Salesforce Launches Agentforce for Retail: Supercharging Productivity with Digital Labor and Seamless In-Store-Digital Integration

Salesforce has introduced two AI-driven tools to help retailers: Agentforce for Retail and Retail Cloud with Modern POS. These tools are designed to boost productivity and sales by helping store associates, customer service reps, and online merchants work more efficiently while providing personalized shopping experiences.

Agentforce for Retail includes a new set of pre-built AI skills that make it easier for retailers to create AI agents. These agents can automate tasks like managing orders and scheduling appointments, while also personalizing the shopping experience for each customer.

The new Retail Cloud with Modern POS is a cloud-based system that combines both online and in-store shopping data into one platform. It allows store associates to offer faster, better service with tools like mobile POS, clienteling, endless aisle, mixed cart options, and omnichannel fulfillment—all while making inventory management easier.

Fresh Insights:

Agentforce for Retail comes with new pre-built skills that help with tasks like order management, guiding customers through shopping, scheduling appointments, and creating loyalty promotions. It brings in trusted, autonomous AI agents that work alongside your team, boosting productivity across marketing, sales, merchandising, and store operations. These digital teammates can handle complex tasks with accuracy and personalization, allowing employees to focus on higher-level work. With scalable AI, retailers can improve efficiency by answering customer questions in real time, modifying orders, processing returns, managing inventory, scheduling appointments, and even coordinating shipping—all without needing human involvement.

The new Agentforce skills are designed to help retailers serve more customers, reduce costs, and boost sales. These skills build on the ones already available for merchandisers, marketers, and customer service reps. Some of the new skills include:

• Commerce Skills for Order Management add order servicing to Agentforce, letting retailers offer self-service options that help cut costs and build customer loyalty. With these skills, customers can easily update their order details, like payment or shipping info, manage exchanges, or quickly check the status of their orders—all through their preferred communication channel.
• Commerce Skills for Guided Shopping help retailers offer personalized shopping experiences at scale, like a one-on-one concierge, but in the digital world. Shoppers can simply use natural language to get product recommendations from an AI agent powered by Agentforce, based on their preferences, inventory, and operational data. The new features also let customers search for products, add items to their cart, and complete their purchase—all through a conversation.
• Field Service Skills for Appointment Scheduling help service reps book appointments for deliveries, installations, or consultations. These skills use AI to manage scheduling and provide real-time updates on availability.
• Marketing Skills for Loyalty Promotion Creation help marketers design and update loyalty promotions using simple prompts. These prompts are based on shopper data, point-of-sale info, and customer segments, which leads to more personalized email content and subject lines that boost customer engagement.

Salesforce is also launching Retail Cloud with Modern POS, a simple, cloud-based point of sale system for retailers. This platform combines both online and in-store shopping and inventory data in one place, giving store associates a single tool to help customers more quickly and efficiently. Some of the key features include:

• Clienteling, Inventory Management, Endless Aisle, and built-in AI powered by real-time shopper and inventory data: Associates can create and update shopper profiles that track purchase history, preferences, and loyalty status. They can also view and manage inventory across warehouses, online stores, and the supply chain. The platform lets them act on insights from customer, order, inventory, and sales data, and use AI for tasks like voice assistance, fraud detection, and offering personalized product recommendations.
• Mixed Cart and Omni-channel Fulfillment give shoppers more delivery and exchange options while reducing supply chain costs: The omni-cart system lets each item in a cart have its own fulfillment method, so shoppers can choose how they want to receive their items. This includes options like buy-online-pickup-in-store (BOPIS), buy-online-return-in-store, and easy exchanges across channels—all in one mixed cart.
• Mobile-first design and secure offline mode release associates from the checkout counter: The offline-capable software lets associates complete checkouts anywhere, even if there's no internet. Payment information is securely encrypted and saved, so it can be processed once the connection is restored. This allows sales to continue during times of no internet, in remote areas, or during busy shopping periods.
• Built-in Salesforce integrations and no-code CMS get retailers up and running quickly: Integrations with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Order Management, and Service Cloud make it easy for retailers to access important customer data, manage orders, sync shopping carts, and handle product info. The cloud-based content management system (CMS) has simple drag-and-drop tools, so stores can customize the interface to match their unique brand.

Explore more about Retail Cloud with Modern POS.

Boosting Workforce Productivity: Retail Cloud + Agentforce Power Both Frontline and Back-Office Teams

AI agents work best when they have access to accurate, up-to-date customer and operational data. To make the most of this, retailers need solutions that can bring together and act on data from both online and offline shopping.

With Salesforce’s Modern POS and Data Cloud, retailers can sync data from in-store, e-commerce, marketing, customer service, and loyalty systems. This gives employees and associates a unified, real-time view of activity throughout the entire customer journey. Now, with Agentforce and its enhanced Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) technology, retailers can quickly access and act on this data to provide precise answers, personalized interactions, and upsell opportunities with every customer.

Why it matters: According to a Salesforce study, 81% of retail executives say that slow processes and outdated tech are hurting employee productivity. Store associates use more than 16 different apps and systems every day, but nearly 78% of them don’t have a single, unified view of their customers. This leads to lost productivity and disconnected shopping experiences.

Availability:

• Commerce Skills for Guided Shopping (Product Search, Product Recommendations, Add to Cart, Re-Order, and WISMO) will be generally available in March 2025.
• Commerce Skills for Order Management will be generally available in March 2025.
• Field Service Skills for Appointment Scheduling will be generally available in February 2025.
• Marketing Skills for Loyalty Promotion Creation will be generally available in February 2025.
• Retail Cloud with Modern POS will be generally available in April 2025.
• Enhanced reasoning and RAG will be generally available in February 2025.

Source:

https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2025/01/10/agentforce-retail-cloud-pos-announcement/