AI’s next test: turning pilots into productivity

Salesforce New Zealand country manager Richard Phillimore-Smith says the next phase of artificial intelligence will hinge on whether organisations can put trusted data, established workflows and people together to solve real business problems.

Speaking to The Business of Tech at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Phillimore-Smith said the event reflected an industry at a turning point. The gathering brought together some of AI’s most influential figures, including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff.

The mood, as is always the case at Dreamforce, a mecca for marketing and sales tech folk, was upbeat. But the keynotes reflected the broader unease about the pace of AI development and the potential for AI to go rogue.

Amodei has urged greater coordination among AI companies on safety and oversight, a collaborative effort to slow down development as required, while pointing out that businesses are still using only 5 - 10% of the capabilities AI already delivers.

An opportunity to lift productivity

Phillimore-Smith said that the immediate opportunity, epitomised by the rise of AI agents and Agentforce, the Salesforce agentic platform, and Claudeforce, which debuted at Dreamforce, is far more practical and less scary. They are using AI agents to improve customer interactions, equip employees with better information and increase productivity.

“We know that we have got an opportunity to lift productivity. We know we’ve got an opportunity to lift customer experience. We know we’ve got an opportunity to lift employee experience,” he said.

“It has to start with data. Businesses organise to get the data right. AI as a tool can then surface that in the way that customers need it to be.”

Phillimore-Smith pointed to Salesforce customer Fisher & Paykel Appliances, where an AI-enabled service experience is built on thousands of existing product and support articles.

On the conference floor at Dreamforce, I caught up with Rudi Khoury, chief digital officer at Fisher & Paykel Appliances, who told me that the whiteware maker has seen nearly 45% of service bookings completed online and a 50% reduction in call-handling times since installing an AI agent to handle customer queries.

“It's like having more people, but this one can scale more,” he said.

“One agent can do a different scale to