Kaushal and Vikas, thanks for joining us.
Kaushal, tell us about the work you're doing at Salesforce.
Where do you see the biggest
GenAI opportunities?
Yeah, thanks, Gigi.
Thanks for having us.
The GenAI work we do is around really transforming all aspects
of business workflows: sales, service, marketing, commerce,
Slack, Tableau analytics.
It's really infused into every part of our workflow that
Salesforce does. As the number one CRM in the world,
we are infusing GenAI
with data and trust to back it up and give customers really the
confidence to build productivity, efficiency and
grow their businesses in new ways that were not possible
before.
So my team helps out in building out the generative AI platform
for all our internal clouds and features to leverage all these
exciting capabilities coming out into the world and deliver them
so that customers can really drive
new forms of efficiency and productivity.
Okay. Vikas, how are business leaders using those
opportunities and mitigating all of the risks?
It's a great question.
And I think there's at least two different categories of risk.
There's the technology risk, which is what we hear a lot
about around auditability and around hallucinations and all of
those things.
And actually I've found that business leaders have been able
to tackle that by and large pretty well. Like, know which
use cases you can use, generative AI, what the state of
the technology is today, and so on.
But there's another category of risk, which I think is
organizational risk, which is
Okay, so the technology is there, but are the people in my
organization fully trained and enabled to use it?
Are we capturing the maximum value from it?
Are we actually dreaming big enough as an organization in
terms of what the potential might be?
And actually, I think there's probably more to be done in that
category.
So the organizational risk, I would say, is almost a bigger
opportunity than the technology risk right now.
So dream big.
How do you help maximize those opportunities?
Where are the areas of growth?
You know, the areas of growth,
a lot of things that we've been doing manually for forever will
tend to get automated and I think something that's tedious
like a customer support agent for instance writes a case
wrap-up summary usually and takes a long time to write it,
45 minutes, will now be able to generate a summary in 5 minutes
and review it with a human in the loop and be able to approve
it and really increase their productivity and do more
creative things.
A marketer can really get the help of, you know, image
creation tools, video creation tools, and use that to create
marketing copy in very quick time and be able to really focus
on the most strategic elements.
So I think it'll free up a lot of the workforce from many of
the tedious things, get the right information to them at
their fingertips, and really have more a productive day,
productive conversations with their business counterparts and
also engage customers, their customers, in a very meaningful
way.
So the opportunities seem, with this general purpose technology,
we have not seen anything like this in AI for a long time.
It's been promised for a while, but it hasn't come and now that
it's here, we are really seeing an endless amount of potential.
So ten years from now, the way we do work, in many aspects of
it, the way we do content production, every aspect of
life, will get touched with some form of this AI revolution.
How do you see GenAI
contributing to growth strategies?
Yeah, this revolution in GenAI
is really going to be transformative for all walks of
life.
I think it is going to improve productivity in in the workforce
across various business functions and also consumer life
will get impacted in various ways, whether it's health care,
banking, life insurance, or any aspect that we can think of.
So it's a very general-purpose technology that we'll see that
it'll transform our lives in many different ways.
I totally agree with Kaushal.
I feel like the potential for GenAI and functional
transformation is incredible.
I also really empathize with business leaders because it's
such a moving target.
You look at where technology is today and where it is six months
from now, and it's completely changed.
So for CEOs and business leaders to really be thinking about,
what do I build, what do I buy, and where do I partner, I think
that's really a key muscle to develop.
Really helpful advice, Kaushal and Vikas, thanks for joining
us.
Thank you, Gigi.