Salesforce at Reverb25: Unified, seamless CX in action

At Reverb25, Salesforce’s Swati Deo, Sr. Director of Product Management, joined Bandwidth’s product leader Caitlin Long onstage to discuss Salesforce’s AI transformation powering and powered by AI.

• Unified CX through data, apps & AI: Salesforce breaks down silos by connecting service, sales, and marketing on one trusted platform powered by Data Cloud and Agentforce. 
• Connected conversations, smarter orchestration: With Bandwidth integrations at the connectivity layer, Salesforce delivers continuous, context-rich multi-modal interactions across channels—from voice to web chat.
• AI in action: Salesforce’s own AI agents now resolve 85% of customer inquiries in web chat, cutting response times by 65% and streamlining employee support in Slack.

Transcript: 

David Morken: Trust fuels customer experience. And the company Salesforce fuels what comes next with Agentforce, delivering personal, reliable messaging powered by AI. Please join me in welcoming Bandwidth’s very own Caitlin Long and Salesforce’s Swati Deo to the stage to dive into exactly how trust is built within Salesforce’s platform.

[Applause]

Caitlin: All right, Swati, welcome. Thank you, Caitlin, and super excited to be here with all of you. We are so excited to have you, and always, the best place to start is the beginning. So, from your experience, why does messaging matter so much to the customers that you serve today, and just creating that overall customer experience journey? 

Swati: Let me start with the rapid shift that we are seeing with customer expectations. Customers expect seamless personalized conversations with the company and consistency when these conversations are transferred across departments. 

But the challenge is (that) enterprise software implementation in most companies is fragmented. You have service on one system, marketing on another system—creating all kinds of disconnected experiences. And that’s where generative AI is actually becoming the real catalyst here, forcing companies to rethink their digital engagement strategy. And, honestly, the promise of the

autonomous AI agents to transform these enterprises into agentic enterprises can only be realized if companies have deeply unified customer 360-degree view across service, sales, and marketing.

And the other thing I feel is important is also having a channel strategy, like your channels like web chat, WhatsApp, SMS, and Slack. They are becoming the front door to agentic AI, and that kind of puts conversational messaging at the heart of the shifting customer experience landscape that we see today. 

Caitlin: So you hit on a lot. I think the complexity of your answer there alone underscores just the fragmented challenge that some of our customers are facing today with really uniting everything. So can you walk us through a little bit more about what Salesforce is actually doing about that? 

Swati: Yeah, broadly speaking, our strategy boils down to three pillars. It’s essentially applications, data, and AI—all working seamlessly together on this one trusted platform. So applications, instead of having a separate product-centric approach, which kind of compartmentalizes your service, your sales, your marketing, the applications that we have—Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud—they’re all built on that same metadata framework. Think of it as the language or the blueprint that kind of connects all of these application layers.

The second is our data. Here, our data cloud is basically the single source of truth. Whether it is the CRM data or data that is sitting outside of Salesforce, using our Zero copy architecture, you can easily access this data in real time.

And then the third is AI agents. Here, Agentforce is our new platform that allows you to build these AI agents as well as support assisted AI use cases in the flow of work for, let’s say, a service rep, a sales rep, or even a marketer. 

And lastly, we are taking all of these conversational channels and unifying them so that we create that connective tissue that allows your AI agents, your humans to all work in that same channel across sales, service, and marketing use cases. 

Cailtin: So you’re speaking my language. I’m in product. So, love a layer cake analogy. Can you dive in a little deeper into just sort of the orchestration and the technical bits on sort of how you’re uniting those different layers together?

Swati: Yes. And again, as I mentioned, the core philosophy is very simple. Customers want one continuous conversation with the company, and they want you to mask all of your internal departmental silos. Now to deliver this, we have built a unified engagement platform which kind of takes three architectural layers and completely unifies, integrates it.

The first one is the connectivity layer. Think of this as Salesforce’s last mile that connects with aggregators like Bandwidth and ecosystem partners like Meta through SMPP binds and APIs, respectively.

And then the second layer is the conversation layer, which takes all these messages, all these voice calls, and stitches it all together in this unified conversation history. And, the third is the orchestration layer, which takes all these incoming messaging sessions, the voice calls, and then intelligently routes it to the AI agents or service reps based on context.

And by doing so we are in a position to provide that end-to-end connected experience across that entire journey. So you can have your marketing promotional message become two-way conversational with an AI agent or a service rep. 

Cailtin: I’m going to ask you about an example. I’m a very visual person. So, can you walk us through, maybe, a good example of how your customers are actually using this solution to really close the gap on their side? 

Swati: Yes. And I have plenty of customer success stories that I can share across regions, across industries, and so on. But the example I wanted to share today was actually how Salesforce is using its own technology to essentially deploy customer-facing AI agents and employee-facing AI agents in messaging. So we’ve become our own Customer Zero. We have deployed AI agents in web chat on our

own help sites. And our help sites, to put this into perspective, get around 60 million customers looking for answers across 740k knowledge articles, and our AI agents are doing fabulous there. They have resolved more than 85% of our customer inquiries, which is leading to a 65% reduction in response times for most users. But that’s not all. We are also using that same technology internally for our employees. So we have deployed AI agents in Slack for all typical HR and IT cases.

There’s an agent called a Well-being Agent, which gives me answers on benefits. There’s a Manager Agent that gives me personalized recommendations on how best to support my teams. And then there is the Tech Force IT Agent which answers most of the common IT-related issues.

And again, the impact is real here. The IT agent has already resolved more than 9,000 cases, which is around 40% of our case volume today and is projected to be around 75% by the end of this year. 

Caitlin: I love those stats. very, very powerful when you’re going out and helping inspire other customers as to what they could do. I am hoping that since we’ve been partners since 2019, Bandwidth and

Salesforce, we’ve been at least some very small part of that journey. So maybe if you could speak to us a little bit more about how we’ve enabled some of those wins on your side.

Swati: 100% and you guys have been a great partner. We go a long way back. I think there are two crucial areas where we have partnered more recently. The first one is real-time visibility. And as all of you know, messaging, especially SMS, isn’t just plug and play. There is registration verification provisioning, which historically has been very slow and opaque. And that’s channel experiences and just new channels, we are exploring RCS and much more with Bandwidth, and then invest in differentiated experiences. For example, multimodal experiences where blended simultaneous sessions across different modalities—voice and messaging, that’s an interesting area.

The second, I would say, is Slack, where building new integrated experiences between Slack, which is the agentic conversational workflow for a lot of internal users, and the most widely used consumer messaging apps are another interesting area.

Caitlin: You’re certainly not going to be bored over the next year. So, so Swati, thank you so much for being here and sharing with all the lovely people here today what exactly you’re up to over at Salesforce. Let’s give a round of applause. Thank you.

[Applause]