Does Zendesk enable a true human – AI partnership?
The news On October 9, 2024, Zendesk held its AI Summit in New York’s Chelsea Industrial. The AI Summit is an event mainly for customers to inform themselves about what is new at Zendesk but also to network with each other. The event featured an interesting lineup of customer and partner speakers, headlined by New York Times bestselling author and podcast host Kara Swisher. My estimate is that there have been more than 250 customer representatives in attendance who not only could listen to the speakers but also get in-depth demos of Zendesk’s updated offerings, following real-life use cases. True to its name, the event centered around the use of AI, in particular bots, to increase not only efficiency, but also customer- and employee satisfaction. CEO Tom Eggememeier opened the event with an emphasis that Zendesk’s AI is built to support humans by stating that it “is designed for humans”, and Zendesk’s service solution is built to strengthen the human – AI partnership. Kara Swisher talked about the promise and peril of AI, giving the audience some food for thought on the day after Geoffrey E. Hinton, the godfather of machine learning turned AI warner got co-awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for his “foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks”. While Swisher sees the value that the use of AI can bring, she, too, warned about the hurdles that still need to be overcome, namely the concentration of power that the technology creates and its immense hunger for energy. The tie into the Zendesk story is that customer service is a prime...Salesforce, Agentic AI, and You
Salesforce told us its agents were coming, and it was still a surprise when the agents arrived.If you’ve been conscious for the past year, you know how much news (or noise) there has been about artificial intelligence. Salesforce billed Dreamforce24 as “the largest AI event in the world.” It caught me a bit off guard when I heard Marc Benioff say it, but it probably shouldn’t have; Salesforce has invested heavily in AI for the past few years, ever since it introduced Salesforce Einstein (now Tableau CRM) in 2016. Its latest effort is Agentforce, and the company is really leaning into it.The topic of AI erputed in 2023 once ChatGPT was unleashed upon the general populace, and it’s only fair that a business would leverage the popularity of the topic. While 2024 seemed poised to be “the Year of the Copilot,” since a number of vendors introduced AI copilot apps—digital assistants that automate routine tasks—the fanfare was to be short-lived. Today, the talk is about agents, or agentic AI—AI that acts on its own to accomplish tasks and achieve goals, reaching into the knowledge stored in linked apps as necessary.Marc Benioff declared, “Agents are the third wave of AI.” It’s hard to argue against this. AI agents have great potential to increase productivity and customer satisfaction, and mark a leap forward in AI capabilities. Benioff stated that one of the goals of this year’s Dreamforce was to get 1,000 customers to deploy Agentforce, a goal which I believe they achieved. It’s too soon for there to be any tangible results that anybody can talk about, so we’ll have to...
How Zendesk builds the future of AI-powered service
The News On April 15 to April 18, 2024, Zendesk held its annual Relate event, including a half day analyst track on April 15. The event was attended by around 1,600 customers, partners and analysts. It was about Zendesk’s strategy, which revolves around – no surprise here – AI to deliver better customer experiences. As part of this strategy, Zendesk also made clear how the past twelve month’s acquisitions of Klaus, Ultimate, and tymeshift get integrated into Zendesk’s customer service offerings, enriching and rounding them off. The company is betting big on AI, working on the assumption that interaction volumes between customers and companies are continuing to increase very fast. As a conclusion of this, service needs to become AI driven to accommodate this scale. Secondly, Zendesk sees AI as the technology underlying the necessary high degree of personalization. Together, this is estimated to increase the market size available to CX solutions that automate CX labor tremendously. At the event, Zendesk had three key announcements. They were AI agents to improve self service solutions, a copilot that helps agents solve incoming tickets faster and provides insight to further optimize the service and a workforce engagement solution that helps improve the productivity of digital and human agents as well as the quality of conversations. Behind all this lies the recognition that customer service is very much conversational. Customers and partners that I talked with had a keen interest in learning more about AI use cases. Many of them had started to use AI but estimated themselves still in early stages. The bigger picture The customer service software market has become...