If Your AI Agents Can’t Finish Each Other’s Tickets, You’re Toast

This week on Funnel Frontier: When AI agents can’t share context, customers pay the price. 2026 is about AI that plays well with others.

This week:

• If your AI agents can’t finish each other’s tickets, you’re toast
• Retail doesn’t need more bots. It needs a better script.

Stat of the Week

53% of businesses experience improved customer satisfaction and retention with CRM tools. (CRM.org)

If your AI agents can’t finish each other’s tickets, you’re toast

In 2026, it’s not how many AI agents you deploy—it’s whether they can pass the group chat vibe check. Salesforce’s Spring ’26 Release is here to fix that, baking a shared intelligence layer into Agentforce 360 so your bots stop acting like interns who skipped onboarding.

As Nitin Mangtani, Salesforce SVP/GM of Commerce and Retail Clouds, put it: “So while context exists across the enterprise, you may end up designing a solution where no single agent can see or reason across it all.”

Everyone technically has “context.” It’s just trapped in separate systems, agents, and workflows that don’t talk to each other. And AI, despite having all the ingredients, can’t cook up a coherent experience.

🛒 Commerce that doesn’t lose the plot

Salesforce’s new agentic commerce tools are built to fix that.

Here’s what’s new in Agentforce 360 this February:

• Two-Way Messaging over email, SMS, and WhatsApp: Turn your “Your order is on the way” emails into personal shopper convos. Customers can ask questions, get product recs, even buy directly in the thread.
• Contextual Search: Customers ask in plain English, and the AI pulls answers using live data, like what’s in stock, when it ships, and what they’ve browsed before.
• Guided Shopping Agents: AI steps in mid-journey to help with navigation, delivery ETAs, product Qs—without switching tabs or channels.

Ask a question in email, continue in chat, wrap it up on the storefront. Every interaction stays connected through a shared context layer, so conversations don’t reset every time the channel changes.

📦 Behind the scenes: agentic orchestration

These features aren’t just shiny front-end tricks. Underneath, Salesforce is upgrading the whole ops engine.

• Agentic Order Routing spots fulfillment issues and reroutes before they hit the customer.
• Proactive Service shifts CX from reactive case management to early detection and guided self-resolution.
• Sales Workspace brings together sellers, agents, and AI in one pane—less toggling, more doing.

There’s also Agentforce Builder for building your own agents, Agentic Enterprise Search to pull insights across 200+ sources, and Voice AI for financial services. Even healthcare and compliance teams are getting smarter tooling.

💡 What this means for your CX stack

The real takeaway here is the architecture shift.

DIY agent setups? They fall apart at scale. Different teams patch on bots, wire up APIs, and hope it feels “connected.” It doesn’t.

Shared context, on the other hand, isn’t just cleaner. It drives results. According to Mangtani, Salesforce retailers saw:

• 6.2% YoY sales growth
• 59% higher growth for those using AI agents
• 126% jump in AI-powered service use during the holiday rush

And this week at NRF 2026, “agentic commerce” isn’t just Salesforce’s buzzword. Everyone from Shopify to SAP is chasing it.

So what’s the move?

• Audit where your AI agents actually hand off and sync context
• Kill the one-off bots that don’t share data or play well with others
• Design journeys that span marketing, commerce, and service—with continuity built in

Seems like 2026 will be about whether your AI agents can actually hold a conversation. With each other.

If your bots can’t share context, trade receipts, or finish each other’s sentences (or tickets), you’re not building good customer experiences. You’re building confusion.

The Week @ CRM.org

All Things CRM Explained Without the Jargon. From what CRM actually means to how it powers sales, service, and marketing—we’re breaking it all down, minus the fluff.

How to Choose a CRM. A little clarity goes a long way.  This checklist strips it down to what actually matters when choosing a CRM.

🌸 Weekly Bloom 🌸 

Short Attention Span + Mindfulness = Success at Work? Our brains have something called “plasticity.” Turns out that’s useful in our contemporary cognitive jumble.

Retail doesn’t need more bots. It needs a better script.

Salesforce kicked off 2026 with a mic drop: context is king. Now Talkdesk is entering stage left with Commerce Orchestration, aiming to turn fragmented CX scripts into actual story arcs.

Their pitch? Retailers need AI agents that can carry the plot from discovery to checkout to “Where’s my order?” without forgetting who the customer is halfway through.

Call it retail storyboarding. Call it orchestration. Just don’t call it another tool.

🛒 What’s actually new

“Retailers and consumer goods brands are overwhelmed with AI tools,” said Michael Klein, Head of Retail at Talkdesk. “But what they really need is commerce orchestration.”

And Talkdesk’s take? Less tool soup, more flow.

Talkdesk’s new Commerce Orchestration layer is built to do just that—connect the dots across the entire shopping journey with AI agents that actually talk to each other. Here’s what it handles:

• Search that sells: AI guides discovery with real-time recs based on what’s in stock, not just what’s shiny.
• Upsells that make sense: Mid-chat bundling, no awkward cross-sell popups.
• Checkout in-chat: Complete a purchase without getting kicked to another tab.
• Cart recovery: Detects drop-offs and re-engages before the customer ghosts.
• Smart handoffs: High-value or messy issues get escalated to humans—fast.

It all runs on Talkdesk Data Cloud, wired into your CRM, inventory, commerce stack, and fulfillment ops.

🧠 From features to flow

Talkdesk has been building toward this moment since 2024. First came GenAI bells and whistles. Then retail-specific AI agents. Now? It’s orchestration or bust.

And they’re not wrong. This might be the only way to fix two growing messes:

• AI sprawl: Voice here, chat there, nothing shares a brain
• Customer expectations: Everyone wants support to be fast, personal, zero handoffs

But stitching that together takes more than clever bots. You need clean data across systems, strong guardrails for autonomous actions, and outcomes that actually move the revenue needle, not just reduce cost-to-serve.

💡 What this means for your CX stack

If you’re stacking point solutions like AI LEGO bricks, 2026 is going to be rough. The play isn’t more features—it’s smarter flow.

So here’s your move:

• Audit your journey: Can your AI handle discovery and delivery issues?
• Check for orchestration gaps: Are bots playing hot potato between channels?
• Measure more than deflection: If orchestration doesn’t move revenue, it’s not working.

Talkdesk is betting that agentic AI + clean data + orchestration is the real unlock for retail CX.

Because customers don’t care if your chatbot has GPT-5. They care if your system can fix a problem without making them explain it three times.

Galactic Gourmet

CRM blips from around the web

Syspro and SugarCRM launch unified CRM-ERP solution. Manufacturers and distributors can now connect Syspro ERP and SugarCRM with out-of-the-box integration. The new solution brings sales, service, and operations data together to help teams drive repeat business and streamline sales-to-shop floor workflows.

Amperity debuts customer data AI agent for instant activation. Amperity’s new Customer Data Agent lets marketers ask natural-language questions, then instantly build segments and journeys using unified profiles.

Microsoft acquires Osmos to bring agentic AI to Fabric. Microsoft is integrating Osmos into its Fabric platform to automate messy data prep with agentic AI. The goal is to help teams spend less time cleaning data and make analytics faster, smarter, and easier to scale.

If you'd like weekly CRM news like this delivered to your inbox, subscribe to Funnel Frontier!