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Dreamforce 24: Salesforce taps Nvidia to power Agentforce

At Dreamforce in San Francisco, Salesforce and Nvidia detail some of the tech that will power the software giant's newly launched Agentforce service

Salesforce and Nvidia have committed to a partnership that will see Nvidia’s artificial intelligence (AI) platform – including accelerated computing capability and AI software – brought to bear alongside the Salesforce platform and its new Agentforce AI agent service, developing more advanced AI capabilities for organisations with autonomous agent and interactive avatars, among other things.

Announced alongside the debut of the Agentforce service at Dreamforce in San Francisco, the two firms said they will work together to deliver optimised predictive and generative AI (GenAI) capabilities – giving Agentforce agents more ability to generate deeper insights and, hopefully, improve productivity and value for human users.

“Together with Nvidia, we’re leading the third wave of the AI revolution – moving beyond copilots to humans and intelligent agents working seamlessly to drive customer success,” said Salesforce chair and CEO Marc Benioff.

“This is what AI is meant to be – powered by the Salesforce Platform and Agentforce, every trailblazer can harness AI to its fullest potential. By combining Nvidia’s AI platform with Agentforce, we’re supercharging AI performance and creating dynamic digital avatars, delivering more engaging, intelligent and immersive customer experiences than ever before.” 

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang added: “In the future, every company, every job will be enhanced by a wide range of AI agents – assistants that will transform how we work. Nvidia and Salesforce are bringing together our technologies to accelerate the development of AI agents for companies to supercharge their productivity.”

Salesforce and Nvidia said the tie-up will also further enhance AI capabilities by accelerating data processing in the Salesforce Data Cloud to unify and harmonise both structured and unstructured data in real-time.

Data Cloud’s Zero Copy capability will let Salesforce’s customers more quickly access their data and make it retrievable by an Agentforce agent to analyse and act on, backed by Nvidia’s full-stack accelerated compute platform to get it done even faster.

Agentforce on the case

As is customary, the mammoth Dreamforce conference has taken over several blocks of San Francisco’s downtown core, with streets turned into grassy walkways complete with a minigolf course, dancing mascots, and a Mindfulness Meadow for humans overwhelmed by AI to sit and reflect. It also attracted an aerial protest.

Some of the potential use cases for Agentforce being envisioned at launch include crisis management, real-time weather impact modelling, and customer support resolution.

For example, Agentforce agents could be pushed into service to surge inbound customer calls following a product recall or service outage; predict and adjust travel or shipping routes based on live weather data to prevent shipping delays; or provide customers with virtually instantaneous solutions to their problems by pulling the relevant CRM data during live chats.

The two companies also trailed upcoming developments on the future of the Agentforce agent avatars that humans will in future be interacting with. As part of their agreement, Salesforce and Nvidia will blend Agentforce with Nvidia ACE – a collection of digital human technologies and NIM microservices – to built better avatars capable of a more human-like experience when interacted with. This will be done using multi-modal AI models for speech recognition, text-to-speech, and contextual visual responses, they said.

The duo believe their enhanced avatars will be helpful in delivering real-time coaching feedback, live event management and training assistance, among many other things.

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