Zahra Bahrololoumi, CEO Salesforce UK & I | Britain's AI Skills Gap

0:00Welcome to Jimmy's Jobs of the Future and this special episode with Salesforce and Focal Data. We teamed up with them to do some exclusive polling around AI and the workplace, how it's being adopted, how many people are using it. I was quite struck by the fact that 61 % of people had said they had received no formal AI training. And I think that is a really big challenge for the United Kingdom coming up. we recorded this at the new salesforce ai center we recorded it in their studio so it may sound a little different but what i was so impressed by this is it's part of a much bigger announcement salesforce have come out with in terms of their investing in the uk and it was exactly seven years since i worked on one to time with london tech week when i was at downing street and i was struck by thinking about when I was at number 10, if a big tech CEO came in to see me about an investment, the two questions would always be, how much is it going to be?

1:07And could we in any way make it larger? And also how many jobs is that going to provide? And I think in the modern world, it is interesting how much the AI technology investment space has changed because so much of the investment is now in compute and in data centers, et cetera. and it doesn't translate necessarily to real jobs that people can see. And that is what is so powerful about this new centre at Devonshire Square that Salesforce have opened up, is it's a physical space. On the morning of the opening, there were lots of school kids in there, being able to be given those first nudges and prompts into how to use AI that makes it so valuable and so important for people to be able to get even just a taste of that workplace experience.

1:51So it was a real pleasure to sit down with the UK and Ireland CEO Zara to talk about all this and all the work that Salesforce are doing in the space. So I very much hope you enjoy listening to it. On to today's episode. Zara, welcome to Jimmy's Jobs of the Future in your amazing new AI centre, which has got so much kind of like London around it. Like it's it's we're in the city right now and the Holy Devonshire Square as well Like it was amazing it listen to the lady mayor earlier talk about how this used to be a warehouse Yeah, like it sort of embodies the change of the city, right? It really does Poetic almost because Salesforce is quite known for its towers isn't it as well.

2:37We love a tower

2:42We like to be like I know, it's quite iconic, like in South Francisco and whatever, like it rises right above the... It's part of the skyline now, it's incredible. But I think it is, it's funny for people to be able to see things like that. It does sort of inspire people on what their careers might become. What was your first job? Before, like as a young teenager? Yeah, like what was the first thing you did for money? Oh gosh, I worked in a pizza place. Oh, did you? Yeah, so I'm a terrible cook, but I can actually make a mean dough from scratch and I can spin the... I can do it all by hand and spin it.

3:14I understand you were in the kitchen. Yeah, oh, yeah. No, I did everything. I did... I made the boxes, I did the prep, I made the pizza, I served, you know, customers in the restaurant. I was literally like Manuel, you know, from... LAUGHTER From£50. It's a slave label when you think about it now. Oh, do you remember what you paid? I was paid£5 an hour, which was actually quite a big deal back in... Yeah? ..1990 or... Yeah, 1990. That's good. It's good, isn't it? 91. I felt really flush with cash, you know. I'd worked many hours. So, yeah, pizza teaches you so much, though. It teaches you about people, about organisation, and I had to deal with the drunkards when they'd come in after the pub rush.

3:53Were they? So it was independent, then? It was an independent place, yeah. So you were doing it all? In a little town called Hitchin. Yeah, I was doing everything. Yeah. Oh, funny. What's your favourite pizza topping now? Pineapple. Controversial. Oh, what? I'll put pineapple on anything. It's actually a question we ask people when they're on board at Salesforce. It's like pineapple or not pineapple? Oh, really? Yeah, we judge. I'm judged. What are the stats around? Do you know? I have no idea. That's probably like the biggest survey ever created online. You've got 80 ,000 employees. You're going to have loads of complaints now.

