Salesforce has deployed new job-ready AI agents on its Agentforce platform as businesses increasingly adopt and use the technology.
The agents, unveiled at the company’s Dreamforce 2026 event in San Francisco this week, are designed to work across sales, service, commerce, employee experience and the back office.
The new agent portfolio includes Casey (help agent), Paige (IT and HR employee agent), Carter (shopper agent), Marshall (supply chain agent), Piper (inbound pipeline generation agent), Fin (customer agent) and Hunter (outbound sales agent).
Salesforce said its approach to applying agentic AI is to start with an agent built for a specific job, give it the ability to handle more complex work, and continuously teach, co-ordinate and improve it as the business evolves.
Linda Saunders, country manager and senior director of solution engineering for Africa at Salesforce, said the announcement is relevant to South African businesses because it offers a quicker, more practical route to using AI in day-to-day operations.
“Companies no longer need to build an agent from the ground up. They can start with one already designed for a specific job and connect it to the customer data and processes they already run in Salesforce. This is particularly useful for South African contact centres. Many of them deal with high call volumes and the time it naturally takes to get new hires fully up to speed. An agent that can perform the role from day one offers real, practical value in that context,” she said.
Saunders has previously said the company is seeing significant uptake of AI within the CRM sector.
According to Saunders, AI remains a complex subject and forms part of the digital transformation process, particularly as a catalyst for more intensive relationship management within the ICT supply channel.
“I think there’s a definite need for us to evolve our relationships," she said. "When you think about the traditional relationship of a supplier – you’re a vendor, we contract you for function and for price – that old model is not serving us particularly well. Partnerships are about shared business value across your vendors as well as your customers, including your customer’s customers. Because ultimately, if you are not driving value for your customers, it’s a moot point.”
Speaking at the ITWeb Chartered CIO Conference 2026 earlier this year, Sabine Holl, VP of sales engineering and CTO at IBM MEA, said organisations are looking to use agentic AI to build businesses at scale, but are struggling to keep up with the technology while also establishing effective governance.
The challenge comes as South African organisations accelerate AI adoption. According to the IBM Institute for Business Value 2026 CEO Study, 83% of surveyed South African CEOs say they are actively embedding AI across multiple workflows to improve business effectiveness, while 67% have already appointed a chief AI officer. The figures indicate that AI is becoming part of enterprise operating models rather than remaining a standalone technology initiative.
According to research by cyber security and identity security specialist CyberArk, access to critical resources is a significant concern among business leaders, with 56% of companies expressing this concern.
A report by technology solutions firm Prosus and VC intelligence platform Dealroom examines the impact of AI in the workplace and the prospect of organisations using AI agents alongside human employees.
The report found that agentic AI is gaining traction, venture capital funding for agentic AI is increasing, and markets are moving towards a multi-agent model. It also found that AI agents are expected to serve as digital co-workers rather than simply as tools, with coding agents the first to reach product-market fit.
Prosus claims fully fledged AI employees are months, rather than years, away.
Availability of new agents
Casey, Paige, Carter and Marshall are generally available. Their availability is expected to extend to SA as part of the standard global roll-out, although Salesforce has not confirmed availability on a country-by-country basis.
Hunter is in the pilot stage and is expected to become available in November 2026.
“AI is creating an interface revolution,” said Marc Benioff, chair and CEO of Salesforce. “We are combining model intelligence with all the context that customers have built into Salesforce to create an intelligent, dynamic, composable system that is securely governed, built with zero data retention and designed to work with the core systems that already run your business.”
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