Do You Hide Your AI Use at Work?

A recent survey of more than 17,000 business users revealed that while 76% want to become AI experts, half are afraid to tell their boss about their AI use, worried that it might peg them as lazy or a cheater. What will help AI feel less like a taboo at work, and more like a team player? Salesforce’s Executive Vice President of Talent Growth & Development has some ideas.

Think AI agents are impressive now? Hang onto your hat

Forget incremental upgrades: The AI agents of tomorrow will be a force multiplier unleashed. Agents will hear your commands and see the world alongside you. They’ll manage other agents and learn your patterns. Here are five ways that agents, like those powered by Agentforce, the Salesforce platform for building AI agents, will evolve.

You benefit from something called ‘ontology’ all the time. What is it? 

Ever wonder how Netflix or Spotify are able to recommend stuff that’s right up your alley? It’s due to ontology, a type of knowledge organization system that gives AI agents a common understanding of words, and how concepts relate to each other. This allows agents to reason and process information better, and give more helpful responses. Here’s a primer on ontology, how it works, and its crucial role in the agentic AI experience.  

AI agent spotlight: Sammons Financial Group 

Overworked and burned out service reps, more than a dozen separate customer service systems, and long customer hold times: These were some of the challenges Sammons Financial Group hoped to solve with Agentforce. See how it helped the company cut its service reps’ attrition rate by more than half, and how agents will help Sammons double in size within five years.  

ICYMI: 

• A recent survey found that redesigning workflows had the biggest impact on boosting earnings from generative AI. Twenty-one percent of companies using generative AI say they’ve made major changes to workflows in at least some parts of their organization. (McKinsey)

• The boom in some discrete AI jobs that emerged with ChatGPT, like prompt engineering, may prove to be short-lived. Why? That skill is embedded in many roles, and most people now know how to do it. It’s one example of “AI jobs” just being, well, jobs. (Fast Company) 

• Pinterest is using visual language models and multimodal AI to help users search with both images and text. When users view a pin, Pinterest highlights details like fit, color, or occasion, so they can shop or explore similar looks. (Chain Store Age)

This newsletter was curated by Lisa DiCarlo Lee, Contributing Editor at Salesforce.

We want to know what you're doing with AI. What's been your biggest triumph? And biggest disappointment? Let us know in the comments. We read each one and just might feature your use case in a future newsletter!