In a tech-led world, the evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been rapid – from predictive AI that analyses large data sets to forecast future outcomes, to generative AI that creates new content like text, images and music, and now to agentic AI which can not only generate content but also be conversational and autonomously act and react to dynamic situations.
The role of humans at work has become more interesting and creative than ever before in an AI-empowered world. Agentic AI is expected to transform industries like healthcare, finance and manufacturing – AI agents capable of independent action and decision-making will act as digital labour and are expected to improve many aspects of work from productivity, efficiency to strategic decision-making and even job satisfaction.
The latest episode of Mint’s series All About AI brought together the humans who build these AI Agents. This includes senior technology and product leaders from Salesforce including Saloni Borar, Vice President (VP), User Interface/ User Experience, Vinod Shah, VP, Software Engineering, Parul Jain, VP, Software Engineering and Vaijayanth MK, VP, Product Management, who shared their insights on this new disruption, what it means for the workforce and the backend of how these agents are put together.
Watch the full episode below,
Envisioning the right product
Fundamental to the success of any feature or technology or product is a good understanding of the market and the customers. This helps design the right kind of user experience, which is critical to adoption of any technology.
“It is a no brainer across industries that AI is driving massive disruptions, whether you talk about healthcare, manufacturing, automotive, every other industry. But, the excitement is also complemented with skepticism because if I talk to start-up founders, or even for the big manufacturing and automotive customers, or CXOs, the question is two-fold. There are a lot of things agents can do, but when we talk about enterprise scale applications and products, how are you going to take care of customer data?” said Vaijayanth.
Simplicity in design
Working very closely with the product team is design, which forms a core element of any product especially if it is a new one, as it needs to meet the needs of the target audience. At Salesforce, different departments – like product, engineering, research – collaborate to develop new products and solutions with the customer at the core of it. The job of the design team is to ensure that everything is coming together as planned.
“One of the key things, especially around the agentic era is trust. It is also the number one value at Salesforce and the design team takes it very seriously. With trust comes simplicity. When something is new, there are challenges. Making it simplified is one of the top goals for our design teams. We do not reinvent something just because it needs to be different,” said Borar.
Creating a digital workforce
On the product side, one of the key products for Salesforce is Marketing Cloud, which now has built-in AI adaptations and agents. The aim here is to develop a product which ensures data safety as it automates manual tasks and helps create a digital work force for the customer.
“Every single brand out there is powered by Salesforce when it comes to sending marketing campaigns. And the beauty of the agentic era is how do we cut the marketers time to the minimal and still offer a personalised customer experience in a trusted manner. We build systems that are safe, because data is not our product,” said Shah.
Data at the core
Data is at the core of every solution. Another Salesforce product – Data Cloud – contains meta data which can be leveraged by all the products that are offered. Then, there is also the flagship product – Sales Cloud, which is the Salesforce CRM solution.
“Sales Cloud is all about seller productivity. Sellers want to be productive, they want to save their time, but ultimately, they want to sell more. And, today, with the advent of generative AI and predictive AI, we can do a lot more for our sellers because we can have this whole agentic workforce out there to help our sellers.
Team collaboration
In today’s times when technology is advancing so fast, solution development is based on products – the teams choose the right technology that fits the problem that a seller is facing. All the different teams work in close collaboration, right from product development to sales and after sales, to ensure customer satisfaction at every level.
“There is the demand for features by customers, and one can never have enough features. And, then, there is the reality of what can be delivered. So, that is where the great collaboration between all of the teams plays a significant part, because you have to prioritise what will give the biggest chance of customer success, and then you go with that. It’s a very good process that we have to enable doing that,” said Sanket Atal.
Disclaimer: This is a Mint editorial initiative, sponsored by Salesforce.