This is the 61st in a series of business tips from industry leaders that Enterprise Times has interviewed.
Enterprise Times recently spoke to Bill Patterson, EVP and General Manager, of Applications at Salesforce, about generative AI across the Salesforce Application clouds. During the conversation, he talked about what leaders should ask themselves when they consider deploying generative AI solutions.
“As leaders, we need to ask more questions about human employment and the labour side of what will AI represent for our businesses globally. Back in January, you saw following the Twitter conversion to X, the company, a lot of leaders were like, maybe we could become more efficient as a result of the technology that’s here. My first sets of conversations earlier in the year around service were – can we use this to reduce 40% of our staff? We said, why would you want to do that?
“(The response) was, well, we think we have too much staff and like what you have. (We said) then you really don’t understand what your team is actually doing. We learned this with Gucci, and what we learned with Gucci early in the year is they’re very averse to using automation to eliminate employment, very adverse.
“What they did, though, is they shifted the labour that their agents did when we created more capacity. They went from updating addresses to making product suggestions and recommendations. That ended up creating an opportunity for service to become part of enriching the relationship experience, not just solving problems, but creating opportunities.
“I definitely think that’s the big shift that will be there. We had this era of social. Prior to the era of social, there was no such thing as a social media manager. I think there will be a world of AI where we have an AI coach, AI optimizer or AI administrator that I think will create great new jobs. That’s the kind of thing that we need to start thinking about, not just the potential to destroy or take away but what does it really allow us to create that I think is going to be very, very profound for us to think through.”
