Salesforce’s Agentforce 2dx update aims to simplify AI agent development, deployment

Salesforce on Wednesday released the third version of its agentic AI offering — Agentforce 2dx — to simplify the development, testing, and deployment of AI agents that can automate business processes across departments, such as sales, service, marketing, finance, HR, and operations.

Agentforce 2dx is the developer-focused update and builds on the second version launched in December. It includes new features such as an API, DX Inspector, Interaction Explorer, and support for VS Code.

These updates can be grouped under two large buckets — orchestrating agents and building agents.

New Agentforce capabilities that help with orchestrating agents

Part of the company’s strategy to expand the reach of its agentic offering, the Agentforce API can be embedded in backend processes, other systems, and directly in applications, the company said.

“Enterprise customers can trigger Agentforce via a REST API to start a session, end a session, and continue a session, as well as ground the agent with data,” it added.

The expanded capabilities include Invocable Actions — a feature that will allow enterprises to embed Agentforce within Salesforce business logic by adding Agentforce as a step in Salesforce Flow and triggering it programmatically from inside Apex.

These actions will help enterprises activate an agent to reason about the next best steps when a scenario triggering it arises, according to the CRM software provider.

“Invocable Actions use cases could include automating service case resolutions, lead qualification, or order processing. For example, an AI agent could dynamically handle customer queries in Salesforce Flow or auto-populate CRM records,” said Dion Hinchcliffe, vice president and lead of the CIO practice at The Futurum Group.

Another new feature is the ability to embed Lightning web components within the response of Agentforce actions, which Salesforce expects will improve customer experience.

Lightning web components is a proprietary framework that can be used to develop build interfaces for mobile and desktop applications running on browsers using custom HTML and JavaScript.

Other updates include making features, announced earlier, such as the Topic Center, MuleSoft integrations, Tableau Semantics, and Slack integrations, generally available.

While the MuleSoft integrations are expected to help enterprises cut down on the time and complexity of building a new custom agent and integrating it into a workflow, Tableau Semantics is expected to improve the quality of agent responses.

New Agentforce capabilities that help develop, test, and deploy agents

In order to help developers build agents faster, Salesforce has added generative AI assistance in its low code Agent Builder tool that works by recommending and creating topics and instructions.

“Called AI Assist, this new capability also helps teams troubleshoot answers that Agentforce provides and gives guidance on how to improve the underlying topic and instructions,” the company said.  

However, some analysts feel that AI-assisted agent development might not be an entirely new feature that Salesforce is introducing.

“It has definitely been highlighted previously. However, the current enhancements look like they are building upon that foundation by making topic and instruction creation even more intuitive and adding deeper troubleshooting abilities,” said Cameron Marsh, senior analyst at Nucleus Research.

Another low code tool, dubbed the Testing Center, has been added to help enterprise teams and developers test their Agentforce configurations at scale using AI.

Testing Center automatically generates and runs test cases in an enterprise’s Salesforce Sandbox, the CRM software provider said, adding that the new tool can be used to evaluate how well Agentforce configurations are adhering to guardrails like faithfulness or context relevance.

In an effort to cater to professional developers, Salesforce has added support for command line interface (CLI) and VS Code in Agentforce.

“Developers can now create, update, and test all aspects of Agentforce configurations using the CLI and VS Code,” Salesforce said.Analysts, such as Hinchcliffe and Marsh, see the added support for pro-code tools as a strategy to cater to developers who prefer control, efficiency, and flexibility of these tools.

Other updates include a DX Inspector and an Interaction Explorer.

While the DX Inspector can be used to understand all the metadata and data being used by Agentforce inside an enterprise’s Salesforce Sandbox, the Interaction Explorer can be used to view detailed reporting, analytics about how Agentforce is performing, ranging from general trends down to individual session tracing.

“Enterprises can use the Interaction Explorer to understand each user request, the reasoning steps associated with the response and see AI-powered recommendations to help continuously refine topics and instructions to improve agent performance,” Salesforce explained.

Other updates and availability

In its efforts to expand the reach of Agentforce and give developers the opportunity to play and learn more about its agentic offering, Salesforce is offering the Salesforce Developer Edition.

The free environment, which is generally available, can be used to access Agentforce and Data Cloud and comes with 10GB of access to Data Cloud and 150 large language model (LLM) generations per hour.

The full release of Agentforce 2dx will be generally available in April 2025, with specific features being released in advance starting this week.

The Agentforce API, Invocable Actions, and the DX Inspector have been made generally available. The AI assist capability inside Agent Builder will be available later in March 2025, followed by the Testing Center being included in April and the Interaction Explorer coming in Fall this year.