Sarah Flamion on Generative AI

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Sarah Flamion, Research Architect on Salesforce’s Research & Insights Team.

Join us as we chat about what recent advances in generative AI mean for admins and the Salesforce platform.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Sarah Flamion.

What is generative AI?

Generative AI is a blanket term for algorithms that can generate new content: text, images, code, voice, video, and more. It does that based on what it has learned from the existing data you give it.

Sounds complicated, but one of the coolest things about generative AI is that the interface for it is natural language processing (NLP). You can describe what you want it to make in plain English and it will spit something out at you.

The human in the loop

One thing that’s important to understand about generative AI is that it’s not an encyclopedia, it’s a completion system. Fundamentally, the way it works is to identify patterns and then predict the next thing in the sequence.A new field is emerging called prompt engineering, which is focused on how to talk to these models to get better results. You can adapt the model to specific knowledge by “grounding” it with data that isn’t public, for example, your brand voice or information about your industry. You can also give it feedback on its responses, which gives it a chance to learn and improve thanks to “the human in the loop.”

The main takeaway from all of this is that generative AI “supercharges the things that the humans can do,” Sarah says. You can make an image and then have the model give you three variations on it, or get a quick first draft for the opening of a piece of content you need to write.

Jobs to be done and Salesforce

For Salesforce, there is a lot of potential to make users’ lives easier. You might be able to automatically log calls based on an AI-generated transcript of the conversation, or clean up old data that was perhaps sloppily entered.

Sarah and her team often look at their research in terms of “jobs to be done.” Businesses generally have a list of jobs they’re trying to accomplish and then use tools, like Salesforce, to help them do those jobs. The thing is, the tools might change but most businesses will have the same jobs to be done, even over decades. Generative AI stands to shake that up, both in terms of what businesses need to get done and who can do those jobs.

Be sure to listen to the full episode for our in-depth conversation with Sarah and why change management just might be the most important skill for admins in the future.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more

• If You Can Say It, You Can Do It: The Age of Conversational AI

Social

• Sarah: @SFlamion

• Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns 

• Gillian: @GillianKBruce

• Mike: @MikeGerholdt