Manufacturers Gain New AI Workforce: Salesforce’s Agentforce for Manufacturing Optimizes Production, Boosts Sales, and Cuts Downtime

Key Takeaways

• Agentforce for Manufacturing offers prebuilt, role-based AI agent templates to optimize operations, support sales teams, and enhance service 
• Agentforce leverages industry-specific data, workflows, and policies to deliver contextually aware digital labor that reduces administrative burdens 
• Salesforce customers like JPW Industries are using Agentforce to cut processing times and build differentiated customer experiences

Today, Salesforce launched Agentforce for Manufacturing, helping manufacturers instantly deploy AI agents that assist employees and customers with everything from routine inquiries to complex operations so human teams are free to focus on the jobs only they can do. These AI agents in manufacturing work alongside employees to help them with tasks like intelligently monitoring fluctuations in demand, streamlining inventory, uncovering real-time sales opportunities, optimizing incentive programs, minimizing asset downtime, and eliminating technician administrative load.

Facing unprecedented pressures from volatile markets, fractured supply chains, and a widening labor skills gap, manufacturers are at a critical inflection point. Adding to these challenges, 70% of manufacturers are still constrained by manual data entry; service technicians are wasting nearly an entire workday a week on administrative tasks; and almost 2 million jobs are expected to be unfilled in the industry by 2033. Manufacturing leaders are turning to AI as the solution to augment their human workforce, with 80% saying AI is now essential to growing or maintaining their business. 

Agentforce for Manufacturing brings agentic AI to Salesforce apps like Manufacturing Cloud and Field Service, drawing on rich customer data and external knowledge to automate complex processes. Agentforce for Manufacturing helps organizations, ranging from original equipment manufacturers to industrial chemical producers, to deploy AI agents that understand their industry-specific data, apps, and processes.

Agentforce helps teams move faster and serve smarter — whether it’s answering questions, predicting demand, or solving issues in real time. Built on Data Cloud and the Atlas Reasoning Engine, it pulls live data from ERPs, field knowledge, asset IoT systems, and even websites — so AI agents can take action instantly and respond in natural language. 

The customer perspective: 

“It used to take 16 to 24 hours for us to process a manual order. Now with Agentforce, we’ve reduced that time to less than an hour. AI agents have also helped us reduce case resolution time by almost 40% despite us taking on a 15% increase in workload.” – Terri Eshleman, VP, Customer Experience and Direct Sales, JPW Industries 

With Agentforce for Manufacturing, organizations can leverage the out-of-the-box agent templates that provide premade topics (what the agent’s job is) and actions (what tasks the agent can perform) that are specifically designed for the industry. These topics and actions can be quickly deployed and adapted for every employee, department, and organizational process, saving development time, increasing efficiency, and improving productivity for manufacturing workers. New prebuilt agent templates available today — as a part of Agentforce for Manufacturing — enable manufacturers to: 

• Match asset production to changing consumer demand: Assist sales and operations employees by providing them with a digital worker that can monitor and alert them to notable deviations in build plans based on planned and actual product sales. Based on these deviations, an agent can automatically schedule an onsite visit with proposed talking points for the account team, helping to ensure better production alignment and improved resource allocation. 
• Simplify inventory management and identify upselling opportunities: Help sales and service employees tap digital workers to quickly search for inventory on their behalf, as they’re speaking with customers. Agentforce can also automatically request inventory to be replenished across distributor locations based on customer needs. This gives businesses the ability to upsell or cross-sell with recommended accessories or improve sales for underperforming inventory in real time.
• Better manage incentive programs: Enable product teams or rebate program administrators with digital labor that helps them better manage incentive programs by providing clear insights and feedback into program performance, payouts, and the bottom line. This allows channel sales teams to easily identify underperforming incentive programs while helping them focus on the incentives that materially improve profits. 
• Reduce asset downtime and technician administrative burden: Service representatives or fleet managers can get support from a digital worker that can proactively identify asset issues that require maintenance or take action like creating repair quotes, drafting work orders, and creating email summaries with maintenance estimates. Now, an agent can warn customers and service teams of issues before they happen while automating time-consuming administrative tasks, helping to ensure that a vehicle or asset is never out of service and expected revenue isn’t compromised.

The Salesforce perspective: 

• “Manufacturing companies are at a breaking point, struggling with labor shortages, supply chain disruption, and economic pressure,” said Achyut Jajoo, SVP and GM of Manufacturing for Automotive and Consumer Goods at Salesforce. “They don’t need theoretical AI; they need digital agents that can start generating value on day one. We’re delivering that with out-of-the-box agents that understand their specific challenges – from preventing asset downtime to aligning sales plans and operations – and immediately work alongside their teams to drive results.”

Manufacturing companies can also benefit from new innovations that help field service technicians to: 

• Schedule appointments autonomously: Customers can easily book, reschedule, or cancel service appointments in natural language through an AI agent that autonomously handles everything from job understanding to technician matching and final booking. 
• Resolve schedule gaps: An AI agent can help dispatchers optimize scheduling by recommending the best appointments to fill a gap in the schedule based on data points, like job duration, available parts, and technician skills, then automatically schedule it. 
• Wrap up paperwork faster: Technicians can ask an AI agent to draft a comprehensive report of the work completed at a jobsite and automatically save it to the correct work order.
• Proactively schedule maintenance appointments: Through a new feature announced today, field service teams can deploy an AI agent that can autonomously reach out to customers and schedule service appointments based on upcoming maintenance plan dates — all without human involvement. This helps to ensure critical assets stay operational and well maintained while freeing up dispatchers from time-consuming scheduling.  

The Salesforce perspective: 

• “Field service teams are the unsung heroes of asset-intensive industries — responsible for keeping the world’s factories running, vehicles moving, and infrastructure humming,” said Taksina Eammano, EVP and GM of Field Service at Salesforce. “But these teams are being stretched thinner than ever, and time spent on admin tasks is leading to burnout. These new Agentforce innovations give dispatchers, technicians, and asset managers an intelligent partner that works alongside them — identifying issues faster, scheduling smarter, and resolving problems before they become disruptions. This is how we help service teams not just keep up but lead the charge into a more resilient, AI-powered future.”

Unlike other solutions, Agentforce for Manufacturing provides: 

• A faster way to deploy agents with prebuilt templates: We’ve developed prebuilt templates, topics, and actions focused on transforming the highest-impact areas of manufacturing businesses — including sales, service, and inventory — to facilitate high ROI. This allows businesses’ most valuable resource — their overburdened employees — to focus on building experiences that drastically differentiate their business, not on industry-standard processes. 
• Relevant, accurate results that speak the industry’s language: Agentforce for Manufacturing is rooted in industry data models, apps, and processes. This allows the Atlas Reasoning Engine — which is how Agentforce understands, decides, and acts autonomously to provide trusted, accurate answers — to more precisely take action within the context of industry-specific processes and customers’ terminology.
• Trust and guardrails, out of the box: Agentforce for Manufacturing contains powerful low-code guardrails and security tools designed to keep data secure, prevent abuse, and reduce hallucinated and biased responses. Manufacturing customers can deploy AI with confidence, knowing their data is secure and integrated across their value chains. 

Agentforce for Manufacturing agent templates are available today, including Sales Planning, Inventory Management, and Asset Service.
The Channel Management agent template will be generally available in October 2025. 
Proactive scheduling of maintenance appointments will be generally available in August 2025.

This article may include references to services or features that are still in development and are unreleased. Customers should make their purchase decision based on fully released and available features.