Welcome to the Business of Tech, powered by Two Degrees Business.

I'm Peter Griffin, coming to you from San Francisco, where I've been hanging out with well around fifty thousand other people in town for the annual dream Force conference put on by software company Salesforce, and it's flamboyant founder Marc Benioff.

I've always liked getting to dream Force because Benioff, You've got to hand it to him, puts on a great show.

He always gets big names to talk at his conference.

This year's highlights included Google CEO Sundaipachai, President Trump's aisar and member of the PayPal mafia David Sachs, and an unexpected one, Pete Bodhage Edge, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who ran in the Democratic presidential campaign in twenty nineteen before dropping out and serving as President Biden's Transport Secretary.

Bootage Edge is still tipped as a future potential candidate and his talk was really fascinating.

I've included a clip of it at the end of the podcast.

Dream Force was dominated once again by artificial intelligence.

It's a year since Salesforce debuted Agent Force and look Salesforce is a tech company that is probably most enthusiastically embraced AI agents.

These are autonomous software programs that perceive their environment, make decisions, and take actions to achieve goals, often with minimal human intervention.

Agents are particularly useful for automating aspects of customer service and support, sales and marketing, which is why Salesforce has gone all in on agents.

It has twelve thousand Agent Force customers after its first year.

It's around eight percent of the entire Salesforce customer base of companies, which a number of analysts pointed out is relatively low uptake, but as Benioff countered, it's a heck of a lot more than any other tech company is managing at the moment.

Still, despite the AI boom, some would say bubble that we're in, Salesforce has actually seen at share price retreat twenty three percent this year.

It claims it's using AI to reduce one hundred million dollars in costs across the company each year.

It shared four thousand staff, many in customer support roles by shifting to AI agents, and it told the share market it expects to return to double digit growth out to twenty thirty, when it expects to rack up sixty billion dollars in revenue, up from around thirty eight billion last year.

That growth will largely come on the back of businesses taking up AI agents.

One thing that only got a fleeting demo in the Dreamforce keynote, But one of the things that Salesforce is piloting, which is really interesting, is Agent Force Voice.

It's like calling up a call center where you might typically get a human on the line or maybe a voice activated menu.

Now you'll potentially get an AI agent.

You can talk to one that can understand what you want.

It might be changing your broadband plan, returning some clothing that doesn't fit, reporting an electricity outage, or buying a plane ticket.

Given that up to eighty percent of interactions with customer service in some industries is still coming in via phone lines, that would be huge.

If it works as envisaged, that's a game changer.

More about Agent Force Voice coming up in the show.

At dream Force, I also got around a lot of companies that are using agents to automate various processes.

PepsiCo is using agent Force to let its smaller merchants more easily check on the status of their orders just using a simple chat based agent.

Lululemon, the active where company, is offering customers the chance to use an agent to customize a wardrobe through an app based experience and then go on to purchase what they've been looking at.

Pearson's, the education provider, is letting students use agents to change courses and by textbooks.

I saw a really cool agentic service from Chicago Medical University to give patients one chat based interface to order prescriptions, change appointments, get their medical records delivered to them.

That would remove a heck of a lot of hassle dealing with this sort of gap we have between patient portals which we all sort of have in New Zealand now, and the mirrid range of healthcare professionals who actually deliver frontline services.

It can be frustrating actually going from one to the other.

Good to see some New Zealand companies one in Zed, Fisher and Pikeland Zero among those being showcased at Dreamforce for Innovative Uses of AI agents.

So you're hearing the piece from Jason Paris, who I caught up on a show floor at Dreamforce where one in Zed had a display and demo area.

But first I wanted to invite back onto the show Hamish Miles, the managing director of Salesforce New Zealand, to get his take on what's transpired since Agent Force unleashed the AI agents almost exactly a year ago.

Here's Hamish Miles from s Salesforce.

Okay, so Hamish, welcome back to the business of Tech.

How are you doing.

Yeah, awesome, It's been an epic few days.

I'm absolutely pumped and looking forward to what comes next.

Yeah, we're on the roof of the Muscone Center in San Francisco.

