Salesforce + NVIDIA agents

Salesforce and NVIDIA said on March 16 that companies can now run AI agents through Agentforce and Slack using NVIDIA Nemotron models inside regulated and on-premises environments. (salesforce.com) The setup splits the job into parts: Agentforce builds and runs the agent workflow, Slack is the employee interface, and Nemotron supplies the model that reads, reasons, and responds. Salesforce said NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano is now available in Agentforce. (salesforce.com) Salesforce said those agents can be grounded in Data 360, its data layer that connects enterprise systems through a metadata and semantics layer, then act across Customer 360 applications and connected systems. Slackbot receives the request in Slack, triggers the Agentforce workflow, and returns the result in the conversation. (salesforce.com; salesforce.com) An AI agent is software that does more than draft text: it pulls data, follows rules, and takes approved actions across business systems. Salesforce and NVIDIA are pitching this version at banks, healthcare groups, and other companies that cannot send sensitive work to a public cloud service. (salesforce.com) NVIDIA said Nemotron is a family of open models with open weights, training data, and recipes, and said the Nemotron 3 line is built for high-throughput agentic work. Salesforce said Nemotron 3 Nano brings a 1 million token context window, which lets an agent keep much longer documents and histories in view during one task. (developer.nvidia.com; salesforce.com) NVIDIA said its broader Agent Toolkit also includes OpenShell, an open-source runtime with policy-based security, network, and privacy guardrails, plus AI-Q, a blueprint for agentic search. In the Salesforce tie-up, that gives customers NVIDIA model and runtime pieces under Salesforce’s workflow and data controls. (nvidianews.nvidia.com; salesforce.com) Salesforce has been moving Slack toward this role for months. On January 13, Salesforce announced the general availability of Slackbot and said it would become the main conversational interface for Agentforce and third-party agents. (salesforce.com) That helps explain why Slack sits at the center of this launch instead of on the edge of it. Salesforce bought Slack in a deal valued at about $27.7 billion in 2020 and closed the acquisition on July 21, 2021. (salesforce.com; salesforce.com) The immediate pitch is control: keep model processing inside a company’s own security boundary, apply business rules in Agentforce, and let employees call those agents from Slack instead of switching tools. The companies are betting that enterprise buyers will adopt agents faster if the software fits existing approval chains, data residency rules, and internal systems. (salesforce.com; salesforce.com)