What is Salesforce Agentforce
Salesforce’s Agentforce AI is the autonomous agent released by Salesforce to assist users with 24/7 support. Setting up an agent is easy. In simple natural language, you describe what you want to do, then it describes predefined actions that the agent has to fulfill based on the information given to the agent to get the job done. The established guardrails are guidelines for agents to operate under.
This amazing independent agent was launched during Dreamforce 2024, where Marc Benioff proudly announced that Agentforce is what AI was meant to be. Salesforce’s Agentforce uses real-time data, deep domain expertise, and intelligent automation is the ultimate revolution for AI bots.
We can say that Salesforce Agentforce AI was built on Einstein GPT, and launched before it. Salesforce perfected the Einstein chatbot first, where it was truly capable of retrieving data from the company documentation and customer database. It did generate summaries and smart replies but it was not capable of doing jobs.
Understanding the Salesforce Agentforce cost
This autonomous agent is capable of resolving customer inquiries, engaging with prospects, personalized sales role-plays, offering personalized product recommendations, and creating and optimizing campaigns, all that too 24/7. This all comes at a cost.
Monthly subscription fees:
Before diving into whether Salesforce AI costs of Agentforce is affordable, let’s break down the costs involved.
You need to buy a subscription package from Salesforce to get access to Agentforce. These are
1. Essential plan
Starts at $25/user/month, ideal for small teams getting started on Salesforce CRM.
2. Professional plan
Around $75/user/month, suitable for businesses looking for more advanced features.
3. Enterprise plan
Priced at about $150/user/month, tailored for larger businesses with extensive CRM needs.
For Agentforce pricing for small businesses, consider the following packages
- Starter Suite which is $25/user/month offers simple CRM capabilities like marketing, sales, service, and commerce.
- Pro Suite which comes at $100/user/month offers greater customization and automation, sales quoting and forecasting, and access to AppExchange.
Additional costs
Other than the above packages, there is the following added cost that your business will incur.
- Implementation fees
- Training and support
- Customization of features or integrations
Total Salesforce Agentforce cost = (Monthly Salesforce subscription cost x no. Of users) + (Agentforce usage fee x no. Of conversations) + implementation fees + training and support costs + customization and integration costs)
Evaluating the Value proposition:
When you evaluate if this Agentforce AI agent will give you a return on this investment start by simply estimating the benefits by studying the features in detail.
Salesforce AI Agent features
Earlier we’ve touched a bit on how Agentforce agents work by defining jobs, setting actions, and getting the job done in set guardrails. There are the following types of agents:
1. Sales Representatives
Your sales agents will be able to respond to leads and follow up automatically and autonomously. For instance, a lead reaches out to inquire about other options available. The bot will quickly take up the question and follow up with the answer. The customer doesn’t have to wait for a human agent to respond.
2. Banking Agent
It can autonomously analyze data, proactively manage client requests, and provide personalized banking and investment advice. It can even analyze users' investing and spending habits and suggest the best financial plans.
3. Retail Agent
In an e-commerce online store, the agent can assist visitors on what to shop. The visitor can ask the agent to show some options for the upcoming birthday party. The agent, based on their preferences and buying history, can pull up recommendations that can lead to upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
4. Operations Agent
The operations team can greatly benefit from this agent, which can create, plan, and track project progress and resources.
5. Customer Experience Agent
Customer experience is the department that you as a business want to excel in. But the reality is that you can’t hire resources for this customer support that is available 24/7. With this agent, you can manage multiple channels and promptly
6. Analytics Agent
This agent can autonomously share data insights, and visualizations while suggesting data-driven actions. It’s an essential tool for making significant decisions, especially when access to financial advisors is limited. These bots are valuable resources, providing instant stat-based answers to relevant questions.
7. IT Agent
When you have a lot to manage, multiple business operations side by side, having bots that can manage administrative work, like IT agents. These can automatically manage the ticketing system. Additionally, it monitors security threats, shares network insights, and resolves employee issues. The bot can walk the recipient through steps to fix issues.
