This Month at Salesforce | Agentforce Coworker, Slackbot, Piper

Welcome to another episode of This Month at Salesforce. I am your host, Shabani Ahuja, and we are back to give you all the latest product news, announcements, and innovations that are coming out of Salesforce this month. All right. So let's talk innovation and not just updates or new versions. No, no, no, no, no, folks. We've got brand new products. On that, there's a hot topic trending and it's a little bit contentious. So we're about to get spicy up in here. We've now launched Slackbot, Agentforce Coworker, and Piper from Qualified. Are, are we competing with ourselves or are they BFFs? Well, let's break it down. We'll start by looking at 3 very powerful AI agents that you can start using right now. The first is Agentforce Coworker, which is built directly into Salesforce. It's especially powerful when you want to go deep on your business context, like think about your pipeline, cases, records, workflows, and enterprise data. And it's a great way to orchestrate specialized agents to get work done. And the best part is you don't have to do some complicated configurations. Nah, all you have to do is flip that switch and turn it on. Disclaimer, flipping that switch does not mean that we have a magic wand for your legal, privacy, and compliance teams. You got to figure that switch out on your own with the lawyers. The next agent is Slackbot, which is in Slack, of course. Now, Slackbot is incredibly smart. I could not live without it. Just ask it a question and it will find answers across your team's conversations, files, and connected apps, which includes inside Salesforce as well. So here's where it gets a little spicy. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Now, Agentforce Coworker and Slackbot, are they frenemies or are they best friends? Nah, folks, they're best buds. Now, both can draft, summarize, and take actions across the systems and agents they're connected to. And thanks to Headless 360, this is another one of those choose-your-adventure options. The difference, however, is where you start. Are you working in Salesforce apps or an external app like Claude? Well, then ask Agentforce coworker. Are you working in Slack? Well, then ask Slackbot because it's right there for you. Your AI teammate meets you where you work. Now, I mentioned that there were 3 agents, and this The third one works directly with your customers. Piper is an AI SDR agent to help companies grow inbound pipeline at scale. She can interact with customers, she can answer questions and book meetings around the clock. And here's the incredible part. 100% of qualified customers go live and they do it in 45 days or less. So you've got employee agents and customer agents working together alongside each other. Together, they're a part of the Agentic Enterprise. But let's get back to Piper because she's pretty cool. And here to talk a little more about her is Dan Darcy from Qualified.

Hey, Shivani, how are you?

Hey, Dan. Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

Welcome to This Month at Salesforce, but also welcome back to Salesforce itself.

Yes, I'm absolutely excited to be back here at Salesforce. I was here previously from 2008 to 2021. Left in '21 to help start Qualified, and 5 years later, boom, boomeranged back with Piper.

So you boomeranged right back onto the set too.

I like that.

It was pretty slick how you came in.

Yeah.

Now Piper is all the rage. Why don't you tell us a little bit about this Piper?

Well, Piper is Qualified's AI SDR agent. But what I like to say about Piper is that she is the best inbound sales rep that any B2B company can actually hire. She helps engage with visitors on the website 24/7. She helps qualify that pipeline. And really, at the end of the day, really about turning website traffic and emails into pipeline. But you know what I mean? You know, we shouldn't hear from ourselves. We should actually hear from Piper. I want to introduce you to Piper. So hold on a second. Here you go.

What's up, girl? How are you?

Hey, I'm doing great. Thanks for asking. What's on your mind today?

Hey, Piper, why don't you introduce yourself and tell everyone about what you do and the capabilities here on the website and in the inbox?

Sure thing. I'm Piper, an AI sales assistant for Salesforce. I help visitors learn about our products, answer questions, and even book meetings with our team. Just let me know what you're exploring and I can guide you from there.

Hey, Piper, can you tell me a little bit about Headless 360? And, and I'm a bit of a visual learner, so show me something.

Here's a visual of the Salesforce platform. Headless 360 is that top layer providing APIs, identity governance, and access controls for seamless integration. What else would help you dig into it?

