Salesforce announces the launch of Agentforce for Retail as well as Salesforce Retail Cloud with Modern POS. The news comes just prior to the National Retail Federation’s conference in New York. This initative reflects Salesforce’s commitment to deploying AI agentic resources across its platform.

Saks Fifth Avenue and SharkNinja are among the brands testing Agentforce in a retail context.

Dig deeper: SharkNinja embarks on its Salesforce AI journey

Agentforce for Retail. Salesforce Agentforce is used to create AI agents that can boost productivity by assisting with a range of routine tasks. The new Agentforce for Retail includes a library of pre-built agent skills relevant to retail such as order management, appointment scheduling, guided shopping and loyalty promotion management. This is aimed at facilitating the creation of AI agents by retail brands to supply what Salesforce is calling “digital labor.”

The new skills available include:

• Order management. Self-service order servicing options allowing customers to conversationally update order information like payment or shipping details.
• Guided shopping. Using natural language, customers get product recommendations from agents and check out conversationally.
• Appointment scheduling. Automated scheduling with real-time availability updates aimed at field services like deliveries, installations and consultations.
• Loyalty promotion creation. Assistance for marketers in creating and optimizing loyalty promotions with conversational prompts.

Retail Cloud with Modern POS. This new offering brings online and offline inventory data together on a single platform. Capabilities include:

• Clienteling. Associates are able to create profiles capturing shopping history, preferences and loyalty status.
• “Mixed cart” omnichannel fulfillment. Provides each item in the cart with its own record of shopper fulfillment preference (such as BOPIS).
• Mobile first design. This frees associates from the check-out counter because POS can be anywhere.
• Inventory management. Self-explanatory.

There are built-in integrations with Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud and Order Management.

Why we care. That’s quite the list of announcements. We saw a demonstration of conversational engagement with an AI agent at the Agentforce World Tour event last November. It was impressive. This is Salesforce simultaneously making Agentforce a common denominator across its multi-cloud architecture while doubling down on creating cloud capabilities for specific spaces, in this case retail.

“Together, AI-fueled digital labor and a modern POS can unlock a new scale of operational capacity for retailers,” said Nitin Mangtani, Salesforce’s SVP and GM, retail, in a release.

Dig deeper: Salesforce Agentforce: What you need to know