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Learn what it takes to build effective AI agents for sales: compare Salesforce AgentForce and Intersight on features, costs, and set up complexity, and other key dimensions.
Salesforce has spent the last two years integrating AI into every corner of its platform, including Einstein predictive analytics, Copilot, Data Cloud, and, most recently, AgentForce —a low-code AI agent builder platform.
Salesforce AgentForce has generated considerable buzz recently. But what does it take to build valuable sales-domain specific agents that deliver practical insights and actually help improve sellers' performance? And how much would it cost?
However, if you run a revenue organization, you have likely noticed a persistent gap between impressive AI demos and day-to-day deal execution.
I've conducted hours of research on Salesforce Agent Force based on publicly available information. In this article, I'll break down how Salesforce Agentforce compares to Intersight, when it's appropriate to choose one over the other, and where they diverge.
Please note: I am basing this information on publicly available data from Salesforce. Due to the rapid pace of AI advancements at Salesforce, I cannot guarantee absolute accuracy of the content presented here.
Salesforce AgentForce is a low-code platform for building autonomous agents that reside within the broader Customer360 cloud. Each agent can both retrieve data (e.g., pull account history) and take action (e.g., update a record or fire a Flow) thanks to the Atlas Reasoning Engine and Einstein Trust Layer.
Agents must be designed, configured, tested, and tuned. They are highly customizable, but not prebuilt for specific domains (e.g., customer service vs. sales) or sales methodologies (though Salesforce provides some templates as a starting point). End-users can use agents in copilot mode and use particular phrases to invoke the agents to take pre-defined actions.
Intersight is an AI-native revenue-intelligence and sales-enablement platform delivered as SaaS. It bridges your CRM, email, meeting transcripts, and notes, then uses large language models to transform that data into actionable outputs:
Furthermore, Intersight offers automatic meeting transcription, smart meeting summaries and recaps, and automated CRM field updates, eliminating administrative busywork.
Intersight provides startups and mid-market firms in the B2B SaaS, hardware, and professional services industries with a single, purpose-built system to enhance meeting effectiveness, buyer engagement, win rates, and overall sales efficiency—without the need for a lengthy “builder” setup or a heavy data engineering lift.
Salesforce AgentForce comes with:
If you already run multiple Salesforce clouds, have large datasets in Data Cloud, and value a single-vendor strategy, AgentForce is a natural next step.
Deploying AgentForce is a real project with many steps:
First, you need to purchase new AgentForce licenses. Multiple pricing options exist:
Suppose you'd like the AI agents to have access to historical call transcripts and emails – critical deal context to build an effective sales coaching agent – and to be able to use semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation. In that case, you need to bring that data into Salesforce Data Cloud. This move can be a significant lift and costly for the organization.
Once all your data is available, someone in your organization needs to take the time to design, configure, test, and tune the AI agents. Someone must define the topics, prompts, actions, and permissions in Agent Builder. This type of work can take anywhere between 2 and 10 hours per agent, depending on the kind of agent and the individual's skills.
Then, identify a pilot group of users (e.g., SDRs, Account Executives) to test it out; you'll likely need to iterate before it gains widespread user acceptance.
Users must be trained on what agents can and cannot do, as well as how to phrase their requests appropriately to achieve the best results.
To bring agents to production and gain user adoption, Salesforce recommends a formal AI project plan and continuous QA.
Large enterprises often budget six-figure amounts for professional services engagements to accelerate this work. Mid-market teams without dedicated Salesforce architects should factor in those costs and the associated ramp-up time.
End-users of custom-built AI agents will use specific phrases to invoke the agents to take pre-defined actions.
Intersight is an all-in-one AI-native revenue intelligence and sales enablement platform, ideal for B2B sales teams ready to leverage AI to improve sales effectiveness and efficiency immediately.
It comes with purpose-built, out-of-the-box AI agents and AI-powered sales efficiency tools for B2B sales teams engaging in consultative, solution-driven, value-driven, or challenger-style sales using methodologies such as MEDIPICC, SPICED (Winning by Design), and others.
Intersight bridges across your CRM, email, meetings, and notes data and uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to transform your sales data into valuable, structured outputs, including:
Intersight also provides a suite of sales efficiency tools, including meeting transcription, AI-generated meeting summaries (AI note-taking), AI writing assistance (including templates tailored to B2B tech and services sales), and automated CRM field updates to eliminate dreary admin work for sellers, giving them time back to focus on actual sales.
Intersight is different from AgentForce in five distinct areas:
While AgentForce is designed for customers heavily invested in the Salesforce ecosystem, Intersight is CRM-agnostic. We currently support the most widely used CRMs in B2B tech and IT services: Salesforce and HubSpot. However, we have plans to support additional CRMs in the future.
Intersight's founders have a B2B technology sales background, and the solutions we've developed are highly tailored to B2B technology and IT/tech/business services sales organizations.
We've embedded our domain expertise into Intersight's prebuilt agents, focused on sales effectiveness (e.g., win rate, contract value, velocity) and efficiency (e.g., time to draft a business case).
Meanwhile, AgentForce is a platform that Salesforce customers can use in any industry and vertical. It is not just meant for a single function (e.g., sales), but is designed to automate labor in various functions, including sales, sales development (lead generation), support, and customer service.
Setting up a sales coaching or deal guidance agent on Salesforce requires a moderate to significant amount of work.
Here are the steps to take before an end-user receives value from a sales coach agent built on AgentForce, assuming you want the sales coach agent to have historical context about your company's deals and each user's current deals to make intelligent recommendations:
Additionally, an administrator must understand the costs of using Data Cloud and determine which AgentForce license model is best suited for the organization. All in all, an administrator needs to manage agent development as its own project and dedicate a significant amount of time to the endeavor.
On the other hand, with Intersight, administrators do not need to spend time developing agents. The sales coaching agent is ready to assist your sellers on day one. There is no data integration work, no agent design or testing work. Because we proactively deliver structured outputs to sales representatives, no additional training is required. The total time needed to set up Intersight is around one to two hours.
With Intersight, an administrator user simply keys in their credentials to securely connect their sales systems and activity data sources to Intersight. It takes a few hours on the backend for the AI engine to kick into gear and generate sales guidance for all reps' current deals. Then, sellers can log in and receive immediate value by seeing deal-specific guidance for their active deals, generating sales documents, and leveraging Intersight to handle their CRM field updates.
Intersight has a straightforward pricing model. We provide all the features and charge based on the number of sellers with access to Intersight per organization.
Current pricing is $167 per salesperson per month (charged annually). We do not charge for administrator licenses, sales leader licenses, or viewer licenses (which allow users to view deals and reports).
We do not charge extra for AI usage credits, AI tokens, data storage, or professional services fees.
On the other hand, Salesforce has three pricing models for AgentForce. While we're not experts on Salesforce pricing, based on public information, we found that Salesforce lets customers choose between three models:
Data integration may incur additional costs. Using Data Cloud requires credits and may necessitate the use of professional services.
Choose AgentForce if:
Choose Intersight if:
Absolutely. Many customers will deploy AgentForce for horizontal automation (e.g., case triage, contract renewals) while layering Intersight for deep sales-specific intelligence.
AgentForce is a powerful canvas for enterprises ready to invest in bespoke AI workflows across their go-to-market teams. Intersight is a ready-to-run specialist that boosts win rates and rep efficiency in weeks.
Evaluate the complexity you can support, the outcomes you need fastest, and the budget you can lock in—then pick the solution that matches your needs.
