Salesforce this week launched Agentforce IT Service, an IT service management (ITSM) platform that is based on an agentic artificial intelligence (AI) framework.
Kishan Chetan, executive vice president and general manager for Service Cloud at Salesforce, said this latest addition to the company’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) application portfolio provides IT teams with a conversational-first IT support platform that streamlines IT workflows and processes by, for example, enabling AI agents to automatically alert employees via Slack or Microsoft Teams that there is an issue and, if needed, create an incident on behalf of the employee.
Additionally, Agentforce automatically creates and prioritizes incidents based on employee reports. If multiple employees report am issue, Agentforce identifies it as widespread problem and escalates it to a major incident and then alerts the human members of the IT teams to resolve it.
Agentforce can also analyze past incidents to help detect an underlying problem, generate a summary, and propose recommendations to resolve them.
Finally, IT leaders can also monitor team performance, track asset inventory, and manage overall incident volume to ensure service levels are maintained.
Collectively, those capabilities will reduce the overall volume of tickets that are currently overwhelming IT staffs, said Chetan.
At the core of the Salesforce ITSM platform is an Agentic Configuration Management Database (CMDB) and Service Graph that maps all infrastructure and a set of discovery tools. It also comes with more than 100 pre-built connectors for third-party platforms from Box, Crowdstrike, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Okta, Oracle NetSuite, Qualtrics, TeamViewer, Workday and Zoom.
Designed to adhere to IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices, early customers that have already adopted Agentforce IT Service include UNESCO, EPB, Piedmont Healthcare, and the Ospelt Group.
It’s not clear to what degree IT teams are looking to replace their existing ITSM platforms, but Salesforce is at least partially counting on the fact that some organizations may want to consolidate the number of vendors they currently rely on to deliver ITSM, customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing platforms. The challenge is some of the providers of ITSM platforms are now expanding the scope of their offerings to include CRM and marketing applications.
The one thing that is clear is that in the age of AI agents the relationship between end users and IT platforms is fundamentally changing. Salesforce sees that transiton as an opportunity extend the scope and reach of its portfolio into adjacent areas such as ITSM. Of course, the leaders within organizations that select an ITSM platform are not always the same ones choosing which CRM to employ so it remains to be seen to what degree Salesforce can woo IT administrators that usually have long histories with using rival ITSM platforms that are typically well entrenched in the organizations that rely on them to manage a wide range of interconnected workflows.
More challenging still, many of those rival providers of ITSM platforms are just as equally committed as Salesforce is to embracing agentic AI in a way that doesn’t necessarily require them to acquire and deploy an entirely new platform.
