How to Leverage Agentforce for Sustainability Transformation

Sustainability teams are often strapped for resources, and the climate crisis demands urgent action. These teams are small, have limited budgets, and are frequently asked to do more with less. The pressure is mounting, with increasing demands from leadership, suppliers, and regulatory bodies; sustainability transformation has never been more critical for value creation. It’s a challenging landscape, but there’s a new superhero in town that’s ready to help: Agentforce.

In this blog, we’ll dive into:

• How Agentforce helps sustainability professionals
• Use cases for Agentforce in sustainability
• How Salesforce uses Agentforce for emissions insights
• What organizations should consider before using Agentforce for sustainability
• The future of sustainability transformation with Agentforce

How Agentforce helps sustainability professionals

Agentforce is the agentic layer of the Salesforce Platform deploying autonomous AI across any business function. With Agentforce, companies can employ digital workers to handle the most tedious and data-driven tasks. These digital assistants are especially good at digging through large amounts of data and reports to find answers to specific questions or to generate larger bodies of text. This means sustainability professionals can be more efficient, produce more accurate and comprehensive reports, and improve data management processes and outcomes.

Hearst, a global information, services, and media company, is looking forward to using Agentforce to automate ESG-related processes, improve data accuracy, and demonstrate its commitment to sustainability.

Improve business outcomes

Because Agentforce is an agentic layer that goes across all Salesforce applications, its benefits extend to all parts of the business. That means that when combined with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data, Agentforce can integrate ESG insights into other key areas, actually improving the bottom line in two ways:

Decrease costs

• Optimize truck routes by sharing emissions data with Service Cloud, saving on labor and fuel costs. See how Net Zero Cloud and Service Cloud are already working together to reduce truck rolls (by up to 26%) and save on fuel. With Agentforce, we expect such integrations to increase.
• Identify decarbonization opportunities around water and energy usage to increase efficiency and reduce costs.
• Save hours of employee time with more efficient data gathering and management.

Drive revenue generation

• Share product-level emissions data with Commerce, Sales, and Marketing to feed sustainability insights directly to commerce sites, personalized web ads, or sales representatives, boosting sales. See how Will Solutions, an environmental company, is using Net Zero Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Experience Cloud to drive 5X revenue growth.

Use cases for Agentforce in sustainability

Here are some specific use cases that show how Agentforce can make a real difference:

Gather insights with a simple query

Sustainability teams are often bombarded with questions from leadership and internal stakeholders. Agentforce helps you quickly find answers to your most pressing questions, freeing up time to focus on ESG strategy and solutions.

Sustainability teams are often bombarded with questions from leadership and internal stakeholders. Agentforce helps you quickly find answers to your most pressing questions, freeing up time to focus on ESG strategy and solutions. For example, an ESG manager might ask, “Which office had the highest emissions intensity per square foot in FY25?” Or, “What is the total amount of renewable energy (in MWh) procured through renewable energy certificates (RECs) or power purchase agreements (PPAs) in the last fiscal year?”

This is especially useful for:

• Improving supplier engagement: Automate responses to supplier questionnaires, improving engagement and data accuracy.
• Automating the cumbersome RFP process: Easily demonstrate your environmental and social impact to prospects in the areas that are most material to them. 
• Communicating with investors, customers, and leaders: Quickly and accurately respond to the increasing number of ad hoc questions from internal and external stakeholders.
• Program planning: Enable program managers to understand past performance and make faster decisions for future planning.

Automate ESG reporting for regulatory compliance

Reporting on ESG metrics is a crucial aspect of demonstrating a company’s commitment to sustainability. With mandatory regulations rolling out worldwide, ESG reporting is no longer optional to remain compliant.

Agentforce expedites the ESG reporting process by…

• Building, updating, and storing snippets: Agentforce can build and update snippets of information for both voluntary and mandatory reports, as well as 10-K filings, aligning with specific frameworks such as ESRS, SASB, CDP, and GRI. It will also store the snippets for future use, making it easier to maintain a consistent and detailed record of ESG activities, complete with links to original records for audit trails.
• Automating reporting tasks: Agentforce creates, updates, and adapts snippets for use in a variety of standard reporting frameworks. It also automatically includes all necessary documentation, ensuring an accurate audit trail and eliminating a significant manual burden.
• Ensuring the responsible use of AI: Agentforce operates within established governance frameworks, ensuring the responsible use of AI in ESG management.

How Salesforce uses Agentforce for emissions insights

At Salesforce, we’re the first customer, or “Customer Zero,” of Net Zero Cloud. Like many other organizations, our sustainability team needs to access critical ESG insights quickly. Our partners and customers frequently reach out with questions about our ESG metrics, and internal stakeholders need answers as well. Looking up the metrics, performing calculations, and responding to requestors require a large amount of time and resources. Agentforce presented an opportunity to transform how Salesforce’s sustainability team responded to these requests and managed data analysis.

The Salesforce sustainability team is using Agentforce to streamline emissions data retrieval and analysis, surfacing insights from the company’s own data in natural language. Trained on Salesforce’s environmental data and public documents, Agentforce delivers real-time, trusted insights, including historical emissions, energy consumption, and progress against climate targets via a conversational chat interface. Accurate data is essential for both ESG reporting and making informed decarbonization decisions. Now, Agentforce automates much of this data retrieval and analysis process, enabling instant access to insights while reducing manual effort. By automating these workflows, Agentforce is expected to save hundreds of hours annually, allowing the team to focus on more strategic and high-impact decarbonization efforts.

What organizations should consider before using Agentforce for sustainability

To fully leverage the power of Agentforce, organizations should consider a few things. Net Zero Cloud is an accelerator, thanks to its built-in data model and governance frameworks. And Salesforce puts trust and customer success at the center of everything it does. With that in mind, here’s what you should consider before getting started: 

• Data infrastructure: Net Zero Cloud is a single source of truth for all your ESG data, whether it comes from a structured or unstructured source. It’s important to ensure your data is clean and usable. Check out our guide to learn how Salesforce integrates ESG data with Net Zero Cloud. 
• Governance frameworks: Salesforce has developed an internal trust product framework, calling for model safety testing, human-at-the-helm product design, and in-app guidance to help Salesforce users interpret results. This framework extends to Net Zero Cloud and ensures the responsible use of AI, so you can maintain stakeholder trust.
• Training and support: Both Net Zero Cloud and Agentforce are designed to be used by everyday employees. Customizing Agentforce for your company, however, will produce faster and better outcomes if done by a trained Salesforce admin. Because Net Zero Cloud is built on the Salesforce Platform and Agentforce is an agentic layer across all products, companies can use the same admin they use for all their other Salesforce products for custom agentic skills.

The future of sustainability transformation with Agentforce

Agentforce will be a game-changer for sustainability. By automating key tasks, providing accurate insights, and enhancing stakeholder trust, it will help organizations meet their sustainability goals while improving ‌efficiency and creating long-term value. Agentforce will become your trusted ally in navigating the journey from ESG management to sustainability transformation. We’re excited to be on this journey with you — in both our own sustainability practice and in our product development. Get ready for the next level of sustainability transformation with Agentforce. Join us on this journey to a more sustainable future.

February 7, 2025 at 11:09PM
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Sarah Anderson, Kelly Chartrand, Michelle Sharda