Dream Force, the biggest conference in San Francisco, the biggest tech conference, has been going all week and interesting what you say is that the highlights obviously Agent Force three sixty is the centerpiece of this and to me, it seems like we're a year into this agentic ai movement that Salesforce really led you back in October twenty twenty four.

It's sort of moved from being a product to a platform.

This is the systematizing of agentic ai into everything that Salesforce does.

For me, it's been an absolutely fascinating few days and you can see the progression of the journey I've been GenTech AI and you can see some of the great outcomes our customers are starting to produce.

I think Agent four three sixty is a natural next step for us.

It makes a lot of sense to our customers.

What excites me the most is the agentic enterprise.

Where are we going to go next?

And then the combination of humans and AI working together things an exciting time for the industry and we're just starting right We're just scratching the surface.

Twelve thousand customers, I think half of them are paying customers are using agent Voice.

Now, what's been the adoption like in New Zealand.

You know, I think we're at the front edge as well.

I've got some great customers doing some great things.

I mean, you've heard from Jason Paris at one and said, that's an agentic journey, that prepay agent does multiple things all in one journey, all in a few minutes for Shre and Pike or on the path with field service agents and are scaling the premium product with Premium Service zero are going to do some exciting things very shortly.

And it seems to me, like Jason said, the customer facing ones, which typically will look like a chatbot or maybe a voice call.

So but he said, you know that prepaid product shifting sort of agent that they've created.

If you on a mobile plan and you want to move to another one, and this will do it all automatically and suggest the right plan for you.

But he said, there's actually seven agents in the background of that, So all the handoffs and querrying data from one ZED system, there's actually a whole bunch of agents doing that in the background.

Yeah, So they were sort of looking at the first stage of orchestration of agents in that sense.

So the first sort of a augentic agents we spun up.

They were sort of sort of single task orientated.

Salesforce has more than two hundred and two hundred and ten.

Agents live at the moment.

Internally, I think there are five hundred and fifty sort of tasks that it can carry on.

We're in this age now where this one agent, like the one New Zealand or one assystem I think it's called one assistant, can orchestrate multiple actions.

And in their case it's like fraud check.

It's a security checking for the trust layer.

It's have we got the right plan?

Can I make you some recommendations?

And it's absolutely fascinating and we can do so much more as well.

Before I go any further with Hamish, I thought it'd be good to bring in Jason Parris from One end Zed, who I caught up with at Agent for City in the depths of the Moscone Center where all of these demos of agents are being shown.

So he gave me a really good rundown on what exactly one end Zed was doing with these AI agents to help roll out a new service for its prepaid customers.

So tell us about how you're using agentic.

Enterprise, Jason, So, Peter, this is something that's just gone into production.

We've been working with Salesforce and deploying their agent Force technology for over a.

Year now and this is the latest agent.

And So from a tallocommunications perspective, one of the most challenging journeys that a customer can go through is migration.

So when you're moving from a plan that you probably are quite happy with to a new plan that we think you should be interested in, it's quite often a complex and clunky process or a customer to go through.

And it's also a bad.

One for a talco because you can get that reconsideration moment, and you want the journey to be so seamless and effortless that you love the Talco even more at the end of it.

And so we've deployed an agentic agent in our business, which is helping hundreds of thousands of our customers move to.

A better prepaid plan for them.

We've started with our most difficult customers, tens of thousands of those and four hundred percent improvement and engagement on the agentic journey compared to the journeys that we would traditionally have used through normal retail or call center or even our online website presence.

So is the customer interacting with the agent directly, yes, by a chatbody or something.

Yeah, So via the agent itself, right, it'll authenticate you to know who you are.

It'll know so the plan that you're on currently, but also the next best plan for you.

It will present a carousel of options that you can interact with, and the agent will talk to you about the pros and cons of the plan compared to what you're currently on, and then we'll ask you to confirm and then once you're happy with.

It, it'll tell you that you're done.

Right and await, it'll have a record for you and for us of what we've agreed should anything change, and then also the agent will ask if it can help you with some other frequently asked questions of someone who is a mobile customer that might want to know.

So that part of it we're going to continue to build out and approve on.

