VENDORiQ: Salesforce Announces the Acquisition of Tenyx to Enhance its Voice Technology Capabilities

Why It’s Important

A recent survey commissioned by the customer experience platform Callvu revealed that over 80 per cent of customers would rather wait to speak to a human agent because the current generation of chatbots aren’t meeting their expectations¹. The competition to humanise chatbots, with the potential to disrupt the industry, is intensifying with companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, ServiceNow and Salesforce continuing to innovate and expand their AI capabilities. While there is no formal agreement to date, ServiceNow appears to be partnering with Resemble.ai who provide a voice generator and voice cloning software that can create realistic, emotional text-to-speech using AI². In 2022, Microsoft had acquired Nuance, an industry leader in legacy voice technology, and added their conversational AI with Microsoft’s cloud offering³.

Late in 2023 Salesforce acquired Airkit.ai, a generative AI customer service platform that specialised in creating fully customisable, autonomous AI agents designed to enhance customer interactions and resolve 90 per cent of customer questions. Following this acquisition, in July 2024 Salesforce released its Einstein service agent, its first fully autonomous AI agent with the ability to understand and act on a broad range of customer service issues without preprogrammed scenarios.  

While Einstein is effective at interacting with customers in real time, it cannot match the level of natural interaction and industry-specific customisation that Tenyx can deliver. Salesforce sees the next evolution of AI as autonomous agents, and the acquisition of Tenyx represents another significant step in enhancing their platform offering. Tenyx’s focus on industry-specific solutions and human-like conversational AI will greatly enhance the overall customer experience and effectiveness of Salesforce’s voice agents and provide them with a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Who’s Impacted

• C-Suite
• CIO, CTO 
• Sales and marketing
• Customer service process owners

What’s Next?

• Take a measured and cautious approach to implementing AI voice agents provided by Salesforce and other platform providers.  The natural assumption is that the platform providers have solved for most of the technical challenges, such as integration with existing platform products, recognition of variations in accents, and contextual understanding. Thoroughly testing customer facing systems is essential. 
• Design your processes with user experience in mind by ensuring the AI/human balance is correct. Ensure that your processes allow the AI agents to rapidly hand off the inquiry to human oversight if a quick and accurate response cannot be provided.
• It is important for organisations to manage risk by not only maintaining transparency regarding how AI voice agents operate and make decisions, but also by complying with regulations governing data collection, user privacy and copyright.

Related IBRS Advisory

• AI in Enterprise Customer Service: State of the Art
• Virtual Service Desk Agent Critical Success Factors
• VENDORiQ: Salesforce Introduces New Generation of Einstein
• VENDORiQ: Salesforce Announces Einstein GPT and Data Cloud Integration to Flows
• Every Breath You Take: The Impact of AI on Privacy
• VENDORiQ: Salesforce Launches Generative AI CRM Technology

1. How will customers feel about AI in your customer service?, Callvu, March 2024 ↩︎
2. Neural Text to Speech and Custom Voices with ServiceNow, Resemble.ai ↩︎
3. Microsoft completes acquisition of Nuance, ushering in new era of outcomes-based AI, Microsoft News Center, March 2024 ↩︎