Diving briefs:
- Salesforce CEO and Financial Officer Robin Washington is leaning on artificial intelligence and accelerating preparation for revenue calls to settle in her new role, the executive said in the AI virtual roundtable.
- Among other purposes, Washington said it will use AI tools to analyze data and summarize information that will help you focus your message.
- “We use a lot of AI to understand what is happening in competitive terms, not just the questions our company predecessors were asked,” Washington said at an August 7 press event. With AI, the time it takes to prepare for revenue calls “is reduced to time rather than days,” she told reporters.
Dive Insights:
Salesforce announced in February that it had appointed Washington, a member of the board since 2013, to serve as the newly created role of “COFO.”
The company said at the time that then-Coo Brian Milham was planning to retire. At the time, CFO Amy Weaver was ready to leave her post after he announced plans to resign earlier.
According to Washington, the decision to combine the two roles is to allow the tech giant to “decompose the silo” and move at a greater speed.
“I think COFO organizations will be a much more effective business partner to support and fuel their businesses in a variety of ways,” she told an AI roundtable that includes PayPal CFO Jamie Miller.
Miller said her team is using AI agents to create internal content centered around data analytics and create the first draft of “executive-level material that actually summarises the strategy.” Both she and Washington said their teams have not yet used AI to generate documents such as the Public 10-K Form, which the Securities and Exchange Commission requires.
Salesforce has convened the event to highlight research that shows CFOs are becoming more bullish when AI adoption occurs.
Of the 261 CFOs surveyed worldwide, only 4% reported having a conservative AI strategy from 70% in 2020.
“This rapid transformation underscores the broader perception among financial leaders that AI is no longer a new technology, but a key tool for increasing efficiency, optimizing operations, and critically promoting long-term growth,” according to a summary of the findings.
Respondents said they hope that AI agents in particular will increase the company's revenue by almost 20%. On average, CFOs reported that they allocated 25% of their current total AI budget to agents.
Salesforce is one of the leading high-tech companies that are making big bets on the future of agent AI technology. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff shows plans to deploy 1 billion agents by the end of 2025.
