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Every company in the world is scrambling to figure out how to use AI within their own ranks, but not all of them are as well equipped to meet the challenge as tech giant Salesforce.
The cloud-based software company is known for products like communications app Slack and data visualization platform Tableau, but they’ve been experimenting with AI for over a decade, according to a company rep. And today, Salesforce is sharing specific ways that its AI bot, “Einstein,” is affecting employee productivity within its own workforce.
Integrating Einstein into Slack has saved employees 50,000 hours within one business quarter, and the bot answered nearly 370,000 employee questions, according to the company. Merging it into Project Basecamp, the company’s personalized employee support platform, has resolved 88,000 worker requests, speeding up issue resolution from an average of 48 hours to just 30 minutes. Around 85% of staffers have used the Einstein-powered business planning tool to compute the best course of action to meet a career goal, and it’s also involved in the company’s hiring and onboarding function, Experience Cloud. Salesforce says that on that platform, it has resolved 88% of problems that would have typically required human intervention, reducing reliance on tech agents by 50%.
Fortune spoke with Salesforce’s chief people officer Nathalie Scardino to get her thoughts about AI in the workplace, how she collaborates with fellow executives, and what she thinks is most critical when it comes to HR and the new tech.
“The HR space, with the acceleration of AI, is transformative to the employee experience in a way that I don’t think we’ve ever seen before,” she says. “What I’m loving is we know that AI is transforming how we work.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
How do you work with other executives on AI initiatives?
The person I work with the most is our CIO, Juan Perez. I think we must talk every other day at this point. With his office we’ve deployed over 50 AI tools into the hands of our organization. At our Dreamforce event in September last year, we had an opportunity to start talking about the future of work. At that point it was myself, our CIO, and our head of real estate. Because if you think about the employee experience, it’s people, places, and technology that affects employee engagement. So the three of us have a weekly steerco [steering committee meeting] when we talk about key metrics and how adoption is going of these deployments.
How are you working to eliminate bias in the AI tools?
We have an AI governance council. We make sure it’s ethical, it’s legal, and that we’re looking at potential risks of bias before it even gets released. Our AI Council has been a big game changer that has centralized our work—it is spearheaded by the Office of Ethical and Humane Use that has been in place for at least five years. We have the head of data and analytics, who works on the strategy and intelligence of that data, and then there’s the CIO and people representation.
How do you measure which AI tools are working best for staffers?
We have pretty robust listening strategies and surveys of our employees. Each part of the business has ways to engage, whether it’s at a hackathon or work that rolls up through the AI Council. We try to make it easy for staffers to provide feedback.
Also the CIO and CPO relationship is a part of the strategy we have, which is looking at adoption. We’ve deployed 50 AI tools, but what is the adoption of each? These [Einstein-powered tools] are clearly some of the biggest adopted applications that we’ve seen in using AI. But we’re constantly looking at what should stay, what should go, what’s redundant, what’s no longer useful. What new ideas that we should search towards.
Emma Burleigh
emma.burleigh@fortune.com
Around the Table
A round-up of the most important HR headlines.
Animation studio Pixar will cut about 175 staffers, or 14% of its workforce, as parent company Disney reels back content production amid slumping box office success. NBC News
Blackstone will grant equity to workers at companies it buys, offering broad-based ownership as a way to give lower-level workers more opportunities. Wall Street Journal
Apple has hired a new diversity officer, the former DEI chief of Bank of America. Bloomberg
Watercooler
Everything you need to know from Fortune.
Real world. The founder of Shake Shack says new graduates should “tune out” of what they studied in school and chase the job they really want, even if they bounce around in their career. —Jane Thier
Ultimatum. Some banks including Barclays are considering enforcing a five-day RTO policy for some staffers after stricter U.S. brokerage regulations. —Gillian Tan, Bloomberg
Tightroping poverty. An American Airlines employment verification letter circulated online, shows that the starting salary for flight attendants is just around $27,000, raising eyebrows about how workers are being compensated. —Sunny Nagpaul
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