Workplace software services giant Salesforce just revealed its Agentforce IT Service product — an AI agents-based system that offers always on, always available IT support and helplines for its client companies. In a Thursday press release, Salesforce reiterated some of the same arguments made by AI evangelists, promising its use could allow workers and IT staff alike to “spend less time on manual tickets, forms, portals, and searching through knowledge articles, and more time on high-value, strategic work.”
Even if your company isn’t one of Salesforce’s myriad clients, this system is a little sample of the future, and yet another example of how AI is encroaching on diverse sectors of everyday work life. There’s one caveat to the new tool, though. It still relies on people.
We’ve all been there: sending a “help!” email to the IT team because some important piece of software or hardware has gone kaput, only to receive a ticket number or case number from an automated system, usually accompanied by a note saying the team will respond “soon,” or, worse, describing a longish wait window like “by tomorrow.” Depending on the setup, and the nature of the problem someone will then show up in your office, or send suggested fixes (which may read like a foreign language to a non-technical worker) by email or a messaging app, or take over someone’s computer via remote access to fix the problem.
The Salesforce tool, the company insists, is unique because it’s “conversation-first,” and “agent-first.” Essentially the idea is to dump the “ticket” system, and allow someone to make an IT help request via pretty much any platform they’re using, from chat systems like Slack or Teams to email.
In a demonstration press event, one example featured a new employee who needed to go through their IT onboarding. They began a chat in Slack with an AI “conversation agent,” which verified a few details with the worker, then set to work sending them the relevant documents and guidelines, as well as actually working behind the scenes to, for example, give the worker access to file systems, GitHub code repositories and other information for their onboarding. It’s able to do this because unlike a query-then-response AI chatbot, agent AIs have a degree of autonomy and can perform some digital tasks automatically.
It sounds like magic, and unlike, say, having a long wait for an IT operative in a remote call center, the system is effectively on 24/7/365. Salesforce also demonstrated that the AI agent system also works in a similar way for IT support people as well, offering answers to technical problems via a chat interface.
IT-savvy readers, or perhaps IT-wary ones, may have some worries at this point. It’s one thing to trust a human expert with your computer when, say, an important Excel file you’ve worked on for hours gets corrupted. But AI systems aren’t human, and we know that they can hallucinate fake or incorrect outputs and pass them off as true or reliable.
When Inc. asked Salesforce about this during a press conference about the new agentic AI IT service, Muddu Sudhakar, Salesforce’s senior vice president and general manager of IT Service and HR Service agreed this was the “most important” question concerning AI deployments today. Then he said the company’s multiple AI agents were trained carefully, and operated within “guardrails” that should keep them in line, and prevent serious errors occurring if, for example, the AI suggested a fix for a user’s computer that actually makes things worse.
Salesforce also noted that there’s always a “human in the loop” as part of this AI-centric system. Someone who should be able to spot if an AI has made an error, or to whom you can “escalate” the issue if you’re not confident the AI can fix your problem.
What can you take away from this for your company?
First, this is a hint of the future. Not just for IT services, but for many business support systems that are likely to operate like this as AI chatbots and AI agents get more powerful. If you contract out to third-party companies for, say, IT or financial service support, then it’s likely that you’ll be interacting with AI agent-based systems soon, instead of humans first. Salesforce has previously released an AI agent product that can work like a sales rep—so you see which way the wind is blowing.
Second, Salesforce’s human-in-the-loop model is a reminder that while AI tools can boost worker efficiency, they are not perfect and they can make mistakes. (The Salesforce IT model speeds the process, so, the IT team may be able to deal with incoming user queries faster after AI tools do a big share of the initial work.) If you’ve rolled out AI at your business, you should remind your workers that every AI output needs to be checked for veracity and relevance before it’s built into any product — that way you can avoid problematic, or even legal, expensive, AI-induced mistakes.
Kit Eaton
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