Dive Transient:
- Salesforce’s AI brokers have dealt with “tens of millions of conversations” in current months whereas human brokers ship experience and empathy on calls that want it, co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff stated throughout a Q2 2026 earnings name.
- On Salesforce’s personal web site, assist.salesforce.com, AI brokers addressed 1.5 million inquiries prior to now 9 months, in accordance with Benioff. The corporate’s customer support workforce continues to be within the hundreds, and CSAT scores have remained regular.
- Whereas Salesforce nonetheless sees a job for stay brokers, the seller decreased its buyer help workforce from about 9,000 folks to about 5,000, Benioff stated on a podcast.
Dive Perception:
Though Salesforce is investing closely in agentic AI, executives acknowledge the restrictions of the expertise.
The massive language fashions that energy the expertise can’t obtain 100% accuracy, in accordance with Benioff. He estimates that Salesforce’s personal efforts put its AI agent within the 90% vary. In consequence, folks proceed to play an vital position in customer support.
“Sure, there’s lots that we are able to resolve mechanically by means of these brokers with the purchasers, however there’s additionally lots that can not be resolved,” Benioff stated through the name. “And that must be escalated to the people, and so it is people and brokers working collectively to fulfill buyer success.”
Research have supported the significance of human interplay in buyer expertise. Greater than 4 in 5 folks say they’d nonetheless favor human help even when wait occasions and time spent are the identical, in accordance with a HubSpot and SurveyMonkey survey. Furthermore, a Verizon research discovered that 88% of customers report satisfaction with human-led digital customer support interactions, whereas the share drops to 60% for AI-only interactions.
A number of of Salesforce’s companions, together with DirecTV and Reddit, have been utilizing agentic AI to cut back their customer support brokers’ workloads.
DirecTV’s AI brokers execute 50,000 actions per week and have saved billing representatives almost 300 hours of inquiry dealing with in below a yr, in accordance with Benioff. Reddit decreased its common decision time from 8.9 minutes to 1.4 minutes.
Williams Sonoma is partnering with Salesforce to energy its AI customer support assistant, which rolled throughout its retailer portfolio final week. The identical expertise will help Williams Sonoma’s deliberate agentic culinary companion, which can help with meal prep and product discovery.
Salesforce’s income was up 10% yr over yr to $10.2 billion within the second quarter of fiscal 2026, which ended July 31, in accordance with a firm earnings report. Information Cloud and AI annual recurring income rose 120% yr over yr to $1.2 billion.
