Executive Sales Leader Briefing: Your Company and Artificial Intelligence

This week I’m in San Franscisco with 170,000 other people attending the Dreamforce conference, the mega conference hosted by Salesforce.

For the last 5 years, I’ve been one of the speakers for their Sales Summit, and what I’ve found interesting has been the level of discussions around artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on how we do things.

I find myself going back to the movie I saw as a kid, 2001 A Space Odyssey, and the computer “Hal” and its ability to take control of people’s lives.

Fast forward more than 50 years and it seems as if we’re there. Salesforce is calling their AI work “Einstein” as a a credit to Albert Einstein and his personal goal of trying to make the complex simple.

Ask yourself this question, “What would I prefer to not do and would feel comfortable having a computer or a bot do for me?”

Look no further than your email folder to see it already being done.  Your email system has parameters based on your usage that are determining which incoming emails to dump into your junk folder.

Let’s now put this into play with you in your leadership role. Each time you empower someone to do something, what you’re doing is practicing AI in the human form.

We already have AI — It’s the people we interface with. My goal is to each day find others from whom I can learn and with whom I can share ideas. I also am always on the lookout for people I can empower.