Surging demand is pushing field service teams to the limit. Inefficient scheduling is the #1 time drain on field service teams, and skilled tradespeople and technicians waste nearly an entire workday a week on administrative work — time that should go toward hands-on repairs and customer service.
Meanwhile, experienced workers are retiring faster than new talent is entering the field, creating a growing gap in service coverage.
That’s why Salesforce is launching Agentforce for Field Service — the digital labour platform built for field service that augments dispatchers and technicians with trusted AI agents to eliminate scheduling bottlenecks and tackle routine, time-consuming tasks.
Agentforce integrates seamlessly into existing data systems and user interfaces, autonomously scheduling appointments, assisting with filling schedule gaps, troubleshooting in real time, and summarizing job reports — so teams can complete jobs faster, reduce truck-rolls, and serve more customers better than before. And with audio playback and natural language voice commands, field technicians can conveniently interact with Agentforce and consume information while on the move — boosting productivity, safety, and response times.
How it Works:
Agentforce for Field Service helps companies with in-the-field workers quickly and securely deploy AI agents that can execute tasks proactively or in the flow of work. This agentic AI technology uses pre-built topics and actions and is underpinned by Data Cloud, Salesforce’s hyperscale data engine that unifies structured and unstructured data — such as a customer’s service history, external product catalogues, or connected asset insights — to ground Agentforce’s responses in accurate and timely information. The Atlas Reasoning Engine, the “brain” behind Agentforce that mimics or even surpasses human thinking, then converts this raw data and metadata into intelligent actions.
What it is: Agentforce for Field Service enables businesses across any industry, and works with Salesforce’s industry clouds such as Manufacturing Cloud, Energy & Utilities Cloud or Communications Cloud, to:
- Schedule appointments: Onsite service appointments take an average of 17 minutes to schedule, 15 minutes to change, and 12 minutes to cancel. Now, customers can engage Agentforce on-demand 24/7, in natural language via web or messaging channels to schedule, reschedule, or cancel service appointments in less than five minutes. Agentforce will understand the job type from the context of the conversation and create a Work Order and corresponding Service Appointment. The AI agent will then query possible technicians based on location and skills required, take into account any constraints communicated by the customer in real time, and offer the best available time slots. It can then add the service appointment to the schedule and finalize the booking — all without human involvement.
- Resolve schedule gaps: When gaps appear in the schedule due to cancellations, no-shows, or early job completions, Agentforce can now help dispatchers adjust with speed and precision. Leveraging the Salesforce Field Service optimization engine, Agentforce considers key data points — such as job duration, available parts, and traffic data — to identify the best possible appointments that deliver on key business objectives, such as meeting SLAs or avoiding overtime. The dispatcher can then choose from these options and quickly update the schedule to keep operations running smoothly.
- Listen and work on the go: With Pre-Work Brief playback, a technician can listen to an Agentforce-generated summary of the work order, enabling them to arrive at a job site fully informed. Additionally, iPhone users can talk to Agentforce through a Siri shortcut, which will open the AI agent in the Field Service mobile app and initiate any request it’s been set up to do, such as surface information, draft a post-work summary, or schedule a follow-up appointment.
- Troubleshoot issues onsite: When a technician asks Agentforce for troubleshooting help in the Field Service app, the agent will query relevant structured data such as product manuals, similar repairs, and sensor data, and unstructured data, such as previous chats and emails, to formulate a response. But instead of returning a long summary of steps that are hard to follow, Agentforce will guide the technician through each step in a back-and-forth dialogue and can adjust its responses by understanding the context of the conversation or analysing photos, improving first-time-fix rates.
- Wrap-up jobs: At the end of each service appointment, Agentforce can assist with drafting a comprehensive Post-Work Summary report by pulling in data collected by the technician throughout the job. Once drafted, the technician can use natural language to instruct Agentforce to refine the summary by adding additional information or changing what was summarized. Agentforce can understand the meaning behind the request and rewrite the summary, making changes based on the user’s input but leaving the rest of the summary unchanged.
In the field: With Agentforce for Field Service, businesses across critical sectors like manufacturing, energy and utilities, consumer home services, and technologies can better support their in-the-field workers and customers:
- An HVAC manufacturer can now autonomously manage preventative maintenance visits. When an AC or heating unit hits a usage or performance threshold, Agentforce for Field Service can automatically notify the customer via SMS and offer a service appointment, and work with them using natural human language to find the best day and time for the repair.
- A hardware company managing thousands of installation and repair appointments can use Agentforce for Field Service to intelligently resolve schedule gaps due to last-minute cancellations. Dispatchers can engage with Agentforce directly from their dispatch console to fill technician’s schedules with appointments that are optimised for location, time, and skill.
- A communications service provider (CSP) technician can use Agentforce for Field Service to troubleshoot a network issue onsite. Agentforce can adjust its guidance based on what the technician has already tried, analyse photos provided by the technician to determine if something was incorrectly installed, and walk them through how to fix the issue.
- A roadside assistance company technician can use Agentforce for Field Service to get up to speed on their way to help a customer who has broken down on the side of the road. Agentforce can share what service is likely needed, provide a vehicle description, and alert the technician to potential hazards while en route. Once onsite, they can use voice commands to get troubleshooting support from Agentforce.
- A power utility’s lineworkers can wrap up jobs more efficiently by tasking Agentforce for Field Service with generating summaries of their work orders based on the forms completed by the technician and the troubleshooting steps taken onsite. The lineworker can then give Agentforce feedback to refine the summary and save it to the corresponding work order.
“Agentforce for Field Service redefines how work gets done in critical industries like manufacturing, telecommunications, utilities, and consumer home services. Powered by data and intelligence, this is a massive leap in AI innovation that tackles the inefficiencies that plague field workers today, solving the pain of back-and-forth scheduling while giving field reps the power to make context-aware decisions and handle real-world nuances more effectively. This is just the beginning of a labour revolution where digital and skilled workers together will enable better, faster service, increased customer satisfaction, and accelerated growth across the field service sector”. — Taksina Eammano, EVP & GM of Field Service, Salesforce.
Image Credit: Salesforce