But the upgrade path for a customer.

Seamless, and it took us five weeks to build and deploy it.

Right so, and doesn't require a lot of coding or anything like that.

It's all drag and drop, build your own templated agent building.

Yeah, so some configuration, but it's mainly around data cleaner, making sure the data is accurate, integration with our existing it the Salesforce Agent Force product set are mainly taken and deployed.

The time to deploy it probably is build.

It's making sure you understand what the journey is and the integration with your own rest of your technology and the data cleanup.

Like the very first agent we built with Salesforce took us eight hours and then two weeks to deploy again because of the data and the integration with another to other technology.

Right So, those tens and thousands of problematic customers there, ones that are may be about to churn off one into the you're going to go somewhere else, So that the agent is looking at all the data that sits in Salesforce about that customer, going okay, I know what you need.

Here are some suggestions.

Yeah, well that's the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

So an another tool within the ecosystem that helps us look at our data set, query customers into different SEGM and cohorts and put exactly that brief in and then it will give us that subset.

And so you know that when you are trialing an agentic tool with your most difficult customers, if it works for them, it's going to work for everyone.

So you always start with the naliest ones first, normally to give you confidence that when you do decide to scale it from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands to millions of customers, you've got that clients.

So like, if I'm looking at changing plans, I'll go to the one in ZED website and I'll see all the panels here.

If the different are the broadband or mobile plans that you've got, so in the near future you're more likely to just go straight to an agent and say this.

Is what I need.

What have you got for me?

Yeah, you will, and we'll be transparent about it as well, by the way, so it's not as if you'll think you're talking to a human.

You'll know that you're talking to an agentic tool.

Increasingly, because they're doing such a good job, we think that our customers will go thank God, because I don't want to talk to those use of body humans.

I'd like to talk to more efficient and so that's exactly how that will work.

And then what we will do is we'll keep the human conversations to the probably more important ones.

So if I really have a complex technical issue that I need.

Some help with, or I want to talk to someone.

About upgrading my handset because it's going to cost me three thousand dollars to do that, or maybe unfortunately I'm calling because there's been someone who's l or under financial stress or has passed away in the family, those are the moments where you really want to have a conversation with a person versus a tool.

So we're deploying the technology or the agentic technology on the areas where really humans shouldn't be doing that work, but it's just by default that we're having to throw a lot of people at it.

Now we can put those people onto more important stuff and let the agents do the hard yards for us.

Yeah, so that the agent will complete the transaction.

So if you decide yes, I do to move on to a different plan, that will do that automatically.

Yeah, that's great.

And then so everything in the back end in terms of your record of what plan they're on, that's all updated automatically by the agent.

Yeah, correctly, So into our CRM Salesforce tool at the same time.

So you've got the ecosystem of the traditional customer relationship management, which we're moving.

On to Salesforce.

So all of our prepaid customers, all our products, all our plans are now on the Salesforce CRM, and then you apply the agentic player on top of it, so the.

Intelligence layer on top of it.

Yeah, where you've got a whole bunch of agents performing a whole bunch of tasks and one of them is a plan upgrade or a customer migration.

So end to ends, the ecosystem has a record and that the.

Customers clear about.

The only thing is there's disco movement, dancing and music, and that doesn't happen when you're on our website.

Right right, Yeah, Well, interestingly, you know they have been talking here about Agent Force Voice, which they're piloting get a lot of coal traffic.

Still people want to call up and then you know, if it's overloaded, you might get a callback option or something like that.

What do you think about the option of being able to talk to an agent's and you know how hard it is to get voice recognition and stuff really accurate.

Do you see promise in that it's a game changer.

It's probably of all the things that were discussed yesterday that personally I'm most excited about.

I genuinely believe that voice to agentic tools is the game changer because you think about, I don't know, an eighty year old who might be really kind of resistant or nervous about typing something into an AI which is perceived to be a bot, Whereas actually, if I could have a conversation where there's no latency, that it's a humanized conversation that you can build rapport through transparency that you're talking to an agentic tool, it's probably an easier step for needed just to talk to an AI agent in the same way I would talk to an agent and a call center compared to being forced down a text or social media type conversation.

