Shoko Chukin Accelerates Transformation to Team-Based Sales, Leveraging Agentforce to Turn Sales Data into Assets

Salesforce Japan Co., Ltd. announced today that Shoko Chukin Bank has adopted Salesforce's Agentforce platform. Shoko Chukin aims to utilize the platform's AI agent features to advance DX (Digital Transformation) and AX (AI Transformation) as a growth partner for SMEs, aiming to transition from individual-dependent sales to team-based sales and enhance customer experience by turning accumulated data into assets.

Background and Challenges

Under its purpose, 'Supporting the future of companies. Making Japan resilient to change,' Shoko Chukin focuses on problem-solving support that engages with customer issues from their perspective, rather than just providing funds, and is driving integrated reform across 'organization, talent, and digital.' Although it had used a scratch-developed sales support system since 2008, long-term modifications made the system complex and rigid, requiring massive time for information retrieval. Shifting from a sales style dependent on individual experience to accompaniment-based support, where knowledge is shared and utilized across the entire organization, became an urgent task.

In this environment, Shoko Chukin adopted Salesforce as its new foundation, aiming to centralize information to suppress individual reliance and enable team-based sales. Unlike scratch-developed systems, the bank highly valued the flexibility for phased evolution based on standard features and the scalability as an AI agent platform for future AI and data utilization, leading to the decision to introduce Agentforce.

[Full-Scale Deployment]

Currently, approximately 3,300 employees nationwide, including sales staff, use Salesforce to manage daily customer information and interaction history centrally.

[Digitization of Customer Touchpoints]

Furthermore, the bank built the corporate portal 'Biz Link,' based on Customer Community (formerly Experience Cloud), providing online submission of financial statements and financial/ESG diagnostics. This trial visualizes customer interests—which could not be grasped through real touchpoints alone—as data, promoting the creation of higher-quality customer engagement.

[Full-Scale Expansion of AI Agents]

Following a PoC with 130 staff at branches in the latter half of 2025, which confirmed clear results, full-scale development of Agentforce for Sales began in April 2026. Specifically, it will deploy automated summaries for pre-visit preparation and natural language search for similar transactions and consultations. Since support based on deep, customer-specific context is a domain that general AI cannot replace, Agentforce is positioned as a practical tool to complement this.

Implementation Results

Although there was some confusion in the field during the early stages of Salesforce implementation, it was overcome by building a careful adoption structure, such as gathering representatives from each branch to promote collaboration and resolve questions. Now, information transparency has progressed, and reproducible team-based sales are being established. Moreover, with the production deployment of Agentforce for Sales, staff mindsets are expected to shift significantly from input for recording to input as 'assets to be used.' The project does not set long-term numerical targets company-wide; it emphasizes qualitative changes in sales activities, such as how much more time is spent on customer dialogue and strategy formulation, rather than just quantitative ROI. Thanks to efficient information retrieval, staff are already reporting, 'We have more time to face our customers.'

Future Prospects

Moving forward, the bank will promote the optimization of data management systems premised on AI utilization and further expand customer touchpoints through Biz Link. It will strictly implement AI in a way that supports spontaneous judgment by staff on the ground, rather than delegating judgment to AI, further evolving problem-solving support for SMEs.

Masahiro Sekine, President and CEO of Shoko Chukin Bank, stated: 'Our bank aims to be a partner that confronts issues from the same perspective as business owners, not just as a fund provider. DX and AX promotion are not ends in themselves, but means to improve the quality of support for SMEs. By establishing a digital foundation called Agentforce for Sales, we will utilize knowledge that was previously confined to individuals across the entire organization, contributing to the future of SMEs and the Japanese economy through a new form of accompaniment-based support that fuses the real and digital worlds.'