'Empathetic' Salesforce bots to help those fired by uncaring humans

There’s a joke in Boston that goes: the people in Southie will steal your wallet and help you look for it.

And now, the thousands of workers ostensibly replaced by bots will now have a bot to help them get unemployment benefits, thanks a new Department of Labor deal to use Salesforce’s Agentforce to triage applications at its national call center. The SaaS giant ays that its agent will "respond empathetically" to queries.

The Department of Labor Agent (DOLA) is built on top of Salesforce Government Cloud’s FedRAMP infrastructure, and it uses Data 360 to merge the structured and unstructured data from third-party systems and a library of more than 2,900 department of labor knowledge articles into a “holistic citizen view,” Salesforce said in its press release.

Neither the Department of Labor nor Salesforce provided a dollar figure for the deal. The DoL did not reply to emails from The Register seeking comment. Salesforce declined to comment beyond what was stated in the announcement.

When people call for help, Agentforce for Public Sector and Agentforce Marketing will handle questions across all 28 Department of Labor programs, including Unemployment Insurance, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Veterans’ Employment and Training Service, Mine Health and Safety Administration, and Job Corps.

The agents will collect intake information; open cases; and can text, email, and call customers using Salesforce Voice.

The DoL handles about 2.8 million cases on behalf of workers who need help. The new system will also take over the task of processing of 236,000 OSHA logs and 41,000 Job Corps applications, “significantly reducing manual entry errors,” the release states.

With the agents in place, humans inside the Department of Labor will be retrained to handle more complex tasks, the announcement stated.

Meanwhile, on the back end, Salesforce Tableau Next will give the US government real-time analytics and mission dashboards to monitor contact center performance and customer satisfaction.

“If a citizen asks to speak with a person or if a query requires a deeper empathetic touch, DOLA automatically transfers the conversation to a human staff member,” the press release states. “And by integrating AI agents directly into its service fabric, the DOL can now triage citizen needs with what the DOL has called ‘hospital-like precision’ — helping to ensure that resources are always directed toward the most critical worker needs.”

The purpose of the deal is similar to the one Salesforce struck with the Department of Transportation in December, which used Salesforce Agentforce to provide around-the-clock support for common tasks like complaints, accessing services, and analyzing complex datasets — such as weather, traffic trends, and historical incident data — to create alerts that help USDOT reduce accidents and injuries. ®