This week, we see the latest installment of the Google/HubSpot saga, a bold Salesforce claim, legal issues for a Talkdesk customer, and a “GenAI Playground” from Kore.ai.
Here are the extracts from some of our most popular news stories over the last seven days.
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has decided to drop its plans to acquire CRM giant HubSpot, according to Bloomberg and Reuters sources.
The former publication, citing people with knowledge of the matter, noted that preliminary talks never reached the point of “detailed discussions about due diligence.”
Upon this revelation, HubSpot’s share price has plummeted 12 percent. Meanwhile, Alphabet is up 1.2 percent.
CX Today reported on the initial discussions in May. Yet, the regulatory fog engulfing big tech always made the deal unlikely.
After all, if Google could control not only a search system that drives traffic but also a popular CRM solution that manages customer relationships, it may have developed an anti-competitive CX workflow engine.
Such a vision would have asked a lot of regulators to decode, regulators who spent over a year trying to determine whether Figma was a direct competitor to Photoshop.
There are also questions over whether Google could have made the concerted effort necessary to develop that workflow engine (Read on…).
Salesforce has announced the Einstein Service Agent, the company’s first fully autonomous AI agent.
Having been teased in an X post by CEO Marc Benioff earlier this month, the tech firm has now officially revealed its latest customer service solution.
Currently in pilot and slated to be made generally available later this year, Salesforce claims that the Einstein Service Agent will make “conventional chatbots obsolete” due to its ability to understand and act upon customer inquiries outside the remit of pre-programmed scenarios.
The company believes that this differentiates the solution from traditional chatbots, which can only manage pre-designed queries and lack the ability to grasp context or subtlety, describing the Service Agent as “intelligent and dynamic.”
The tool combines generative AI (GenAI) capabilities with the capacity to interact with large language models (LLMs), allowing it to analyze customer communications and provide natural-sounding responses based on a company’s data, brand voice, and tone.
In discussing the news, Salesforce Service Cloud General Manager, Kishan Chetan, expressed his excitement at how the Service Agent will complement human agents, and vice versa:
Salesforce is delivering a future where human and digital agents join forces to improve the customer experience.
But how will the company deliver on its promise to make chatbots obsolete? (Read on…).
Patagonia has been accused of breaking California privacy law by recording and analyzing customers’ communications without their permission.
The outdoor clothing and equipment provider deploys Talkdesk’s CCaaS offerings to handle customer service communications, with the lawsuit alleging that the vendor intercepts, records, and analyzes every customer and business communication.
As well as the information being accessible to Patagonia, it is also routed directly to Talkdesk’s servers in real-time, where it is transcribed and analyzed by AI models to provide an overview of the customer’s query and emotional state.
While data collection may appear to be fairly standard contact center practice, the suit claims that Patagonia and Talkdesk do not obtain customer consent before recording the communications, which is illegal under California law.
Moreover, the suit also states that Talkdesk “uses obtained communications for its own purposes,” arguing that the customer engagement and real-time data collected is used to advance and improve the company’s solutions.
The lawsuit has been brought forward by Patagonia customer Michelle Gills, on behalf of herself and “all others similarly situated,” (Read on…).
Kore.ai has launched an “industry-first” dedicated generative AI (GenAI) application platform: GALE.
GALE empowers enterprises with a playground to build, test, and optimize GenAI applications that augment and transform business processes.
While Kore.ai is best known for its Magic-Quadrant-leading XO conversational AI platform, which is often implemented within contact centers, the use cases for GALE are much broader.
Indeed, enterprises can use the platform’s no-code interface to develop apps that streamline business-wide operations, increase productivity, and/or deliver enhanced customer experiences.
That goes far beyond customer service functions, as businesses may also build apps that streamline supply chain management, resource management, finance, etc.
Such apps may facilitate significant, long-term business value. However, GALE will also help in the delivery of disposable applications, which are speedily developed software apps that temporarily serve a specific purpose.
Businesses can build these for all types of use cases, such as provisional email services, outreach campaigns, or data transformation initiatives (Read on…).