With Agentforce IT Service, Salesforce Redefines ITSM Around AI Agents and Employee Experience

Salesforce has delivered on its promise with the launch of an AI-powered IT service tool that lets companies deploy agents to automate incidents, handle service requests, and manage tickets directly through Slack. Agentforce IT Service, as it’s called, is built to eliminate the more than 350 hours employees spend annually solving common and complex IT challenges.

Though it invites comparisons to ServiceNow, ITSM is hardly new territory for Salesforce. The CRM tech firm has long provided some elements of case management through its Service Cloud. However, until now, it didn’t have a dedicated ITSM product.

Agentforce IT Service is part of a new trend by Salesforce to “reimagine” itself inside the team communication app it acquired in 2020. Joining it are Agentforce Tableau and Agentforce 360. By designing Agentforce IT Service to operate inside the app where work happens, Salesforce wants to eliminate context switching. Instead of needing to remember opening up a ticket in JIRA, ServiceNow, BMC’s Helix, or Microsoft’s System Center Service Manager, employees can submit their issue on Slack.

However, while there is an emphasis on Slack, Salesforce’s new tool can operate wherever employees work, including in Microsoft Teams, an employee portal, or via a webchat.

“This is something that you had to expect that Salesforce would lean into,” Patrick Moorhead, the CEO and chief analyst of Moor Insights and Strategy, tells me. “The company has many assets that it can bring to bear, and now that enterprise generative AI is viewed as encompassing even more workflows, this just makes sense.”

There are four main components to Salesforce’s newest application:

• An agent-powered IT service desk built to provide end-to-end IT service management functionality while complying with ITIL processes
• Specialized bots trained across multiple subject matters (e.g., collaboration agent, incident analysis agent, endpoint agent, and employee agent)
• Over 100 connectors, integrations, and workflows (e.g., Google Workspace, Box, Okta, Workday, Zoom, CrowdStrike, IBM, and Qualtrics)
• Agentic Configuration Management Database (CMDB) and Service Graph, giving administrators better visibility on how everything is connected and dependent on one another. It automatically detects and maps assets to give IT teams a comprehensive picture of their environment, allowing them to detect issues earlier, resolve incidents faster, and identify root causes more accurately.

Take, for example, an employee who received a new laptop but encountered setup issues—a scenario Shibani Ahuja, Salesforce’s senior vice president for enterprise IT strategy, outlined during the company’s opening keynote at Dreamforce. “Now, with Agentforce IT Service, there’s no opening tickets—you jump into Slack and ask Agentforce, ‘Hey, I got a new laptop. It’s not working so well,’” she explained. “Agentforce instantly knows who I am, my role, the entitlements, and the applications I had.” Workers need only confirm the details, and they’ll instantly have access restored.

As for the IT administrator, while their Slack may be filled with support tickets, Ahuja demonstrated that the laptop issue won’t be displayed. “That’s because Agentforce has been able to offload all of that work so [the IT admin] can focus on the tickets and the incidents that matter,” she asserted. If the administrator notices a large number of unresolved tickets, they can ask Agentforce to analyze them for patterns, saving the admin from reviewing each one individually to identify the issue.

Despite its proactive nature, Salesforce says Agentforce IT Service can transfer cases to a human agent if it’s highly complex or time-sensitive.

All of Agentforce IT Service’s features highlight the modernization of what ITSM platforms may look like in the AI era. Traditional vendors are investing in forms, portals, bots, and tickets, according to Salesforce’s Executive Vice President and Service Cloud General Manager, Kishan Chetan. All of these are interfaces and technologies that create friction and slow down productivity.

“The fragmented, legacy ITSM model is fundamentally broken,” Muddu Sudhakar, Salesforce’s senior vice president and general manager for its IT and HR Service, remarked in a statement. “By building Agentforce IT Service natively on the Salesforce and Service Cloud platform, we are driving a conversation-first, agent-first revolution with product and technology innovation that transforms IT and HR for incredible efficiency and cost reduction.

Salesforce points to a March 2025 Gartner report to support Sudhakar’s claim. The research firm predicts that by 2029, 80 percent of common customer service issues will be resolved by autonomous agents without human intervention. Salesforce says that for employees, “IT support is no longer a portal where you file a ticket and wait, but instant, personalized, and proactive help wherever they work.” For IT teams, the company adds, this shift lowers costs, embeds AI assistance into daily workflows, and frees them to focus on strategic initiatives that drive business growth.

Sudhakar’s perspective appears to be shared by Rebecca Wettemann, the CEO and principal analyst of Valoir. “I think what Salesforce brings to the table here that’s interesting is that ITSM solutions have traditionally been built by tech for tech. [Agentforce IT Service] is built from a customer and end-user experience perspective. So when I think about enabling the AI-empowered workforce of the future, I need to think more about the human aspects, the experience aspects, and that’s the real strength that they bring to the table here.”

She downplayed Agentforce IT Service’s comparison to what ServiceNow offers, pointing out “that’s not where they’re headed.” She believes Salesforce is trying to reach existing customers that “need that ITSM solution that is highly experiential [and] to manage everything on one platform.” Ultimately, the enterprise tech firm, facing pressure from Wall Street, is exploring new growth areas to expand its total addressable market.

Salesforce declared that the full-stack Agentforce IT Service will be generally available later this month. However, Agentforce, employee portals, and Slack are currently available.

Disclosure: I attended Dreamforce as a guest of Salesforce. The company paid for most of my expenses. However, Salesforce in no way dictated the content of this post. These are my words.

Featured Image: Credit: Salesforce/screenshot