Zota’s investment in digital labor pays off with 30% YoY growth.

Zota is the first global marketplace for payments, helping businesses reach 8 billion customers who don’t use credit cards. They offer thousands of payment options in more than 150 countries.

Bogged down by service cases created for common questions, Zota’s merchant success reps couldn’t prioritize high-value work.

Eight billion people around the world live without a credit card — but that doesn’t mean they can’t shop, travel, or even pay for products and services online. Zota, the world’s first marketplace for digital payments, is changing how businesses connect with this massive, underserved audience. By enabling merchants to accept alternative payments in over 150 countries — from mobile money and QR codes to local currencies, wire transfers, and crypto — Zota makes global commerce simple, secure, and inclusive.

As the first company of its kind, Zota paved the way with a bold vision for growth — and the financial technology to match. They built the MetaGate™, an all-in-one financial software platform that powers their marketplace and scales with the needs of global merchants. With over 500 integrations, multicurrency support, cross-border remittance, and sophisticated fraud prevention, the MetaGate™ is designed to meet and exceed the financial needs of clients across a wide range of online industries. In the year ahead, Zota expects to handle three times more inquiries and grow their merchant customer base by 30%, with a goal of doubling the number of merchants on the platform from 500,000 to 1 million.

Zota is counting on their 60 merchant success reps to help them reach this goal. These reps were hired to close deals and build strong relationships, but often found themselves answering routine support requests like “What are eWallet payments?” or “Can you help me transact in the Balkans?” Although simple to answer, these questions added up over time — resulting in 180,000 inbound support cases per year.

Each inquiry, submitted through a standard form on Zota.com, was handled manually, with an average response time of more than 24 hours. That delay often frustrated merchants and chipped away at their confidence in the platform’s service. Slow replies on simple questions raised concerns about how long more complex tasks — like settling funds — might take. Delayed responses also meant missed opportunities: Some inquiries weren’t just questions — they were potential leads. “If we respond to a prospect within the first couple of hours, the chances of winning the opportunity increase dramatically, more than 40%,” said Avner Ziv, Chief Executive Officer.  “It’s crucial that we follow up quickly.”

Rather than adding more headcount and cost, Zota sought an AI-first solution — one that could provide fast, personalized support around the clock and free up their reps to do what they do best: help merchants grow. 

Agentforce handles routine questions instantly so Zota’s team can focus on growth, not support tickets.

Zota deployed Agentforce — the agentic layer of the Salesforce Platform — to augment their merchant success reps with digital labor. Agentforce acts as a digital front-line representative, using trusted company data to deliver accurate answers to merchants with zero wait time, around the clock to support customers in every time zone. “By being the first with Agentforce, we will be light-years ahead of the competition,” said Ziv. 

For example, if a prospective merchant wants to know how payment processing works in China, they can simply start a chat. Powered by Zota’s knowledge articles and website data — unified by Data Cloud — Agentforce instantly finds the right information and shares it in a conversational, easy-to-understand way.

When a merchant asks something outside the scope of Zota’s knowledge base — like a question about their personal account or transaction rates — Agentforce seamlessly switches to lead capture. Agentforce asks for their name and contact info, then creates a new lead in Sales Cloud using a preset flow and adds it to the merchant success reps’ queue, ready for quick follow-up.

With Agentforce, Zota isn’t just delivering around-the-clock service — they’re also building a smarter, faster pipeline. “An agent is going to be our next-generation worker. We can go to sleep, and agents are still working for us,” said Ziv.

To keep the pace of growth without hiring more support staff, Zota is going all in on digital labor.

Zota’s long-term vision goes well beyond FAQ support and lead capture. Building on the success of their website agent with Agentforce, they plan to deploy nine more agents by the end of the year — starting with internal assistants for Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. These new agents will function much like the original, but instead of helping merchants, they’ll help Zota’s own teams work faster and smarter. This includes specialized agents to streamline deal discovery and supplier outreach, analyze risk, flag high-risk merchants, assist with meeting prep, and even resolve technical inquiries in multiple languages.

From there, Agentforce will only grow in complexity. Zota’s longer-term roadmap includes more than 30 agents, covering a mix of headless, autonomous, and assistive use cases — with every interaction making the system smarter. “I estimate that in the next two years, every department in the company will have an Agentforce tailored to its needs, and managers in the future will manage agents long before they manage employees,” said Ziv.

Zota’s digital workforce will be uniquely configured to handle everything from answering merchant questions and providing 24/7 guidance on the MetaGate™ to coaching sellers one-on-one and even supporting internal tech teams. That’s all possible because Agentforce is grounded in unified data from Data Cloud, enabling it to drive results across every part of Zota’s business.

Take sales, for example: Instead of spending hours combing through CRM activity and industry trends, a seller could simply ask Agentforce for help within Sales Cloud: “I have a meeting tomorrow with this account. Prepare a two-page summary of our last six months of interaction history. Recommend new tools and products that we can offer them. Only offer products they don’t use.” Agentforce would instantly deliver the tailored insights and recommendations, giving the seller valuable time back to increase productivity and close more deals. 

