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.
The voice agents are front-end, conversational autonomous agents that brands can customize in Copilot Studio to support 26 languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and Turkish.
While some contact center multilingual support solutions necessitate a separate bot for each language, Microsoft supports multiple languages via a single voice agent.
The solution also has the capacity to switch languages mid-call based on caller input; when a customer is choosing a language from a menu, for example.
In addition, contact center staff can assign dedicated phone numbers for each language, using a single voice agent to initiate conversations based on the dialed number.
Provided the bot supports the voice channel’s primary language, the tool may also begin the interaction in the caller’s preferred language.
Moreover, during instances where the voice agent cannot resolve a query or the customer requests human assistance, administrators can set routing rules to escalate the call to a live agent queue that matches the conversation’s language (Read on…).
HubSpot Ventures Makes Agentic AI for SMBs a Primary Investment Goal for 2025
Many CRM providers target small and midmarket businesses (SMBs) until they get their first enterprise customers. Then, they chase more.
Yet, HubSpot has stayed laser-focused on this segment, differentiated, and brought AI to businesses that previously considered it unobtainable.
In 2024, that included generative AI (GenAI). Agentic AI represents the next frontier.
Already, HubSpot has teased Agent.AI, a network where businesses can identify, test, and implement AI Agents that work alongside their teams.
Now, some of these AI Agents are live. For instance, there’s a Prospecting Agent that isolates keen buyers and builds those into a sales pipeline.
Other examples include a Social Media Agent that drafts targeted posts and a Customer Agent that leverages trusted knowledge content to autonomously support customers.
HubSpot’s next step in its agentic AI journey is giving its venture arm – HubSpot Ventures – the directive to invest in companies building agentic applications for SMBs. Ultimately, this will boost its future AI Agent ecosystem (Read on…).
