Dreamforce 2024: Automation pushes business rethink

AI is pushing businesses to rethink traditional job roles as automation takes over routine tasks, creating new opportunities for innovation and growth. Despite these advancements, research by Slack and Salesforce shows that two-thirds of workers still haven’t integrated AI into their daily routines, underscoring a major gap in onboarding and training.

“AI workers are at different points in their AI journey in terms of adoption and onboarding,” said Michael Costigan, team leader for Salesforce Futures, during a media briefing at Dreamforce 2024. The annual Salesforce conference drew over 44,000 attendees to San Francisco this month, making it one of the largest technology conferences globally.

This finding aligns with the 2024 South African Generative AI Roadmap study, led by World Wide Worx (WWW) in partnership with Dell Technologies earlier this year, in which it was uncovered that 45% of South African respondents were not using generative AI (Gen AI), but plan to use it, highlighting its lack of adoption.

Ben Kus, CTO of Box, told the media briefing that generative AI could transform work by boosting employee efficiency. He gave an example of how salespeople often tell customers “let me get back to you,” but Gen AI can provide real-time access to information, allowing seamless interactions.

Kus said: “One of the hallmarks of Gen AI is how it’s able to be used in so many generic ways, so many general ways. It is no longer narrow AI; it is more generalised. The ability to instantly pull together all relevant materials—training, marketing, and product data—while on a call with a customer is a game-changer, something that wasn’t possible before.”

This aligned with WWW’s research in which 95,6% of respondents said that Gen AI has a very positive effect on productivity. This variable was the highest rated among the effect of Gen AI on companies, with competitiveness in second, far lower at 71,1%.

During the briefing, Denise Holland Dresser, CEO of Slack at Salesforce, summed up the current state of work as “challenging”. She said: “On average, 41% of our time is spent on the work of work. The drudgery, the finding things, the rolling things up. It’s difficult.”

She said that 71% of enterprise applications remain unconnected, which leads to inefficiencies, with almost half of the workforce struggling to find what they need to perform their jobs effectively.

“This is the general state of work. If you apply this type of innovation onto a platform of work that is fundamentally broken, we risk missing the opportunity of unlocking the potential and performance, and could induce more harm. The future of work is going to have to be a platform that allows you to bring all of your humans, data, applications, and workflow into one place.”

 Nathalie Scardino, president and chief people officer at Salesforce, spoke of the need for upskilling and reskilling. 

“Some of it is the learning,” she said. “Its giving time back to employees to spend on learning. We know that learning is a meta skill. Some of the top skills over the next decade include: AI, data literacy, and creative thinking, but many of these are self-regulating skills; so resilience, active listening, and empathy.

“Tasks change, jobs change. The rise of ecommerce, social media marketing; that is what we are starting to see here when we are starting to automate more of the manual tasks.”

Scardino said that, while automation shifts work away from mundane tasks, higher-value jobs are being created. She referenced an old article about the eradication of accountants: “Now we have ten times the amount of finance professionals. That is because they are doing higher value work. They don’t have to do expense management on pieces of paper anymore.

“New jobs are being created, we are now hiring for jobs that we weren’t hiring for 12 months ago, whether it is prompt engineers or ethical AI architects that are more focused on how the product gets built. If jobs are a series of tasks, yes, the tasks of the job change.”

Dresser said that we will have increased time and cognitive capacity to approach new problems in different ways, expressing optimism about this. She believes that AI will create new markets that are currently unforeseen, and anticipates that jobs will evolve in terms of how daily tasks are performed.

Kus said that AI is meant to support, but not to replace: “AI is an assistant to you. Even with Agentforce, it’s done in a team of AI in helping you with more complex tasks. This then means that workers can do more.”

When asked for advice on AI adoption, Scardino spospokf the importance of employee feedback and iteration.

 “Learnings around adoption, it’s bringing employees along with you. Making sure that you hear the feedback, what’s working, what’s not, measure it.”

Kus encouraged methods of starting small.

“Find something to get started. There’s usually a lot that goes in to enterprises adopting new technologies, especially something as fast and powerful as AI. If they can do that with just one use case, then they can usually get started.” 

He also advocated for giving employees early access to AI tools so they can integrate it into their daily work. “Let people learn how to use this technology across the board.”

Dresser said that AI offers a chance to rethink how work is done. 

“When you have more time, you are still just doing more of that work. I think this is a leadership moment. It’s really important to have a truthful conversation about using AI, that it is acceptable in certain places… We have to change the way that we work in this world of AI because if we get all this productivity and improvement, yet are still doing the work of work, we are really not going all the way.”

* Jason Bannier is a data analyst at World Wide Worx and writer for Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter and Threads at @jas2bann.