Zuko Mdwaba, Salesforce area vice president, Africa executive and South Africa country leader.

Generative AI (GenAI) continues to open opportunities for businesses in Africa, with significant benefits for workforce strategies and employees.

“To make this future a reality, businesses need to create a workplace where humans and AI agents work successfully side-by-side,” says Zuko Mdwaba, Salesforce area vice president, Africa executive and South Africa country leader.

Empowering employees to hand repetitive tasks to bots so they can focus on more meaningful work isn’t just good for the employees, it’s also good for business, improving efficiencies, performance, productivity, and wellbeing.

To make AI work for workers, leaders must reimagine how they develop and train every part of their organisation. A tailored approach to AI enablement is essential to set up every employee for success.

Three key actions leaders can take to encourage AI adoption are: creating a culture of continuous learning, giving visibility to use cases of AI, and encouraging experimentation. Sharing how others are using and benefiting from AI tools, and troubleshooting AI use cases, will help clarify AI norms and encourage more employees to share their own AI learnings.

“Creating a trusted environment where teams feel supported to try new technologies is essential. Workers who feel trusted by their employers are 94% more likely to have tried AI for work related tasks,” Mdwaba says.

Building a culture of experimentation and encouraging employees to find ways to improve their work with AI, means changing the way that productivity is measured. Instead of using input metrics such as time spent on a task, the focus should be on defining clear outcomes such as improving customer satisfaction or innovating new product offerings. This will encourage employees to use their time to be creative and employ whatever tools they have, to achieve those outcomes.

One of Salesforce’s most powerful new innovations is Agentforce. “This new layer on our platform enables companies to build and deploy AI agents that can autonomously take action across any business function,” Mdwaba says. “These agents effectively automate a wide range of daily tasks, allowing employees to focus on more complex duties.”

Agentforce goes beyond chatbots and co-pilots. It uses advanced reasoning abilities to make decisions and take action on issues as wide as resolving customer cases, qualifying sales leads, and optimising marketing campaigns. Agentforce doesn’t depend on human engagement to get work done. Agents can be triggered by changes in data, business rules, pre-built automations, or signals via API calls from other systems.

These out-of-the-box agents are easy to deploy, with low-code or no-code tools, and they work around the clock across any channel. Pre-built agents can be customised to serve any industry and use case, from order management in retail, to billing and payment support in financial services.

“Agentforce is redefining what’s possible in business and beyond, ushering in a new era of limitless workforces that augment every employee, build deeper customer relationships, and drive unprecedented growth and profitability,” Mdwaba emphasises.

Unlike other agent platforms that require complex data integration and custom builds, Agentforce is already built into Salesforce’s trusted, fully customisable platform, which successfully integrates enterprise data, metadata, AI models, workflows, security and applications.

Existing flows, prompt templates, Apex, and APIs can be turned into agent actions, connecting to enterprise data, security models, and automations, with the added power of tools like Data Cloud, Slack, and MuleSoft.

Customers can easily create an on-demand digital workforce that operates without constraints, using the Salesforce tools and language they already know.

“If you can describe it, Agentforce can do it,” Mdwaba concludes.

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