8. Finance Agent
You can autonomously manage your financial matters. Like generating employee pay slips and asking them to generate specific reports based on what you require. It is highly beneficial when you want to make quick effective financial decisions.
Benefits for small businesses
The Agentforce pricing for small businesses is $2 per conversion where they get an autonomous agent available 24/7.
You won’t have to invest highly in human resources. You only don’t have to pay salaries, but also have additional costs for every employee, like job security, health, and other benefits and costs of the vicinity and other facilities like tea/coffee, amenities, etc.
In this case, having tools, that get the job done for a fraction of the cost, is no doubt the best decision that small businesses can take for themselves. Salesforce Agentforce AI benefits for small businesses include the following:
1. 24/7 agents available
As mentioned above, you get agents that are accessible throughout the day no matter the hours. They are not restricted in any way as they have their jobs along with safety guardrails set. They do not require your assistance, or approvals to get simple jobs done like generating tickets, sending automated replies, etc.
2. Eliminates the need for human agents
When you are a small business, every penny you spend has to give you some return. The more people you hire for jobs, the more money you need to spend to retain and train them. With Agentforce you get agents for everything from sales to operations management. The best part, you can end and create jobs as you require without any consequences.
3. Marketing Cloud
Agentforce’s agents can fit into any business domain. In marketing, it can generate compelling campaigns, segment audiences, and send automated personalized emails. They can even send personalized new collection emails to persuade people to visit the store at least once.
4. Sales Cloud
Your sales team will gain an agent who effectively manages the sales pipeline, closes deals, and sends timely emails, acting like a skilled resource without the added salary costs. This agent summarizes conversations, creates to-do lists for follow-ups, and generates smart messages for up-selling and cross-selling, automatically aligning with customers' schedules.
Additionally, it promptly answers customer inquiries about availability and options, resolving uncertainties and keeping leads engaged to accelerate their journey to becoming customers.
5. Services cloud
Pretty much like sales and marketing, AI service agents can act swiftly to respond to customer inquiries. They can answer very specific questions like how to set up, and troubleshoot, (can go over thousands of manual instructions and company documents) or place a maintenance or service request over a call or message with the agent. The quicker you are able to resolve customer issues the better loyalty you happen to see from them.
6. Automation
This is not just about Agentforce which has predictive or generative AI capabilities. It is about having an agent who can automatically and autonomously handle various business operations. That too within your set guidelines, so you can provide a highly branded service that separates you from your competitors and builds an identity in the customer's minds.
Cost- Benefit analysis
The above is a general overview of what a small business gets by investing in a Salesforce Agentforce AI agent. As is quite evident, it gets autonomous assistance in all business avenues. If you look closely you might find it as the best all-in-one tool for a small business having a small team to handle or a sole proprietorship.
You’ll need a robust tool like Salesforce Agentforce and the assistance of a Salesforce developer to set up your agents so that they work, just like you want them to. But wait we haven’t discussed the price yet.
Comparing Salesforce Agentforce cost against Potential ROI
ROI of any business investment is a measure of financial performance that evaluates the efficiency of an investment or compares the benefit of the cost of investment.
Salesforce Agentforce comes at a cost of $2 per conversion. That means whenever wherever the agent is used, which may be equivalent to moving a finger, it will cost you money. Every move counts and adds to the cost.
Now when you compare its return on investment, and the ROI of Salesforce Agentforce you’ll find some striking conclusions as follows:
Every move adds costs:
No matter the conversion, it will cost you money even if it's your bot saying Hi to a visitor on the website who didn’t reply back and also didn’t purchase anything from the site.
Agents for every job
Yes, Agentforce is offering a lot of agents for specific jobs, but do you need it for every cloud? I mean there is something that only human agents can work on.
Adds cost
If you are a business that earns a fair deal of profit on every piece of your product then investing in Salesforce Agentforce AI can be a good option. On the other hand, if this $2 just sore up your cost and reduce your already thin profit margins, then what’s the point of investing in such a tool?
