, for something like that where it's a common task, you need certain information, but it's just so easy to be able to do that right where I'm working already and then be able to spend my time focused on the things that I really need to be spending time on my team and, you know, other more demanding tasks for me as a manager.

So that's my favorite.

Love it sounds so easy, so efficient. Thank you Deborah for sharing your experience with us.

Thank you.

Love hearing Deborah's perspective. Now, as we mentioned earlier in the show, Salesforce is expanding to support all different types of service beyond traditional customer service. Julian Walker, Senior Director of Product Marketing is back with a preview. Now, Julian, what? What's the future of Salesforce's employee service solution?

Oh yeah, like we have, we gave you one announcement, but now we're giving another one. And as you know, we at Salesforce, we're always innovating. And guess what, we're expanding our employee support capabilities even more. And later this year we're introducing an IT service solution commonly known as itsm. So this means that you're going to have all of your customer support and employee support needs on one platform. So what does this mean for you as HR leaders? This means that you're going to be able to improve the employee experience even more. The employee portal and agents that we mentioned earlier will not only be restricted to HR use cases, they'll be expanded to cover IT service needs as well. So now your employees will get all the support they need in Slack or their portal.

That sounds amazing. So I'm sure our customers are like, when? When can we get our hands on this?

Oh yeah, and don't you worry, it's right the corner. The pilot begins this summer, so if you want to join in on the Pilot, please reach out to your account executive and learn more.

Thanks, Julian. Very exciting things on the horizon, but now we're going to put you in the hot seat. We're also. It's time for our audience Q and A. We're also going to bring back Sharon Sunny, Senior Director of Product Management. So, Julian, the first question is for you, and we hear this one a lot. When it comes to AI, can agents be trusted?

Oh, yeah. That's a big, big question for sure that we hear from a lot of our customers. And I just have to say, here at Salesforce, trust is our number one value. So we considered all of those factors when we built AgentForce. So AgentForce is ultimately protected by something that we call the Einstein Trust layer. So you see a lot of terms on this slide in front of you that might be unfamiliar, like data masking, toxicity detection, and zero retention. But to put it simply, these are just measures we put in place to ensure that your data is protected. Ultimately, your data is yours. It's not ours. It's not our LLMs. And we want to keep it that way. And we want to ensure that your AI agents are delivering accurate responses to your employees. So that's why our platform gives you the full transparency into every action that AgentForce takes too.

Awesome. Okay, great. Well, let's get to some questions. Is the HR Service console the same thing as the Service Cloud console?

Oh, yeah. Great question as well. Like when we think of that console, the HR service console is really tailored for HR service needs, so it's built on service cloud. But we would recommend using the HR Service console for HR service because it has that those different actions and things built in that are going to be more beneficial for the HR rep.

Okay. All right, next question. Is there a longer List of AgentForce use cases beyond the use cases being demonstrated today?

Yeah.

I should put this on a slide because of the number of times I'm asked this question. Yes, today you just saw two of our actions, but we have six other actions that we are going to go live with in our summer release. So more coming up for sure. And of course, we will continue to add actions in each of our releases.

Okay. Rachel on Salesforce plus asked, what are the benefits of using the HR service agent versus the current service agent or the default agent?

That's a great question. I mean, yeah, we came out with our service agent a number of months ago, and that service agent is really great for customer service use cases, which some of those can be applicable to hr. But the unique thing about this HR Service agent is that it really has HR specific actions. So those things that we talked about earlier like PTO request or submitting expense reports, things like that, those are very specific to HR that are out of the box with this HR service agent, which you are not going to get with that customer service agent.

Great, Great answer. All right, another question. Is there a talent management or recruiting aspect of HR service?

Yeah. Can I just toss it over to you, Julian? Because that's a hard one.

No, I'm just kidding. Yeah. Phone a friend.

Yeah. Yeah. So again, this is a question that we have heard a lot of times. We are doing our due diligence to make sure that this is something we should be working on. So stay tuned. More on this later.

All right, more to come. Stick around. All right, next question. Does AgentForce work with other human capital management systems besides Workday?

Oh yeah, that's also a great question. Definitely one that we get as well. So just to start out, we have that out of the box integration with them, but we will be expanding with other leading HCM and HRIS companies as well. So you can expect those on our roadmap. They'll be coming soon enough. So just wait and we'll have more out of the box options coming soon.

Okay.

And I just wanted to add that it's not just the HCM and the HRIS systems, but like learning management systems and payment and payment systems, etc. So we have couple of integrations coming up down the road.

Fantastic. Can I use HR service for IT cases too?

Very good question. Especially with the last thing that I just said. Right. But I mean, so really HR service is tailor made for HR use cases. I will say this. You're going to want to use our IT service solution for IT cases because it's tailor built for IT cases and it's going to have things that are out of the box. Things like helping you handle your assets, like laptops, things like that that you're not going to get with this HR service solution. So I would say keep HR for hr. The IT piece will come and I would wait for that because it's going to be much more out of the box and easier to get set up.

Great.

Can I use AgentForce on my existing portal or intranet?

I was like with that one. I mean, love your perspective here too. I would say yes, you can use IT on those. You can deploy Agent Force for HR on your portal, on our portal or the intranet. Anything else you'd add there, Sharon?

No.

That sounds like the perfect answer.

Yeah.

Okay. All right, and then our final question. This is from ELISA on Salesforce. Any info on what anypoint connectors are on the roadmap?

Yeah, so I kind of just alluded to that as well. But like I said, we are going to start with the HCM and the HRIA systems, but in the future, we want to expand to learning management systems, to payroll systems, et cetera. So more details will come, but it's not just going to be HRIS and HCM systems.

Okay, well, thank you so much, Julian and Sharon, for your expertise and for joining us today. And thank you, our Salesforce plus audience, for all those great questions. Before we go, I'd like to know if you've got one takeaway for our audience that you'd like them to leave with today. Julian, I'll start with you, man.

All right. One takeaway, I would say my one takeaway. It's just. Oh, my gosh. Slack. Like I said before, I use slack every single day. We're a slack shop. And the fact that I can get all of my answers in one place without navigating to a bunch of different systems, that's huge for me. So that simplicity that you're able to provide to your employees, if you have slack, go ahead and just send them there. It makes the job much, much easier.

Yeah. And I'm going to reiterate what Jen was saying, which is start small. This could, especially with Agent Force, it could spiral into. I could do this and I could do that, but identify that top use case that is essentially attributing to 60% of your queries. Automate that, and from there, keep on adding cases to start small and expand.

That's a good one.

Thank you guys so much for taking the time to join us today. We really appreciate it. All right, well, to all of our viewers, thank you so much for watching. HR's best benefits. Smarter employee support with Agent Force. If you want to learn more about Agent Force for HR Service, we have a number of resources for you. You can reach out to an Agent Force expert via the link on your screen, and we'll also drop that link in the chat for you. To learn more about what sets AgentForce for HR service apart, check out an analyst report. It outlines the product and its benefits. And before we go, we would love to hear from you. What did you think of this event? Just take a short survey on your Salesforce plus experience. It won't take long, we promise. Just scan the QR code on your screen or click the button in the chat below. Your feedback matters to us. And if you think your team or another colleague or anyone you know would be interested in checking out this virtual event, please share it with them. We've put the link on your screen sforce co hrbenefit and we'll also drop that email into the chat. Thank you for watching, everyone. I'm Diane Mizota, and we'll see you next time.

Sam.