Enterprise support agents operate in rapidly changing environments where policies, product capabilities, and knowledge bases evolve continuously, making static assistants brittle and costly to maintain. We present LinkedIn's self-evolving agentic support system, which integrates retrieval-augmented generation with evolutionary auto-prompting and a modular, production-aligned evaluation framework to enable safe, continuous improvement without retraining foundation models. The system treats prompts, retrieval, and evaluation as a closed-loop, versioned workflow with operational guardrails. Offline simulations and ablations show clear quality gains over vanilla RAG and baseline agents, including reduced hallucinations and improved response completeness. In a two-week user-randomized A/B test on LinkedIn's production support traffic, the integrated self-evolved workflow increased QA self-serve by 9.0 percentage points, cancellation self-serve by 4.8 points, and routing accuracy by 30.6 points. These results demonstrate a practical path to scalable, self-evolving AI agents in real-world enterprise settings.
Production voice agents span cascaded, speech-to-speech, and hybrid architectures. Voice-agent benchmarks typically measure component quality and conversational properties such as word error rate, latency, naturalness, and turn-taking. Fewer measure whether the agent handled a phone call correctly on its own. Contact centers refer to this as ``containment'': the share of phone calls the automated system resolves without handing off to a human. On some phone calls the right outcome is refusal or a redirect. To address this gap, we introduce VAmoS Bench, the Voice Agent Simulation Bench. It measures complete voice-agent systems end to end in a stateful customer-support task. The agent is Riley, a credit-card support representative for a fictional bank who can freeze, cancel, replace, or activate a card. Each of 100 scenarios supplies a simulated caller with a private goal and a seeded PostgreSQL backend. The platform uses each scenario to populate and activate an isolated simulation in which the caller reaches Riley over audio; roughly one-third apply adversarial pressure. The agent can use five tools that execute real SQL against the backend. Each scenario also defines binary assertions. A grader evaluates them against the complete trace of what the caller and agent said and what the agent did, including tool invocations, arguments, and returned rows. This catches an agent that claims to have changed a card without updating the database, as well as one that makes the right database change while disclosing protected information. This first benchmark version focuses on financial services. Its evaluation protocol supports an evolving leaderboard: additional voice agents can be evaluated on the same version, while later versions can expand the tasks and scenarios.
The evolution of customer support systems is rapidly advancing with agentic chatbots, yet these systems face significant limitations when accessing enterprise data without predefined API endpoints. This paper presents SAFAARI (Schema-Aware Framework for Accelerated Advertiser Response Intelligence), a multi-agent framework that addresses the critical bottleneck of schema linking in Natural Language to SQL (NL-to-SQL) systems through specialized content, metadata, and orchestration agents. We also introduce SEAL (Schema Evaluation and Accuracy in Language-to-SQL), a novel composite metric that holistically evaluates system performance while penalizing inconsistent results. Through systematic experimentation with five feature set configurations, SAFAARI achieves an 81.66% SEAL score (6.65% improvement over baseline), with notable gains in datapoint accuracy (5.51%) and schema-linking precision (4.69%). The framework's effectiveness is validated through human-in-the-loop evaluation with domain experts, which proves its adaptability across diverse support domains. By automating the labor-intensive process of schema linking and query generation, our framework demonstrates 8x reduction in development time while maintaining high accuracy. The solution streamlines API development and enhances self-service capabilities, particularly benefiting customer support enterprises with complex data ecosystems.
Deploying task-oriented dialogue agents in enterprise customer support faces a persistent annotation bottleneck: robust training requires labelled interaction data at scale, yet enterprise conversational logs are privacy-sensitive and expensive to annotate, while user behaviour evolves faster than labelling pipelines can keep pace. We present RL-ADA (Reinforcement Learning with Adversarial Dialogue Agents), a co-evolutionary training framework that eliminates this bottleneck by replacing human labels with \emph{world feedback}: consequence-based reward signals derived directly from measurable interaction outcomes. A Customer Support Agent (DA, 3B parameters) and an Adversarial Customer Agent (CA, 7B parameters) co-evolve in an adversarial arena guided by a fixed automated judge: the DA is rewarded for correctly handling multi-turn customer conversations to successful resolution, while the CA is rewarded for producing realistic, intent-concealing utterances that cause misroutes, creating asymmetric adversarial pressure through opposing but independently structured rewards. An isolation gym iteratively retrains the weaker agent on prior-failure transcripts, requiring no human annotation at any stage. In a banking customer support proof of concept, tool-routing errors are eliminated and the strict end-to-end PASS rate doubles over five co-evolutionary cycles, driven solely by automated arena reward with no labelled data. We additionally observe the emergence of \textbf{Contextual Camouflage}, an adversarial strategy in which the CA learns to embed intent within dense realistic customer detail purely from reward pressure, with direct implications for enterprise red-teaming and robustness evaluation.
