Due to its highly-regulated nature, the finance industry must particularly cautious with AI. That makes adopting AI and delivering ROI for those investments particularly tough.

According to IMB and Salesforce, combining Agentforce, Salesforce’s suite of autonomous agents, with capabilities from IBM’s watsonx, the companies will help finance customers harness the power of pre-built agents using their unique data and maintaining strict control over their systems. This will foster the improvement of banking onboarding experiences by collecting and reconciling data for new applications. It will streamline approvals, and overcome system data challenges, while engaging directly with customers.

Integrations planned between Salesforce Data Cloud and IBM Data Gate for watsonx can enable customers to access their business data in IBM Z mainframes and Db2 databases to fuel agents, combined data analysis, and AI workflows across the Agentforce platform.

Additionally, customers will be able to access a wider variety of AI model and deployment options through an integration with IBM watsonx.ai, and will be able to power their new agents using Granite, IBM’s family of foundation models built for business.

Enhancing business automation with tailored autonomous agents

Through the Agentforce Partner Network, businesses will be able to build and customise AI agents that independently interact with various enterprise tools and platforms. Agentforce Agents can reason, understand, and make decisions to help their users perform multi-step tasks based on triggers or chats. They can also interact with users when needed, to request approval to perform tasks that exceed their assigned scope or authority.

Agents will enable customers to automate routine or time-consuming tasks and be able to free up internal resources to focus on more strategic work. Additionally, the Agents will drive greater efficiency, help streamline operations, and improve customer service.

IBM will integrate watsonx Orchestrate, its generative AI product that automates business processes, with Salesforce Agentforce. Watsonx Orchestrate leverages IBM’s Granite models, optimised for enterprise-grade, targeted business domains and use cases.

Using watsonx Orchestrate, IBM plans to develop new pre-built agents for specific business challenges. These agents will be designed to bring unique value as they will be powered by both Salesforce and IBM’s data and AI.

"Together, we are empowering our customers to exceed their strategic objectives by making their data and agents work harder and smarter for them,” said Brian Landsman, Executive Vice President, Global Technology Partners, Salesforce.