And I think it's going to be way more efficient, like even the way that I use my own tools.

Now, if I'm talking to.

Chat GPT, I'm not texting you speak of having a conversation with it.

Yeah, And I think even that's what ob an Ai has seen over the last three years of when the first versions of chat GPT, it was all people were using it like a Google search query.

Now it's a conversation.

And I think that conversation can move from a text.

Based one to a voice based one with lower latency.

It's going to be a game change dealing which salesforce say they've been able to cope with background noise, distracted callers, QWI accent, all that sort of stuff.

If we can nail all of that.

Yeah.

And also I think talking about the ki.

Accent, the ability for you to talk in different languages and understand each other at the same time.

How cool is that?

So you think the possibilities are endless, And I think that the voice upgrades is going to be a really big feature.

And it's one of the things I've been talking to.

Salesforce about over here is how can New Zealand be a world first in Talco for the service.

So you look around here and you look at the brands.

I am really proud that one New Zealand is the only Talco here.

But also the way that we get the attention of a company like Salesforces by moving a pace.

And so it's our job to say, serves Salesforce has got a cool feature, let's experiment.

With it and roll it out in New Zealand.

First, where do you see the other real areas of promise for agents across one in z Well?

I think actually sales is probably the next next area.

We've been focusing a lot on service.

But again kind of sales is in the DNA of Salesforce, right, It's in the name, and so everything from being able to pre qualify leads before our salespeople talk to the customer to be able to capture the information I've got the customer wants, the size of the business, the complexity, and then also do some sales coaching for our teams next best action that they might want to take all of those things as a tool that can sit beside your salesperson to do a lot of the heavy lifting before they actually need to talk to the customer, but also sales coaching to get higher conversion as part of that conversation.

That's something the next big wave.

So we've already using salesforce within marketing, we're using salesforce within service and that great journeys and now using I think salesforce and from a sales perspective, whether it's any segment, consumer or small business or large enterprise.

That's the next wave.

And it's proven technology, which.

Is why we're so excited to roll without.

Yeah, and you're seeing the return on investment already.

Across our AI investment five times return wow.

Yeah.

And so we've been deploying AI and all the variations of it, so robotic process automation and machine learning for over ten years.

We've only been deploying agentic for last year.

Because no one even really knew about it twelve months twelve months ago.

But yeah, five times ROI on our AI investment.

So we a lot of people are saying is the value there?

We can see the value absolutely, and we think this is just the beginning.

We want more.

So there are these early adopters and one inserts a real example of that.

Jason said, for every dollar he's investing in AI, he's already getting a five dollar return on that investment.

So that's incredible.

So where is that coming from.

That's obviously efficiencies and is it people.

It's people not having to do all of that work and you can deploy them to somewhere else.

That agent on twenty four to seven and when it launched, it launched at four o'clock in the morning, and it had nine conversations by the time the core center had come alive and nine engagements a week later.

We're talking about four hundred percent improvement and conversion of plans, you know, getting people off old prepaid plans onto the new plans that they want to promote, and a four times improvement rate on the traditional rate.

I know that sounds ironic, traditional journey digital journeys that they have by the web.

I think they've still got the same head count the people doing it.

So it's augmenting humans to make them more efficient and it can be open twenty four seven, which as a consumer, that's a great thing.

What do we need to do in new Zealand to address this issue that Mike Benioff raised, you know, in his keynote on the first day, this gap between incredible innovation that is moving at pace and this sort of lag and adoption.

The companies are just struggling a little bit to keep up.

Is it purely an education issue or do they not have the confidence and frankly the money at the moment and tight times to say we're going to invest in this.

So I'll park the.

Training sort of side, because I think skills is really important.

We need more skills in the market.

But I think there's probably a little bit of reluctance to make a start, and I think people think about data, but data doesn't have to be perfect.

You've probably got three areas of data goal bronze, silver and gold and your account information.

Well that's goal.

We want to wrap that one.

Now, that's true, but marketing messages, et cetera.

Data doesn't have to be perfect and it never will be.

And you've worked out on your journey.

