As Customer Zero, we put our technology to work on our own toughest challenges — and that includes scaling Salesforce’s sustainability and impact programs. This is no small feat; while making the world a better place is important to Salesforce, it also matters deeply to our customers.
In fact, annually, Salesforce answers thousands of sustainability and impact-related questions from customers worldwide. From 2024-2025, we saw a 65% increase in these questions, and we don’t anticipate this momentum slowing down any time soon.
That’s why we’re using artificial intelligence (AI) agents to deliver critical sustainability and impact insights, answer customer questions, and assist with our philanthropic grantmaking, which includes our support of ecopreneurs — innovators focused on solving sustainability challenges.
This means our Impact team can be more efficient, improving reporting and data management processes and outcomes, while also freeing up time to take more meaningful, strategic action.
It’s important to note that as AI scales, so does its potential environmental impact. However, we’ve also seen firsthand how this technology can accelerate solutions to the world’s biggest challenges. We are committed to both making AI more sustainable and leveraging AI for a more sustainable future.
Here’s a look at how we’re improving our sustainability and impact programs at Salesforce with AI agents.
We’ll cover:
- Building our own sustainability and impact solutions
- How Salesforce uses Agentforce to scale sustainability and impact
- How AI agents make our sustainability and impact programs more efficient
Ready to blaze your own trail?
We’re our own toughest customers — rigorously testing, launching, and adopting our products. As Customer Zero, we’re sharing our lessons learned, so you can experience the same success.
Building our own sustainability and impact solutions
Just a few years ago, our emissions data took months to compile and lived in disparate spreadsheets. Similar to how we developed and adopted Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud) to solve our problem of data silos, we created a solution to simplify carbon accounting.
In 2019, our sustainability team built an app using the Salesforce Platform to manage emissions data. The following year, we made that app more generally available — offering customers the same complete sustainability management solution that we developed and improved internally.
In 2022, that custom app became Agentforce Net Zero (formerly Net Zero Cloud), allowing us to conduct scope 1, 2, and 3 carbon accounting, assurance, and reporting all within one sustainability management platform.
Using this technology, we reduced time spent collecting data by 40% and reduced the cost spent on consultants by 37%. What once took months of manual work can now be accomplished in a fraction of the time.
And we’re still innovating. As agentic AI has become more mature, we’ve begun exploring how to use Agentforce to accelerate our sustainability efforts and programs.
Salesforce AI Sustainability Outlook
Explore our ongoing work to understand and reduce the environmental impact of AI and deliver on its potential for good.
How Salesforce uses Agentforce to scale sustainability and impact
Today, we’re piloting Agentforce directly in Slack to answer critical questions about our impact-related work — all of which need to be answered quickly and precisely to meet customer and sales needs.
Think of it like a living reference guide. Account Executives can ask Agentforce questions like, “how can I get an emissions report for my customer, ACME, Inc.?” And Agentforce immediately answers, grounding itself in our most current company policies and initiatives. With a projected 50% faster response time, this frees up our Impact team to focus on more human-centric and high-impact work.
“With a unified platform like Agentforce, we shift from managing data to driving meaningful action. By automating routine tasks, we free up our teams to focus on the creative, strategic work that tackles our biggest challenges and amplifies our impact,” said Sunya Norman, SVP of Impact.
Agentforce is also a key player in our philanthropic strategy, which includes our commitment to supporting ecopreneurs. Agentforce Nonprofit helps our grantmakers get instant answers and take action, automating tasks such as:
- Creating accounts for new grantees
- Creating prospecting records to identify potential grant recipients
- Summarizing grantee applications
With Agentforce, our grantmaking team is projected to spend 65% less time on record creation. This helps grantmakers stay in the flow of their work instead of getting bogged down with administrative tasks, making the most of their valuable interactions with grantees.
How AI agents make our sustainability and impact programs more efficient
Agentforce gives our Impact and Sustainability team a vital resource — streamlined, conversational access to one single, unified pool of impact-related data. This makes it easier for us to take action and make decisions based on data we can trust.
We’ve given the agent the ability to understand what we mean when someone is talking about a grant, an application, or a prospect. This means a user doesn’t need to have a detailed knowledge base in order to take action.
Plus, AI agents can answer questions around the clock. So an employee in Paris doesn’t have to wait for a response from a coworker in San Francisco — the information they need to build a report or check up on sustainability targets is right there when they need it.
Employees across our Impact and Sustainability team wear many hats, and the work they do is critical. With Agentforce, we’re augmenting and streamlining those processes to scale impact, faster — and that’s an incredibly powerful motivator for us.
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