New agentic AI features are the big focus in Salesforce’s latest software platform update, including help simplifying sales and IT service operations.
Winter is coming to Salesforce on October 13, with the Winter ’26 Release of the CRM company’s software platform.
There are new AI features all over the place, in particular for building and managing AI agents in sales and service operations.
These updates come just months after the CRM software provider released Agentforce 3, the confusingly named fourth version of the AI agent creation suite that made its debut in September 2024
One of the new AI features is Agentforce Grid, which Salesforce describes as a spreadsheet-like interface for chaining together CRM data, AI prompts, actions, and agents. It can be used to run bulk updates, generate insights, and test multi-turn AI conversations, enabling low-code experiments to accelerate development, the company said.
There’s also an update to Agentforce for Service: IT Service, which offers Slack integration and an employee portal along with incident detection and root-cause analysis to accelerate IT operations.
“This puts Salesforce head-on against ServiceNow in IT service management,” said Everest Group Practice Director AS Yamohiadeen. Forrester principal analyst Charlie Dai echoed that, saying, “Agentforce’s expansion into ITSM and centralized agent management directly challenges the core domain of ServiceNow.”
Automating lead generation
Turning website visitors into sales leads is the focus of another new feature, aptly named Agentforce for Sales: Lead Generation. The agent interacts with visitors to the website to ask and answer questions, even booking meetings with sales representatives without the intervention of a human agent, Salesforce said.
On the e-commerce front, Salesforce said that Agentforce is offering an agent-based personal shopper for online platforms, with links to its Data Cloud for hyperpersonalization.
Other enhancements to the sales pipeline include help for sales representatives with drafting follow-up emails, scheduling meetings, and triggering custom tasks.
Agentforce for Financial Services now includes Collections Assistance, an automation tool for debt recovery.
“It automates the entire customer outreach workflow by orchestrating contact, answering questions, and securing payment commitments,” Salesforce said in a statement, adding that this could free up debt recovery specialists to negotiate complex settlements and manage sensitive cases.
Other new features includes updates around analytics, security and e-commerce use cases.
Tableau Next now contains a pre-built analytics skill, Data Pro, which in turn can be added to an agent via Agentforce to reduce the manual effort needed for semantic modeling of data.
“The skill when integrated into an agent can reduce technical barriers to enable more users to create trusted, actionable insights and expand self-service analytics across the organization,” said Forrester’s Dai.
Enterprises have been trying to adopt self-service analytics solutions as they allow employees without technical expertise to explore and interpret data without needing any help from developers, freeing up talent and reducing time needed to generate business insights.
In cybersecurity, Agentforce can now help IT admins investigate threats by summarizing and analyzing user activity.
The AI additions in the Winter ’26 release are of interest, said Everest’s Yamohiadeen, because “Together they improve automation coverage, resolution speed, and time to insight while preserving control.”
