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Andy White shared thisFear is everywhere right now. The best antidote is to embrace it. Before every customer meeting, I ask: what would I tell them if they were my friend inside that organization? How do I get them running faster and help them skip my mistakes? Two of the most common topics: • Start with green space. Pick a problem nobody's solving yet, that's where you can move fast and take real risk. • Find an opinionated stakeholder. Someone who owns the space, wants to disrupt it, and will move with you. This isn't an IT transformation. It's about transforming organizations from the inside out.
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Andy White shared thisMany CIOs I speak with are asking the same question: how do we move from implementing AI to generating meaningful business outcomes? 𝘈𝘐 𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘪𝘴 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦. 𝘔𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘷𝘢𝘭𝘶𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘯𝘰𝘵. This is what I share: • Where to begin? Start with green space. Give your team room to innovate without playing it safe. • Which business problems to prioritize and measure? A clear business problem you can measure. • Who needs to lead alongside IT? An opinionated business stakeholder willing to drive change and be disruptive. • How to move quickly without compromising trust? Protect your systems of record and give trusted access through MCPs and semantic layers. As Customer Zero at Salesforce, we're living these questions inside our own organization, learning what works, and sharing the practical steps that can help customers reach value faster. For more on where to start and how to build momentum, click here: https://lnkd.in/dJ4JYWmc We also shared some of our story at the Salesforce on Salesforce keynote last week at Dreamforce. Check it out below: https://lnkd.in/dGhw55eA
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Andy White shared thisFor a long time, we built our company for human scale. Every team, every process, every system designed around what one person could get done in a day. It's changing fast, and I can't wait to talk about it. Join me, Joseph Inzerillo, Adam Johnson, Bernard Slowey, Sabastian V. Niles, and Nathalie Scardino on stage at Dreamforce for the Salesforce on Salesforce Keynote — Scaling the Agentic Enterprise: Our Customer Zero Story. Come build with us. Moscone West, Level 2 Tuesday, September 15 | 3:45–4:35 PM PDT San Francisco, CA & Streamed on Salesforce+ Add it to your agenda: https://lnkd.in/dcpQBZ-9
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Andy White shared thisOver the years, I’ve heard the same thing from IT leaders: Your service desk is overwhelmed. Your teams are burned out. And you're being asked to do more with less (again). What if IT service could actually be autonomous? Not just automated, but intelligent enough to resolve issues before they become tickets? That's what we're exploring on February 4th during our Agentforce IT Service virtual event. This is your invitation to see: ✔️ How AI agents are shifting IT service from reactive to proactive ✔️ Real use cases (not vendor fluff) on reducing resolution times ✔️ How customers, UNESCO and Milestone, went live so quickly Register today: https://lnkd.in/ez4cU3yh
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Andy White shared thisMeet the new Slackbot — your personal, intelligent agent for work, now generally available! Slackbot is truly amazing. Internally at Salesforce, we’ve been using the new AI-powered Slackbot for months. It has earned a 96% satisfaction rate — the highest of any AI feature we’ve ever shipped. The results speak for themselves: 80% of employees who try Slackbot continue using it. Users are saving between 2 and 20 hours per week. Why is it so effective? Because it doesn’t start from zero. It’s grounded in your unique context. Your conversations, files, and priorities all while respecting the security and permissions already in place at your company. Read more about our team’s experience, including how employees like Haley Gault ☁, Kurtis Kemple, and Kate Crotty are using it to transform their workday: https://bit.ly/4qP1OLY The new version of Slackbot will be gradually rolling out to customers over the next few weeks. I can’t wait for you to experience it for yourself. Let me know what you think!
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Andy White shared this𝙇𝙚𝙖𝙙𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙝𝙞𝙥 𝙋𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙘𝙞𝙥𝙡𝙚 #3: 𝗣𝗲𝗿𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗠𝗮𝗻𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 - 𝗖𝗼𝗮𝗰𝗵 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗦𝘂𝗰𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀 As leaders, it is our job to help our teams succeed. Performance management is all about giving feedback to help people get better each day. 𝗪𝗲 𝗔𝗿𝗲 𝗠𝗲𝗮𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗲𝗱 𝗯𝘆 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗪𝗲 𝗧𝗼𝗹𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲 Leaders are measured by what we do and by what we tolerate. Tolerating poor performance, toxic behaviors, or lack of accountability sends a message to the entire team about what’s acceptable. 𝗦𝗲𝘁 𝗖𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿 𝗘𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 Without clear expectations, you are relying on luck to be successful. Clear expectations are not only kind but are also necessary for trust. When you identify an area where you are not clear, use it as an opportunity to share. Pay attention when something strikes you as odd or out of alignment with your expectations. It is most likely a lack of clarity, and it is your job to fix it. Expectations in your head are not agreements with your team. Borrowing from Brené Brown: “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.” 𝗛𝗼𝗹𝗱 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗢𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗔𝗰𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 Accountability begins with us. We have to model the behavior we expect of others. If we don't, it's an integrity issue. It's simple but not easy—follow through on commitments, own mistakes, and hold ourselves to the highest standard of integrity. Then we can expect the same from our teams and hold them to those expectations. 𝗛𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗖𝗿𝘂𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀—𝗗𝗼𝗻’𝘁 𝗪𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗵𝗼𝗹𝗱 𝗼𝗿 𝗗𝗲𝗹𝗮𝘆 𝗙𝗲𝗲𝗱𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸 Giving feedback, especially when it’s difficult, can feel uncomfortable. Withholding feedback doesn’t help anyone—it only delays growth. Don't make excuses for why you can't give feedback. Ask yourself if the situation were reversed, what would you want to be told? I would want to know how I can improve. Feedback is a gift. Push fear aside.
