MAROKO133 Breaking ai: Salesforce Agentforce Observability lets you watch your AI agents t

📌 MAROKO133 Update ai: Salesforce Agentforce Observability lets you watch your AI

Salesforce launched a suite of monitoring tools on Thursday designed to solve what has become one of the thorniest problems in corporate artificial intelligence: Once companies deploy AI agents to handle real customer interactions, they often have no idea how those agents are making decisions.

The new capabilities, built into Salesforce's Agentforce 360 Platform, give organizations granular visibility into every action their AI agents take, every reasoning step they follow, and every guardrail they trigger. The move comes as businesses grapple with a fundamental tension in AI adoption — the technology promises massive efficiency gains, but executives remain wary of autonomous systems they can't fully understand or control.

"You can't scale what you can't see," said Adam Evans, executive vice president and general manager of Salesforce AI, in a statement announcing the release. The company says businesses have increased AI implementation by 282% recently, creating an urgent need for monitoring systems that can track fleets of AI agents making real-world business decisions.

The challenge Salesforce aims to address is deceptively simple: AI agents work, but no one knows why. A customer service bot might successfully resolve a tax question or schedule an appointment, but the business deploying it can't trace the reasoning path that led to that outcome. When something goes wrong — or when the agent encounters an edge case — companies lack the diagnostic tools to understand what happened.

"Agentforce Observability acts as a mission control system to not just monitor, but also analyze and optimize agent performance," said Gary Lerhaupt, vice president of Salesforce AI who leads the company's observability work, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. He emphasized that the system delivers business-specific metrics that traditional monitoring tools miss. "In service, this could be engagement or deflection rate. In sales, it could be leads assigned, converted, or reply rates."

How AI monitoring tools helped 1-800Accountant and Reddit track autonomous agent decision-making

The stakes become clear in early customer deployments. Ryan Teeples, chief technology officer at 1-800Accountant, said his company deployed Agentforce agents to serve as a 24/7 digital workforce handling complex tax inquiries and appointment scheduling. The AI draws on integrated data from audit logs, customer support history, and sources like IRS publications to provide instant responses — without human intervention.

For a financial services firm handling sensitive tax information during peak season, the inability to see how the AI was making decisions would be a dealbreaker. "With this level of sensitive information and the fast pace in which we move during tax season in particular, Observability allows us to have full trust and transparency with every agent interaction in one unified view," Teeples said.

The observability tools revealed insights Teeples didn't expect. "The optimization feature has been the most eye opening for us — giving full observability into agent reasoning, identifying performance gaps and revealing how our agents are making decisions," he said. "This has helped us quickly diagnose issues that would've otherwise gone undetected and configure guardrails in response."

The business impact proved substantial. Agentforce resolved over 1,000 client engagements in the first 24 hours at 1-800Accountant. The company now projects it can support 40% client growth this year without recruiting and training seasonal staff, while freeing up 50% more time for CPAs to focus on complex advisory work rather than administrative tasks.

Reddit has seen similar results since deploying the technology. John Thompson, vice president of sales strategy and operations at the social media platform, said the company has deflected 46% of support cases since launching Agentforce for advertiser support. "By observing every Agentforce interaction, we can understand exactly how our AI navigates advertisers through even the most complex tools," Thompson said. "This insight helps us understand not just whether issues are resolved, but how decisions are made along the way."

Inside Salesforce's session tracing technology: Logging every AI agent interaction and reasoning step

Salesforce built the observability system on two foundational components. The Session Tracing Data Model logs every interaction — user inputs, agent responses, reasoning steps, language model calls, and guardrail checks — and stores them securely in Data 360, Salesforce's data platform. This creates what the company calls "unified visibility" into agent behavior at the session level.

The second component, MuleSoft Agent Fabric, addresses a problem that will become more acute as companies build more AI systems: agent sprawl. The tool provides what Lerhaupt describes as "a single pane of glass across every agent," including those built outside the Salesforce ecosystem. Agent Fabric's Agent Visualizer creates a visual map of a company's entire agent network, giving visibility across all agent interactions from a single dashboard.

The observability tools break down into three functional areas. Agent Analytics tracks performance metrics, surfaces KPI trends over time, and highlights ineffective topics or actions. Agent Optimization provides end-to-end visibility of every interaction, groups similar requests to uncover patterns, and identifies configuration issues. Agent Health Monitoring, which will become generally available in Spring 2026, tracks key health metrics in near real-time and sends alerts on critical errors and latency spikes.

