Businesses reinventing workforces with agentic AI

Workplaces are transforming as digital labour, capable of releasing trillions of dollars of trapped value, is deployed at scale. Rowena Westphalen, AI and innovation expert at Salesforce, says the implementation of Agentic AI couldn’t come soon enough as Australian businesses face an urgent productivity problem.

The pace of change in the artificial intelligence space is picking up speed. First, it was predictive AI, then generative AI, and now, businesses are figuring out how to implement a brand new concept: agentic AI. 

Redefining business processes quicker than expected, agentic AI refers to artificial intelligence systems that make independent decisions and perform autonomously to achieve business goals. 

While previous AI systems were rules based and had limited ability to act independently, agentic AI uses sophisticated reasoning to solve complex, multi-step problems and implement plans to handle everyday tasks that usually fall onto the shoulders of humans. 

“It’s going to change the rules of the game,” says Rowena Westphalen, AI and innovation expert at Salesforce. 

The next iteration of AI couldn’t come soon enough. Australian businesses are facing a productivity problem, with a recent McKinsey report warning that declining living standards need to be considered a national emergency. 

The McKinsey report should sound as a warning bell given that a growing number of businesses openly admit to a burnout and attrition problem, leading them to contemplate the benefits that AI can offer to fill the gap. 

Another McKinsey report estimates that 75 per cent of AI’s value will come from front-line functions like customer service and sales. It’s a technological revolution that some businesses understand while others are still trying to figure it out. 

Westphalen says that a big part of Australia’s productivity problem stems from the fact that workers still spend a large chunk of their day completing repetitive and low-value tasks. 

As the Senior Vice President of Innovation, AI and Customer Advisory for Salesforce, Westphalen is at the coalface of AI revolutions unfolding in corporate Australia. Many business leaders she meets in her role recognise the opportunity that AI presents, though the next steps aren’t always clear. 

But change is in the air. Westphalen says Australian businesses have been jumping at the opportunity to implement Agentforce, the agentic layer of the Salesforce platform that allows users to create and deploy autonomous AI agents. And Salesforce itself is no exception. Since launching Agentforce on the Salesforce Help site, AI agents are now solving 83% of customer queries without a human, halving the number of issues that require human intervention and nearly doubling the average number of weekly conversations. 

“In the past two years, we’ve witnessed technological innovation that promises to address employee satisfaction and the productivity issues plaguing our economy. We’ve seen the emergence and development of predictive AI, which can identify patterns. Then came Generative AI, which can personalise content. 

“Now, we have agentic AI, which enables AI agents to analyse information, make decisions, and take action independently, adapting and learning as they go. All without human intervention.

“Only agentic AI has the potential to augment the work  

of humans and deliver always-on digital labour.”

Rowena Westphalen

With Agentforce, businesses can equip AI agents with any necessary business knowledge to execute tasks according to a specific role. It combines the apps, data and agents to deliver accurate, low-hallucination AI at low cost, integrated with the CRM apps employees use daily. 

“Instead of burdening customers with the costs and complexities of creating, training and maintaining AI models, Agentforce gives them the ability to build AI agents with a platform they already use,” she says. 

How to implement

Rather than using AI for its own sake, it should be integrated to solve real business challenges or take advantage of real business opportunities in a strategically sound manner, Westphalen says. 

“When we consider how business leaders can develop and implement an AI strategy given the radical implications of agentic systems, what’s clear is that the technology strategy can’t be treated in isolation.  

Leaders need to seriously consider what an Agentforce-powered version of the business should look like.” 

When it comes to cutting-edge AI, there are some early movers in the business world, like hipages, which has switched on Agentforce in recent months. Legacy systems hindered the daily experience of internal teams and tradies at the leading two-sided marketplace.

Chief Technology Officer Jeremy Burton knew it was time to make the leap into AI. 

hipages has been evolving and scaling over the best part of the last decade, creating a better experience for tradies to land more work in their local community. 

AI agents powered by Agentforce have been key to bolstering efficiency and service for hipages. “It made sense to pick an all-in-one platform solution, with all the building blocks in place to continue evolving our processes as we grow,” Burton says. 

Introducing Agentforce will enable hipages to save 193 hours per month on average of license checking time. Having this task autonomously handled by agents frees up human power to better serve more complex customer cases. 

Fisher & Paykel is also deploying Agentforce to scale its customer support team with AI agents – taking actions like answering frequently asked questions and scheduling service appointments. 

Fisher & Paykel’s customers expect efficient and personalised experiences that match the quality of their premium products. By using Agentforce, Fisher & Paykel will be able to deliver around the-clock, high-quality support, giving customers premium service experiences and gifting human reps more time to build customer relationships that increase loyalty. 

As hipages continues to innovate and leverage new technologies, Burton is plotting a use for rapid license checks but quickly looking to scale Agentforce into other opportunities. “The future for our company is very exciting,” he says. 

“If you stand still, you’re actually going backwards. Every business needs to innovate and embrace new technologies just to keep up and stay where they are.  

The trick is to pick the right innovations and focus on the implementation so that you’re adding value to your customers and business,” he says. 

He advises other businesses to take one step at a time. “Don’t try and solve all your problems at once. Pick a meaningful use case where you can really add value and use that to drive forward an initial implementation. That will help get buy-in and trust in what’s happening in the business,” Burton says. 

For more information, visit Salesforce