When ChatGPT first burst onto the scene, it sparked a wave of enthusiasm about how generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) could revolutionize online customer service. Finally, users won’t have to be frustrated by the canned answers of basic chatbots that often miss the mark. Instead, they could engage with a helpful, chatty AI chatbot that could understand their needs and — in the age of AI agents — complete the task. No need to call or text a human agent. More than two years later, many customer-facing chatbots aren’t smarter. Instead, AI has been relegated to helping human representatives research company policies and product information that they can give to customers

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More. The next phase of agentic AI may just be evaluation and monitoring, as enterprises want to make the agents they’re beginning to deploy more observable.While AI agent benchmarks can be misleading, there’s a lot of value in seeing if the agent is working the way they want to. To this end, companies are beginning to offer platforms where customers can sandbox AI agents or evaluate their performance.Salesforce released its agent evaluation platform, Agentforce Testing Center, in a limited pilot Wednesday. General availability is expected in December. Testing Center lets enterprises observe and prototype AI agents to ensure they access the workflows and data they need. Testing Center’s new capabilities include AI-generated tests for Agentforce, Sandboxes for Agentforce and Data Cloud and monitoring and observability for Agentforce. AI-generated tests allow companies to use AI models to generate “hundreds of synthetic interactions” to test if agents end up in how often they answer the way companies want