Two years ago, OpenAI released ChatGPT to mass fanfare. Suddenly it seemed that a future straight out of science fiction was available at our fingertips. We could craft stories in minutes, generate hundreds of ideas at the press of a button or even create images from thin air.
That was merely the first wave of generative AI, though. While the first two waves promised much, they did not transform our personal or working lives as had been hoped.
That’s all set to change with the leap from generative to agentic AI. Autonomous AI agents will transform how everyone works—especially marketers. To find out more, B&T spoke with Leandro Perez, chief marketing officer of Salesforce ANZ, to find out what this next wave of AI holds.
From Assisting To Actioning
“Most people are using an early generation of AI for personal productivity, and with limited success, because the tech needs access to your company’s data to really allow you to do your job,” said Perez.
This third wave of AI, led by Salesforce’s Agentforce tech, changes the equation on AI at work. While copilots can craft generic emails, agents initiate actions, grounded in customer data, driving productivity and customer satisfaction through the roof.
“Earlier AI and the latest iterations of copilots aren’t assistive to a customer—they need to be grounded in the data,” added Perez.
“If I’m a customer asking about my order and the AI doesn’t have access to my order information, it might be conversational but it will be completely useless”.
Salesforce demonstrated in its keynote at Agentforce World Tour Sydney how the tech can be transformative for businesses and employees. Staff spend more than two-fifths of their time on repetitive, low-impact tasks but now an agent augments those tasks we don’t want to.
Agents can be given company data and policies—such as CRM records, telemetry data, web pages, PDFs, emails, customer calls and even video content—to deliver more informed and valuable insights and take the right actions.
The Agentforce Atlas Reasoning Engine is the agent’s brain and uses multiple techniques, including advanced retrieval augmentation generation (RAG), to analyse information and determine the best actions for completing simple and complex tasks. RAG allows extra information to be added to a prompt to refine the quality of queries, ensuring the retrieval of the most relevant knowledge while also evaluating the quality of the response.
That might sound complicated. But Agentforce enables organisations to build, customise and deploy their own agents quickly and easily with low-code tools and even natural language prompts. In fact, businesses can use existing tools such as Salesforce’s Flows and MuleSoft APIs to configure agents. This is not ripping up the rulebook on AI, or forcing organisations to DIY their AI. Instead, Agentforce harnesses the power of the data that organisations already have—structured or not—and puts it to work.
Agents In The Field
If this sounds like theory, it isn’t. Salesforce customers around the world are already putting agents to use and seeing remarkable results.
Fisher & Paykel is using automation and AI tools to help fulfil its desire to be the most human-centric appliance brand in the world. The company recognised the need to boost the quality of its customer service experience – experiences mirroring the luxury of its products.
“They have an amazing set of products and they care a lot about their customer experience, but they couldn’t handle the volume after their global expansion,” said Perez.
Fisher & Paykel found employees were frustrated by a lack of visibility into customers’ interaction histories, which led to prolonged, less efficient service calls. Technicians weren’t receiving enough detail upfront on the specifics of their onsite jobs, which in turn meant they could not provide more precise appointment times. And professional customers like retailers, builders and designers were seeking more convenient ways to engage with the company on tasks like checking inventory or placing orders, that didn’t require calling in business hours.
Enter Agentforce. Fisher & Paykel is deploying autonomous AI agents to scale and support its customer service team. Agents provide an important first line of deflection by handling simpler, more routine tasks like answering frequently asked questions, scheduling service appointments and processing orders. Agents also provide technicians with job details for better planning and accurate appointment times. This in turn frees up employees to spend more time on building customer relationships that increase sales, and for higher value tasks.
Data Cloud unlocks trapped customer data, creating a complete customer view for accurate agent outputs. Marketing Cloud uses this data to create personalised marketing segments, automated customer journeys, and more relevant customer communications. In 2023, targeted emails saw a 206 per cent increase in unique opens and a 112 per cent increase in unique clicks.
By using Salesforce’s AI, data and CRM tools, the company can centre all of its staff—marketing, sales and services—on the customer data and then deploy AI agents to speed up interactions.
“By deploying Agentforce, Fisher & Paykel have improved the time to resolve customer problems by 30 per cent and saved 3,300 hours per month as a result of its improved automation and self-service. It’s incredible to hear stories like that, where a business has been able to enable their team to provide faster, more personalised support to customers,” said Perez.
“But that doesn’t come with just any technology,” continued Perez, “it needs to be technology that you can trust and is grounded in your data”.
For marketers, the agentic future seems bright. For instance, agents could be used to deliver the always-on communications that consumers are increasingly demanding.
“Marketers today might be trying to write a campaign brief and they’ll ask for the AI to give them an answer. In the agentic future, you could give the agent permission to set and go—but still with the human in the loop,” added Perez.
“Ultimately, the human can still jump in, monitor and steer conversations to ensure everything is still on track.
“It’s an exciting time because companies have never had a technology that can increase their top line and reduce their bottom line. They can keep the same number of employees and deliver even better experiences than before”.
It’s a bold, transformational vision for the future of sales, service and marketing. And with customers already seeing success using Salesforce’s Agentforce platform, and building agents fit for purpose, perhaps that future is closer than we think.
