Canadian businesses increasingly recognize that artificial intelligence is an economic imperative, but Salesforce Canada Country Manager Dave Borrelli says they must move more quickly from exploring the technology to putting it to work.
Speaking during an interview at Dreamforce in San Francisco, Borrelli said the urgency surrounding enterprise technology has changed considerably during his 19 years with Salesforce.
“In the cloud era, most of the initiatives we were working on were perceived by Canadians generally as a nice-to-have,” he said. “I think there is an urgency now.”
That urgency is producing more inbound interest from Canadian organizations eager to understand how AI applies to their operations. The challenge, according to Borrelli, is overcoming Canada’s traditionally cautious approach to adopting new technology.
Canadian companies tend to scrutinize the expected return and potential risks of projects more closely than their American counterparts. While that caution has served businesses well in the past, Borrelli believes waiting for AI technology to mature could leave them behind.
“We’re in a world where we just have to get started with AI,” he said. “Companies will learn as we go.”
Borrelli pointed to Carmichael Engineering, a century-old, family-run Canadian heating, ventilation and air-conditioning company, as an example. The company is deploying Salesforce’s Agentforce technology to automate the work technicians complete before and after service calls, giving them more time to repair equipment and serve customers.
The company did not wait until it had perfect data, systems or extensive in-house AI expertise before beginning.
“There’s not a company in the world that really does,” Borrelli said.
He also described a large food manufacturer that had identified thousands of possible AI applications but began with a single workflow. Its first agent prepares sales representatives for meetings and completes follow-up work, potentially saving half an hour per appointment.
The company’s next agent will analyze restaurant menus to identify establishments that do not carry products it sells. Benefits produced by the initial deployments can then fund subsequent applications.
“We can build while we evaluate,” Borrelli said. “We don’t have to take on this nine-figure project and hope to get ROI in three years.”
Technology alone will not determine whether these projects succeed. Borrelli said leaders must deliberately create an organizational culture in which employees understand AI and are encouraged to identify practical applications.
One Salesforce customer, a large waste-management company, held a Dragons’ Den-style competition inviting employees to pitch workflows that could be improved with AI. Executives selected the most promising ideas for funding, creating enthusiasm while generating use cases from the bottom up.
Borrelli said similar competitions are most effective when held within individual business units, where newer employees may feel more comfortable sharing their ideas.
Salesforce Canada has adopted that approach internally. Borrelli’s team recently launched a contest asking employees to demonstrate Slackbot skills they use in their daily work, with a cash prize for the strongest submission.
The shift is also changing the composition of Salesforce’s own workforce. Borrelli said the company may not be hiring as many developers as it once did, but is hiring significant numbers of forward-deployed engineers who work directly with customers to apply and implement its technology.
He does not expect AI to produce a wholesale “jobs apocalypse,” but believes it will reshape positions by automating administrative duties and allowing employees to spend more time on customer relationships, judgment and other higher-value work.
At RBC’s wealth business, for example, Salesforce AI can assemble information for an advisor’s client meeting in about a minute, according to Borrelli, replacing preparation that could otherwise take an hour or two. HVAC technicians can similarly complete more service calls when AI handles pre- and post-visit paperwork.
Where automation does eliminate a substantial amount of work, businesses will have to redesign roles rather than simply leave employees idle. Borrelli said Salesforce has moved some customer-service employees from responding to inbound requests into more proactive, customer-facing work.
For younger workers, his advice is to develop expertise in a particular field while becoming proficient with AI.
“The jobs you’re going after are probably not going to completely go away, but you will lose out to somebody who knows how to use AI,” he said.
Borrelli believes AI could become an important part of the response to Canada’s longstanding productivity problem. Unlike trade policy and other external economic pressures, productivity is something Canadian companies can influence directly by changing how their employees work.
Technology will not solve every economic challenge facing the country, he cautioned. But practical deployments that free advisors, technicians, salespeople and service representatives to focus on more valuable work could help Canadian businesses begin closing the gap.
“What I hope we’re talking about next year at Dreamforce,” Borrelli said, “is the lineup of customers that have actually deployed these things and are now seeing the benefits.”