---
title: "Agentforce Actions: Where Should the Work Run?"
description: "Agentforce selects actions to complete a task; this explainer weighs native record updates against external services so engineers can place each responsibility sensibly."
---

# Agentforce Actions: Where Should the Work Run?

**Type:** [Trade-offs](https://yomu.fyi/visual-explainers/category/trade-offs.md)

![Trade-off diagram showing Agentforce choosing between Salesforce-native actions and external OpenAPI services, with benefits, costs, and decision conditions for each path.](https://yomufyi.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/visual-explainers/c60ca77b-7d6f-4b34-a2a6-9366123455e3/image-ebdf93e5-000b-443e-ad04-32fa231f586f.webp)

> Agentforce selects actions to complete a task; this explainer weighs native record updates against external services so engineers can place each responsibility sensibly.

## Explanation

Agentforce can select discrete actions, while those actions may run in Salesforce or call external code through an OpenAPI-defined contract. Use Apex for transaction-critical record updates, and consider AppLink or a Heroku service when the work needs external integrations, intensive computation, elastic scaling, or existing Node.js, Python, or Java code. The key trade-off is control and proximity versus extensibility and reuse.

**Tags:** [Agentforce](https://yomu.fyi/topic/agentforce.md), [AI Agents](https://yomu.fyi/topic/ai-agents.md), [API](https://yomu.fyi/topic/api.md), [Salesforce](https://yomu.fyi/topic/salesforce.md)

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