4:33Comment section will be going, absolutely flying off the handle. Amazing. How long did you do that for? I did that for a couple of years and into my first year at uni. Okay. And then I didn't work at uni because then it was a sandwich course, so I'd have, you know, placements. And then I did a job placement, you know, an industrial placement with them. And then did you go straight into Accenture? So I did an industrial placement with Vauxhall Motors. Oh, right. Yep. Love Vauxhall Motors. Yeah, yeah. And then when I left, I actually wanted to be a diplomat. So I wanted to work for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

5:10Oh, right. And there were a whole load of rules that filtered me out because of my background. And I had various conversations, but we couldn't overcome. I think back then in the 90s, you had to be a second-generation immigrant. I'm a first-generation born here. And if you were not second-generation, your parents had to have been in the country for more than 25 years. So I failed that criteria. Right. which is ironic given my background and what's going on in the world right now. Well, quiet. The world needs a savvy, tech savvy, farty speaker. So that, I was very despondent when I came out. That was my plan A.

5:50That was my only plan A. And, you know, I did have a few, I applied to a few of the, what was called the big six back then, you know, the big consulting companies. But I wasn't interested in doing that. And then I bumped into somebody at a careers fair, the final conversation I'd had with the FCO, and they were like, sorry, this is just not going to work. And then I joined a software house called American Management Systems and I suddenly fell into tech. That was the thing that really kind of woke me up to the technology sector because that was just not on the card. And then actually I really enjoyed it but I very quickly got bored and so then I picked up the conversations again with the big six and then I ended up at Anderson Consulting, which became Accenture.

6:34so I was there for 22 years. Yeah, and that's unusual in some ways to be somewhere for more than two decades now. Yeah. You started off doing energy stuff as well. I did a lot of energy stuff. I actually started in financial services so when they offered me my position and it was, you know, you go in as an analyst but you go into different sections of the company I actually insisted on going into tech and they were like, you don't have a tech background. I said, but I don't know why but I think the future is tech and I need to learn more. So I said, that's the condition of me accepting. So I actually joined the technology practice.

7:09And back then, you know, I think about some of the most advanced industries at the time that were really transitioning and really embodying tech. Was financial services, was the telco. So I did, you know, I did a new insurance framework for a big insurer on the mainframe. Big deal. And then the first digital TV implementation for what was then Telewest, which then merged with NTL now, you know, all got converged into the different industries. And this was the mid-90s? This was the late 90s, yeah, mid to late 90s. And then a big chunk of time in energy. But it's interesting because, to me, it feels like we're about to have one of those kind of reflection moments of it again.

7:55But it seems like there's a bit more awareness, like everyone seems more aware of it. But one of the striking things, We've done this polling data, Jimmy's Jobs, with Focal Data and Salesforce. And I am struck that 51 % of people have received no employer training. If you have been enjoying today's conversation, we have put together a report with Salesforce exploring how AI is being used in the workplace. One of the most striking findings was that 61 % of workers told us they had received no formal AI training. The report looks at the skills gap, workforce confidence, productivity and what businesses and policy makers need to do to help Britain make the most of the opportunity.

8:45You can download the report using the link in the show notes below. Now, back to the episode. I am struck that 51 % of people have received no employer training. Like it's a lot. Yeah. Right? How do we... I mean, you've got this new AI centre, right, which is like a physical embodiment of it. Yeah. I mean, look, we've come away from the days where... And maybe some of the programmes still exist, but certainly I was very fortunate when I came into the workforce. I had very much structured classroom-based learning. and then there was stuff that I actually took self-responsibility to learn. I didn't have online stuff.

9:26I went and bought books on TCP IP protocols. You know, I went and studied DVB standards. So, you know, there was the level of personal responsibility and resourcefulness. And you see that today. You see lots of people experimenting with AI. You know, most people are using it within their personal life. People are engaging. I think people genuinely are engaging with AI. I think, look, from a business perspective, I can certainly tell you what we're doing. And, you know, we had the conversation before, but, you know, we've got, we're in the AI centre. Next door, we've got, you know, school children from primary and secondary schools.

