After years of being asked to "do more with less" and putting ambitious growth plans on hold, business leaders and entrepreneurs suddenly face a more encouraging prospect: a limitless digital laborforce of agents. Agents are purpose-built workers that use AI to learn and analyze information, reason, make decisions, and take action autonomously. Leaders are understandably excited about using agents to scale their capacity, considering labor costs take up to 60% of budgets in the Fortune 500. McKinsey estimates that generative AI could generate up to $4.4 trillion in potential profits annually, compounding the cost reductions and revenue increases reported by early AI adopters.
Agentforce, Salesforce's digital labor platform for enterprises, can already perform a wide range of customer-facing interactions pulling from CRM data and related systems such as inventory management. But this is just the start of an even bigger wave of digital labor: employee agents that work alongside teams and perform specialized tasks from IT help desk services to product expertise to HR business partners.
As with any new technology that automates work, some knowledge workers are anxious about the arrival of this 24/7 digital workforce. But a closer look at the current state of work suggests that digital workers will be a boon to employee experience and productivity. Today, 41% of work is spent on low-value tasks, as employees chase information across an average of 11 applications just to get their job done. Despite investing more than ever on enterprise software over the past decade, many companies operate more like private sector bureaucracies than the nimble growth engines their CEOs want them to be.
Companies can reverse this trend by hiring agents to do the "work of work" that drags down productivity, giving employees newfound time and bandwidth for more creative and strategic endeavors. But simply deploying agents ad hoc risks adding more noise to an already dysfunctional work environment, with the added challenge of unsupervised autonomous agents taking actions that may be inaccurate or even harmful. Just as the PC and mobile revolutions required new operating systems to fulfill their potential, the Agentforce revolution needs a new "work operating system" that orchestrates work between human and digital workers across all the projects and processes that make your business run. A work operating system centralizes agents where their inputs and actions are transparent to employees and subject to your organization's enterprise security and policies. To take advantage of the next wave of agentic productivity, every organization is going to need a work operating system.
Context is critical to success with agents
What makes today's agents exponentially more useful than yesterday's chatbots is ironically what makes them behave more like humans — they are conversational, and we can ask them to do things in natural language. Even more, they can remember and build on our instructions in multi-turn conversations, anticipate our responses and proactively execute tasks on our behalf. So for a work operating system to successfully put agents to work, it needs to be a conversational platform, ideally the same platform your teams work in today, so agents can organically learn from collective knowledge and day to day operations of the business.
But that's not enough. For agents to truly be productive, they need to be connected to the same data, apps, and workflows that we spend our days navigating — the key difference being that agents can search and analyze vast amounts of data in seconds. A work operating system that unlocks agentic productivity embeds agents at the heart of the organization, working alongside people as members of the team. This is the only way agents will have the real time context of company priorities, understanding of your brand, operational know-how and institutional memory so you can trust them to take the right action at the right time.
Slack: the Work Operating System for the Agentforce Era
Even before the arrival of agents, innovative companies like Ford, IBM, Target, Capital One, Accenture, and Rocket Companies have been using Slack as their work operating system. Millions of people work in Slack every day, connecting to global teams and external partners with over 700 million messages and running over 3 million workflow automations daily. By centralizing work in Slack, companies report a 47% increase in productivity and 31% faster issue resolution time.
With the launch of Agentforce 2.0, Slack is the work operating system for a new generation of employee agents that will unlock even greater productivity gains. Custom agents built in Agentforce's Agent Builder can be deployed in Slack, where employees can find the right agent for the job in the new Agent hub, chat with agents in messages and channels, and even direct agents to do common tasks like sending a message or creating a channel.
Our customers see Slack as the natural place to bring employee agents to life. "You go to a single, conversational interface in Slack and you can interact with humans and AI. Agents are doing the work, and we've dreamt of that for decades in computing, and now we're finally seeing it" says Aaron Levie, CEO of Box.
Agentforce in Slack heralds not just a new era of digital labor, but a new era of employee success. Now everyone is empowered to build and shape agents that will allow us to experiment, innovate, and achieve what only recently was impossible.
Click here to learn how Slack can help your organization put AI to work.
This post was created by Insider Studios with Slack.