With FedRAMP High accreditation, Salesforce brings agentic AI to tackle government efficiency goals
As the Trump administration continues its pursuit of efficiency as a top priority, Salesforce believes agentic AI can help drive toward that goal and offset agency resource constraints.
The customer relationship management cloud giant recently received a FedRAMP High accreditation for its Agentforce platform, which will allow civilian agencies handling some of the government’s most sensitive data to introduce AI agents for their workflows managed by Salesforce.
Particularly, as the Department of Government Efficiency looks to cut back on federal spending and dramatically reduce agency employee counts, it couldn’t come at a better time, according to Paul Tatum, who leads Salesforce’s Global Public Sector Solutions Engineering team.
Amid DOGE’s reshaping of federal operations, “what we’re being asked by agencies … is: ‘Can you start building a digital agent? Here’s my problem,’” Tatum explained. Employees at those agencies, he said, “are doing great work, but frankly, are underresourced against the workload that they’ve been given.”
With a huge footprint as one of the federal government’s most-licensed software platforms, Salesforce is integrating the agents as part of its existing platform for federal customers, Tatum said, adding that the company is currently doing demos and proofs of concept for those agencies.
In the federal context, Salesforce sees AI agents serving a need in “adjudication” contexts, such as when an agency issues a benefit, makes a payment, or takes other similar actions on some service delivery, Tatum told FedScoop.
“There’s an application, there’s a case, there’s a request for services, and government ultimately has to decide yes or no,” he said. “When they’re deciding that, they’re comparing it against some kind of policy, and that can be pretty hard. The policies are long, they’re complicated, they’re updated frequently. And so what we’re finding is these AI agents are extremely good at helping provide recommendations on that adjudication.”
Working with federal personnel, these digital assistants would then serve as “copilots” to issue recommended actions for a human’s final review.
Federal agencies are abuzz with excitement about the possibilities of agentic AI, seen as a progression from generative AI in which the technology goes a step further to take or direct an action. The CIA’s chief AI officer recently said the emerging field is the most exciting recent development in AI and that the agency will look to AI agents to support business-oriented use cases.
On the government’s fitness for agentic AI adoption, Tatum said it is “just primed for it” and an ideal candidate.
“All of the documentation policies are very well structured. The data is super clean. It’s very clear, the use cases of this adjudication,” he said. “I think it’s going to help government be more efficient and more responsive.”
Salesforce isn’t the first or only technology company to lean into agentic AI for federal use cases. Amazon, Google and ServiceNow in recent months have also announced FedRAMP authorizations for agencies to use their AI agents.
