Is the human still in the loop?

Oracle Cloud World is in the books, Dreamforce has started, and there is one key theme that overarches all discussions.

And no, it is not Larry Ellison getting all cozy with AWS (or Azure, for that matter). It is also not that his keynote was distinctly geeky, after some years of Oracle putting business solutions to the front.

No, the theme is ... drumroll ... you will have guessed it ... AI agents. After all, Oracle's Steve Miranda talked about them at length in a line of business context, while Larry focused on more IT, security, and database oriented agents.

For Salesforce, agents are even more of a topic, dubbing Dreamforce the biggest AI event and Salesforce the most successful AI CRM - both technically right but probably somewhat short selling the full value of both.

For Salesforce, the next big thing is Agentforce, it's AI Agent platform.

What struck me watching both keynotes - Ellison's and Benioff's - is the change from last year's messaging to this year's messaging.

Last years it was all about Co-Pilots, or digital assistants, this year, it is about autonomous agents.

So, what is the key difference? There are basically two. One is that a co-pilot serves and supports the human. With it, one of the core messages was that the machine helps the human, supported by the human will always be in the loop.

This year, the emphasis is on autonomy, whether it is already achieved or not. And I argue that it is achieved only for fairly simple use cases as per now. Still, autonomous agent reads a lot like automation, and there is a difference between the human deciding and taking acition vs. the machine "deciding" and "taking action".

This translates to, as Miranda nicely said in his post-keynote press conference, "the early use cases will be a little less autonomous and human assisted". In other words, human helps machine, until they are "more autonomous" and do not need the assistance anymore...

Benioff put it somehow similar in his keynote when he listed many, many agents that Salesforce already now (well, GA is in October 2024) with Agentforce. So many in fact, that I felt inclined to comment that "the CEO agent is missing to have a fully virtual company".

At the same time, both Oracle and Salesforce insist in their messaging that their objective is not the replacement of humans by AI but taking away the mundane work, which according to the recent Salesforce report Trends in AI for CRM amounts to a whopping 41 per cent of employee workload.

Zendesk foresees a whopping 80 per cent of all service interactions being resolved without human intervention. This essentially makes the human the AI's supervisor - which technically is a human in the loop scenario, until that supervision can get automated, too ;)

Their second stated goal is improving the customer experience, something that Salesforce's Patrick Stokes demonstrated with an impressive live(?) demo during the Dreamforce keynote.

The question is what their customers' objectives are. Do they think outside-in or inside-out?

Will they use AI agents as a convenient tool to cut costs by cutting employees, something that also heavily depends on AI pricing? In other words, are AI agents the next iteration of outsourcing? Or will companies use agents to become better without laying off employees? Obviously, one scenario is more toxic than the other one.

Let me ask two sets of questions for you to comment. One for the vendor side and one for the buyer side:

Vendors: How do you convince your customers that your agent platform is more valuable when used to help the company become better instead of "leaner"? How do you educate them?

Buyers: What are your key objectives when implementing AI agents? What are the KPIs you use to determine success and how much do these KPIs need to change to achieve success?