So from streamlining operations to enhancing customer experiences, AI has become an indispensable tool for driving business transformation. And transformation is the key word in here. Organizations across industries are harnessing the power of AI to gain insights, optimize processes, and stay ahead of the competition. In this discussion, we'll delve into the intersection of AI and business transformation, exploring how AI technologies are revolutionizing traditional business models and paving the way for innovation. Please welcome our next panel of speakers, Clara Shi, CEO of Salesforce AI at Salesforce, and Nigel Vaz, CEO of Publicis Sapient. The moderator of the discussion is Jason Karyan, Business News Director at The New York Times. That's right. Hello, everybody. Great. Hi, I'm Jason. I'm from The New York Times, and I'm absolutely delighted to have Clara and Nigel with me today. We're just hearing about hopes and fears. I mean, this is not even Clara's first AI session today. And it's because it's what's happening. It's what everyone is talking about. And the flavor of what I want to hear from you today are how AI intersects with business transformation, as the title of the session goes. How big is the opportunity there for companies to do things better, faster, cheaper, deeper, et cetera, et cetera? What does it mean for jobs? What does it mean for trust, for ethics? What does it look like in practice? So I'm delighted to have these two business leaders with me today to talk about that. And so let's just jump right in to some real world applications here. Clara, at Salesforce, as I understand it, you kind of treat yourself as patient zero for a lot of these AI applications. And you apply them internally to test them out and get a feel before unleashing them onto your clients and the world. Can you just tell us a little bit about that and maybe what you've learned there and then how it's applied outside of Salesforce?
So first of all, it's amazing to be at my first event. Yeah. I don't think we can. Yeah, you're not on. Okay. We'll come back to you. We'll come back.
So, Nigel, this is where it's always fun when I can do this. You literally wrote the book on digital business transformation because that's the title of your 2021 book. Sure. But that was out BC, which is before ChatGPT 2021. Can you just tell us a bit about sort of now that you think about business transformation and AI is mixed in, like how your thinking has changed on that?
I think for me, the biggest recognition was that, you know, we always believe that the opportunity for business to reimagine itself was what business transformation was about. It was about moving from being a caterpillar to a butterfly, not a faster caterpillar, if you will. And I think AI has created the context within which now that reimagination has reached the consumer in every single organization in a way that meaningfully you can start to see the progressive leaps happening in a much shorter cycle. I think I lived through the Internet generation where when you started talking to CEOs about building a website, they were like, I don't know what a website is, but I know I need one back in the 90s. Right. Today, you have the same level of excitement and energy around AI, possibly even bigger, because I think there's real recognition that this is not just an ability to go faster, cheaper, but fundamentally reimagine businesses. And I think we're starting to see that happen all around us in very, very meaningful ways. We just worked with a 200-year-old institution, we were talking about being in London, the Royal Horticultural Society, which is a gardening charity run by the Queen. And basically, they now can take a picture of any flower and tell you the genus, tell you how to care for the flower, tell you what diseases there are, all at the touch of a button in a way that just combines computer vision and real intelligence about plant knowledge, as well as their incredible database on what to do to address all of the issues you're seeing. And I think every one of these examples, or for Marriott, we're helping people in words find holiday destinations in simple language, right, which we're just, is another evolution of describe your most amazing holiday. And while you describe it, we will show you what might fulfill that criteria. So I think these are, you know, steps that are showing people that that reimagination is totally possible.
Right. Great. Clara. Okay, we'll try this again. Patient Zero at Salesforce. What was it like using, I assume, the bleeding edge, the cutting edge of AI within Salesforce in your own job?
So first of all, I'm really excited to be here at my first VivaTech. It's just tremendous energy in the room and at the event. AI is the biggest disruption in our lifetimes. I believe that it's even bigger than the internet and cloud computing. And it's a pivotal moment at every tech company, including Salesforce. And so not only are we building AI products and applications and platforms for our customers to use, as you said, we ourselves are deploying AI into our operations across the company. And we call this program Salesforce on Salesforce. And it's a really great way to keep us honest, to make sure that our technology is delivering. And so across the board, whether it's our marketing team generating campaigns and landing pages, or it's our sales team, now all of our salespeople across Salesforce worldwide are using Einstein Co-Pilot to be able to securely access data, ask questions of their data, access business processes from within Salesforce in a trusted way, all the way to our customer support team, driving higher efficiency and productivity through both our self-service experience. So customers being able to answer their own questions and access their own workflows, as well as helping augment our customer support engineers so that they can answer questions and resolve issues 10%, 20% faster than before.
Great. And so what I'm hearing there is like sales conversions, resolving queries, that sort of thing. Is that what you would consider the low-hanging fruit right now? And if we had to talk about opportunities, what's next? And then what's like a moonshot application of AI when it comes to the transformation, to the change projects, to that sort of genre?
Yes, it's very early days. I always say that we're living in, is this like 1998 for AI? And so as you see with any new disruptive technology, the first wave is we're changing how people spend their day. We're automating mundane tasks, repetitive tasks. We're seeing that again across sales, service, marketing, commerce, and really every class of knowledge worker across the board. And so we are driving more efficiency. We're also driving greater performance. I mean, there's been this kind of age-old aspiration to get every salesperson behaving and performing like your very best salesperson, getting every customer support agent as knowledgeable as your very best customer support agent. And AI is actually helping us do that, and we're seeing that play out in the numbers. Usually as technology then diffuses more and becomes more mature in these deployments, then we start to reimagine, as Nigel was saying, entire departments. And then usually the final phase as the technology really gets mature is that you invent new business models, just like we went from license on-premise technology to Salesforce pioneering software as a service 20 years ago. And we're going to see the same thing happen with AI.
