Bernard Slowey
Appearances
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
It's this transformational moment that I think every company is like, wow, how do I enable this and how can I use this for my customers?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Yeah, yeah, totally. It's crazy. Like it's, you know, it's often sometimes that you, you know, you have that advantage when you're new is that you can build around this technology that's there versus having legacy hold you back a little bit.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Yeah, it's kind of crazy to think about. We have our big sales conference, Dreamforce, around September every year. And we had Dreamforce last year, which we pivoted to AgentForce as a company. AgentForce just kind of happened. As I said, this technology exploded. We were very lucky that we were working on an incredible product that could leverage that.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
So our whole Dreamforce conference was pivoted to AgentForce. And I was kind of standing there, I was in that conference and I was like, wow, if anyone should be an amazing use case of this, it's what me and my team do because we're responsible for our help portal at Salesforce, which is where customers go when they get like 60 million visits a year.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
It's like the second biggest portal at Salesforce. And it has a lot of content. It actually has 740,000 pieces of content. And it does a good job. People find what they need. But we always heard two common pieces of frustration. It's too much content. I can't find what I'm looking for when I need it quickly.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And so that was the opportunity with AgentForce, right, is you can now have this conversational experience, ask it a question, get the answer you want and go back and forth. So I challenged my team. I came back from Dreamforce and I said, let's get this up and running in October. So that was four weeks it took us.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And that shows how easy this product is, because if you think about Salesforce, right, it's a massive B2B enterprise, hundreds of products. You know, it's complicated. And we launched on October the 11th. So it was just over, I think we were four and a half weeks that we got it up and running and we launched it on our help portal, which was pretty incredible.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I've been in, you know, I worked for Microsoft for 15 years. I worked for GitHub. I've been in lots of technology companies. And to get something like this launched so quickly just showed the flexibility in the product.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Here you go, Mr. Benioff. You're a great example for you now. No, we did tell people we were doing it. I felt like we were the perfect use case. I think service is a great use case, right? Because there's a clear ROI, right? It's like, hey, if we can have customers solve with this agent, then, you know, more of them are getting the solution, what they need, et cetera.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
So you're seeing a lot of companies as they look at these agents, service is kind of the number one use case. And it's not to say there's like marketing's use cases, sales, there's hundreds of other ones, but I think companies are kind of honing in on like, okay, service is something where I could really see this thing having an impact.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And so that's why I felt we should be, you know, my leader, Jim wrote, I know you had on the show before, he always challenges us on to be customer zero, you know, use our own products, be a showcase for our own products so that I can go talk to customers and say, here's how we're using it. Here's the mistakes we made. Here's the impact we're seeing from it.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And so we really wanted to be the customer zero of agent force. That was our goal.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Totally. Totally.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Yeah, it's interesting. So like if I reflect back to that, like I was so nervous and like I was so nervous, like I had major anxiety because this was like it's going to be available for people to use. And, you know, once people have access to something, they're going to tell you what they think about it. And so we went live. We started small, actually.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
We went live to a cohort of authenticated customers. What I mean by that was a small percentage of customers who are logged into our help portal could see the experience. So they kind of saw like an ask agent force kind of on our documents. So We felt comfortable doing that because we wanted to see, well, how does it perform? How many people click on it?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Like all your classic... It's like a funnel, right? You're seeing who lands on your portal, out of that number, who engages with agent force, how much did agent force resolve, how many went through to the humans. So you had all of these metrics that we're measuring. And so we started pretty small, but then...
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
We actually, as we started to have reviews internally in Salesforce, we realized we were actually going too slow and that we just needed to get out there and open it up so that we could start to get feedback and learn.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I'm going to screw up this quote, but Reid Hoffman, who started LinkedIn, he has this great quote on like, you should never be happy with the first product you release, but you should release it. And so that was the mindset. I was like, it's not going to be perfect. it's going to be things that people aren't going to like.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
But because it's out there and because it's live, we're going to quickly iterate and improve on them things versus if we keep it back here forever, we're probably going to be too slow. And so that was our mindset was like, it's good enough. It's not perfect and it will never be perfect, by the way. We're going to have to constantly keep iterating. It's good enough. Let's get it out there.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
So then we exposed it to everybody. So anyone who goes to help.salesforce.com, you'll now see this beautiful full screen experience of agent force. You can access it. Anyone can access it. Whether you're logged in or not, you can go ask it a question and it will help you on a question related to Salesforce.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
It's interesting because the hardest part actually came was Mark Benioff tweeted about it and posted on LinkedIn that we were live. And he got a lot of comments after his LinkedIn and his Twitter post. And I was literally like going in reading every comment. Every day I'd get up and have my morning coffee and I'd open it to see what new comments were.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Some of them are brutal. Some of them, I honestly, I didn't feel great about my Salesforce career that first day because we had a lot, like we have a very engaged community at Salesforce. Like we have our trailblazers, our MVP program. Like we are incredibly lucky, the engagement we have from our community. But with that, they'll tell you what they think. And I like that, right?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Tell us how big companies are using AgentForce. I know already it's being employed.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
But there was times they were asking it questions and the answer coming back wasn't a great answer. Right. And, you know, there was I'll give you one example, which is like someone had put a screenshot underneath them. They asked a question about integration with a competitor product. And we kind of said something about the product and then had a link to that company's website, which is nice.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Not a great situation, right? I was like, okay, I'm definitely gone. This is the end of my career. And I'll just, this is like one of the learning moments of agents, by the way, is like, what we did then is you go into, we have something called agent builder, which is where your prompts live. So this is like, you teach agent force.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
