Salesforce and Workday today revealed they are working together to enable artificial intelligence (AI) agents to interoperate across their respective platforms.
The two companies have been working together to make it simpler for organizations to employ AI agents to automate workflows, for example, that might span customer relationship management (CRM) software provided by Salesforce and the human resources (HR) applications provided by Workday, says David Schmaier, president and chief product officer for Salesforce.
At the core of this collaboration is a forthcoming Agentforce Platform that Salesforce will deliver later this year to enable end users to more easily employ natural language to invoke agents based on the Salesforce Einstein and Workday AI frameworks. Workday will make use of a Salesforce Zero Copy Partner Network launched earlier this year to integrate its data with the Salesforce Data Cloud.
The Salesforce Zero Copy Partner Network makes use of data virtualization capabilities to enable agents to be trained and analyze data without having to migrate data into Salesforce Data Cloud. That platform is already integrated with data lakes from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Databricks, Google, Microsoft and Snowflake. “We’ve harmonized the data,” says Schmaier.
As a result, organizations will then be able to set up, for example, an AI service agent that will surface recommendations and complete tasks on behalf of employees.
In addition, employees will be able to interact with those agents either via the Salesforce Slack messaging platform or any other platform they prefer, says Schmaier.
At the same time, organizations that identify sales teams that are not performing as well as expected can also use agents to automatically schedule them to participate in additional training, notes David Somers, chief product officer for Workday. Organizations will also be able to more easily identify skills gaps in the organization that AI agents will make it easier to identify.
Onboarding of new employees will also be greatly simplified as AI agents organize the tasks that need to be completed, he adds. “HR departments will be able to create personalized messages for each new employee,” says Somers.
Finally, AI agents will enable HR departments to configure agents that will enable employees to self-service any questions they might have about benefits, health care plans or other company policies, says Somers.
It’s not clear how many other providers of platforms will be making use of the Salesforce Zero Copy Partner Network to integrate applications infused with AI capabilities with the software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications provided by Salesforce. However, over time organizations are going to expect that the AI agents created by various software vendors will be able to interoperate with each other. Less clear is to what degree the unification of workflows enabled by harmonized data might eventually lead to additional mergers and acquisitions as data virtualization makes it simpler to integrate workflows.
In the meantime, however, organizations should expect it to soon become much simpler to drive a much wider range of digital business transformation initiatives in the age of AI.
