3 Takeaways - AI: How It’s Being Used Now, What’s Next, and What’s After That (#231)

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

There’s a lot being said about AI these days that’s science fiction. One person who knows the facts is David Schmaier, President and Chief Product Officer of Salesforce. Here, he talks in detail about the many unseen ways AI is being used now, how it will profoundly stimulate innovation and benefit humanity, the rise of robots, and more.

Artificial intelligence, whether people realize it or not, is all around us. It's being used in our daily lives in unexpected ways with unexpected results. Where is it being used now and what's next? Hi everyone, I'm Lynn Toman and this is 3 Takeaways. On 3 Takeaways I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers and scientists. Each episode ends with 3 key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better.

Today I'm excited to be with David Schmayer. David is the president and chief product officer of Salesforce. Salesforce is an American cloud-based software company, which is the world's largest enterprise software firm. They are one of the leaders in technology, and their clients include 90% of Fortune 500 companies. In 2020, Salesforce replaced ExxonMobil in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Salesforce has invested a billion dollars in generative AI startups, which David also oversees.

Welcome, David, and thanks so much for joining Three Takeaways today. It's great to see you again, and thanks so much for joining Three Takeaways today. It's great to see you again, and thanks so much for having me. It is my pleasure. Let's start by talking about how AI works. You believe there are four or five stages of AI. Can you tell us what they are, and then I'm going to ask you about each one in turn. I'd be happy to, Lynn. AI has been around since the dawn of computers.

So it was first talked about in the 40s and the 50s. And Alan Turing came up with something called the Turing test, where if someone could carry on a conversation back then by teletype, and you couldn't tell whether it was computer or not, that was deemed artificial intelligence, as we call it today. And the idea was the neurons that we have in our brain could also work. There could be computer-oriented neurons that could sort of think just like we do as human

beings. And so based on that idea, there was predictive AI, the first type of AI that really became popular. And the second is the big boom that we're in now that really changes everything in my opinion, which is called generative AI. And the third is agents. And then robots are going to be the next big wave, and that's coming now too.

And this is all on the road to what many of the AI startups call AGI, which is artificial general intelligence, where the AI can do everything that a human can do, but it can do it faster. Let's start with predictive AI, your stage one of AI. How does it work? Predictive AI is a mathematical model that looks at the past data and uses that data

to literally predict what the future will be. So I buy something on an amazon.com website and it predicts and recommends, what are the next things I should buy? Product A, B and C. So that's all based on the mathematical model of predictions from the past to the future. You believe that stage one of AI is predictive AI

and stage two is generative AI. How is generative AI different than predictive AI? Chat GPT is based on this new transformer architecture. That's the T in GPT. And that's based on a paper that was authored by a division of Google called the Google Brain Division, where a number of AI scientists figured out that you could take AI and train it on a set of words that had never been done before or have been contemplated. And so what they did is they originally trained the original version of Chet GPT.

I think the numbers are 500 million words. And then they went to billions of words. And then they went from there with like each model. Each one of these is trained on more and more words and more and more content. So it's literally in the billions now. words and more and more content. So it's literally in the billions now. And in order to crunch all of those words, to train it,

it literally costs billions of dollars and takes billions of dollars of Nvidia GPUs, basically Nvidia chips on a supercomputer that can now predict the next word or the next sentence or the next paragraph. So yes, it uses AI, but it's trained on an entirely different data source, not data, but content. That algorithm to predict words can also be used on other kinds of content, like images, like videos, like movies. And so now there's this concept of multimodal AI models where we started out using it to train it on words. Now you can train the AI on images, on videos, on sounds. All of the five senses, if you will, can interact with the AI.

And you have AI that can cross these different modalities so that maybe I talk to the AI and it gives me the answer in text and then it generates a movie out of it. Or I can, you know, ask it, tell me what is a horse, write a poem about a horse, and now generate a movie of a horse running through a meadow for me, and the AI can do all the above. Fundamentally, it's generating new answers. Yeah, it's generating new content versus new predictions about the data. So that's the fundamental difference. Yeah, predictive AI literally is predicting

the data in the future. Generative AI is generating the content that you asked it to generate. Can you give some more examples of generative AI and what it can do? Sure, it can create the essay, it can create the document, it can create the doctoral thesis, it can create the movie, it can create the poem, it can create anything.

And so now the AI could not only read the data, but it can understand the semantic meaning of what's being said, whether you're texting with it or talking with it or interacting with it across any of these modalities. So that's the big unlock because now it's working like the human brain where it literally understands and then it can take action just like people do. David, can you explain what an agent is, how you think about agents? So an AI agent has a specific role. Maybe it's a customer service agent,

or maybe it's a sales agent, or maybe it's a marketing agent that launches marketing campaigns for your company, or maybe it's an e-commerce agent that helps customers buy the right products on an e-commerce agent that helps customers buy the right products on your e-commerce website. This gets to the higher level, sort of next level capabilities of the AI. So we talked about how the generative AI can create words or sentence or documents. We talked about how it's multimodal.