There's something called the global instructions, which is like a topic. where you teach agent force the world it lives in. So you tell it you're part of Salesforce, no code, right? It's all in natural language. And you tell it, I want you to speak in this voice and tone. These are the things I don't want you to speak about.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
So you can set guardrails, like maybe you don't want it to ask questions on your CEO as an example. So you put all of this inside the global instruction. So when we saw that happen, we were like, oh, crap. Jumped into our global instructions and said, do not talk about our competitors and listed every competitor. Problem solved. Great.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
The very next day, the very next day, we saw a case where someone asked, how do I integrate this competitor's product with Salesforce? We have great content on that. But what happened? AgentForce didn't answer, right? Because we'd given it this strict guardrails of what not to do. So this was the learning moment for us. We went back into AgentForce and we coached it.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Just like you would coach a human employee. We told it, we deleted that guardrail and we said, listen, you're a Salesforce employee. You're a customer service agent. Put the best interest of Salesforce in everything you do. That was what we wrote. And so we taught it, we taught it to think. We were treating it like an old school chatbot. Don't do this. If that do this, right?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Instead, it was like, no, no, you're smart. We just need you to think this way. And that solved that problem. And so that was a huge learning for me and my team. It's like this prompt design, this prompt engineer, and it's a discipline now that's in the industry. And it's like, it's really, really need to think through it on what you write and how you write it.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I think maybe coming back to Lauren's question, which I didn't do a good job of answering on, of like risk averse versus pushing. Like we definitely had like people internally, like I used to, like we obviously Slack, Salesforce, it's a massive product for us. And so we all live in Slack.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I would get Slacks every single day from people in the company giving me examples of where it didn't do a good job. A lot of the times they were people that were very knowledgeable in Salesforce products asking it a very detailed question. And a lot of the times the problem wasn't agent force. The problem is the content in the back end that it's trained on. If you don't have good content, right?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
It's only as good as the knowledge it has access to. And people will go and they try it with ChatGPT and they go, well, ChatGPT gives me this answer. I say, yeah, but ChatGPT has access to the whole internet. So it can pull an answer from Reddit. It can pull an answer from some blog somewhere. And the risk of that is hallucinations, right?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
That's what scares companies on these agents is like, so ours is one of the, what I mentioned earlier on, but agent force you limited to your own content set. So with that, sometimes if it didn't have the right content, it didn't do a good answer. So we had to work on updating our content. I think it actually exposed to us areas where we didn't realize we didn't have great content. Yeah.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
No, no, I don't think anyone has a clean house. We had, we have an advantage at Salesforce that we have this other product called Data Cloud. And with Data Cloud, like people always ask me where we started with AgentForce. And what I tell people is like, it's like when you have a new employee start, what do you do? you give them access to data, right?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
You give them content, you train them so that they can start to be up-skilled and be able to do their job. And so Data Cloud allowed us to take all of these different data sources, right? These knowledge articles, these products, and actually hydrate them all into Data Cloud. And then that gave AgentForce this foundation. It's able to access all of this data in Data Cloud.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
That's the unstructured data. And as I mentioned earlier on, we're now going to give it access to structured data as well. So I think I had a bit of an unfair advantage where I had access to Data Cloud because I work in Salesforce. But when I talk to customers, I'm like, this needs to be part of the solution.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Like you can use it without data cloud, but if you can have a repository that can contain all of this data and can bring it all in, it can normalize it, it can standardize it, then you have a huge advantage as you go live in these agents.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
We learned this kind of the hard way. So we're a couple of months in now and our agent force implementation still feels a little bit robotic. Like it responds to you, it gives the right answer. And so what we learned is what else do you do when a new employee starts in a service world, right? Yes, you train them on the hard skills. Right.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Like, do they have the information to answer these problems? But you also train them on the soft skills. Right. The way that you deliver a difficult message. Right. If you're a support engineer, like we spend a lot of times on that soft skill training. And so what we forgot to do with agent force is we trained it on the hard skills, but we didn't focus on the soft skills.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And we talk about this as the head and the heart. We were very much focused on the head, the brain element of it, and not enough on the heart. So now we're doing a lot of work where we're actually taking the training that we train our support engineers on, and we're using that around some of the prompts for agent force. So just think about it as we're giving agent force access to that training.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
So it has much more of the soft skills on how it delivers its message. It's kind of crazy when you think about that, but that was being a big learning for us.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
You're just teaching it in certain ways. Like we always have this good example. Like if someone comes to us, let's say with a severity one issue, right? Like let's just say Salesforce is down. Doesn't happen very often, but some companies can have things that are down. The last thing you want is the agent going back and forth with you on potential ways to solve that problem.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
You want it to go, oh my goodness, you're having a SEV1. I'm so sorry to hear that. We're going to get you through to one of our support engineers and they're going, you know what I mean? Like that's an example where agent force needs to get out of the way quickly, but it needs to have a lot of empathy in that situation. Right. And so that's the example of what we mean.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
You don't want it to be like kind of robotic and try and answer that problem. It's like, no, no, get out of the way, be very empathetic to it. And that's how you would teach a human employee to also react in that situation.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
So this visual that you can see, this was our health portal in, I guess, September last year, right? And so it looks like pretty much every single company in the world has some portal like this, right? You can come to it, you could search on it, you could access our content. It has videos, places to learn, et cetera, and you can go in and create a case from it.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
So that's kind of what it looked like. back then. And so, as I said to you earlier, unfortunately, the problem with this is people struggle to find what they were looking for, right? Especially if you were having a problem, you need an answer quickly. You know, we hear that in all of our research with customers.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
