Paul O’Sullivan, Salesforce SVP Solutions Engineering and UKI Chief Technology Officer spoke to the Let’s Talk Data podcast about the importance of AI and data for driving customer loyalty and competitive advantage.
He also shared how Salesforce’s recently opened AI Centre in London will host Salesforce customers, partners and industry experts to collaborate and advance innovations in AI.
Why it matters: The UK AI market is expected to grow from 21 billion to more than 1 trillion dollars in the next 10 years. However, there’s a knowledge gap that needs to be addressed to be able to make the most of this opportunity. Recent Salesforce data revealed that while a third of UK workers are using or planning to use generative AI, 62% lack the skills to do so effectively and safely.
Salesforce perspective: O’Sullivan shared how Salesforce is helping organisations to operationalise AI and data and drive competitive advantage. Highlights include:
- Differentiating consumer and enterprise AI: “Large language models (LLMs) offer a huge opportunity to drive productivity and efficiency, but consumer AI is not fit for purpose for the enterprise. This is because open source LLMs are trained on publicly available data which can lead you to any kind of response. We believe we need to ground generative AI in contextual models that are relevant to the enterprise and if we do that, the accuracy of insights will improve.”
- Breaking silos with Salesforce Data Cloud: “Over the past few decades, we have created multiple enterprise applications and IT systems resulting in hundreds of data silos. With Salesforce Data Cloud we can help our customers bring all this data together. This supports the contextual understanding and the grounding of AI but also if organisations can service up relevant information to employees, they can better engage with their customers.”
- The importance of trust in unlocking AI’s value: “We are working with our customers to bring AI very close within the workflow of the business, so that they can continue to incrementally unlock value from AI and become more productive and efficient… To successfully do this, trust in AI is crucial. We need to make sure AI is relevant, meaningful and adds to the user experience.”
Trust in AI is crucial. We need to make sure AI is relevant, meaningful and adds to the user experience.
Paul O’Sullivan, Salesforce SVP Solutions Engineering and UKI CTO
Learn more:
- Watch the full interview here
- Learn more about Salesforce Data Cloud
- Read about the opening of Salesforce’s first AI Center
