From creating personalised experiences to providing support: five ways digital labour can grow your business

The Guardian

3 hours ago

Technology-based innovations have changed the way we work to be more efficient, faster and more connected. But how can agentic AI help us get more from the tools we already use?
By Jocelyn Zanasi, senior vice president of professional services, Salesforce
From mainframes to spreadsheets and customer relationship management (CRM), technology-based innovations have changed the way we work to be more efficient, faster and connected.
But these tools have all required human input, interpretation and step-by-step guidance, including most AI-driven solutions – until now.
Not a new wave of technology to understand and incorporate, I hear you cry!
Yet, agentic AI isn't just another tool – it's a fundamental shift to how businesses in the UK operate today.
Unlike traditional automation that assists, AI agents act alongside humans to analyse, decide and execute autonomously, handling both routine, low-value work and high-value multistep tasks.
Instead of AI being an extra layer of complexity, it's working with teams – empowering humans with digital labour to collaborate and achieve growth together.
Here are five examples of how digital labour is helping UK businesses grow.
1. Creating personalised experiences at scale with Secret Escapes
Secret Escapes offers discounts on luxury hotels and holidays across the globe, but it's up against rising customer demands and increased expectations.
Delivering personalised, high-quality support at scale – while maintaining the same headcount and excellent customer service – has never been more important.
Digital labour, powered by AI agents, allows Secret Escapes to provide around-the-clock customer support – from handling last-minute crib requests for a hotel room with self-service general inquiries to escalating more complex or sensitive queries to human representatives.
In just two weeks, Secret Escapes was able to build, test and launch its agent – compared with the six months it took to build and train the company's previous self-service bot.
2. Powering new offerings for Capita
Capita wanted to improve its labour-intensive recruitment process, to make its staffing, IT, and business process solutions more efficient in eight countries.
The company spotted an opportunity to offer recruitment-as-a-service to help businesses staff up at higher volumes. But, to make this possible, Capita needed a way to quickly transform the recruitment process so it too can provide this service at scale.
Enter a digital workforce. AI agents can autonomously take action on early-stage tasks, such as assessing thousands of résumés in seconds or enabling candidates to find jobs that fit their needs.
The move to supercharge its workforce with AI agents means Capita will be able to build a high-volume recruitment platform to accommodate around 10,000 people a year.
3. Providing Bionic customers with 24/7 support
Bionic helps more than 200,000 UK small businesses compare, switch and renew business energy, insurance, broadband and more – making life easier for busy owners, so they can focus on running and growing their own businesses.
The company handles more than 30,000 calls every day, but such a high call volume of repetitive inquiries, such as meter readings and switch tracking and slow, manual processes were proving challenging – with increased wait times and more than 7,000 voicemails piling up each month.
Bionic needed a better way to support customers and provide its call reps with the information they needed to jump in and help straight away, and its path to world-class customer service and operational efficiency began with agentic AI.
A limitless digital workforce now handles common customer enquiries automatically, day and night – pulling data directly and providing instant, accurate responses. Customer calls are intelligently routed to the right agent and AI agents handle routine queries, with Bionic projecting a 25% drop in average handle time.
4. Automating routine tasks for Secret Escapes and Bionic
Both Secret Escapes and Bionic are using AI agents to automate routine tasks and simplify workflows.
It's anticipated that Secret Escapes' AI agents will resolve 30% of customer requests through live chat autonomously – helping to achieve the goal of providing customers with high-quality experiences 24/7.
Automating routine tasks frees up customer service specialists to better serve Secret Escapes' customers by handling more complex and last-minute travel needs.
For Bionic, agentic AI plugs into its CRM platform to retrieve customer details and respond with appropriate updates.
With 50% of customer questions projected to be answered automatically by AI agents, not only does this free up human support to handle more complex cases, but it also arms AI agents with information to get to the right answer – quickly. That's the Bionic way – automation where it makes sense, human support where it matters most!
5. Maintaining Capita's business continuity with predictions
At customer contact centres, employee turnover rates average between 30-40%, which can create staffing crunches for businesses and impact customer service – from quality to response times.
AI agents are helping Capita ensure its customers maintain business continuity by filling roles before vacancies occur with time-to-hire analysis, monitoring staffing trends and predicting attrition.
Agentic AI will reason across millions of pieces of structured data, such as candidate details and unstructured data (PDF résumés, for instance) to predict staffing needs based on trends: for example, how successful the job description was in attracting and retaining candidates.
Growing UK businesses
It's no secret the UK is facing a productivity challenge. The OECD Economic Outlook from May 2024 projected the UK to be the worst performing economy in the G7 next year. If left unchecked, the UK's productivity challenge could turn into a crisis.
Yet, agentic AI is already creating exciting opportunities for businesses – and the UK is perfectly placed to take advantage.
At Salesforce, we've been walking the walk as customer zero for our own technology, and right now we have the world's largest agentic AI deployment, powered by Agentforce.
Not only are we seeing real results in how agentic AI is transforming our business, but also for our customers.
Want to understand what agentic AI could do for your business? Use the Agentic AI ROI calculator for bespoke insight. This content is paid for and supplied by the advertiser. Find out more with our