Susan and Ben, thank you so much for joining us.
And Susan, for early adopters, what are the key things that
they need to be doing for success?
We all know that all technology projects really benefit from
executive support.
That's a really good thing to move through blockers and to
have commitment to succeed.
But the way I would phrase it is: The time for technical
experimentation is really 2023. Like, that's over.
That's an old game.
And so, in today's day and age, you need to be very, very
focused on those business outcomes.
And then and from there, with that hypothesis of value, really
put all the wood behind those arrows to really execute.
So, at Dreamforce, like, one of the things that usually happens
for me when I'm talking to customers is I expect they'll
have a lot of questions about what they saw on this stage, and
I need to unpack it for them.
That did not happen this year.
Everyone walked away and said, "I get it, it was demonstrable,
and I want it."
And then the question we often get is: How do we think of this
in connection with existing investments we've made? And what
are those natural points of integration--whether it's
process or other technology decisions--that bring it all
together?
So, executive support a hypothesis of value, and then
mindful in terms of how it's playing into the enterprise.
And Ben, this next question for you, what strategies are proving
to be most effective?
I think it actually is starting with that process.
It's to say, you know, not everything starts with GenAI
or AI.
It starts with, you know, I--it starts with that process.
And if you try to build intelligence off a broken
process, you're not going to get very far.
And so, really, actually being process led and strategy led
there and then ultimately bringing together your
stakeholders.
I know Susan said having the executive support, but what
we're seeing from some of our research is drastically
different expectations across technology teams and business
teams in both the investments that they want to put in as well
as the return that they expect to see out of it, not to mention
the readiness that they see.
It's funny for a sales organization to say we're ready
for GenAI
only to be saying, you know, an IT organization, you know, we've
got to work on the data in the infrastructure there.
And Susan, from a product perspective, what innovations at
Salesforce are you most excited about?
Agentforce. So the product launch that we did today was so
impactful in terms of our next step in the frontier of
generative AI.
When we launched 18 months ago, it was very deliberately around
human in the loop and in an employee facing.
And with the stuff that we built out with our AI automation and
our reasoning engine, which we call Atlas,
and some of the techniques that we have for putting guardrails
and process around it,
is really unlocking all sorts of capacity in terms of the ability
for people to go aggressively with AI.
And not just in terms of more use cases for their employees,
but to take this stuff externally to their customers
with these agentic or these autonomous applications.
Thank you so much.