'Empathetic' Salesforce bots to help those fired by uncaring humans

There’s a joke in Boston that goes: the people in Southie will steal your wallet and help you look for it.

And now, the thousands of workers ostensibly replaced by bots will now have a bot to help them get unemployment benefits, thanks a new Department of Labor deal to use Salesforce’s Agentforce to triage applications at its national call center. The SaaS giant ays that its agent will "respond empathetically" to queries.

The Department of Labor Agent (DOLA) is built on top of Salesforce Government Cloud’s FedRAMP infrastructure, and it uses Data 360 to merge the structured and unstructured data from third-party systems and a library of more than 2,900 department of labor knowledge articles into a “holistic citizen view,” Salesforce said in its press release.

Neither the Department of Labor nor Salesforce provided a dollar figure for the deal. The DoL did not reply ...