generative ai salesforce: Excited with what generative AI will bring to our business: Salesforce CIO

Companies are reevaluating their tech spends and looking to extract maximum value from their investments in light of the overall economic environment, said Juan Perez, chief information officer at customer relationship management software maker Salesforce.

“CIOs all over are focusing on finding efficiencies, making sure that we implement technologies like automation, and other capabilities to really enable teams to improve their productivity and efficiency,” Perez told ET in an interview. Alongside, there is a shift towards investing in emerging technologies, which will make the business future ready.

Salesforce has over 700 employees in India that are a part of Perez’s team, and he was recently in the country to take stock of the work being done out of India.

“India plays a key role in achieving our goals of building a better IT organisation to support the needs of the customers and the company for the future. The talent here makes it a great place for us to do both—continue to improve our capabilities to build technology, but also do it in a cost effective manner,” said Perez.

Perez, who is also responsible for the internal digital transformation at Salesforce, said internally, the company was actively looking for ways to reduce expenses and improve operating margins, while reinvesting in the business.

For Salesforce, a lot of these investments are going into areas like bringing generative AI into its products and platforms, The company is embedding more AI-based tools into its platforms as well as tools that it uses internally. In March it released Einstein GPT, a generative AI tool for customer experience management.

“It is essential to keep an eye on the future—keep an eye on what’s going on with generative AI. Do a little bit of experimentation and start thinking about how these technologies can truly influence your business,” he said. The economic challenges would pass, and when that happens, it’s important not to be caught off-guard. As part of the IT organisation, the CIO has to support the needs of a business and not let it become a barrier towards supporting growth, he said.“I rarely get excited about some of these technologies but this time, I’m actually truly excited about what AI is going to bring to our business in terms of more capabilities to support our users, better user experiences within the company, and of course, efficiency again,” said Perez.

The company is using AI in its Sales Cloud to support the sales team to generate better leads and in its service cloud to support service agents in providing information to customers for different use cases.

The focus for the year ahead, for Perez, and most CIOs, he said, was to continue to deliver on the returns that are expected from the implementation of technology and creating real business value, while continuing to invest for the future.

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