Kishan Chetan
Appearances
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
if we help our customers to be efficient they will love us for it exactly don't think of just our time and our efficiency but think of what it means for the customer i mean that's customer experience nailed it let's not forget this is not ai in isolation it's ai that works seamlessly with humans so making sure it has the right loop to the humans as well as the right ai that sits along with the human to make that more productive
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
The beauty of AgentForce is, given it's built on the platform, any type of automation that you've done with Salesforce, you can essentially do that with AgentForce. So think of that. And let's take a few examples. And I oversimplified it to essentially bring it to three categories. The first one is what I call action-oriented.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
So think of all the customer service interactions you've had to find a quick piece of information. You called up like a FedEx or you called up a UPS and any of these and you want to know, hey, where is my thing that's going to get delivered to me? I want this quick piece of information. It's very transactional. I want to go get that. So the ability to have that.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
be a voice call or any like, you know, agent interaction and getting that information and doing that quickly. That's like what I call extremely like action oriented. The second one is what I call more order related. So it starts with like action oriented. I want to know about my order, but very quickly it starts to move into, Hey, what can I know more about this product?
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Can I actually like, you know, change my order? It starts to become more consultative. It starts to become more understanding what this product's about. And that is where you could start with an agent, you could get that scale, but very soon you realize, hey, look, somebody is here trying to buy this luxury bag.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
And at that point of time, we had this fantastic example where Gucci did a lot of work with us, where you quickly want to go to a human and the human needs to have the right message about the product, the right message about the brand. And that becomes very important. So that's where the agent and AI in the flow of work really helps the human agent be far more productive.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
And the third one is what I call very knowledge-centric. So if you're reaching out to a high-tech company and you want to understand, how do you fix this particular problem that I've had with my router? Cisco is a great customer of ours. And that requires looking at all of this knowledge, looking at all of this data that's there in Salesforce, outside of Salesforce.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
And that requires a lot of work on unstructured data. And that's another great example where agents look at all this unstructured data, synthesize it back into two or three things. We've had customers who were spending almost... $100 to $200 on a customer conversation because it just took that time to go get that information.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Imagine if you could save that time and make that much cheaper because you don't have to read like 300 or 400 documents. So those are kind of examples, like very quick, get me an answer, logistics, hospitality, those types of industries. Great examples, like we went to OpenTable, you can go... reschedule appointments, find information about restaurants. That's super, super effective with that.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Very action-oriented. To the second, which is more order-oriented, like I want to find out more about this product. Do you have this great cashmere sweater if I was like Saks or a retailer? How can I return it? To the final one, which is like, hey, listen, I'm having this problem with the product that I have at home. How can I go change it? How can I go set up my best music system?
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
So those are all examples of customers using agent force doing all of these different types of
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Yeah. I mean, that's such a fantastic question. I mean, there's like so much different types of unstructured data, right? So if you look at like unstructured data that sits in, let's say a conversation you've had with a customer, like a phone call, a live transcript of a phone call or a chat, there's like a wealth of data, right? Like
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
a lot of our customers have gone back and tried to do like, you know, maybe a survey with a customer to understand how they feel and think. But like you have this wealth of information that you can use to actually understand what the customer is thinking without asking them.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
So imagine if you could use all of that information to understand the sentiment, understand the intent, are they looking to buy? Are they unhappy? Are they looking to return? And you can use that to like,
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Yeah, that's such a fantastic question. I mean, if you think about it, I think the biggest thing that I think customer service will be with AI is limitless. That's the word I like to use. And let me explain what I mean by that. If you look at it traditionally, customer service was always focused in some sense on minimizing the number of interactions you had. It was about deflection.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
you know, do aggregated, like give a offer to somebody who's called in an airline because their flight was delayed or their baggage was damaged and give them an offer, give them the ability to get like a better discount on their next flight. That would be fantastic. And that's why we have this customer experience intelligence to be able to kind of look at this aggregated intent and sentiment.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Imagine you're having a whole bunch of like calls around something broken in a fridge. If you're a manufacturing company, there's a certain problem with like the appliance and you're seeing like 30 or 40 calls come into your contact center. What if you could take those different cases and make it like a knowledge article?
