Only 17% of enterprise executives say they have clear clarity on their AI strategy!!!! That is from a survey of 500 leaders at Global 2000 companies. I spoke at Dreamforce with David Cushman, Executive Research Leader at HFS Research, and Gurvinder Singh Sahni, CMO at Altimetrik on The Ravit Show, to talk about what that gap actually looks like!!!!
What we covered:
- The shift at Dreamforce itself. Service providers used to dominate the floor. This year the attention moved to AI labs, AI infrastructure, and the interaction layer. Dario Amodei and Jensen Huang were in the room.
- Enterprise leaders are still confused about pricing models, and there is a real distance between where most companies are today and where Salesforce's vision sits.
- The legacy problem nobody wants to talk about. If your digital transformation is half finished, you cannot layer advanced AI on top of it. The foundation has to get sorted first.
- The theme of this phase is the harness. Control, governance, cost management, protecting enterprise margins. Making sure AI delivers results safely.
- Human at the helm, rather than human in the loop. David's point stayed with me. In the loop puts the human under the machine's control. At the helm means the human directs, decides, brings creativity, and stays accountable. Salesforce's responsible AI work uses the same framing.
Advice for leaders from both of them:
David said leaders have to use these tools themselves, daily. Without hands on experience you cannot see where AI actually fits in your organization.
Gurvinder said the same from the practitioner side. Equip your own teams first with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini. You cannot authentically guide clients on something you have not done yourself.
And the goal is augmentation. Efficiency per person, revenue per employee, human capability extended rather than swapped out.
Thank you David and Gurvinder for a great conversation.
#dreamforce #salesforce #agentforce #altimetrik #hfsresearch #ai #enterpriseai #theravitshow
