Six months after its launch, Thames Valley Police and Hampshire & Isle of Wight Constabulary say that Bobbi, the UK’s first police AI agent, is changing how communities access policing and how contact center teams manage non-emergency demand.
Built on Salesforce Agentforce, Bobbi was introduced as an additional digital contact channel for citizens who need guidance, updates or support, but do not require an emergency 999 response. The agent is now helping manage the equivalent of 14,000 citizen contacts annually across both forces, while freeing up more than 3,200 operational hours a year.
Chief Superintendent Simon Dodds from the Joint Operations Unit for Thames Valley Police and Hampshire & Isle of Wight Constabulary, said:
“Bobbi has allowed us to rethink how we manage non-emergency demand, ensuring our officers and staff can focus on the people and situations that need them most.”
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The Challenge: A Digital Front Door for Modern Policing
Policing teams across Thames Valley, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight handle a large volume of public contact every year. At Salesforce’s Agentforce World Tour London event, Tom Kempster, Director of Digital and Innovation at Thames Valley Police, explained the scale of that challenge, explaining: “We typically receive between 1.3-1.4 million contacts per year.”
A significant proportion of those contacts are emergency calls. But much of the remaining contact is non-emergency, with citizens asking for updates, trying to contact an officer, seeking advice, or looking for the right public service to handle an issue.
Before the Salesforce program, wait times for calls to 101 were placing pressure on citizens and staff. “We were under extreme pressure when we started this pre our Salesforce journey. Average wait times were about 26 minutes on our 101 service. That number is doing a really good job of hiding some really high wait times in our peak times.”
The forces also recognized that citizens’ expectations had changed. People are now used to contacting banks, retailers, healthcare providers and councils through multiple digital channels. Policing, by contrast, has historically relied on 999 for emergencies and 101 for non-emergencies, with some online reporting options.
As Rob Brind, Superintendent and Head of Operational Delivery for Contact Management, Thames Valley Police and the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary, noted in a panel discussion: “We knew that the challenge was the public is shifting in the way that they want to contact us or how they want to speak to us, so we knew that we needed to move with the times.”
The forces’ first Salesforce transformation focused on the service stack: public portals, automation journeys, and more sustainable routes for citizens to contact officers or receive updates. That work produced measurable gains, including a 15 percent increase in customer satisfaction and a major reduction in average wait times.
Bobbi was then layered on top as the agentic AI capability.
The Solution: Bobbi, Built on Salesforce Agentforce
Bobbi is designed to support non-emergency interactions, answer common questions, guide citizens to appropriate services and escalate cases where risk is detected. Bobbi now handles around 200 conversations per day and fully resolves approximately 45 percent of non-emergency enquiries without human intervention, according to Salesforce.
The AI agent is grounded in 91 verified knowledge articles. It does not access the open internet or unverified sources, and its responses are capped at 350 words to ensure they remain concise, professional, accurate and empathetic.
Under the hood, Bobbi uses Salesforce Agentforce 360, Data 360, Experience Cloud, Agentforce for Public Sector and MuleSoft. This setup connects into legacy policing systems, reduces duplicate data entry and enables replies to reach citizens without unnecessary manual intervention.
At the London event, Salesforce positioned Bobbi as an example of agentic AI moving beyond pilot deployments and into real operational use. Zahra Bahrololoumi, CEO of Salesforce UK&I, said: “Bobbi proves that the Agentic era is here, protecting lives right now. With Agentforce, our police forces have shown what it means to put communities first.”
More than a generic chatbot, Bobbi operates in one of the most sensitive contact environments possible, where even an apparently routine interaction may reveal a safeguarding issue, a crime or an emergency.
As Kempster pointed out, “any channel that the police open could potentially be an emergency.”
That principle shaped the implementation, because Bobbi had to do more than deflect low-value demand. It had to understand when not to automate.
From Contact Deflection to Safeguarding
The forces initially expected Bobbi to help with low-level, non-policing enquiries such as dog fouling, parking complaints, loud music or issues better handled by local councils.
While that has happened, the more significant finding has been that Bobbi is reaching people who may not have contacted the police at all.
As Brind explained:
“What we're finding is that people who perhaps aren't confident enough to pick up the phone and talk to a police officer and speak to us in the traditional way will actually engage with the agent and have the conversation with the agent.”
That behavior has opened a new route into policing for vulnerable people. Some citizens use Bobbi before deciding whether to speak to a person and others use it because they cannot safely make a phone call.