Profit Margins
If you are a small business having a small team but a business earning substantial profits, then investing in such a tool will make excess customer volume handling easy and prompt. Then if you can earn from every customer, it is a good option for you to go with a tool.
Justifying costs
The Salesforce Agentforce cost is not too much at $2 conversion at every interaction, but if you have 100 customer queries every 1 hr, that's $200 per hour. You need to justify this cost by the revenue that you were able to earn in that hour.
Great tool for single-person(startup) teams
If you are a single-person team as in a startup. Salesforce is a cost-effective CRM for startups having a team of autonomous agents that can get various jobs done. In this case, investing in an expensive tool like this will be much more affordable than hiring complete teams.
Comparison Table of Business Size Features for Calculating ROI
| Feature | Small Business | Medium Business | Large Business |
| 24/7 Customer Support | Increased customer satisfaction, improved response times | Enhanced customer experience, reduced support costs | Scalable customer support for global operations |
| Automated Tasks | Streamlined operations, increased productivity | Improved efficiency, reduced manual effort | Optimized workflows, increased operational efficiency |
| Data-Driven Insights | Better decision-making, improved marketing effectiveness | Enhanced analytics capabilities, data-driven strategies | Advanced analytics and predictive modeling |
| Scalability | Easily adapt to growth, scale operations | Increased flexibility, future-proofing | Support for complex business needs, global expansion |
Other CRM platforms offering Affordable AI solutions
If after reviewing the information above, you believe that the Salesforce Agentforce AI agent will not provide the return on investment (ROI) you desire, there are several other budget-friendly CRM solutions available for your small business to consider:
SuiteCRM
Though SuiteCRM has no built-in feature like Agentforce AI agents, being an open-source CRM platform you can get plenty of third-party plugins you can attach to your platform. There are plugins for automation and agents to handle customer interaction. But bear in mind they might be limited in their work and cannot cater to more complex queries.
Custom CRM development
Sometimes the plugins are limited in what they offer and are not specific for your business. In this case, you can get custom, tailor-made agent options, which you can develop with the assistance of CRM developers.
Automation
Automation of workflows is a game changer. A lot of the time businesses don’t need fancy technologies or functionalities to serve their customers. If you just need agents to automatically send ‘thankyou or confirmation’ emails you can simply use the automated workflow features. You can do multiple things like bi-directional record syncing with third-party software, moving records, and automatic task logging.
Concluding if Salesforce Agentforce is worth the investment?
Evaluate the above-mentioned potential benefits of Agentforce like increased efficiency, improved customer satisfaction, and cost savings to determine if the investment is worthwhile. Other benefits of using CRM for business growth include personalized marketing, customer service, sales and lead management, and data analytics.
The answer to whether Salesforce Agentforce is a worthy investment for your small business is very subjective. After all, the said cost is not the total Salesforce Agentforce cost, there are various other factors to consider.
- Large businesses can greatly benefit from Agentforce agents as they are a way for them to cut costs on human resources and generate business at a much lower cost.
- A good option for medium-sized businesses is they get agents that handle incoming inquiries and lead to faster conversion rates.
- In the case of Agentforce for startups and Small businesses, need to consider their profit margins, and if adding another costly resource will actually lead to a higher return or a higher cost.
To implement Agentforce for your Small business or to get other CRM-related services for implementation, training, support, or customization, you can hire assistance from RT Dynamic CRM experts. Reach out to us today!
| Salesforce Agentforce cost | Small Business | Medium Business | Large Business |
| Initial Setup Salesforce Agentforce cost | Higher due to customization and integration needs | Moderate | Lower due to economies of scale |
| Monthly Subscription Cost | Lower tier plans | Mid-tier plans | Enterprise-tier plans |
| Agentforce Usage Fees | Lower volume of conversations | Moderate volume of conversations | High volume of conversations |
| Training and Support Costs | Higher due to smaller teams and less in-house expertise | Moderate | Lower due to larger teams and dedicated IT staff |
