How Businesses Use AI to Meet People Where (and When) They Are

People with questions are everywhere, all the time, and entities like city governments and medical institutions don’t necessarily have the budgets to establish 24/7 call centers. Taxpayer dollars and patient fees are precious. Using AI and Agentforce, however, these organizations can meet their constituents, patients, learners, and customers whenever and wherever they are when they need help. It doesn’t just save money on after-hours staff. It builds the kind of trust that money can’t buy. 

City of Kyle

Soon, people will be able to visit the DMV at 10 a.m. on a Saturday or 8:30 p.m. on a Tuesday. Just kidding. Government services operate 8 to 5 Monday through Friday, said Joshua Chronley, Assistant Director of Finance for the City of Kyle, a suburb south of Austin, Texas. 

In Kyle, however, an Agentforce-driven 311 app allows residents to flag anything from a broken bench to a pothole to a water leak. Ultimately, the city’s goal is to make the system voice-enabled, allowing residents to call and talk to an agent that knows everything about the city and can answer questions or field service requests. 

The city has already seen a 10% drop in traditional call volume, but a steady number of requests for service have continued to flow in. Residents are getting the services they want –  no awkward phone tree or call timing required. 

Pearson

For students enrolled in classes through Pearson, an online education platform, learning happens when and where they’re able to carve out a few hours. And that could be anytime — day or night. Suddenly realizing they don’t have the right access code for their courseware can be frustrating. 

Using Agentforce, Pearson can get those students logged in, ready to work through courses or problem sets no matter the hour. The value, said Gabriele Bauman, VP of Customer Relationship Management & Employee Platforms for Pearson, is not necessarily monetary. It’s a feeling of being supported right away. “It really drives loyalty,” she said.

UChicago Medicine

The patient journey through the healthcare system can be disjointed. At UChicago Medicine, the customer service hub had more than 150 representatives, but patients were still often routed to voicemail or transferred to departments that didn’t have the right information at hand. 

Even simple tasks like refilling a prescription or figuring out parking took an average of four minutes. “We are trying to flip that on its head and really make this a way for patients to reach out to us at the time they want to and in the mode that they want to,” said Tyler Bauer, SVP of System Ambulatory Operations for UChicago Medicine. 

Now, instead of patients being forced to try and contact their clinicians at certain prescribed times, AI is helping UChicago Medicine remediate some of that disjunction. Better still: When the patient actually is with their doctor, technologies like ambient listening eliminate the need to type notes on a computer and allow the clinician and the patient to interact as humans, face-to-face.

Go deeper:

• Take a tour of Agentforce City
• Learn how voice is reshaping the call center industry
• Find five key takeaways from Dreamforce 2025
• Dive deeper into how the city of Kyle, Texas, used AI to reinvent constituent services