See, that's awesome about Piper because she's also able to bring up presentations and slides as well too. So it's incredible. Hey, Piper, why don't you tell us a little bit more about Slack and Slackbot too?

Absolutely. Slack is Salesforce's collaboration layer. Think channels, workflows, and huddles. Slackbot is an AI-powered assistant boosting productivity inside Slack. Want to dive deeper into how it can help your teams?

Piper, this is amazing. You and I, girl, we're going to chat later about Dan. I think, I think that's what I'm going to talk to you about once he leaves.

I'm here to keep us on track with Salesforce solutions. What area can I help you with today?

She's only here to talk about pipeline and ConvertPipeline, not to talk about me. So that's Piper.

Dan, that was incredible. It was nice to meet both you and Piper. Thank you very much. And looking forward to the next time.

Definitely. See you next time. Thanks for coming. Thanks, Dan.

Woo!

Piper is going to do great things for our customers. Now, our customers are number one, but we like to call ourselves customer zero. We actually use all of these products before we release them, and we get to see firsthand what the customer experience will be, what works and what doesn't. And now in the tech world, they call that eating your own dog food, but we keep it classy. We call it drinking our own champagne. And if you wanna learn more about how we actually deploy these products for ourselves first and use them every day, there's a new series all about just that. Check it out.

300+ agents deployed, millions of hours saved, 170,000 fewer support cases year over year. This is how we actually built the Agentic Enterprise. Here's what nobody tells you. The path to production-ready agents runs through real obstacles: duplicate agents, hallucinations, adoption challenges, and governance gaps. We hit all of them and then we solved them, building on the Salesforce platform for ourselves first as customer zero. I'm Alex LeBeck and This is the Salesforce AI Blueprint, our Customer Zero story. Every episode, I sit down with the team that built it, the architects, the operators, and the leaders who deployed Agentforce across our own business, broke things, fixed them, and then rebuilt Salesforce as an agentic enterprise. No corporate fluff, just the people, the architecture, and the lessons that made it real. Join us to learn from the team who built it.

So that's what's going on with us. But we're not here just to talk about ourselves because the real measure of our success is our customer success. So let's take a look at one of those successful customers, Batteries Plus. Batteries Plus is a US company that sells— well, the name gives it away— batteries, but also repair services and power solutions for homes and businesses. Now that's where the plus comes in. Now Batteries Plus, they had a unique challenge, a really good one, but a challenge nonetheless. They had double-digit growth 4 years running, which is incredible, but that makes it harder and harder to stay connected with every customer as the business was scaling. Now, spoiler alert, Agentforce might have had a little something to do with solving that problem, and we're making a film about that story right now. Here he is live on set, Jeff Swiatek from Batteries Plus. Welcome to the show, Jeff. Now, double-digit growth is a good problem to have. Let's talk about your challenge and why you turned to Salesforce and Agentforce specifically to solve it.

Yeah, I mean, you said it, right? So we've had double-digit growth for the last 4 years. And as most people know in sales, the executive team at Batteries Plus just expected that to continue to grow. The question was, how do we connect with more people without adding resources. And it made perfect sense to, you know, partner with Salesforce on the agent and have them connect with not only new leads as they came into our store, but new, you know, customers that have been around for a long time that maybe the salespeople just didn't have time to reach out to.

Engagement. That's a great use case for an agent. Now, how long did it take to build that?

We started this end of— beginning of February. We did run into some bumps, so it wasn't perfect. But I would say May, we really hit the ground running and have been connecting with our customers since then. We've built a solid pipeline of about $15 million, maybe $16 million. I didn't check it today. We've seen about $1 million close in that pipeline. Our team is happy with the results. We could always use more. But in general, over the last 90 days, it's been a, it's been a pretty good story.

Now, Jeff, was there a moment when this really clicked for you though? Like where you thought, oh, this is actually working?

One of our toughest franchise owners, we connected with one of his customers that drove about a $50,000 opportunity. So when you get a $50,000 opportunity that you would've never gotten because you just didn't have the bandwidth to talk to that customer, That helps that franchise owner. He gets the word out across the network that, hey, the agent's working, they're connecting with customers, they're bringing us opportunities. Without the partnership of Salesforce, we wouldn't be where we're at today. You've learned our business.

