Good morning from San Francisco.
I’m in town to speak at Dreamforce, the annual gathering hosted by Salesforce that’s now being cast as the “largest AI event in the world.” Indeed, this year’s agenda revolves around the enterprise tech giant’s launch of Agentforce, a suite of autonomous AI-powered agents that can make decisions and do other complex tasks, enabling a higher level of service. When I saw how a Saks Fifth Avenue bot named Sophie added discounts and delivery options for a sweater, I suddenly wanted to shop at Saks. (I bought my first Philips Sonicare toothbrush after listening to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff extol the virtues of connected brushing at another event 10 years ago.)
I moderated a lively session yesterday with eight CEOs who talked about their own experiences with AI, across a range of industries. Because the conversation was held under Chatham House rules, I can’t identify who said what, but the overall mood was one of anticipation, of starting to see transformative insights, cost savings, productivity gains, and personalized customer experiences. Think of speed as a metric of success and curiosity as a core competency in hiring. We also discussed the need to build trust and monitor for bias—something I thought about when reading McKinsey’s 10th annual Women in the Workplace report that came out yesterday, showing how fragile women’s gains can be.
The best example of the power of curiosity came during Benioff’s conversation with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Both men are billionaires who could be eating bon bons by the beach instead of working as hard as they do. Benioff, who joked that he sometimes uses ChatGPT as a therapist, noted how hard it can be for anyone to “stay that fired up over a long period of time” without cultivating a ‘beginner’s mind’ that sees possibilities and new ideas in familiar places.
For Huang, who credits part of his success to working at Denny’s at age 15, this period of innovation is just too exciting to miss. “I realize that that our company is in a once-in-a-lifetime position to be able to make a real contribution,” he said. “We now have the instruments, the tools, this capability called artificial intelligence, that will solve all of those other problems that we've been excited about ever since we were kids … We don’t want to miss this next decade.”
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Diane Brady
diane.brady@fortune.com
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