Salesforce.com is continuing to build out its portfolio of software-as-a-service products with the general availability of Einstein Bots for its Service Cloud platform.

Service Cloud is software that’s used by customer service professionals to provide support services after a sale has been made. The division is Salesforce’s second-most profitable business after its flagship Sales Cloud platform.

The Einstein Bots, introduced at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference in November, are designed to be used by customer service reps to help them understand what issues their callers have before they talk to a human operator.

Einstein Bots are powered by machine learning technology that allows them to learn and improve over time, so they get better at understanding what customers want. With the bots, customer service reps can set up automated responses to gather basic customer information, or answer simple questions before inquiries are passed along to a human.

Interestingly, Salesforce said it wants to encourage its customers to make it clear that the bots are computers, rather than trying to pretend to be actual humans and confuse their own customers.

Alongside the Einstein Bots, Salesforce introduced a new feature called Lightning Flow for Service Cloud that lets users create menu trees of options available to them, based on common customer requests. Lighting Flow also helps to automate responses to customers to speed up workflows, the company said.

A third new feature announced today is Einstein Next Best Action, which uses predictive models to deliver intelligent, contextual recommendations and offers to customers based on their conversations with agents. These actions, said to be delivered at the “moment of maximum impact,” surface directly in the Service Cloud console so agents can act on them immediately.

“Almost every company looking to compete on customer service is looking at how they can leverage AI, but for even large companies it’s often a question of resources,” said Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of research at Nucleus Research. “With this release, Salesforce further accelerates time to value for companies that want to better understand and service customers by scaling Salesforce’s expertise, depth and breadth of data, and AI models that are laser focused and trained for customer interaction.”

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