Agentic AI and Customer Support - learnings from 'Customer Zero' as Salesforce talks hearts and brains, customer deflection mindsets, and moving on from a chat bot UX

Since the agentic AI arms race kicked off - was it really less than a year ago?!? It seems so much longer - the hunt has been on for real-world use cases to validate the theoretical promise posited by humans and agents working in tandem.

A lot of attention has been focused on the area of Customer Support and Service as obvious areas of application for the technology. As Katy Ring notes here, Salesforce, for example, has made itself into its own use case, deploying its Agentforce offering via its help.salesforce.com support page. That passed a significant milestone earlier this week with the announcement that a million interactions had now been handled in this way.

It has, as noted, been a relatively short time since this experiment was put into play, but such is the speed of agentic acceleration that a lot of learnings have been picked up along the ...