Salesforce Unveils Einstein: The Autonomous AI Customer Service Agent

Salesforce Debuts Autonomous AI Service Agent Einstein

Customer relationship management company Salesforce has debuted its first fully autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agent. Einstein Service Agent, announced Wednesday (July 17), is designed to replace conventional chatbots by understanding and taking action on a broad range of service issues without preprogrammed scenarios and make customer service more efficient. "Salesforce is delivering a future where human and digital agents join forces to improve the customer experience," Kishan Chetan, general manager of Salesforce's Service Cloud, said in a news release. "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." According to the release, Einstein differs from traditional chatbots, which can only handle specific queries that have been specifically programmed into their system and don't recognize context or nuance. The agent interacts with large language models (LLMs) by analyzing the full context of the customer's message and then autonomously deciding what to do next, using generative AI to craft conversational responses according to a company's brand voice, tone and guidelines. "For service organizations, this means they can offload a large number of tedious inquiries that bog down their productivity so they can focus on tasks that require a human touch," Salesforce said. "For customers, this means they get the answers they need much faster because they no longer need to wait for human agents." As PYMNTS wrote last week, many companies are trying to make their AI-powered chatbots more conversational, though this approach also offers challenges. "As AI becomes more human-like in its interactions, it can sometimes lead to confusion or unrealistic user expectations. In documented cases, customers have developed emotional attachments to AI assistants or mistaken them for real human operators, raising ethical concerns about the boundaries of human-machine interactions," that report said. And it's not just individual customers developing feelings for AI chatbots. A conversational AI called Xiaoice, developed by Microsoft for the Chinese market, received millions of user messages saying "I love you," a level of emotional engagement with AI that raises questions about the psychological effects of anthropomorphic design in technology.

Salesforce introduces autonomous AI customer service agent powered by Einstein - SiliconANGLE

Salesforce introduces autonomous AI customer service agent powered by Einstein Salesforce Inc. today announced the pilot launch of Einstein Service Agent, the company's first fully autonomous artificial intelligence agent that it says can handle and resolve customer service issues just like a human worker. Many modern chatbots that assist with customer service issues can only handle specific queries and tasks programmed into their system and don't understand context. Instead, they're often programmed to handle a branching set of scenarios and cannot understand anything outside those, making for poor customer interaction. "This is a complete evolution of a traditional chatbot experience into a conversational autonomous agent grounded in large language models," Ryan Nichols, chief product officer of Service Cloud at Salesforce, told SiliconANGLE in an interview. Although 61% people of people polled by Salesforce said it's their preference to talk to a chatbot about simple issues, 81% said that if they had a complex problem such as a return or an exchange, they'd prefer to wait for a human. Nichols said that highlights a problem with traditional systems in that they just can't keep up with a customer needs. The new customer service agent is built on the same "brain" as Salesforce's Einstein Copilot, the company's generative AI assistant. It is a customizable AI conversational assistant that integrates with every application within the company and can execute actions automatically and behave like an AI teammate - one of its most important capabilities is its ability to take actions on behalf of users. As a conversational generative AI app, the Einstein Service Agent can be accessed through self-service portals and messaging channels, such as WhatsApp, Apple Messages, Facebook Messenger and SMS. So customers of an electronics manufacturing company could open up the service agent on their phone for technical support for their microwave, which is showing an error. Einstein can understand images, so the customer can send an image of the error code, and determine that a replacement can be justified by looking at customer records. Similarly, the agent could also take the opportunity to upsell the customer on a different unit with more features. Once customers select the unit they want as a replacement, the service agent can complete the entire process automatically without the need for interaction with a human worker. It can get records for customers' shipping addresses from internal records, verify that a replacement or exchange is valid ,and complete the entire process. All of this is possible because the underlying large language models can understand not just the context of the conversation and customer needs, but can also connect to the company's internal records. Nichols explained that internal guardrails as part of the Trust Layer would make certain that it would always stay on brand and remain grounded in the company's knowledge as well. If the agent determines that the situation is too complex for it to handle, or the customer asks, it can always hand off the conversation directly to a human co-worker. Ordinarily, this includes a huge transcript of the previous conversation and the pertinent details about the service ticket for the customer service agent, but the AI assistance doesn't stop there. "We generate a summary of the conversation," Nichols said. "It's called conversation catch-up. It's a quick way to just get up to speed on what's transpired and then also generate a suggested first response." Grounding the suggested first reply in the previous conversation and providing a summary puts the human agent in a better position to get going, he explained. Since the AI has the context of the conversation, it can also make helpful suggestions for the human agent. For example, if the recommended exchange period is 30 days and the customer is at 32 days, but the agent notes that the customer has been with the company for a long time, it might suggest making the exchange in spite of the policy. Nichols said that one of the customers in the pilot replaced a traditional chatbot with 248 machine-learning models with the Einstein Service Agent. The agent's backend itself only required three different roles, or human-readable service topics, such as "you are a helpful service agent who provides order management, cancellation management and exchange management." None of its configuration requires machine learning expertise and the LLM configuration and deployment are handled by Salesforce. "It just makes it available to a much broader set of customers," said Nichols. The new autonomous customer service agent is currently in pilot and Salesforce plans to launch it into general availability globally later this year.

