News from the AI & ML world
DeeperML - #agentforce
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@Salesforce
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Salesforce
The modern workplace is undergoing a significant transformation with the integration of AI agents into daily operations. Organizations are increasingly adopting autonomous AI systems capable of automating entire workflows across various industries. This shift marks the beginning of the "agentic AI era," where intelligent systems can perform complex tasks, make decisions, and interact with systems with minimal human oversight. This evolution requires organizational leaders to strategically plan for AI agent integration and implementation to maximize efficiency and productivity.
This new collaborative workforce sees humans and AI agents working together, fundamentally changing roles, workflows, and strategies. The contact center is a prime example, moving away from a "bot vs. human" approach to a "bot with human" model. In this landscape, human agents become orchestrators of complex customer journeys, while AI agents act as autonomous copilots, taking initiative on routine tasks and deferring to humans when emotional intelligence or nuanced understanding is required. This collaborative approach aims to improve speed, operational throughput, and decision quality. Companies such as Cisco are building the infrastructure to support this AI-driven future, where potentially billions of AI agents will work together globally and continuously. This includes developing systems where AI agents can independently handle tasks such as identity verification, multi-step backend actions, and even proactive customer engagement. However, successful integration requires careful consideration of data integration, system compatibility, governance, compliance, and change management to ensure AI agents operate within predefined boundaries and judgment frameworks. Recommended read:
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@futurumgroup.com
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Salesforce has officially announced its plan to acquire Informatica in a deal valued at $8 billion. This move signifies Salesforce's continued investment in Artificial Intelligence (AI), specifically to bolster its Agentforce service and enhance data management and governance capabilities. The acquisition will provide Salesforce with a broader pool of metadata and improve data transparency, allowing it to train and inform its AI agents more effectively. Salesforce's Agentforce service, launched in September of last year, provides users with autonomous AI agents for various sectors such as customer service, HR, and recruitment.
The acquisition of Informatica is expected to provide a unified architecture for agentic AI, enabling AI agents to operate safely, responsibly, and at scale across enterprises. By integrating Informatica’s data catalog, data integration, governance, quality, privacy, metadata management, and Master Data Management (MDM) services, Salesforce aims to create a more complete and agent-ready data platform. CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff, stated that the combination of Informatica's capabilities with Salesforce's Data Cloud, MuleSoft, and Tableau will empower autonomous agents to deliver smarter, safer, and more scalable outcomes, strengthening Salesforce's position in the $150 billion-plus enterprise data market. Informatica's CEO, Amit Walia, added that joining forces with Salesforce represents a significant leap forward in bringing data and AI to life, empowering businesses with the transformative power of their data. The deal, which has been in the works for over a year, is expected to close early in Salesforce’s next fiscal year and is anticipated to boost operating margins from the second year onwards. Under the agreement, Informatica shareholders will receive $25 per share, reflecting a premium of approximately 11% from the previous closing price. This acquisition follows Salesforce's earlier purchase of Slack Technologies for $28 billion in 2021 and acquisitions of Tableau and MuleSoft in previous years, demonstrating the company's history of strategic acquisitions to expand its capabilities and market presence. Analysts believe that Informatica's data management tools will add crucial data governance and orchestration capabilities to Salesforce, essential for effectively running AI agents with data from outside CRM systems. Recommended read:
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@devblogs.microsoft.com
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Microsoft is aggressively pushing AI innovation to the edge, with a series of announcements highlighting the company's vision for an AI-powered future where humans partner with autonomous agents. At the Build developer conference, Microsoft unveiled tools designed to help developers build this agentic future, embedding bots into browsers, websites, operating systems, and everyday workflows. Unlike previous Copilot-centric approaches, Microsoft is placing greater emphasis on dynamic agents, powered by integrations with third-party systems through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), shifting from single-use AI assistants to broader, integrated ecosystems.
Microsoft is also introducing the Agent Store for Microsoft 365 Copilot, a centralized, curated marketplace designed to help automate tasks, streamline workflows, and boost productivity. The Agent Store offers a new experience within Microsoft 365 Copilot that enables users to browse, install, and try agents tailored to their needs, and features agents built by Microsoft, trusted partners, and customers. With over 70 agents available at launch, the Agent Store aims to make it easier to discover, share, and deploy agents across teams and organizations, using both low-code and pro-code tools. Furthermore, Microsoft’s agentic AI platform, Azure AI Foundry, is powering key healthcare advances with Stanford. Beyond healthcare, Microsoft is exploring ways to bring AI to web apps on the Edge browser and enable developers to deploy bots directly on Windows, as the company recognizes the full potential of its AI agents ecosystem is still unfolding. Recommended read:
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@Salesforce
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Salesforce is aggressively expanding its Agentforce platform to capitalize on the growing demand for AI-powered digital labor. A key component of this strategy is the acquisition of UK-based AI automation startup, Convergence.ai. This acquisition will bring Convergence's team and technology, including their expertise in AI agent design, autonomous task execution, and adaptive systems, into the Agentforce platform. The move is intended to accelerate the development of sophisticated AI agents capable of handling complex digital workflows within enterprise environments.
