Salesforce brings an AI-powered digital labor force to retailers – News

Salesforce Inc. is targeting retailers with its latest artificial intelligence innovations announced today, including a customized version of the Agentforce platform and a new product called Retail Cloud with Modern POS.

The new tools will help to boost the productivity of store associates, digital merchants and customer service teams and help them to provide more personalized experiences, the company said.

Agentforce is the company’s platform for building so-called AI agents, which are AI algorithms that go beyond the capabilities of traditional chatbots, performing more complex tasks on behalf of users with minimal intervention. AI agents are one of the hottest trends in AI right now, and Salesforce is refining the technology to make it more useful to customers in the retail industry.

AI retail agent skills

With Agentforce for Retail, customers can access an extensive library of prebuilt AI agent skills, which are aimed at making it easier for teams to create customized AI agents specifically for tasks within their organizations. It envisions its customers creating AI agents for order management, guided shopping, loyalty promotion creation, appointment scheduling and delivering personalization at large scale.

Salesforce aims to help retail organizations adopt fully autonomous AI agents as trusted team members that can handle various time-consuming tasks without human supervision, so they can free up their human workers to focus on more valuable and creative work. It believes that by deploying highly scalable “digital labor,” it will help retailers enhance the productivity of their workers, automating tasks such responding to customers in real time, issuing returns, modifying orders, managing inventory and so on.

The new Agentforce skills for retailers include “commerce skills for order management,” enabling retailers to offer self-service order serving options to consumers. The idea is that consumers can engage with a chatbot in their normal voice to update things such as their payment information, shipping address and so on, or inquire about the status of an order.

With its “commerce skills for guided shopping,” Salesforce wants to help retailers deliver personalized concierge services to shoppers. Its agents will engage with consumers using natural language, and draw on the shopper’s history and the current interaction to recommend products, based on what’s available in the company’s inventory.

The “field service skills for appointment scheduling” can assist customer service agents in booking appointments for deliveries, installations and consultations, while the “marketing skills for loyalty promotion creation” enable AI agents to create new loyalty promotions customized for each shopper.

Enhanced point-of-sale system

Meanwhile, Retail Cloud with Modern POS provides retailers with a modern, user-friendly and cloud-based point of sale system that unites online and offline sales and inventory data within a single platform. It allows store associates to better serve customers with features for clienteling, which make it possible to quickly update a shopper’s profile, and inventory management, so they can view and update inventory in real-time.

Other features for store associates include actionable analytics based on omnichannel customer, order, inventory and sales performance data, return fraud alerts and personalized product recommendations

Additionally, Retail Cloud with Modern POS provides shoppers with more options for product deliveries and exchanging goods. By using what it calls an “omni-cart architecture,” the system allows each line item to define its own fulfillment method, such as buy online and pickup in store, buy online and return in store, and so on.

It also supports offline checkouts with encrypted transactions that can be processed the moment the system reconnects to the internet, enabling sales during internet outages or in remote locations. The entire system is fully integrated with Salesforce’s customer relationship management platform, including products like Commerce Cloud, Order Management and Service Cloud, meaning retailers can access customer data insights, product information databases and more.

Salesforce argues that such tools are essential for retailers, citing a study from last year that shows how 81% of retail executives believe inefficient processes are a drain on employee productivity. The study found that the average store associate logs into 16 applications and systems each day, and lacks a single, actionable view of their customers, hurting their productivity.

Nitin Mangtani, Salesforce’s senior vice president and general manager of retail, believes the combination of AI-powered digital labor and a modern POS system can enhance the operational capacity of retailers. “With these latest Agentforce skills for retail and a cloud-based, intuitive POS system, Salesforce is helping retailers deliver seamless, unified shopping experiences across both the physical and digital realms of retail,” he said.

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