AI-powered virtual agents that autonomously resolve customer support inquiries across chat, email, and voice channels without human intervention. Core capabilities include natural-language understanding of customer intent, knowledge base and help center integration for answer retrieval, conversation orchestration with multi-turn dialogue, handoff to human agents with full context when resolution fails, and analytics on deflection rate, resolution accuracy, and containment. The category has evolved from rule-based chatbots to LLM-powered agents capable of complex, multi-step issue resolution including order modifications, refund processing, and account changes via API integrations with backend systems.