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Salesforce Says AI Customer Service Saves $100 Million Annually (bloomberg.com) 45

Posted by msmash from the claims-made dept.
Salesforce says it's saving about $100 million a year by using AI tools in the software company's customer service operations. From a report: The company is working to sell AI features that can handle work such as customer service or early-stage sales. To illustrate the value of the Agentforce product to business clients, Salesforce has been vocal about its own use of the technology.

Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff announced the statistic on Salesforce's savings during a speech Tuesday at the annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. The company said more than 12,000 customers are using Agentforce. For example, Reddit was able to cut customer support resolution time by 84%, Salesforce said.
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Salesforce Says AI Customer Service Saves $100 Million Annually More

Salesforce Says AI Customer Service Saves $100 Million Annually

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  • Salesforce advertises (Score:5, Informative)

    by beelsebob ( 529313 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2025 @05:27PM (#65725150)

    I'm not sure that this will help them sell anything. They're just advertising that their customer service sucks. On the other hand, maybe the MBAs wont notice.

    • Re:Salesforce advertises (Score:5, Insightful)

      by korgitser ( 1809018 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2025 @05:43PM (#65725198)
      Imagine the money they would save by closing down customer support altogether...

    • Describing the steps taken to enshittify their offerings, while trying to paint it as some kind of benefit to somebody somewhere. Standard practice.

      I presume this wasn't aimed at customers so much as potential investors. Investors into AI companies as well as Salesforce. If there aren't Salesforce broads providing blowjobs to OpenAI bros, they are at least heavily vested in the stock.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      While it might be true they fired a bunch of help-desk people and replaced them with AI, that's not the same as being any good.

      It's possibly a case of being technically right but practically wrong.

      For example, you could replace staff with monkeys who you pay peanuts and claim you saved lots of money. Yes you did, but customers are now talking to monkeys. It's banana logic.

      • Re:Salesforce advertises (Score:5, Informative)

        by DamnOregonian ( 963763 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2025 @07:34PM (#65725412)
        The part you failed to realize, is that the humans you used to employ in the role didn't outperform the fucking monkeys.
        The era of good support is long fucking gone. These poor fuckers have been ripe for replacement for a while.
        I've watched my own support department go steadily downhill to the point where replacing it with AI seems rational.

      • In truth, if you are replacing direct support roles with AI, you are most likely automating transactional tasks. Just a the voice response systems automated password resets and online self-help move that along another iteration, much of what passes for tech support is indeed transactional. And that is potentially able to be automated.

        It's how my job went away, and a few years before AI was considered viable for those tasks. In fact, my job evolved, and I moved from role to role, as each time it was found to

    • > They're just advertising that their customer service sucks

      Or that their product is too complex or not intuitive, causing support calls for stuff users should be able to work out for themselves. Failing that, their documentation is rubbish, or quite probably (knowing how it is with a lot of companies), the search engine on their support website is a crock of shit.

      Ultimately, at least 80% of the support now done by AI should either have never needed support, or should have been solved by documentation. T

  • If you make me talk to some AI bot, I'm hanging up and calling the competition. Plus, Salesforce is expensive. If a premium product can't deliver a premium experience, the sale is lost.

    • Buddy, I got news for you. You might as well try to get one AI agent to whine to the other AI agent.

      My MINI / BMW dealer went to an AI agent to book oil changes and such early this year. They fired the lady that used to do it.

      This BS is nearly ubiquitous now.

      • You don't need "a lady or an AI to book oil changes. All you need is a website that displays available time slots and a system to allow the customer to register for one of those time slots.

      • Apples to Oranges. When you call to schedule an oil change, that *is* something that can be handled by a bot...or a web form.

        Very different than having to deal with SF because an api call that you're writing code for won't work right and you have a deadline looming to get data out and processed through yet another complex procedure that then needs to talk to another api to get the data properly back into SF.
      • It isn't at all ubiquitous - it's well known that most corporate AI pilots are failing to deliver any value. Investment is cooling off, consumers and C-suites are beginning to understand the tech's serious, unsolvable flaws. Companies that have invested heavily in it are motivated to lie about the outcomes, but that can only last so long before the truth comes out. It's a bubble, and it's deflating.

        • One of the CTOs at my last work commented, 3 weeks into the role, that he was disappointed that only 68% of the corporate IT projects could be considered successful. He had a point, It was not that, at the time, we were only twice as successful as the overall reported success rate, for all industries that would answer the question.

