Published on the 28/02/2025 | Written by Heather Wright

Because copilots are so 2023…

Copilots have had their day, and it’s now the era of agentic AI, with local companies already making good on the technology’s promises.

At least, that’s according to Salesforce, whose team took to the stage at Agentforce World Tour Sydney this week in front of around 10,000 people to espouse the value of agentic – and Agentforce, its platform to enable customers to quickly spin up AI agents.

“It’s a perfect storm where supply simply doesn’t meet demand.”

Frank Fillmann, Salesforce A/NZ EVP and general manager, says agentic changes the AI equation for business, enabling AI to do more than just answer basic questions, and instead to ‘plan and reason and take action’.

“This is what AI was meant to be. This is delivering the digital labour platform our customers are asking for.”

He says three key themes come up when talking to businesses about headwinds: A tight labour market, a ‘productivity crisis’ with almost a decade of flat productivity, and rising customer expectations.

“We are all used to all this incredible magic on the phone,” he says of genAI apps, “but when we engage with a brand it doesn’t often show up.

“Our last great experience is our new bar. It’s our new expectation and it’s creating a divide that is really stressful for organisations to handle.”

Leandro Perez, Salesforce A/NZ chief marketing officer, says while generative AI has brought much for consumers, the benefits have been lacking for business.

“We’ve come a long way from chatbots with their fixed rules and limited answers, and copilots which had so much promise, but when you brought them from the consumer world to the business world, they lacked context and ultimately they provided a little bit of productivity but they couldn’t take action. And taking action is what is key.

“Taking action is how you will unlock the trapped value you have in your organisation through digital labour.”

Research from YouGov, for Salesforce, suggests Australian and New Zealand executives – or at least those already embracing AI – are already sold on agentic as the next step.

The survey of 480 c-suite executives from across Australia and New Zealand found 69 percent of those who prioritise AI are focusing on agentic AI over the next 12 months, with 38 percent already implementing the technology.

Among those considering AI as a top priority, the top agentic AI use cases included 24/7 customer support across channels (68 percent), sales forecasting and analytics and platform management (both 58 percent) and marketing strategy and campaign development (57 percent).

One company which Salesforce says is already benefiting from agentic AI is household appliance manufacturer, Fisher & Paykel.

Just months after deploying agentic AI for customer service, appointment scheduling and briefing technicians, the company is using it to resolve 30 percent of customer queries, saving up to 3,300 hours per month.

F&P was struggling to provide a ‘premium’ support service, with high call volumes meaning it couldn’t move quickly enough, and was seeking a way to simplify customer service and reduce technician visits.

It initially deployed chatbots to ease the load on reps, but found the bots could only handle around one-third of inquiries. When questions were too complex, it connected them to the call centre which was still fielding a high volume of calls, around 60 percent of which were about appliance issues.

Rudi Khoury, Fisher & Paykel chief digital officer, says where chatbots could resolve things about 33 percent of the time ‘we’re forecasting to well and truly double that’.

Agentforce mines the company’s knowledge base to triage customer issues, pinpointing the exact customer appliance and what might be wrong with it based on the customer’s natural language description of what is happening, and walking them through troubleshooting steps.

If the self-service doesn’t solve the issue, Agentforce, which is integrated with Service Cloud, routes inquiries to the right service rep and generates instant summaries of the account and case history, surfacing relevant knowledge base articles for the rep to reduce call times and ensure consistent answers. It can also provide fall case details to technicians.

“It’s a really big change for us,” says Khoury. “It’s giving us the ability to scale our existing workforce… and help us meet the customer where we want to do business with us.”

Hipages, the online marketplace connecting tradies with homeowners, is also using Agentforce and Data Cloud to manage the manual work of onboarding tradies, Fillmann says.

The company’s first agent helps automate the verification of tradies’ licenses and business registrations, reducing turnaround time for onboarding verification checks from three hours to ‘near real-time’.

“Tradies don’t want paperwork, they want to get to work. They can onboard in minutes instead of hours. They can get connected to jobs in minutes instead of hours,” Fillmann says.

The company is using Data Cloud, integrated with Databricks, to help with data consolidation and provide greater visibility of operational data, including insights such as leads claimed and won by each tradie and ongoing revenue from those leads.

Telco One New Zealand’s use of Agentforce was also showcased at the event with Fillmann telling the audience telcos struggle with technical debt, manual processes, siloed data.

Agentforce will provide 24/7 proactive support for customers and employees, by handling online requests, scheduling in-store appointments and creating personalised offers.

But while Salesforce was talking up Agentforce in Australia, things all that rosy on the financials front, with the company forecasting its 2026 revenues to come in below Wall Street expectations, with slower than expected adoption of Agentforce blamed.

Salesforce’s Q4 revenue also came in just shy of expectations, coming in at US$9.99 billion.

Around 1,000 of Salesforce’s 170,000 enterprise customers are using Agentforce, which launched last October, with others experimenting.

The company also announced this week that it has done a $2.5 billion deal with Google which will see Gemini integrated into Agentforce, and Salesforce available on the Google Cloud Platform.

And in other news from the Sydney event, Salesforce says it is investing $2.5 billion over the next five years to support AI Innovation, workforce development and sustainability initiatives in Australia.

The announcement had few specifics on where the investment would be, other than noting a new roadshow of learning days and hackathons in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.