Salesforce added two named sales agents to Agentforce in September, and they divide along the oldest line in sales development. Piper works inbound: the visitor on the website or the lead in the inbox. Hunter works outbound: accounts that have not raised a hand, pursued over weeks. Piper is generally available. Hunter is in pilot, with general availability planned for November 2026 (Salesforce).
The split reflects how the two halves of the SDR job differ mechanically, which matters even for teams outside Salesforce.
What the two agents are
Salesforce announced seven role-specific agents on 11 September 2026, ahead of Dreamforce (PPC Land). Two are for sales. The others cover service, IT and HR requests, commerce, supply chain and customer experience.
Piper came from Qualified, which built it as a standalone AI SDR for website conversations. Salesforce completed the Qualified acquisition on 1 April 2026; its quarterly filing puts the fair value of the consideration at $1.2 billion (Salesforce Form 10-Q). Hunter is new, and it is the first agent to run on what Salesforce calls its long-horizon runtime.
Why inbound and outbound need different machinery
Inbound qualification is a short loop. A person arrives, asks something, and qualifies or does not within one conversation. The agent's job is to ask the qualifying questions, answer product questions and route a warm lead to a rep with the conversation attached. That is the job Salesforce describes for Piper.
Outbound is a long loop. A sequence runs for weeks, the account's situation changes partway through, and most of the work happens between touches: research, prioritisation, deciding what to say next. An agent that forgets everything when a session closes cannot do that work.
The long-horizon runtime is Salesforce's answer. The company says the agent converts an objective into a measurable goal, builds a plan, keeps context in persistent memory across sessions, and uses durable execution so the plan keeps running and can be adjusted as circumstances change (Salesforce). Salesforce lists Hunter's scope as researching and prioritising prospects, drafting and sending outreach, progressing opportunities in Salesforce, preparing proposals, and supporting pipeline reviews and forecasts (Salesforce).
How this differs from a sequence
A conventional sequence in a sales engagement platform is a fixed script: an email on day one, a call on day three, a pause on reply. Someone decides the logic in advance.
An agent with a goal picks its own next step. That is the substantive change, and it moves control away from whoever wrote the sequence. Outreach's May 2026 release added filtering to its Sequence Performance report so leaders can see meetings booked, pipeline created and revenue attributed to activity from its Revenue Agents (Outreach). When software chooses the next touch, managers need a way to see what it chose and what came of it.
What changes for SDRs and AEs
For inbound SDRs, the first qualifying conversation moves to the agent. The human work shifts to what the agent routes: a lead that arrives with a transcript and answers, rather than a bare form fill.
For outbound SDRs, research and first drafts are the parts Hunter targets. Whether a team requires rep approval before anything reaches a prospect decides whether the SDR becomes an editor of agent drafts or a supervisor of an agent that sends on its own.
For AEs, the relevant line is that Hunter progresses opportunities and supports forecasts. An agent that edits opportunity records touches the pipeline data AEs are measured on. Teams will need written rules on which fields an agent may change.
What to evaluate
- Contact data. An outbound agent is only as good as the records it works from. Apollo was named a flagship data partner for Hunter and says Salesforce customers can reach its network of 240 million contacts through the agent without an Apollo subscription (Apollo). That is Apollo's own figure. Ask what enrichment costs extra and how bounces feed back.
- Sending identity. Salesforce says Fulton Bank used Hunter to draft outreach in the seller's own voice by connecting to tools like Gmail (Salesforce). If an agent sends from reps' mailboxes, their domains carry the reputation risk. Google asks senders to keep user-reported spam rates below 0.1% and never reach 0.3% (Google). More volume means more exposure to those limits.
- Approval defaults. Confirm which customer-facing actions require human sign-off out of the box, and who can change the setting.
- Write-back scope. Establish which CRM objects and fields the agent can edit, and whether each edit is logged.
What commonly goes wrong
The most predictable failure is volume without targeting. An agent that researches and sends at machine pace will, with a loose ideal customer profile, contact more of the wrong people faster.
Data drift is less visible. An agent updating opportunities from inferred signals can shift stage and close-date fields that forecasts rely on.
Handoff is the other weak point. If it is unclear when an agent-owned account becomes a rep-owned account, both will work it or neither will.
Hunter's November release is the next marker. Until then, published results come from pilot customers that Salesforce selected, and they should be read that way.
Sources
- Salesforce. "Salesforce Expands Agentforce With a New Portfolio of AI Agents." 2026. https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/agentforce-job-ready-ai-agents/
- PPC Land. "Salesforce agents gain a runtime that pursues goals over weeks, not chats." 2026. https://ppc.land/salesforce-agents-gain-a-runtime-that-pursues-goals-over-weeks-not-chats/
- Salesforce, Inc. "Form 10-Q, quarter ended 30 April 2026." 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001108524/000110852426000127/crm-20260430.htm
- Salesforce. "Your Agent Can Sprint, But Can It Go the Distance?" 2026. https://www.salesforce.com/blog/long-horizon-agents/
- Salesforce. "AI Outbound Sales Agent." 2026. https://www.salesforce.com/sales/ai-sales-agent/outbound/
- Outreach. "Outreach Product Release Notes, May 2026." 2026. https://support.outreach.io/support/solutions/articles/159000431194-outreach-product-release-notes-may-2026
- Apollo. "Apollo Named Flagship Data Partner for Hunter, Salesforce's New Outbound Sales Agent." 2026. https://www.apollo.io/newsroom/announcements/apollo-named-flagship-data-partner-for-hunter-salesforces-new-outbound-sales-agent
- Salesforce. "Five Big Ideas Coming Out of Dreamforce 2026." 2026. https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/five-dreamforce-2026-takeaways/
- Google. "Email sender guidelines." https://support.google.com/a/answer/81126?hl=en