What are AI Agents?

You might be putting all your energy, technology, and human resources into delivering the best experience possible to each of your customers. But today’s customers demand what’s more than ordinary: Smart, Next-Gen, and Extraordinary personalized experiences.

That’s what triggered the innovation of AI Agents in the market. They are not just advanced chatbots; they are now being defined as a third wave in the AI revolution. These AI Agents are smart and autonomous, can analyze data, make decisions, and execute actions independently, all while continuously improving performance based on past interactions.

Now, the question is: What is an AI Agent? Will they deliver value smartly? And so on.

Explore this blog to learn everything about AI Agents. (You’ll figure out that these aren’t just the glorified bots?)

What is an AI Agent?

An AI agent is an intelligent system that comprehends and responds to customer inquiries. Building on machine learning and natural language processing, which handles a wide range of manual tasks, including addressing customer queries, answering basic questions, and multi-tasking, AI agents can improve their performance by self-learning.

The good thing is that it will give you a different AI experience, considering human intervention is reduced in this.

How do AI Agents work?

Now, let’s understand how these intelligent agents make your lives simpler: 

• Perception and Data collection

Like all other AI bots, AI agents get to work by assembling your data from different data sources. This data includes customer interactions, transaction histories, and social media traction to identify the roots of customer queries. For real-time data integration and processing, there is no alternative to advanced AI agents, who will load your database with updated information and allow you to handle inquiries like a pro.

• Recharging Decision Making 

AI agents read and process the assembled data using machine learning models to define patterns and give an output for decision-making. They will get you the most suitable response to a customer query by reading the past interaction and present query in seconds, reducing the response time and increasing the customer satisfaction ratio. 

• Action Execution 

Once they decide on curating a correct response, the next step is executing the action, which can be processing a request, escalating the case to a human agent, or personalizing and sending a revert to a customer online. What good does it do: it makes customers feel prioritized, valued, and addressed at times of urgency and gives your team enough time to handle high-end queries. 

• Learning & Evolving

AI agents are built in a way that they will learn from each interaction, constantly improving their algorithms for effectiveness and accuracy. They keep updating their knowledge center and get trained from the feedback, automatically optimizing the quality of future interactions. This helps them stay relevant and future-ready for customer queries. 

These capabilities allow AI agents to autonomously cater to millions of customer queries in new window tasks, making it a one-stop shop for various functions like follow-up interactions, providing information, giving product recommendations, and so on. Result: human agents are not stuck in the loop of answering general queries, and their growth is upgraded by devoting time to value-adding jobs.

Benefits of Working with AI Agents

These agents aim at transforming the way businesses engage with their customers, and here are the benefits you can expect if AI Agents is what you are planning to switch to:

1. Enhanced Efficiency:

Handling multiple customer interactions at once and delivering a satisfactory reply? Is it too big of a task for human agents? AI agents can significantly cut down this and revert to multiple customers in one go, with responses that quickly answer their confusion. This capability allows businesses to address a bulk of inquiries while maintaining high service quality.

2. Improved Customer Satisfaction:

Who doesn’t appreciate the quick response from the customer support department? AI agents contribute to taking your customer satisfaction ratings to the next level by leveraging data to customize and personalize interactions, hence making customers happy. Additionally, their ability to learn and adapt autonomously over time positions them for an ongoing increase in this metric.

3. Around-the-clock Availability

Unlike human agents, AI agents won’t sign off after 9 hours of shift. They stay available 24/7 to handle your offbeat hour queries promptly. This constant availability exceeds customer expectations for self-service options and helps businesses build greater customer loyalty.

4. Scale as you like

You can expand or shrink your AI agents to accommodate fluctuating customer interactions, making them perfect for businesses eager to deliver quality at all times.

5. Valuable Data-Driven Insights

Not only do these intelligent agents collect and process data, but they sort it out based on customer interactions, behaviors, and purchasing preferences. These data-ruled insights allow businesses to uncover prospective customer needs and trends and make decisions to enhance their offerings.

