At Salesforce's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, executives from AT&T, Southwest Airlines and Crocs described how they are deploying AI agents inside their operations while deliberately limiting how much decision making the technology takes over. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said roughly 30,000 of the company's customers now use Agentforce, the platform's AI agent feature, a figure that represents about 20 percent of Salesforce's customer base.
AT&T is using AI to cut the time it takes an employee to upgrade a customer's phone from about 30 minutes to roughly 10 minutes, according to John Miller, the company's vice president of consumer and business solutions. Miller said AT&T stops short of letting AI agents handle cancellations, keeping human employees in charge of understanding why a customer wants to leave and trying to resolve the issue. Southwest Airlines uses agents for tasks like flight changes and completed transactions through chatbots, while directing human staff toward situations that call for immediate, empathetic support.
Crocs has built a consumer facing agent called Rivet for chat and voice interactions and uses internal agents to help staff create promotions and categorize products on its website. Feliz Papich, the company's senior vice president of digital technology and experience, said human oversight remains necessary while the company continues to learn the limits of automation. Papich added that the quality of underlying data matters as much as the sophistication of the AI interface itself.
Source: Adweek - https://www.adweek.com/media/ai-agents-get-a-reality-check-att-and-crocs-want-automation-but-still-need-humans-in-the-loop/