Today, Salesforce announced a variety of agentic management tools to automate testing, prototype in sandbox environments, and manage usage.
The two aspects that I am most interested in across-the-board are:
The AI generated testing in Agentforce Testing Center where I think it is going to be vital for agents to be stress tested with the help of AI. It will obviously be easier for AI to bring up a wide variety of potential tests for an agent.
In the next few months, it will honestly be fairly trivial to build a standard agent within most large enterprise application platforms. But the challenge will be in testing these agents to run at enterprise scale, and with the variety of languages, context, grammar, jargon, and patois that may exist across the world in describing demands.
As George Bernard Shaw said “England and America are two countries separated by a common language”. and that can be multiplied by the countries and rules and backgrounds that global companies are trying to support with their Salesforce agents.
The other part that I most excited about is what Salesforce calls Utterance Analysis. This is a real time analysis on the usage of an agent based on the user inputs, requests, and query outputs. There has long been a struggle in translating event logs into useful data simply because logs are overwhelming. Salesforce’s efforts in this area are an important step forward in incorporating log data into more
practical and consumable analytic form factors.
The one big question this press release does not tackle is around the orchestration and ongoing management of agent portfolios. Is it possible to find duplicate or similar agents and avoid the technical debt associated with managing 100s or thousands of agents going forward? It is a stated goal of Mark Benioff to have 1 billion agents built in a year. That is a great goal, but anyone who has ever worked IT or in sales ops knows that 1 billion custom objects, workflows, tests, agents, or any other documented item is always going to be an administrative burden.
Although I believe that Salesforce is making progress in this area, it is no secret that we look to Salesforce as providing a standard around enterprise governance for CRM and related applications. And I think this is an opportunity for Salesforce to show leadership in the ongoing management of agent portfolios at a time when the data and metadata in Salesforce are increasingly important to the valuation of the company as a strategic partner and to a publicly traded market capitalization.