But I think most importantly you can start, make a start because it's a low risk entry.

Is the agent going to be perfect straight away?

No, it won't be, But will it learn yes, it will.

Can we make corrections very quickly, yes, I will.

So start experimenting, do something internal first before you go external, and you'll incremnially keep on improving.

And I think for New Zelling customers we need to really keep moving already.

Look with this customer, we're seeing.

Great productivity gains, like great productivity leagain, so it's cost effective.

It's also seeing revenue increase and productivity.

And I think it's a pretty strong message to share a New Zealand.

So you know there's Data three sixty which is data Cloud, so that's all been agentized and all that, so it's all there.

If you want to put your data on Salesforce, you can do all of this stuff enable it in in a very simple way.

A few of the other sort of innovative things that I think have come out of this week is the move into voice agent Force voice so if you can power a voice interaction with a customer with an agent's and it'd be a good experience.

Have you seen that demo.

Or have you used We've seen it demode and we're looking into the first few New Zealand customers to get on and start trialing it right and that's happening shortly so, but I won't talk about it today, but it's going to be really impactful because we want to meet the customer where they are in the journey, and quite often that's voice.

It's a voice conversation, could be a text, and it could be a digital channel, and it could be an agent, but more often than not, a still voice.

It's I think seventy eighty percent for some businesses that are coming in and protectingly for telcos.

Thin think about having a digital twin.

If you're in the contact center, my name's Maddie, and I create a digital twin that's on twenty four to seven.

I can have a personal relationship with you, Peter, twenty four seven.

I don't even have to be at work and to answer some of your questions, and so you actually feel like you will have a personalized service with your digital assistant who has actually got a human behind it.

That I think for a lot of people will be very very good experience and quite comforting to have that consistent service because you know when you ring up, you're a different person every time.

Now I want to speak to Maddie.

Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see it at scale, particularly with the Kiwi accent.

How Yeah, So that is a really because that's when you get into you know, people talk about large language models and contextual stuff, so that accent, that stuff is going to be really important.

But also picking up other languages as well.

You know in New Zealand we just you know have TODAYO and we have all those languages from all the people come from other parts of the world.

Yeah, pacifica language in Latin America, Asia.

Yeah, it's going to be interesting.

That is going to be really interesting.

A couple other things move into it service management.

You know, that's obviously was a bit of a gap there, but as Bennyov said, you know from it query support, queries, organizing field staff, technicians, all of that sort of thing that's an area Service now is really good at.

But it is going to be possible now on the Salesforce platform.

Too, you know, because we've always been sales service and marketing very externally focusing.

It's not that much different from our service operations and you know, raising tickets and distributing, so it's quite a natural adjacency for us to enter and it's going to give customers that singular platform opportunity if I raise a field service ticket or I raise a ticket which turns into a field service action.

You know, that could be a tech person or it could be a contractor.

And as a consumer, I don't really care.

I just want that service, and I think that we lean naturally into that, so you know, it's a great option for our customers.

Any use cases you saw as you walked around Agent Force City downstairs that you thought, Wow, that's its pretty cool.

I've enjoyed, and excuse the pun here, watching the journey of Heathrow Airport.

You know, I've been on planes and thought I've missed a gift opportunity for family member that might have had a birthday or something like that, a moment in their life that I so the opportunity to interact with their agent.

Also know, I need a gift and I need to go to Judy Free.

Can you have that ready for me?

And I'm running late already and having that shopping consumer experience at the airport making life really easy.

And also like once say no, I booked publishing data, pushing data to meet your flight's on time.

It's going to be at this gate.

Oh, by the way, we've changed the gate.

Just making life easy at an airport, because airports can be stressful.

Yeah, I just think that's a wonderful story.

Yeah, and many the what I've seen, like Chicago Medical University, a huge health provided as four billion dollars in revenue, and like us in New Zealand, they're using patient portals.

You can you can get all of that, but every time you so you need to talk to your doctor or a nurse, it's sometimes it's by a text message, sometimes it's a phone call, sometimes it's an email.

It's just all scattered.

Bringing that all into one interface where you can query it through chat.

