Agentforce meets SAP

Bill Gates wrote in his blog, that in his lifetime, he only saw two technologies that struck him as revolutionary – the graphical user interface and lately generative AI, or ChatGPT to be more specific.

I think there will be very little readers of this blog who have not tried ChatGPT or one of its competitors at least once. Many of us use it daily and for me it became part of my working routine.

Generative AI is taking the world by storm, so it is no wonder that enterprise software companies like Salesforce and SAP are jumping on it as well. To be brutally honest, I am very skeptical if these organization are announcing new solutions based on trends like augmented reality, wearables, blockchain, NFTs, etc. From my experience, very often this is just hot air.

So, I was positively surprised when I got my hands on Agentforce and when I had the chance to explore it.

Agentforce – Standard and Custom Actions

Agentforce is built around so called “Actions”. An Action is something, that the chatbot can execute when the user is asking for it. Some of the standard Actions, that are shipped with Copilot are:

• Tell me about < object >. – get a summary of an object in Salesforce. For example, when you write “tell me about Northside Bikes”, it will give you an overview about the account, its opportunities, cases, etc.
• Draft an Email – will write an email, including the information from Salesforce that you ask for. For example: “Draft an email to Northside Bikes, including a list of open cases and ask for the status of them”.

But the real power of Agentforce comes with custom Actions. They can be developed in three ways:

1. Apex – an Action can trigger an Apex class. The class is then returning the text, that should be included in the answer to the prompt.
2. Flow – if you prefer no code, you can use a flow instead of Apex
3. Prompt Template – this is another new Salesforce concept, which we will discuss in another blog post. It also allows the generation of an answer.

While Agentforce can integrate with Salesforce data out-of-the-box, access to 3rd party data needs to be handled via custom Actions.

Agetnforce with a mix of standard and custom Actions

Agentforce and Vigience Overcast

Our solution Vigience Overcast offers more than a 150 pre-built business processes that connect Salesforce with SAP (ECC, S/4HANA, Business One etc.), including lightning UI’s. With Overcast, long and risky custom-built integrations are a thing of the past.
So, it was only logical to bring the same concept to Agentforce. With the latest Overcast release, all our real-time SAP integrations are out-of-the-box available as Agentforce Actions, allowing you to ask for information stored in SAP. To give you a few examples:

• Show me the open invoices of this account – will access SAP in real-time and fetch the list of open invoices.
  

  A prompt to fetch invoices from SAP in real-time

• What is the stock level for C950 BIKE Monster Runner? – will check the different storage locations in SAP and return the current stock level?
• One of the amazing features of copilot is that you can combine Actions. For example, you can prompt: Draft me an email to Northside Bikes, sending them the available quantity of C950 BIKE Monster Runner. This drafting the email for you and the required stock level from SAP will be insert in real-time.
  

  A prompt to write an email including SAP data

• Create a quote for this account for 10 M525 BIKE Red Devil with a discount of 5% shipped to 27 Springstreet, Brisbane. Overcast works bi-directional, which means we can also create new quotes, sales orders or quality notifications in SAP.

Of course, all custom build real-time Overcast integration scenarios are also available in Agentforce.

All of this is possible because Vigience Overcast is meta-data driven. So, it was easy for us to generate the required Actions with little to no additional effort.

The Overcast architecture

With Agentforce and Overcast, Salesforce and Vigience offer the most powerful generative AI solution for companies running SAP.

Conclusion

It is exciting to see what we can do with Overcast on top of the Salesforce platform and with new solutions like Agentforce, Prompt Builder, Einstein Copilot and Data Cloud. Without the need of custom development, we provide additional value for our customers, that can now leverage the power of generative AI within Salesforce.

Reach out to us if you want to jointly prototype your first SAP-integrated Agentforce Agents and Actions in a solution workshop. We will prove that this can be done within a few days.