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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- AI agents can reduce service costs by more than 20%.
- Service leaders are investing in tech and data integration.
- Only 46% of service reps’ time is spent engaging customers.
The 2025 State of Service report from Salesforce found that four out of every five service leaders say AI agent investment is essential to meeting business demands.
The report highlighted several key findings, including adoption rates of AI agents, business opportunities and challenges, and, most notably, how companies are incorporating predictive, generative, and agentic AI to deliver faster, more accurate, and more personalized interactions. Leaders expect AI agents to boost prior AI-enabled outcomes and are backing that expectation with investment.
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To better understand the impact of AI on the customer support and service industry, including the adoption of agentic AI in the enterprise, I interviewed Michael Maoz, senior vice president of innovation strategy at Salesforce, one of the world’s leading experts on customer relationship management (CRM), customer experience (CX), knowledge management (KM), and customer service.
Before joining Salesforce, Maoz was a research vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, serving as the research leader for the customer service and support strategies area. Here are the highlights from my conversation with Maoz.
1. AI agents are taking hold
We are seeing the rise of autonomous systems that sense, reason, decide, and act, all with minimal human input, and it would be interesting to see how that trend, which ideally should be guiding a business’ architectural playbook, is playing out in the new Salesforce State of Service report. What did you find?
Michael Maoz: The customer service leaders that we interviewed are both visionary and practical. They might not be ready for autonomous systems, but they clearly talked about their intention to ramp up the use of agentic AI. I found four highlights in the report:
- Generative and agentic AI take away what’s boring and repetitive, and instead create the space for customer reps to focus on more complex tasks.
- Accurate data available at the moment of customer engagement raises customer satisfaction and lowers costs.
- Better service process design, with great knowledge management systems and real-time insights, upskill customer representatives as never before.
- The future of customer engagement is multimodal.
The last one, multimodal, was a surprise. There is a lot of excitement around adding video, images, and sensor data (collectively called multimodal) to service responses.
2. Consumer-facing firms lead the way
In all my conversations with our customers and partners this year, I’ve heard that the use of AI agents is taking off. That is especially true in consumer industries. Those sectors include financial services, travel, and retail. I’ve been showing people how Salesforce is experiencing 85% autonomous resolution of service cases, and the lesson there is that powerful AI and access to information, tied to understanding the customer context, leads to success.
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Service will be half-automated by AI within two years. The Agentic Enterprise Index’s service outlook is blunt: by 2027, approximately 50% of service cases will be resolved by AI, with most service leaders calling AI-agent investment “essential” to meeting demand. The thrust is cost, speed, and customer satisfaction gains from end-to-end agent workflows.
Michael Maoz: As I went through the survey, I thought back to a powerful image you share of children drinking water from a faucet. Your point is that data is like water: it does no one any good unless it is clean and accessible. In our survey, which reached 6,500 service professionals around the globe, we asked respondents what they see as most critical elements for accelerating AI adoption. The answer came back to exactly your point: connected, trusted data is the bedrock of successful AI adoption.
A strong data foundation is essential for driving enterprise success, and it has to be discoverable and accessible. Whether the discussion is about how to upskill reps so they are more intuitive and better at their jobs, or how AI can create actions, the path to realizing these capabilities rests on accurate, trusted data. Data comes from structured databases and unstructured content in documents, images, and sensor signals.
3. Customer service is a team sport
Way before the introduction of gen AI and agentic AI, such as Salesforce’s Agentforce, businesses understood that a single view of the customer was a differentiator. The challenge is that bringing together accurate data is key to fully realizing the benefits of AI. For a customer service organization, there are multiple challenges, not the least of which is that they are supporting an increasing number of areas, such as marketing, e-commerce, and social media sites, as well as their traditional roles.
Customers feel something almost magical when a service organization has all of the relevant information for the interaction at their fingertips (even if those are the digital fingertips of a chatbot), consistently across the engagement channels.
Michael Maoz: Definitely. From the survey, your point about a single view of the customer come outs. For our customers who have unified their data, Agentforce takes existing workflows, and all of the existing actions, and creates autonomous actions with them.
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Others use the hundreds of prebuilt Agentforce workflows, and they also build their own. The results are amazing. That explains our findings in the seventh State of Service report that organizations that unify service channel data in one platform are more likely to call their AI very successful.
4. Data silos must be addressed
We sometimes forget that behind the scenes, the average enterprise gathers and maintains between 20 and 200 separate data points about a customer. It is difficult for most organizations to pull all of the right data points together in real time because it is scattered across independent silos.
Credit information is held in the financial system, order information is in the ERP or commerce system, and customer channel behavior is held by marketing, as is loyalty and membership data. As a result, the rep must jump from system to system, piecing the information together.
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I found a great statistic in the survey. The top-performing service organizations have found the key to overcoming the issue of dispersed data is to prioritize data integration. The survey says that 88% of leaders are prioritizing tech integration. And 44% say data silos have already delayed AI projects.
Michael Maoz: We continue to see voice calls with human support representatives handling up to 35% of all customer service needs. When we dig in, customers call a business out of frustration and for lack of a better alternative, not out of choice. The reason for those calls is frustration over the failure or unreliability of the other options, such as chat and chatbots.
That 35% of phone calls also masks the enormous strides in self-service that most customers use without thinking about channel choice because it feels intuitive and natural. Look at banks, online retailers, and airlines. They have shifted 90% of service interactions to mobile wallets and apps, kiosks, and websites. The same is true in many other industries, such as media and telecommunications.
5. Service pros can focus on value
Self-service has definitely improved. At the same time, most organizations have a long way to go. The next level of automation and self-service is agentic AI, such as Agentforce. The survey showed that 79% of leaders agree that AI agent investment is essential.
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Agentforce moves beyond generating the right content to performing actions previously performed by humans. It is more critical than ever to help service representatives spend less time on repetitive, boring, but required activities. At the same time, since self-service has solved the easiest problems and left representatives with more difficult work, giving humans much better tools to meet the new requirements becomes really important.
Michael Maoz: That brings us to upskilling and caring for the customer representative. They see AI coming. They also report that, in 2025, only 46% of the rep’s time is spent engaging customers. That 46% of the time is upleveled when rich, personalized, contextual data and insights are available.
What about the other 54% of representative time? That is spent on case notes, meeting notes, and searching for information. They are interested in optimizing all of that data, and a great way is using Service Cloud tools, such as Enterprise Knowledge and Agentforce. The time saved can be redirected to the marketing and sales journey.
6. AI agents remove wasteful activities
Service leaders often ask me where to begin. My observation is that leading service organizations inventory the most logical tasks for Agentforce, such as refunds, rescheduling, or dispatching a technician. Often, FAQs are the obvious place to start, moving to conversation analysis and summary, knowledge discovery, and then onto actions, such as appointment changes, order returns, form completion, managing the return of damaged items, and hundreds more.
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A best practice we see is to set up a dashboard such as Tableau Pulse to see critical data, such as the change in issue resolution rates, average handling time (AHT), and customer satisfaction. The survey shows that reps can realize 20% cuts in service cost, and much of that reduction is because the resolution times for their representatives improve.
Michael Maoz: It is sometimes a fun exercise to ask a business if they have asked customers the question: ‘Have you switched to a new company because of a bad ad placement or marketing message?’ It’s unlikely the answer is yes. Customer service budgets should be much higher. Most customer surveys rightly focus on the impact of bad customer service, where 43% of consumers say that they will cut spending due to bad service.
Customer service sits at the intersection of need and emotion. Something has gone wrong; there is a problem, issue, or uncertainty. Looked at as an opportunity, when a business anticipates an emerging issue or immediately resolves a customer problem, the customer is calm and potentially receptive to a marketing message or a sales offer. Sales and marketing organizations are increasingly aware of the enormous opportunity to grow customer spending by providing a differentiated service experience.
This awareness might explain the statistic that 70% of service leaders expect to receive larger budgets to perform marketing and selling tasks, or to train a new generation of representatives to work with advanced AI. The question business leaders must ask is, ‘How do we get marketing and customer service to work better together?’ We are absolutely seeing the answer at visionary companies. In the survey, 81% of service representatives said building relationships with customers is an important part of their job.
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In my conversation with Maoz, he reminded me of an important takeaway: “From 2025 to 2030, nearly every service organization will face this question: How do we support our people in a world increasingly powered by AI? There’s no single answer, but there is a north star. The companies that succeed won’t be the ones that automate the fastest. They’ll be the ones that lead with purpose, communicate with empathy, and design with humanity in mind.”
Maoz highlighted key findings of the State of Service report that showcase the importance of culture, people, process, strategy, and lasting technology — perhaps, ordered accurately, as key business success factors in an AI-powered economy.
The seventh edition of the State of Service report is filled with hundreds of critical insights. Agentic AI removes repetitive tasks and opens up time for the human rep to be more creative. Clean data and contextual knowledge are in high demand. Consistency across channels is essential to customer loyalty. The future of customer engagement is multimodal.
Michael Maoz will be covering the State of Service report extensively at Dreamforce. The session details are: DF25 5268 – Unlock the Future: Humans & Agents Unite to Redefine Service, 12:30 PM on 14 October. Hosted by Maoz, the session will include a panel discussion with the best and brightest service executives and trailblazers from various industries.
This article was co-authored by Michael Maoz, senior vice president of innovation strategy at Salesforce.