This week in CX has seen new AI agents from Microsoft, a fond farewell for Salesforce's Einstein Copilot, impressive growth for HubSpot's agentic AI platform, and more Avaya layoffs.
Here are the extracts from some of our most popular news stories over the last seven days.
Microsoft Beckons the Self-Learning Contact Center with Its Upcoming AI Agents
Microsoft will release two new AI Agents for its Dynamics 365 Contact Center “early in 2025”.
The first is its Customer Intent Agent, which discovers new intents by listening in on customer conversations across all channels.
It then analyzes the case notes, transcripts, and summaries to map issues and uncover the key troubleshooting steps agents may take to resolve each query.
The second agent is its Knowledge Management Agent. Leveraging intelligence from the Intent Agent, this crafts new knowledge articles.
Additionally, it isolates opportunities to update existing articles, suggests changes, and puts these forward for review.
Customer service teams – including both human and AI Agents – may then leverage the knowledge articles to autonomously solve customer issues.
Businesses can build such a customer-facing AI Agent for the Dynamics 365 Contact Center via the Copilot Studio. For voice, they may also leverage the native conversational IVR, powered by the Studio.
Either way, the AI Agent may interact with a customer and – if connected to the correct systems – solve many of their problems (Read on...).
Salesforce Bids Farewell to Einstein Copilot, Now It’s Just Another Agent
Salesforce has confirmed that its Einstein Copilot is no more.
While the CRM leader had previously let slip that the conversational AI assistant was being retired in January 2025, it has still taken many users by surprise.
In a post on LinkedIn, Ashish Agarwal, a Salesforce Architect, Consultant, and Trainer, drew attention to the change.
While working on a Salesforce project, Agarwal noticed that the feature – formerly known as Einstein Copilot – has been renamed to “Agentforce (Default).”
In detailing why the vendor had decided to make the change, Salesforce said in its release notes that it was choosing to include it as one of its Agentforce agents.
The tech firm confirmed that there would be no changes to functionality, but there had been updates and minor refinements to Permissions, UI elements, and Help documentation.
