Salesforce was already at the forefront of AI-driven SaaS solutions, with the fully customizable Einstein Copilot enhancing employee workflows. The company is stepping it up with the arrival of Einstein Service Agent, an AI helper taking action on behalf of customers.
Whereas Einstein Copilot is intended for sales staff, marketers, and customer service departments, Einstein Service Agent interacts directly with Salesforce users’ customers. It is ‘customer-facing’ instead of Einstein Copilot, which is employee-facing. In its introduction, Salesforce called the AI agent a chatbot that customers want to talk to, referring to the limited usability of its predecessors.
A traditional chatbot can only answer questions whose answers are explicitly programmed into the system. The Einstein Service Agent can generate its own answers based on training data, understand context and nuance, and perform targeted actions for the customer. Examples include initiating processes for exchanging items or getting a refund.
The agent can understand images, video and audio and take multiple steps in a complex set of interactions. The AI does so based on workflows set up by the respective company. Customers can ask the agent for help in natural language, and the agent replies in plain human language.
Fully integrated
While deploying AI agents is not a first in itself, the Einstein Service Agent integrates completely with existing Salesforce applications and the Einstein platform, including the Einstein Trust Layer. This ensures the AI agent’s range of allowable actions remains compliant with company policies and can securely draw on existing proprietary data sources.
The Einstein Service Agent’s initial use case is customer service. However, plans are to expand its applicability to a variety of other scenarios. The AI agent is based on the same technology as Einstein Copilot, and multiple AI models can be used in parallel. VentureBeat reports that a large, unnamed clothing company is running the Einstein Service Agent as a pilot.
Also read: Salesforce Einstein 1 Studio allows organizations to easily apply genAI