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Andy White shared thisLeadership Principle Number Two: Career Development: Help others succeed, see potential in people. In my career, I've had people put their hand on my shoulder and tell me they saw qualities in me that I didn't see in myself. They believed in me in ways I didn't believe in myself. Their confidence in me pushed me achieve beyond my expectations. Many people I have spoken to have been lucky enough to experience this too. We can be that person for others. Create an environment that encourages "givers" (see Adam Grant's great book "Give and Take"). Encourage people to help each other with no thought of what they get in return, while maintaining healthy boundaries. Tell people about their potential. Share what you see in them and why it matters. Build on strengths, focus on what you are great at, and minimize weaknesses. Apply this principle beyond your immediate team. Don't wear blinders when helping others. Teams change, invest in everyone you cross paths with, not just your "team". You never know - one day, they could be part of your group or even your boss. As leaders, do for the one what we wish we could do for all. As my teams have grown larger, I have found myself saying "We can't do that because we can't do it for everyone." I challenge myself and my team to say - "How can we do for one what we wish we could do for all?" "Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it. I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free." - Michelangelo
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Andy White shared this84% of enterprise CIOs believe AI will be as significant to their businesses as the rise of the internet. Do you agree? We are still in early days of AI - 11% of CIO's believe they’ve fully implemented the technology. These leaders highlighted technical and organizational challenges, with security and data being the biggest initial hurdles. Dive into these and other key findings from a new Salesforce survey of 150 CIOs of companies with 1,000 or more employees for a snapshot of the state of enterprise AI. https://lnkd.in/e4b4-rsyJust 11% of CIOs Have Fully Implemented AI as Data and Security Concerns Hinder AdoptionJust 11% of CIOs Have Fully Implemented AI as Data and Security Concerns Hinder Adoption
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Andy White posted thisOver the years I have had many excellent leaders. I learned what good leadership and bad leadership looks like, I have made good choices and mistakes and would like to share some of that learning here. A few years ago, I wrote a set of eight leadership principles based on my experiences, with input and feedback from my team. Leadership principle number one, Surround yourself with excellence - Hire and grow people more talented than you - Identify and develop successors Surrounding yourself with excellence means you intentionally hire people and invest in your team to make them better. Don't hoard information or resources to try and protect your position or authority. Build a team that can replace you, be intentional about making the team successful after you leave. That is how you are judged as a leader (and a person) by how things are after you are gone. The original nugget of truth here came from Bob Kehlor. When I was a first time manager and struggling with my workload, he told me to take hiring seriously. If I didn't hire awesome people, I would have even bigger problems a year later. Thank you Bob.
