{"id":10360,"date":"2024-07-18T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-07-18T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.salesforce.com\/?p=10360"},"modified":"2024-07-24T23:28:18","modified_gmt":"2024-07-24T13:28:18","slug":"ai-agents-at-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salesforce.com\/au\/news\/stories\/ai-agents-at-work\/","title":{"rendered":"How Artificial Intelligence Can Help Us Build a More Human Workplace"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Editor\u2019s Note: <\/em><\/strong>This byline sets up the context for how we get to the kind of plausible, trustable future of AI-human collaboration explored in the second issue of Salesforce Futures Magazine<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Tomorrow\u2019s business leaders won\u2019t run their companies the way they\u2019re run today. They\u2019ll rely on specialized, autonomous AI agents<\/a> to augment employees. They\u2019ll have AI chiefs of staff that manage teams of these specialized agents. And they\u2019ll use new, AI-powered tools to get closer to their customers and make faster, better decisions. The sum of these new capabilities will have a major impact on the shape of work\u200c \u2014 \u200cboth for leaders and employees. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A big shift is coming, and the evidence isn\u2019t just anecdotal. According to the Slack Workforce Index<\/a>, the number of leaders looking to integrate AI tools into their business has skyrocketed 7x since September 2023. Salesforce research tells us nearly 8 in 10 global workers<\/a> are open to an autonomous AI future. These changes could happen slower or faster than experts anticipate, but we feel confident that, in the near future, work won\u2019t look like it does today. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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According to the Slack Workforce Index, the number of leaders looking to integrate AI tools into their business has skyrocketed 7x since September 2023.<\/p>\nMick Costigan, VP, Salesforce Futures<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Still, despite all of the hype and excitement around technological possibilities, AI leaders have yet to present a cohesive, plausible, and optimistic vision of an AI-powered workplace that serves the needs of humans and customers. What might such a vision look like?  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thinking beyond tech and narrow applications to existing workflows<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In the [still] early phases of a major technology shift, we tend to over-focus on the application of technology innovations to existing<\/em> workflows. Such advances are important, but closing the imagination gap about the possible new shapes of work requires us to consider more than just technology. It requires us to think about people, both as the customers who react to new offerings and as the employees who are responsible for delivering them. Some will eagerly adopt new technology. Others will resist and drag their feet. As they put the technology to use, they\u2019ll uncover new complications the innovators never foresaw and devise novel solutions. And they\u2019ll collaborate with both human colleagues and AI in familiar and unprecedented ways.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Truly insightful futures also require us to go beyond close-in changes to the second-order effects spawned by AI. To take a canonical example, imaginative thinking about the potential effects of building the interstate highway system might have led us to expect we\u2019d see big-box retailers like Walmart popping up along the way as well as longer commutes. Bonus points would go for realizing that, with more people stuck in traffic jams than ever before, a new captive audience for offerings like talk radio was being created. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In our first issue<\/a>, Personal AI<\/em>, we created \u201cspeculative futures\u201d that imagined the impacts of different types of personal AI agents at scale. We envisaged a state-sponsored AI agent, a premium, hyper-personalized agent subscription service, and a new marketplace of highly specialized \u201cindie agents\u201d from upstart providers, among others. These imagined offerings generated the bulk of reactions from our readers as they pushed and pulled on the different futures and debated their likelihood. They also helped us have more strategic conversations with Salesforce leaders and our customers about how the relationships between companies and their customers might change.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n