The future of Salesforce, between artificial intelligence and attention to diversity
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In March 2020, when the world locked itself into the pandemic lockdown, with the roads blocked and the ban on leaving the house, shift 50,000 employees worldwide from office to home work it was like flipping a switch: “A weekend exercise.” The reason? “We were already a digital native company.” On the business card of Vala Afshar it says “Chief Digital Evangelist”. He is the digital ambassador of Salesforce, the cloud enterprise software giant. He has a home in Boston, Iranian roots and an office in the digital cloud. Afshar calls himself a ‘double immigrant’: together with his parents he emigrated to the USA at the age of ten, after the fall of the Shah of Persia. But he’s also a middle-aged gentleman who travels the planet talking about digital despite being born into an analog world: he is an immigrant in the USA but he is also and above all a “digital immigrant”. “I’m not a digital native – he says in Milan, passing through for the annual event organized by Salesforce with its customers and partners – because I was not born with digital technologies. Instead, I adapted and changed with the world. This is also the case with companies that may be immigrants. Salesforce was born in the cloud, already fully digital, in 1999. But today, in our hyperconnected economy, a lot of things have changed. However, it must be clear that it is not the technologies that make the difference, but the people and their culture”.
Teaching innovation
Afshar’s job is just that: teaching how to do digital innovation. In the interest of your company, certainly, but also in that of potential customers, who are the first to benefit from a transformation to the cloud that requires much more and much more than a software to install or a new server to rent. Instead, technology relies on motivation. “It’s not enough – he says – for customers to love your products or, in our case, our cloud services. If your employees don’t love you too, nothing works. This is why I like to talk about “employee-centered company“, Of “customer company“. For us and for our customers. It’s a matter of corporate culture which is fundamental but you don’t define it with service orders. A company’s culture is what people say about their work when the manager leaves the room “.
Salesforce continues to grow for 24 years under the leadership of Marc Benioff (who appears to be organizing his succession at the top of the company). In 2021 it was the largest software company in the world by market capitalization ($250 billion), has grown from 5 million in revenue in 1999 to more than 21 billion in 2021, with 150,000 customers of its management software worldwide, including large companies such as Coca-Cola, Unilever, Amazon and Adidas. All online, because the company sells its software as a service via the cloud: nothing to install, nothing to bring to the company.
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Artificial intelligence
The future passes through artificial intelligences and, with a number of agreements with OpenAISalesforce is putting AI into its products: Einstein GPT bring the tools of generative intelligence inside Customer 360, Tableau, MuleSoft and Slack. Tableau (data analysis and visualization software) e Slack (collaborative chat for customers) are two excellent examples of how AI is used: they automate the procedures for analyzing and selecting information in a way that could not be done mechanically by traditional software. For example, Slack, the corporate chat software similar in concept to WhatsApp organized groups. It’s not just about asking SlackGPT inside Slack what is the latest data on a given business. Today, looking for the meaning of a discussion in thousands of interventions perhaps over several weeks, or a specific version of a document shared and modified several times, is practically impossible. Here he intervenes SlackGPT: just ask him what is the point of the discussion and in an instant the synthesis of thousands of man-hours of research and data analysis arrives. “AIs – says Afshar – support and help to reduce noise and increase the definition of the signal, i.e. the information we need. They help to navigate the flowwhich is very important because all businesses, like people, are in a state of flux, not static.”
Listening
With the pandemic, hundreds of millions of people have discovered that they could use the internet differently both for your life and for your work. If in many countries there has been an explosion in e-commerce, on the other hand there has also been the discovery of working from home, of the possibility of revolutionizing the times and spaces of life. Which, after the pandemic, helped pave the way for phenomena such as “Silent Quitting” (workers who gradually decrease their commitment to the company) e the “Great Resignation” (actual resignation). Phenomena to which, according to Afshar, he responds with corporate values and pride in his work, linclusion and the ability to listen to take the bias out of the software. That is, those “bias” that create errors that are sometimes traumatic for those who use them. “A world guided – he says – increasingly by technology, with algorithms that codify our ideas and our beliefs needs innovation, of course, but also of inclusion of diversitybecause it can’t just be 50 middle-aged white men writing all the algorithms. Otherwise we remain frozen in their prejudices. And then there’s sustainability, because the planet is one of the key stakeholders in everything we do, inside and outside the company”.
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The diversity
The concept of flow is at the heart of the idea of innovation and growth according to Afshar, but he also sees the need to continue listening to people to help them learn: “Today 54% of humanity has access to the internet. It’s an incredible achievement, but there’s still a lot to do. Every 10 seconds in India a person connects to the network for the first time. There is still so much room to grow. And to make our society more inclusive we need to create algorithms with less bias. To do this, the only way is increase the diversity of experiences and thoughts of the people who work in the company. One thing that, among other things, gives a competitive advantage to those who do it because the more different and unique you are, the more successful you are”. The most difficult thing about this process? It is not learning new things, but forgetting those “No one loses their job to an AI. Instead, it is lost when someone else knows how to use AI and we don’t. For this one must understand that the cycle is “learn, unlearn and relearn“. And the hardest part is always unlearning, because we follow old habits even when we would have the chance to learn new amazing things. Real change is unlearning“.
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