Salesforce co-founder and Slack CTO Parker Harris discusses whether conversational AI agents will render traditional enterprise SaaS and GUIs obsolete.
Insight
Harris: 90% AI reliability is insufficient for enterprise business
“As you know, Alex, like this technology can work, you know, maybe five times out of 10, seven times, nine times out of 10. But in business, you know, you need that predictability and that assurance that it's not going to mess with your brand. It's not going to…”
Disclosure
Harris: Salesforce Needs Fewer Support Reps Due to Agentforce Automation
“We actually, because this help.sale, the agent for us on the website is really helping us with this, you know, super simple support scenarios. We don't need as many support reps to do that job. What we do need is to retrain a lot of those people and get them i…”
Opinion
Harris: Generative AI is bigger than the internet, mobile, and cloud shifts
“But I really think generative AI is bigger than all of that because we've had to completely retool our product strategy and our company and we're still in the middle of it.”
Opinion
Harris: Salesforce risks being leapfrogged without fast agentic AI adoption
“If we don't go fast enough in this world of agentic AI, Some competitor will leverage us, leverage it to skip past us, and we're not gonna allow that to happen.”
Opinion
Harris: Best AI innovations happen in post-training as data runs out
“It does seem like post training is where the best innovations are happening now and the pre-training and the amount of data, like they've, we've used up a lot of the data. They're trying to create synthetic data to try to improve model performance.”
Insight
Harris: Corporate DIY AI implementations have suffered widespread failure
“So it was DIY all over the place. And there's a lot of failure in that. You know, it was, it, at first it was like, oh, so cool. Look at what it can do. But again, that repeatability, that trust, that security, the data access, all the things we've talked abou…”