Salesforce Debuts Autonomous AI Service Agent Einstein

Customer relationship management company Salesforce has debuted its first fully autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agent.

Einstein Service Agent, announced Wednesday (July 17), is designed to replace conventional chatbots by understanding and taking action on a broad range of service issues without preprogrammed scenarios and make customer service more efficient.

“Salesforce is delivering a future where human and digital agents join forces to improve the customer experience,” Kishan Chetan, general manager of Salesforce’s Service Cloud, said in a news release.

“Einstein Service Agent, our first fully autonomous AI agent, will not just complete service jobs on its own; it will augment how human agents work and completely transform how service teams operate, making them far more efficient and productive. We are reimagining customer service for the AI era.”

According to the release, Einstein differs from traditional chatbots, which can only handle specific queries that have been specifically programmed into their system and don’t recognize context or nuance.

The agent interacts with large language models (LLMs) by analyzing the full context of the customer’s message and then autonomously deciding what to do next, using generative AI to craft conversational responses according to a company’s brand voice, tone and guidelines.

“For service organizations, this means they can offload a large number of tedious inquiries that bog down their productivity so they can focus on tasks that require a human touch,” Salesforce said. “For customers, this means they get the answers they need much faster because they no longer need to wait for human agents.”

As PYMNTS wrote last week, many companies are trying to make their AI-powered chatbots more conversational, though this approach also offers challenges.

“As AI becomes more human-like in its interactions, it can sometimes lead to confusion or unrealistic user expectations. In documented cases, customers have developed emotional attachments to AI assistants or mistaken them for real human operators, raising ethical concerns about the boundaries of human-machine interactions,” that report said.

And it’s not just individual customers developing feelings for AI chatbots. A conversational AI called Xiaoice, developed by Microsoft for the Chinese market, received millions of user messages saying “I love you,” a level of emotional engagement with AI that raises questions about the psychological effects of anthropomorphic design in technology.