Salesforce has announced the release of Agentforce 2dx, the third version of its agentic AI offering, designed to simplify the development, testing, and deployment of AI agents that can automate business processes across various departments. This developer-focused update builds upon the second version launched in December, introducing a range of new features, an API, and integrations to enhance the capabilities of Agentforce.

The updates can be categorized into two main areas: orchestrating agents and building agents. The Agentforce API, a key feature, allows enterprises to trigger Agentforce via a REST API, enabling them to start, end, or continue a session, as well as ground the agent with data. This capability can be embedded in backend processes, other systems, and directly in applications, expanding the reach of Agentforce.

Another significant feature is Invocable Actions, which enables enterprises to embed Agentforce within Salesforce business logic by adding Agentforce as a step in Salesforce Flow and triggering it programmatically from inside Apex. This feature allows AI agents to reason about the next best steps when a scenario triggering it arises, automating processes such as service case resolutions, lead qualification, or order processing.

Salesforce has also introduced the ability to embed Lightning web components within the response of Agentforce actions, expected to improve customer experience. Additionally, features announced earlier, such as the Topic Center, MuleSoft integrations, Tableau Semantics, and Slack integrations, are now generally available.

In terms of building agents, Salesforce has added generative AI assistance in its low-code Agent Builder tool, dubbed AI Assist. This feature recommends and creates topics and instructions, helping developers build agents faster. It also provides guidance on how to improve the underlying topic and instructions, making topic and instruction creation more intuitive.

A new low-code tool, the Testing Center, has been added to help enterprise teams and developers test their Agentforce configurations at scale using AI. The Testing Center automatically generates and runs test cases in an enterprise's Salesforce Sandbox, evaluating how well Agentforce configurations adhere to guardrails like faithfulness or context relevance.

Salesforce has also catered to professional developers by adding support for command-line interface (CLI) and VS Code in Agentforce. Developers can now create, update, and test all aspects of Agentforce configurations using the CLI and VS Code, providing them with control, efficiency, and flexibility.

Other updates include the DX Inspector, which helps understand all the metadata and data being used by Agentforce inside an enterprise's Salesforce Sandbox, and the Interaction Explorer, which provides detailed reporting and analytics about how Agentforce is performing. The Interaction Explorer enables enterprises to understand each user request, the reasoning steps associated with the response, and see AI-powered recommendations to help continuously refine topics and instructions to improve agent performance.

In an effort to expand the reach of Agentforce and give developers the opportunity to play and learn more about its agentic offering, Salesforce is offering the Salesforce Developer Edition, a free environment that provides access to Agentforce and Data Cloud, along with 10GB of access to Data Cloud and 150 large language model (LLM) generations per hour.

The full release of Agentforce 2dx will be generally available in April 2025, with specific features being released in advance starting this week. The Agentforce API, Invocable Actions, and the DX Inspector have been made generally available, while the AI Assist capability inside Agent Builder will be available later in March 2025, followed by the Testing Center being included in April and the Interaction Explorer coming in Fall this year.

Industry analysts, such as Dion Hinchcliffe and Cameron Marsh, have praised the updates, seeing them as a strategy to expand the reach of Agentforce and cater to developers who prefer control, efficiency, and flexibility. As AI-powered automation continues to transform businesses across various departments, the release of Agentforce 2dx is expected to have a significant impact on the industry.