Skip to content
No PriorsNo Priors

No Priors Ep. 43 | With Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI

AI is the new UI for enterprise customers according to Clara Shih, the CEO of Salesforce AI. Salesforce released Einstein, now called Einstein GPT, in 2016, making it an early example of how beneficial AI can be when embedded in enterprise software. This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad talked with Clara about what the evolution of AI in enterprise looks like, how Salesforce is adoption AI across the organization, and the onboarding process for companies looking to integrate AI into their workflow, plus the challenges of pricing for AI services. Clara Shih is the Chief Executive Officer of Salesforce AI where she leads the AI efforts across Salesforce including AI co-pilot and agent platform, model development, go-to-market growth, adoption, partnerships, ecosystems, and secure responsible AI. Before that was the CEO of Salesforce Service Cloud She is also the co-founder and previous CEO of Hearsay Systems. She is also on the Board of Directors at Starbucks. 0:00 Clara’s Background 0:50 From cloud services to AI 3:25 Internal Model Development vs Open Source 5:20 The Co-Pilot Approach 8:50 Enterprise AI Adoption 10:54 The future of Enterprise AI 13:23 Cross-team collaboration 14:40 AI is the new UI 19:11 Structuring the Dataset 21:25 What’s next for generative AI in Enterprise 23:18 Pricing challenges in AI 26:30 Startups and AI 28:22 Collaboration in AI Industry

Elad GilhostClara ShihguestSarah Guohost
Dec 6, 202327mWatch on YouTube ↗

At a glance

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

Salesforce AI CEO Clara Shih on Data, Copilots, and Enterprise Adoption

  1. Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI, explains how Salesforce evolved from early NLP and transformer models into a broad generative AI platform spanning every Salesforce cloud.
  2. Salesforce is pursuing an open architecture that combines in-house and third‑party models, wrapped in a unified Copilot and Copilot Studio platform for prompts, actions, and bring‑your‑own‑models.
  3. Enterprise adoption of generative AI is still early—"second or third inning"—with leaders already deploying production use cases while most are focused on getting their data organized and connected.
  4. Shih anticipates AI will fundamentally change enterprise UX and software development, shifting from hard‑coded flows to goal‑oriented agents, while business models must balance AI compute costs with clear, measurable ROI.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Enterprise AI platforms must support a mix of internal, external, and customer‑owned models.

Salesforce uses its own models, enables customers to fine‑tune their own via Data Cloud, and integrates with Anthropic, Cohere, OpenAI, Google Vertex, and others so different customers can choose or delegate model selection based on their needs.

A unified copilot and agent platform is key to scaling AI across products.

Einstein Copilot and Copilot Studio (Prompt Builder, Action Builder, Einstein Studio) provide shared infrastructure for prompts, actions, and models, so every Salesforce cloud can quickly layer AI into workflows while reusing common services and trust controls.

Data readiness is the main bottleneck to broad enterprise AI adoption.

Most enterprises have fragmented data across multiple lakes and systems; Shih notes that Salesforce Data Cloud and zero‑ETL integrations with BigQuery, Databricks, and Snowflake are growing fast because companies must unify structured and unstructured data to power training and RAG.

Start with narrow, high‑value customer service use cases rather than boiling the ocean.

Many enterprises are successfully deploying generative AI first in support: unifying knowledge bases, using vector search and RAG, and giving agents reply suggestions grounded in articles and case history, which shortens handle time and improves customer experience.

AI will increasingly replace rigid UX flows with dynamic, goal‑driven experiences.

Shih describes prototypes like “Generative Canvas,” where the system dynamically assembles UI components and visualizations as users converse with an AI copilot, shifting product work from hard‑coding flows to specifying goals and constraints.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

AI is the new UI, or maybe Slack is the new UI for AI.

— Clara Shih

It’s early—probably the second or third inning—for enterprise adoption of generative AI.

— Clara Shih

Most companies, especially in the enterprise, as you know, their data is just all over the place, and so that’s kind of like step one.

— Clara Shih

The job of the software engineer and product manager and designer is gonna shift from prescribing the how to describing the why and the what and the goal.

— Clara Shih

Salesforce, like, we’re doing a lot, but we can’t do everything.

— Clara Shih

Clara Shih’s path from Hearsay Social and Service Cloud to leading Salesforce AISalesforce’s open AI architecture: in‑house models, customer models, and third‑party providersEinstein Copilot, Copilot Studio, and the platform for prompts, actions, and agentsCurrent state and trajectory of generative AI adoption in large enterprisesCentral role of data readiness, data clouds, and zero‑ETL integrations for AITransforming customer service and sales workflows with generative AI (e.g., Gucci case study)Future of enterprise software: AI as the new UI, pricing, and startup opportunities

High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.

Get more out of YouTube videos.

High quality summaries for YouTube videos. Accurate transcripts to search & find moments. Powered by ChatGPT & Claude AI.

Add to Chrome