AI is advancing rapidly, attracting the attention of CEOs, CTOs and CIOs with its proven ability to increase productivity, improve employee performance and improve customer relationships.

By Linda Saunders, Director: Africa Solutions Engineering at Salesforce

We are entering the third wave of AI where autonomous AI agents will go beyond simple content generation and analysis, as chatbots and co-pilots did in the first and second waves, and will be able to reason and act autonomously for their human colleagues.

Indeed, they will work 24/7 to tackle individual, low-value, time-consuming tasks, or collaborate with other agents to complete larger, more complex tasks and projects.

In sales, for example, they will engage with prospects, answer questions, handle objections, and schedule meetings based on CRM and external data, allowing salespeople to focus on building more customer relationships. in-depth. Through dynamic, conversational self-service, they can be configured to answer customer questions using companies’ existing knowledge base so they can automatically resolve account access. They can also triage registration and payment issues, directing customers to the appropriate resources.

Simply put, the future of AI lies in agents, and it is here. Businesses should prepare to implement them quickly, as these autonomous agents will become essential to organizations’ customer engagement and experience strategies.

By working together, these customizable agents can act autonomously on tasks and allow workers to focus on tasks that only they can perform.

At Dreamforce, Salesforce unveiled Agentforce – a suite of customizable, standalone agents and tools that makes it easy for customers to create their own “agent force.” Agentforce is how humans and AI together drive customer success, and it was designed so that any organization can create, customize, and deploy their own agents quickly and easily, with low-code tools.

The shift from generative to agentic AI will transform the way humans work.

Despite the eagerness of companies to experiment and deploy AI, many still worry about how to do so securely, how to keep data under their control, and how to ensure that they can trust the results of AI.

There is considerable concern that AI will displace workers or become too powerful and operate at odds with humans.

Officers need guardrails and need to be monitored to ensure they are doing what they are supposed to do.

Success requires not only finding the AI ​​models or creating AI actions that best meet a business’s needs, but also having the infrastructure and data security to do so responsible.

Audit trails are necessary to hold autonomous AI agents accountable, just as employers can establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to enable human workers to progress toward their expected goals.

It’s important to think about the role of agents at work as a partnership between people and AI. Complementary skills and intelligence will deliver better business results.

Although agents can orchestrate complex actions on behalf of the user, they require these skills to be configured and require a certain degree of mastery to function optimally.

Companies need to take their employees on the AI ​​journey. They will need training to work with autonomous AI agents because they need context and onboarding, just like new hires.

Setting direction, clear goals, and giving feedback ultimately helps the AI ​​train better.

The future of work is a hybrid workforce

Together, agents and humans will drive customer success. This is what AI is supposed to be.

Every business has more tasks to accomplish than resources available to accomplish them. As a result, much work remains unanswered or unfinished.

An estimated 41% of employee time is spent on repetitive, low-impact tasks, and 65% of office workers believe generative AI will allow them to be more strategic, according to the Salesforce Trends in AI report.

However, it is essential that AI agents understand and implement their vast capabilities. It is equally, if not more, important for them to recognize their limitations and understand when human intervention is necessary.

The future of work is a hybrid workforce of humans and agents, enabling businesses to compete in an ever-changing world. Thanks to AI, humans can focus on what’s truly important: human relationships.