What Happens When AI Agents Join the Customer Support Team?
Salesforce News & Insights
News and insights from Salesforce. For media inquiries contact pr@salesforce.com.
The scoop: Just ten months after deploying Agentforce to tend to customer inquiries on Salesforce’s own help site, AI agents are now handling 45,000 conversations per week — and are continuing to rise.
True, that remains only a small fraction of the 3 to 4 million visits to the Salesforce Help Site every month. And yet, by resolving transactional queries, AI agents are ensuring that humans can focus on the more relationship-driven, nuanced work that people are best at.
This real-world implementation provides critical insights, revealing that success hinges on a cultural shift toward managing and collaborating with digital colleagues, embracing iterative development, and learning from real-time customer interactions.
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The Big Story
When AI Agents Join the Customer Support Team
It’s no longer a question of whether AI will transform customer support — it’s already doing so. The challenge for organizations is how quickly they can learn to manage digital colleagues, coach AI teammates, and strike the right balance between automation and human expertise.
For those willing to learn by doing, the rewards are substantial: a workforce that never sleeps and that can scale infinitely.
“My need for headcount has not diminished as the result of AI,” said Zachary Stauber, Senior Director of Agentforce Data & AI within Salesforce's Digital Success group. “What has significantly changed, though, is I no longer need to hire people to handle menial tasks.”
More Insights
Physical AI: Three Forces Driving the Future of Enterprise Robotics
With the potential for physical AI to augment human capabilities, robotics experts inside and outside of Salesforce predict specialized robots will soon be everywhere.
As digital and physical AI converge, robots are poised to revolutionize work, fill labor shortages, and perform critical tasks at a significantly greater scale than is currently possible.
The most successful organizations will be those that use robotics not just to boost productivity, but to deliver new value and better customer experiences.
The Quote to Capture Revolution: Under the Hood of Revenue Cloud’s New Architect
RevOps is becoming more complex than ever, with hybrid monetization models, omni-channel sales, increasingly personalized customer journeys, and growing pressure for real-time, AI-powered decision-making.
But traditional quote-to-cash (QTC) software is falling short in several key areas, mainly because it wasn’t built for the pace, complexity, and intelligence required today.
According to Deloitte, 71% of B2B executives struggle with manual, fragmented sales processes — and 13% of deals are lost because of disconnected tools.
Revenue Cloud is made for the hybrid world of today’s RevOps. It’s the industry’s first modular, composable, agentic RevOps platform. No longer do sales executives need to suffer through tedious workarounds that hold the QTC process hostage.
Agentforce Boosts Salesforce Partner Support, Handling Over 19,000 Requests Since Inception
Salesforce is investing in its partner ecosystem with innovative tools and resources. The latest investment includes Agentforce for Partner Community, an AI agent embedded in Salesforce's Partner Community experience that provides 24/7 conversational support grounded in technical and program knowledge.
In the three months since Agentforce for Partner Community’s launch, more than 19,000 requests have been handled, averaging 1,400 conversations per week. In total, 120,000 monthly Partner Community users are engaging with the platform.
Natasa Marinkovic, Vice President of Marketing and Alliances at Atrium.ai, highlighted how the agent reduces Atrium.ai’s information search time by approximately 75% and allows her team to focus more on the customer experience.
“Agentforce for Partner Community has been transformational in terms of how we engage with Salesforce, one of our primary partners,” she said. “This is not a capability that we have across our other partnerships in the ecosystem right now.”
How an Industrial Giant Is Optimizing Supply Chains and Boosting Growth with Salesforce
Regal Rexnord − a U.S. company headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin — has about 30,000 employees and thousands of suppliers across North America, Europe, and Asia.
The company produces automation, motion control, power transmission, and air-moving technologies that power data centers, industrial vehicles and equipment, and more.
Regal Rexnord’s vast product inventory and highly complex global supply chain left the industrial conglomerate exposed following a merger and a global pandemic, forcing a fundamental rethink of its technology stack.
The company's response — a wholesale embrace of Salesforce CRM, order management, integration, and AI technology — offers a template for how manufacturers can navigate volatile operating environments while positioning themselves for the next phase of growth.
Did You Know?
Unlocking Gen Z’s AI Potential: How Leaders Can Empower the Next-Gen Workforce
While many of the generational cohort born between 1997 and 2012 are enthusiastic users of generative AI in their personal and academic lives, they’re less confident using this technology in a workplace setting, according to a survey by Slack. The research also revealed that nearly half of desk workers feel uneasy admitting AI use to supervisors.
That said, organizations have a significant chance to develop their Gen Z employees into an AI-powered workforce. Senior executives must enable this generation by fostering trust, reimagining conventional positions, and establishing clear AI guidelines.
Companies should also welcome what Gen Z brings to the table. To unlock their potential, businesses must redesign entry-level positions with AI capabilities in mind, prioritizing training for AI development, research, and oversight abilities alongside traditional skills.
"AI won't replace entry-level positions," notes Gemma Quinn, Salesforce's VP of Global University Recruiting. "But these roles will transform because the people filling them have already transformed."
Salesforce Voices in the Media
Slack CMO Ryan Gavin discussed how digital agents like Agentforce are already impacting the way businesses work.
"If you're a small business, this is the most exciting time ever, because small businesses can start to act like large businesses. That was typically out of reach because of the scale and resources small businesses had," said Gavin. "Small businesses now have access to the same scale [as large businesses] with AI agents and autonomy. And all of that growth, what does it do? It generates jobs.”
Shibani Ahuja, SVP, Enterprise IT Strategy at Salesforce introduced the company's four-level maturity model for implementing agentic AI in businesses. This model guides companies from basic information retrieval agents to future multi-agent orchestration across diverse systems.
“No matter where you are on your agentic journey, it’s natural to feel a little FOMO hearing about the sophisticated implementations some enterprises are already deploying,” said Ahuja. “But going from standing on the sidelines to standing up complex orchestration isn’t as daunting as it sounds.”