Clara Shih (Salesforce): 'The opportunity is enormous'
On the 61st floor of the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco: an interview with AI chief Clara Shih on Einstein Copilot and Salesforce's all-in AI push at Dreamforce 2023.
On the 61st floor of the Salesforce Tower I conducted one of the interviews with the best view over Silicon Valley. AI chief Clara Shih explains how the company is putting its entire product line onto AI – while 40,000 people pour into the Dreamforce conference below.
What is at stake
Salesforce founder Marc Benioff is making AI the top priority at his company. “Artificial intelligence is the future,” he announces at Dreamforce 2023. At the same time Salesforce is under pressure: ten per cent of the workforce laid off, co-CEO Brad Taylor gone, activist investors on board. Benioff needs a success story – and is betting on the Einstein Copilot, integrated across all Salesforce products.
Why this is supposed to save Salesforce
Salesforce software helps companies around the world manage customer relationships – sales, marketing, customer service and collaboration via the 28-billion-dollar acquisition of Slack. Clara Shih tells me: “Never before has it been so easy for an employee to have instant access to all information about a customer.” The Einstein Copilot handles routines: drafting emails, summarising meetings, preparing proposals, transcribing videos. Behind it stand language models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Salesforce’s own models.
What the fight against SAP looks like
The challenge targets German rival SAP directly. While Salesforce demonstrates broad AI integration with Einstein, SAP has so far held back noticeably. Many SAP board members were in San Francisco in the weeks before Dreamforce – but Walldorf has not yet presented a competitive product. Benioff is using the momentum to defend CRM leadership with AI. Which provider becomes the better enterprise AI partner will be decided in the next twelve months.
What does not quite shine
Scepticism lingers behind Benioff’s announcements. Some customers report maturity problems with the new AI products in internal tests. Benioff is known for making big promises that are not always fully delivered. And the company’s home city of San Francisco remains an ambivalent base: Benioff had temporarily considered moving Dreamforce because of the city’s drug and homelessness crisis. This time he praises the tidy city and asks: “Why doesn’t San Francisco always look like this?”
I wrote the full interview and analysis for Handelsblatt.