Convergence.ai, founded in 2024 by machine learning scientists Marvin Purtorab and Andy Toulis, has developed innovative AI agents, including "Proxy," designed to learn, evolve, and collaborate with humans. Their technology enables AI agents to navigate and execute tasks within dynamic digital systems, adapting to challenges such as pop-ups, system errors, and user interface changes. According to Salesforce, this acquisition will enable Agentforce to deliver AI that truly transforms how work gets done, allowing for AI assistants that can intelligently manage intricate tasks with human-like ingenuity. To further drive adoption of Agentforce, Salesforce has introduced new flexible pricing. The new ‘Flex Credits’ pricing model is designed to enable businesses to scale AI-powered digital labor to every employee, department, and process. This initiative aims to meet the rapidly accelerating demand for digital labor and positions Salesforce as a leader in the evolving landscape of AI-driven automation and customer interaction. Salesforce executives envision a future where Agentforce empowers customers with AI agents that not only follow instructions but also perceive, reason, and adapt to the complexities of modern digital workflows. Recommended read:
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@Salesforce
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Salesforce, a US-based cloud software giant, has announced its acquisition of Convergence.ai, a London-based company specializing in AI agents for digital environments. This strategic move aims to significantly enhance Salesforce's Agentforce platform, a core component of its AI strategy. Convergence.ai, founded by Marvin Purtorab and Andy Toulis, develops AI agents capable of navigating dynamic digital systems and executing complex tasks, such as managing online workflows and multi-step processes, even when encountering issues like pop-ups or system errors. The acquisition is expected to close in Q2 of Salesforce’s fiscal year 2026, ending July 31.
The Convergence.ai team brings expertise in AI agent design, autonomous task execution, and adaptive systems, which will be instrumental in accelerating the development of advanced AI agents for Agentforce. Adam Evans, EVP & GM, Salesforce AI Platform, emphasized the importance of this acquisition, stating that "the next wave of customer interaction and employee productivity will be driven by highly capable AI agents that can navigate the complexities of today’s digital work." He further added that Salesforce is looking towards a future where Agentforce can empower customers with AI agents that can perceive, reason, and adapt to complex digital workflows. Salesforce is investing heavily in AI to empower Agentforce. Christophe Coenraets, SVP of Developer Relations at Salesforce, is building the new Salesforce Developer Edition, which includes access to the company’s agentic AI platform, Agentforce. A flexible pricing plan for Agentforce has also been announced. This plan includes flex credits, which come in packs of 100,000 for $500, to scale Agentforce across workflows, along with a Flex Agreement that enables companies to shift between user licenses and flex credits as needed. Recommended read:
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Coen van@Techzine Global
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ServiceNow is making significant strides in the realm of agentic AI, highlighted at their Knowledge 2025 conference. A key announcement is a partnership with Nvidia to develop Apriel Nemotron 15B, an open-source reasoning model. This model is designed to be faster and more cost-effective than larger language models, while still providing enterprise-grade intelligence. The ambition is to give businesses a single, coherent way to get all their different AI tools and intelligent agents working together, right across the company.
NVIDIA NeMo, NVIDIA Llama Nemotron open datasets and ServiceNow domain data trained on NVIDIA DGX Cloud was used to create this new model. Apriel Nemotron 15B is engineered for reasoning. It draws inferences, weighs goals, and navigates rules in real-time. This makes it well-suited for powering AI agents that can support thousands of concurrent enterprise workflows. Furthermore, ServiceNow and NVIDIA are introducing a new data flywheel architecture, integrating ServiceNow’s Workflow Data Fabric with NVIDIA NeMo microservices, enabling continuous learning and improvement for the AI model. In addition to the Nvidia partnership, ServiceNow is launching Agentforce for HR Service. This initiative brings AI agents and Service Cloud capabilities to human resources, empowering employees to get personalized answers to HR-related questions and take action on their own, freeing overwhelmed HR teams to focus on more strategic work. ServiceNow believes AI innovation is the answer here, a way to fundamentally change how businesses run – making them more resilient, more efficient, and helping them get a handle on costs, all while chipping away at that mountain of tech debt and operational guesswork. Recommended read:
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@zdnet.com
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Salesforce is tackling the challenge of "jagged intelligence" in AI, aiming to enhance the reliability and consistency of enterprise AI agents. The company's AI Research division has introduced new benchmarks, models, and guardrails designed to make these agents more intelligent, trusted, and versatile for business applications. This initiative seeks to bridge the gap between an AI system's potential intelligence and its ability to perform consistently in unpredictable real-world enterprise environments. Salesforce is focusing on "Enterprise General Intelligence" (EGI), which prioritizes consistency alongside capability for AI agents in complex business settings.
