From Microsoft’s new-look AI agent to a Lenovo customer service AI chatbot weakness, here are extracts from some of this week’s most popular news stories.
Microsoft has announced its new-look Customer Intent Agent in a move it describes as “accelerating the journey toward fully autonomous contact centers.”
The tech giant first unveiled the Customer Intent Agent, available across its Dynamics 365 Contact Center and Customer Service offerings, in January 2025.
Upon the original announcement, Microsoft showcased how the AI Agent scans service conversations to pinpoint the contact center’s core demand drivers, or ‘intents’.
From there, it clusters transcripts, case notes, and summaries to map each intent and outline the steps to a successful resolution.
That intelligence then plugs into other AI agents, automating knowledge article creation, informing self-service interactions, and boosting the agent-facing Copilot.
Meanwhile, the Customer Intent Agent keeps working in the background, unpacking emerging customer intents, enabling the creation of new knowledge content, and expanding the scope for contact automation (Read more…).
Salesforce is continuing to tinker with Agentforce’s pricing model.
The goal remains the same: to reduce barriers to entry and get more of its 150,000+ customers on the AI agent platform.
As of May 2025, 8,000 of those customers are currently leveraging Agentforce.
Hoping to boost those numbers, Salesforce’s latest move is to introduce ‘pay-as-you-go’ and ‘pre-commit’ payment options.
Along with the pre-existing ‘pre-purchase’ option, Salesforce now offers three distinct ways to pay for Agentforce.
When sharing the new payment options, Bill Patterson, EVP of Corporate Strategy at Salesforce, underlined how they pave a path for “businesses of all sizes” to start testing and deploying AI agents. He said:
We’re removing the friction and lowering the barrier to entry so every company, whether they’re a long-time customer or trying Salesforce for the first time, can get started and see immediate value from digital labor with Agentforce.
The updates follow the introduction of that ‘pre-purchase’, consumption-based pricing model earlier this year (Read more…).
Lenovo is the latest high-profile brand to have a security flaw exposed in its AI customer service chatbot.
Indeed, Security Researchers at Cybernews opened up Lenovo’s ChatGPT-powered customer service assistant, Lena, with jaw-dropping results.
Its investigation found that Lena can be tricked into providing sensitive company information and data.
Cybernews researchers were able to uncover a flaw that allowed them to hijack live session cookies from customer support agents.
With a stolen support agent cookie, an attacker could slip into the support system without any login details, access live chats, and potentially dig through past conversations and data.
And all it took was a single, 400-character prompt.
In discussing the investigation, the Cybernews researchers highlighted the relative ease with which AI chatbots can be duped:
Everyone knows chatbots hallucinate and can be tricked by prompt injections. This isn’t new. What’s truly surprising is that Lenovo, despite being aware of these flaws, did not protect itself from potentially malicious user manipulations and chatbot outputs.
The news comes soon after CX Today reported on how a different team of researchers cracked open a replica of McKinsey & Co.’s customer service bot, getting it to spit out entire CRM records (Read more…).
Zoom has integrated its Virtual Agent with Zoom Phone, helping businesses connect callers directly with the department that can solve their issue.
Often, queries flow through to the contact center, where an agent either transfers the customer or plays the go-between.
However, thanks to this new capability, Zoom customers can unlock a new “24/7 AI receptionist”. That receptionist routes the customer to the best-placed department on the agent’s behalf.
Critically, it also interacts with customers, gauges their intents, processes inputs, and uses that intelligence to offramp the customer.
In “processing inputs”, the Zoom Virtual Agent (ZVA) takes helpful information from the customer and passes it to the employee, boosting their troubleshooting process.
Additionally, departments using Zoom Phone can utilize the Virtual Agent to automate tasks, such as booking appointments and providing customer updates. No longer are these capabilities limited to the contact center; they’re democratized (Read more…).