Salesforce debuts Einstein Service Agent, a new AI Agent for customer self-service

Salesforce is jumping into the AI agent world with a new service that builds on the company’s Einstein platform for AI.

The new Einstein Service Agent is a generative AI-powered self-service experience for customers. Einstein Service Agent is designed for end-customers to use, providing a conversational AI interface to answer questions and get resolution for any number of issues. The new agent service uses a similar foundation as Einstein Copilot, which is employee-facing, for internal use within an organization. 

The basic idea behind agentic AI is that it can go beyond basic question and answer to actually be able to take action on behalf of a user. In the case of the Einstein Service Agent those actions could be to enable things like product returns or even refunds. The system can handle simple to complex multi-step interactions, using approved company workflows already in Salesforce.

Initially, Einstein Service Agent will be deployed for customer service scenarios, with plans to expand to other Salesforce clouds in the future.  

While there are many vendors moving to enable AI agent driven workflows, the key differentiator of Einstein Service Agents is its seamless integration with Salesforce’s existing customer data and workflows.

“Einstein service agent is a generative AI powered, self-service conversation experience that is built on our Einstein trust layer and Einstein platform,” Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI told VentureBeat. “Everything is grounded in our trust layer as well as all the customer data and official business workflows, approved workflows that companies have been adding into Salesforce for the last 25 years.”

What’s the difference between an AI agent and an AI copilot?

Over the past year, Salesforce has been detailing various aspects of its generative AI efforts.

Among those efforts has been the development of the Einstein Copilot, which officially became generally available at the end of April. The Einstein Copilot enables a broad range of conversational AI experiences for Salesforce users, but that’s the catch: it’s focussed on direct users of the Salesforce platform.

“Einstein Copilot is employee facing, so it’s for your salespeople, for your customer service reps, for marketers and for knowledge workers,” Shih explained. “Einstein Service Agent is for our customers’ customers, so it’s for their self-service.”

The basic idea of having a conversational AI bot of some sort to answer basic customer questions is not a new concept. Shih emphasized that Einstein Service Agent is something that is somewhat different and benefits from all the data and gen AI work that Salesforce has been doing in recent years. With the agent approach, it’s also not just about being able to answer simple questions, but rather about providing the ability to deliver a customer knowledge based response as well as taking action.

With a copilot, it is possible to chain multiple AI engines and responses together. The AI agent approach also chains AI models together. For Shih, the difference is a matter of semantics.

“It’s a spectrum toward more and more autonomy,” Shih said.

The AI agent approach is driven by existing customer workflows

As an example, Shih said that Salesforce is working with a major apparel company as a pilot customer for Einstein Service Agent. 

If a customer places an online order and then somehow gets the wrong order, the customer could just call into the retailer during business hours and get a human agent to help them. That human agent might be using the Einstein Copilot on their own system to help assist the customer. If the customer reaches out when human agents aren’t available, or chooses to go an entirely self-service route, that’s where Einstein Service Agent will fit in. 

With the Einstein Service Agent, the customer will be able to ask about the issue and if enabled in the workflow, also get a resolution.

The workflow that understands who the customer is and how to handle an issue, is something that is already part of the Salesforce Service Cloud. Shih explained that the Einstein Studio is where the administrative and configuration work for all things Einstein AI, including Service Agents, takes place making use of the existing data in Salesforce. The Einstein Service Agent is just providing a new layer for customers to interact with the existing logic to solve issues.

“Everything seemingly that the company has invested in over the last 25 years has come to light in the last 18 months for us to allow customers to securely take advantage of generative AI in a trusted way,” Shih said.