VHA Deploys Salesforce-Powered Agentic Operating System, Saving Thousands of Staff Hours for Front-Line Veteran Care

SAN FRANCISCO & WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Salesforce, the world’s #1 AI CRM, and the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), the nation’s largest integrated healthcare system, today announced the deployment of a new agentic operating system to simplify incident response and improve Veteran care across its more than 150 Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) medical and outpatient centers.

Across these medical centers, the VA serves between 16 million and 18 million Veterans. To best support them, the VHA needed to connect all of the people who play a critical role in delivering care – from medical teams to friends and family who might be formal or informal caregivers, to service providers and the VA employees overseeing Veteran programs and facilities. The VHA also needed a single operating system integrating tools, software, and resources while helping teams keep pace with changing care dynamics, easily share best practices between teams, create efficiencies, and cut costs without sacrificing care delivery to maximize program budgets.

By combining Salesforce’s real-time data insights, integrated service, and complaint healthcare capabilities into a single, AI-powered operating system in Slack, the VHA is transitioning from static reporting to automated problem-solving that eliminates administrative silos and accelerates front-line Veteran care. This strategy enables the VHA to cut costs, streamline facility operations, and simplify services across facilities nationwide while freeing thousands of staff hours to re-focus on direct Veteran support.

“We use Slack as a connective performance-management layer that drives real work. It enables us to cut costs, create efficiencies, and focus more time and energy on front-line Veteran care,” said Josh Geiger, Senior Advisor to the VHA Chief Operating Officer, VHA.

The Agentic Work OS in Action

The VHA is fundamentally changing how more than 370,000 employees manage operations and services across America's largest integrated healthcare system. By deploying Slack as an agentic operating system — where AI, humans, and enterprise data work together seamlessly — the VHA is moving from fragmented, manual workflows to intelligent collaboration at scale. When facility metrics flag potential issues, AI automatically assembles the right experts in Slack, surfaces relevant context, and accelerates problem-solving — all in the flow of work.

This shift enables VHA leadership to focus on strategic decisions while AI handles routine coordination, creating a connected performance management layer that helps deliver better care to Veterans. Now, the VHA has:

• Single Front Door for Staff: Slack serves as the agentic operating system where VHA data becomes conversational. Instead of logging into multiple legacy systems and applications, staff uses Slack to easily view facility metrics and patient trends in the flow of work, collaborate in real time, and take action without switching between systems.
• Automated Swarming: When a facility metric — like wait time or patient satisfaction — crosses a vulnerability threshold, Slack automatically creates dedicated channels and pulls in medical center directors and relevant subject matter experts to swarm on the issue. Slack AI then summarizes context and surfaces relevant information to accelerate triage and resolution.
• AI-Powered Context: Slack AI summarizes long chat histories, identifies urgent improvement areas, and surfaces promising practices from similar past incidents to help provide better, faster care.
• Mobile Field Integration: Staff conducting site visits can upload real-time photos and notes via mobile devices right to Slack, syncing immediately with VA HQ to eliminate information delays.
• Institutional Memory: By establishing this connective performance management layer, the VHA is creating a permanent memory of best practices that serves Veterans today and in the future.

“This strategy has enabled the VHA to move faster, identify trends across pockets of information, and bring the learnings or best practices from every incident to any program or facility,” said Greg Goins, Acting Chief Operating Officer, US Department of Veterans Affairs.

“The VHA is setting a new standard for how large-scale government agencies can use AI to move from reactive reporting to proactive care,” said Dave Rey, President of Global Public Sector at Salesforce. “By building an agentic operating system on Salesforce and Slack, the VHA isn't just managing data — they are empowering their 467,000 employees with instant, actionable insights. This is about more than just efficiency; it’s about helping to ensure that every Veteran, no matter where they are, receives five-star care fueled by the collective expertise of the entire VA system.”

What comes next: The VHA is now exploring pilot programs to connect its Slack infrastructure to VA Health Connect, the agency’s 24/7 virtual contact center powered by Agentforce Health and Agentforce Service. This would bring interagency telehealth collaborations into the same AI-enhanced environment, allowing teams to manage patient intake and triage with the same speed as hospital operations.

Learn more:

• Learn more about how the VHA is transforming operations with AI
• See how USDOT is using AI to modernize national transportation and safety systems
• Read the Agentforce for Public Sector announcement
• Find more public sector customer examples and Agentforce features

This article may include references to services or features that are still in development and are unreleased. Customers should make their purchase decision based on fully released and available features.

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