Agentic AI is collapsing the traditional divide between CX and sales as the customer interface becomes unified.
Even if companies are still organized into separate teams, customers are now expecting a single, continuous conversation that moves seamlessly across the entire journey.
For CX leaders, the next challenge now requires them to think about designing AI around understanding intent and guide customers.
In conversation with CX Today, Hao Sheng, Founder of Expertise AI, argued that the future of customer engagement lies in a single AI interface that understands intent.
“The interface is unified on the website," he said.
"You have one AI agent interface, but it cannot be: 'for support, go to agent Alice, for sales, go to agent Tommy'. It cannot be like that.
A New Commercial Front Door
Previously, AI in CX was designed to automate service interactions and answer common questions to reduce ticket volumes, however after the acquisition of Qualified, Salesforce was able to engage website visitors in real time and orchestrate seamless handoffs across teams.
This acquisition enabled AI agents to participate across the earliest stages of the customer journey, reflecting the next stage of digital engagement as customer expectations move beyond support-only AI.
“We saw many of our customers are not only asking an agent that can provide CX, but also generate revenue at the same time," Sheng noted.
This original design that separated customer-facing teams into distinct systems and workflows required customers to navigate multiple handoffs before reaching the right person.
Today, agentic AI is now removing those boundaries by combining knowledge and data within a single conversational interface.
“An agent that can decide where to route the person, whether route to customer success manager, customer support, organization,” he explained.
Instead of relying on the customer to know, AI can determine the appropriate destination behind the scenes.
However, as AI becomes capable of identifying buying signals during routine customer conversations, revenue generation that previously remained the responsibility of sales, now becomes increasingly difficult to maintain as responsibilities become blurred.
