“You can’t keep adding bodies. That math does not work,” said Velia Carboni, CIO with appliance company SharkNinja. “The unlock with Agentforce versus historical chatbots will be authenticity. Agentforce gives us that opportunity. It feels more personal, more like a dialogue than a black-and-white ‘I ask this question, I get that answer.’”
AI agents, assistants, copilots — whatever the preferred term — are a hot topic in the customer experience space right now, whether the value lies in assisting human reps or engaging with customers directly. Unlike traditional chatbots, AI agents need not follow a prescribed pattern of answers to common queries, but can respond more flexibly to questions or issues having been trained on internal data as well as drawing on the support of a large language model. Salesforce’s agentic AI can be trained on data in Salesforce Data Cloud.
When is a shark a ninja?
First, it was important to get clarity on SharkNinja itself, at least for the benefit of those that haven’t yet shopped with the brand. Essentially, it’s one company, two brands: Shark and Ninja. Shark represents home and cleaning appliances, Ninja makes appliances for kitchen use.
“Our guys are innovating, sometimes 30, 40, 50 products. I do think that having it divided helps them better focus on categories,” explained Carboni. “I think we have 33 different categories right now and an insane amount of product in each.”
The relevant question that arises is whether information services and software are split between Shark and Ninja or centralized. “Centralized,” said Carboni. “We service both brands; we’re one company but there’s a lot of commonality. Consumers have cleaning needs, consumers have kitchen needs, so there’s a lot to leverage between the brands. We do have two separate websites.”
One thing SharkNinja is looking to do with Agentforce is build on its legacy of informercials, a popular way of engaging with customers (it has a dedicated informercial channel on YouTube). “The essence of what they did was bring a product to life and make it easier for a consumer to understand if it was going to meet their needs,” Carboni said. “I want to bring the infomercial authenticity into the way we deliver consumer experience.”
Engaging with Salesforce
Is Agentforce simply an addition to a pre-existing SharkNinja Salesforce stack? “I joined SharkNinja seven months ago, but I have been a Salesforce customer for a long time,” said Carboni. “I’ve dabbled a lot in Service Cloud and chatbots.” SharkNinja was not a Salesforce customer before her arrival.
“We’re replatforming a lot of things here at SharkNinja. Salesforce will be our new commerce provider, customer service, all of those things. Agentforce, to me, was the frosting on the cake. It takes us to a whole new level. There’s so much that we offer — how can I help the consumer navigate the products we sell? We want to delight them so much that they come back and buy the next thing.”
Despite an established presence in big box stores, SharkNinja is now investing in direct-to-consumer, including social, and this forms a large part of Carboni’s responsibilities. “It’s not about how you buy, it’s about how we bring you into the community. Our reset around all the things we’re about to do with Salesforce is how we create community, a destination, a home for people to feel they are part of the SharkNinja family. Social is a big part of that,” she explained. Using agents on social or in other channels creates a big opportunity to achieve these goals, Carboni believes.
Customer service is another big opportunity. “I think I can solve a lot of what people are calling in for with both the work we’ll do on the website with the replatforming as well as Agentforce. What goes to my live [human] agents may be something more complicated,” she said.
Dig deeper: Salesforce launches new, ‘more trustworthy’ generation of AI bots
Here’s the roadmap
Despite Salesforce’s insistence that building Agentforce agents is a rapid process, Carboni had told the audience at the Salesforce World Tour event that she hoped SharkNinja would be using Agentforce as part of its Salesforce suite early or middle of next year.
“I definitely want to clarify that,” she said. “It’s not because it’s hard to build agents. It’s a very strategic decision on our part. We could go off with agents and maybe we’ll dabble with a couple, but we are so consumer-obsessed that we want to do this the right way. You get one reset in digital and this is our reset.” In fact, Carboni was planning to build a quick agent herself at the World Tour Agentforce kiosk. She confirmed that SharkNinja has already done some experimentation and dry runs.
Change management is involved too. The tech part, Carboni insists, is easy. “The harder part is getting people on the journey. I’m trying to bring more people along on the journey, whether or not they have direct involvement. If I was a product person at SharkNinja I would want us to be as meticulous in creating the right experiences as they are in the amazing products they deliver.”
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