So now it can create images or videos or it can do any combination thereof. Now, the next level of AI intelligence is what they call reasoning. And many of the companies open AI and we build our own reasoning engine, which we call Atlas, where it can not only create the next word or the next sentence, but it can literally understand the semantic meaning of what's going on. So you and I are having a conversation right now and billions of neurons in our brain are processing this data.

And then I'm understanding what you're saying and you're understanding what I'm saying. Well, now the AI can start to do that too, which is really quite remarkable. So based on this generative technology, you can build reasoning engines that allow the AI to do very specific things for you. And that's where, you know, really there's the aha moment in AI, where AI can do more than autocomplete sentences. It can in fact do things that humans can do. Can you give some examples?

I'd be happy to. We at Salesforce think that AI agents are truly the next big part of this generative AI revolution. So we talked about predictive. We talked about generative. We think AI agents, or what they call agentic behavior, is really the current phase of AI that we think is taking off right now before our eyes. And so I'll give an example.

We had Sachs-Fittsav as our keynote customer in our main presentation at Dreamforce. So Dreamforce is our annual technology conference. It's one of the largest technology conferences in the world. And we showed a live simulation where a customer in the pre-agent world tried to return a sweater through customer service at Sachs Vithav and went through the normal phone tree, you know,

for customer service. If you know the name through the normal phone tree, you know, for customer service. If you know the name of the person you're trying to reach, type it in now. If you'd like to talk to somebody in one of our stores for our store directory, punch straight. That's not great customer service, in our opinion. And so what we showed is a working agent that we literally built in minutes for sex with their CEO and their chief technology officer, where you could talk to this agent and literally have a conversation with the agent and say, hey, I bought this sweater. It's a size medium.

I'd like to exchange it for a large because it doesn't quite fit right. And you're literally having a conversation like you and I are having a conversation now, but it's not with the person, it's with an autonomous AI agent. So AI works without specific instructions. For a company with millions of customers, how does AI enable that company to create a tailored and unique experience for each customer without giving the AI these specific instructions? I'm sure you and all the listeners out there have used chatbots before. And this is way beyond that chatbot experience in a number of different reasons.

First, the chatbot experience feels very robotic. And the reason it feels robotic is in many ways it is, it's programmed with if-then-else statements. So if you say this, then it should say that. And if you say that, then it should say this next thing. And first of all, that's very brittle because it's hard to anticipate what people say because people are unpredictable and the situations are unpredictable that customers have. So now with an AI large language model underneath a reasoning engine that reasons just like you and I do, now the AI can listen, it can learn, and with voice AI, as we showed at our Dreamforce conference, if you Google this sex video at Dreamforce, you can see this live, we created an agent called Sophie, where

you're literally talking to Sophie and having a real live conversation with Sophie. And in this demonstration, we showed that Sophie offers to return the sweater via FedEx in three days. But the scenario we were showing is the customer needs it tomorrow, which is a real life situation that you couldn't possibly anticipate with the chatbot. And so the reasoning engine says, oh, well, instead of getting the new sweater by FedEx, you can stop by our local San Francisco store, which is three blocks away, and you can get it in two hours. Would that work for you? And that's real customer service.

That's the kind of memorable, magical customer experience that we think all of us want. And in the year 2024, when you have an amazing customer experience, you never, never forget it. And we think there's going to be more of that in this agent, AI agent world and in our agentic future. You talked about how today's large language models are multimodal and gave the example

of text and video, but multimodal offers many more possibilities than that. Can you give some examples of multimodal and the potential? Sure. We are working with one of the largest healthcare companies in the world. Healthcare is a big business for us and there's a what I would call fragmented customer experience with most healthcare companies today. You know, you get your And there's a what I would call fragmented customer experience with most health care companies today. You get your labs, you go in for your physical, and then you get your diagnostic information,

and then you go to a generalist who has to refer you to a specialist. And it really is kind of maddening how complicated it is. And I'm not a doctor and as far as I know, Lynn, I don't think you are, but you feel like you need to go to medical school because you're now the advocate for your own patient journey. And so what if you imagine this future where you had a medical concierge, your own AI physician that was working on your behalf every single day that was helping you throughout this entire process and reading the imagery,

looking at diagnostic information, understanding your profile versus mine versus someone else's and it could really walk you through that whole experience. That would include text or emailing it and be reading the email conversations back and forth. It would include voice. So you might be talking to this AI agent. It might be not only looking at images but reading images to understand what's going on. It might be accessing medical databases to look at other people with similar types of lab results that you have to diagnose problems. And so our view is that AI works in concert with humans.

