If you’re in manufacturing, you operate in one of the most demanding environments in the world. Master the complexity, and you’ll gain a powerful competitive advantage.

Agentic AI is an impactful concept that helps market leaders harness that complexity, overcome modern problems, and make smarter decisions.

Agentic AI combines AI and automation, using AI agents to automate complex processes and solve issues in real time. When applied in manufacturing, agentic AI can simplify the toughest challenges:

• Machines, sensors, dashboards, and forecasts generate floods of real-time data that demand immediate responses from humans.
• ‍Siloed systems, fragmented data, labor shortages, and maintenance delays create operational bottlenecks.‍
• Volatile supply chains, fluctuating demand, rising costs, regulatory changes, and high customer expectations add external pressure.

Agentic AI is not a trend. Forrester Research calls it “a competitive necessity.”

Where Does Salesforce Come In?

Salesforce is a backbone in this industry, bringing order by centralizing information and connecting customers, partners, and business operations. But Salesforce relies heavily on people to interpret dashboards, prioritize findings, and act on insights.

Agentforce shortens the delay by moving Salesforce from telling to doing. AI agents streamline operations, offload complex decisions, and take action to solve problems in real time, rather than in weeks or days. The results are fewer delays and bottlenecks, plus unprecedented precision and speed across operations.

What Is Agentic AI?

Agentic AI is an answer to a modern problem in manufacturing, where responding to nonstop data and rapidly shifting conditions has grown beyond the capacity of humans alone, especially with workforce shortages and volatile demands. Implementing agentic AI addresses the gap and helps organizations see, decide, and proactively respond in real time before opportunity slips away.

Agentic AI is a concept that combines AI (thinking, learning, and reasoning) and automation (doing and acting) to help organizations operate more efficiently, make decisions faster, solve problems proactively, and continuously improve.

AI agents within the system observe conditions, plan multistep actions, reason through options, and take autonomous action across integrated systems.

Forrester (March7, 2025) explains that agentic AI is comprised of “systems of foundation models, rules, architectures, and tools which enable software to flexibly plan and adapt to resolve goals by taking action in their environment” and gain increasing levels of sophistication.

An AI agent is a specific instance and real-world application of agentic AI (AI + automation) focused on a narrow task or objective. Agentic AI makes use of multiple AI agents, each performing specific tasks. Working together, they achieve a larger goal. For example, AI agents can monitor supply chain health, detect a shortage, reassign suppliers, or log changes in Salesforce – all without human intervention.

AI agents are not the same as bots. While bots follow scripts and handle repetitive, rule-based tasks (like automatic shipment notifications or email responses), they can’t adapt or respond to unexpected change.

Here are some specific tasks that an AI agent can handle in manufacturing:

• Inspect product images for surface defects
• Summarize shift reports for plant managers
• Import paper invoices into the ERP system
• Match purchase orders with received goods
• Forecast shipment delays and update logistics dashboards
• Intake and prioritize customer support tickets

Engineers design AI agents to help humans do their work and act as decision-making partners that execute decisions independently and learn continuously. Using agentic AI leads to more intelligent operations, faster responses to disruptions, higher productivity, and a better customer experience.

What Is Agentforce?

Agentforce is agentic AI for Salesforce, where AI agents help transform Salesforce from a reactive system of record that just shows what’s happening into a proactive platform that does something about it.

How does Agentforce work with Salesforce?

Salesforce is a cornerstone in manufacturing, managing sales, service, partners, and operations through its cloud ecosystem (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Manufacturing Cloud, and partner portals). It provides a single source of truth across critical functions and integrates seamlessly with ERP, supply chain, and service platforms. Salesforce’s Einstein AI adds machine learning and predictive intelligence, but it still relies on humans to act.

Agentforce changes that. By deploying multiple AI agents to do separate and specific tasks, working in concert to achieve a greater goal, Agentforce enables AI agents to recognize changes, decide what to do, and act without waiting for humans.

Agentic AI is layered into Salesforce’s decision loop across connected systems and teams. This transforms Salesforce from a decision-support tool into a decision-execution hub, leveraging Salesforce’s existing data and workflows to act autonomously.