It's like, hey, if I'm having an issue, you need to be able to answer me quickly, right? And so let me now show you what this looks like now. So this is help.salesforce.com now. And so what you can see is it's a completely different experience. It's a full screen experience of agent force. So you can go in and ask it any questions I mentioned earlier.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
It doesn't matter whether you're logged in or not, you can engage with agent force. And what we've done as well is you asked me like, how do we determine the success, right? We believe transparency is key for trust. So what we've done is down the bottom, you can see down here, we actually have a live ticker to show how many agent force conversations. So since launch, you know, we've had 450,000
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
conversations with AgentForce. So since October the 11th, that's a pretty huge number. And then you can see, we also try and show our human tickets as well, because we want to try and show people. But what I want to show you is just something a little bit cool here now. And I go, you can click on this, here's how.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And what that will do, it's going to show you all of our metrics and how we measure success. So this is our customer zero page. And you'll actually see there's a video there that some of me and my team are in to talk about our implementation. But what we show you is you can actually look at all of our data and you can go back to any date since we launched.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
What you asked earlier on is like, how do we measure success? Right. And so what we look at is think about this as a funnel, right? Someone has a conversation with agent force, right? It comes back with an answer and you go away. And we consider that resolved, right? So you asked it a question, it came back with an answer and you go away.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
You don't, when I say go away, you don't want to create a case with a human. And so you can see our resolve metric is like mid to high 80s, right? But We also get asked questions, but is that really resolved? Like, how can you determine that was resolved? Like maybe the question I just went away.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And so what we've implemented now is we have something called customer confirmed resolution, which is in the flow of the conversation. We ask the question at the end of the conversation, hey, did this resolve your issue? Yes or no. And on that customer confirmed resolution right now, we're about 76%.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
So that's a really good data point for us that like all of these conversations that you're having at the highest level, it's probably about 80 something. And then customers are telling us it's about 76 when they answer that question. The other two metrics I just wanted to show you so I can help explain it is we also look at this thing. This is the agent force conversation handoff.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
So you can see that 4%. So that is that week, 4% of customers who engage with agent force got handed off to a human support engineer. So that was that kind of flow that I was telling you about. Like it's really critical to us that it's an easy flow. The other metric which is interesting for us is we have this thing called abandon.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And let me explain what abandon is, is you can kind of see the ask agent force in the bottom right-hand corner. So certain percentage of customers click ask agent force, they open it up and they don't ask it a question. And we're really interested on this and why is that happening?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And we think some of this is to do with kind of UX UI where people are like, oh, that's one of them old school chatbots. I don't want to engage with that. Right. And so they don't ask it a question. And so that's something that we're working on is how do we kind of pull more people into the experience? And but but that is kind of the metrics that we measure today.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And what's pretty cool on this site, by the way, is we have lots of blogs on how we did it. You can there's Jim wrote up there. You all know very well. And so we're very transparent. Here's all of our information. Here's how we launched it. Go look at it and see what you think yourself.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
You did a great job. Dude, I gotta admit, the ticker was not my idea, but I love it. And at first I was like, a ticker? Why would... Because like, it's going to hit like half a million soon, you know? And you're like, wow, like that's a pretty incredible number.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And then, yeah, to your point on transparency, Lauren, like if we're not using our own products and we're not showing them, like why would a customer buy it? You know? So it's this like, this trust piece of, okay, Salesforce is using it. Here's all the metrics we measure. And like, We debate the metrics as well. Like people are like, well, is that really a resolution rate?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And we're like, yeah, you're right. We need to do better there. And so we introduced that customer confirmed resolution, which is people actually telling us, yes, you solved my issue, you know? And so we're just like any support leader in the world. I have the same pressures they do to kind of show ROI and all of that sort of thing. And so we're transparent. Here it is. Here you can see it.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I love what you said there, Stephanie, because one of the other things that we like had these long debates on is that hand off to human. Internally, we call that escalation rate, which is a real support mindset metric. And you say that to people externally and like they're like, what's escalation? Is that a bad thing? And so... At that whole page you saw, our marketing team built that page.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
So we partnered heavily with our marketing team on like, how can we tell this story easily to customers so they can go use it? And kudos to our marketing team. Hand off the customer is way better than our human is way better than escalation rate. But the thing I want to tell you about, like we had a long debate, that escalation rate was down at like 1% and sometimes it was 2%.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And now we're at 4% and people are like, oh my God, what's going on? And it's actually a four because it was too hard to get from agent force into a support engineer. with too much friction in the process. And so we've simplified that process. You can literally come and go talk to a human, talk to an agent, whatever that might be, and it will create your case and send you through.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And so we think that escalation rate would probably get a little bit higher and we're okay about that because that means it's a good experience for our customers, which is the most important thing we're doing. But it's interesting as people can get driven by metrics, you know, it's like, oh no, it's a 4%. It's like, yeah, but that's a good thing, you know?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And so, so that's just like, as you talk about that Google and that like debate and metrics, we do that a lot internally as well.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I share this story with my team all the time. Like when I was kind of earlier in my career at Microsoft in Dublin in Ireland, we had this project that was literally called Automate and Eliminate. And if ever there was a name on a project that tells you you're doing the wrong thing, Automate and Eliminate was that.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And like, I remember I won like a gold star or some monthly award at Microsoft for driving up this number of automate and eliminate. And what did we do? We just made it really hard to get to the human. We put lots more clicks in the flow. And so we saw people drop off and we were high-fiving each other. So it's my example of like, whatever leadership defines is like, these are the metrics.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