So that might not all happen today entirely with AI. And if there's a question that the AI can't answer, it transfers the call back and forth. So we think it's gonna be AI and humans working together hand in hand, but this medical concierge example is a perfect example of how multimodal could be live in action in all of our lives coming soon.

What are the implications of agents for labor? I've heard estimates that companies and organizations will need 20% or even 30% fewer employees. What do you think? Well, there's no question that AI changes everything. And the world will never be the same with generative AI and with agents and with robots and ultimately HCI in the future. So we're going into this AI future full speed. Now that doesn't mean that there won't be any jobs in the AI future.

Every prior technology revolution like the internet and e-commerce and social pundits have theorized that all the jobs are going away. And in fact, what you would find if you examine those other technology trends as employment in effect increased, it didn't decrease due to those trends. And so we still go into the bank branch, even though we have digital banking and we still call people, even though we can also Slack them or email them using the internet. So it's surprising that the world doesn't change

quite as fast as sometimes people imagine. And this is an opportunity, not a problem. And it's gonna reduce a lot of the monotonous work. So it's really gonna stimulate human creativity, I believe. It's really gonna stimulate innovation and it's gonna allow us to do the best work of our careers. But there's no question it's going to change what people are going to do in the future, what they did in the past. There are certainly occupations in the 1900s that are not thriving today, and there's new disciplines like computer programming or becoming a data scientist that didn't exist 100 years ago.

And the next stage after AI agents you believe will be robots, AI in a physical body, if you will. Can you talk about that? It makes perfect sense, Lynn, if you think about it. So now I have an AI agent that I can talk to, that I can text with, that I can read my emails and understand them, that really understands who I am and what I want. And now I can put that AI agent into a physical device. And so that will happen in business, like the Waymo example in the autonomous car, that will happen in the household where I think there'll be personal robots, literally right out of iRobot from Isaac Asimov and that AI future. We're going to put these AI agents and this semantic

reasoning capability with guardrails into physical devices that will do things for us. And because you build this physical device, you can have it do very purpose built kinds of things for you. Like if you go online, there's really amazing videos now. And they sell these today of these robotic dogs that can like run and jump and do things that is really incredible. It looks like an ax and moves just like a real life dog.

That future is amazing, and it's coming sooner than we think. The future is here now. The next wave after robotics, you believe, will be AGI, artificial general intelligence. What do you think its capabilities will be and where will it be used? AGI is on the minds of everyone in the AI industry and if you look at all the venture capital dollars pouring into AI it's really incredible and the smartest people in the world are all trying to win this

global AI race not only here in America but all around the world are all trying to win this global AI race, not only here in America, but all around the world. So it's truly a global race. One of the reasons I got into the technology business is I grew up reading science fiction books. Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Lord of the Rings, and Star Trek and Star Wars. And I think the founders of these AI companies grew up on not just those books, but those movies. And in these movies, starting with maybe HAL in 2001, Space Odyssey, or a dark version of that is in the Terminator movies, you can really see that AI has the potential to do everything that humans can do, but can do it faster. And through what we now call the Internet, it can connect to all these devices and to all the robots.

And so there's incredible power to that vision. And there's also, you know, some people that this really scares. I'm a tech optimist. I believe this will be really great for the world. And all of these prior technologies, can you use them for nefarious or bad reasons? Of course, but I'm a big believer that those same technologies that can be used for bad purposes, good guys or gals,

can use those same technologies to enforce the laws that we have in human society. So I think this is just part of human progress where people are going to use these technologies for good or not so good. But I think the potential is really incredible. One of my favorite stories about this is Sal Khan from Khan Academy. I heard him give a great speech saying that AI will transform education beyond anything that's been previously imagined. And he did a great job himself with Khan Academy, democratizing education. But now, if I not only had access to the curriculum on YouTube, but I had an AI tutor there in every small town and every small country

all around the world. That surely will make the world a better place because education is the great equalizer and it leads to great opportunities for all people. David, what are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today? Whereas AI changes everything. And I believe that the world will never be the same. And this changes what we do in our personal lives.

This changes the winners and losers in the business world. And there will be a Waymo in every single industry. Second, AI agents are here now and coming to a theater near you. You're gonna see AI agents on the popular websites that you go to. You're gonna see this from all the companies that you deal with.

You're gonna see this in your personal lives. You're gonna see AI agents on your phone. This is happening now. AI agents on your phone. This is happening now. And third, AI will have both positive and not so positive effects on society. But I believe that the overall effect will be very, very positive.

That it will reduce the repetitive and monotonous work that will allow us to have incredible advances as we talked about in education and healthcare, and make the world a better place. Thank you, David. This has been wonderful. My pleasure. If you're enjoying the podcast, and I really hope you are, please review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps get the word out. If you're interested, you can also sign up for the Three Takeaways newsletter at ThreeTakeaways.com,

where you can also listen to previous episodes. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, I'm Lynne Toman and this is 3 Takeaways. Thanks for listening.