PenFed Credit Union has been gaining efficiency with internal AI agents and plans to deploy consumer-facing agentic AI tools by the end of the month.

The credit union’s agents are built on Salesforce’s Agentforce platform.

“2025 was kind of a testing year, figuring out how we were going to deploy these agents,” Olivia Boles, assistant vice president of solution architecture at PenFed, said during a Salesforce briefing on Aug. 6, noting PenFed started with internal-facing bots.

“We did pilot those with a smaller set of employees first, just to kind of make sure, just for a pulse check,” she said.

Once proper auditability and governance were in place, the credit union rolled out the agents to work alongside its employees, Boles said.

Given that PenFed is a highly regulated entity, the credit union “spent an enormous amount of time piloting, designing and developing, augmenting those governance statutes that we had in place,” Boles said.

Three agents

The three agents that PenFed launched have yielded the following efficiencies:

1. Penny: The internal, employee-facing IT agent handles about 70% of IT service management cases that employees previously submitted, Boles said. It has handled that volume well enough that PenFed turned off its internal IT phone support line for employees, she said.
2. Wingman: This is another internal, employee-facing agent built to intercept support calls before they reach a supervisor or back-office support group by surfacing relevant information front-line employees could not find or didn’t have time to read, Boles said.
3. Ace: PenFed’s first external member-facing agent is in beta testing on its online banking and mobile app channels, Boles said. Ace answers questions grounded in general knowledge and members’ account data including transaction history and payoff amounts. It can execute actions including making payments and setting up transfers and recurring payments. PenFed is on track to roll out Ace to its full membership on online banking and mobile by the end of this month.

Launching internal-facing agents first helped PenFed be ready to deploy consumer-facing agents as guardrails and governance systems were already in place, she said.

Agentforce adoption

Joe Inzerillo, executive vice president and chief digital officer at Salesforce, said during the briefing that the company’s agentic index report, published today, found that there are more than three times the number of agents in production compared with five quarters ago, signaling strong adoption across all industries.

Financial services is one of the fastest growing verticals when it comes to Agentforce adoption, Inzerillo said, adding that the agent deployments for its financial services clients has increased 1,300% between February 2025 and February 2026.

Inzerillo also pointed out that the average time for a user to get an agent production-ready has fallen to under two days, compared to four days in February 2025 as Salesforce looks to make adoption of its tools easier.

“Even though these regulated industries might be slower to adopt, but once they did, their agents are much more sophisticated,” he said.

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