Salesforce Launches Agentforce for Retail and Retail Cloud with Modern POS

Salesforce today unveiled Agentforce for Retail and Retail Cloud with Modern POS, helping store associates, customer service representatives, and digital merchants boost productivity and sales, while delivering more personalized shopping experiences.

Agentforce for Retail includes a new library of pre-built agent skills to help retailers build AI agents that automate time-consuming tasks, such as order management, appointment scheduling, guided shopping, loyalty promotion creation, and deploy rapid shopper personalization at scale.

Agentforce for Retail includes new pre-built skills for order management, guided shopping, appointment scheduling, and loyalty promotion creation. It also has capabilities for responding to customer questions in real time, modifying orders, issuing returns, managing inventory, scheduling consultations, and even coordinating with shipping providers without human intervention.

These new Agentforce skills include the following:

• Commerce Skills for Order Management, allowing users to offer self-service order servicing options, conversationally update order information like payment or shipping details, handle uneven exchanges, or inquire about order status.
• Commerce Skills for Guided Shopping, helping retailers scale personalized one-to-one concierge services to digital proportions. Shoppers can use natural language to get product recommendations from an agent calculated by Agentforce and grounded in shopper, inventory, and operational data. New actions allow customers to search for products, add items to their carts, and checkout conversationally.
• Field Service Skills for Appointment Scheduling, to assist service representatives with appointment bookings for deliveries, installations, or consultations, powered by AI-driven scheduling and real-time availability updates.
• Marketing Skills for Loyalty Promotion Creation, to assist marketers create and revise loyalty promotions with conversational prompts grounded in shopper, POS, and segmentation data.

Salesforce's Retail Cloud with Modern POS, meanwhile, brings online and offline shopping and inventory data together on a single platform with mobile POS, clienteling, endless aisle, mixed cart and omnichannel fulfillment, inventory management, and more. Features include the following:

• Clienteling, Inventory Management, Endless Aisle, and built-in AI powered by real-time shopper and inventory data, so associates can create and modify shopper profiles that capture shopping history, preferences, and loyalty status; view and update inventory across warehouses, commerce channels, and supply chains; act on analytics from omni-annel customer, order, inventory, and sales performance data; and activate AI for voice assistance, return fraud analysis, and personalized product recommendations.
• Mixed Cart and Omnichannel Fulfillment with an architecture that allows each line item to have its own fulfillment method, offering a single mixed cart with shopper fulfillment preferences, including buy-online-pickup-in-store, buy-online-return-in-store, and omni exchange.
• Mobile-first design and secure offline mode that enables checkouts anywhere. Payment transactions are encrypted and stored, ready to be processed when associates reconnect, allowing sales to occur during a loss of internet, remote and outdoor activity, or peak shopping activity.
• Built-in Salesforce integrations with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Order Management, and Service Cloud for access to customer data insights, order management, cart synchronization, product information management, and more. The cloud-based CMS uses drag-and-drop features to tailor the interface to each store's unique branding.

With Salesforce's Modern POS and Data Cloud, retailers can harmonize data and metadata from in-store, commerce, marketing, service, and loyalty systems for a unified, near real-time view of activity across the entire shopper journey. Retailers can now use Agentforce, with enhanced retrieval-augmented generation, to retrieve and act on this data and deliver precise answers, tailored engagements, and upsell opportunities with every shopper interaction.

"Together, AI-fueled digital labor and a modern POS can unlock a new scale of operational capacity for retailers. With these latest Agentforce skills for retail and a cloud-based, intuitive POS system, Salesforce is helping retailers deliver seamless, unified shopping experiences across both the physical and digital realms of retail that drive productivity advancements and business growth across their entire enterprise," said Nitin Mangtani, senior vice president and general manager of retail at Salesforce, in a statement.