Business dynamics have been severely shaken up by the introduction of generative artificial intelligence.

With Salesforce Inc., businesses can customize their workflows and processes with AI, increasing accessibility for nontechnical departments, including sales, marketing, customer service and finance. With its platform, the company is enabling customers to build and deploy customized and personalized experiences, according to Alice Steinglass (pictured), executive vice president and general manager of platform at Salesforce.

“What we see is that AI is now a CEO-level priority for every one of our customers,” she said. “Sales teams are looking at how they can auto-generate sales tasks, like composing emails. Service teams are talking about how they can auto-generate knowledge articles, working with marketing teams to dynamically generate personalized content.”

Steinglass spoke with theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier at Supercloud 4, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the importance of trust and data governance, ensuring AI is used both securely and responsibly, and how both small and large language models are reshaping the technology landscape.

Harnessing convenience

Recently, Salesforce composed a survey that reported over 45% of respondents would use generated AI more if it was already integrated into the technology they use. An example given was email, which now frequently suggests different responses based on what the user has typed and what was written in the original message, Steinglass explained. Businesses can use generative AI to create different types of email — including promotional, outreach and opportunities — but it requires the right data and configurations.

“What we want to do as an IT person or as a developer is figure out how do I get all that right data and connect it into the prompt in a programmatic way and then be able to activate that in the course of work so that it’s just in line,” she said. “What we’re doing at Salesforce is we’re building those tools. We’re building the prompt builder tool so that you can create that connection as a developer.”

A hot topic of controversy surrounding AI is the responsible use of the technology, which requires both governance and guardrails in place. At Salesforce, the customers own their own data, giving them complete control over it, with Salesforce only supplying the tools, Steinglass explained.

“We’re acting as a trusted custodian to help companies manage their data, and we also have to give them the tools so that they can have that same promise with their customers. They can guard and protect their customer’s data as they’re using it,” she said. “A lot of this base infrastructure of just having the right set of enterprise data governance in place for your data is critical, and it’s a starting point for using it with the AI.”

Keeping up with accelerating technology

When Steinglass talks to IT leaders and chief technology officers, the conversations frequently touch upon how these leaders want to leave space between themselves and new technology to give them time and space to understand, as technology accelerates faster than it ever has before.

“What we’re doing at Salesforce is we’re building an open platform with a bring-your-own-model as part of the core foundational piece so that you can play with these things,” she said. “As a developer, you can say, ‘Hey, I’m going to try training this with our data, with our specific scenario’ and see what that does.’ But the other thing we’ve seen is that in a lot of cases, you don’t need to. It is amazing what grounding with a generic large language model can accomplish.”

The conversation ended with the two discussing how data has changed. Whereas in the older days, enterprises relied on siloed data and data warehouses, now data is a part of the infrastructure and even the fabric of coding.

“At Salesforce, we’ve built a data cloud product that allows you to bring in that structured and unstructured data and to bring in the engagement data, all of these data from other sources, and leverage that as part of your AI, as part of your customer relationship management,” Steinglass said. “Being able to connect those dots together from the data into the CRM is a space where the engineer, the IT thinker, but also the line of business thinker can really think about, strategically, how do you connect these things together? A lot of these tools are low-code or no-code.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Supercloud 4:

Photo: SiliconANGLE