Salesforce debuts Einstein Service Agent, a new AI Agent for customer self-service

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Salesforce is jumping into the AI agent world with a new service that builds on the company's Einstein platform for AI. The new Einstein Service Agent is a generative AI-powered self-service experience for customers. Einstein Service Agent is designed for end-customers to use, providing a conversational AI interface to answer questions and get resolution for any number of issues. The new agent service uses a similar foundation as Einstein Copilot, which is employee-facing, for internal use within an organization. The basic idea behind agentic AI is that it can go beyond basic question and answer to actually be able to take action on behalf of a user. In the case of the Einstein Service Agent those actions could be to enable things like product returns or even refunds. The system can handle simple to complex multi-step interactions, using approved company workflows already in Salesforce. Initially, Einstein Service Agent will be deployed for customer service scenarios, with plans to expand to other Salesforce clouds in the future. While there are many vendors moving to enable AI agent driven workflows, the key differentiator of Einstein Service Agents is its seamless integration with Salesforce's existing customer data and workflows. "Einstein service agent is a generative AI powered, self-service conversation experience that is built on our Einstein trust layer and Einstein platform," Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI told VentureBeat. "Everything is grounded in our trust layer as well as all the customer data and official business workflows, approved workflows that companies have been adding into Salesforce for the last 25 years." What's the difference between an AI agent and an AI copilot? Over the past year, Salesforce has been detailing various aspects of its generative AI efforts. Among those efforts has been the development of the Einstein Copilot, which officially became generally available at the end of April. The Einstein Copilot enables a broad range of conversational AI experiences for Salesforce users, but that's the catch: it's focussed on direct users of the Salesforce platform. "Einstein Copilot is employee facing, so it's for your salespeople, for your customer service reps, for marketers and for knowledge workers," Shih explained. "Einstein Service Agent is for our customers' customers, so it's for their self-service." The basic idea of having a conversational AI bot of some sort to answer basic customer questions is not a new concept. Shih emphasized that Einstein Service Agent is something that is somewhat different and benefits from all the data and gen AI work that Salesforce has been doing in recent years. With the agent approach, it's also not just about being able to answer simple questions, but rather about providing the ability to deliver a customer knowledge based response as well as taking action. With a copilot, it is possible to chain multiple AI engines and responses together. The AI agent approach also chains AI models together. For Shih, the difference is a matter of semantics. "It's a spectrum toward more and more autonomy," Shih said. The AI agent approach is driven by existing customer workflows As an example, Shih said that Salesforce is working with a major apparel company as a pilot customer for Einstein Service Agent. If a customer places an online order and then somehow gets the wrong order, the customer could just call into the retailer during business hours and get a human agent to help them. That human agent might be using the Einstein Copilot on their own system to help assist the customer. If the customer reaches out when human agents aren't available, or chooses to go an entirely self-service route, that's where Einstein Service Agent will fit in. With the Einstein Service Agent, the customer will be able to ask about the issue and if enabled in the workflow, also get a resolution. The workflow that understands who the customer is and how to handle an issue, is something that is already part of the Salesforce Service Cloud. Shih explained that the Einstein Studio is where the administrative and configuration work for all things Einstein AI, including Service Agents, takes place making use of the existing data in Salesforce. The Einstein Service Agent is just providing a new layer for customers to interact with the existing logic to solve issues. "Everything seemingly that the company has invested in over the last 25 years has come to light in the last 18 months for us to allow customers to securely take advantage of generative AI in a trusted way," Shih said.