AI tool has transformed non-emergency policing, forces claim after six-month pilot

Thames Valley Police and Hampshire & Isle of Wight Constabulary have claimed that Bobbi, the Salesforce-powered virtual assistant they piloted for non-emergency public contact from November 2025, has transformed the way the two forces handle demand.

According to the chief digital and information officer for the forces' Joint Operations Unit, Mike Lattanzio, in the six-month pilot period, the system resolved close to 45 per cent of enquiries without staff intervention.

The forces reported the following performance over the pilot:

• Around 200 non-emergency conversations handled each day, supporting roughly 14,000 public contacts a year.
• Nearly 45 per cent of enquiries resolved without staff involvement, with the remainder routed to Digital Desk operators.
• More than 3,200 contact-centre hours freed for staff across the two forces.
• A public satisfaction rating of 4.6 out of 5
• At least one high-harm offence escalated for staff intervention each day, including an average of two cases a day involving violence against women and girls.

Bobbi runs on Agentforce, Salesforce's agentic AI platform, which the forces say operates only on closed-source data they supply, with shared information held within the two constabularies.

On the forces' account, staff remain in the decision loop for anything significant. Enquiries the assistant cannot resolve, and cases where a caller asks to speak to a person, transfer to human operators, and flagged safeguarding matters are passed to trained staff. The forces cited an instance in which a young person raised a high-risk domestic situation through the assistant, which escalated the concern for officers to respond, and an earlier case in which a parent uncertain about a school-related difficulty was signposted to relevant support.

Lattanzio described the rollout as a "pioneering moment in policing", saying the assistant had allowed the forces to rethink how they manage non-emergency demand while directing officer time to the people and situations that most need it. He said reluctance to report concerns remained a persistent barrier, and that an always-available, discreet channel offered in multiple languages was reaching people who might not otherwise make contact. Lattanzio added that further development is planned to widen the assistant's role across both force areas.