Agentic large language models (LLMs) deployed in fact-sensitive applications such as customer support must simultaneously preserve factual correctness and generate responses in a controllable stylistic register. Activation steering enables fine-tuning-free style control by perturbing hidden representations, but it lacks an explicit mechanism for distinguishing verifiable facts from stylistic content, leading to semantic leakage. We address this challenge through \emph{Defactualize-Steer-Rehydrate} (DSR), a knowledge-engineering framework that integrates a typed, salience-weighted knowledge graph (KG) with activation steering. DSR extracts salient entities using a layered regex or NER or lexical-classifier pipeline, replaces them with typed placeholders prior to steering, and deterministically restores verified values through salience-guided rehydration after generation. DSR is evaluated across six LLaMA-family models (1B--13B parameters) on 600 A2A-generated customer-support cases (1,200 generations), with a dedicated KG ablation study. DSR significantly increases verified-entity recovery relative to a steering-only baseline (Cohen's $d=0.225$, $p_{\text{Bonf}}=1.0\times10^{-4}$), though the absolute recovery rate remains modest, while preserving effective style control across diverse model families. Layer-wise separability and steering-strength diagnostics further show previously unexplored interactions between representation-level steering and factual grounding. hese results demonstrate that explicit knowledge engineering can systematically enhance trustworthy, controllable, and reproducible generative AI without requiring model fine-tuning. Code, cached steering vectors, and evaluation scripts are publicly released to support reproducibility.\footnote{https://github.com/Tanmay-IITDSAI/KG-Gated-Defactualization}
Most companies read their customer support data at scale using sentiment analysis, which measures how customers sound rather than whether they were satisfied with the result. We tested a richer alternative on 70,450 support conversations from a leading online fundraising platform: alongside tone, we used GPT-5.4 to estimate each customer's satisfaction and to flag whether they reported a concrete problem, then validated all three readings against the 1-to-5 ratings customers left on the conversations they rated. The satisfaction estimate tracked those ratings far better than sentiment did, correlating at 0.47 against 0.36 and flagging unhappy customers with far fewer false alarms. The structured read also sees what sentiment cannot: tone and satisfaction disagree in 44% of conversations, a single "Neutral" label hides everything from quietly satisfied customers to ones who quietly gave up, and the largest group of all is "tolerated friction," customers who are satisfied but still reporting a fixable problem, a standing issue that no sentiment-based dashboard can surface. The broader finding is that LLM-based annotation can capture far more than the tonality of a customer's language, offering strong potential for new business metrics grounded instead in the customer's state (whether they were satisfied) and the cause of their problem extracted directly from the raw textual data of interactions and feedback.
Aman Gupta, Kevin Rossell, Edesio Alcobaça +8cs.CL
The rapid rise in LLM capabilities has made AI agents increasingly viable across a broad range of tasks. Among the most promising applications is building production-ready customer-facing agents, a challenge that demands coordinated excellence in evaluation methodology, context engineering, training, and online measurement. Yet these critical pillars are typically developed in isolation, creating blind spots that only surface after deployment. In this paper, we present a unified framework that bridges offline development with online impact for customer support AI agents at Nubank, a company with 100M+ users. Our approach integrates several key components: (1) structured context engineering tailored to customer support agents, (2) systematic human-in-the-loop prompt iteration, (3) rigorous LLM judge evaluation with measured inter-rater agreement and GEPA optimization for consistency, and (4) ideation-to-production validation. A central insight is that evaluation-pipeline quality directly determines iteration velocity. We present results from five production deployments spanning distinct domains: card delivery, debt management, credit-limit support, card management, and product explanation. These deployments deliver consistent customer-satisfaction gains while substantially accelerating iteration. In our card-delivery deployment, large-scale A/B testing yields a 37 percentage-point improvement in AI transactional Net Promoter Score and a 29 percentage-point gain in self-service rate over prior agent variants, alongside a strong correlation between offline simulation metrics and online outcomes, demonstrating that eval-driven development reliably predicts production impact. On most use cases, AI satisfaction reaches within a few percentage points of expert human agents.