A conversational interview about the rapid impact of AI on contact centers, featuring examples from Singapore Airlines and Salesforce. Speakers describe deployments that produced hundreds of thousands of agent–customer interactions, potential headcount reductions (~30% reported in some cases), and customer pilots (e.g., Lennar) showing revenue and service benefits. The tone is cautiously optimistic: big short-term gains and larger decade-scale transformations.
Chapters
When I was in Asia I was with Singapore Airlines is a huge customer ours and has been for a long time.
Yeah.
And they of course they're running sales and service and slack and marketing. All the things you expect. But the power of Singapore Airlines is that the CEO, his name is Go, by the way. So let's go. Incredible visionary CEO and he's building an agentic layer over the airline. And that was very motivating because here within a year we're going from idea to this point where these customers are able to deploy a huge amount of value in a relatively short period of time.
Yeah. So many folks talk about. We can talk about a little bit if we don't run out of time about AI for changing coding and programming. You talked about freezing hiring and engineering. I want to get to that. But most folks are not. Don't have visibility into the contact center. It's just as transformational in one year. It's crazy. The transformation of contact center, isn't it? Agent Force is at the bleeding edge of it. It's so fast.
Look at Salesforce. Salesforce has help.Salesforce.com we have 9,000 support agents. We've already done more than a half a million of these interactions with customers and agents. But that idea I think is pretty big and pretty incredible.
Yeah, it is. Do you. I know it's a. I know it's maybe a complicated topic but I'm seeing. I've invested early in a bunch of folks in the contact center gorgeous. Which has 20,000 Shopify customers and talkdesk in the Salesforce ecosystem. I'm seeing folks already reducing headcount there. 30% already. 30% in a year. It's crazy. Any thoughts on that?
I'm thinking that I would like to try to do that myself and that's a big idea. I can deploy those resources to other parts of the company where I desperately need more help and more capability and I encourage customers to really look at that. That said customers, especially large companies like ours, the ability to do something like that in a material way, it takes time.
Yeah.
It's that old phrase people overestimate what you're going to do in a year and underestimate what you're going to do in a decade. And that is where we are with this as well. Which is that yes, we can say this is what's going to happen to the contact center but we might be saying that a year from now or two years from now still and then incrementally we'll have more examples. We'll have pioneers. People have done it, but we're still at the beginning of a lot of these opportunities. Yeah.
Have you. So we rolled out a little AI just on Saster itself. We had 30,000 conversations in one month. It's just pretty crazy. And a lot. One of the things that surprised me, I thought I knew about AI until I saw it on the other side. What's really interesting, how people do things you wouldn't expect. Do things you wouldn't expect.
Right.
Like today, someone had a half an hour board discussion about how to work with their board.
They have.
They shared their board deck. They reached out to me. They did every. You wouldn't expect it. Right. Any things you've seen that are unexpected?
I think some of the things that I've seen that are unexpected are also expected. And I think, like, with. I like talking about some of these customer stories.
Yeah.
The Singapore Airlines story, the Salesforce story. This idea that we're doing. I've done a half a million conversations. As we kind of head to Dreamforce. I'm sure that we'll get into the millions.
Yep.
And then when I see, like, really solid customers of ours, Lennar, which is one of the largest home builders in the United States, for years, they've had this vision that they've talked to us about of not just using our apps, they use all of our apps and do all the customer work. But how can they really provide more service to their customers? How can they provide more revenue lines to their customers? And that idea that has become very real, that's actually happening right now, that idea is going down, that this is going to be something that these customers are going to be served by these agents. And for Lennar, they have given us incredible revenue projections based on what they have found. And I think that is going to be something that we're going to see with a lot of customers. I think a lot of customers are going to all of a sudden start to experiment. And I'll tell you the most exciting thing, like, since we're in the Lennar zone. Yeah, they called me originally. CEO Stewart is incredible person. Father was the founder of the company. And he said, our guys went to Dreamforce. They came back, and we did a hackathon here on Agent Force.
