Welcome back to our Sunday edition, where we round up some of our top stories and take you inside our newsroom. What would you do to land your dream job? One man was so eager to kick-start his tech career that he lived in his car for three months to take a role at Google. He soon found out he wasn’t the only Googler doing it.
On the agenda today:
But first: Getting AI to work for you.
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At the Davos conference in January, Marc Benioff asked a crowd of luminaries whether AI was a basic human right.
Here is another question: Can it make him money?
He gushed about AI agents last year, enthusiasm that helped drive the company’s stock to an all-time high in early December. This year, though, Salesforce isn’t in the AI darling club. Its shares are down roughly 28%.
Business Insider’s Ashley Stewart has been reporting on the company’s “Agentforce” project, which represents Salesforce’s big bet on AI agents.
“Inside the company, some current and former employees say there’s been constant struggle for the teams scrambling to deliver on Benioff’s public promises of what their AI products can do,” she wrote.
Her in-depth piece showed how hard this evolution can be, even at companies all in on it.
“It’s very, very difficult — even for people working on the products — to know the difference between what we say in a demo, what’s on a road map, and what’s actually in production,” one senior employee told Ashley. “It’s a full-time job just figuring that out.”
Meanwhile, my LinkedIn post on the story generated a pointed discussion.
At Business Insider, we’re actively reporting on how AI is and isn’t helping people in business. And we’re not just looking at big companies.
A new series, Tiny Teams, features entrepreneurs trying to leverage themselves with AI to scurry around incumbents. Our profile of Tim DeSoto, most recently of Walmart, is an example.
DeSoto is launching an AI-driven shopping app he hopes will help customers this holiday season. Reach out to BI’s Agnes Applegate if you have a similar story to share.
