As the year draws to a close, the CX space is showing no sign of slowing down.
This week has seen Salesforce announce its Agentforce 2.0 solution, fresh AI voice features from Twilio and Microsoft, and an SMB-specific agentic AI release from HubSpot.
Here are the extracts from some of our most popular news stories over the last seven days.
Salesforce Announces Agentforce 2.0: 5 Big Talking Points
Salesforce has unveiled Agentforce 2.0, lauding it as “The Digital Labor Platform”.
The CRM leader introduced the new terminology to clarify that Agentforce doesn’t just manage information; it manages digital labor as well.
Yet, the Agentforce 2.0 announcement isn’t just a rebranding exercise. Instead, it signals an evolution of the platform, which allows users to build and deploy AI Agents that perform tasks autonomously.
That evolution includes an expanded vision, new capabilities, and more, as the following five big talking points explore:
- Salesforce takes agentic AI beyond CRM
- Slack becomes the “natural place” for Agentforce
- Agentforce 2.0 reasons with Atlas & Data Cloud
- Salesforce gives Agentforce its own testing center
- Benioff challenges competitors: put agents on your website
While Agentforce 2.0 won’t become generally available until February, Benioff has already teased that the 3.0 version may be ready by May (Read on...).
Twilio Advances Its Voice AI with Conversation Relay, Releases Studio 2.0 In Beta
Twilio has unveiled Conversation Relay, a suite that gives developers new tools to create seamless, natural voice interactions.
Sharing the news as part of its Q4 release, Twilio noted how Conversation Relay differentiates with real-time interruption handling. This ensures voice AI interactions stay smooth, frustration-free, and responsive, even when disruptions occur.
Another notable feature is its natural conversational pacing, which ensures voice AI conversations feel human-like, removing awkward pauses and robotic tones.
A demo led by Jason Spulak, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Twilio, showed that Conversation Relay could also switch language preferences on request.
The effortless integration seamlessly connects to your existing AI tech and top-tier speech-to-text and text-to-speech providers like Deepgram, Google, and Amazon. We offer flexibility, scalability, reliability, and future-proof voice AI for any use case.
One potential use case is for a contact center IVR or intelligent virtual agent.
When enabling these, CX teams may also leverage Twilio Studio. The Studio offers a low-code/no-code app builder with drag-and-drop widgets to build voice, messaging, and comms workflows (Read on...).
Microsoft Announces Multilingual Contact Center Voice Agents
Microsoft has confirmed a new multilingual voice agent for its Dynamics 365 Contact Center.
