The Golden Summer of AI
AI
The Summer of AI continues, which is good because the summer of England is decidedly Autumnal and we need more to keep us occupied indoors while it’s raining.
The first of the Salesforce GPT solutions went live, with Sales and Service GPT becoming generally available on July 19th. You can read what I thought about this in detail at Salesforce GPT - It’s Alive. Short version - it’s good that something tangible is now available to use after all the marketing hype of the last few months. The markets liked it too, with the stock rising 2.7% on the news.
It hasn’t all been good news though, as ChatGPT-4 is apparently becoming lazier and dumber, which sounds like the machines are becoming indistinguishable from humans to me. This isn’t idle speculation though, a study from Stanford and UC Berkeley concluded that is has become less capable over the last few months at answering the same questions. A reminder, if one were needed, that these tools will continue to evolve so we can’t just check them once when we start using them and assume we are safe forever more.
Salesforce released the 3rd edition of the State of IT report, and in a development that surprised nobody, found that AI and Automation are of paramount importance for enterprise IT teams.
And some good news for those developers who are worried that AI will take their jobs - Brent Hayward, CEO and General Manager of MuleSoft, says we are running out of developers. Whether the developers we have are the developers we need remains to be seen, especially once AI takes care of the mundane and repetitive jobs.
Other
In other news, Salesforce announced it’s first price rise for 7 years, with an average 9% increase. This doesn’t seem to have been received too badly by many customers, although I’m sure it has motivated the sales teams of it’s competitors. There’s also the question of whether anyone actually paid the Salesforce list price - if you timed your purchasing decisions right there were significant discounts to be had. What it probably will mean is more focus on the number of licenses in use and whether they represent value for money - I guess that this could mean more services work as customers look to move more apps over to Salesforce to maximise license ROI.
A new appointment in the Salesforce C-Suite, as Sabastian Niles was appointed Chief Legal Officer shortly after helping to fight back on the activist investors demanding change.
Marc Benioff appears to have changed his mind again about the use of offices, and is now of the opinion that downtown San Francisco is never going back to the way it was with regard to commuting to the office.
Me
Like many in the technology world, most of my recent focus has been on AI, and that is where any spare time has been directed in both my work and personal life. The Salesforce World Tour in London was no exception to this focus, rebranded at short notice to AI Day and showcasing Prompt Studio for the first time ever. We’re not used to such announcements in London, coming as it does between TDX and Dreamforce, but the pace of change means things can’t wait for the major events.
I delivered the first in what has turned into a series of webinars on AI:
If you want to hear more from me on this topic, specifically prompt engineering, don’t sign up for the next instalment on 23rd August.
I built my first integration to OpenAI - a Salesforce CLI plug-in that can explain technical terms around the CLI, Apex, or Salesforce in general. I also read an interesting report where various experts gave their predictions for what the future holds in 12 years time.