These are, I'm sure you can do things to do that, but it can have terrible, terrible impacts.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I'm very excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Even if I think about my role, I'm the SVP for digital success. And someone called me recently in a webinar, a unicorn, which I didn't know how to think about that. But like, what it is, is that... Not many companies have a leader on a team that are 100% focused on the digital experience when you think about service, right?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
A lot of the times, like I got passionate in this in my career because like I used to lead Windows support for Microsoft, massive support footprint, thousands of support engineers. But I always say like no one gets up in the morning and says, I want to contact support. Right. They're all going to go online. And so like I started to really kind of hone in on digital and spend a lot of time there.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And then kudos to Jim Rolte, he created a function and I joined to come lead it. And my team wake up every single, we wake up in the morning thinking about how can we improve the digital self-service experience for our customers? That's our day job. It's not an art.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Like I find in many companies, they have people that run functions and then like, it's like, oh, and also you should think about digital. Um, you know, and so, so that's the big thing for me is you have to have people that are invested in it. You know, I have a team of over a hundred people now that are working on like agent forces.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
One thing we work on, we have other things, but they're all waking up in the morning thinking, how do we improve the digital experience for our customers? Yeah. whether that's, you know, that's not just support motions. We also think about success motions, right? You've bought our product. How do we help you onboard?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
How do we make sure that you're getting, you're getting the value from that product? So you renew, right? Like that's critical, like supports kind of that moment, something goes wrong and I need help, but we also need a great digital journey to help you on. And that's what my team 100% focuses on. And that's been a big learning in my career is like, you need people that that's their day job.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
That's all they worry about.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Yeah. Yeah. No, it's funny. Like there's, there's a, there's a LinkedIn community now for digital success and there's like digital success webinars and like that didn't exist before. And a while ago, you know, and so so I get asked to attend these things and talk a little bit about my role and Salesforce.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
That's where the unicorn thing came up, because I think I'm the only SVP that's on digital success, which made me made me laugh. But no, it's not. It's not something that unfortunately for a lot of companies, it's on top of someone's current job.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Yeah, I love that.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I actually started as a tech support agent for AOL and worked my way up to project manager.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Yeah, it's actually interesting. That site I showed you, if you scroll down to the bottom of that site, you'll also see other customers that are using it as well. So I feel like a majority of my job now is going to talk to the customers about what we do. So that wasn't my job a couple of years ago. But we have some great examples like OpenTable is a big company that's using AI agents now.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And so we share with them what they're doing and they kind of share. I also want to learn from these other companies, by the way. And like, how are you implementing and what are you doing? What learnings can I take from you? So OpenTable is a huge one. Vivid, I actually have them in my house, their security alarm system, camera system.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
If you go to their website, you're going to engage with an agent. Remarkable, which probably behind me somewhere.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Yeah, yeah, incredible. And the best, amazing. You go to their website to engage with support and you'll engage with agent force. And so they're just kind of three top of mind examples. Like there's huge companies that we're working with right now. I can't kind of get into the names of some of them that are getting ready to do implementations.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Yeah, yeah. I was a tech support agent part-time when I was in college. That was where I started.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And so that's where me and my team come in a lot because we share what we did, our lessons learned and our mistakes so that they can get ready to go live. So you're going to see a lot of companies going live with AgentForce over the next couple of months. A lot.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Yeah, well, one of them you all touched on earlier, which is a kind of around the data hygiene, right? Like we actually, there's this new terminology my team are talking about recently, which was a new one for me called data collisions.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And which is like you have data that, you know, content is a good example where maybe you have a couple of articles on something that's similar and maybe you're using like an acronym name or something. And the agent can pick the right piece of content. It's a collision of that content. And so so that comes back to this kind of data hygiene piece that you asked about earlier.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
It is really important that you have the right data. You're you know, we've spent a lot of time actually calling older articles. stuff that's not relevant anymore so that the agent's not trained on it. So that's definitely a very, very common one. The other one I would say is the experience from agent to human. We talk about that a lot. Because in our experience, it's like you have a choice.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
You can have the human join the chat And so, you know, they come in, it's a seamless experience or maybe you don't have the time at that moment. So you can create a case to like have someone come back to you at a time that works for you. And so we spend a lot of time designing that experience. And so a lot of customers are like, how did you do that? Show me how it works.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And so that's another one that we spend a lot of time on as well.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I can't remember the name of the bias, but as humans, we have a bias for machines that machines should always be correct. And the example, the great example is like self-driving cars, right? Like we're afraid to let them onto motorways because there's like 0.000 whatever percent chances that we'll have an accident. Humans have accidents all the time. Right.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Yeah, you made me feel old, by the way, when you said that, which kind of made me laugh. But it has been a while. Yeah, God, it's incredible change, actually, when I think back on it, because I started as I was in college and I needed a way to fund my college activities. I worked for AOL in the evenings and on weekends. And I used to be a support agent helping people set up AOL on their computers.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
So self-driving cars are actually a safer option than a human. Right. But we don't want that to happen until it's near perfect. Right. And so it's similar with some of these agents. It's like people expect the answer to be perfect all the time. And it might not be. And it might not be for multiple reasons. Like we talked about content.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
If the agent doesn't have access to the right content, if that content's wrong, then your agent is going to be wrong. Right. You know, and so so there's so many reasons, like there's so many reasons behind it. Like I gave you the example earlier on of like, if you don't like the prompts are in position the right way, then it might respond in a different way than you want it to.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And so there is that expectation setting. And that's why I think that experience agent to human is critical because you need to make it easy that someone can go, oh, actually, you know what? I just want to go true to the human.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
It's interesting, actually, we spend a lot of time as a team just thinking about like, what do we not want it to answer questions on? And so one example is we have a simple guardrail that you should only answer questions on Salesforce products. which I think every company would do. Right. Like, it's funny. I look at I look at our conversations every day.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I go in and read some of the ones and I can see like we have a sediment analysis that runs on our conversations that tells me whether they are positive, neutral or negative. And I can go look at the negative ones and see what it was. And so like some of the negative ones, people ask, like, how do I cook pasta? And so like agent force didn't respond. And I'm like, wow.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Like, and I think it's because like people think chat GPT. And so they want to go ask it anything. And like, no, we've confined it into the world of please don't answer anything. Just answer questions related to Salesforce. you know, so that was one, it seems obvious, but like, that's a, that's a design choice.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
If you want, you could give like these things access to the internet and say, Hey, go, go answer all of these things. Other things. It was funny. Like we were sitting down and going, God, we don't want it to try answer questions on Mark Benioff. Like we, We don't want people to be asking questions about our CEO and it comes back and says, you know, because that's not ours. It's a support persona.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
It's a support site. That's not what it should be for. So we set guardrails. If someone asks about one of our leadership team, it will point them to our investor relations page. You know, so it's really interesting. Like it's an exercise you need to do with your team. Where do I want it to answer? And then probably more importantly, where do you not want it to answer?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Totally. And the other thing I'd say, Lauren, is like companies kind of treat it like a traditional software release, right? Like, hey, we're going to go do all this work. I'm going to bang, release this thing. And like, it's not a one and done. It's a constant refinement. It's a constant looking at the performance. Why was it doing things this way? Like, did we not have content for that?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Do we need to adjust our prompts? Because like we said earlier, it's an employee, right? And it's grown. It's getting better all the time. Like ours is far from perfect right now. It'll get better and better and better over time. So you've got to be thinking like that. It's not an old school, traditional software release, right? It's a digital employee and you got to be constantly refining it.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And even if I think back to that, like they had CDs to install and So now it's like even just thinking of a CD and trying to put it in. And it's just like at the time that was that was normal. Right. That's what everyone did. I mean, like the cloud didn't exist back then. Everything was mainframes. It was local.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
We were treating it like an old school chatbot. Don't do this. If that do this right. Instead, it was like, no, no, you're smart. We went back into AgentForce and we coached it just like you would coach a human employee. And that solved that problem. What we forgot to do with agent force is we trained it on the hard skills, but we didn't focus on the soft skills.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Every company in the world has this problem of they show their silos to their customers. You know, you have marketing that's all about lead gen and like, how are we driving the pipe, et cetera. And OK, now you have sales. We're going to create that. And we have a customer. Now you kind of have your post sales function support success and they tend to be siloed.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And suddenly you now have this agentic layer that goes across all of them. Right. And so like an example of that is like I see what companies that they struggle to pass the relevant information between the different departments. Like I'll give you a very simple example. Sometimes a success team doesn't have the relevant information of why the customer bought the product. What do I mean by that?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Sales sold it for a certain reason, right? They sat in a room and said, hey, you buy this product and it's going to give you this feature, it's going to give you this ROI. They sell and they're gone. I mean, I'm not, this is not Salesforce, by the way. I'm just saying this is what a lot of companies tend to think about it, right?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Yeah, yeah. Right. And then suddenly it's like customer customers. OK, like and so your success team needs that information. Right. So that they can now figure out how do I do a tailor on board for Lauren to make sure that she gets that value of why we sold it? right? Or why we marketed it originally, right?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And so now you have this agentic layer across the mall that's able to see all of this data. It's able to see what did marketing do? Why did we sell it? What was the business outcomes the customer said they wanted?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And now I can tailor, like we get really excited with agents is that today our agent's really about the support persona, but we're going to light up these other personas like a success manager, right? It would help you with your onboarding, right? It We're getting ready to launch voice, right? Which is pretty incredible.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Our agent would ring you and say, hey, you know, I see you just signed up for Salesforce. I see you bought it for these reasons. I'm here to help you onboard. Let's schedule an onboarding session. You know, that's something today that not every customer might get because maybe they're a smaller customer or something like that.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
So suddenly these agents give you this ability, this digital workforce to do all of that at huge scale.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And so, yeah, it was it was an interesting job because I would have people I couldn't see them. So now we're all used to video calls. That feels really normal to us. Like it was literally just me. talking to someone and then trying to describe their problem to me and me tried to describe steps for them to do.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Totally. And one of the conversations we've been having, Stephanie, is like, I think the danger with some companies is you could go create agents for all of them divisions. You can have a sales agent, a marketing agent, a support agent. And for us, we want to make sure in our customer's experience it's agent force, right? So it's one agent, but it might be behind it.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
You have an army of agents that are skilled in certain things. You could have a renewal agent, a success agent, a sales agent, a support agent, but depending on what you ask it, it brings the relevant agent into the conversation. So for the customer, I'm just talking to agent force in my world, like companies will call it different things. I'm just talking to that company's agent.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I don't realize there's all these different agents behind it. So you suddenly Because what companies do today is they show their organizational seams. My example with this is portals. Companies will have a support portal. They'll have a sales portal. In Salesforce, we did it. And we're working to try and bring all of them together. The danger is you do that with agents as well.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
You build all of these separate agents versus leveraging the capability that it can work across it all.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
You can still have, so you still have like your, your subject matter expertise and your company should still build your sales agent, you know, and your support team should. But what you have with agent forces, we have this, this agent to agent transfer process. And so what it should do is based on the question Stephanie asks it.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
So let's say like you ask it, like maybe you have a licensing question or a pre-sales type question. In that scenario, agent force is able to recognize that question is related to this domain. I'm going to bring in this agent to answer that question. It's more about the technology, recognizing what the customer's intent is, and then bringing the relevant agent into that conversation.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And so even if I think back to that and where we are now just on this call, right, or I think about my son and he uses FaceTime to call home to my grandparents in Ireland, like it's just amazing the change in technology that we've seen in that timeframe, both in our personal lives and also in enterprise commercial. Yeah.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
problems. Coming back to, if we're using structured data and let's say you are a customer, right? And you're logged on, we're then able to start to use some of this information as well to know what we should come back with, right? Like maybe we can see, okay, Stephanie's day two with our product, right? She's, she's onboarding, right? We need to use our onboarding aids.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Like, so there's, there's ways we can use our structured data as well, like to help us and understand where you are in your journey and what you're trying to do.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Totally. And it knows who you are, Lauren. That's the most important. It knows who you are and it's tailored that experience based on who you are.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
They probably do, but they just don't want you to cancel.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
It's interesting. So one of the things, I'll come to your question in a minute, but just, I think one of the other things is this like fear of what to kind of do for my job, et cetera.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
One of the things we've been really trying to do is like with our support engineers is making sure they're part of our agent force launch. So we use our support engineers to look at the performance of agent force to help go, actually, what would you have done that in that scenario? Because they have more expertise in our products than anyone else in the company, maybe outside our engineering team.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
So since day one, we've included our support engineers so that they feel really part of it. And, you know, hopefully it takes away some of the volume that's probably easier for them. And they're left with the more complex scenarios where We're always going to need like incredible support engineers. So that's the first thing I'd say. On your question, it's been interesting.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I was having this conversation with my team the other day. We just hired a prompt designer slash engineer. And, you know, that role, I don't know how far back you go, but it didn't exist. There was no such thing, right? Like, you know, and so, and I was even laughing because I was super curious on what type of applicants we will get.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I was like, God, does really have a, you know when people put like 20 years experience or something and there's no possibility of 20 years experience. So I was like, I wonder like who's going to apply for this. We actually got a rock star. I can't wait for her to start. But like to your point, there's these new roles starting now. We have a director of our LLM operations.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
You'd have told me two years ago, I'd have a director of LLM operations. I'd be like, what are you talking about? Is this English you're speaking?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And so I do think it's up to people to be start training on some of these, like, depending on what your interest is, like, you know, UX designers, there's now this prompt design, which is a new flavor of UX design, you know, and then there's understanding these models and more about them. So I think it's, it's really exciting. And I said it to my team. It's like, wow, look at us.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
We're blazing a trail. We're creating these new opportunities. There's opportunities for existing people on my team are getting more deeper into it. It might create new roles for them. So it's kind of cool to be honest with you on some of these roles that are opening up.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Yeah, and I think your point is, I feel in a lot of situations, they augment the human. You know, I was just on a call earlier today. I have a team, a video production team. So we have a Salesforce support YouTube channel. It's an amazing use, like the second fastest growing YouTube channel in Salesforce.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And we have a lot of things happening in Salesforce, which shows you like how much it's grown. But they were talking to me now about how they're using AI for their video scripts. You know, and something that would have normally taken, you know, hours and days is now taking minutes, you know, so it's not that it's replacing their role.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
It's allowing us to go faster and to implement more videos at a more, you know, quicker timeframe. And so that's great because it means we're getting more out there for customers to self-serve on. So I think you'll see more examples like that, where it's like, it's augmenting my job. It's allowing me to be more efficient at my job.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I love this question, but I'm going to steal this question and I'm going to use it with people when I'm interviewing them, because I think you'll see how our brain thinks. I had to think about this a lot, by the way. So kudos to you. You had me kind of like, oh, my God, what will I say to this one? The thing I landed on is like, I don't think data is everything.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And I think a lot of leaders in marketing, support, whatever it is, they just live in data. Now, I live in data. I look at data all the time. But sometimes I think the best decision goes against what data tells you. And so, like, I always push my team is just because our data is telling us something like, is that really what's happening?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
It doesn't often tell you the why and the why someone chose to do something, the why they made that decision, the why they went that way. And so I challenge people. Of course, you should have data. Data is foundational to everything you do. I live in scorecards and metrics, but I really challenge people. Sometimes it's about going with your good instinct.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
you know, and saying, hey, no, I think this is the right idea. I've been doing this for a long time. I'm going to go against the data and I'm going to try to do something myself.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I don't know if I have a perfect example, but even coming back to agent force, like, you know, data probably should have said, don't release agent force to the whole world at once, right? Like it's, it's doing an okay performance or resolution rate is X or whatever. You know, you look at the data and you're like, let's just continue to go slow. Let's just iterate.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And over time we'll get it better and better and better. And then we'll go large. And if I'd have made that decision, I don't think we would be where we are now. Because because we went big, even when the data told us it wasn't doing an amazing job, it was doing a good job. It meant that suddenly it was exposed to more people and there was more pressure on me and my team to make it better, faster.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And so that's like that's an in like where it was like it forced us to go faster by going against the data and releasing it to everybody.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Yeah, I think we have like these moments in time with technology, like every 20 years or something, there's just something that transforms it. Like if you think about the service industry, it started face to face. You had to walk into a physical store or whatever it was. And so you were limited in the hours of operation of that store. Right. Then we had tele service. Right.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Totally. And your intuition is built up over years of decisions, bad decisions, you know, things that went wrong, you know, and so like AI doesn't have that, you know, and so sometimes your human instinct is the best way to go and it's the best way to go.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Yeah, exactly. Right. No, it's great. No, you're crazy. Right. Why would you do that? People are going to die.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
it's a lot of my focus right now and I actually kind of worry a little bit that I spend so much time here like my team has lots of other elements like I talked about like our YouTube channel I manage all of our email campaigns for onboarding and there's just like a ton of things to my team and I worry actually a little bit that I'm so much of my time is an agent force that people that aren't working on it in my team feel like they're not working on the big shiny thing and so
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
It's about prioritizing my time and making sure I'm still spending times in other areas so that they can see that it's still because it's not all agent force. You know, we've lots of other things we do that's super important.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Although I do tell my team, I think everything that we do today will change. Like even like if we go in that example of like, you know, we send emails to customers, right? you know, and like, hey, you know, you bought Salesforce, you should do these things. Like, and it feels so 1980s now, you know, and like, you can imagine a world, like I said earlier, a proactive agent, right?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
That's looking at signals and saying, oh, Stephanie hasn't turned on this feature yet, you know, and it either reaches out in text or voice or like, you know what I mean? And so like, it all becomes automated.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I do think everything we do today will change. I think some things will change completely. Other things will augment. Other things will be a little bit different, you know, and so, but I think everything will change.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Yeah. Yeah. Like how much do we use ChatGPT now in your daily life, you know?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Yeah, no, I have a good one because someone actually shared it with me was we're going on spring break vacation in a few weeks. And someone shared to me about like actually putting into chat GPT where you're going on vacation, who you're going with. I have an eight year old son. These are the things I like, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Here's how I'm going to be here.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Here's the food we like to eat. And it gave me a tailored inventory of what I should do on my holiday. And I was like, wow, some of this is really cool. Not saying we're going to do everything on it. I want to relax at some point as well. But like, what a cool use case, you know, of like being able to get that inventory of what to do.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
All of a sudden you could phone someone. Right. And that was a big transformation in technology. Right. Seems kind of weird to think about that now, but it was. It meant people could be available longer hours. It wasn't just the opening hours of the store. Then we had the Internet. So then it all became very much self-service.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I'll give you a good one, Stephanie, because I know you have kids that someone shared with me recently is they were at home and it was a rainy day in Seattle and they asked ChatGPT and it gave them games to play in the house with their children that they had never played before.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
There you go. Yeah. Carrington 101 from Berman here. There you go.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Oh, that's an easy one for me because I talk about this a lot is I don't think the word customer obsession. I find people say them words and they don't really mean it. Like it's like it sounds good. It's a nice thing to write on a wall. But like you've got to be spending time even in the digital space. Right. Like AgentForce is a good example.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Like I read every day some transcripts from AgentForce, the ones that were bad. Right. I'm meeting with customers. I'm meeting with our MVPs who give very critical feedback on like, what should we be doing different? How do we make it better?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And so, like, I think to be truly customer obsessed, you have to be looking at your calendar and going, how many hours a week am I actually talking to customers or reading something that was interaction with them? That's what it means. And I just think if you're in the world of CX, that is critical to anything you do.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Every single company in the world has a portal that you can go to and try and find out something about their product. Everybody starts in Google. Everyone searches. They go to YouTube. They try and figure it out themselves, probably before they even come to you or come to your company.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Yeah, great to meet you both.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And so now we have this moment in time, which like anyone who used ChatGPT, that first moment you used it, you kind of went, wow, you know, it's these moments in time where it just transforms technology. And so now you have this way, these agents that are going to enable you to have 24-7 availability. You know, it's always there. It's always available. It's trained on all of your content.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
You don't have to like predefine these specific scenarios. It has access to everything that you want it to have access to. And it's incredibly accurate. And the other thing that's amazing is like today, a lot of our interactions are text-based, but voice is coming at us fast. You know, so you're going to be able to deal with these AI agents and it's not like a robocall.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And we talk about this as the head and the heart. We now have a digital workforce that will augment our human workforce.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
It's actually, you know, natural human language. It feels very, very natural. So you think about that in the service injury space, it's like, I'm going to be talking to an agent that's going to be helping me solve my problem or to help guide me on onboarding, whatever that might be. So it's just, it's this transformational moment that I think every company is like, wow, how do I enable this?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And how can I use this for my customers?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Yeah, I think like people still trip up a little bit on like chatbots and agents and kind of what's the difference. And I think we've all had an experience with a chatbot on a company's website. And generally it tends to be a bad experience. Chatbots historically, like you had to define the logic that was in the chatbot. What I mean by that is you would write a dialogue.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
You would literally say, if this, then that, if this, then that, if this, then that. And if you ask that specific question that that chatbot was trained on, it did an okay job. It had no emotion, no intelligence, just help with that thing. But if you went off script, if you asked it something that it wasn't trained on, it is a terrible experience, right? So now...
