PenFed Credit Union has launched three AI agents, underpinned by Salesforce’s Agentforce 360 platform, to improve client-facing and back-end operations. 

The agents are “streamlining repetitive tasks, surfacing insights faster and enabling our teams to focus on higher value interactions,” Shree Reddy, executive vice president and chief information officer at $29 billion PenFed Credit Union, told FinAi News.  

Salesforce, a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, launched its AI agent platform Agentforce in 2024, according to the company. Financial institutions including Bank of America, Caixa Bank and payments company Stax have deployed Salesforce Agentforce agents.

At PenFed, the agents are deployed in IT, collections and member services.  

“We’re seeing strong positive returns from Agentforce, particularly in improving service efficiency and responsiveness,” Reddy said.  

Examples of these improvements:   

• Within member services, the agent saves 30,000 minutes daily through call summarization, saving $3 million a year, according to the credit union.  

• IT service requests see autonomous resolution up to 75% of the time.  

• The time employees spend on customer calls has been cut by 10%. 

“Based on those results, we see a clear path to expanding the use of AI agents,” Reddy said, adding that agents are being considered where they “can decrease back-office latency, reduce friction and improve overall member experience.”  

PenFed has worked with Salesforce since 2017. The tech provider “has been a key enabler of how we modernize member engagement and deliver more personalized, data-driven experiences,” he said. 

Agentic enterprise

PenFed is focused on being an agentic enterprise, Chief Executive James Schenck said in the credit union’s April 30 first-quarter earnings release. 

“Being an agentic enterprise is central to creating value for our members, employees,and the institution by driving innovation, building resilience and generating long-term impact throughout PenFed,” he said. 

Salesforce is driving the agentic efforts, but AI is deployed elsewhere throughout the credit union: 

• It uses AI to generate a summary of borrower’s habits in lending operations, Chris Kleczynski, vice president and head of auto lending product strategy, told FinAi News’ sister publication Auto Finance News. 

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