Salesforce Co-Founder Parker Harris on Why AI Keeps Him Up at Night

While the Salesforce co-founder has directed leaders at the enterprise software behemoth to move as quickly as possible to integrate AI into its products, Harris is concerned about balancing the need for speed with the company's track record delivering high-quality solutions to clients. Striking that balance has even kept him up at night.

"I have anxiety that the speed at which AI is going, I've never seen anything like it," Harris said at Salesforce's World Tour event in New York City on Thursday. "I feel like we've gotta go faster. We can't hold back, we can't worry. And yet, we have to worry, because our customers trust us to help them in the best way possible." One of the questions he said he's been asking himself when it comes to AI is, "How do I go as fast as possible and not make mistakes along the way?"

Harris, who in January became chief technology officer at Slack, a subsidairy of Salesforce, added that AI's ability to generate images and video from simple prompts--something he refered to as "magic tricks"--might not be as impressive in the workplace as they are on social media. 

Harris also noted that many entrepreneurs have a fear of missing out on the AI wave, especially after AI hit a "tipping point" in February, when market leader OpenAI was valued at $80 billion. That moment, combined with the knowledge that Salesforce rival Microsoft had been working with OpenAI to develop AI-powered workplace tools, made Harris and Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff realize they were likely running behind in the AI race, and needed to catch up. "Marc and I were like, 'We have to reboot the whole company,'" Harris said. "AI, let's go." 

Salesforce's flagship AI product is Einstein, a platform that businesses can use to build predictive AI models that leverage proprietary customer data. In Slack, enterprises with a business account pay a monthly fee of $10 per-person to get access to Slack AI, a tool that can summarize conversations and search through chat histories to provide answers to questions.

A problem that Harris said pagues AI, however, has to do with trust. "Sometimes it lies," he said. "What if that Slack summarization missed very important things? What if we give our customers something that hallucinates and causes problems, or just doesn't work quite right?" If a user notices that an AI-generated summary left out multiple key details, Harris said, it's unlikely that they'll trust the tool again.