Big CX News from Microsoft, Salesforce, HubSpot, & Avaya

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Published: January 17, 2025

Rhys Fisher

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.

Having only been made generally available in April of last year, Einstein Copilot was Salesforce’s premier generative AI (GenAI) solution (Read on…).

HubSpot Founder’s Agentic AI Platform Surges Past 250,0000 Users

Dharmesh Shah, Founder & CTO of HubSpot, has revealed the rapid growth of his “Agent.ai” platform.

Introduced during September’s INBOUND 2024, Shah launched the platform as a network of autonomous AI agents for service, sales, marketing, and operations teams.

Via that network, users can scout, test, and deploy the AI Agents within their CX ecosystem.

As of January 2025, the platform already has 258,000 users, racing past the 100,000 target that Shah has set for the project.

Yet, despite its initial success, the “Agent.ai” platform runs independently from HubSpot. Although, the founder hopes it will eventually become part of the CRM giant’s ecosystem.

That happened with Shah’s previous project, “ChatSpot”, which is now Breeze Copilot.

Alongside AI Agents preconfigured by Shah and his team, Agent.ai includes an Agent Builder. This offers a low-code interface for CX teams to create their own agents (Read on…).

The Avaya Layoffs Spread, Leaving Some Regions Thread Bare

Avaya continues to make global layoffs, with Europe and the Middle East hit particularly hard.

While many online have suggested that this represents another round of cuts, it’s a continuation of those that Avaya announced in November.

The move is just hitting different regions at different times for legal and processing reasons.

That’s according to Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, who has been in contact with Avaya’s senior management team.

While Kerravala couldn’t share the exact numbers of staff laid off, the analyst emphasized that the cuts were deep, with a significant impact on EMEA.

First, laying off people in the UK is complicated, so Avaya has avoided that until now, and now it’s coming all at once.

In centering the business around Avaya’s top 1,500 customers, Avaya’s CEO Patrick Dennis – who took charge of the company in September 2024 – is trying to implement a scaled-down version of the Broadcom playbook (Read on…).

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