"Salesforce is committed to Israel. We leave politics out of the company"
"Salesforce is committed to Israel. We leave politics out of the company"
Meir Amiel, Executive Vice President & Chief Technology Officer of C360 Applications at Salesforce, was called back to the company following the generative AI revolution. He believes Israel can be a technological leader in this field. According to him, the development center in Israel is strategic for Salesforce and will continue to grow.
Growing up in Or Yehuda, Meir Amiel could not have imagined that one day, Salesforce's founder and CEO, Marc Benioff, would call him to return to the company to prepare it for the AI revolution. Amiel joined Salesforce in 2010, when it was relatively small, with only 2,000-3,000 employees. Since then, the company has grown to nearly 80,000 employees worldwide, including 750 at the development center in Israel, which Amiel helped establish.
A month ago, Salesforce reported an 11% increase in revenue in the first quarter, with a net profit of $1.53 billion, though these results missed analysts' forecasts.
Over the years, Amiel, now the Executive Vice President & Chief Technology Officer of C360 Applications at Salesforce, has held several significant roles in the company. His first role was on the force.com platform, the dedicated platform for developers. After a few years in this position, he was appointed Executive Vice President (EVP) of Salesforce Sales Cloud, the company's main division. "When I started, the division was only generating hundreds of millions of dollars, but when I left, the annual revenues were around $5 billion," he says.
Later, he moved to the position of Chief Product Officer of MuleSoft, a division Salesforce acquired. There, he managed to increase the division's revenues from $350 million to $1.5 billion. About three years ago, in an act of what his wife calls "temporary insanity," he left Salesforce to work at Twilio, where he served as General Manager (GM) of Data Applications for about two years.
"One day, about a year ago, I got a call. Marc Benioff was on the line. He asked me if I was interested in coming back. The reason was simple: we started to see the transformation of generative AI, and we realized everything was going to change. Salesforce created a new role for me as the CTO of all Salesforce applications. Part of my role is to understand what AI will do in organizations. AI is going to be a very complex transformation. When Apple launched the iPhone, none of us understood its full impact. Today, I book all my trips via my iPhone. I don't remember the last time I was in a bank branch because I do all the operations from my mobile. We think AI is going to be much bigger than that,” he says.
There is a big gap between the use of artificial intelligence as an individual and its use in an organization, Amiel explains. "As a private person, I have no limitations, but organizations that use data must be careful and work according to a clear data management strategy. When talking about AI for private consumers versus organizations, there are three important components: the UI (user interface), the LLM (language and data models), and the data. For example, ChatGPT is an innovative user interface that allows us to talk to the machine in our language—something that was not possible before. The big language models, like OpenAI's, are another important part, but it is becoming clear they will become something generic over time. The third and most important is the data. While ChatGPT and similar tools use existing data, organizations need to have a strategy to embed their data in these models to give them the right context. When you ask ChatGPT to create a route for your trip to Italy, it is very nice because all the information is on the internet. But if you are a company needing to serve a customer, you need to understand who the customer is, what the policy is, and what your processes are as a company. All this data does not exist outside the company's borders. What we, and other companies in the field, do is take the data and give the model a context."
For example, if a company needs to serve a customer who wants to return a shirt they purchased, the models need to understand the customer, understand the company's policies and internal processes, so the AI can provide a tailored response to the specific context of the customer and the company.
What do you think our working day will look like in five years in a Gen AI world?
"Already today, you can see how AI improves the productivity of employees. People in different positions will become more efficient and will need to use new tools to do this. The set of skills they will need, in my opinion, revolves around two very important areas: the first is data. Data is very scary for many people, but it is the lifeblood of the company because it helps to generate ideas and identify new opportunities. So people will have to really understand data and how to put it together; the second is prompt engineering, which becomes critical. The quality of the instructions to the machine largely determines the quality of the output, and you don't need to be an engineer to do it. In addition, we are starting to see the entry of digital workers—autonomous AI that helps us in our daily work, such as conducting conversations with customers or performing routine operations."
What, for example, will digital workers be able to do?
"Let’s say I'm a salesperson. A big part of my job is to pick up the phone for a list of leads, make the initial pitch, and then hopefully set up a meeting. What if I have a digital employee whose job is to call and have a conversation with potential customers? If we reach a stage where a meeting can be scheduled, I, the actual person, join the meeting. This is how we manage the sales together. These things sound like science fiction, but we can already see them happening. We will start to see digital employees working alongside us, and it is not very far off."
