💃 AI Will Not Replace Salesforce Professionals 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerd! Are you worried that AI is going to replace you?

Take your job? Take your livelihood?

Fear not!

AI is rapidly changing your Salesforce professional role, but there’s complexity, nuance, and good ol’ human-touch that AI Is not ready for (and may never be 🤷🏻).

To be clear, your role DEFINITELY will change, but maybe in a good way? You be the judge….🧑‍⚖️

Let’s take a look at a few things AI can replace right now and dive into some things only you can do.

AI WILL REPLACE…

AI’s Plate of Salesforce Responsibilities

So what will AI replace in your Salesforce world?

First, let’s re-frame it to what can AI take off your plate (so that you can do bigger, better things 😃). Here is a thicc list of items you can say adios to and let AI sweat over 🥵

📝 UAT Test Scripts

If you’ve ever led the UAT phase for an enterprise project, you know it’s a significant effort to

1. Review each user story, identify the objective, understand it

2. Identify the business process, understand it.

3. Write a test script that follows the business process AND meets the objective AND outputs a measurable result that can be passed or failed.

4. Write negative tests. This is not a happy path world.

5. Create a repository to manage all of the user results and any follow up action that is needed.

Do this for tens or hundreds of Jira cards.

This could take a business analyst or quality assurance analyst weeks to build out…or have AI do it in a few prompts 🙌.

🤖 Time Saved: 80 hours

🧼 Data Scrubbing

Data migration is a notoriously tedious task where every line and field matters. Scrubbing a 500,000 line Contact export is something you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.

But ChatGPT is game! It doesn’t have emotions, doesn’t need to eat or sleep. Its eyes don’t get tired and it could care less if the client’s VP of Sales shows up late to every meeting.

Now, AI is not going to take that hairy spreadsheet and turn it into a prom queen, but it can make a first and second pass to identify dupes, exceptional values, and even follow up with next steps and offer to do them for you (If you ask, or sometimes it will bring agency to the table ChatGPT can follow up with: would you like me to add a column that with my description of the issue and a recommended next step?)

🤖 Time Saved: 6 hours

🧑‍🏫 Deep Research

This is especially great for consultants, here’s why - when you’re billing $250/hr, then your clients expect you to have ALL of the answers.

And, well, you’re human and you just don’t have them all 🤷🏻.

But you know who does? Yup, AI 🤖.

Here’s an example - Einstein Activity Capture, that imperfect solution that seems to do everything and nothing the client wants. It’s super accessible (free/cheap) and the implementation is user-level (for better or worse…).

IYKYK. You’ve spent tens of hours in this rat’s nest.

But no more! Simply give your favorite genAI platform the Help Article URL and the issue the client is experiencing and allow it to give you an instant response!

This scales up, from EAC nuance to Enterprise Sales Cloud builds, ERP integrations and beyond.

🤖 Time Saved: 3+ hours

AI DOESN’T STAND A CHANCE

Your Plate of Salesforce Responsibilities

AI can do mucho, but not todos.

Perhaps even 10yrs from now, when we are definitely in some kinda Terminator/Matrix reality, AI will not do these things that are key to a Salesforce professional’s role-

🤝 Stakeholder Management

I had a boss who always said humans are gonna human. What he meant by that was humans have emotions, personalities, (huge major glaring) faults.

And it takes a personal touch to manage that. AI may do well with one or a few stakeholders, but groups of people - teams, departments, companies - create an environment that AI does not have the emotional intelligence to succeed in. Hell, most humans don’t…but only humans do 💯.

🔀 Change Management

Driving adoption, training an array of skill-levels and personalities, managing fear and resistance. AI can’t even stop itself from giving a car away for a dollar. How’s it gonna convince a bunch of burnt out white-collar workers to adopt the new CPQ bundle process?

To be clear, humans fail at this too. Onboarding and training are some of the most under-resourced activities in business. But humans are also better setup for success - to ability to relate to their coworkers, spend extra time with a struggling worker, less time with an efficient worker, or to come up with the insight to pair the strong with the weak through live-observation, experience and empathy.

👥 Taking the Blame

Especially true for consultants - your entire existence is so that the client’s leadership has someone to blame.

Who’re they gonna blame in an AI-only failed implementation? Themselves?! 🤣🤣🤣

In all seriousness, the blame is downstream of the outsourcing of accountability. And AI companies are football fields away from being trusted enough to be in the position of absorbing blame like this (ironically, they all want to be 💰🤷🏻).

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

AI isn’t going to take your job, but it is going to takeover tedious, frontline tasks that you dread doing.

It’s going to give you time back in your role to do higher-level, strategic, people-oriented things.

It’s going increase the expectations of your role - that you’re able to produce more, and higher quality, than without AI.

For some of you, this might sound awful. For others, you may welcome using AI to produce UAT scripts and SOP documentation

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes