Slalom wins Salesforce award for Pets at Home AI work

Slalom has been named Salesforce's 2027 Partner of the Year in the Systems of Agency category for its work with Pets at Home.

The award recognises a project in which Slalom worked with the UK pet care retailer and services group to introduce Salesforce's Agentforce technology into customer service operations. The system was designed to improve how frontline staff access information and respond to customer queries across veterinary, retail, grooming, subscription and digital services.

Pets at Home combines stores with services for pet owners, giving customer support teams a wide range of enquiries to manage. That made the deployment notable because it had to handle requests across several parts of the group's connected offering.

According to the companies, inbound case volumes fell sharply when the system went live. On the first full day in production, daily inbound cases dropped by about 30%, from around 1,300 to 900, while customer satisfaction remained above target.

The project also stands out because Agentforce had been generally available for less than 18 months when the work began. Headless production deployments supporting both anonymous and authenticated customer journeys were still relatively uncommon, making the Pets at Home implementation an early live example in a complex retail setting.

Slalom carried out the work alongside Salesforce, focusing on embedding AI into customer service workflows rather than treating it as a separate experiment. The aim was to help teams handle routine questions more efficiently and spend more time on complex interactions that require human judgement.

Operational shift

The deployment reflects a broader push by large customer-facing businesses to move AI projects from pilots into everyday operations. Retailers and service groups have been under pressure to show measurable returns from AI spending, particularly in customer service, where labour costs and response times are closely watched.

For Pets at Home, the use case appears to have been closely tied to operational metrics. Lower case volumes can reduce pressure on service teams, but maintaining satisfaction scores is often the harder test when automation is introduced.

Salesforce's partner awards typically recognise consulting and integration firms that deliver projects using its software. In this case, the award highlights the growing commercial importance of AI-related service work for technology advisers as clients seek help integrating new tools into existing processes.

Slalom has a long relationship with Salesforce and said it was the software company's first strategic systems integrator partner for Data Cloud and AI. That relationship has helped place the consulting firm in projects where data and artificial intelligence are tied to practical business changes rather than stand-alone software rollouts.

Industry context

The Pets at Home project also underlines how AI adoption is spreading beyond purely online customer service into businesses with hybrid operating models. Companies that combine physical locations, subscriptions, specialist services and digital channels often face fragmented customer journeys, making support systems harder to unify.

In the UK pet care market, Pets at Home has built a business that extends well beyond retail sales. Its support operation must deal with appointments, product queries, subscriptions, grooming services and veterinary-related customer interactions, all of which can create a complex service environment.

That complexity is part of why the implementation drew attention within the Salesforce partner ecosystem. A live decision-making agent operating across multiple customer pathways in such an environment offers a test case for how similar systems might be used in other service-heavy consumer businesses.

Sarah Duffy, Head of Enterprise Applications at Slalom, said the lessons from the deployment had influenced wider technical standards. "Pets at Home is an example of deep collaboration across domains to deliver a first of its kind, complex and unique headless solution. And our learning informed pattern standards that persist," she said.

Duffy added: "The agent helps customers get what they need faster while preserving the care and judgment that an elevated service experience requires. On the first full day in production, inbound cases dropped by approximately 30% while customer satisfaction remained above target. The positive impact to the customers and employees of Pets at Home is significant. It's what we mean when we say fiercely human consulting. I'm so proud of Slalom's long-time partnership with the team at Pets at Home and honored that Salesforce has recognized what we accomplished together."