Salesforce brings agentic AI to IT service management

Salesforce is bringing agentic AI to IT service management (ITSM). The CRM giant is taking aim at competitors like ServiceNow with Agentforce IT Service, a new IT support suite that leverages autonomous agents to resolve incidents and service requests.

The suite includes an agentic IT service desk that provides end-to-end IT service management functionality compliant with ITIL processes, AI agents that work together as subject-matter experts (SMEs) to support employees and IT teams, and a range of enterprise-wide connectors, integrations, and workflows. Underneath it all is an agentic configuration management database (CMDB) and service graph to deliver a full view of connectivity and dependencies via an enterprise graph of all infrastructure, applications, and services.

“We have consistently heard the feedback from our customers that the same experience we enable them to provide to their customers, they also want to provide that to their employees,” Kishan Chetan, EVP & GM of Service Cloud at Salesforce, said in a press conference Wednesday. “They want to engage with employees in a personalized, proactive manner.”

That’s the reason the company launched Agentforce for HR Service in May.

“We’re starting to see great success with that and that’s the reason that we put a significant investment into launching our Agentforce for IT Service,” he said.

Chetan explained that HR service and IT service are both undergoing significant disruption driven by a demand for a more conversational, more agentic experience. Previous automation attempts leveraging portals and chatbots have helped fill out tickets, but those tickets have still largely depended on human IT representatives for resolution, leaving employees waiting.

“As you’re creating more and more of these tickets and more and more of these issues that the IT team have to look at, you’re overwhelming them,” he said.

Agentic AI promises to relieve some of that pressure by resolving simpler issues autonomously.

Connectors and incident management

Chetan noted the suite is designed to meet employees where they work. They can request help from IT service agents via Slack, Microsoft Teams, employee portals, or webchats. The suite will launch with more than 100 pre-built connectors and integrations to offerings from partners such as Box, CrowdStrike, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Okta, Oracle NetSuite, Qualtrics, Workday, Zoom, and others to further support IT teams with integrating the suite with IT and HR workflows.

Employees can make service requests via a messaging interface that is already part of their workflow. An autonomous agent can answer questions about things such as eligibility for a laptop refresh by consulting an employee’s profile and the company’s policy to provide personalized, real-time resolution. Agents can also provide proactive incident support in the event of something like an email server outage, creating and filing incidents, alerting affected employees, and offering real-time status updates. If an issue proves highly complex or time-sensitive, agents can escalate to a human IT representative.

By automating incident management, Salesforce promises to reduce IT support costs while helping IT teams scale their efforts. Agentforce can automatically create and prioritize incidents based on employee reports. When incidents do occur, it can analyze past incidents to detect the underlying problem, generate a summary for human IT representatives, and propose solutions.

The Agentforce IT Service solution, including IT Service Desk, employee agents, and the embedded CMDB will be generally available later this month.