OpenAI and Salesforce hand bots more decision-making power

• The result, OpenAI says, is much better at handling complex queries, especially around math, science and coding.

• Salesforce, meanwhile, debuted Agentforce, its effort to move from using genAI as a copilot to improve human productivity and into a world where autonomous AI agents are empowered to take action on their own, albeit with guardrails and limits.

• "Its careful attention to detail and thorough thinking enables it to do a few tasks correctly where we have seen every other model so far fail," CoCounsel product head Jake Heller told Axios.

• Answers take longer, Heller said, but he added that most of the time "professionals want the most thorough, detailed and accurate answer — and they would much rather wait for it than get something wrong and quick."

• "We've seen an over 40% increase in our case resolution when you compare the agent to our old chatbot," Kevin Quigley, a senior manager at Wiley, said during a Salesforce event on Thursday.

• "You don't want to just give AI unlimited agency," Salesforce chief ethical and humane use officer Paula Goldman told Axios. "You want it to be built on a set of guardrails and thresholds and tested processes. That's where you're going to get good results, and otherwise, you're inviting a lot of risk for your company."

• EqualAI CEO Miriam Vogel told Axios that using AI agents for low-stakes tasks is reasonable, but cautioned, "We do not want to move into AI agents prematurely in areas where advice could impact someone's benefits, safety, etc." To do so "is inviting liability and potential harms."

• "With AI agents having access to the enterprise data and having this intelligence with their reasoning and the planning capabilities, we feel that's going to be a revolution," ServiceNow VP of platform and AI innovation Dorit Zilbershot told Axios.

• ServiceNow announced its own AI agent push earlier this week. "But we know that with that power comes a lot of responsibility," she said. One of ServiceNow's key guardrails is that by default, all of an AI agent's planned actions have to be approved by a human. Once a business is confident that the agent is behaving properly, they can choose to have it act autonomously, Zilbershot said.

• "Even if we get bias and hallucinations down to an acceptable level, many proposed AI agents' use cases don't make sense because they will set up arms-race conditions that drive up costs for everyone, but only benefit the arms dealers," Phil Libin, co-founder and former CEO of Evernote, told Axios.

• "LLMs are incomplete, but they can be an important part of a system that has other, non-LLM ways of grounding them to reality and values," Libin added.

• "An AI system is not 'thinking', it's 'processing,'" Delangue wrote on X. "Giving the false impression that technology systems are human is just cheap snake oil and marketing to fool you into thinking it's more clever than it is."

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