“We’re not going to be more than 300 employees, no matter what,” Ziv added. “Even when we support 1 million businesses — with Agentforce, capabilities will scale to anything we’re faced with.” 

Agentforce takes action on a 360-degree view of every merchant, powered by Data Cloud. 

Zota is as much a technology company as it is a financial services company, and from the start, they built their infrastructure to scale. The team started with a flexible data foundation with Data Cloud that today powers everything from self-service support to personalized sales experiences — and now, Agentforce.

Data Cloud connects and unifies data across the company — transforming scattered sources into complete, up-to-date merchant profiles. Before Data Cloud, much of Zota’s merchant data lived in Salesforce, but the MetaGate™ operated independently. That meant account managers had to manually cobble together a view of merchant engagement by switching between payment data in the MetaGate™ and CRM activity in Sales Cloud.

Now, thanks to integrations built with MuleSoft, data from the MetaGate™ flows directly into Data Cloud alongside unstructured data from Zota.com. Meanwhile, knowledge content from SharePoint and Salesforce is unified in Zoomin, which automatically connects to Data Cloud to convert scattered help content into structured, usable records.

This unified foundation is what makes Agentforce’s responses so fast, accurate and tailored to individual merchants — and it’s what will allow Zota to scale its vision for agentic AI across the business. Whether it’s surfacing account insights in Sales Cloud, answering merchant questions online, or recommending new products, every experience is powered by the same real-time, 360-degree view of the merchant.

With the deeply unified Salesforce Platform, Zota and Salesforce Professional Services designed, built, tested, and deployed the merchant FAQ agent in just five weeks.

Zota approached their Agentforce implementation with a clear strategy: Start with a high-impact use case that was easy to build. Automating responses to customer inquiries was the obvious choice — Zota already had a knowledge base in Data Cloud, high website traffic, and insight into the top customer FAQs. This targeted use case could serve as first-line support for 180,000 inquiries annually, improving the customer experience at scale, generating more leads, and giving the team time back to follow up, close deals, and onboard new partners.

Using GPT-4 Omni and out-of-the box tools in Agent Builder, Zota’s FAQ agent went through thorough testing before launch. Zota started by pulling their service case history, then testing real merchant questions using both Agent Builder and Agentforce on Zota’s staging website. If the agent didn’t respond as expected — or didn’t respond at all — the team updated or added knowledge articles and tested again.

After sufficient tuning of the agent, Professional Services uploaded the full set of test questions into the Agentforce Testing Center to validate results at scale. To protect merchant and company data, they built a custom retriever in Einstein Studio that ensures the FAQ agent only surfaces active, publicly available content — never anything confidential or out-of-date. 

Just before go-live, employees across Zota jumped in to test the agent in every way they could think of. Early tests revealed a few surprises: One issue was that the agent initially responded slower than expected. To improve speed without losing accuracy, the team fine-tuned the prompts and adjusted the retriever to return fewer, more relevant results.

Testing also revealed gaps in Zota’s knowledge base. For example, when asked, “Can Zota help me accept cryptocurrency?” Agentforce incorrectly said that Zota doesn’t support crypto payments — even though they do. That happened because there wasn’t a knowledge article on the topic. Once the team added one, the agent started responding correctly. 

Another issue involved lead capture. At first, default protections from the Einstein Trust Layer blocked the agent from collecting basic contact info, like name or email. These safeguards are meant to filter out not only unsafe prompts, inappropriate language, and misuse, but also protect personal information. To fix it, Professional Services updated the FAQ agent’s instructions to safely collect basic merchant information, while keeping the rest of the protections in place.

Looking back, Zota notes that although building their first agent took time, it laid a strong foundation for success. The lessons they learned are now helping them build new agents faster and with greater confidence.

"Before I had the first employee, I purchased Salesforce licenses and built the methodology," said Ziv. From day one, Zota didn’t just use Salesforce — they built their entire business around it. Ten years later, they’re running wall to wall on the deeply unified platform, crediting their Salesforce infrastructure as the reason their team of 140 performs like a team of 800.

What sets Salesforce apart, according to Ziv, is its ability to support Zota’s growth and vision — while keeping every part of the business connected and secure. “There is no scenario where we add a new tool that isn’t immediately implemented into our Salesforce single source of truth,” Ziv said. From HR to finance to merchant service, “There are hundreds of great companies we can plug into with the AppExchange. We are always going to start with Salesforce.” 

Zota’s deep investment in Salesforce isn’t just about tools — it’s about mindset. They’re proud to be Israel’s first customer for Data Cloud, Einstein, and now Agentforce. Even as CEO, Ziv is personally taking Agentforce Trailhead courses and requiring every employee to do the same. And because Zota operates globally, any new technology they implement must exceed multi-geo security and governance regulations. With the Trust Boundary and built-in features like Shield, data masking, and platform encryption, Zota trusts Salesforce to keep their data secure and compliant. It’s a partnership that’s helped them stay ahead — by building smarter, moving faster, and never starting from scratch.