Another example given by Amiel is a customer service representative who can provide a personal answer, understand the customer's problem, link it to the company's process or policy, and then give the customer the service. "These operations, which today require people, might not need people in the future. It's a matter of efficiency; people will be able to work on more complex tasks."
There is a lot of talk about the forecasts for the labor market, about job losses and changing positions, but it seems that the change, at least for now, is delayed in coming.
"The conclusions of a study we conducted with IDC, in which we looked at the 'Salesforce economy'—that is, employees who are not Salesforce employees but are in the ecosystem, for example, an administrative worker employed by a third party and helping them manage Salesforce—were that in the coming years, until 2028, Gen AI is expected to create 28,000 jobs in Israel. When you zoom out to the global economy, the Salesforce economy is going to create 11.6 million jobs worldwide between 2022 and 2028. This means that some jobs are going to disappear, but this happens in every industrial revolution, including the internet revolution. However, many jobs are going to be created, and we still don't fully understand where and what exactly."
The trajectory of Amiel's professional life, which eventually led him to become one of the most senior Israelis in global high-tech, began in Or Yehuda, where he grew up and where his parents lived in an absorption camp. "At some point, I heard about a high school in Tel Aviv that I didn't know much about but heard was good. I asked my father to take me there. It was Ort Singlovsky, and that's where I was exposed to programming. I traveled every day from Or Yehuda to the high school in Tel Aviv. After my army service, I met my wife, an American Jew who visited Israel. I decided I wanted to work in programming before pursuing a university degree and worked for a company called IOL, Israel Online, one of the first companies in Israeli high-tech. During my undergraduate studies, my wife stayed with me in Israel, and when she wanted to do a master's degree, we moved to the USA. From 1999, I worked in many startups until, in 2010, I realized the future of software was SaaS, software as a service. Salesforce was a relatively small company at that time. I had a friend who worked at Salesforce, and after talking to him, they offered me a small job. But I believed in Salesforce so much that I decided to take it. I joined," he says.
As part of his position at Salesforce Global, Amiel was also involved in establishing the development center in Israel, where much of the company's AI development is done. "Today, we talk a lot about GenAI, but before that, there was Predictive AI. One of the reasons Salesforce came to Israel many years ago was due to the assumption that we could find a lot of talent around AI. In Israel, we built the products that sit under the 'Einstein' group of predictive and Generative AI. The focus today is on GenAI, but in the future, we will have to do both together—generative and predictive." For example, the same sales agent who can talk to customers will use predictive AI to know who to call.
One of the AI technology developments made in Israel is the Salesforce Einstein Co-pilot, as well as the 'scoring' tool that ranks lists of potential customers according to the best leads.
Today, there are doubts about Israel's ability to remain a technological leader in the field of AI. What do you think about that?
"I think if you look at Israel and what worked in Israel in the past, it's that we have the human capital, there's a lot of investment, and I don't think that's going to change. The third thing is entrepreneurship, the Israeli culture. AI doesn't change that. What led Israel to be a leading country in global high-tech will continue with AI. We have this triad of talent, investments, and entrepreneurship.
"I really hope that this war will end soon, and we can return to focusing on what we need to—improving the Israeli economy, innovation from Israel, and the things we are good at."
We are currently at war, there is hostility, and even boycotts towards Israel in the world. There is anti-Semitism. Tell us about your experience as the most senior Israeli in a global organization.
"First of all, my whole family is in Israel and is obviously very connected to Israel. I come to Israel often and have been there several times since the beginning of the war. At Salesforce, from the beginning of the war, we made the welfare of the workers and their families a priority. We were one of the first companies to provide financial assistance to workers and supported those evacuated from their homes or who feared for their safety. Additionally, we donated over three million dollars to non-profit organizations in Israel, and our employees engaged in volunteer activities across the country, providing real-time technological assistance to companies and associations that use our software. I personally worked very hard to ensure these things happened, and the team in Israel received all the necessary support."
Do you feel hostility towards Israel in the world, particularly in the USA?
"We are a global company. What happens in the world also happens in our company, which employs 75,000 people. But we ensure an open work environment that accepts all employees. We leave politics out of the company."
As someone who was a significant part of establishing the Salesforce branch in Israel, how do you view the opposite process happening now, where companies are removing activity and development centers from Israel? Have you considered this?
"Salesforce has strategic hubs. A few years ago, we announced Salesforce Israel as a strategic center, and we continue to invest in it. I really hope that other companies won't go in the opposite direction. In any case, we see the site in Israel continuing to grow. When I was in Israel and talked to our employees, these were the questions. I am personally committed to the site in Israel, and I know that Salesforce as a company is committed to Israel."
