Exclusive: Salesforce lets AI agents speak for themselves
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Salesforce will announce next week two new capabilities designed to make its AI agents more versatile and useful for businesses, Axios has learned.
Why it matters: Salesforce faces growing competition from tech giants with their own large language models and startups focused on AI customer service.
Zoom in: Salesforce agents will now have the power of speech and new hybrid reasoning skills.
- The upgrades aim to make them sound more human while following clear rules for key decisions, like giving refunds.
Driving the news: The features will be part of a flurry of announcements that Salesforce will make at its annual Dreamforce event next week.
- Agentforce Voice works across phone systems, websites and apps, and will be widely available on Oct. 21.
- Hybrid reasoning will debut as part of a feature called Agent Script, now in pilot, with a customer beta coming in November.
What they're saying: Both features reflect that there's no one-size-fits-all approach to AI agents, Salesforce Executive VP Adam Evans told Axios Wednesday.
- "You can have the creativity and fluidity when you want it, or you can have the rigidity, consistency and scale when you don't," he said. "It's your choice on a job-by-job basis."
- Companies appreciate that bots don't sound like bots, but they also need them to stick to a consistent approach, Evans said.
- "If you're doing 100,000 transactions with the customer and some of them are different than the others, that's not a feature," Evans said. "That's a bug, right?"
Salesforce said it's spent about a year developing the new voice features, focusing on understanding speech and detecting nuance and emotion to respond appropriately.
- The voice system can also pull data from various systems and seamlessly hand off to a human worker when needed.
- "There's not very many companies that can do that," Evans said.
Enterprise agents for customer service is a saturated space with fierce competition from tech companies like ServiceNow and startups like Sierra, which was co-founded by Bret Taylor, a former top Salesforce executive.
- While Sierra prices its services based on interactions that its AI agents can address without human intervention, Salesforce has largely stuck with a model that charges based on the length of conversations or number of tasks its agents perform.
- Sierra requires customers to identify its voice agents as AI bots. Salesforce doesn't, noting that disclosures may not be needed for some uses, like internal company agents.