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
So people can easily find this information online, but more importantly, as you said, proactively send out like a notification to everybody who has that machine. like a washing machine or a dishwasher and ask them to go fix it. Like Fisher Paykel is a great example of like a customer of ours who was in the service cloud keynote. They can use a lot of this kind of asset-based data.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
So that's another great example of like, you know, Where we're using all of this information coming into the contact center and being able to automate it, better operations, drive more knowledge or deploy more agents to focus on a specific area because that product line is getting a lot of questions and a lot of issues. So that's another great way of using data.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
And finally, another place where unstructured data becomes super crucial is all of this knowledge information. Imagine if you could get knowledge and knowledge information from your SharePoints or from your OneDrives and from your files or from your websites and bring this all together and use that to ground your AI.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
And that's where our unified knowledge and all of the investments that we've done to bring knowledge from everywhere else really powers it. So fantastic investments in summary on analytics to understand sentiment intent, to manage your operations of your contact center using unstructured data, as well as using unstructured data like knowledge to drive automation in a much bigger way.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
So those are the big places where we use unstructured in a much nicer way.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
No, Lauren, thank you for that. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. That's a huge part of it, which is how do I get all of this information, this wealth of information that's there? I mean, imagine if you're a high-tech chip manufacturer. I met them a couple of months ago. Super complicated product. The people who use it are like these highly technical engineers.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
It's about not actually speaking to somebody in customer service, Because you were focused rightfully so on managing costs because every company has to manage its bottom line. And customer service, while it was very important, was something that you could manage.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
And it takes them like 10, 12 hours to go through all of these documentations and understand how to do something. Imagine if you could get all of that document together so that you could answer a bunch of questions in a much easier way. And that's where bringing the knowledge together helps.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
But there's a second part of it as well, which is I was speaking to another high-tech company, which is focused on making your networking much nicer. For them, what was important is not just having a lot of data, but having the right data. So making sure that you had the right quality, that you didn't bring a bunch of garbage data because in some sense it's garbage in, garbage out.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
So you brought the right data, you already had the right quality. So that's another place where data is super crucial, but having that human element to make sure that this knowledge is rightfully curated, is updated, it has kind of the right segmentation, the right categorization of it becomes super important. And that's when it's really around bringing all of the data
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
and making sure that you use the right part of that data to essentially power your AI, because otherwise it just won't be able to do much.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Yeah, no, I mean, listen, when I have AI discussions and I've had like AI discussions over the last several years across different industries, it always first comes back to a data discussion, which is, do you have the right data? Do you have the right things in place in order to do that? So I think that definitely becomes a huge part of that discussion.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
So that's one thing that I always kind of start people with, which is like, you know, do you have the right data? What are the right set of data that you kind of want to take? But while I say that, I also am mindful of the fact that you don't want to make this a massive data project because there's a lot of value that you can get right now with AI.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
But instead of that, imagine that you're in a world where you could actually have a conversation with somebody at the company you're speaking about 24 by 7 across any channel, whether that's voice, whether that's like text or whether that's on WhatsApp that I love a lot. And you could do that every time in any part of your journey.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
So it's essentially about figuring out what are the use cases that you can immediately turn on that you can get value. Can I... Like, you know, make it very easy to find like answers about a set of knowledge articles. Can I turn on an agent to answer a set of questions? Can I turn on an agent for like scheduling something?
