3 Scenarios Where I Won't Use Agentforce

Agentforce is all the rage right now with AI set to take over and the introduction of 'Agents' that can perform actions without human interaction. This is set to usher in a new age of the AI revolution with Agents set to take the place of humans for routine requests.

It's worth noting that each Agent conversation will be charged at $2 and requires other consumption based products such as Data Cloud to monitor usage and audits. For these reasons there are certain use cases where it would be more cost effective to use humans that are already on the payroll or automations that you've already built instead.

1. Custom Object Creation

If you hookup Agentforce with Apex this offers a range of options for creation of Metadata. For example, you could use this to generate a new Custom Object and provide this instruction to a agent for it to perform this task.

In order to set this up initially you'd need to build a Prompt Template and Apex Action to perform this task. If you only use this to create Custom Objects ad-hoc then the initial outlay to set this up is probably going to be more than the benefits it'll bring.

There are other ways I'd use instead such as;

• Lightning Object Creator Allows you to create a Custom Object from a spreadsheet and import data all within the same process.
• Salesforce.com Field Creator Enables you to create fields 'in bulk' which is helpful when you need to create a number of custom fields on the same Object.

2. Record Creation

Agents can be used to generate a Salesforce Record such as a Case. In fact Agentforce has a standard Agent Action: Create Case! While this may sound helpful what's happening here isn't that revolutionary. The Agent consumes a Contact, Case Subject and Case Description and will then return a Case Record that's been created as a result.

Sure this would help to perform this task using natural language but there are other ways to create a record including;

• Create Case Form in Experience Cloud allow a user to easily create a case from a form
• Salesforce Flow within Salesforce or Experience Cloud build a case creation wizard in Salesforce Flow
• Email-to-Case consumes incoming emails and automatically turns them into cases
• Web-to-Case allows you to create a case from a custom form on your own website

3. User Management

Using Agentforce you may be tempted to perform user management actions such as reseting a password or assigning a permission set.

This may be helpful, but you can already perform these actions from Salesforce Setup, so why initiate a chargeable agent conversation to do the same thing?

You can perform this actions in other ways too such as;

• User Access Policies can be used to automate the assignment of permission sets, permission set groups, queue, public groups, permission set licences and package licences
• Reset Password Button simply Navigate to a User Record as a System Admin and press Reset Password
• 'Forgot Password' link on the Login Page can issue the requesting user a password reset link
• Salesforce Flow can be used to provide a 'menu' of user management options

Summary

While it's easy to get distracted by the hype and opportunities that Agentforce has to bring lets not lose sight of the cost here of $2 per conversation.

If you can already perform a task like reset a password or create a object yourself with very little effort ask yourself this, what value does a Agent bring if it performs this task instead? Is the cost worth the benefit?

Don't get me wrong there is lots of potential when it comes to external users and having the agent figure out what's the best cause of action, but with internal users I'm yet to see a compelling use case that you can't already achieve via native tools.

Agents are great at summarising information, looking for sentiment within reviews and searching a knowledge base, but let's not lose sight of what we could already do before agents even came along.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments!