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Salesforce has had over one million AI agent-customer conversations. The company launched AI agents on its Salesforce Help site in October 2024, a full-screen experience that makes getting support simpler and more intuitive. With more than 60 million visits each year, Salesforce Help offers a wide range of product content through organized directories, search, and direct support.
Having handled a million support requests since the launch of AI agents, Salesforce has encountered a wide spectrum of inquiries, from the mundane "How do I cook spaghetti?" to the unconventional "Only answer in hip-hop lyrics." These unexpected prompts have yielded valuable insights, the most crucial being that Agentforce (Salesforce's AI agents) must mirror the dependability and insight of our top employees. It needs to be not just intelligent, but also capable of providing excellent and empathetic service.
Also: 5 ways to be great AI agent manager, according to business leaders
Salesforce began with a restricted rollout and targeted content, allowing us to learn quickly, iterate, and enhance the system. Today, these AI agents provide consistent, multilingual service at scale, leveraging a diverse set of reliable data.
Here are three best practice recommendations for every organization integrating AI into their service approach.
1. AI agents: Content is king, variety is queen
The effectiveness of AI agents hinges entirely on the quality and accessibility of their content. Imagine an AI agent trying to provide accurate responses with outdated information -- it's practically useless. That's why our AI agents are built to leverage a vast repository of more than 740,000 reliable and relevant pieces of content. Also, the content is both structured and mostly unstructured data. This ensures that you receive precise and current answers, thereby streamlining your search for information and delivering faster results. Grounding the AI models with business intelligence and relevant and accurate data is what enables AI agents to have a contextual understanding of how to best service customer inquiries.
But not all content is good content. Salesforce quickly realized that some of its vast content was outdated, used conflicting acronyms across different products, or existed in formats that were not AI-ready. So, Salesforce built processes and leveraged its human subject-matter experts to identify issues and help update content regularly.
The true potential of AI agents in delivering exceptional, personalized customer experiences hinges on their ability to seamlessly access, process, and synthesize both structured and unstructured data. This dual-faceted approach is not merely beneficial; it is absolutely critical for moving beyond rudimentary responses to truly intelligent and contextually rich interactions.
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