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
So data is super crucial, but like if you identify the right use cases, you can already figure out the right data that you need to get for that use cases. So be pragmatic. Figure out where you have the highest value, the highest pain point that you can immediately address customers' needs. And more than that, delight the customers and get the right data for that.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
The other part of agent strategy and AI strategy very quickly becomes about channels. How are customers trying to reach you? If I'm trying to go turn on a project in Latin America, maybe I have some fantastic retailers, really great telco companies who are our customers. And for that, WhatsApp is absolutely crucial.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
like business is conducted on WhatsApp in like Brazil and Latin America or in India. So having that channel on is super crucial. If you're a much more complicated high-tech company, like I was speaking to, not just a high-tech, I was speaking to like a healthcare company, which has a fairly complex product and they do patient services with their patient.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Most of their questions are on email because they're complex, they're lengthy, they're like, you need to have a bunch of questions. So having the right channel mix turned on for what you need. super transactional, maybe an SMS, maybe WhatsApp for the geography, the right mobile channel.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
If it's like more relationship oriented, the demographic that you're targeting is slightly different, voice becomes super important. So having that combination of the right channels, having that data, having that use cases. And finally, let's not forget, This is not AI in isolation. It's AI that works seamlessly with humans. So making sure it has the right loop to the humans.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
If you want to create the loop between agents and humans, as well as the right AI that sits along with the human to make them more productive. So I think that's kind of the way to think about it. But my advice to leaders would be, there's so much demand. I'm sure your CEOs are asking for it. I'm sure your customers are asking for it.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Start with something that you can turn on, show value, and then you can expand.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
I think the way we've looked at it with clients is, one way to think about it is, what are the areas that there's actually a lot of demand? Customers are not being satisfied. They're not getting the answers the way they want to. It's essentially not being serviced, right? So there's literally not moving it away from humans to AI.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Like, you know, I'm exploring to buy this like fantastic new headset that I need. And, you know, I'm trying to do that or I'm trying to do that during the purchase or after it. And I could always get somebody on hold. That would really change customer service. And I think that's the biggest opportunity AI kind of offers because a lot of people look at it as like, hey, it can really help save costs.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
You're essentially going after almost a greenfield area where you could go solve. So that's one way of thinking about it. The second way is when you look at your user base itself and your tier one, tier two in your contact center, how much of that is repetitive things? Is it always about resetting your passwords or updating your accounts?
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
So what are the repetitive tasks that you can make sure that you have a very well-defined process? That you can automate away and the customer will actually be more delighted because it happens faster because they don't have to wait for somebody to become free up.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
So I think having that ability to make sure that you have the right process with the AI supporting the human to then being totally autonomous becomes very important. So start either with a green field or start with something that you just have a lot of repetitive cases around.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
And then the third one is like, I always like to pilot it, pilot it in specific regions, pilot it with specific product lines, pilot it for specific processes and see value, show the value to your clients
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
people your leaders and start to expand so that that essentially is like the best way to do it so my motto is like turn that's what i tell customers turn on something and show value make sure that you're comfortable because it's in front of your customers it doesn't have the right too many hallucinations and our technology is built to like minimize hallucinations
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
make sure that's accurate and solves the customer's problems and then expand.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Yeah, I mean, that's a fantastic question, right? I mean, one of the things that we saw is a few things that people are doing with extra time. So we have this great example with Formula One. All of us know Formula One. They had a race recently, a couple of races in the US. Initially, their contact center reps used to handle a lot of like
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
repetitive elementary tasks, as that got more and more automated away with AI, they started to handle things which were much harder, much more difficult. So one thing is that you're just handling far more, far many more customer reaches that you never had before. So that's literally like, instead of handling thousand cases a week, you're just handling like, you know, five, 10.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
depending on what it is. So that's a great example of where you're using the same number of people, but you're essentially handing a lot more than you ever had before. If you look at companies that are high-tech companies, they are growing 10% to 15% every year. They have that many more customers. For them, using this AI was a way to handle the load with the same number of people.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
So those are examples of you're essentially being able to do just more. The third category, which is the greenfield, is where we're seeing a lot more focus on, let's have the service reps start to build relationships, drive a lot more growth, be an advisor. If you're in the retail industry, for example, especially in luxury retail or You're in wealth management.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
which is true, but where I look at it is it can essentially offer service 24 by seven across all parts of the customer service journey.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
That's what you want your agents to do. So where we are seeing that moving away from transactional things like update my account or where's my order, if I can get a voice agent to handle that, then I'm focused on advising people about the latest look. What is the latest bag? What are the materials in this? Are these sustainable resources?
