Salesforce Extends Agentforce to HR, So Employees Can Skip the HR Shuffle

A staggering 86 percent of chief human resource officers (CHRO) say digital labor will soon be essential to their roles, according to a new Salesforce study. To support this, the company is launching a variation of its Agentforce platform specifically tailored to the human resource industry. Agentforce for HR Service, as it’s called, plugs directly into Salesforce’s HR Service, bringing AI-powered capabilities to the employee service solution.

The infusion of Agentforce brings with it the ability for employees to execute everyday HR support tasks conversationally, either through Slack or their employee portal. Salesforce claims it eliminates the need to file a ticket, parse through policy documents, or juggle multiple applications. Any agent will be trained not only on the company’s data but also on its knowledge articles, policies, and what is accessible in its Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS) and Human Capital Management (HCM) systems.

“HR teams are overwhelmed,” Kishan Chetan, Salesforce’s executive vice president and Service Cloud general manager, remarks during a press briefing last week. “In fact, if you actually go survey the HR teams, 90 percent of HR professionals say they’re stretched too thin, and that’s because they’re overwhelmed with a set of routine tasks that include questions and answers [and] routine tasks that they could have ideally automated away.”

He goes on to add, “If you go and look at this from an employee perspective, it’s a tough experience for employees today. It’s pretty disjointed. Employees often feel pretty frustrated and unsupported when they’re essentially trying to get the right support.” In reality, workers are forced to search through an HR portal, intranet, or another disconnected knowledge base—all to do pretty basic things such as taking time off, submitting expense reports, and more.

Happy Employees, Successful Business

When Agentforce is integrated, Salesforce states workers will be able to receive personalized answers to their queries, pulling from employee and company data. The platform should also be able to determine worker eligibility based on their position and location. Employees can also easily update the information a company has on them (e.g., address, phone number, or last name) using natural language prompts.

In addition, AI agents can process time-off requests and provide leave balances without requiring any paperwork to be filled out. When submitted via chat, Agentforce will verify and ensure compliance based on what’s in the knowledge base and company handbook. Then, if approved, the requests will be automatically updated in the HR systems, all without the worker or HR administrator needing to get involved further.

Other common HR tasks that Agentforce can assist with include managing expenses, setting up direct deposit, and tracking employee programs such as training modules, onboarding, parental leave, and more.

Chetan states that customers have petitioned Salesforce to take the same personalized agentic engagement experience they receive from the platform and bring it to HR. “The reason for that is that for every leader, having happy and productive employees drives better customer experience and engagement, and drives up the top line,” he contends. “Essentially, happy employees are really good for the business.”

How Agentforce for HR Service Works

As with its other use cases, Salesforce believes agentic AI will streamline employee requests, ease the burden on HR teams, and ultimately free them to focus on more strategic, high-touch work. Agentforce for HR Service embeds the platform’s agentic AI capabilities directly into the employee portal and Salesforce’s HR Service Center console. This allows employees to interact with agents—both bots and humans—where they’re already working, such as Slack.

This offering also provides ready-out-of-the-box customizable topics, a broad set of tasks an AI agent can perform. It includes actions, questions and answers, and the knowledge that it will use to respond. Chetan points out that the set of topics and actions is explicitly made for HR use cases.

But what happens if the AI comes across a complex HR scenario that requires human intervention and judgment? It will depend on the guardrails set up and how organizations determine how escalation should be handled. However, when this occurs, Chetan states Agentforce will automatically retrieve the full context of the conversation and then ensure it’s routed to the appropriate HR team member with subject matter expertise. That way, the human agent knows the activities and tasks that must be focused on.

Slack plays a prominent role in this offering, serving as the chat interface where employees can communicate with AI agents about their HR concerns. The tie-in is fitting not only because it’s a Salesforce property but also because the software has become one of the central places where work takes place. It’s where employees communicate not only with each other for projects and socially but also with bots to get jobs done.

“Agenforce with HR Service will allow HR teams to scale support by ensuring HR specialists have all the employee data and case information in one place,” Rebecca Wettemann, Vailoir’s principal analyst, says. “Employees will get time back in their day to focus on their day job because their cases are getting resolved more quickly and they can self-serve through an AI-powered employee portal, driving greater productivity within and beyond HR.”

Digital Labor Comes For HR

The debut of this Agentforce variant comes a day after Salesforce published another AI study. A poll of 200 global HR executives found that interest in agentic workers is expected to increase by 327 percent over the next two years. Those who buy into the digital workforce envisioned by Marc Benioff and Microsoft believe the proliferation of these bots will redefine their company’s structure and how workers are skilled.

Reskilling is one of the components behind Salesforce’s AI push. Besides the Agentforce platform, the company has set its sights on training one million so-called “Agentblazers” by the end of 2025. Its study revealed that four in five HR executives are either actively or are planning to help their workers reskill to adapt to this new form of digital transformation.

“We’re in the midst of a once-in-a-lifetime transformation of work with digital labor that is unlocking new levels of productivity, autonomy, and agency at a speed never before thought possible,” Nathalie Scardino, Salesforce’s president and chief people officer, states. “Every industry must redesign jobs, reskill, and redeploy talent—and every employee will need to learn new human, agent, and business skills to thrive in the digital labor revolution.”

Interestingly, while 77 percent of CHROs believe AI will transform their organization’s structure and 89 percent will empower them to reassign employees to “new, more relevant roles,” Salesforce’s research doesn’t appear to dive deeper into its impact on overall headcount. Do CHROs subscribe to the trend that teams should use AI first before considering additional hires? The data provided shows that respondents expect 61 percent of the workforce to stay in their current roles and 23 percent to be “redeployed” to new roles or teams.

The Salesforce Agentforce Universe Grows Further

Although many vendors exist in this space, whether they are Human Capital Management (HCM) systems, HR information systems, or workflow systems, Chetan asserts that Salesforce is driven to provide differentiated employee engagement. This could be with agents in Slack, portals, or digital channels, and the “engagement layers of making that seamless, transitioning the engagement from agents to the human HR reps, and making the HR reps very productive” are what Salesforce does well at. “Our customers have told us that’s the reason why we feel that there’s a need for a new market in this space, which focuses on engagement. Of course, we have to automate the workflow, but really driving better employee engagement and agentic experiences across the board.”

This isn’t the first time Salesforce has spun out a specialized version of its agentic platform. In September 2024, it made a developer edition generally available. Formerly Einstein for Developers, this product provides assistive capabilities and automation features to complete routine, boilerplate work and let developers concentrate on more complex and creative projects.

And last month, Salesforce released Agentforce for Field Service, introducing AI tools to augment the work of dispatchers and technicians. Still, it mirrors a familiar strategy from the pre-AI era, when enterprise tech companies like Box, Dropbox, and even Salesforce built tailored platforms for specific industries.

But despite different variations of Agentforce being launched—whether it’s for HR, health and life sciences, or customer service and sales—Chetan emphasizes that they all share the same Agentforce platform. “It’s the same agent builder, using Data Cloud, [and] using a knowledge offering,” he says. “We built out these specialized things to make sure that they’re the right topics and actions that are relevant to that particular workflow.”

Agentforce for HR Service will start rolling out this month through June.

Featured Image: An AI-generated image of a human being working on their computer, chatting with a digital agent. Image credit: Adobe Firefly