Articles, industry benchmarks, technology deep dives and customer stories on AI-powered business automation.
Prompt injection in a customer-support AI agent arrives inside the ticket. Six attack strings, five controls mapped to OWASP LLM01 and NIST AI RMF, a permission table for read, write and irreversible actions, and a test that proves each control works.
Sierra and Meta's Personal Agent Protocol standardises how a customer's AI agent signs in to a business, not what it may do once inside. A dated changelog, the reconciled partner lists, PAP vs MCP, A2A and AP2, and a readiness checklist by action class for the helpdesk you already run.
AI agents for banking can read, explain, chase KYC documents and triage disputes alone. Which actions need step-up verification first: ten use cases tagged autonomous, gated or human-only, and the regulation that bites on each.
Escalation management for AI-first support: the three tiers (suppress, on request, proactive), six handoff triggers with signals, thresholds and actions, an AI-era escalation matrix, and what UK and EU right-to-a-human rules require.
Aissist, Fin, Zendesk AI Agents, Salesforce Agentforce and Sierra compared on price per resolution, where they run, channels, security and published resolution — with pros and cons for each and a worked cost example.
Ten AI SDR and AI sales agent tools, split into outbound SDR agents and inbound sales agents and ranked separately. Compared on data source, CRM write-back, pricing metric and whether each published performance claim has a denominator. Seven of the ten don't, and independent data puts cold email replies at 0.45% of 7.5 million emails sent in 2025.
Eleven AI agent orchestration frameworks scored out of 30 on the questions their docs bury: durable execution, replay on failure without re-billing completed model calls, human-in-the-loop interrupts that survive a restart, per-step cost accounting, and licence. Only three give you per-step token accounting from the open-source package with no vendor platform in the path. Includes a worked monthly cost model and the corrected AutoGen maintenance-mode timeline.
Gartner counts roughly 130 genuinely agentic vendors among the thousands claiming it. Five tests — resolution denominator, named action, model-failure behaviour, price of a failure, per-decision audit trail — each with a verbatim question and a passing and failing answer, applied to seven AI support agents from their own live pages. Aissist.io fails the first one.
Salesforce closed on Fin on 10 September and Microsoft shipped a Salesforce migration tool the day before. Lock-in is measurable on five dimensions — export format, deployment host, workflow portability, model dependency and contract shape — scored here across seven AI support agents, Aissist.io included, from their own live documentation.
