Field notes — week of August 25, 2026

Salesforce and Anthropic announced 'Salesforce in Claude' on Aug 26, bringing live CRM data and 37 prebuilt skills into Claude, with a pilot now and open beta expected in September; Salesforce also reported Agentforce ARR above $1.5B, up 240% year over year. Separately, the EU AI Act's Article 50 transparency obligations became enforceable Aug 2, requiring clear disclosure when people interact with AI, with fines up to €15M or 3% of global turnover.

Field notes — week of August 25, 2026 What changed in AI-support tooling this week. Every item was checked against its source before it entered this list. Intercom - Fin now carries a returning customer's context across sessions and channels chat to email , per the Aug 13 changelog entry https://www.intercom.com/changes/en ; the same week added proactive incident detection that flags emerging problem clusters before they escalate Aug 17 . Zendesk - the August release https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/11068070409882-What-s-new-in-Zendesk-August-2026 bundles copilot intelligent triage topic, sentiment, language, entities into Suite and Support Professional plans at no extra cost; auto assist now draws on Confluence, Notion, crawled web sources, and similar solved tickets. The legacy "AI agents – Essential" line enters wind-down. Salesforce + Anthropic - announced "Salesforce in Claude" https://salesforcetime.com/2026/08/27/claudeforce-salesforce-meets-claude/ on Aug 26: live CRM data and 37 prebuilt skills usable inside Claude without opening Salesforce; pilot now, open beta expected September. The same earnings call reported Agentforce ARR above $1.5B https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/salesforce-delivers-record-second-quarter-200100684.html , up 240% year over year. Sierra - agents can now place outbound calls and navigate IVR phone trees https://sierra.ai/blog/navigating-ivr-systems - detecting human pickup, choosing speech versus keypad, remembering successful paths - with vendor-reported success rates rising from ~57% to ~85% Aug 11 . Sierra, again - opened a Seoul office https://sierra.ai/blog/sierra-launches-in-korea Aug 25 ; the post cites retailer Next live in six weeks across 48 languages and 83 countries, and Singtel above 70% resolution after a 10-week rollout. Vendor-reported figures. EU AI Act - Article 50 transparency obligations became enforceable Aug 2 https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/safer-and-more-transparent-ai-2026-08-02 en : people must be clearly told when they are talking to an AI system, and fines reach €15M or 3% of global turnover. Gartner - a survey of 3,566 customers via CX Dive, Aug 25 https://www.customerexperiencedive.com/news/customers-still-want-access-to-a-human-in-customer-service/828755/ : 87% say companies using GenAI in customer service must keep a human agent available - while half say GenAI actually makes interactions easier. LinkedIn engineering - published production A/B results for a self-improving support agent system https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10224 arXiv, Aug 10 : +9.0 points QA self-serve rate, +4.8 on cancellations, +30.6 on routing accuracy over two weeks of live traffic.