Clara Shih, head of AI at Salesforce, was the first of several panelists who offered insight into the many obstacles facing generative AI for big businesses. Salesforce, she said, was seeing “a surge in demand for predictive AI” in its current products—the company has long branded “Einstein” as an early-generation AI—but a lot of work remains in helping customers systematically identify where AI “can unlock the biggest bottlenecks in ROI.” She noted a lot of opportunities in customer support, sales, and marketing teams, which could be far more productive with better tools. She related a story about how the fashion brand Gucci had reinvigorated its high-touch customer support operations with the help of AI.
But Salesforce customers, she said, often feel overwhelmed on where to start: “Companies get really excited, and there are board-level mandates, and they sometimes take an LLM and slap it on their data,” she said. But that’s a recipe for hallucinations.
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