Salesforce Customers Share How Agentforce Turns Cost Centers into Revenue
Companies including AT&T, Southwest Airlines and Canada Goose say AI agents are helping them move service teams from cost centers toward value centers, according to Salesforce. The company collected lessons from its customers' agentic deployments, pointing to human roles, user feedback and built-in control as common themes.
- Canada Goose says Agentforce autonomously resolves 89% of routine messaging inquiries and 15% of calls, per Salesforce.
- Canada Goose's former call center is now an Experience Center that, according to its executive, brings in millions in revenue.
- Southwest Airlines uses real chat data to prioritize deployments and reports CSAT improving week over week.
- Sammons Financial Group ran more than 200 guardrails and tests and uses a supervisor agent as a kill switch.
- AT&T can turn agents on or off at any time and uses its own LLM for proprietary IP.
Agents take routine work, humans take higher-value work
Salesforce says a consistent theme among its customers is that handing time-consuming tasks to agents lets people offer more value. At Canada Goose, staff no longer spend their days answering questions about delivery times or size exchanges. According to Salesforce, Agentforce now autonomously resolves 89% of routine messaging inquiries and 15% of calls.
The company's "Style Experts" instead focus on personalization, personal shopping and moments of connection. Dennis Liut, Head of Global Customer Experience and Revenue, said: "We wanted to make sure that AI wasn't removing the human; it was actually elevating the human." He added that the former call center is now an Experience Center "bringing in millions in revenue."
Canon is also shifting its service organization from a cost center to a value center. Bill Duval, VP of Service Information Management and Technology, said capturing customer information while lowering customer effort and feeding product development is "incredibly valuable" to the company.
AT&T uses AI to improve human interactions rather than replace them. Its "agent briefing" uses check-in details captured through the AT&T retail app to package a customer's key information, so a retail expert knows who they are helping and why before connecting. Salesforce notes this depends on investing in data quality and governance up front, and on being deliberate about where AI enters a conversation and where it steps back. John Miller, VP of Consumer and Business Solutions, described the goal as proactive customer service.
Ask customers what they want, and keep asking
Several customers cautioned against designing a rollout around internal assumptions. Rudi Khoury, Chief Digital Officer at Fisher & Paykel, said: "When you start off, you have a lot of hypotheses around what customers want. And you quickly learn through doing what they actually need." His advice: "Just get started and learn directly from your end user."
Southwest Airlines applies this to its roadmap. It uses real chat data to decide where to deploy next, so actual customer questions drive prioritization rather than internal guesses. Megan Rauber, Manager of Customer 360, said the airline continues "to see our CSAT score improve week over week as we're continuing to introduce new capabilities." Salesforce frames the lesson as deployment being an ongoing conversation with customers, not a one-time decision.
Governance built in from the start
In many regulated industries, Salesforce says, trust matters more than speed or efficiency, and the customers with the most durable results build governance in from the beginning.
- AT&T: can turn agents on or off at any time, and uses a trust layer and its own LLM for anything touching proprietary IP.
- Sammons Financial Group: ran more than 200 guardrails and tests before going live and chose to prevent the model from learning from live conversations, which effectively eliminates drift in a compliance-sensitive environment.
- Takeda: is automating administrative work that consumes sales reps' time while staying within pharmaceutical industry constraints.
Andrew Walling, AVP of Capability Planning and Delivery at Sammons, described a fail-safe: "We have a kill switch, a supervisor agent that's constantly listening to all of those phone calls, checking the values in the CRM against what was said on the line." Samer Ansari of Takeda, Head of Commercial Innovation and External Experience, said of the pace of change: "AI is moving at such a rapid pace. You've got to keep up with it."
What it means for companies starting out
The accounts come from Salesforce customers and are presented by Salesforce, so the results reflect the company's own selection of examples. Still, the pattern is consistent: define success, listen to users, and set up guardrails that can be sustained. Salesforce's own summary is that governance is not a constraint on ambition but what makes ambition sustainable.
For organizations weighing similar projects, the examples suggest that service teams can be repositioned around revenue and personalization, provided routine work is automated reliably and the rollout adapts to what customers actually ask for.
