Speaker brand Sonos is eager to have agentic AI surface operational efficiencies and handle B2B customer requests.
Speaker brand Sonos likes the sound of agentic AI so much that it is piloting an agent for its business-to-business customer portal.
The B2B ordering platform, which caters to Sonos’ custom integrators and distributors was in desperate need of a refresh, Sharif Kadri, senior manager of professional technology at Sonos, told attendees at the Salesforce Connections 2025 conference in Chicago in June. The interface looked “very Windows 95” and was not a good representation of the Sonos brand, he said.
Sonos rebuilt its portal on Salesforce’s commerce cloud and marketing cloud. The portal includes 40 new features to help its buyers, gives access to marketing assets and a merchandise store. Sonos added the ecommerce swag store in response to its buyers requesting merchandise because they liked the brand and wanted to represent it.
Building the portal took years, including putting prototypes in front of its B2B customers and asking them to conduct certain tasks, timing it, and asking them what was efficient and what could improve. Now, the portal is more robust and personalized.
“This portal experience is different depending upon who’s logged in,” he said. “So it’s an authenticated experience. If you’re a buyer, you see one thing. If you’re a content user who just needs marketing assets, you see something else; It’s all tailored to you. And now with Agent Force, that is going to be getting even more personalized.”
Sonos pilots agentic AI
Now, Sonos is piloting agentic AI on the portal to handle a variety of tasks, such as recommending related products, adding them to cart and purchasing, answering “where is my order?” calls, and summarizing FAQs. Agentic AI is the latest flavor of artificial intelligence that uses bots or “agents” to autonomously make decisions and handle tasks.
“Where is my order?” questions are the largest driver of interactions to customer service, and deflecting those to an agent to share detailed information provides tremendous value to Sonos, Kadri said.
“The way that we interact has fundamentally changed over the last 15 to 20 years,” he said. “That is rapidly changing over the next few years with the introduction of AI. If you’re going to stay on top of that and keep up with consumer expectations, than we need to be willing to invest in our technology, take on some of these problems that might be harrier than we’d prefer to deal with.”
Why Sonos is big on AI
While Kadri believes the AI will deliver more personalization, higher conversion rates and order volumes, he is most eager for what the technology can do behind the scenes in terms of understanding its operations and logistics, and offering suggestions to become more streamlined.
“AI just makes it so much easier to understand your data and get insights into large data sets that right now you need to hire analysts and hopefully not have siloed data,” Kadri said. “It becomes much quicker and easier to understand why you’re performing the way you’re performing. You can identify areas where you could do better.”
Kadri recommends for anyone investing in agentic AI to ensure that it gives the agent a clear scope and guardrails. For example, the agent should know that it should only recommend Sonos products.
“We think of the agent as a digital employee,” Kadri said. “Just like a new hire, you need to train it, you need to tell it what it can and can’t do, how it should do the things that it should do. So that grounding and those guardrails are critical so that it doesn’t go off.”
While the AI agent is in pilot mode on the B2B side of Sonos, it is still evaluating how to implement agentic AI on the consumer-facing side of its business.
Overall, Sonos is hedging its bets with AI technology providers, as it doesn’t want to get stuck in multi-year contractors.
“We’re only doing one year contracts with anything that’s AI related because it’s just changing so fast,” he said. “We don’t want to make a big bet and then find out six months from now that Joe over here that didn’t exist six months ago is now the best in the business.”
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