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AI's Pivotal Moment at Dreamforce

The AI Dilemma: Speed vs. Caution

New Zealand's AI Adoption Leadership

The Trust Factor in AI Implementation

Data Quality and AI Success Stories

Human-Centric AI Implementation

AI Force: Revolutionizing Software Interfaces

The Future of Salesforce Administration

Super Agents: The Next Step in AI

AI's Broad Impact Across Industries

Government and AI: A Promising Partnership

Key Takeaways from Dreamforce

Wrapping Up the AI Discussion

Salesforce New Zealand country manager Richard Phillimore-Smith says the next phase of artificial intelligence will hinge on whether organisations can put trusted data, established workflows and people together to solve real business problems.

Speaking to The Business of Tech at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Phillimore-Smith said the event reflected an industry at a turning point. The gathering brought together some of AI’s most influential figures, including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff.

The mood, as is always the case at Dreamforce, a mecca for marketing and sales tech folk, was upbeat. But the keynotes reflected the broader unease about the pace of AI development and the potential for AI to go rogue. 

Amodei has urged greater coordination among AI companies on safety and oversight, a collaborative effort to slow down development as required, while pointing out that businesses are still using only 5 - 10% of the capabilities AI already delivers.

An opportunity to lift productivity

Phillimore-Smith said that the immediate opportunity, epitomised by the rise of AI agents and Agentforce, the Salesforce agentic platform, and Claudeforce, which debuted at Dreamforce, is far more practical and less scary. They are using AI agents to improve customer interactions, equip employees with better information and increase productivity.

“We know that we have got an opportunity to lift productivity. We know we’ve got an opportunity to lift customer experience. We know we’ve got an opportunity to lift employee experience,” he said.

“It has to start with data. Businesses organise to get the data right. AI as a tool can then surface that in the way that customers need it to be.”

Phillimore-Smith pointed to Salesforce customer Fisher & Paykel Appliances, where an AI-enabled service experience is built on thousands of existing product and support articles. 

On the conference floor at Dreamforce, I caught up with Rudi Khoury, chief digital officer at Fisher & Paykel Appliances, who told me that the whiteware maker has seen nearly 45% of service bookings completed online and a 50% reduction in call-handling times since installing an AI agent to handle customer queries.

“It's like having more people, but this one can scale more,” he said. 

“One agent can do a different scale to one person, but they still require management and leadership like a person does, and I think that's often forgotten about in the business context.”

Don't forget the dishwasher knob!

Agents are now also powering the apps Fisher & Paykel field service technicians use to prepare for in-home visits, with the app serving up detailed information about the customer and suggesting which spare parts to bring on the job.

Khoury said running AI agents involved treating them like digital employees, monitoring their performance and output to improve how they operated.

“When we first put Agentforce in, the feedback to [Salesforce] was, I need more observability. I need to know how it's going. And over the course of time, they provided those tools- really, really cool testing tools. So actually, we're able to simulate how the agent will perform before we deploy it. That's really great."

Xero, another key New Zealand Salesforce customer, deployed an AI customer service agent on its website in April, which is accessible to around five million Xero accounting software users worldwide.

“It creates capacity for our people, our specialists, the deep, deep knowledge people, to still be involved, to still be part of it," says Nigel Piper, executive general manager, customer at Xero, which separately has created Just Ask Xero (JAX), an AI agent for use within the Xero interface that accesses a customer's financial data to serve up information quickly.

Agritech company Halter, which has seen its Salesforce grow to 300 people internationally as it scales up its smart cow collar business in the US, Europe, and South America, uses AI agents to deliver company data stored in Salesforce to the Halter app.

Agents on the ranch

A demo at Dreamforce showed how salespeople driving between farms in their company utes can interact with Halter’s voice agent via the app to set up meetings, adjust contracts and get an update on their sales targets.

Dreamforce’s major Salesforce announcement was “AI Force”, an approach designed to let organisations access Salesforce data and workflows through the interface that best suits them – whether that is Salesforce’s own software, Slack, Anthropic’s Claude or another AI front end.

Phillimore-Smith described it as a move towards greater customer choice, while retaining the security, governance and workflow controls that sit beneath the interface.

“Salesforce is saying that our platforms continue to provide everything they have done for 25 years around the trust, the security, the governance, the semantics and all those workflows that your business runs on are still there,” he said.

AI at a tipping point

But AI Force is also an acknowledgement that the future of software companies is not owning the interface, instead focusing on maintaining and organising high-quality business data so it can be accessed by your AI agents of choice.

But the harder task for the majority of Kiwi businesses remains scaling pilots into business-as-usual deployments and building workforce capability. 

“We’re at that kind of tipping point now,” Phillimore-Smith told me. 

“Businesses, organisations can see that the technology does work, it’s trusted, and I think we’re now seeing an up-skilling coming off the back of that.”

Listen to the entire conversation with Richard Phillimore-Smith on The Business of Tech, streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. 

Peter Griffin attended Dreamforce as a guest of Salesforce.

