Reflections from AIforce world Tour London

Reflecting on Salesforce's AI Force World Tour in London yesterday, it can be almost a bit scary and overwhelming looking at the number of tools and products that are now available and the rate of change within everything that we're seeing (especially related to AI at the moment). It's easy, maybe, to get a bit lost and second-guess if you are heading in the right direction or whether you should be using tools or solutions that you don't currently have but you've seen.

My advice or thought on this is to take it back to almost the basics or the first principles: all of these products and solutions ultimately exist to solve a problem. Always start with that problem and find the right solution for that problem rather than getting swept up in some of the hype and excitement and investing in tools or solutions because they sound good but don't necessarily solve the real problems that you're facing in your business.

And this is absolutely not to take anything away or discredit any of those products but you just need to keep in mind that Salesforce is the number one CRM platform in the world. That means the number of customers they have is enormous and they build products to serve their entire customer base. Each individual business may only need a small slice of what they offer and that's okay.

The magic comes from finding the tools and the solutions that solve the unique problems and challenges your business faces and implementing them in a way that truly reflects how your company runs. The value and the ROI will only truly be realised when that tool or that solution that you invest in is widely adopted and used within the business. Generally that will only occur if your team sees value in using that product. The easy way to win them over and ensure that they see value is by either solving a real problem for them, making them more efficient, or making them more successful at their jobs.

There's always a pressure to change and move to better and more efficient ways of working but I think you have to trade that up with this: if you have a process that is already working today, and your teams are comfortable with it, they understand it, and they know how to follow it, they need a reason to change and adopt a new way of working. That isn't just because it's new and shiny or it has the potential to improve the lives of your team. They need to see it, feel it, and realise it for that to come true.

Even though the world is changing and the tech landscape is evolving at an unprecedentedly fast pace, I still believe that there are fundamental principles that stand true around the way that companies use and adopt software. Whilst the upside and the improvements (the efficiency gains that can be made) are astronomical, we're not yet at a point where throwing money at AI to solve the problem is guaranteed to solve that problem.

I'd urge every company investing in AI to keep both the problems and the people they're solving them for front of mind in all of their technology and investment decisions.