Push for AI agents will have consequences in the workplace
I don’t know about you, but I first encountered the concept of software ‘agents’ when I read Nicholas Negroponte’s 1995 book Being Digital. Among its predictions, a good many of which have – unusually – panned out, was that we would use intelligent agents to perform various quotidian tasks on our behalf. These agents might even themselves deploy agents, Negroponte speculated, with the ultimate goal of allowing us to get on with the business of living a life while machines took care of the mundanities.
It is a simple vision but one that seemed as distant a prospect as flying cars in the face of the artificial stupidity doled-out by tech companies claiming to be helping us. That may be about to change, however, as the artificial intelligence (AI) tick burrows into every conceivable aspect of information technology, in search of shareholder value.
Take customer service software giant Salesforce. Last month, the company told us that the age of agents was upon us. Already all-in on AI, and with clients including football team Tottenham Hotspur, Salesforce has announced Agentforce, a suite of what it says are autonomous AI agents that users can use to, for example, respond to customers. Actually, the technology can seemingly do a lot more, but this example is worth tarrying on for a moment.
An upgrade to Einstein Copilot, Agentforce differs from its predecessor in that it is designed for immediate and easy customisation. Rather than being limited by AIs designed by someone else and then trained – which can be a costly business – on a company’s data, Salesforce supplies low-code and no-code tools called Agent Builder that allow users who have domain expertise, but not necessarily development skills, to build agents suited to specific tasks. In addition, Salesforce provides access to the Agentforce Partner Network where users can get hold of a range of agents developed by third parties.
What Spurs is doing with the tech is occluded somewhat by typical press jargon like “digital touchpoints” and thought-hampening boilerplate such as “best-in-class personalised engagement”. In practice, it seems that the club has signed on to use Salesforce’s cloud-based CRM software for its support, sales and marketing teams. Still, given Agentforce’s inclusion in Salesforce’s Spurs announcement, this suggests that the club will be using agents for something in the customer chit-chat department.
Whatever about either Salesforce or Spurs, though, the wider implication of the move is that software agents, which move away from task-based activity toward goal-oriented activity, are likely to become a common feature of the workplace.
In addition, the ability to create new agents simply by describing what you want them to do and then applying already-defined workflows to them is intriguing. Customer service call centres will, no doubt, be the first to feel the impact, and despite the claim that AI will augment rather than replace jobs having taken on the portentiouness of holy scripture, P45s are sure to follow.
There may be just one fly in the ointment, however: customers are less pleased with chatty robots than cost-conscious companies are.
A study conducted in the insurance industry by IBM, itself no stranger to AI, has found that while businesses believe that using generative AI is necessary in order to keep up with the competition, customers are significantly less enthused about talking to machines.
IBM found that just 29% of insurance customers queried said they are comfortable with generative AI virtual agents providing service, with only 26% saying they trust in the reliability and accuracy of advice given by generative AI.
Still, as we all know, when it comes to in-bound call centres, the customer is always wrong. In fact, it is safe to say that most of us have had experiences that amount to ‘the customer can go to hell’, and so, no matter what objections we might have to automated customer service agents, you can be certain that they will be widely deployed. In due course they may even put an end to call centres as we know them.
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