Giving AI agents clear boundaries.
An assistant that drafts an answer leaves a person to decide what happens next. An agent that can take an action brings a different management question: what exactly have we authorised it to do?
Salesforce announced Agentforce 2.0 in December 2024, with the full release planned for February 2025 and some features arriving earlier. The start of the year is a good moment to define the work before expanding the autonomy.
Specify the authority
Take a straightforward service request. An agent might retrieve approved information, identify the relevant record and prepare a case update. Changing an order or making a financial commitment involves a different level of authority.
Write down which actions are permitted, which require a person and which are outside scope. Apply those limits through permissions and the action implementation as well as instructions. A persuasive request should not be able to expand the agent's authority.
Use a narrow first process with a clear result. The team should be able to explain what success looks like and identify the point where a person must take over.
Treat handover as part of the experience
An escalation should carry the customer's request, the information already gathered and a clear account of what the agent has done. Asking the customer to begin again wastes much of the value of the first interaction.
Give the receiving team a dependable queue and an owner. Test what happens when information is missing, records conflict or an action fails partway through. Repeating an action after a timeout must not accidentally duplicate the result.
Review the work the agent actually completes
A count of conversations says little about whether the customer got help. Review completed outcomes, unnecessary escalations, incorrect actions and the effort needed to repair them. Keep representative cases for repeatable testing after changes.
Someone must remain responsible for this process after launch. They need access to its results and the authority to reduce scope or pause it. A launch date does not transfer that responsibility to the software.
My priority for 2025 would be an agent with a useful job and boundaries the business can enforce. Earn broader responsibility through evidence from that first job.
Context: Salesforce's December 2024 Agentforce 2.0 announcement.
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