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Andy White liked thisAndy White liked thisMy time as a Principal Member of Technical Staff in Applied AI at Salesforce is coming to a close. As I prepare to return to my roots in precision medicine, I find myself overwhelmed with gratitude for what has genuinely been the best job of my career. Being the sole data scientist in the IT organization deploying Agentforce completely shifted my perspective. It moved me from focusing on individual research to seeing how a team comes together to deliver massive systems in a live, complex ecosystem. My work centered on enablement, agentic evaluations, and deploying the generative AI Help agent on help.salesforce.com. Alongside cross-functional teams, I built synthetic LLM-as-a-judge frameworks calibrated with Human-in-the-Loop feedback, designed hallucination detection algorithms, and assisted with multiple enterprise model deployments. Beyond the immediate deliverables, I was deeply passionate about studying the core development and the agentic platform running Agentforce. I leave completely humbled by the rigor, complexity, and speed of development driving this technology. But more than the technical work, I was moved by how Salesforce and its people embraced me. As an applied statistician, I have never felt so supported, respected, and cared for in my scientific work. I sat close enough to the production servers to feel the heat, and because of this team, I never once felt like I was sitting there alone. That care and dedication came from the top down. I worked with Vice Presidents and Senior Directors who got on calls at all hours and answered pages themselves. No ivory towers at Salesforce, just brilliant people showing up for the work and, most importantly, showing up for each other. I am profoundly thankful to Salesforce and my colleagues who made me feel so valued every single day. I am eager to take this renewed energy back to the mission of spatial biology and cancer diagnostics. Let’s stay connected as I step into this next chapter. Salesforce Andy White, Vince Stuntebeck, Garth Pettijohn, Phani Attili, Alexander Smith
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Andy White reacted on thisAndy White reacted on thisLast month I wrote about Rapid Innovation Squads (RIS). Small teams, end user sitting inside the squad and straight to build. Wanted to share the first story. Its about agentifying timesheet reports. Sales and Solution Engineers spent 2-3 hours a week logging their time. Nobody enjoyed it, and nobody trusted the data that came out the other end. We set up a 3-person squad with Theresa Hall, who leads Solution Engineering, sitting inside it. Not a stakeholder we reported up to on a Thursday. That is the whole model. We opened a public Slack channel on a Monday and the objective was set in the first hour: working solution by Friday, in production by end of month. How it went down: 1/ First we had to fix and simplify the process My first version of the skill topped out at 36% accuracy and I assumed I needed a better prompt. Instead I read 12,157 real submissions from last year. Three of the 23 categories carry 64% of everything logged. One was never used at all, not once, in a whole year. And the two biggest had a 40% cross-error rate between them, because an SE prepping for a customer meeting can honestly call it either one. We simplified the classification and the same skill jumped to 60%. The bottomline: we set out to automate a process and had to go fix the process first. 2/ We built with the end user from day 1 No steering committees, no monthly demo: real SEs were with us in the channel from week one. We sent the skill to 200 of them on day five. One came straight back and told me the opportunity matching was 50/50. We shipped search inside the table the next morning. That loop ran for weeks and is the biggest reason we improved fast. 3/ We parallelized what agile runs in sequence Discovery, design, build, launch. That sequence exists because each step used to need the output of the one before it. At agent scale, it doesnt anymore. The skill was being built while the data was still being analyzed. The widget was being built while the skill was still wrong. Design even landed after launch. Thousands of SEs were already using it when our UX team came in, and they did not send a Figma file. They opened a branch, pushed commits co-authored with Claude and opened a pull request. Design as a fast follow, not a gate at the front. Where it landed In production in under four weeks, and around 80% of our SEs use it today. Roughly 25,000 activities logged in a normal week, over 90,000 at quarter close. That is what it looks like when the friction is gone. It is spreading on its own: FDEs run their own version, and other groups are picking up the same skill and MCP pattern. In the end we deployed this 70-80% faster than the same scope would have taken through traditional agile. Huge credit to Samuel van Oostveen, who has shipped an improvement nearly every week since launch, and to Theresa Hall for backing this before it was proven. Jeff Kinzer, Sandeep Poman Robbie Birbeck, Nam Hua and Damilare O. all made it real
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Erica Kuhl
The most intense prioritization exercise of my career happened in a windowless conference room in Hawaii… arguing about whether Trust or Customer Success mattered more. It was a Salesforce leadership offsite – Marc Benioff plus ~400 leaders – and my first real exposure to a V2MOM. Ever since, I’ve used and refined the V2MOM framework because of what it forced us to do in that room. At Salesforce, V2MOM wasn’t a feel-good planning doc. It was a forcing function. It made tradeoffs explicit – and uncomfortable. From execs all the way down to ICs, everyone could clearly articulate: – what mattered – why it mattered – and just as importantly, what wasn’t getting done That last part is where most teams fall apart. What I’ve learned is that V2MOM doesn’t fail because the framework is flawed. It fails when it turns into a document you fill out, save to a shared drive, and forget. A strong V2MOM governs your year. It gives you air cover (and language) to push back when new work shows up: “Happy to add this… what moves off?” “What priority does this replace?” “What decision are we actually making?” But it only works if it’s ALIVE. The best V2MOMs show up in 1:1s, performance reviews, and at the start of strategic meetings. They become the grounding reference point for decisions, feedback, and tradeoffs as things inevitably change. I’ve seen V2MOMs work at the company level, for individual teams, on single projects – even for personal goals. The real power is shared clarity and permission to say no with context and alignment. This year, Chuck asked me to help roll out the V2MOM process to all of Gainsight for FY27… and I promise to do it in a bright room full of windows! I pulled together the best practices we’re using into a short PDF (linked in the comments) in case it’s helpful as you think about your own approach.
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D. Scott Andrick
Ken Stillwell, COO & CFO at Pegasystems, discusses how organizations may be left with only one or no employees who understand critical legacy systems, as others retire and replacements are hard to find. This situation creates serious modernization and operational risk. Explore the full conversation: https://lnkd.in/g3R4UP72
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