This article is part of a VentureBeat special, “AI at Scale: From Vision to Viability.” Read more about this story here.

Seven or eight months ago, when the customer called or emailed Baca Systems with a service query, the human agent handling the query can begin searching for similar cases in the system and analyzing technical records.

This may take about five to seven minutes; then the agent can provide a “critical first response” and finally start solving problems.

But now, it is AI assistants powered by Salesforcethat time has been shortened to five to 10 seconds.

“That’s a huge reduction,” Andrew Russo, business architect at Baca Systems, told VentureBeat. He emphasized that, “for us, it does not affect how we can eliminate the number of people, reduce the number of employees. Our goal is, how do we make sure the customer gets back up and running as quickly as possible? “

Reducing time, provides a faster time to resolve

BACA Systems, a robotics company in Michigan, started using Salesforce in 2014, he added Service Cloud that instead of “vanilla, or maybe strawberry ice cream, a cloud base,” Russo explained. The company underwent a “major digital transformation” in 2021, introducing the Salesforce Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform.

Team members soon began working with AI for sales forecasting and production forecasting; The company then switched to AI agents, using Salesforce Agentforce within the last year.

The first thing to use was to make a phone call. Russo explained that about 57% of the questions that come in from customers are related to equipment (for example, the machine is down or needs maintenance).

Now, instead of looking through databases of past customers and similar cases, personal reps can ask I have an assistant to get the right information. AI takes a backseat and lets people respond immediately, Russo said.

AI can also help improve prevention. For example, a circuit breaker may be continuously tripping, indicating that there is a short in the wiring that needs to be checked, Russo explained. This can help solve problems that have not been solved in the past.

“It’s all about how fast we deliver to our customers,” Russo said.

AI assistants that generate sales leads, solve customer queries

Another difficult case is sales, because as a small company, Baca naturally does not have hundreds or several sales people (mostly they have at least 10).

“We have a lot of equipment that we haven’t had time to get to,” Russo said. “Our goal is: how do we start interacting with them?”

AI can work as a sales development representative (SDR) to field multiple inquiries and emails, have back-and-forth conversations, and provide feedback to a member of the sales team, Russo explained. Bringing in additional salespeople to perform such tasks would require thousands of dollars in fees, but if AI can create new contracts, the cost is “easy to justify.”

In the coming months, the company plans to ship to customers support assistants who can interact with users via text message to open and solve cases without the need for people first. If the AI ​​assistant cannot solve a problem, it will escalate the matter to a human representative.

The goal is, “How do we continue to give more money to customers on the service side and generate more sales on the sales side?” Russo said.

Outside of marketing and services, Baca is using AI to generate emails, create receipts and create “sophisticated collection letters” when needed. Russo, for his part, is using the technology for incremental analysis, based on the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) model and quick builders to identify duplicates to prevent bad data from entering Salesforce.

There has been little pushback from the staff, he says: The company started small, initially offering a select group of users. Then others started asking quickly. “They started asking (us) to give them a chance,” Russo said. “No one is afraid; they like to use it because it helps their work to be better.”

The company is maintaining this deliberate, incremental approach as it also integrates AI to make it more robust. “Our goals don’t change, it’s our approach and the path we’re taking,” Russo said. “It’s a different road, it’s a better road – that’s the main road.”

AI is funding ezCater

Corporate food is more complicated than it sounds. There may be changes in demographics, food preferences and food restrictions, and other issues.

ezCater continues to grow in this space, and as it turns out, the level of high-quality service necessary to meet the needs of customers can be difficult to increase without the use of technology, Erin DeCesare, CTO of the service center, told VentureBeat.

But once the company uses Salesforce’s Agentforce, a customer who needs to change a system will be able to communicate with the AI ​​in natural language, and the AI ​​agent will automatically make the changes. When problems arise – such as reorganizing the system or changing the entire location – the AI ​​assistant will push the issue to the person.

“This is going to save us a lot of money,” DeCesare said.

Another method used is “finding a restaurant” – that is, AI assistants will be able to guide users to the best places based on their food preferences, budget, location and more. This will be supported by data from millions of workplace food orders. “That’s what NLP and AI are all about,” DeCesare said.

ezCater is initially integrating AI assistants in-house to support agents, and human agents love them, he says. “We’re giving them the tools to do better, and be able to make more calls.”

There has been an improvement in the comfort of engineers, too, because they can have more organized assistants. “They can test and trust in a way that feels like software development,” DeCesare said. “It’s like what they would expect from programming.”

Business partners also enjoy the possibility of services such as business analysis or production maps. “This technology has been available for the last six months,” DeCesare said. “You can easily see how this will become the norm. We will be in a very different world 12 months from now.”