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
The ability to advise people if you're a luxury company with the right bags or what we've seen, that's where I think we are seeing using that time to essentially take on more of the revenue growth roles, if I may. That's definitely something that we are seeing in a much more structured way.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Yeah, I mean, I think like a few things that I see, I mean, I think this 2025 is going to be where you see a lot more agents used in a lot of scenarios which go well beyond service. I mean, even at service, we are scratching the surface, right? Starting to have agents which do more. I think that that's definitely going to be one big thing.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
The second is, I think the area that we both spoke about this is around proactive. I mean, most of the companies, like 80% plus of companies believe they're proactive. But when you turn back and ask the question to customers, they only think 30% of the companies they work with are proactive. So bridging that gap. And, you know, being far more proactive, far more delightful in your experiences.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Like, I want everybody to have the same experience as what I have with my electric car, where it tells me that I need to go do this. That's exactly what you need, right? So I think much more proactive, but based on data, I think it's going to be a big part of like... trend that I see for next year.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
And then in terms of customer experience, particularly, I see that we'll see a lot more customer experience and service in the entire journey. You'll have a lot more pre-purchase because you really can do it now at scale. You'll have a lot during purchase and post-purchase. So I think we'll see a lot of that across the board.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Now, I also think that we will start to see some questions from different countries and different geographies about what's the impact of this. So we'll have a healthy debate and discussion around that, I think, as we go on. But this is one where... the customers, me as an end customer and end consumer, we'll just be delighted by the type of service that we'll get.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Exactly. So it's proactive in the sense that, listen, if I went in and I inquired about a headset and I moved off of it, can I actually get a reminder? Can I get some follow-up from there? So it's proactive in that sense, proactive because you have a product and Your telemetry indicates that. For example, several of the products, like a car now, has so much telemetry.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Like, I really want everybody to have the same, you know, insurance, you know, experience that you had when you were delighted. That's what we need. And we'll see more of that across the board. So I'm an optimist.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Yeah, I think what we need to watch out for is, this is a machine that can go really fast and can really support a lot of cases. Are we making sure that we have the right monitoring of that? Do we have the right oversight of it? As a company, as a brand, if I can go create this experience for everybody, Is it diluting in some sense what I stand for? Who are my core customers? What's my vision?
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
So making sure that first, it's the right oversight. It's solving the right problem. It's not hurting the brand. I mean, we've heard examples of this airline company which had a problem in terms of a suggestion. And I don't want... Like brands have to be very careful about that.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
And second, like making sure that the brand continues with what its core purpose, what its core value is, what its identity is. I think that's important. And third, we need to make sure as a society that as we are kind of using this to handle a lot of like what would be done by labor, how do we ensure that
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
the employees are then trained to take on this additional building relationships, driving growth. So there's a whole bunch of like training that we kind of broadly need to do. So there are things that we need to concertedly watch out as a group.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
I'm sure your CEOs are asking for it. I'm sure your customers are asking for it. Start with something that you can turn on, show value, and then you can expand.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Couldn't have said it better, Lauren. I think that's the key thing. I mean, think of a small mom and shop store where you have this corner store where you want to go buy some flowers or things like that. I mean, now they can essentially have an engagement and far better communication. kind of service than they ever did before, before they were just constrained based on resources.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
It was great when I was driving my car the other day, and I got a couple of notifications on my phone saying that you need to take care of these couple of things. And that was fantastic service stuff. I did not even know needed to be done. It already happened in my electric car, which is connected to the internet, and everything was super well connected.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
So in that case, it's not about like people. In fact, we are actually driving more business with them. So I think that's like, it opens up a whole bunch of opportunities that we just never had before. So, and the experience and us as consumers are just going to be richer for it. But there are things that we of course have to work through.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