Yeah, great. Nigel, does that ring true?
Absolutely. Just building on that conversation, I think for me, we're at a point now where we're starting to teach people how to be augmented in a very real sense, right? So it's not just you, but it's you and how you're augmented. And I think that is almost this idea of creating a physical and digital being, so a memory that now spans everything that you ever wanted to hold in your head, sight that allows you to process images significantly faster, language comprehension beyond your innate capabilities as a person. And I think when you think about that in the context of organizations, it creates an incredible platform for reimagination to the point that Clara was talking about, because I think you're at a point in time where you're not just incrementally moving things forward, you're fundamentally reimagining things. So how do you take car design from 18 months to 18 weeks? Or Salesforce and us did a piece of work to transform the LA Public Defender's Office, which is basically the public defender's office that provides legal aid to people who can't afford aid, and transforming the outcomes for people by matching lawyers with the data that they need about the cases that they're solving, or potentially matching them to the right cases. And those kinds of transformations literally are lifesaving. So when you start to think about moonshots, you're like, how awesome would it be if my doctor was not just relying on years of med school and pattern recognition, but was augmented as a person with every single pattern related to the treatment or the course of action? We've got hospitals today instrumented, providing them that kind of information, or radiologists who are not referring people to biopsies, but getting definitive views, being augmented by AI about whether something is likely to be malignant or not. I mean, these are life-changing ideas, and they're in play now. So if this, as Clara was saying, is the first wave, you can only start to project how quickly we'll get to a very different future than we grew up in.
Right. So that all sounds very exciting. Previous session was talking about hopes and fears. So let's talk about maybe the fears there. Within the business transformation realm, what could go wrong here? Clara?
Well, I think we're already starting to see a lot of what can go wrong. I mean, AI, especially generative AI, there are a lot of unknown unknowns. And to this day, despite all the smart researchers that are working in this space, we don't actually know ultimately how transformers work. Massive opportunity here for you to start to rethink yourself as not just me, but me in the context of a world that is augmented by all of this capability.
Got it, yeah. There's a very interesting booth from Moet out there about sommeliers, AI sommeliers, which I hadn't thought of that. It's kind of like your horticulture idea.
And it's not unlike in the 90s. Everyone had to learn how to Google search. Everyone had to learn how to use email. For a lot of people, that felt frightening at the time. And now we look back and we kind of can't believe we ever didn't have that. I think the same is going to be true with AI. I think it starts in K-12 education. It's been a long time since we've reformed education in many countries, including in Europe and across the Americas. And AI is going to force us to be able to have to rethink what those skill sets are in the future. And then it's also then a lifelong learning journey, because AI is continuously evolving. And whatever we know about it today, in just a few weeks, in just a few months, it literally becomes obsolete. And just to say one thing I'm really proud of the Salesforce team having done here is we open sourced our AI curriculum that we developed for our own employees. And we made it available for free on Trailhead, which is our free online learning platform. And since we launched our first set of AI courses last summer, over a million badges and certifications have been earned by our customers, our partners, and just members of the general public. So I think there is that hunger and desire for people to continuously upskill.
I think so. I think the biggest skill now is to learn, unlearn, and relearn, because everything that you learn is going to need to be unlearned soon enough, and then relearned in a different context. So the value is actually how do you keep that constant cycle of learn, unlearn, and relearn. Because literally what you learn to do a few months ago is needing to be unlearned at the speed of change and the rate of change continues to accelerate.
And to update your LinkedIn profile, I guess, is kind of what you're getting at, too. So to wrap it up, we talked about the impact of AI. We talked a little bit about the risks and ethics and trust issues about jobs. To conclude my sort of final question, two-part question, if we had this session at this time next year, A, would we still have our jobs because of AI? And B, what would we be talking about when it comes to AI and business transformation in May 2025?
I believe that we will still have our jobs in 12 months, but how we spend our day and how we spend our weeks is going to look very different. And that's a good thing. I think a lot of us, if we took stock of how we spend our time at work and personally, there is still a lot of kind of rote work that's going on. And a lot of that is going to go away. And I mean, it's incumbent on us to keep learning, keep experimenting as these technologies evolve. In terms of the specifics, I think that the steepness of the change curve right now is so great that we can't actually answer that question. 12 months is an eternity. And if you think back 12 months ago, the reality we were living in, I mean, to be here where we are, where we have real multimodal models that are working fully in production, deployed in actual customer situations, I don't think any of us would have had the audacity to think that would happen. And I think the next 12 months it's going to be even faster.
Absolutely. For me, I think the frame we think about from a transformation perspective is this acronym I call SPEED. So being really clear on what your strategy is, having a very focused product agenda, being really thoughtful about the kind of experiences you're designing, obsessed about engineering because I think more and more as much as we are augmenting engineers, we're going to need more of them to build this digital world around us. And then the D is the data and AI component of that, the underlying fact that your organization is a living, ever transforming entity. And then I think the same thing applies, as I was saying, to people, because I think 12 months from now, I might be able to play some musical instruments that I couldn't play today. I might be able to do a lot of things that I couldn't do because I'm just that much more able with the tools that are augmenting my own learning journey to be able to do stuff. And I think that's just incredibly fascinating because I think as you see how organizations and people develop, the cycles and the leaps forward will be exponential as opposed to linear.
Great. I look forward to hearing that perhaps next year. Thank you so much. It was a very illuminating conversation. Thanks a lot to Clara and Nigel, and thank you all for listening, and have a great rest of Evitech.
Thank you.
Thank you.
All right.