Pierre Matuchet, senior vice president of IT and digital transformation at Adecco, said the visibility helped his team build confidence even before full deployment. "Even during early notebook testing, we saw the agent handle unexpected scenarios, like when candidates didn't want to answer questions already covered in their CVs, appropriately and as designed," Matuchet said. "Agentforce Observability helped us identify unanticipated user behavior and gave us confidence, even before the agent went live, that it could act responsibly and reliably."

Why Salesforce says its AI observability tools beat Microsoft, Google, and AWS monitoring

The announcement puts Salesforce in direct competition with Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services, all of which offer monitoring capabilities built into their AI agent platforms. Lerhaupt argued that enterprises need more than the basic monitoring those providers offer.

"Observability comes out-of-the-box standard with Agentforce at no extra cost," Lerhaupt said, positioning the offering as comprehensive rather than supplementary. He emphasized that the tools provide "deeper insight than ever before" by capturing "the full telemetry and reasoning behind every agentic interaction" through the Session Tracing Data Model, then using that data to "provide key analysis and session quality scoring to help custo…

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🔗 Sumber: venturebeat.com

📌 MAROKO133 Breaking ai: Temple of Venus survived almost 2,000 years in volcanic l

A new study uncovered the secrets of the ancient Roman builders—how did they build the Temple of Venus to withstand thousands of years on a volcano, even?

The Temple of Venus on the volcanic Phlegraean Fields in southern Italy has long baffled scientists because, despite the volatility it has endured over the past 2,000 years, it still stands impressively intact.

In a study published in Geoheritage, researchers analyzed the materials by taking samples from the former grand bathing pool in an imperial thermal complex. They identified the mix of ingredients that Roman engineers used to achieve the durable structure.

And yes, it was impressive.

The study’s findings reveal the technical prowess behind one of the most significant and emblematic structures in Baiae, which shows their innate understanding of how materials work together to make “a lasting impression.”

A seriously strong temple

As the authors of the new study clearly stated, “the aim of this research is to characterize the geomaterials used for the construction of the Temple of Venus.”

The Temple of Venus is a “wonderful example of Roman architecture of the imperial era,” one of the landmarks of the city of Baia in Naples, Italy.

The Romans have long been admired for their architecture. The design of the Temple of Venus is even unique. However, this study reached beyond the aesthetics to understand their construction methods, as the Temple of Venus has even endured volcanic eruptions.

To decipher its secrets, they gathered nine samples: mortars, bricks, building stone, tuff, volcanic scoria, lava, and efflorescence.

Its strength lies in its threat

The secret to the building’s strength lies in its biggest potential threat—the volcanoes upon which it sits.

Originating from the Neapolitan Yellow Tuff, archaeologists discovered that the mortars they used were lime-based, but these volcanic fragments produced a reaction with the lime once water was introduced, effectively creating a hydraulic mortar, according to LBV. Analysis of the material at a microscopic level revealed that the mortars strengthened over time, despite inconsistencies or pockets of “unreacted lime.”

The bricks were comprised of an equally diverse mixture that utilized volcanic material, once again, to reinforce them. Their mineral composition, which included quartz, mica, iron oxides, and hematite, gave them the reddish hue and required moderate firing temperature, as per Archaeology News.

Archaeologists noted that the lightweight volcanic scoria that they employed in the upper sections of the temple was the most remarkable building material in the temple, as the Romans sourced it further away on Mount Vesuvius. It reduced the stress on the building while supporting it.

The Romans did not sacrifice quality; in other words, they chose to perform a little extra labor to construct a building that was beyond structurally sound but able to endure thousands of years. They wanted their legacy to last, not like today, where everything, it seems, is built to break down.

The key to restoration is salt

Finally, the detail that will impact restoration efforts: the efflorescence was made of common salt, which will aid conservation work as it deteriorates when moisture rises and dissolves the salt, as per LBV.

All in all, the Romans had a profound knowledge of the materials available to them, and most importantly, they knew how to use them to the point that scientists today are inspired to study their methods with sincere admiration.

Read the study Geoheritage.

🔗 Sumber: interestingengineering.com