10:02And, you know, we are, we've created the Future Trailblazers programme because we don't think it's any one person's responsibility, but we want to contribute and say, right, we've got to train and educate young people because I believe action is the antithesis of anxiety. So we can not be aware, not learn, or we can actually be proactive and help people engage and take action and be familiar and reduce the fear levels and, you know, inspire and educate folks. And I think from a corporate perspective, we are we're very proactive. It's our business, though. We are very proactive in educating our own people.

10:38You know, 100 percent of us are all on our own agent, our super agent Slack bot. we engage heavily with AI, we are learning, we encourage it, we make it available to people. But I think you can't rely on one party. You can't say government, it's your job, you know, business, it's your job. I think we've all got an individual. We're not at a buffet. We have to participate in society. It's not, these skills aren't served to us. We all have to engage in a very proactive ecosystem to educate ourselves. And what's the thinking behind the physical centre of it, right? Because you were saying in your remarks earlier that there are, yeah, you're investing a lot of money, but sometimes a lot of this investment can feel to the average citizen quite a lot.

11:25Doesn't touch them. Doesn't touch them, right? No, no. The numbers are so big partly as well, but also is they just don't, yeah. We, I remember the conversation we had about, do we do this or not? And I think the physical manifestation is really important because what you can't, if you think about our company, our ethos, it's about humans and agents working together. What agents will never, ever replace is the human to human connection. And I think I go back to we've got to be proactive. We've got to be accessible. And so we wanted a space that was inviting, that was welcoming, that supported the collaboration, that was open to, you know, charitable sectors, public sector, the commercial sector, educational institutions, because we will only embrace the full potential of AI and unlock it fully if we are all participating in together.

12:12And who doesn't want to be in a gorgeous space like this? And actually it just makes it less isolating. I mean I could sit at home with my laptop and you know download every other kind of you know frontier model and start playing with it will I learn as much as if I'm pushing and pulling and engaging and testing and workshopping and understanding really how I can use it I don't think I will have that experience in my bedroom you've got to be here and also we need to participate in society what are we going to do we're going to all be locked away no we've got to be here physically so we feel that very strong I feel that very strongly what's the what's the most interesting thing that you have used AI for lately and I'm gonna I'm gonna give you just a second think about it because I was sharing in the panel my thing and it's funny because it is that human to human connection I say this at lots of talks I go to is one of the most interesting things that I've used it for is to take everything it knows about Jim McLaughlin everything can find out online I've talked to it and predict my career for the next 30 years I love that I'm gonna do this yeah exactly I'm actually gonna do this people are so interested and the amount of people that come to me after panel be like I'm doing that it's afternoon um and so I just think it's really interesting like again it's that human-to-human connection of being like I did this and it was quite cool um what have you kind of used it for I've used it for so many I mean I there's there's a difference between how I use it in my work context and how I use it in my personal context and in my work context and I was again I was just talking about this earlier I mean we use we use like our super agent is slack bot so we've got a whole company all of our all our public channels are available and it's got full context of our business that makes my job so incredibly amplified yeah right is the best way I can describe it and I am really conscious in how I use both in work and personally in that I don't want to just be served an answer so I tend to use it to critique or challenge so I will say you know something like and by the way you can use it very passively I'll give you an example when I log in every morning my slack bot serves me my today and in my today it will have trawled through any conversation that requires me to do something and it will serve it in a slate for me to check off you need to prove this you need to do this So that's the first thing which makes my life so much easier.

14:35All right, number one. So I do use that. And then it will have my calendar. And against each meeting, it will have a prep button. And I can press prep. And it will go and get the right context. And it is scary how brilliant it is. And it will say, you're about to meet Jimmy. These are the things that are top of mind. Here's who Jimmy is. I didn't do that, by the way. But I could have done. So that is fantastic. Now, if I was being lazy, I would just rely on that fully. But if I'm setting every Monday morning, you know, the three priorities for my leadership team and what we need to focus on, I could just press the prep button.

