Salesforce and AI – Your Long-Term Career Path

This has certainly been the year of ‘GPT’, kicked off by Einstein GPT being unveiled – and with the Salesforce AI Cloud roadmap including no less than 16 capabilities rolling out in fast succession.  

With use cases including Slack, sales, service, marketing, commerce, and app builders, Salesforce are ‘covering all bases’, bringing generative AI to an array of personas across the organization that you already support in improving their work-lives. 

Salesforce and AI

As a Salesforce professional, you may be wondering what your role is in the whirlwind of change that’s happening. The C-suite is certainly talking about how they are going to incorporate AI. As heard from a panel of Salesforce executives, the conversations that are happening between executive-to-executive are leading to a new ‘innovation cycle’. 

It’s the “how are we going to incorporate AI?” question that provides a golden opportunity for Salesforce professionals to step up as a key stakeholder in this fast-moving technology. Generative CRM has made the promise (and has been proven during the closed pilots that Salesforce have conducted) to make every employee more productive, and every customer experience better. 

Organizations like yours don’t want to be left behind, so let’s see how Salesforce technologists can take advantage of this golden opportunity.  

Salesforce Professionals are Well Positioned

Salesforce acknowledges that they have an incredible community of Salesforce professionals that advocate for how Salesforce technology is transformative (that’s why we’re called Trailblazers, and now TrAIlblazers). Why we’re perfectly suited for the impending transformation boils down to how each organization’s Salesforce org differs from one to the next: 

• We understand our business, particularly the workflows of our users. 
• We understand our data – what’s stored, and how – and how our system architecture works (including integrated systems).

Patrick Stokes, EVP & GM of the Platform at Salesforce, is at the forefront of Salesforce’s AI developments, but still maintains a Salesforce Developer’s perspective. 

“They [Salesforce Admins/Developers, etc.] are perfectly suited for up-leveling AI out across their organization. It’s an incredible opportunity for those people that represent those roles. That is certainly top of mind for me, as a developer.”

Patrick Stokes, EVP & GM, Platform at Salesforce

Intentional Friction

Salesforce is taking an intentional friction approach – in other words, no outputs from generative AI are being automatically applied into users’ workflows, requiring a ‘human in the loop’ at every stage. This leads to the need for change management, to guide organizations in implementing and adopting changes, and then iterating upon them over time. 

Salesforce says that they are being very intentional about adding friction in order for admins and other hands-on professionals to share in the understanding of how models are being used. This is another reason as to why we’re becoming stakeholders in the AI transformation.

The Appetite to Experiment

What is heard continuously from many C-suites is the appetite to experiment with use cases for generative AI. The trouble is knowing where to get started: which processes to automate? Can the data be trusted? How have the large language models (LLMs) been trained? Plus, the aspect of change management (as already raised above) is another stumbling block for getting started with experimentation. Again, those that are ‘close’ to their Salesforce org will be prime stakeholders in delivering successful experimentation.     

Skill Highlight: Prompt Engineering

Salesforce have announced Prompt Studio which will enable admins to create prompt templates, choose how they want to ‘ground’ the prompts in Salesforce data, and activate them for users quickly and easily. 

This is to enable admins in what’s called ‘prompt engineering’ – giving them control over how their users are instructing generative AI, and helping users get to the most optimal results for their query. However, Prompt Studio is only the tool – prompt engineering is a skill that requires both a technical understanding (data, data models, system infrastructure), and a softer skill understanding of how humans interact with technology. In other words, how they converse and what they would expect as an output from a large language model. 

Patrick Stokes compared this to search engine optimization, where the objective is for users to enter a query, and expect the optimal result. However, as he added, prompt engineering is like that, but ramped up 10 or 15 levels. 

“It’s more than just asking the question – it’s sourcing the data that you need to put into the question/instructions, so I think that’s why the ‘engineering’ word is there. It’s more than just the question – it’s the connectivity.”

Patrick Stokes, EVP & GM, Platform at Salesforce

What Patrick is getting at here is the ability to connect to your data model (via Data Cloud), and, with a set of instructions, bring data together and figure out how to attach that to the workflow of your users.  

Salesforce sees ‘prompt engineering’ and Prompt Studio as an effective way that organizations can rapidly roll generative AI out, thanks to Salesforce Admins (and other Salesforce professionals) who know their orgs like the ‘back of their hands’. 

Emerging C-Suite Roles

We’ve already seen how we can step up in our organizations to deliver effective and responsible AI usage in our day-to-day. 

If your aim is the C-suite, then there are a number of existing and emerging roles:

• Chief Data Officers: Existing today, Chief Data Officers look at and manage what data is required to execute the business’ overriding objectives. That could include what types of data, where and how it flows in and out of systems, and how to treat data to ensure that it’s appropriately protected and leveraged for initiatives, like personalization.  
• Chief Ethics Officers: Also existing today, this executive ensures ethical use of AI on not only a longer term, but also on a daily basis with the support of their team. This means understanding how users are exploring, interacting with, and deploying AI.
  Salesforce says that they also have an obligation. In using their technology, they want to ensure that decision-making is transparent – clear, open, and available to people. We’ve heard that we should expect to see more momentum in terms of skills and capabilities. 
• Chief UI Officers: Are uncommon but are likely to be required because the user interface (how users interact with the underlying system) is changing.
• Chief AI Officers: Considering the roles above, and the explosion of generative AI in businesses, it’s likely that this executive is required that in some respects, blends responsibilities of the preceding three in the list. 

“Probably 12 months from now, we’ll be sitting here talking to some of them.”

Patrick Stokes, EVP & GM, Platform at Salesforce

Going Further: In-Demand AI Skills

Upskilling is critical across wide swaths of these emerging technologies. As a result of the rise in AI and automation, people leaders say data security skills (60%), ethical AI and automation skills (58%), and programming skills (57%) will become increasingly important in the workplace. When asked what ‘soft’ skills will likely be more important as a result, people leaders ranked creative imaginative skills (56%), customer relationship skills (53%), and leadership skills (51%) highest (Salesforce Research – New Study Reveals Only 1 in 10 Global Workers Have In-Demand AI Skills).

Summary

With AI dominating not only Salesforce but the wider tech market, there has never been a more exciting time to get equipped with the skills and knowledge to make the best of use of this not-so-futuristic tool. With Salesforce taking AI in its stride, there’s plenty to explore here right in the ecosystem.

Take the time to think about how you’re positioned at the forefront of integrating generative AI with people’s work-lives, and where this could propel you in the future. After all, it’s still early days, and the possibilities could be limitless.