AI is advancing rapidly, capturing the attention of CEOs, CTOs, and CIOs with its proven ability to boost productivity, enhance employee performance, and improve customer relationships.
By Linda Saunders, director: solutions engineering Africa at Salesforce
We are entering the third wave of AI where autonomous AI agents will go beyond simply generating and analysing content, as chatbots and copilots did in the first and second waves and will be able to reason and autonomously take action for human colleagues.
Indeed, they’ll work 24/7 to tackle individual, low-value, time-consuming tasks or collaborate with other agents to get larger, more complex jobs and projects done.
In sales, for example, they’ll engage with prospects, answer questions, manage objections, and schedule meetings based on CRM and external data, allowing sellers to focus on building deeper customer relationships. With dynamic, conversational self-service, they can be configured to answer customer questions using companies’ existing knowledge base so they can automatically resolve account access. They can also triage registration and payment issues, directing customers to the appropriate resources.
Put simply, the future of AI is agents, and it’s here. Companies need to get ready to implement fast as these autonomous agents will become central to organizations’ customer engagement and experience strategies.
Working together, these customisable agents can autonomously take action on tasks and free up workers to focus on the jobs only they can do.
At Dreamforce, Salesforce unveiled Agentforce – a suite of customisable, autonomous agents and tools, makes it easy for customers to build their own ‘agent force’. Agentforce is how humans with AI drive customer success together and it’s been designed so that any organisation can build, customise, and deploy their own agents quickly and easily, with low-code tools.
The leap from generative to agentic AI will transform how humans work.
Despite business eagerness to experiment with and deploy AI, many still worry about how to do so safely, how to keep data under their control, and make sure they can trust the AI’s output.
There is considerable concern about AI displacing workers or becoming too powerful and working at odds with humans.
Agents require guardrails, and they have to be monitored to make sure that they’re doing what they’re supposed to.
Success requires not just finding the AI models or building AI actions that best suit a company’s needs, but having the infrastructure and data security to do so responsibly.
Audit trails are necessary to hold autonomous AI agents accountable, just as employers might establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to keep human workers marching toward their expected goals.
It’s important to think about the role of agents at work as a partnership between people and AI. Complementing skills and intelligence will bring better business outcomes.
While agents can orchestrate complex actions on behalf of the user, they require those skills to be configured and need a degree of hand-holding to perform at their best.
Businesses need to take their employees on the AI journey. They will require training to work with autonomous AI agents because they need context and onboarding much like new employees.
Setting direction, clear goals, and giving feedback ultimately helps AI train itself better.
The future of work is a hybrid workforce
Together, agents with humans will drive customer success. This is what AI is meant to be.
Every company has more jobs to be done than the resources available to do them. As a result, many jobs go unaddressed or uncompleted.
An estimated 41% of employee time is spent on repetitive, low-impact work, and 65% of desk workers believe generative AI will allow them to be more strategic, according to the Salesforce Trends in AI Report.
However, it’s essential for AI agents to understand and execute their expansive capabilities. It’s equally, if not more, important for them to recognize their limitations and understand when human intervention is necessary.
The future of work is a hybrid workforce composed of humans with agents, enabling companies to compete in an ever-changing world. With AI, humans can focus on what’s really important: human relationships.