Earlier this week, I spent a morning at New York’s Javits Center listening to Salesforce representatives talking about Agentforce. In particular, all the great things AI agents will be able to do in commerce and customer service. It’s not only Salesforce that’s in the “agentic” game, of course.
Being naturally skeptical, I thought about all the things that could go wrong. Training agents on incomplete or obsolete internal data. Hallucinations. The difficulty of getting an AI agent to understand something a human agent would pick up instantly. All things that Salesforce and other vendors are trying to solve for.
Then the universe decided to add its two cents (this is a true story). I paused to try to upgrade the cellular data on my phone. Something went wrong on the mobile site, so I clicked on the chat button. Estimated wait time: 49 minutes. That phone company is still using humans.
Kim Davis
Editor-at-large