15:13And it would say, based on performance last week, this is what you need to do. This is what you need to call out. What I do do, though, is I use it and I say, here are the three things I want to talk to my team about and here's why. Tell me what I'm missing and where I'm wrong. And have I overlooked something in terms of performance that I need to make sure that we need to bring into this week? So that's how I use it. And, you know, when I prepare for customer meetings and I will always go to Slack bot and say, tell me what I need to know and what's top of mind and what might so-and-so ask. In my personal life, I'm going to tell you what cool things I'm using.

15:42Yeah, yeah, yeah. I use it to create playlists. So I will say something like, what is the optimum beats per minute that will guarantee everyone will dance? And it will say 130 or 120 beats per minute. I'll go, right, now compile me a playlist with the theme of Miami Vice. that will like and and it will create the best but it doesn't integrate with Spotify yet which is a real limiting Yeah, so I do it for that, but I also do it You know I had a problem with my eye over the weekend and I was just giving it my symptoms and rather than the Google doom of death like you know Yeah, so yeah, basically so I just I use it I try to be critical in how I use it rather than passive And how do you think we're going to keep that kind of critical?

16:26thinking because it can be you know taking the work examples of where like you know so much is kind of done for you how do you not almost offload too much cognitively onto it i think people are really savvy and can detect if something's been written by or created by yeah ai and i think it all comes whether you've got a whether in the era of ai or whether we weren't in the area like authenticity is what will shine and um you know authentic leadership authentic styles is what will really dominate so i think you've people have to make an active i think you have to make an active choice genuinely i think you have to make an active choice um and how do you decide as a leader like what we all prioritizing right like because it's still you putting the inputs in right of the four or five things how do you in the role of chief executive how do you prioritize what the key things are?

17:23Well, the great thing is our priorities don't actually, you know, customer success, you know, we've got to drive growth, we've got to look after our people, look after our people, look after our customers. And, you know, those orders oscillate, you know, vie for number one at any point in time. So that's always our mission. That's always our North Star. So everything is quite easy. Everything is in service of that. So if it's not in service of that, then it quite simply isn't a priority. With Salesforce, we've got a whole load of mechanisms to isolate our objectives and our priorities for a given year.

17:55And we're good at calibrating against that on a quarterly basis. I think the thing with AI right now is that everything is minute critical. Everything is minute or second critical. And as a leader, you have to not get carried away with that and remember what you're here to do. You're here to make customers successful. You're here to make your people successful. You're here to grow the business. So there was this fascinating stat that kind of came out of the polling with Focal data, which is that almost one in five are using AI multiple times a day or a daily basis, right? So it's like top 20 % of people regularly using it, getting benefits out of it.

18:35And then you've got 50 % of people who basically haven't used it or have only used it once in the last month, which I think is pretty negligible. But it's like you've got three quite sort of big chunks there of people that are using it more than four times a day, people that are using it maybe once or twice a week, and then barely at all, really. And I just worry about this kind of digital divide that's going to accelerate beyond. And how do we keep everyone up and benefiting from this technology? You know, we could have had this conversation five years ago and we would have talked about the digital divide and you'd have gone through exactly those same categories and we'd have talked about the frozen middle and then the non-digital folks, people that are just not engaged with it and then you've got the digital savvy folks and you couldn't attach an age or a demographic or whatever.

19:23We could have had that conversation five years ago. We're just talking about a different technology and we still see that schism, we still see that. And I think, honestly, it goes back to the more we can get out there, the more we can educate, the more we can make people less fearful of it, the more we can get people adopting it and scaling their usage of it, then the more we're going to get out of it. And I think, to your point, there are individuals that use it in their personal lives. I think where I'm focused with our customer base is ensuring that our customers are embracing. Because I think enterprise AI adoption is very different from, you know, anyone can play with a model.