I've been traveling a lot in the last few weeks, and I've really had to use OpenTable quite a bit to discover, you know, like restaurants and the type of food, etc. I really enjoyed kind of the
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
agentic experience that we have with them and you know glad to hear that we power them and that was something fantastic because what was important for me was like you know I was having a conversation in a different city then I moved to another city and it kind of remembered that conversation and it remembered the context and remembered the taste and kind of was making better recommendations so I think that was like a really delightful experience and another experience that I had was not like a brand but it was actually a
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
you know, a state department licensing here where I wanted to go schedule an appointment who, like, you know, who enjoys going to a DMV? I don't, right? But man, it was so efficient. Like I could easily schedule my appointment. I got there in 15 minutes. I got done and it was all great. And the whole experience of like self-service scheduling
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
without actually having to do anything and being super efficient on time, getting it done and getting out, that was remarkable.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
So I think a very nice self-service experience in one case from a government, from a public sector, there are a lot of public sector agencies using Salesforce and OpenTable, which was there in our service cloud keynote with experience of engaging and getting that fantastic reservation experience and discovery experience was awesome.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
So that's absolutely what we see, which is proactively.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Exactly. Don't think of just our time and our efficiency, but think of what it means for the customer. I mean, that's customer experience.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Think of exactly the right customer you want to design your customer experience for. Like, who's the customer? What are you designing your experience for? And then make sure that you have the right data for it, you have the right channels that they're on, you have the right ways to reach them.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
But even in addition to proactive, even in reactive mode, imagine I'm in an airport, I'm in a totally different time zone, I'm calling what is late in the night in the US time, and I actually still speak to an agent on the other side, a voice agent, which is really an AI-powered agent, and I can have that conversation anytime, versus being told, you have to call between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.,
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
You could have the best experience design, but if your customer is looking to engage with you in a different place, it doesn't work. So identify your right customer, understand what they want, and be where they are with the right data.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
And we need to give them options. That's exactly right.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Thank you, Lauren, for having me and for the wonderful conversation. It's fantastic to hear your insights and I love your simple distillations of the key truths here in customer experience.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
on regular working hours in US time. So I think that's the difference. It's proactive and also like just the ability to get it 24 seven.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Oh, that's fantastic. Yeah. I mean, agent force is really a key part of our overall kind of platform. It's built on our overall platform. What agent force does it, it makes it very easy to build an AI agent across any role. So you could have an agent for service, which is what we're discussing, but it could be for sales to help with better sales across any industry.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
It could be for retail, it could be for consumer goods, financial services, and across any product. So that's kind of the core force part of agent force. And what you might ask is like an agent, And the way we look at agent is agent is somebody who like, which has a role like you're selling or you're marketing or you're servicing. It works across a set of channels.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
So voice, as you mentioned, could be on a text, could be on a chat. It works on a set of data, which is your data as a customer service. It works on your data so it knows what's there in your knowledge base. The agent knows what's in your website, et cetera. And it essentially drives a set of actions.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
And that's crucial because really what the agent is focused on is taking this data and converting that into action. And the key part of agent force is does that in a very intelligent way because at the heart of all of this is what we call our Atlas reasoning engine. It basically takes all this data, processes that data, reasons on it, and creates this output and orchestrated set of actions.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
What that translates into is I call up somebody saying, listen, I'm coming in a little late today into my hotel, which I do all the time because flights seem to run late. Can it change my check-in or have my mobile key ready? I call up a bank and say, listen, I want to change my address. Can it actually make that happen versus like putting you in a queue?