Agentforce has AI agents for: ‍

• Producing reports for insights and trends‍
• Generating recommended next steps based on live data‍
• Creating content and responses automatically‍
• Automating routine decisions and repetitive tasks‍
• Guiding and triggering workflows and automatic processes‍
• Flagging and resolving urgent issues before they escalate

What Are the Benefits of Agentic AI and Agentforce?

Agentic AI and Agentforce deliver what manufacturing leaders have wanted for years: true operational intelligence that executes in real time with increased speed, accuracy, cost savings, resilience, and customer satisfaction.

Integrating agentic AI into Salesforce transforms it into an intelligent, self-correcting platform that automatically connects, interprets, and responds to data across every layer of operations. It anticipates problems, takes action to prevent them, and continuously learns and improves.

Manufacturers using Agentforce report these outcomes:

Use Cases: Agentforce at Work in Manufacturing

Dynamic Demand Forecasting and Allocation

Using Agentic AI in Salesforce enables AI agents to monitor incoming orders, distributor demand, and market trends or seasonality. If demand spikes in one region, AI agents will reallocate production capacity, adjust lead times, and notify sales teams, keeping forecasts accurate and aligned with production demands.

Supply Chain Risk Mitigation and Supplier Management

Agentforce monitors performance in real time, rather than waiting for quarterly reviews of suppliers. It tracks delivery delays, price changes, or geopolitical disruptions. When risks emerge, the system automatically suggests alternate suppliers, updates Salesforce supplier records, or escalates issues to procurement teams.

Proactive Maintenance on Factory Floor

By integrating IoT and machine data into Salesforce, AI agents detect early warning signs, automatically create service tickets, order parts, and reschedule work orders to prevent downtime.

Quality and Compliance Automation

Agentforce analyzes customer commitments and regulatory requirements stored in Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud. AI agents monitor production data, identifies anomalies, triggers corrective actions, logs incidents, notifies managers, and ensures full compliance documentation – without manual intervention.

Intelligent Customer Service and Product Support

Agentic AI analyzes service cases to detect patterns, predict product issues and potential recalls, and initiate proactive customer communication. AI agents can open a case within Service Cloud, dispatch technicians, or recommend warranty exceptions to resolve issues faster, prevent escalation, and strengthen loyalty.

Implementation Roadmap

If you want to close the gap between insights and execution in Salesforce, the path is clear:

• Assess readiness: Ensure your manufacturing data, pipelines, Salesforce implementation, data integrations, and APIs are clean and ready for using agentic AI.
• Prioritize use cases. Identify a high-impact use case, like demand forecasting or maintenance.
• Launch a pilot. Start with a small, controlled pilot with human oversight.
• Build trust. Validate outcomes, measure ROI, and refine the AI agent's decision logic.
• Scale accross functions. Once proven, expand agentic AI by deploying more agents to cover end-to-end manufacturing processes.

Challenges and Considerations

Like any transformation involving data, agentic AI adoption requires the right foundation. Implement strong guardrails, continuous monitoring, governance frameworks, and change management to mitigate the challenges of agentic AI.

• Poor data quality undermines agentic AI decisions.
• Organizational change management is essential. Employees will resist agentic AI and offloading tasks to AI agents unless you create buy-in and trust so that your team is on board with the journey.
• Governance and compliance must be built in to ensure accountability for autonomous actions.
• Security measures must be in place before granting AI agents system-wide access.

Conclusion

In an era defined by volatility, manufacturers who use agentic AI with Salesforce will lead the next wave of industrial innovation. Agentic AI was designed to help humans solve challenges whose scope has grown beyond imagination, traditional tools, and manual processes.

Agentforce has already helped market leaders who are boosting operational resilience, efficiency, and responsiveness. Agentforce transforms Salesforce from a system of record into a system of action.

If you’re interested in agentic AI, our advice is to start with a small pilot to work out issues. Then you can scale with confidence to build intelligent, agile operations that adapt in real time.

Marlabs offers deep expertise in AI, automation, data and analytics, and Salesforce integration with a strong focus in manufacturing. We help companies turn their vision of agentic AI into reality with AI agents that produce measurable results.

Learn how Marlabs can help you adopt agentic AI.