Salesforce expands beyond the front office with Agentforce Operations

Enterprises have been fixated on AI agents for front office workflows, but there’s still a lot of operational drag behind the scenes. Many back office tasks, such as returns processing, inventory reconciliation, and supply chain oversight, are still performed manually, leading to inefficiencies.

Today, Salesforce is turning its attention to that problem with Agentforce Operations, which tasks AI agents with the drudgery of the back office. The company claims agents can cut cycle times by up to 70% for processes like auditing and onboarding, and eliminate 80% of manual chores like data entry.

Compared to Salesforce’s Agentforce, an early-entrant agent builder platform, the new Agentforce Operations “is tackling a completely different problem,” said Sanjna Parulekar, the company’s VP of AI. “There’s so much time spent on these back office processes, to no avail.”

Autonomous agents handle ‘busy work’

Agentforce Operations builds on Salesforce’s acquisition of Regrello, an AI-powered operating system for manufacturing and supply chains.

Agentforce Operations coordinates AI agents that handle “busy work,” based on business process blueprints. These guidance documents can be loaded into the system for company-specific workflows, or users can access 30-plus out-of-the-box blueprints for common tasks like onboarding, invoice auditing, or rescheduling. Either way, users don’t need to build models from scratch.

“You have a Lucidchart, a Word doc, a drawing, you upload it into Agentforce Operations, and it’ll digitize that process into a multi step workflow,” Parulekar explained. “It’ll split up the work into several minion agents that can take action on different steps.”

For instance, agents extract data from documents, run computations, or identify gaps in compliance. They can work across typically disconnected systems like email or enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms.

Human users can continue working with existing tools and interact via email, Slack, or Microsoft Teams, tweaking AI activities as needed, and updating agent operations with plain language. The system automatically flags delays (such as lags in required approvals) or suggests fixes. Every agent action is recorded and mapped back to the digital blueprint.

“You can build in steps for review, for humans to be in the loop wherever you want,” said Parulekar. “That combination of non deterministic and deterministic, when it comes to this agentic AI world, it’s so critical.”

Salesforce claims that a single AI agent can perform an audit within 60 seconds; normally, this would take a team of human auditors four hours to complete.

A new area for Salesforce

Matt Mullen, lead analyst for AI applications at consultancy firm Deep Analysis, noted that the ability to rapidly create a diagrammatic of a process, ingest it, and have a workable starting point for an automated version is indeed a potential time-saver.

When combined with technology such as task mining via Salesforce Apromore that determines process details up front, it offers “real potential to organizations looking to modernize their key processes,” he said.

The biggest hurdles enterprises face when handling backend workflows are “complexity and criticality,” Mullen noted. But these processes define primary operations: How things are made, how materials are ordered, how products are shipped.

“Those processes have a lot of moving parts, and typically are integrated into a whole raft of line-of-business systems at various points in their execution,” he said. Processes evolve, and in some cases they’re only understood in totality by a small number of people.

Thus, enterprises that already have partial or complete automation established for various processes will likely see Salesforce as a cost-effective tool, Mullen said, particularly in areas like banking, insurance, healthcare, or in heavy industries like construction that still rely on manual, paper-heavy tasks.

That said, this is a new area for Salesforce. The company will need to enable its vast array of integration partners to have conversations around job titles and organizational areas they’ve not typically engaged with.

“Salesforce has been front-office focused from its inception, and making sure that it can articulate the value and sell into back office operations will be an ongoing challenge,” said Mullen.

A hard problem to solve 

When orchestrating agents for backend systems, there’s a lot to consider, Parulekar pointed out, including issues around ERPs, customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, and external data lakes. Some of these systems are so old they may not even have application programming interfaces (APIs).

“It’s a minefield for customers,” she said. “It kind of feels obvious: [They ask] ‘why didn’t someone do this already?’ [The answer:] Because it’s a really hard problem to solve.”

What’s different about Agentforce Operations, Parulekar said, is that agents look at processes first, rather than people, and assess how those processes can be managed accurately and with high performance. That might even mean adding more steps to the process.

“It’s such a knee jerk reaction if you’re optimizing for humans to say, ‘let’s just give [a human] one thing to review instead of five,’” she said. With agents, a workflow may go from five steps to 50, but 48 of those are completed by an agent. Humans are only brought into the loop when they’re most useful, and can focus attention elsewhere otherwise.

“The most trite thing people say right now is ‘AI is going to free up your work,’” Parulekar acknowledged. But it’s true, she said: “I think it’s really bringing some creativity back to the work. Enterprises can focus on more critical decisions that have less to do with the minutia of a process and more to do with strategy.”

More capacity without more headcount

Melanie Kalia, director of product management at Equinox Group, said that, like many organizations, the fitness company was dealing with back office and operations workflows that were slow and labor-intensive. Particularly in the fitness industry, she explained, there’s an “enormous amount” of administrative work around managing sales pipelines, following up, explaining promotions, and scheduling tours.

“We agreed automation had to be part of the answer, but generic workflow tools weren’t cutting it, or felt like luxury,” she said. Her team looked at other options like Sierra and Netomi, but Agentforce Operations was a natural extension to its existing Salesforce infrastructure.

The company’s primary focus with agents is lead generation and “nurturing,” Kalia explained. Leads can fall through the cracks because back office teams are too stretched to follow up consistently. Agentforce Operations is helping automate outreach sequences, qualify inbound leads, and move prospects through the funnel without requiring manual intervention at every step.

“It’s essentially giving us the capacity of a much larger team without adding headcount,” she said.

Being an early adopter ‘a challenge’

Being an early platform adopter was a challenge, however; as Salesforce iterated its approach, her team had to follow suit. Early CRM cleanup was also required to ensure more reliable outputs. Then there was the internal change management piece; getting sales and ops teams comfortable handing off tasks to AI took some trust, Kalia said.

However, “once we ran a few pilots and people saw the agents actually working accurately, adoption has picked up and is gaining momentum,” she noted.

Ultimately, Equinox is seeing “encouraging signals,” with faster response times to inbound leads and more consistent follow up on those that otherwise might have gone cold.

“We haven’t fully quantified the full ROI yet,” Kalia noted. But the results are trending positive, leading to sales increases, more quality messaging, and “a sense that our solution is finally working for and with us rather than replacing us.”