Salesforce New Zealand country manager Richard Phillimore-Smith says the next phase of artificial intelligence will hinge on whether organisations can put trusted data, established workflows and people together to solve real business problems.
Speaking to The Business of Tech at Salesforce&rsquo;s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Phillimore-Smith said the event reflected an industry at a turning point. The gathering brought together some of AI&rsquo;s most influential figures, including Nvidia&rsquo;s Jensen Huang, OpenAI&rsquo;s Sam Altman, Anthropic&rsquo;s Dario Amodei and Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff.
The mood, as is always the case at Dreamforce, a mecca for marketing and sales tech folk, was upbeat. But the keynotes reflected the broader unease about the pace of AI development and the potential for AI to go rogue.&nbsp;
Amodei has urged greater coordination among AI companies on safety and oversight, a collaborative effort to slow down development as required, while pointing out that businesses are still using only 5 - 10% of the capabilities AI already delivers.
An opportunity to lift productivity
Phillimore-Smith said that the immediate opportunity, epitomised by the rise of AI agents and Agentforce, the Salesforce agentic platform, and Claudeforce, which debuted at Dreamforce, is far more practical and less scary. They are using AI agents to improve customer interactions, equip employees with better information and increase productivity.
&ldquo;We know that we have got an opportunity to lift productivity. We know we&rsquo;ve got an opportunity to lift customer experience. We know we&rsquo;ve got an opportunity to lift employee experience,&rdquo; he said.
&ldquo;It has to start with data. Businesses organise to get the data right. AI as a tool can then surface that in the way that customers need it to be.&rdquo;
Phillimore-Smith pointed to Salesforce customer Fisher &amp; Paykel Appliances, where an AI-enabled service experience is built on thousands of existing product and support articles.&nbsp;
On the conference floor at Dreamforce, I caught up with Rudi Khoury, chief digital officer at Fisher &amp; Paykel Appliances, who told me that the whiteware maker has seen nearly 45% of service bookings completed online and a 50% reduction in call-handling times since installing an AI agent to handle customer queries.
&ldquo;It's like having more people, but this one can scale more,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp;
&ldquo;One agent can do a different scale to one person, but they still require management and leadership like a person does, and I think that's often forgotten about in the business context.&rdquo;
Don't forget the dishwasher knob!
Agents are now also powering the apps Fisher &amp; Paykel field service technicians use to prepare for in-home visits, with the app serving up detailed information about the customer and suggesting which spare parts to bring on the job.
Khoury said running AI agents involved treating them like digital employees, monitoring their performance and output to improve how they operated.
&ldquo;When we first put Agentforce in, the feedback to [Salesforce] was, I need more observability. I need to know how it's going. And over the course of time, they provided those tools- really, really cool testing tools. So actually, we're able to simulate how the agent will perform before we deploy it. That's really great."
Xero, another key New Zealand Salesforce customer, deployed an AI customer service agent on its website in April, which is accessible to around five million Xero accounting software users worldwide.
&ldquo;It creates capacity for our people, our specialists, the deep, deep knowledge people, to still be involved, to still be part of it," says Nigel Piper, executive general manager, customer at Xero, which separately has created Just Ask Xero (JAX), an AI agent for use within the Xero interface that accesses a customer's financial data to serve up information quickly.
Agritech company Halter, which has seen its Salesforce grow to 300 people internationally as it scales up its smart cow collar business in the US, Europe, and South America, uses AI agents to deliver company data stored in Salesforce to the Halter app.
Agents on the ranch
A demo at Dreamforce showed how salespeople driving between farms in their company utes can interact with Halter&rsquo;s voice agent via the app to set up meetings, adjust contracts and get an update on their sales targets.
Dreamforce&rsquo;s major Salesforce announcement was &ldquo;AI Force&rdquo;, an approach designed to let organisations access Salesforce data and workflows through the interface that best suits them &ndash; whether that is Salesforce&rsquo;s own software, Slack, Anthropic&rsquo;s Claude or another AI front end.
Phillimore-Smith described it as a move towards greater customer choice, while retaining the security, governance and workflow controls that sit beneath the interface.
&ldquo;Salesforce is saying that our platforms continue to provide everything they have done for 25 years around the trust, the security, the governance, the semantics and all those workflows that your business runs on are still there,&rdquo; he said.
AI at a tipping point
But AI Force is also an acknowledgement that the future of software companies is not owning the interface, instead focusing on maintaining and organising high-quality business data so it can be accessed by your AI agents of choice.
But the harder task for the majority of Kiwi businesses remains scaling pilots into business-as-usual deployments and building workforce capability.&nbsp;
&ldquo;We&rsquo;re at that kind of tipping point now,&rdquo; Phillimore-Smith told me.&nbsp;
&ldquo;Businesses, organisations can see that the technology does work, it&rsquo;s trusted, and I think we&rsquo;re now seeing an up-skilling coming off the back of that.&rdquo;
Listen to the entire conversation with Richard Phillimore-Smith on The Business of Tech, streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.&nbsp;
Peter Griffin attended Dreamforce as a guest of Salesforce.

The Business of Tech, hosted by leading tech journalist Peter Griffin. Every week they take a deep dive into emerging technology and news from the sector to help guide the important decisions all Business leaders make.

Issues such as cybersecurity, retaining trust after a cyberattack, business IT needs, purchasing SaaS tools and more.

New Episodes out every Thursday. Follow or subscribe to get it delivered straight to your favourite podcatcher.

@petergnz

@businessdesk_nz

Proudly sponsored by 2degrees Business!

 

The Business of Tech, hosted by leading tech journalist Peter Griffin. Every week they take a deep dive into emerging technology and news from the sector to help guide the important decisions all Business leaders make.
Issues such as cybersecurity, retaining trust after a cyberattack, business IT needs, purchasing SaaS tools and more.
New Episodes out every Thursday. Follow or subscribe to get it delivered straight to your favourite podcatcher.
@petergnz
@businessdesk_nz
Proudly sponsored by 2degrees Business!
&nbsp;

The Business of Tech

AI’s next test: turning pilots into productivity

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