19:57The data has not been verified. The data is, you know, it's been trained on a ton of data and that's not necessarily being curated. You know, there's no veracity that you can really point to. that's very different in the business world and I think you know with an enterprise for us to use AI for us to adopt it fully we have to be able to trust it and for us to be able to trust it we have to be able to have it grounded in a company's data and that data better be organized and that data better be good and that is the unlock and that's you know that's where we come in you know Salesforce with our data foundation our system of work our system of engagement and our system of agency and all of that is now open but with us you get an operating system with the right guardrails and the right security and the orchestration to be able to use ai safely and responsibly and until we get more enterprises adopting ai at scale it's not going to be within our everyday work and we're going to be using it for the playlists and for the recipes and yeah and for that we're going to use it like google and it's just just going to be prompting it so i think there is this The challenge as well when it comes to business is the dangerous middle.

21:08In the sense of, and it's a bit similar to the individuals that we just discussed, large enterprises have got teams, can dedicate resource, thinking time, solid cash flows, can implement this and so on. And then at my end, the kind of like Jimmy's Job small business side of things, we're small and we're nimble and we can implement it quite quickly, drop it and so on. And it's been a bit of a, it really has been. It's a game changer. Yeah, it's been a superpower for our business over the last year or so. But then again, it's actually that sort of middle of perhaps the 40 to 200 employees where it's just a bit more challenging to do that.

21:45They might not have an AI lead and so on. How are you working with those types of businesses? That is actually the segment that has gone gangbusters in terms of growth, right? You're right, that logically... Sorry, I hope I haven't heard the sound here. Logically, that is exactly where I would be. the reality and what the data is showing us and our business performance are small and medium small emerging and small businesses and our mid-market segment right so the mid-market is is exactly the the space that is engaging and utilizing certainly our business and our agent force capability you know at scale as you described as a superpower it's their superpower they can now grow without growing headcount.

22:28All of a sudden they're seeing such a vast economic impact. I'll take a good example. So Simply Health, you know, you wouldn't say they're a massive, they're not massive, they're an amazing organisation. And they are using, they have used agent force within their contact centre and they're seeing now something like a 90 % reduction in response times. And they're just, they're freeing out something like 90 hours a week. That's amazing. So logically, you think, OK, well, they're getting a greater throughput. They've not made one single person redundant, by the way. All the people in their contact center are doing higher value work and they're actually paying their people more.

23:05And it's a better experience. That is a really massive unlock. And they didn't have they didn't have an army of tech people. They didn't have a chief AI officer. they had an absolutely determined chief customer officer that wanted to make sure that she got the right outcome for her people and for her customers. I go back to those two things, right? And learned with us. She was one of our early adopters, Claudia, just one of our amazing early adopters. So that is a... That I can tell you about 10 of those examples over and over and over. It's actually the bigger enterprises with all the tech teams that sometimes get in their own way.

23:41I say that with the utmost respect I say that because you take institutions that have got tons of engineers they want to build it themselves they want to build they don't want the platform they're having to start from scratch in terms of security and controls and guardrails and I go back to for us to adopt it we have to trust it and so you know you get teams and teams of engineers, no, no, no, we're going to build our own reference architecture. Hang on a minute, how are you going to compete with these platforms that have that safety already inbuilt? So that is the difference I see in terms of the type of customers and how they engage with it.

24:25It's quite interesting in the panel that Piers Linney was in the audience and he asked a question about what's the kind of difference between sort of buying and building, right? And he asked the chief installation officer at Pets at Home. You buy commodity, you know, build to differentiate. It was so good. And it's like basically by piercing, I scribbled it down immediately. Like, it's such an interesting line though. But you can replicate that across. You would never invest, build activity into something that was a enterprise or an industry standard or something you could get off the shelf. Why would you do that?

