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Avatar - Your Digital Twin
Avatar - Powered by Salesforce Agentforce

Inspiration

In today’s dynamic business landscape, employee absences—whether due to holidays, parental leave, illness, or personal emergencies—can disrupt workflows, delay projects, and impact client relationships. We saw a universal challenge: how can organizations ensure seamless continuity and knowledge flow when key employees are away? This inspired us to create Avatar, an application that leverages AI to build "digital twins" of employees, ensuring that business operations continue smoothly, no matter who is out of the office.

What it does

Avatar is meant to be an Agentic AI application that creates digital representations—digital twins—of employees. These Avatars are sophisticated agents equipped with comprehensive knowledge about the employee’s ongoing projects, open cases, meeting notes, opportunities, tasks, and even personal notes about clients and projects. When an employee is unavailable, their Avatar steps in, acting on their behalf: communicating with colleagues, providing project updates, mainly covering for the employee.

How we built it

Our development journey began with the realization that we needed a platform capable of centralizing business information, facilitating communication, and empowering AI agents to act autonomously. We identified three essential pillars:

Slack: We chose Slack as the core work operating system. Its features—note-taking, personalized workflows, collaborative canvases, and robust API ecosystem—make it a natural repository for daily business activities and knowledge. Slack became the central hub for both communication and data, providing the context our digital twins need to operate effectively.
Salesforce Agentforce: To create, deploy, and manage the AI agents, we needed a flexible, scalable, and accessible environment. Salesforce Agentforce, with its no-code interface, enables rapid development and customization of AI agents, allowing organizations to tailor digital twins to the unique needs and working styles of their employees.
Salesforce Data Cloud: For Avatars to act intelligently and stay up-to-date, they must be continuously fed with the latest information from a wide array of third-party applications—email, cloud storage, productivity suites, and more. Salesforce Data Cloud acts as a dynamic data pipeline, aggregating and synchronizing information from platforms like Gmail, Microsoft Teams, Google Drive, Box, AWS services, and beyond.

By combining Slack, Salesforce Agentforce, and Salesforce Data Cloud, we established a powerful, three-legged foundation for Avatar, ensuring real-time, dynamic data integration and agentic intelligence.

Challenges we ran into

One of the key challenges we faced was ensuring seamless agent performance across different platforms. Just because an agent works well within Salesforce does not guarantee smooth operation on Slack. It was not always obvious why we get an answer A in Salesforce but an answer B in Slack, for the same prompt. But we believe, we've done a good work so far.

Another significant challenge emerged when we experimented with using PDF files in the "data libraries" of our agents. We found that agents often struggled to extract and utilize information from PDFs, leading to inconsistent and suboptimal performance. It takes way more time to re-initiate the search index when we upload a new version for the same content in PDF format. To address this, we shifted our approach: instead of relying on unstructured PDF files, we began recording business data directly into structured databases. This data is then fed into Salesforce Data Cloud via data streams, resulting in much higher performance, reliability, and accuracy for our Avatars. This change not only improved agent effectiveness but also streamlined data integration and future scalability.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have developed a platform that truly addresses the pain points of business continuity. Avatar’s ability to maintain comprehensive business context, and provide transparent reporting sets it apart. The seamless integration of Slack, Salesforce Agentforce, and Salesforce Data Cloud demonstrates our commitment to leveraging best-in-class technologies. Most importantly, we are proud that Avatar would empower both organizations and employees, supporting productivity and work-life balance.

What we learned

Throughout this journey, we learned the importance of deep integration and context in building effective digital agents. There were 2 ways to do this project. One way is to create one big Avatar agent which would role-play a different employee when needed or to create a new brand Avatar agent for each employee. We discovered that personalization is key—and we instantly observe that using the same Avatar for all employees is not a good idea, especially when we think how AI systems could be nondeterministic by nature. It is not about how heavy you put guardrails, there is always a data leak risk. And also trust and transparency are essential for adoption; employees need to feel confident with their digital twin.

What's next for Avatar

Looking ahead, we are committed to expanding Avatar’s capabilities. We plan to integrate with even more business systems, enhance the personalization and learning capabilities of Avatars, and make them more “autonomous”. Our vision is for Avatar to become the standard for business continuity, redefining how organizations manage knowledge, collaboration, and employee well-being in an increasingly dynamic and distributed work environment.

Avatar is poised to become a pioneer in business continuity—empowering humans and AI to collaborate for greater resilience, productivity, and peace of mind.