Salesforce, a global player in the customer relationship management (CRM) market, like many other technology giants, has made a number of announcements around generative AI. Arundhati Bhattacharya, Chairman and CEO of Salesforce India, said: business line On the growth potential the company sees in its generative AI products. Edited excerpt:
How does Salesforce see its Generative AI offering? Given all the announcements, do you think this new technology is more than just hype?
We all think generative AI has immense potential, and as new versions of generative AI come out, the potential will only get better. I understand there was a lot of discussion about other solutions, but the hype was way ahead. A real solution on the market. But the general feeling is that that won’t happen with generative AI. GenAI has many applications, and sooner or later those applications will be commercialized.
AI has been around for a long time, but what differentiates it from generative AI is that it uses a large language model that can give you a prompt and get an answer. Its ability to retrieve data points from any large set of documents is far superior to previous artificial intelligence models.
Also read: How do we solve the ‘thick problem’ called Gen AI?
How does Salesforce address corporate concerns about the use of proprietary data, its privacy, and security?
All our GPT-introduced products have a layer of trust, the data you use remains yours and we are not allowed to train language models on that data. There are technologies that have access to large language models but do not allow the use of the data. One of the biggest challenges companies face is the inability to leverage their customer’s data, so we ensure how it is done. It should be used responsibly and not abused. So they don’t want to take responsibility for them.
There are three questions companies typically ask. How confident are you that your data will not be misused, what will happen to pricing, what will happen to liabilities. We are aware of the fact that these questions exist. We don’t have all the answers, but when it comes to trust, privacy, and confidentiality, we are firmly committed to this. We ensure that a sufficient amount of security and firewalls are provided to prevent your data from being lost to others when our products are in operation.
Also read: Generative AI: A New Era of Misinformation
How do you think generative AI will impact your job?
Every time there is a disruptive change, certain types of jobs are lost while others are created. That being said, I don’t think emotional intelligence can be replaced by any machine. I find it very difficult to say that human emotional intelligence will be replaced by the insensible.
What new upskilling initiatives will be introduced?
We have started working on improving our AI skills, and the materials are being prepared and will be available soon. Many upskilling initiatives are introduced first for employees and then for ecosystems such as partners and customers. We have a learning platform called Trailhead, and it’s mostly free. We plan to put it all on Trailhead for the entire ecosystem to train on.
Also read: Microsoft Launches Free Generative AI Skills Training Course
