AI agents are arguably one of the most avant-garde trends in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Recently, Salesforce has made a push into this territory with its Agentforce solution. This platform is designed to build and deploy trusted assistive and autonomous AI agents for healthcare. Could this development mark a significant turning point in healthcare operations? Let’s explore.
AI Agents: The Next Evolution Is Here
For businesses, the allure of AI agents is quite attractive. Their potential to automate complex workflows, from customer service inquiries and data analysis to supply chain management and personalized marketing, promises an entirely new level of productivity. This vision is echoed in Salesforce’s descriptions, which speak of a collaboration between ‘humans and agents’ and refer to AI agents as a ‘digital labor.’
Unlike copilots or conventional chatbots, autonomous AI agents can perform tasks with minimal human supervision. They combine Large Language Models (LLMs) with the ability to reason through problems, access systems, and execute actions across multiple domains.
In other words, if Copilots can suggest what you might do next, agents can actually do it for you, with judgment that approximates human decision-making. In healthcare specifically, where over 40% of global health systems experienced a moderate-to-significant ROI on generative AI, AI agents offer a pathway to substantial cost reductions and improvement in both provider and patient experiences.
How Agentforce Can Help Healthcare Businesses
Salesforce introduced Agentforce in September 2024. It embodies the company’s first dedicated autonomous agent toolkit for various industries, including healthcare. The system builds upon Salesforce’s Einstein AI infrastructure but extends it with healthcare-specific capabilities. Agentforce for Health arrives with several pre-built AI skills. Among other capabilities, this number includes:
• Appointment scheduling and management across multiple provider calendars • Insurance verification and prior authorization processing
• Clinical documentation assistance and summarization
• Patient outreach and communication management
• Support in R&D for clinical trials and intelligent trial support
The system’s convenience lies in the automation of processes that traditionally require multiple human touchpoints. Consider how Agentforce enhances patient access and services: When a patient calls a
community health center regarding their upcoming appointment, they typically encounter a lengthy queue before speaking with a staff member who must manually verify their insurance coverage.
With Agentforce deployed, this patient instead interacts with an AI assistant that immediately accesses their profile, verifies current insurance status, and confirms coverage for both the appointment and prescribed medications. The system also checks if prior authorization is needed for any upcoming treatments or procedures. Throughout this interaction, the AI can document all verification details in the patient’s record for staff reference.
Customization, Trust, and Guardrails
In contrast to many AI products that arrive as black boxes, Agentforce provides an opportunity for companies to build agents accommodated to their workflows. Organizations can use Salesforce’s development platform and low-code/no-code tools to tailor pre-built skills or even construct entirely new AI agents from the ground up.
Meanwhile, different hospitals, clinics, and research institutions operate with distinct protocols, patient populations, and data sets. Agentforce recognizes this variability and allows organizations to use their data to train and fine-tune AI agents. This ability to ground AI functionality in an organization’s specific information more accurate outcomes.
Salesforce has embedded trust mechanisms and guardrails within the solution. Notably, the Einstein Trust Layer enables Agentforce to use any LLM safely and guarantees that no data is viewed or retained by third parties.
How We Can Help
As a digital technology partner, Avenga offers guidance across the entire Salesforce ecosystem. We have specialized expertise to help you integrate these AI agents into your existing operations.
We can work with:
• Readiness assessment that evaluates your organization’s technical infrastructure, data architecture, and operational workflows to create a phased Ai agents’ adoption
• Custom agents tailored to your specific clinical and administrative needs.
• Training and organizational change management to ensure your staff successfully transitions to agent-augmented workflows
• Healthcare interoperability that connects Salesforce Health Cloud to all major EHR systems, including Epic, Cerner, MEDITECH, and Allscripts
Think of us as your shortcut to realizing the full potential of AI agents. Our team can work with you to find the perfect use cases for Agentforce, design customized AI agents that fit your workflows like a glove, and support smooth integration with your current systems – all while prioritizing data security and compliance.
What Can We Expect in the Future?
The emergence of AI agents within healthcare, particularly as integrated with platforms like Salesforce Health Cloud, will likely lead to a future where autonomous systems become woven into the fabric of patient care and administrative operations.
We can anticipate AI agents evolving beyond their current capabilities of task automation to become more proactive, contextually aware, and even capable of nuanced decision-making within defined parameters.
The future of healthcare AI will likely feature collaboration between multiple agents. Different specialized AI systems could work together in coordinated networks, sharing information and insights in real time. This approach could lead to more efficient solutions, where the strengths of individual agents are combined to tackle problems in patient care, operational management, and scientific discovery.
In addition, the interoperability and standardization of data will be critical enablers for the widespread and effective use of AI agents. Seamless data exchange between different healthcare systems and devices is necessary for AI agents to access the patient information required for accurate analysis and effective task execution.
Final Thoughts
We’ve reached a pivotal moment in AI agents’ adoption, but the journey continues. Agentforce is an important step forward in healthcare AI, yet one that requires thoughtful adoption planning. The platform’s success will ultimately depend on how effectively it can balance autonomous capability with the nuanced requirements of healthcare, a balance that continues to evolve with each implementation.
About Hans Andersson
Hans Andersson is Global Head of Avengas’s Healthcare and Life Science Industry division with a long background from innovation work at companies such as IBM, Accenture, and Capgemini as well as startup businesses. Hansa has a proven track record of driving growth and transforming companies through strategic insights and understanding of market dynamics and a passion for innovation.”
