The surge in agentic workforce solutions is probably at an all-time high with several big tech companies entering the game. Indian SaaS giant Freshworks is the latest. The company unveiled its version of a new generation AI agent, Freddy AI, an easy-to-deploy autonomous service agent designed to enhance both customer and employee experiences.
With minimal setup time and an average resolution of 45% for customer support requests and 40% of IT services (on beta), Freddy AI agent demonstrates Freshworks’ commitment to embracing generative AI capabilities.
Evolution of Freddy AI
Freshworks is among the early adopters of AI capabilities for its portfolio. It released its AI engine, Freddy AI, in 2018, well ahead of its competitors.
Last year, the platform saw generative AI making its way with Freddy Self Service, Freddy Copilot and Freddy Insights to help customers with various tasks. It has now moved a step further with agents.
“We have two broad capabilities of Freddy AI, which is the copilot, what we call the self-service. Agents are part of the self-service offering that we are releasing. It’s a revamp of self-service offering,” said Ramesh Parthasarathy, Senior VP of Technology at Freshworks, in an exclusive interaction with AIM.
The latest Freddy AI agent comes under their self-service bucket. “These are autonomous systems capable of answering customer queries just like humans, with all the personalization and multi-tone conversations, as well as performing intuitive actions,” said Parthasarathy, adding that the AI agents can do the same tasks that a human would.
Copilot or AI Agents?
With several AI agents in the market, the terminology surrounding them has come under scrutiny, particularly regarding the classification of copilots as agents. Recently, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff accused Microsoft of rebranding Copilot as ‘agents.’
Parthasarathy emphasised the major difference between Microsoft’s Copilot and AI agents in their ability to autonomously analyse complex situations with the information they have.
While co-pilots analyse complex scenarios using information from past customer interactions, AI agents focus on solving specific customer problems based on their current context, he says.
Salesforce’s Freddy AI Agent allows organisations to quickly deploy it without coding or training models, learning from existing documents and websites. It operates autonomously, providing round-the-clock conversational support across various channels, while personalising interactions in multiple languages. The company assures that the system is designed with privacy controls to ensure security and meet compliance standards.
Parthasarathy confirmed that the system is built on general-purpose models but enhanced with custom prompt engineering and customer context integration. “So all these are built on top of the general purpose model so that we can create a really good customer experience during the conversations,” he said.
Speaking about limitations, Parthasarathy mentioned that the systems are only as effective as the content provided to them, meaning poor-quality data results in poor performance. Additionally, these agents are confined to business-specific knowledge, such as return policies, and have limited reasoning abilities.
“So whenever it comes to the question of reasoning, we typically defer it to a human agent,” he said.
Other Players Go Big
Salesforce’s AI agents ‘Agentforce’ which made its debut during their Dreamforce event held in September, are said to autonomously handle tasks, and drive sales, marketing, analytics and other functions. It integrates data, LLMs, workflows, and security into a unified Customer 360 platform. “This is what AI was meant to be,” said Benioff.
Taking a jibe at Microsoft, the latter released agentic capabilities for businesses. One can create autonomous agents with Copilot Studio and ten new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365 to help across functions, including service, finance, and supply chain teams. Microsoft believes agents are the new apps for an AI-powered world.
Cloud giant Oracle also launched 50+ AI agents within its Fusion Cloud Applications Suite, at their recent CloudWorld event, to automate tasks across functions including finance, HR, supply chain and more.
Comparing Fresheworks’ AI agents to other players, without taking names, Parthasarathy explains their AI system stands out by providing human-like responses that are strictly grounded in the business’s own information, ensuring no hallucinations or irrelevant content.
Another key feature is the transparency, offering reports that allow users to trace how the AI operates and where its responses come from. Furthermore, the system is designed to be user-friendly, enabling businesses to set it up in as little as 30 minutes, making deployment quick and intuitive.
Reflecting on the sudden craze of companies embracing AI agents, Parthasarathy believes that everybody is seeing value in it. “They see that’s where the industry is going, and also now the technology is available to do it for everybody. So that is why you see a lot of people doing it at the same time,” he said.
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