They just think it's going to cut their call volumes by seventy percent.

I can play that foward to that digital twins.

So the person that's with you on that journey.

Yeah, because sometimes when people go through these procedures, Yeah, very stressful, lots of information, someone coaching you through.

Yes, your appointments here in two days, you're going to be this.

This is what they're going to be talking about.

This is what was talked about in the session.

Yeah, So it's I think I said it.

I think we're I'm not even sure we're scratching the surface yet.

I mean, I think the opportunity is going to be huge and when we sit here in ten years time, we'll look back and go, Wow, what a start.

Yeah.

And you know, we touched on the capability issue and the training issue, and I think that is a bit of a gap, particularly in New Zealand.

I mean there is this perception it's all sort of vibe coding.

You don't need that much expertise to do it, but you sort of do to do it properly and to put in the right governance around it, and just have the confidence across the business for people to go I want to go in this journey.

And what I've learned this week, it's got to be from the leadership of the company saying we are going to be in like Jason Paris and said, we're going to be in AI centric talco and the first one in New Zealand.

To do it, you sort of have to have that approach.

What do we need to do to get there?

In New Zealand we have a skills gap and the tech sector and I think some support around that would be amazing.

Lo we have all these programs online and probably the entire industry feels the same way.

So some assistance in getting more people into the tech secer, and we know it transforms people's lives, right, they can go from minimum wage to double that quite quickly.

So that's one aspect.

And I think to your point around what do New Zealand companies need to do, You're absolutely right.

Leadership needs to come from the top.

And if you look at any successful transformation project over the last ten to twenty years in technology, the one core ingredient that I had that it got right was governance, and leadership came from the top.

If you look at all the ones that have missed and delayed, and you know there is a graveyard of transformation projects that have missed their deadlines, they have a common theme that the leadership wasn't all on board.

I think as we move into.

The surgetic enterprise, it'll break down the silos of how we work.

You know, relationships will become absolutely critical.

What does the agent do, which is really task and function and high processes and orientated to what do the humans do then, which is relationships, empathy, context and that constant training and oversight.

So governance leadership really important and.

We just need to start I mean it's still pretty soft in New Zealand's economically hoping we'll turn our coin interest in what you're seeing, I mean that rich data coming from your customers as to how they're doing, and there seems to be an opportunity here to cut cost, to use salesforce and agents to actually take some costs out of your business, which is what they need to do at the moment.

Everyone's quite cost conscious, but they're also productivity oritented.

So how do you do both?

And I think the opportunity is that you know we can.

You can reduce cost, you can increase your productivity, and typically that means improving your top line.

I think you're right.

I think you know there's no secret that the economy is sort of bouncing around a wee bit at the moment.

We're hoping to see it continue to improve.

But the customers that we've got that are embracing the agentic journey are seeing some pretty good results early in the piece, which is encouraging.

And I would love to see more of New Zealand.

I think we New Zealand can lift if we embrace this agentic journey.

Yeah, because you will get cost out and you will get productivity up and you probably get revenue up.

It's good to see the governments just put seventy million into literally asking for AI centric projects through the new Advanced Technology Institute, which is the first big investment in AI at a government levels.

That so, I guess is compelling.

Yeah, and I.

Think we need to continue that push for training, right, training and skills in the industry because that will help New Zealand lift that will benefit all of our businesses, central government, the vendor, community, partners and you know, the community in the end.

Yeah.

Just finally, the other thing that struck me this week is around Slack.

Oh yeah, this is cool.

Yeah, and Slack sort of being like I've used it not in the salesforce domain, but you know, as a lot of media companies use slack great for messaging, but it's become more than that, hasn't.

It's become the front end really of sales.

That's quite what it was originally found for.

But right now it's the central console for people to go and get their work.

Now.

I made a quote earlier two before, you know, two hundred and thirteen agents, five hundred and fifty tasks.

I got that through Slack because Jason was asking me a question.

He goes, how many agents you've got?

I went, so I went to slack pot, which I'm now using more than Gemini to ask questions about internally, how many agents we have.

What are they doing?

So we're surfacing all that Argentic layer through Slack.

