Talk To The Bot: Salesforce AI Agents Could Replace US Govt Employees

American citizens seeking help from the federal government may soon find themselves being assisted by an AI agent, if Salesforce's new public sector offering is a success.

Salesforce on Tuesday announced Agentforce for Public Sector, a new government-geared version of Agentforce, its agentic AI development platform. What's better, Agentforce has FedRAMP High authorization, so agencies looking to deploy some AI agents, be they for internal use or public-facing, can begin to do so now. 

Agentforce for Public Sector includes a number of prebuilt AI bots that Salesforce claims can be plugged right into existing environments and put to work. The agents include:

• A code enforcement bot that "can support compliance officers and inspectors by recommending specific code violations, helping with regulatory fee calculations, and creating documentation."
• A complaint identification agent that combs through public comments to identify trends, ties issues to prior problems, and recommends solutions
• A recruitment bot that filters job applications to agencies that might be interested in a person's skills
• A job recommendation bot that suggests government jobs to candidates
• A benefit application bot that helps constituents find out what types of assistance they are eligible for
• A complaint filing bot that helps constituents file their grievances properly

Of the six prebuilt bots mentioned in the press release, the first three will be available at launch, with the latter three coming in October. Salesforce told The Register that it's working on other prebuilt AI agents for future releases, with a focus on automating candidate sourcing and the licensing, permitting, and inspection processes. 

Plug-n-play AI agents

According to a company representative we spoke to, Agentforce bots are deployed into Salesforce environments with access to all the data available to humans in a public sector solutions instance, and are also able to pull data from Salesforce Data Cloud. The AIs can gather information from outside sources as well, a good thing for government agencies with so many siloed systems. 

Deploying prebuilt AI agents isn't the only thing you can do with Agentforce for Public Sector. The platform also serves as a low-code bot development environment, where users can vibe code an AI agent to suit their needs or even import existing Salesforce workflows and give them agentic makeovers. 

Salesforce stressed to The Register that, while Agentforce bots are being increasingly integrated into the broader Salesforce ecosystem, they'll remain an optional add-on that won't be forced on users. No Agentforce, no agents. 

Ready to trust an AI agent?

Salesforce hasn't exactly been quiet about its love for AI as a product and profit driver, so there's no surprise that its use is expanding, but placing AI agents in public-facing roles is another thing altogether. 

Gartner forecasts that more than 40 percent of agentic AI projects will be canceled by 2027, while separate Carnegie Mellon research shows the best-performing AI agents still fail on roughly 70 percent of office tasks.

That's not great odds for, say, someone hoping to confirm a court date or renew a permit, which is why many organizations remain skeptical of agentic AI's potential to mess up their bottom line and lose their company money.

Salesforce maintains that its public sector AI has been beneficial, at least so far, and pointed to the city of Kyle, Texas as an example of Agentforce for Public Sector success. 

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Kyle used Agentforce to develop an AI 311 system for public complaints, and Salesforce said that the city was able to reduce service request resolution time and address more complaints during the initial call with increased frequency. 

Getting broad adoption across the federal government - especially with agentic AI still far from a sure thing - might take time for Salesforce. But given the trajectory of AI in the federal government of late, frontline customer service might soon be a job for a Salesforce AI.

Despite Agentforce only recently receiving FedRAMP high authorization, Salesforce told us that several federal agencies have already purchased it and are in the process of deploying Agentforce for Public Sector in their environments. The company declined to tell us who had purchased it, but said much of the interest had come from agencies that are constituent-oriented and deal with a high volume of public inquiries. 

Given prior government layoff news, we can at least take a guess at who might be deploying AI agents to make up for the lack of human ones. ®