It’s been another busy week in the world of customer experience, with Salesforce announcing a new version of Agentforce, HubSpot launching AI agents, Twilio releasing attention-based routing for contact centers, and a controversial leaked memo from Shopify’s CEO.
Here are extracts from some of our most popular news stories over the last seven days.
Salesforce Drops Another Version of Agentforce, This Time Targeting Field Service
Salesforce has released Agentforce for Field Service, a specialized edition of its digital labor platform.
The offering comprises AI agents that augment the jobs of dispatchers and technicians.
In doing so, the agents aim to take cumbersome tasks off their plates, including scheduling, reporting, and paperwork.
As a result, field service personnel may spend more time troubleshooting, running repairs, and building customer relationships.
Sharing more, Taksina Eammano, EVP & GM of Field Service at Salesforce, said: “Agentforce for Field Service redefines how work gets done in critical industries like manufacturing, telecommunications, utilities, and consumer home services.
This is a massive leap in AI innovation that tackles the inefficiencies that plague field workers today, solving the pain of back-and-forth scheduling while giving field reps the power to make context-aware decisions and handle real-world nuances more effectively.
When announcing the platform, Salesforce also cited original research indicating that skilled technicians and tradespeople “waste” almost a day per week doing admin (Read on…).
HubSpot Brings AI Agents to SMBs
At Spring 2025 Spotlight, HubSpot introduced new and improved Breeze Agents.
Among many feature announcements, perhaps the biggest of all includes four Breeze Agents to enable go-to-market team scale.
The announcement comes at a time when businesses are moving at warp speed and teams are struggling to keep up.
Marketing tactics that worked last year are now obsolete. Sales playbooks that used to be reliable are outdated.
Customer service expectations have skyrocketed beyond what most teams can handle.
The driver turning the screws: The uplift in the development of AI.
The first – named Customer Agent – is an extension of support teams. It automatically resolves customer queries 24/7.
According to HubSpot, customers use Customer Agent to resolve up to over 50% of support tickets, and they spend nearly 40% less time closing tickets (Read on…).
Twilio Brings Attention-Based Routing to Contact Centers
Twilio has released attention-based routing for contact centers in a public beta.
Announced during the company’s Q1 2025 release, the new feature will be available for users of Flex, Twilio’s cloud contact center platform.
To understand how the feature works, it’s critical to understand the challenges of an agent working in an omnichannel contact center.
These agents must typically navigate contacts across several different channels.
Some of these contacts (phone/video) will require an agent’s undivided attention, while they can handle others simultaneously (SMS/WhatsApp).
In jumping between these two types of conversation, agents can struggle to prioritize their workloads.
Twilio’s attention-based routing solution aims to address this pain point by allowing organizations to set specific “attention levels” for each channel directly in the console (Read on…).
Shopify CEO Directs His Team: Hire an AI Before You Hire a Human
An internal memo from Tobi Lutke, CEO of Shopify, has leaked online, causing debate around how leading tech providers view the future of AI in the workplace.
Following the leak, Lutke posted the complete memo on X, explaining: “I heard this internal memo of mine is being leaked right now, so here it is.”
There are some huge takeaways, including the subtle suggestion that Shopify’s hiring team will recruit an AI before they hire a human.
As Lutke explained:
Before asking for more headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI.
He also advised his staff to picture: “What would this area look like if autonomous AI agents were already part of the team?”
From this, AI is seemingly now a baseline expectation at Shopify (Read on…).