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
With these AI agents, something like ChatGPT is trained on the internet, right? So it's incredible the access it has. But what we do at Salesforce is we give you the capability to train agent force on your content corpus. So instead of me having to suddenly like write all of these dialogues, I can literally give this large learning model access to whatever content I want to give it access to.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Every company in the world has this problem of they show their silos to their customers. Suddenly you now have this agentic layer that goes across all of them.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And so now we can answer any question straight out of the gate related to that content. But where it gets much more powerful is that's called unstructured content. At Salesforce, we also have a lot of structured content. So a lot of information about our customers that's stored in something called our C360, right? So you start to use that structured content and you can personalize the experience.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I know who Lauren is. I know the product she bought. I know she just recently became a Trailhead Ranger. And so you can really personalize this into the agent experience while it's given answers. That's just something you could never, ever do before. You know, it's pretty incredible.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
So today, like with our implementation of agent force, it's Q&A conversational. You ask it a question and it comes back with an answer. And that's kind of how most of us have experienced ChatGPT. But where we're moving to is the agent can actually do action on your behalf. And that's super powerful. So if you think about the example where you ask it, how do I reset a password, right?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Generally, it will come back where you do steps A, B, C, and D. But imagine when we can actually do that on your behalf. Right. So there's information we can get just to verify you are who you are. And then we reset the password for you. That's just a very simple example. Like in banking worlds, it's like issuing a refund on your behalf. A retailer could be as well.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
So they can actually do action as well as just conversational Q&A. And that's a game changer.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Yeah. Yeah, we think about it a lot as like it's a digital employee. Just the way that we have human employees, we now have a digital workforce that we need to empower and that will augment our human workforce, right? It allows us like a good example as well is these models have language capabilities in them. Right.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
So suddenly we can go to all of these other languages that we might not be in today because we just wouldn't have the budget to invest in headcount to do support in these languages. Now you have it in English and you can use these large learning models to do real time translation. So, you know, Lauren could be in Japan as an example, that's gone back and forth with our agent.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
You're going to see a lot of companies going live with agent force over the next couple of months. A lot.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
That agent was trained in English, but it's able to translate and go back and forth with you and you know no difference. you know? So, so that's pretty incredible as well as these real, these language translation models just open up so many avenues for companies.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Just months after announcing AgentForce, Salesforce is unveiling its next generation AI platform called AgentForce 2.0.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
It's interesting that I meet with companies a lot to talk about what we're doing and like everyone's really interested and everyone wants to get started. But in a lot of cases, companies are afraid to get started. A lot of cases, they want to do internal implementations before external.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
When I say internal, what I mean by that is like maybe you have an agent beside your support rep that's helping your support rep, which is a great use case, right? But They're nervous to go external because they're worried about things like hallucinations or is it going to say something that like, oh, no, my company is going to be associated with this.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And so that's one of the things I've really been helping companies and customers with is like I showcase what we did to say, hey, look, there's rules, there's guardrails you can put in place so that it only answers certain things. And so I definitely see people want to get into it, especially companies. But I do see an apprehension and nervousness on like what happens if it goes wrong?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
And for us for that is like we have in Salesforce, it was a design principle for us was that agent force is backed by humans. And so if it can't solve, you easily go into the conversation with a human. It's actually pretty slick. Like agent force leaves the conversation. Lauren, the support engineer joins the conversation. She can see the history of the conversation with agent force.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
She gets an AI summary of it. So she can quickly start with, okay, I'm going to continue on from here. And so I think that's an important design principle to help companies is it should always be backed by humans. Otherwise, you're going to dead end. You're going to dead end people and frustrate them.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
I think it's the full spectrum, Stephanie, which is kind of what's amazing. Like if you're a small business company today, like you probably can't have like a support phone number, right? And like, you know, because you're not going to invest in that headcount. You've other things you need to be worrying about, right? And so suddenly you have the ability to have support, right?
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
You could have a digital agent on your website that's maybe answering some of your top questions from your FAQs. And if it can't answer, maybe it submits like an email a case where one of your humans can come back afterwards. But I think it goes all the way from like small SMB to massive enterprise. Now, obviously, the use cases are different than how enterprises are going to think about it.
Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
But I actually think it helps give SMBs a leg up because suddenly now you have this digital workforce that you can leverage to help you go faster.