It’s not just hype – here are real-life use cases for AI agents

This article is part of VentureBeat Magazine’s special issue, “AI at Scale: From Vision to Feasibility.” Read more of the case here.

Just seven or eight months ago, when a customer called or emailed BACA Systems With a service question, the human agent handling the query will start looking for similar instances in the system and analyzing the technical documentation.

This process will take approximately five to seven minutes; Then the agent can provide the “first meaningful response” and finally start troubleshooting.

But now with Artificial intelligence agents Powered by Sales forcethis time was shortened to at least five to 10 seconds.

“This is a significant (reduction),” Andrew Russo, an enterprise architect at Baca Systems, told VentureBeat. “For us, it’s not about how do we eliminate staff and reduce headcount,” he stressed. “Our goal is, how do we make sure the customer gets back to work as quickly as possible?”

Bridging time gaps, providing faster time to resolution

BACA Systems, a Michigan-based robotics manufacturer, first implemented Salesforce in 2014, and eventually added Service cloud It will replace the “vanilla, or maybe like strawberry ice cream, core service cloud,” Russo explained. The company then made a “giant digital transformation” in 2021, bringing on Salesforce’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform.

Soon, team members were working with predictive AI for sales and manufacturing forecasting; The company then evolved into AI agents, which implement Salesforce Agentforce During the past year.

The key’s initial use case was service calls. About 57% of questions from customers are hardware related (for example, a device dropped or needs calibration), Russo explained.

Now, instead of having to sift through databases of past customer calls and similar cases, human representatives can ask Amnesty International agent To find relevant information. Russo noted that artificial intelligence works in the background and allows humans to respond immediately.

AI can also support preventive maintenance. For example, a circuit breaker may continually trip, indicating a short in the wire that should be checked, Russo explained. This may help in getting rid of persistent unresolved issues in the past.

“It’s all about how we can provide a faster time to resolution for customers,” Russo said.

AI agents generate sales leads and handle customer inquiries

Another crucial use case is sales, because Baca, as a small company, does not naturally have hundreds or even dozens of sales staff (in fact they have less than 10).

“We have a lot of potential customers that we didn’t have time to reach out to,” Russo said. “Our goal is: How do we start engaging them?”

AI can act as a sales development representative (SDR) to field general inquiries and emails, conduct a back-and-forth dialogue, and then pass the lead on to a member of the sales team, Russo explained. Bringing in additional salespeople to handle such tasks would require tens of thousands of dollars in salaries, but if the AI ​​can develop new deals, its initial cost is “very easy to justify.”

In the coming months, the company plans to deploy the customer-facing system Service agents It can interact with human users via text messages to open and handle cases without the initial need for human intervention. If an AI agent cannot solve a problem, it will escalate the issue to a human representative.

The intent is, “How do we continue to deliver more value to customers on the service side and create more deals on the sales side?” Russo noted.

Outside of sales and service, Baca uses AI to generate emails, create receivables, and draft “very aggressive collection letters” when needed. Russo, for his part, uses technology to check for deduplication of parts, leveraging recovery augmented generation (RAG) with rapid creation tools to detect duplicates to prevent bad data from being transferred to Salesforce.

There was no opposition from employees, he said, as the company started small, initially granting a select group of users access. Then others quickly began to inquire. “They have already started begging us to allow them access,” Rousseau noted. No one is afraid of him; They love using it because it helps improve their work.

The company is maintaining this intentional and gradual approach as it further integrates AI to remain agile. “Our goals don’t change, it’s just a matter of how we get there and the path we take,” Russo said. “It’s a different way, it’s a better way – it’s the highway.”

Artificial intelligence serves savings for ezCater

Corporate catering is more complicated than it may seem. There can be shifts in staffing, food preferences, dietary restrictions, as well as other logistical challenges.

ezCater continues to grow in this space, and as it stands, it can be difficult to measure the level of high-touch service needed to solve customer needs without using technology, Erin DeCesare, CTO of the workplace catering platform, told VentureBeat.

But once a company implements Agentforce from Salesforce, a customer who needs to modify an order will be able to communicate their needs using natural language AI, and the AI ​​agent will automatically make the adjustments. When more complex issues arise — such as reconfiguring the order or changing the location entirely — the AI ​​agent will quickly push the order to a human representative.

“This represents a significant cost savings for us,” DeCesare said.

Another intended use case is “restaurant discovery” – i.e. Artificial intelligence agents It will be able to direct users to the best place based on inputs about their food preferences, budget, location and other factors. This will be supported by data from millions of workplace food orders. “This is what NLP and AI are perfect for,” DeCesare said.

She mentioned that ezCater initially integrated AI agents within the company to assist concierge agents, and that the human agents love that. “We’re giving them the tools to be better and be able to handle more calls.”

There has been a shift in the comfort level of engineers as well, as they are able to visualize factors more structurally. “They can test and trust in a way that is similar to software development,” DeCesare said. “It’s more like what they expect in the software development life cycle.”

Business partners are also excited about the capabilities of tasks such as business analysis or process mapping. “The technology has become very accessible in the last six months,” DeCesare said. “You can easily see how this will quickly become the norm. We will be in a very different world 12 months from now.”

Daily insights into business use cases with VB Daily

If you want to impress your boss, VB Daily has you covered. We give you the inside scoop on what companies are doing with generative AI, from organizational transformations to hands-on deployments, so you can share insights to maximize ROI.

Read our privacy policy

Thanks for subscribing. Check more VB newsletters here.

An error occurred.