Salesforce Agentforce: How Its AI Agents Work and What They Cost

Salesforce Agentforce is Salesforce's platform for AI agents that work on the data in your Salesforce org. Customer-facing agents answer on your website, in messaging channels and on the phone. Employee agents work inside Salesforce, for example by updating a record or summarizing a case. You pay per agent action with Flex Credits, per customer conversation, or per user through add-ons and the Max editions.

Agentforce does not run on its own. It needs a Salesforce org, and the free way in is Salesforce Foundations, a $0 add-on for Enterprise Edition and higher. Einstein, the older brand, now mostly names the layer underneath: the Einstein Trust Layer masks data and scores responses for toxicity, while the assistant once called Einstein Copilot is part of Agentforce.

Customermates, an open-source CRM, publishes this guide. Salesforce facts come from Salesforce's own pages, checked on 8 October 2026 and linked at the end. Customermates appears once, in its own labelled section.

How an Agentforce agent works

An agent is a role, a set of topics, written instructions and the actions it may take, all configured in Agentforce Builder. When a request arrives, the Atlas Reasoning Engine works out what the person wants and which action to run next. Salesforce calls this hybrid reasoning, combining "deterministic logic and adaptive AI": Agent Script holds the steps that must run the same way every time, and the model handles the rest.

Salesforce lists the web, the phone, apps, self-service portals and messaging channels as places to deploy agents, and MuleSoft API connectors for reaching systems outside Salesforce.

One question, followed through

A customer types into your web chat: "Where is my order 4711?" The agent matches the topic "Order status", and the reasoning engine calls three actions: one finds the customer, one looks up the order, one reads the shipping status. Before the prompt goes to the language model, the Trust Layer can swap the customer's name and email address for placeholders. When the answer comes back, it is checked for toxicity, the real values are put back in, and the exchange is written to the audit trail.

Billed in Flex Credits, those three standard actions use 60 credits, which is $0.30. Billed per conversation, the same exchange costs $2. That gap is the main pricing decision: per-conversation pricing only comes out cheaper once an average conversation runs more than 20 standard actions.

The Einstein Trust Layer and its toxicity score

The Trust Layer sits between Salesforce and the language model. Salesforce lists secure data retrieval and grounding, data masking, zero data retention (prompts and responses are never stored or used to train the underlying third-party models), toxicity detection and security guardrails.

The toxicity score is what most people look for in the documentation. Salesforce's Trailhead module on the response journey explains that the overall score runs from 0 to 1, where 1 is the most toxic, and that it covers five categories: violence, sexual, profanity, hate and physical. The audit trail stores the prompt, the original unfiltered response, any toxicity scores and the feedback collected along the way. Review it after a pilot, before you let an agent answer customers unsupervised.

What Agentforce costs

These are Salesforce's list prices from the Agentforce pricing page, checked on 8 October 2026.

The Foundations page currently lists 450,000 Flex Credits for Agentforce and Data 360 "to get started (restrictions apply)". Older Salesforce pages give smaller numbers, so confirm the figure for your org.

You buy usage up front for the contract term (Pre-Purchase), commit to a baseline with no upfront payment (Pre-Commit, which Salesforce says becomes widely available later this year), or pay only for what you use with no commitment (PayGo).

All of this sits on top of a Salesforce edition. On the Sales pricing page, Starter Suite costs $25, Pro Suite $100, Core $195, Advanced $395 and Max $550 per user per month. Starter Suite can be billed monthly or annually; the other four are billed annually.

A 10-person sales team, worked through

The last two rows are alternatives, because one org uses Flex Credits or Conversations, not both. None of these figures includes Data 360 usage beyond the included credits (Salesforce notes that overage fees apply), implementation work or any discount in your contract. Every Salesforce edition and add-on is listed in the Salesforce pricing guide.

Looking for an Einstein GPT price? Salesforce's current pricing pages list no product under that name. Generative features such as Prompt Builder come with Foundations, the add-ons and the Max editions, and agent actions are paid in Flex Credits.

Agentforce, Einstein and the other new names

Salesforce has renamed several products in a short time, which is why search results contradict each other.

Introducing Agentforce, one use case at a time

1. Check your edition

   The sales pricing page says AI can be added to Core and above, while its comparison table marks some Agentforce features as available for purchase on Starter Suite and Pro Suite. Foundations is for Enterprise Edition and higher, and Salesforce says its availability varies by region, so ask your account executive what your org gets.

2. Pick one use case with a number attached

   For example, order-status questions in web chat, or an opportunity summary before a sales call. Write down today's figure, such as weekly tickets on that topic, so the pilot has something to beat.

3. Clean what the agent will read

   The Data Library grounds answers in your Knowledge articles, files and web sources. An outdated article becomes an outdated answer.

4. Build the agent in Agentforce Builder

   Define the topic, the instructions and the actions. Put anything that must always happen the same way, such as checking who the customer is before showing order data, into Agent Script.

5. Test with real past questions

   Run a batch of genuine customer or seller questions through the agent, then read the audit trail and the toxicity scores. Rewrite instructions where answers drift.

6. Choose the pricing model before go-live

   Flex Credits or Conversations, not both in one org. Apply the 20-action break-even to your own volumes. PayGo suits a pilot; Pre-Purchase makes sense once volume is known.

7. Go live on one channel

   Start with one channel and one topic, decide what happens when the agent cannot answer, and review the audit trail weekly before adding the next topic.

Without a Salesforce admin in-house, budget for a Salesforce consulting partner. The general rollout questions, from data cleanup to training, are in the CRM implementation guide.

When Agentforce fits, and when to look elsewhere

Where Customermates fits

This section is about Customermates, which publishes this guide. Customermates is an open-source, AI-native CRM built in Germany for small client-facing teams: consultants, agencies, other service businesses and founders. It is not a Salesforce add-on, and it has no agent for your website or phone line. It is a CRM in which AI does the record work around client relationships.

A routine for a consultancy might run On a schedule, Every day at 08:00, with these instructions:

Look at the open deals assigned to me. For each deal, read the
latest conversation with its contacts. If the client wrote last
and has no reply yet, save a reply draft in that thread, in the
language of the conversation. Do not send anything.
End with a list of the drafts you saved.

A routine runs as its owner, with the owner's connected channels and permissions, and refuses anything that would need approval. Mate sends messages when asked to, which is why the instruction says "Do not send anything".

For the same 10 people, Pro costs €290 per month. That includes the unified inbox with 1 connected account per user (email, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Instagram or Telegram), up to 5 routines per user and monthly hosted AI credits per active user. Starter costs €120 per month, with Mate and MCP but no inbox. Billing is monthly. Self-hosting gives you the AGPL core with REST, webhooks and MCP, without the inbox, Mate or routines.

Customermates has no high-volume service agent, no voice agent and no predictive AI for large sales teams. If you need those, or your company has already built its processes in Salesforce, Agentforce is the shorter path, and the Salesforce alternative comparison helps if you are weighing a move.

Frequently asked questions

Salesforce and Microsoft details checked on 8 October 2026 against Agentforce pricing, Sales pricing, Salesforce Foundations, What Foundations includes, the Agentforce overview, the Agentforce 360 Platform, the Einstein Trust Layer, Trailhead on the Trust Layer response journey and on RAG in Agentforce, Agentforce Assistant, formerly Einstein Copilot, Data 360, What Is Agentforce Service? and Microsoft's Sales agent documentation.