THE QUANT
Comfort with using AI in the customer journey falls sharply as autonomy increases. According to research by DEPT’s survey of 2,606 consumers, 65% of people who’ve used AI for shopping are comfortable with AI through the recommendation stage. But only 15% will let it move into preparation or transaction, and just 7.5% are comfortable with fully autonomous actions. The same report found that 56% of people who recently used AI while shopping chose a different brand than they’d originally planned.
DEEP LEARNING: AI Agents Get a Reality Check: AT&T, Crocs Want Automation but Still Need Humans in the Loop
Marc Benioff wants AI agents to take on a lot more work that humans do.
But Salesforce’s adoption numbers suggest that vision is still a work in progress. Roughly 30,000 of its customers use Agentforce—a feature launched in 2024 that builds digital workers to handle business tasks without constant human direction—according to Benioff. That’s just around 20% of Salesforce’s roughly 150,000 customers.
Talking to brands on the ground, I kept hearing a more cautious version of Benioff’s vision: Sure, automate more. Just don’t automate everything.
I toured a section of the conference hall branded Agentic Enterprise City to look at some of those early adopters, and the AI agents Salesforce is pitching as the future of enterprise software.
I spoke with executives from AT&T, Southwest Airlines, CVS, and Crocs about how they are putting AI agents to work. The use cases themselves weren’t particularly novel. But the details of how these brands are deploying them—and perhaps, more importantly, where they aren’t—offer a more grounded picture of what companies actually want from AI agents.
AT&T, for example, is using AI to help cut the time it takes employees to upgrade a customer’s phone from about 30 minutes to roughly 10 minutes, according to John Miller, VP of consumer and business solutions.
When I asked Miller where AI vendors can be unrealistic about what brands actually want from the technology, he pointed to a familiar tension: Efficiency isn’t the same as eliminating human interaction.
