Salesforce's AI chief says companies are frustrated by generative AI’s unreliability, such as hallucinations, or when AI spouts incorrect or biased information, and that the problem keeps many of them from widely releasing products that incorporate it.
That leads to a broader question for businesses, Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI, said on stage at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference in Park City, Utah, on Monday: "Do I trust AI to drive business?’” For many, the answer isn't so simple. “Companies come to us and they want to know how they can really deploy these solutions in a way that actually moves the needle," she explained.
Salesforce is well-positioned to tackle this challenge, Shih argued, because customers already have entrusted their data and business processes with Salesforce over the years. “It provides this ideal grounding for the AI to really inject the context that's needed for the models really to be able to perform,” she said.
Shih, who was appointed as the company’s first-ever head of AI just a few months after OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, said trust is critical for all of today’s generative AI—even beyond core trust issues such as data security and data privacy. She emphasized that Salesforce is implementing all of its AI internally, which helps the company understand their customers' concerns. "We like to drink our own martinis," Shih joked. "It's bumpy at times, but I really like that accountability of us being customer zero."
Salesforce has actually been developing AI to help clients, who primarily use its software for customer service, sales, and automating their marketing, since releasing its original Einstein AI product in 2016. Inspired by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff's admiration for Albert Einstein, it was focused on predictive AI, which was cutting edge technology at the time.
A few months after OpenAI's buzzy ChatGPT launched in November 2022, Salesforce debuted EinsteinGPT, one of the first chatbots from a major company to be based on a large language model. Salesforce followed up with a variety of other AI products including Einstein Copilot, Copilot Studio, Prompt Builder, RAG, Hybrid Search, and Einstein Trust Layer.
On Monday, Shih touted a new planned offering called Einstein Service Agent, a chatbot specifically designed to be used by customer service agents. The chatbot is trained on a company's data and can easily hand off its work to a human customer service agent if needed. Shih said the chatbot's focus may be expanded beyond customer service in the future.
But, she added, trust is key for these types of products—and trust itself depends on the specific context in which the tools are being used. For example, she said, “Do I trust the AI to help me figure out which customers to call on this order?" and "Do I trust the AI to help me answer customers’ questions" using Salesforce's new chatbot? Clearly, at least for Salesforce, Shih insists the answer is yes.
