PenFed Credit Union advances towards a broad rollout of its AI-powered customer-facing tools after demonstrating significant internal efficiency gains with Salesforce’s Agentforce platform, amid a surge in adoption across the financial sector.
PenFed Credit Union is moving closer to a broad consumer launch of its agentic artificial intelligence tools after reporting strong gains from internal systems built on Salesforce’s Agentforce platform. The credit union said the rollout of employee-facing agents helped it establish the governance, auditability and operating controls needed before exposing similar capabilities to members.
Olivia Boles, assistant vice president of solution architecture at PenFed, said at a Salesforce briefing on August 6 that 2025 had been a testing year for the programme. The credit union began with a small pilot among employees before widening access, in part to make sure the tools could operate safely inside a regulated financial institution. Once the controls were in place, PenFed expanded the agents so they could work alongside staff rather than replace them.
PenFed has now deployed three agents. Penny, an internal IT assistant, handles about 70% of service management cases that employees previously filed, according to Boles, allowing the credit union to shut down its internal IT phone line for staff. Wingman is designed to surface information for front-line workers before issues escalate to supervisors or back-office teams. A third agent, Ace, is PenFed’s first member-facing tool and is in beta testing across online banking and the mobile app. It can answer questions using general information and account data, including transaction history and payoff amounts, and can also carry out actions such as payments, transfers and recurring transfers. Salesforce’s customer story says PenFed’s broader AI deployment also includes Max, a collections research agent, while Penny is said there to resolve 75% of routine IT requests and Wingman to support more than 500 staff members.
Salesforce says adoption of its agentic tools has accelerated sharply across industries, with Joe Inzerillo, the company’s executive vice president and chief digital officer, saying the number of agents in production is now more than three times higher than it was five quarters ago. He said financial services is among the fastest-growing sectors, with deployments among the company’s banking and financial clients up 1,300% between February 2025 and February 2026. Inzerillo also said the average time to get an agent ready for production has fallen to less than two days from four days in February 2025, as Salesforce pushes to make the technology easier to adopt in regulated environments.
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