Salesforce Hunter and Piper: The AI SDR Goes Mainstream

Salesforce launched seven named, job-ready Agentforce AI agents on September 11, 2026, and two of them are aimed squarely at the SDR function. Hunter, an outbound sales agent, is in pilot now with general availability planned for November 2026. Piper, an inbound pipeline agent, is generally available today. If you run B2B pipeline, this is the clearest signal yet that the AI SDR has moved from experiment to product line.

The launch landed the same week Salesforce closed its $3.6 billion acquisition of Fin, which now ships as one of the seven.

What did Salesforce announce?

Instead of asking customers to build every agent from scratch, Salesforce is selling prebuilt agents designed around specific jobs: sales, service, commerce, employee support, and supply chain. Each comes with the skills, actions, and data models for that job, runs inside the customer's existing permissions and business rules, and can be renamed to match the brand. Salesforce says it has delivered 7 billion Agentic Work Units across Agentforce and Slack to date, 3.2 billion of them in the most recent quarter.

The company also released Agent Script, an open source language that lets teams combine AI reasoning with deterministic rules, plus Multi-Agent Orchestration (generally available now) to route work across agents.

Who are the seven named Agentforce agents?

What do Hunter and Piper actually do?

Hunter works a pipeline the way a rep does, over weeks rather than in one chat. A seller can hand it a goal like rescuing at-risk deals before quarter end, and Hunter builds a plan, pulls in context, and works the list, with guardrails that define when it acts alone and when it needs seller approval. Salesforce cites customer Perk, which says Hunter builds 60 percent of its sales pipeline.

Piper comes from the Qualified lineage and covers the inbound side: engaging site visitors, qualifying them, and converting them into pipeline. Salesforce says Asana drives 4x its previous conversation volume with Piper, and that customers deploy it in 45 days on average. These are vendor-published customer figures, so treat them as claims, not benchmarks.

What is the long-horizon runtime?

Hunter is the first agent on a new Agentforce runtime built for goals that span days and weeks. Three pieces make it work: memory that preserves context across sessions, durable execution that keeps plans running and lets the agent course-correct, and dynamic steering that adapts behavior to an individual user's feedback. Salesforce says more agents will move onto this runtime over time, and that customers will eventually build their own long-horizon agents.

What should B2B pipeline teams do about it?

First, if you are on Salesforce, Piper is the practical test. Inbound response time is measurable, the agent is GA, and the failure mode (a missed conversation) is cheap. Hunter is worth a pilot conversation now but not a production bet until it reaches GA in November.

Second, if you are not on Salesforce, the same motion exists in your stack. HubSpot runs its own prospecting agent, and standalone AI SDR platforms like AiSDR and Amplemarket do this without a platform migration. The vendor you pick matters less than the system around it: signals in, guardrails on, reps closing.

Third, keep humans in the seat. Every credible deployment we have built keeps the agent sourcing and drafting while reps own the conversation and the close. That is how we build the AI SDR prospecting engine for clients, and nothing in this launch changes it. Named agents collapse setup time; they do not remove the need for someone who knows what good outreach looks like.

Frequently asked questions

What are the names of Salesforce's new AI agents?

Casey (customer service), Paige (IT and HR), Carter (commerce), Hunter (outbound sales), Marshall (supply chain), Piper (inbound pipeline), and Fin (customer experience), announced September 11, 2026.

Is Salesforce Hunter available now?

Hunter is in pilot now. Salesforce has scheduled general availability for November 2026. It is the first agent on the new long-horizon runtime.

What is the difference between Hunter and Piper?

Hunter is outbound: it researches accounts and runs outreach over weeks alongside sellers. Piper is inbound: it engages, qualifies, and converts leads arriving through websites and inboxes. Piper is GA today; Hunter is not.

How much do the Agentforce agents cost?

Salesforce did not publish per-agent pricing in the announcement. Expect pricing through Agentforce's existing consumption model; confirm current numbers with Salesforce before budgeting.

Sources: Salesforce newsroom, September 11, 2026 and the Fin acquisition close announcement, both checked September 14, 2026.