6. Consistency and Precision

AI agents deliver consistent and accurate responses to customer inquiries, minimizing the risk of errors and ensuring a reliable experience for users. This reliability builds trust and confidence in the service provided.

A McKinsey found opens a new window, “more than 72% of companies have started deploying AI solutions, highlighting their inclination towards generative AI. This won’t be long enough; we will be seeing companies incorporating frontier technologies like agents into strategic processes and curating future AI roadmaps.”

Exploring the Frontiers of AI Agents: Salesforce and ServiceNow

As the artificial intelligence landscape consistently grows and works towards improved customer interactions and smartly aligned operations, Salesforce and ServiceNow are the two frontrunners who have opened new ways to the Agentic AI world.

Salesforce, recognized as the world’s leading CRM provider, has introduced the Salesforce Agentforce Platform, which is designed to support and train employee capabilities and optimize customer engagement. Meanwhile, ServiceNow, a major player in operational software, has rolled out its own set of autonomous agents known as ServiceNow AI Agents.

Check out what each of them is and what they are offering to the users:

AI Agents by Agentforce

Salesforce AI Agents, part of Agentforce (an innovation launched in Dreamforce 2024), are autonomous AI agents that help teams in sales, service, marketing, commerce, and other business aspects. Unlike traditional chatbots that rely on scripted responses, these AI agents work on large language models (LLMs) on their backend to understand the context of customer inquiries and autonomously determine the best course of action. 

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Crafted with the power of Atlas Reasoning Engine, generative AI capabilities, and Salesforce Data Cloud at its core, Agentforce Agents craft conversational responses based on trusted business data, enabling them to handle a variety of tasks proactively.

Another standout feature is that you can build your own AI Agent for any action or operation you want and integrate it with your existing Salesforce CRM system. This connectivity ensures that your customers or stakeholders receive accurate and personalized responses.

Salesforce has introduced Agentforce Service Agent and Sales Coach in the market and is expected to roll out more agents soon to cater to different business needs.

You can easily customize these agents with low-code tools and deploy them quickly across multiple channels while keeping up with security standards through the Einstein Trust Layer.

Let us now check the difference between Agentic AI vs Traditional AI

ServiceNow AI Agents

ServiceNow is also entering the Agentic AI market with its own Agents, designed to optimize the overall productivity of different business functions. These AI agents are expected to be rolled out with seamless integration with the ServiceNow platform in November 2024, leveraging the cutting-edge capabilities of advanced reasoning and cross-enterprise data and building a bridge between AI and human employees. 

ServiceNow is starting things with a sharp focus on Customer Service Management (CSM) and IT Service Management (ITSM). These two key areas are set to benefit majorly from the integration of AI agents, aiming to minimize mean-time-to-resolution and give live agents more breathing room to enhance their productivity. 

These AI Agents are not just about automating tasks; they’re built on understanding context, creating intuitive resolution processes, and executing plans while keeping humans in the loop for oversight. What truly set the stage is the unified access to enterprise-wide knowledge and tools on the Now Platform. 

ServiceNow AI Agents will be able to interpret complex contexts, allowing them to handle everything from simple issue resolutions to managing entire workflows autonomously. With built-in guardrails for governance, users or teams can easily customize these agents to fit their unique processes or actions. 

The Final Note

Currently, we are just scratching the surface layer of the artificial intelligence era, and the journey so far has been a roller-coaster ride for both developers and customers. From the early computer days to the rise of the internet and the emergence of large language models (LLMs), technology is constantly improving our ways of working. 

As we look ahead, AI development promises to evolve the business landscape. Interacting with AI assistants is already becoming common when interacting with large organizations. Cyntexa is here to help businesses across various industries smoothly transition into this AI-driven world.

With our expertise, we can ensure that deploying AI agents is efficient and tailored to your specific needs. Whether you require customer service agents, data analysis tools, or automated trading systems, Cyntexa provides the support and technology necessary for a seamless rollout.

The future is bright, and with our help, you can lead the charge into this new era of innovation.