Change is in the air. On the day Salesforce arrived in Amsterdam for (the second edition of) the Agentforce World Tour, ABN AMRO Bank announced layoffs that would primarily affect customer service. KPN also implicitly stated that AI would strengthen, support, and… replace service employees.

 

Salesforce's "State of Service" customer service survey shows that AI currently handles 25% of customer service cases in the Netherlands. This is expected to rise to 41% by 2027. The report was presented during the Agentforce World Tour in Circa Amsterdam. Globally, customer service organizations expect AI to resolve half of all cases by 2027.

Offloading tasks to AI agents

This time, Salesforce focused heavily on its products across its various categories (sales, field service, service, marketing, etc.). Several new product names were launched, such as the "command center of service," which converts all interactions between customers and the company into insights.

But amidst all the product stories and short customer case studies, you can hear that tasks and tasks can be delegated to AI agents in all sorts of different processes. From scheduling service appointments to analyzing incidents, large and small: where exactly is the most urgent problem? And who else within the organization needs to know about it? When an AI agent independently uses Slack to inform other departments, you know that collaboration is no longer the exclusive domain of humans.

Many customer stories reflect that AI and AI agents are primarily a reliable technology platform. Companies start with simple applications and then expand, tapping deeper into the organization's data layer. The next level, agentic AI, hasn't yet sparked a revolution, but it's a start.

KPN is gradually investing in more and more AI applications

Salesforce also introduced service cloud voice and voice agents, generally available since October, promising “real-time, no wait, low latency.”

KPN isn't there yet, but it won't be long, judging by the way the telecom company has been gradually rolling out various AI applications over the past few years. The underlying strategy: KPN wants to move from reactive to proactive customer contact. And, of course, save on costs, as was implicitly evident in the KPN story.

Stanley van Putten (Digital CX Lead, KPN) and Megha Doshi (product owner, KPN) has been gradually implementing AI applications since 2022. They acknowledged: "not everything we envisioned turned out to work well in hindsight." Nevertheless, KPN can already look back on a fairly extensive landscape of diverse AI applications.

Savings expressed in hours

Initially, the focus was on predictive AI, suggesting next best actions, and classifying cases within MyKPN Business. This saved the company 1250 hours annually, and MyEnvironment resolved 18.000 cases without human intervention.

In phase two, real-time transcription was combined with classification and agent assist. This combination enabled agent assist: employees were presented with relevant knowledge articles in real time. KPN also implemented automated line measurements, which could be followed up, if necessary, with automated scheduling of a service technician. All of this is automatically fed into the CRM application Salesforce. KPN has saved 3000 hours with this application to date, and the application has now been rolled out to all 120 agents of MijnKPN Business.

The Billing Agent helps with invoice explanations and arranges an upgrade

The final step involves the implementation of agentic AI. Van Putten and Doshi explained the Billing Agent – ​​one of dozens of specialized AI agents KPN now has in operation. A Billing Agent can explain an invoice or explain why it's different, but can also connect it to the customer's subscription and assist with a potential subscription upgrade. This will help KPN with both problem-solving and upselling, but the Billing Agent is still under development. As for those other digital colleagues: they handle "I become a customer" (from availability checks to setting up the modem), changes (self-explanatory), usage (from SIM card activation to changing the PIN), and outages, "buy more" (upselling advice, contract adjustments), and payments.

License structure

Van Putten and Doshi were asked if they had any feedback for us. "Give us a clearer licensing structure and Dutch-language support," was the answer. The response: "We're working on it." A passing reference was also made to Renameforce, which includes a "live rename ticker." Apparently, Salesforce customers feel that products change names too often.

What's also changing is the role of the customer service representative. Or, as Van Putten and Doshi emphasized: we're changing the roles of employees. "You have to sit alongside the employee": change management is essential, especially since some employees have been in their roles for over ten years, according to Van Putten.

Will AI enhance and support the role of service employees, or replace them? Both, according to Van Putten, but people will remain "in the loop." This also applies to the customer side: the advice was to take the customer's perspective as a starting point for AI implementations.

Salesforce will make a series of new features generally available in February 2026, including real-time translation. This will further shift Salesforce's service portfolio towards a modern CCaaS platform. That's promising.

Image: Erik Swierstra/Wikipedia

AgentForce 2025 took place in the 'iconic geodesic dome' of Around AmsterdamFor the veterans: that's the domed structure that stood at Schiphol Airport from 1971 to 2003 and housed the aviation museum. The structure was stored in shipping containers between 2003 and 2018. Circa Amsterdam has been located there since April 2023. Designed by acclaimed American architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, it was introduced at the 1967 Montreal World Expo.

(Ziptone/Erik Bouwer)

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