          Realizing that, per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 20.4% of businesses fail in their first year after opening, 49.4% fail in their first 5 years, and 65.3% fail in their fir

          • That applies to things that can be improved. The flaws inherent to LLMs are permanent. Make the models as gigantic as you want, LLMs will always hallucinate, and will never be able to reason/understand cause and effect, which makes them unsuitable for pretty much every use case the executive class has been salivating over them for. That hasn't stopped people from trying of course, and fundamental misunderstandings of the tech's abilities persist everywhere, but as more projects fail in spectacular, money-lo
    • AIs are getting a lot better. The current generation of "AI" support I get on the phone or an online chat can barely make sense of my question, usually responds with "can you word that in a different way to help me understand". I'm already happy if they understand the phrase "I would like to talk to a person" and put me through to one, and that's a pretty low bar. But the latest AI support systems that are beginning to be rolled out are surprisingly helpful.

      The newer ones promise something new: they c

    • Most Salesforce users are required by their employer, "on pain of homelessness", to do so.

      The guy doing IT Procurement is probably not one of the employees who use Salesforce for their day-to-day job duties, and will have no contact with Salesforce's end-user support. Or they might have too much contact with Saleforce: bribery, other inside connections that might give them a "special" view of the company.

    • At least one of their competitors already does the same thing. Also a 'premium' product, with crappy support, now papered over with AI.

  • Makes sense, Ai is a good way to deal with failure (Score:4, Interesting)

    by oldgraybeard ( 2939809 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2025 @05:33PM (#65725160)
    Salesforce Data leak [slashdot.org] And save more money than they did on their IT costs.

  • Is this $100 million in the room with us right now?

  • Salesforce Says: AI Customer Service Saves $100 Million Annually.
    Salesforce Customers Say: Salesforce AI Customer Service is utterly, utterly useless.

  • Yes, losing customers means less service expenses (Score:3)

    by ebunga ( 95613 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2025 @05:51PM (#65725220)

    Just switched 250-ish stores to a different carrier because old carrier decided a damned AI chatbot was the way forward to "improve" customer service. Please reboot your DSL modem to fix your metro-e fiber service indeed.

  • There's a bit of exaggeration there I think but they claim to have replaced 4,000 customer service reps. That's about $25,000 per rep which if you account for the cost of an American rep and the cost of an Indian rep that sounds about right.

    Labor gets very expensive very fast. So automation becomes a big deal very fast.

    The problem is that 100 million or whatever it really is is just gone from the economy. It gets absorbed by Salesforce Senior Management and the big stockholders.

    Some of it in a v

    • "The problem is that 100 million or whatever it really is is just gone from the economy. It gets absorbed by Salesforce Senior Management and the big stockholders."

      Oh, dear, all economists are amateurs.

  • Company says it's product is great (Score:3)

    by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2025 @06:47PM (#65725322) Homepage

    I'm betting there's some funny math involved in the 100M savings number.

    On the other hand, customer support has been done SO poorly by SO many companies for SO long, it's not hard to see how AI could improve on the status quo.

    • I'm betting there's some funny math involved in the 100M savings number.

      Doesn't need to be. It's a few thousand employees at my organization's support salaries.
      Salesforce is definitely that large of a corporation.

      On the other hand, customer support has been done SO poorly by SO many companies for SO long, it's not hard to see how AI could improve on the status quo.

      That's my take on it. Support departments have been slowly degrading to the point where I don't really see their replacement with AI as a downgrade.
      I wouldn't have said the same thing 20 years ago.

  • Why not $134 million? (Score:3)

    by thesjaakspoiler ( 4782965 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2025 @06:59PM (#65725342)

    This $100 million sounds more like a promotional soundbite.

  • I hate all the companies that build their dogshit sales and support "applications" on SalesForce.

  • 100,000,000 is a very suspiciously round number, just like a number that a child or an evil villain might make up. Or someone in marketing.

    • Or... hear me out... when you know roughly, but not to the dollar, how much you saved. Or if the material you're preparing doesn't benefit from specificity.

      "How much did you save?" "Oh, a hundred million or so."

      That doesn't sound dishonest. It sounds casual. It's not an audited financial statement. It's a conversation.

      • I don't disagree that it could be an accurate number and that there could be valid reasoning behind it, but I highly suspect that whatever formula was used (if any) and any numbers plugged into that formula (and their sources) would be highly suspect, making the conclusion highly suspect as well. If I had some great technology for reducing my costs, I wouldn't exactly be advertising it for use by others.

        • They want to sell it to other people. That's what salesforce does,

          • It will be interesting to watch salesforce's sales and retention rates with this service, and the stated results for customers using it, especially relevant to their competition and their customers' competition, as well as salesforce's overall customer retention rates in the coming years. Personally, I think the quoted number is probably bogus, and their customers are likely to learn pretty quickly.
  • Rip off the bandaid, admit there never was support, and replace the hotline with a recording that says "fuck you, pay us more" The user experience will improve by $100B worth of experience

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