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
So that ability to take data and drive actions is what like agent force really drives in an autonomous way. How is it different from a chatbot? Yeah, the biggest difference from a chatbot is chatbots are typically like pretty rigid, right? So it's rule-based. So you basically built a lot of rules and you've said, hey, listen, if this happens, then do this. And if this happens, do that.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
And that's all great, right? And it's a great way of like driving automation in the first place versus anything else, but it's still rigid and you can run into walls very quickly. So quite often when you work with chatbots, you run into this thing that I don't know how to react to this. Now you need to speak to a human representative, right? That's a very common thing.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
But with the AI agent, it's powered by LLMs. So that means that the whole interaction is far more conversational. Its reasoning goes well beyond like a rule-based system. It truly has the ability to reason based on all of your data that's in your system, whether it's your order information, whether it's your knowledge or this documentation.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
And then it drives these actions, which can be very broad. And so that's the combination of all of them. And then we built this thing in AgentForce where you can like kind of train this agent to be focused on specific skills, address a set of topics and drive actions. So it's a lot more open and a lot more intelligent than the chatbot, which is more rule-based.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
That's exactly right.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Yeah, and that is super crucial and something that we think a lot about, Lauren. That's absolutely crucial. Because, listen, there are reasons why an AI agent might not be able to handle it. That's because there are things that just need the human ones in judgment. What if a customer sounds really pissed and angry? You perhaps don't want to have that in that conversation. Or...
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Because of your process, if that discussion is about buying a new product or doing more upselling, you might really need to have that human connection in there. So your business need might drive that human connection. But what becomes really important is to pass the full context and have all of that context always available for the human. So which means... Like a very simple thing.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
How often have you had an experience where you've entered all this information in a form or with a bot, and then you go into a person, they're asking you the same questions, and you're like, why didn't you know this? Like, I've already entered it like two times in this conversation. Like, are you seriously asking me for my email? Like, are you crazy?
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
So I think that stuff's like the thing that we should not do, right? So you should make this experience like super seamless. So that way when you go in, You know all of this information. You've taken everything that you've had from the bot or the agent in this case, and that's available to the human agent to do really well. Then we also have agents that sit alongside the human.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
For example, how can you get a prescription on what are the three things you need to do If somebody is complaining about a bad router at their house, right? And that agent essentially makes the human as well, far more powerful. But the most important thing is any conversation that's happened before with an agent, pass the full context, provide the right context to the customer.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
And most importantly, the customer should just feel it seamless. And you know what? From a human, you might actually go back to an agent for some other reason, or you might go to a different channel because you might have started the whole thing in a chat message, but now you're going into your phone and we really don't want you to chat on your phone when you're driving.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
So you might just convert that into voice. So all of that needs to be very seamless. And we've put a lot of effort to make sure that it is.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
And that's exactly right, Lauren. I mean, listen, I mean, if you look at the average contact center and, you know, I was speaking to two customers this week, one of them, they basically hire 120% of their contact center every year. So that means that they lose all of their reps and they have to hire 20% more. So like how much can you actually learn about your own product with that type of a churn?
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
And then I spoke to another customer who was like, you know, had very low, you know, attrition, but they were moving from one department to the other. So they would be doing travel one day, then they would be doing luxury the other day in this large retailer. So then it becomes really important for these like agents to be very knowledgeable.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
And what you don't want on a call is somebody telling you, and this has happened to all of us, I'm sure. Wait for a moment. I need to go like, you know, go check for this and I need to go research about this or I need to go speak to my supervisor. And you're like, Why am I calling this place if these people whom I'm talking to are not the experts?
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
So I think in some sense, the agent sitting next to you makes you the expert because everybody's short on time. We all want our answers now and when we want it. And having this agent providing you that and helping that human employee provide the right answers with the right context and being able to do the automations makes it super important because then, as you said,
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Your focus as an agent is on building the relationships, helping drive growth, helping advocate the products, helping advocate the services, which is way more important than trying to find some information so that I can actually solve the problem for my customer immediately.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
It's an honor to be here. This is such a fantastic set of discussions, and I'm thrilled to be here.
Experts of Experience
Agentforce: Why CEOs and Customers Are Asking For AI Like This!
Yeah, no, I mean, it's great. I'm glad to hear that you had a call with your health insurance company and you left with a smile. I mean, that's exactly what the insurance companies want as well. So that's fantastic.