The Future Of Work Now: Ethical AI At Salesforce

In September 2016, Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff informed employees, customers, and investors that Salesforce would be an AI-driven company. Earlier that year, Microsoft released its Tay research chatbot project through a Twitter Account. Microsoft shut down Tay after only 16 hours because it started to mimic the deliberately offensive behavior of other Twitter users, and Microsoft had not given the bot an understanding of such inappropriate behavior. With chatbots as one of Salesforce's most promising customer service-related technologies, Kathy Baxter, in her role at that time as Principal User Researcher, was curious about understanding what went wrong with Tay. She also wanted to know how that type of AI-enabled system behavior could be avoided at Salesforce.