Agentfarce

Artificial intelligence is being wedged into every app at breakneck pace. Not just general AI assistants, like Siri, but standard workplace tools like Microsoft Word and Excel. Companies are betting the farm on AI-infused software, or at least trying to not be left behind. I can see plenty of places in which a sprinkle of AI can be beneficial for users, but explaining to everyday consumers what value is being added is difficult.

Enter Salesforce, the cloud-based software behemoth that has a solution for every business problem. Salesforce powers many of the “back office” functions that people encounter every day, and it is a natural fit for the magic AI dust. The issue that I have is with how it is being advertised.

Salesforce partnered with Matthew McConaughey, giving him the title of “Brand Partner and Advisor”. I’m not sure what a Brand Partner is, but if the current spate of advertisements is anything to judge the relationship from, Salesforce got fleeced. Strong accusation, but follow along.

The first ad for Salesforce’s AI offering features Mr. McConaughey on a steam locomotive train, dressed as a lawman in the Wild West. The train passengers are being robbed of their data by cowboy-tech-bro-puffer-vest-wearing types. There is a clever pun about the train already leaving the station, and a promise that Salesforce’s AI doesn’t share or steal your data. This on the whole is a good ad.

But the more recent incarnations have seen Mr. McConaughey be the helpless rube, to Woody Harrelson’s more successful AI-aided persona. From understanding which gate his connecting flight is leaving from, to a dream house being sold out from underneath him, to questionable fashion choices, McConaughey is the butt of the joke because the company that he is working didn’t have AgentForce, the presumably agentic (this is the accepted jargon, not my favorite) offering from Salesforce.

The ad that has drawn my ire is known as “Dining Alfiasco,” a thirty second spot in which Mr. McConaughey is seated outside a restaurant in the pouring rain, being served a dish that he is not interested in, all while Mr. Harrelson is across the street enjoying dinner with friends, dry and happy.

This ad is one that I cannot abide.

“The booking app I used didn’t have Agentforce. So an AI agent didn’t know to move my reservations inside or know what I like to eat, which is not that.”

The booking app didn’t have an AI agent, got it. But the restaurant didn’t have a single human working there to check the weather and adjust the seating for the evening’s dinner rush? The server who presumably seated Mr. McConaughey didn’t offer to move him inside, and he appears to not have requested it as he is sitting outside getting soaked. He is served a plate of shrimp, which he did not order (see him grumbling about not knowing what he likes to eat), in the pouring rain after which the server dashes to the dry restaurant. And AI was supposed to solve this?

Ethan Mollick, Ralph J. Roberts Distinguished Faculty Scholar and Co-Director of the Generative AI Labs at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business writes in Co-Intelligence that a human should be “in the loop” when using AI. This is to ensure that the AI is operating as expected, that there are not hallucinations (a term that is going out of style in reference to AI, but I believe is still relevant) and that there is supervision.

This is where the Salesforce ad fails. In a restaurant there are plenty of humans, we see one who delivers the food, yet there is nothing to be done for a customer sitting in a torrential downpour. As of now, restaurants always have a human in the loop. The next ad in the series is as egregious if not more, with Mr. McConaughey being seen in the emergency room by an OB/GYN who puts him in stirrups and tells him behind a curtain that it will be cold.

While I get that these are ads and are trying to be humorous, I think that it is a mistake to oversimplify the use of AI to an audience who have little context for adding AI to the workplace. On one hand, the ads are trying to prove that AI can solve problems that could have easily been resolved by a human, and on the other, it assumes that all employees are robots who are not able to adapt to the situation around them.

These ads make me think that Agentforce is an agentfarce.