For three days, we brought the Wild West to Sydney. Here’s an inside look at the AI-inspired saloon.
Salesforce’s WAILD West Saloon took place in Sydney’s Barangaroo from 6 to 8 February 2024.
At Dreamforce 2023 in San Francisco, we asked, “If artificial intelligence is the wild west, then who’s the sheriff in town?”
As we head further into this AI revolution, it’s clear individuals and companies must start asking the right questions of AI. Trust has become paramount to getting businesses and leaders more comfortable experimenting and immersing AI into their operations.
To bring the conversation into focus in Australia, we created the Salesforce WAILD West Saloon. Situated in Waterman’s Cove in Sydney across three days in February, the hard-to-miss pop-up encouraged Australians to fully immerse themselves in the world of AI. Featuring a range of AI-powered experiences, from bartenders serving bespoke mocktails to saloon music – all inspired by our global brand campaign with Matthew McConaughey.
Navigating a new unknown
As we journeyed through the AI-inspired experiences, there was the notable feeling of something being amiss. It’s no secret that AI can feel a little like a lawless land. Security, trust, safety and ethics are all major considerations for those venturing into AI.
Companies are looking to transform their businesses for the AI world — but they have concerns around privacy, accuracy and safety. It’s becoming clear that the AI revolution is also a trust revolution. Our research shows that sixty-three per cent of people would use generative AI more if it were more secure or safe, and while AI is the #1 priority for CEOs, fifty-two per cent of consumers don’t believe AI is safe.
To combat this, we must all work together to ensure that trust keeps pace with the technology, and we need to help empower people to ask the right questions of AI to bridge the AI trust gap.
We can’t unlock the promise of AI without being able to trust what it generates. This means, from development through to use, there needs to be a focus on following trusted, safe and ethical guardrails. Trust is our number-one value, and it has never been more important than in the age of generative AI.
Salesforce is committed to building trusted, transparent, and accountable AI systems, and trust has always been a differentiator in how we approach AI. With the Einstein Trust Layer, this unique technology ensures that customer data is kept safe and secure, meaning that Salesforce AI doesn’t have access to your customer data, no customer is shared with LLMs, and PII data is never compromised.
Businesses will only adopt AI if they can trust it, and the key to enabling trust is transparency. This is why we supporttailored, risk-based AI regulation — to protect individuals, build trust and encourage innovation.
The new frontier
Leandro Perez, CMO of Salesforce APAC, encouraged attendees to ask the right questions about AI so that we can unlock its full potential without compromising safety and trust.
“In 2024, we will continue to see AI’s ongoing impact across businesses – how we work, on purpose-driven opportunities, and data privacy and regulation. And so a driving force behind this activation is to encourage active experimentation and immersion into the world of AI — so that people start to feel more comfortable with this ‘new frontier’.”
At the foundation of this exciting new frontier is data, and how to use it effectively and responsibly to power AI. A company’s AI strategy is only as good as its data strategy: the more data you can train AI with, the more useful its outputs will be.
Fostering a strong data-driven company requires a focus on driving confidence and, ultimately, trust to drive adoption. Data Cloud enables companies to connect their data, bring it into a single view, and use it to power Einstein — so every action taken is powered by relevant data.
Where do you start?
For businesses grappling with the incredible challenges and opportunities presented by AI, the WAILD West Saloon aimed to offer a goldmine of expertise and insight into what questions to ask and where to start. It’s why we built our AI Strategy Guide as a place for leaders and individuals to start their AI journey.
It doesn’t matter where a company is in its AI journey, but it matters that they are thinking about it now. The businesses that don’t embrace AI will be left in the dust.