25:02You want to be spending your effort building to differentiate. That was ever thus. It applies here. It applies here. It is interesting that some of this stuff is, yeah, there's history rhymes, if not repeats. When it comes to skills of the future, how do you think it's going to change? I was fascinated to listen to Mark Benioff on a podcast last week on the All In podcast, talking about how they realised last year that there were almost 20, between 20 and 30 million sales leads that just hadn't been called back. right and it's you know amazing to come here the founder and chief executive of Salesforce be open and talk about that as a mistake he's like right with that's a loop that we're now closing and so on so what when everything like that ends up being solved what are the skills that are going to manner in the future what are the differentiators well if that particular challenge was solved so that we could feed human salespeople better quality leads so better qualified leads with a higher likelihood of closing it didn't replace it didn't replace humans it was a problem that we could see because we were stretched in terms of capacity and we had leads that were largely ignored and therefore we didn't necessarily always have the best qualified opportunities coming through our pipe but if if we had complete I don't know if whether he completed the sentence on that but had he gone and completed and concluded the paragraph is we continue to grow our sales organization because we've got better we've got better qualified sales leads so it's not a case of we're going to solve it and therefore we're going to remove the need for humans and I hope I haven't heard he will have said it's to augment the the humans because that's what we well he believes we believe yeah um as to skills and how they have I think the nature of work is going to evolve.

26:57And I'll go back to a personal example. So when I ended up going to American Management Systems and falling into tech, I started as a business analyst. What does that mean in the traditional sense? Hi, Mr. or Mrs. Customer, let's capture your requirements. Let's translate them with another team into technology requirements. Let's get that stuff built. Let's go through a testing cycle. Then you need to kind of user acceptance test it. And then we'll go. And that whole thing might take months. God knows, right? Depends on the tech. Like today, that same graduate, for example, coming out of uni, wanting to work in that.

27:29And by the way, it doesn't have to be uni. I'm just using that as a parallel example. But that same individual, I would still come out and I would still sit down with you because you still need something to solve a business problem. But instead of me going through that linear process, and of course, we sexied it up, didn't we, by calling it agile at some point. But it was still the same thing, right? Now, I will do that. I will try and understand what business problem you're trying to solve. but the difference now is I'll probably build it. I'll build it with you, we'll iterate together. Is this what you mean?

27:59And then what we might do is we might deploy it. We might deploy it and while we're deploying it I might tune it with you. Is it giving you the answers you want? Is it serving the value that you need? I'm still that person coming up but the nature of my role has changed. I'm still trying to solve a business problem with technology but the way I'm doing it with you is different and I think that is what we've got to embrace with AI coming, you know, helping us change everything. What do you look for when you're recruiting people? I can't really say on this podcast. Censored.

28:38What do I look for? So I look for a learning and open mindset. I need someone that's going to find a way to do something, not tell me 10 reasons why they can't do it. I need people that can work well with and earn trust from customers. And I need people that can be creative commercially to get the right outcome for customers and for us. And to, again, be critical in their thinking. And I think, honestly, the only way I can epitomise this is a line from a soul to soul song. keep on moving tick tock don't stop with hounds of time you need people that are evolving continually evolving and reinventing and learning I think if you have an individual like that in your team or you have a team mindset like that actually you can do anything we if I think about where we start even to where I started five years ago nothing has stayed the same yeah I mean by design we reimagine our go-to-market structure every year we do that by design now it is not unheard of if we're evolving that within a quarter because of things that are really happening right so so i think about agent force we got our agent force platform live within 90 days i mean this is just mind-blowing yeah so the pace has changed and even that to some will be like oh nice days we launched something so just it's just evolving and getting ever faster the only that's the only thing you can be sure of and you need people that can mold and adapt with it so this is one of the things that I say quite a lot when asked about jobs in the future is that seven out of every eight jobs in the UK are in the private sector, right?

30:21And the private sector's job is to research and develop products that it can then take to market, market them, and sell them for more than that process cost to produce. And that has basically been the same process since the dawn of time. Now the tools have changed in every single process of that, even in my kind of like short career of 15 years, right? The jobs are completely different to what they were at the start, right? Like I remember you having to leaf through like hand-sized papers to kind of do the parliamentary monitoring and so on. So it's just a kind of, and sometimes I think people can get scared of all the change that they're hearing and actually perhaps not realise that there are amazing opportunities.