New Salesforce AI agent "may make chatbots obsolete"

Salesforce has launched a new fully autonomous AI service agent that it says is designed to make conventional customer service chatbots obsolete.

The Einstein Service Agent promises to significantly improve the efficiency of customer service, by resolving cases more quickly and accurately. Salesforce said the new tool can understand and take action on a range of service issues without the need to rely on pre-programmed scenarios. It is capable of having fluid, intelligent conversations with customers, using a reasoning engine to interpret and process information in real time.

The agent can perform tasks including autonomously processing a return, providing personalised recommendations for products and services based on previous customer and business data, and providing troubleshooting steps for customers having a problem with a product or service.

Salesforce said the system can be deployed out of the box within minutes, and customers are able to reuse pre-existing Salesforce objects to equip the agent with skills faster and create custom actions tailored to their specific business needs.

If an enquiry is off topic or outside the scope of the service, the conversation can be transferred to a human agent, who is provided with the full context of the conversation.

Einstein Service Agent is capable of operating 24/7 across self-service portals and messaging channels including WhatsApp, Apple Messages, Facebook Messenger and SMS. The system can understand images, video and audio as well as text, and can perform functions including masking personally identifiable information and only operating within pre-defined guardrails.

Salesforce Service Cloud GM Kishan Chetan said the new agent is at the cutting edge of AI capabilities.

“Salesforce is delivering a future where human and digital agents join forces to improve the customer experience,” he said. “Einstein Service Agent, our first fully autonomous AI agent, will not just complete service jobs on its own; it will augment how human agents work and completely transform how service teams operate, making them far more efficient and productive. We are reimagining customer service for the AI era.”

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