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On Wednesday, Salesforce unveiled its first AI product for financial professionals, creatively called Agentforce for Financial Services. The AI is embedded into Salesforce’s Financial Services Cloud product, and so has access to a company’s internal numbers if it’s already using the platform.
According to the Salesforce announcement, Agentforce can act as a financial advisor, and also autonomously cancel or replace a credit card, explain insurance or loan options, or reverse a fee for banking customers.
“For financial services firms, what actions they’re willing to let happen in an autonomous way is where we’re on a journey as an industry,” VP and GM of Salesforce banking and lending Greg Jacobi told CFO Brew.
He said Salesforce’s software is different from a chatbot, but Glenn Hopper, head of AI research and design at Eventus Advisory Group, is skeptical.
“Everybody wants to call everything they do an agent,” he said of companies advertising their AI products.
Show and tell. An agent would be able to work autonomously and complete a task with a few clarifying questions. Most of the AI agents Hopper “are not ready for primetime”, except for the deep research tools from Gemini and OpenAI. But beyond that, he doesn’t have any clients actually deploying AI agents.
“They’re still vaporware,” he told us. “From what I’ve seen, agents are not ready for prime time.”
Salesforce is entering Agentforce into an AI arms race filled with a lot of competitors. But the jury is still out on whether finance professionals will even use them.
Finance professionals deal with some of the most sensitive data inside a company, and as such are very worried about privacy risks related to AI. A recent survey from Kyriba, a finance software platform, reported that 76% of the 1,000 CFOs it interviewed were concerned about the security risks of using AI.
Because financial services is a regulated industry, Salesforce built an auditing system into its AI architecture including citations, to support compliance and reassure professionals the AI isn’t hallucinating, Jacobi told us. That’s something Hopper agrees is necessary.
“Whatever regulations that you’re required to follow for compliance, regulators are going to have to change,” Hopper said. “The industry is going to have to change. Auditors are going to have to change. It’s a gray area right now.”