AI adoption is reaching a new phase, Salesforce COFO Robin Washington said during a recent press roundtable: one where companies are separating the wheat from the chaff.
Businesses are moving out of the “experimentation” stage and starting to “really decide what are the true value-enhancing AI opportunities that exist,” Washington said. She recommends that companies use “cross-functional teams” to determine which use cases for AI they “want to continue to experiment on, and which ones [they] want to mature and accelerate.”
During the roundtable, she and Paypal COFO Jamie Miller suggested that the next frontier is AI for revenue generation, not just improving efficiency. The examples Miller gave, though, were fairly high-level; she noted that “agentic commerce” could let consumers have an “end-to-end experience in a much different way.”
Are we all vibe coders now? Washington and Miller leaned on the theme of jobs shifting, rather than going away, due to AI. Washington mentioned that AI can complete more of the redundant and time-consuming tasks, which, she said, “unleashes the ability for us to really do our jobs.” That’s allowed Salesforce to “reallocate employees to more value-add type of activities where we see, directionally, growth is coming from,” she said. Miller said she’s seen a similar “reallocation” of employees’ tasks at PayPal.
Ultimately, Washington said, AI could allow people without technical skills to play in the tech sandbox. “It opens up a lot of optionality for people that haven’t come from traditional skills to participate in this AI evolution,” she said, adding that she’s heard that “the biggest language for coding now is English.” (Salesforce recently rolled out agentic AI platform Agentforce, so you know, grain of salt.)
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These trends could place a premium on traditionally “human” skills like EI, curiosity and imagination, systems thinking, and being a self-starter, the COFOs suggested. “I was in a board meeting last week, and someone joked, ‘Sounds like it’s the revenge of the liberal arts grad, finally, right?’” Miller said.
English majors may not want to be smug too soon: Vibe coding is in its infancy. And speakers at this year’s Gartner CFO Conference predicted that the rise of AI means finance personnel will need more digital skills, not fewer.
AI in finance: Both COFOs see great potential for AI in the finance function. Miller speculates that it can help solve the “80/20” quandary that has plagued finance for decades: the theory that finance staff “spend 80% of [their] time manipulating data and only 20% actually doing insightful analysis that helps drive change.”
Washington says AI helps her and her team prepare for earnings calls. They use it to summarize data and drive messaging.
“That work has been reduced to hours instead of days, because I’m able to leverage AI tools to crunch that data, do analytics, and get at the crux of summarizing information,” she said.
Miller said her team is “having agents create content internally around internal analysis of data” and creating first drafts of “executive-level materials ,” like strategy documents.
But she’s not using it for financial statements yet. “I think we’ll work our way to some form of assistance on that,” she said. In those areas, she said, “executive gut feel still really matters, in terms of what’s important and around the risks or the opportunities to be highlighting.”