Happier customers, happier franchise owners.

That's the goal.

Thanks a lot, Jeff. Have fun on the shoot and have fun with hair and makeup. They worked wonders on me, particularly after a late night.

Looking forward to seeing you at Dreamforce.

And if you want to learn more about the Batteries Plus story, there's going to be a film coming to a theater near you, a.k.a. Dreamforce. Of course, that's just one of many, many customers. But the Salesforce ecosystem isn't just us and our customers either. It also includes our partners that help those customers with their implementations. One of those customers and one of those partners just ended up in the hot seat in a new series coming soon to Salesforce Socials called Ecosystem Unscripted. Watch this.

Today with me, I have Tom from NeuraFlash and Tyler from BCU. This is our business speak or BS button. In the world of agentic AI, we're all moving fast and we want these answers to reflect that. So if we hear anything's taking too long, anybody's free to press the button. So let's get started. I'm going to put you both on the spot. In a sentence or less, what was the biggest challenge you had to solve?

So the product was new and we had to work through the new technology, work through data, work through processes to try and get so we could actually put something in production. So putting all those together.

Facts.

It's me. Hi, I'm the problem.

It's me.

I was the problem.

Or maybe it was Tyler. One of us.

It was us.

We were the problem.

It was us.

All right, Tyler, can you sum that up in one sentence?

For us, it is about solving for scalable growth for the credit union.

Love it.

That's a better answer. No buzzer for you.

Why Agentforce?

Agentforce is a product. The big picture for us is the partnership with Salesforce and having partners along the way with Naraflash.

I was going to buzz him too. Great answer. I'm glad I didn't buzz you. That was a good answer.

Yeah, buzz that.

What about you?

When you're on the platform, if you do a point solution outside the platform, you spend all your time integrating, none of your time innovating. Having your hands—

I love it.

I'm done. Don't, don't elaborate. Great answer.

All right, results.

27% reduction in average handle time means the agents are freed up to actually engage like a human.

What's the one thing you would share with any customer going on an agentic journey?

Do not wait. This is not wait-and-see technology because your business will fall behind because BCU is getting better business metrics than you are because they didn't wait.

Love it.

This is what your consumer is looking for. So lean in, invest, go for it.

Well, huge thanks to Tom and Tyler. That's a little bit from our Ecosystems Unscripted show. We would love for you to join us and we will see you there.

We really do spend a lot of time talking about customer success, and it's with good reason. Business outcomes and bottom lines are important, but Who gets that done? It's people. So let's talk about people for a second. Our customers are using the same technology and solutions to improve the lives of real people, real families every single day. Let's look at how Thames Valley Police is using Agentforce to help people in emergency situations. Thames Valley Police, what's your emergency?

About 1.4 million calls across our police services, 400,000 of those were contacting us to speak about something they'd already reported.

If we can reduce that failed demand, that's the benefit of Salesforce technology.

Agentforce is our agentic overlay for people to have conversations with Bobby, our agent. Agentforce allows our humans to concentrate on the high-harm aspects of the work that we do.

This is what we're there for. We're there to protect people. We show you the finished product, nice and polished. But we know that somebody actually has to make all of those implementations work. And those somebodies are the driving force behind every agentic enterprise. I'm speaking, of course, about our Trailblazer Community. We recently caught up with one of our Trailblazers, Brittany Argall from AWS. Here's what she had to say.

I was kind of the keeper of the knowledge. If someone couldn't find something, they would send me a Slack or an email and I would get to it maybe hours later. I said, I can build this employee agent and I can remove myself From this process, now people can self-serve. Now they go in there, they ask a question, and they have an answer in under 20 seconds.

Brittany, take one.