Salesforce AI Research is addressing AI's inconsistency problem by introducing the SIMPLE dataset, a public benchmark with 225 reasoning questions to measure the "jaggedness" of AI systems. They have also introduced ContextualJudgeBench, which evaluates an agent’s ability to maintain accuracy and faithfulness in context-specific answers, emphasizing factual correctness and the ability to abstain from answering when appropriate, especially in sensitive fields like law, finance, and healthcare. These tools are essential for diagnosing and mitigating the erratic behavior of AI agents across tasks of similar complexity. A recent Salesforce survey of 2,552 U.S. consumers reveals a growing acceptance of AI agents, with roughly half (53%) wanting AI to simplify complex information. Furthermore, Salesforce is expanding its Trust Layer with new safeguards, including the SFR-Guard model family, to detect prompt injections, toxic outputs, and hallucinations in both open-domain and CRM-specific data. Overall, the survey makes it clear that AI agents are already starting to have a societal impact. Recommended read:
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@Salesforce
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Salesforce is enhancing its security operations by integrating AI agents into its security teams. These AI agents are becoming vital force multipliers, automating tasks that previously required manual effort. This automation is leading to faster response times and freeing up security personnel to focus on higher-value analysis and strategic initiatives, ultimately boosting the overall productivity of the security team.
The deployment of agentic AI in security presents unique challenges, particularly in ensuring data privacy and security. As businesses increasingly adopt AI to remain competitive, concerns arise regarding data leaks and accountability. Dr. Eoghan Casey, Field CTO at Salesforce, emphasizes the shared responsibility in building trust into AI systems, with providers maintaining a trusted technology platform and customers ensuring the confidentiality and reliability of their information. Implementing safety guardrails is crucial to ensure that AI agents operate within technical, legal, and ethical boundaries, safeguarding against undesirable outcomes. At RSA Conference 2025, SecAI, an AI-enriched threat intelligence company, debuted its AI-native Investigator platform designed to solve the challenges of efficient threat investigation. The platform combines curated threat intelligence with advanced AI techniques for deep information integration, contextual security reasoning, and suggested remediation options. Chase Lee, Managing Director at SecAI, stated that the company is reshaping what's possible in cyber defense by giving security teams superhuman capabilities to meet the scale and speed of modern threats. This AI-driven approach streamlines the investigation process, enabling analysts to rapidly evaluate threats and make confident decisions. Recommended read:
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@techinformed.com
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Salesforce is introducing Agentforce for Field Service, a specialized edition of its digital labor platform designed to integrate agentic AI into the field service sector. This new offering features AI agents that aim to augment the jobs of dispatchers and technicians by automating cumbersome tasks like scheduling, reporting, and paperwork. The goal is to free up skilled workers, allowing them to concentrate on crucial activities such as repairs, troubleshooting, and fostering stronger customer relationships. Agentforce aims to improve efficiency and reduce the administrative burden that currently consumes a significant portion of technicians' time.
According to a Salesforce survey, technicians and tradespeople are dedicating a substantial amount of their work week, almost a full day, to low-value administrative tasks such as manual data input and summarizing jobs. This amounts to approximately 30% of a technician's working hours being spent on tasks like information gathering, customer documentation, and permit filings, exceeding the 28% spent on actually delivering services. The heavy administrative workload is contributing to technician burnout, with 81% reporting overtime work to complete these tasks on a monthly basis. The implementation of Agentforce is intended to alleviate these pressures. Salesforce estimates that a company with 1,000 full-time technicians could be losing over $260,000 weekly due to time spent on administrative duties. By automating processes like scheduling, Agentforce aims to address the top efficiency barrier for technicians, as the survey revealed that a significant percentage of appointments do not occur within the scheduled timeframe. The introduction of AI agents is seen as a necessity for maintaining critical infrastructure and meeting consumer expectations, by enabling technicians to focus on their core responsibilities. Recommended read:
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