Now that won't be just us, you know, we've got partnerships with work Day and Slack will become that console for where you go to get that information.

Is New Zealand a big, big market for Slack?

Are there a lot of customers there?

Yeah, we have some great customers.

I think Zero is a huge user of Slack, huge user and there've been a reference for us for a while McCloud cranes.

Right, So then the other end of the scale in the ESMB space an organization out there lifting and shifting parts of New Zealand around with cranes.

So it's something that can fact any price that we have Ryman homes and you know when they change rooms around, they use that Slack as their workflow when they start updating their villages.

Yeah, yeah, it's cool.

So that has come a long way.

Yeah, Okay, well good luck.

It's going to be really interesting to see in it twelve months time, where the heck we're at Given what's changed in the last year, it's.

In the next twelve months.

What I'd love to see is the multiple agents and the orchestration of work, and then the human and agent collaboration going on, and those journeys as they spread across the enterprise.

It's just going to go deeper and wider.

I think the numbers that we're seeing early now are fascinating, just fascinating.

So what is it going to be in twelve months.

I think we're going to be in for some really great surprises.

Well, let's revisit then and see where we're at.

It has to come back.

This is my fourth one on the bounce, and I think, far away the best one I've been giant leaps every time it's in.

Yeah.

Yeah, also really satisfying to see our customers going so well, like it's just.

A real us kiwis.

It's a really proud moment.

Right, Okay, Hey, well thanks for coming back on the Business of Tech and we'll see any years time.

Yeah, thanks Peter, thank you.

So my head was spending after a week immersed in the agentic enterprise, I definitely felt I got a lot more of a handle on the tangible things AI agents can now achieve.

It's plenty of hype at Dreamforce.

It's basically a sales organization at height, but this agentic wave is coming for businesses Salesforce, customer or not.

Every organization needs to figure out what that means for them.

And when we do have AI centric companies that are automating more and more of the work many people do, it is going to have serious consequences for the workforce, which I don't think we fully appreciate yet.

There's only so much augmenting of tasks that will be done before agents really do eat into certain roles.

It's just a matter of when that happens and how quickly.

So I thought i'd finish off the podcast with this particularly insightful comment from Pete butodhage Edge, who rounded out Dreamforce with a really nice discussion about AI, about keeping our purpose in mind when we develop AI, what are we really doing all of this activity for and who does it serve?

Anyway, here's Pete footage Edge.

I imagine a machine that could do more and more things picture like the replicator from Star Trek, like you can basically make everything, and the more sophisticated the machine gets, the fewer people you need to work in until one day all you really need is just one guy to push a button and the machine can do everything else.

And where that leads you is the wages that that worker can command, according to economic theory, fall towards zero.

And all that actually matters is who owns the machine.

If we come out of the thought experiment, what is the machine?

It's the intellectual property, it's the software, it's the physical plant, the compute, all of those things that add up into these firms right that are doing this.

And I think there is a question of how some of that ownership gets shared in a broader way, some kind of dividend that might come to the American people, for example, which I think is fair game, given that we, the American taxpayer, kind of sort of invented the Internet and that these models trained on our data.

Right, So there's an economic conversation that we need to have that respects the dignity of the role that humans played in creating this technology.

That's it for the Business of Tech Powered by two Greece.

Thanks so much to Hamish Miles for having me at Dreamforce again and coming back on the podcast.

Thanks to Jason Parris from one in Z we're giving us those insights into how one in d ed is rolling out a Genticai to really good effect.

Show notes her at Businessdesk, dot co, dot NZED.

You'll find them in the podcast section, and of course you can stream the podcast from iHeartRadio or in your favorite podcast app.

Next week, got a really nice episode for you.

Sir Peter Beck comes back on the show, reflecting on twenty years of rocket Lab.

Yes, the anniversary is just around the corner, twenty years of one of our most famous successful tech companies.

I've just written a book that has three hundred beautiful pages from the history off rocket Lab that's going out next week as well, and so great to have Sir Peter to reflect on that as he prepares for the launch off Neutron.

Tune in next week for another episode of the Business of Tech.

I'll catch you then,