When Agent Force first went live, I thought it was really out of reach for me. It just seemed too technical for me. When I left Dreamforce, I said, "This is something I need to learn." So I got onto Trailhead, and in just a couple of months, I went from nothing to. to Legend and launched an agent. I am now running the community of practice, we call it, at Amazon. So I am helping builders across our entire Salesforce ecosystem. We have over 200 orgs at Amazon and over 1,600 builders. So I'm helping, in some cases, people like me who don't have a technical background get skilled up so that they can also build agents. We did a trial run of an Agent Blazer challenge within AWS. It was the first one at AWS, and the goal was to help people see that, you know, anyone can build an agent. It's approachable for everybody. I expected maybe 5 or so, and we had about 20 people actually get to Legend within just 2 months. When I think about the impact of building an agent, I think about how I'm making people's jobs easier. Since I'm supporting our Salesforce builders, that means that the rest of Amazon is getting the solutions they need faster. Their developers that support them are spending less time going and finding things and more time with their hands on their keyboard building solutions that help them.

Woo!

Thanks to Brittany. That's 1,600 folks at Amazon that are now builders with the help of Trailhead. Now folks, this is free and it's accessible to all. And speaking of trailblazers, last month we announced a contest, Agent Force in Action, to find all of the really cool things that people are building for themselves and their companies with Agentforce. We have our first 2 winners and they are— drum roll, please. Kapil Batra from India and Abby Matthews from California. Congratulations to both of you. And for the rest of you Trailblazers, this contest is ongoing. It's not over yet, folks. Show us what you're working on and you could be next. Plus, you can win some pretty cool prizes. Like an Apple Watch. Now, you might have heard the Cannes Festival of Creativity just took place in France. And if you're a marketer, a creator, or an innovator, this was one of the hottest places to be. No, like, like literally, it took place during a heat wave with temperatures topping 105 degrees Fahrenheit. That's 40 degrees Celsius to the rest of the world. And here is our very own Madeline Schofield to keep things cool on the Salesforce Beach.

Thanks, Shivani. We are having an incredible time here in Cannes, France, with so much inspiration and creativity here at Salesforce Beach. We've had record-breaking temperatures here in France.

If you made it here, you have survived the heat.

I know it's hot.

How are we doing?

Which might have something to do with the epic dance party we had with Diplo right here at the beach last night.

I know it's humid, but we're going to still dance.

Well, let's talk about a few of the key themes that we have heard over and over. We are hearing from so many executives that you can't move into production unless you have a very solid foundation. And that comes down to having great data, data quality, and making sure that you are ruthless about protecting that data.

The data foundation is critical. Don't underestimate the value of the data foundation.

The ability to stitch data across the organization seamlessly.

And so we go to the, you know, our CIO team and say, If we had this data, look what we could build.

When my clients say today, my data's not ready for AI, I say, cool, you might not be here in 2 years then.

The next is compliance.

Compliance is becoming the, you know, the new sexy. Because we're in the regulated space, all of it has to be driven by compliance.

Compliance cannot be a checkpoint. It needs to be embedded throughout your entire implementation. And lastly, that AI is not here to replace creativity and certainly not us. Human connection is more important than ever before.

It's all about the ideas, and technology has come and gone. There's something new all the time. It's about how do you apply it to do great work.

AI doesn't have taste, you know? It doesn't have a curator. These skills are incredibly important, the uniquely human skills that are needed now more than ever.

To make sure We keep our creatives still human.

That's human and AI working together, which is absolutely incredible. We're having a great time. Back to you in the studio, Shivani.

And finally, speaking of events, the absolute biggest event in the world of Salesforce is coming up next month. Even the sea lions of San Francisco are going to tune in for this one, folks. That's right. Dreamforce 2026 is happening September 15th to 17th right here in San Francisco with groundbreaking keynotes, thousands of sessions, the world's most influential voices, and one really huge concert. I can't tell you who it is, but trust me, my booty is already shaking. Guess what? Your reward for watching all the way to the end of this episode, it's a discount code for 20% off your registration. Use the code DF26TMAS. I will see you there. Well, folks, that is all the time we have today. We want to thank Jeff Swiatek, Brittany Argall, Dan Darcy, and Piper. But most of all, we want to thank you, the doers, the builders, the trailblazers. Thanks for taking the time to join us today on This Month at Salesforce.