Salesforce rolls out AI agents to UK public sector

Salesforce has unleashed what it’s calling a digital workforce of intelligent AI agents for the public sector.

The firm said that UK government agencies can use Agentforce for Public Sector to assist employees and constituents, “enabling easier, faster, and more cost-effective public services.”

The UK government is committed to investing in AI and digital projects to boost services, predicting AI tools will save the public sector £45 billion per year. Additionally, 84 percent of UK constituents would use an AI agent to interact with the public sector, according to Salesforce research from this year.

The company said Agentforce for Public Sector enables government agencies to build, tailor, and deploy custom and out-of-the-box agents. Agencies can use AI agents to autonomously handle work like answering common citizen queries and processing licence renewals. Agentforce also adheres to compliance requirements, including ISO, GDPR, and EU Cloud Code of Conduct.

Built on its Public Sector Solutions, Salesforce said Agentforce for Public Sector allows agencies to deploy AI agents in weeks, rather than months, and enables non-technical teams to tailor agents with plain language and pre-built templates. Leveraging the Public Sector Solutions data model and integrating with Data Cloud, it pulls insights from multiple applications and data sources to provide a more complete picture.

Departments can use prebuilt actions (which tasks an agent can perform) like ‘find similar complaints’ or ‘check for regulatory code violations’ specifically designed for the public sector. These actions can be “quickly deployed and adapted for every employee, department, and organisational process, saving development time, increasing efficiency, and improving productivity for government workers,” said Salesforce in a statement.

“With AI agents working alongside dedicated government workers and providing 24/7 support for constituents – helping with everything from routine inquiries to complex, time consuming tasks, Agentforce will power a more responsive, agile, and effective government,” said Nasi Jazayeri, EVP & GM of public sector at Salesforce.

The Atlas Reasoning Engine – the ‘brain’ behind Agentforce – uses advanced techniques like ensemble retrieval augmented generation (RAG), which combines the strengths of several RAG models, to find highly specific, accurate data for agents. Salesforce said Data Cloud is “the connective tissue” for the Salesforce Platform, making it easy to incorporate structured and unstructured data from different sources inside or outside Salesforce, like apps, data lakes, emails, images, PDFs or legacy systems.

Salesforces also points out that organisations can take advantage of innovation happening across the Salesforce ecosystem. This includes using Agent Builder to tailor an out-of-the-box agent for specific government use cases by defining topics, which include natural-language instructions and additional guardrails. To customise it further, public sector teams can connect a library of actions from existing business logic built in Salesforce, such as Flows, Apex, MuleSoft APIs, and prompt templates.