Palona: Unlocking the Potential of Customer-Centric AI Agents in Sales

Large Language Models Enhanced with Emotional Intelligence, Human-Likeness and Persuasiveness

By Professor Steve Liu and Alex Chen, PhD

Jan. 7th, 2024

Why are most chatbots struggling to meet the bar as a qualified sales agent?

AI agents, powered by advanced LLMs, have arrived to revolutionize sales. They excel at personalizing the shopping experience by analyzing individual behaviors and purchase histories, leading to tailored product recommendations and increased conversion rates. They provide 24/7 customer support, resolving issues with remarkable precision and building brand loyalty for repeat business. 

Despite their great potential, AI agents still struggle with subtle yet critical cues, such as frustration or excitement, which are essential for forming meaningful customer relationships. They also fall short in replicating human-like interactions, and usually offer rigid, mechanical responses, which make conversations feel impersonal, and hinder AI agents from fully engaging with customers.

Agent Palona: Bridge the Gap!

Palona, the AI agent developed by Proactive AI Lab, is specifically engineered to close the gap with superior emotional intelligence, human-like interactions, and persuasive capabilities—tackling the critical limitations that prevent even the most advanced SOTA LLMs from being fully embraced in sales environments.

The Emotional Intelligence of Palona is a major asset in sales. Unlike typical AI, it can detect and respond to emotional cues like frustration or excitement, adapting its responses to show empathy. This creates a deeper connection with customers, building trust and fostering long-term loyalty, which are crucial for driving sales growth.

The Human-Likeness of Palona is what really sets it apart. It’s far beyond robotic or scripted—its interactions flow naturally, adjusting tone and approach based on the customer’s emotions and needs. Palona doesn’t just wait for responses; it actively asks questions to better understand what the customer really wants. This makes customers feel like they’re talking to a real person who genuinely understands them—an essential ingredient in building trust, making them feel valued, and ultimately turning leads into sales.

The Persuasiveness of Palona takes it to the next level. It goes beyond basic recommendations, identifying not only what the customer wants but also what they didn’t know they needed. By aligning its suggestions with the customer’s emotions and sense of urgency, Palona makes every interaction feel timely and highly relevant. This approach not only drives higher conversion rates but also creates natural opportunities for upselling and cross-selling, boosting revenue while making the customer feel truly understood and valued.

The Technologies Behind Palona

Agent Character Creation – At the core of Palona’s capabilities is its meticulously designed agent character creation system. Unlike off-the-shelf LLMs that rely on pre-configured, bot-like tones, Palona’s character is built to align with your brand’s voice while maintaining the flexibility to adjust based on customer preferences. Palona can take on different personas depending on the context—whether it’s a friendly advisor, a confident expert, or a supportive assistant—ensuring that every interaction feels personalized, consistent, and authentic. This dynamic character creation enables Palona to connect with customers on a deeper level, reinforcing trust and fostering more meaningful relationships.

Context and Memories – Palona employs advanced prompt engineering to ensure interactions remain relevant, timely, and engaging. By continuously analyzing real-time customer inputs, Palona can dynamically adjust its prompts based on emotional cues, behavioral data, and the flow of the conversation. This intelligent prompting ensures that Palona always asks the right questions at the right moment, driving the conversation forward and uncovering deeper insights into customer needs. Whether it’s nudging the customer toward the right product or addressing potential concerns before they arise, Palona’s dynamic prompting creates a seamless, responsive experience that feels instinctive rather than robotic.

Step-by-Step Interactions – Palona’s step-by-step interaction design is geared toward guiding customers through their journey with clear, logical progression. Rather than overwhelming customers with too many choices or complex decisions, Palona breaks down the process into manageable steps, carefully guiding them from inquiry to conversion. Each step is designed to gather critical information while nurturing the relationship, ensuring that customers feel supported and informed throughout their entire buying process. This structured yet flexible approach minimizes friction, enhances user experience, and leads to faster, more confident decision-making.

Agentic Workflows – Palona operates with robust agentic workflows that streamline tasks, automate processes, and ensure that every action taken is purpose-driven. From initial customer engagement to final conversion, Palona follows a clearly defined path, making decisions based on data-driven insights and real-time feedback. Its agentic workflows integrate seamlessly with backend systems, enabling smooth transitions between sales tasks, customer service inquiries, and follow-ups. These structured yet adaptable workflows ensure that Palona always acts with precision, driving efficiency while maintaining a personalized, high-touch approach that customers appreciate.

Systematic Knowledge Management – Palona’s systematic knowledge management ensures that every interaction is informed by a vast, real-time repository of customer data, product knowledge, and historical insights. This allows Palona to provide responses that are not only contextually accurate but also aligned with the customer’s preferences, past interactions, and current emotional state. By seamlessly integrating this knowledge into every conversation, Palona can make highly relevant suggestions, anticipate customer needs, and offer precise solutions—maximizing the chances of conversion and customer satisfaction. 

Experiments

We have set up experiments to evaluate the agents’ interactive skills, including Context Awareness (CA), Patience (PA), Empathetic Support (ES), Interaction Skills (IS), Conflict Resolution (CR), Proactive Engagement (PE), Sense of Humor (SH), and Innovative Problem-Solving (IPS).

Figure 1. Normalized scores of interactive skills for different AI agents.

As shown in Figure 1, Palona-7B, powered by our cutting-edge technologies, achieved a remarkable 100%+ improvement in these customer-interaction skills. This performance leap underscores the transformative power of Palona’s capabilities, particularly in fostering trust and rapport with customers. With its enhanced high-EQ human-like interactions, Palona is positioned to significantly elevate the customer experience, driving stronger engagement and higher conversion rates—key drivers of sustained sales growth.