Experts of Experience
AI Agents Explained: Build a Digital Workforce That Works 24/7
Mon, 24 Mar 2025
In this special panel-style episode, Agentforce expert and Senior Vice President of Digital Success at Salesforce, Bernard Slowey, is interviewed by Lauren Wood and guest host Stephanie Postles. This is your inside look at Salesforce’s rapid deployment of its revolutionary AI agent, what this means for the digital workforce revolution, and how ANY company can create a customizable, empathetic digital employee. (With no code, just natural-language prompting.) Bernard shares firsthand accounts of the launch, including navigating real-time customer feedback and the crucial lessons learned about data hygiene and prompt engineering. He also discusses the delicate balance between AI automation and human support, emphasizing the importance of empathy training for these digital agents. Plus, they explore the challenges and opportunities for businesses of all sizes, from SMBs to enterprises, as they grapple with the evolving landscape of AI-driven customer experience, sales, and marketing.Press play and discover how Salesforce is shaping the future of AI in service, and what contrarian views Bernard Slowey holds about the role of data in decision-making.Key Moments: 00:00 Who is Bernard Slowey, SVP of Digital Success at Salesforce?04:18 The Evolution of Customer Service06:28 The Power and Potential of AI Agents18:06 Implementing Agentforce at Salesforce22:07 Challenges and Learnings From AI Agent Deployment33:29 Measuring Success and Future Prospects39:58 Escalation Rate and Customer Experience41:21 The Importance of Human Interaction in Support42:51 Digital Success and Customer Onboarding45:28 AI in Customer Success: Real-World Examples47:24 Data Hygiene and Internal Content Auditing 53:04 Cross-Functional Collaboration in CX01:00:28 The Human-AI Partnership 01:08:36 The Future of AI in Business01:12:51 Customer Obsession in Practice –Are your teams facing growing demands? Join CX leaders transforming their AI strategy with Agentforce. Start achieving your ambitious goals. Visit salesforce.com/agentforce Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org
Chapter 1: Who is Bernard Slowey and what is his role?
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?
Just months after announcing AgentForce, Salesforce is unveiling its next generation AI platform called AgentForce 2.0.
Tell us how big companies are using AgentForce. I know already it's being employed.
I've never been more excited about anything in my entire career.
Chapter 2: What is the evolution of customer service with AI?
Salesforce dove into agentic AI quite early on and developed AgentForce, which I know you were lucky enough to be customer zero.
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.
Chapter 3: How can AI agents transform customer experience?
And we talk about this as the head and the heart. We now have a digital workforce that will augment our human workforce.
You're like the original case study and companies can just copy paste your strategy.
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.
Things that look contrarian and crazy today will be commonplace in the future. And so this will probably be very common, I would assume, in the next year or two.
You're going to see a lot of companies going live with agent force over the next couple of months. A lot.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. And today we have another host as well, Stephanie Postel.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I'm excited to be here. So excited for this conversation today and especially excited to poach this content and put it on Marketing Trends. So thanks for letting me be here.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did Salesforce face in implementing AgentForce?
So yeah, also impressed that they got this up for Salesforce in four weeks. It's crazy. I have not heard of that happening so quickly. So that was amazing.
Yeah, what about you?
What was the most exciting parts for you?
I mean, I think that, fascinating thing for me about agent force. And I've been nerding out on this big time because agentic AI is the next wave of AI. We've been in the generative world using LLMs, chat GPT, all this stuff. And now we have actual AI employees that are joining our team who can own entire processes, who can make decisions on their own.
And that requires us to think very differently about how we are using AI and training AI and actually coaching AI to do what we need it to do. And Salesforce has really been a pioneer in this space. And they've been very early. And I think that agent force is really the best example in the market of an agentic AI that is enabling customer experience to really be what it should be.
And so it was really cool to hear Bernard talk about their experience of being their first customer and the learnings that they had in actually utilizing it and how they're helping other companies now do the same. So I thought it was fascinating. I'm really excited about this episode.
Yep. The authenticity was real. He definitely talked about some stories that we won't share now. Got to get into the episode, but very fun just hearing some of the little mess ups and the feedback they got and LinkedIn posts that got a little crazy and comments.
And so if you want to hear about that, you want to see how to dive into the world of agentic agents and see how it can transform your life. This episode was lit.
Yeah. Let's get into it. Bernard, welcome to the show. It's so great to have you.
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Chapter 5: What are the key metrics for measuring success with AI agents?
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.
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.
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.
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.
And our ability to support customers as well. Like if you think about being on the phone, walking them through a physical action of putting a CD into a computer to download. Now it is just a whole other level of automation and ease as well. And so I'd love to hear, you know, AI agents is the big conversation.
We're going to talk about AI agents a lot today because of AgentForce and all the incredible work that Salesforce has been doing. What makes you excited about AI agents, especially as we look at it in the context of where we've been even in the past 10 years?
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.
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.
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Chapter 6: How important is human interaction in AI support?
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.
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.
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.
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?
And how can I use this for my customers?
I think it solves so many of the problems that we've been seeing in the customer experience space. For example, when we call, I mean, this is still to come, but when we call a company and we have to then choose the button or choose who we want to talk to and go through all of this, it's so laborious. And now we are just easing so much of that friction. through AI.
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Chapter 7: What role does data hygiene play in AI effectiveness?
And I'd love to just take a quick step back to make sure everyone understands what we're talking about when we talk about AI agents, because this is still new. Can you define it for us?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
When it comes to AI agents, I hear the pieces around adding in the custom data and you've got your own LLMs that you can work with. But to me, how I understand them is they're more goal oriented. Like they have somewhere like a problem they can solve. And they can head that way without building out chatbots and adding in information.
Like it's really built off, like you said, if this and that, only the scenarios that you built out. But is it correct to understand that AI agents is more just like goal-oriented?
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?
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Chapter 8: What does the future of AI in business look like?
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.
What kind of company is this for? I'm thinking at least as like a small business owner. Is this something that a small business owner can use or is it right now really for enterprise companies who do have a lot of data and a lot of things that they're trying to automate?
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?
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.
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.
It seems like companies will be built off of this model, like of agent force and having a bunch of agents. It's like a whole different way of building a company. But even when thinking about these different marketing leaders that I talk to and the teams that they have, like they're thinking about team structures different.
And I think actually startups might have a really great advantage of like, I have no employees currently, but I can have some digital ones. And now I have five or 10 departments that are all, you know, these digital employees. Totally.
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.
I see this a lot in my consulting work because I work with a lot of startups who are in that position where we kind of have a blank slate or it's not too hard for us to take a step back and redesign how we're approaching AI, especially AI and CX. And then I also work with organizations that are much larger who it's challenging.
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