Former Salesforce AI CEO Clara Shih has stepped down after less than two years in the role to join social media giant Meta as the head of a new Business AI group.
The move may come as a surprise to many in the Salesforce ecosystem as it was just two months ago that we saw Shih discussing Agentforce – a game-changing project which she herself spearheaded – at Dreamforce 2024.
“Full-Circle Moment”
Salesforce Ben reported on Monday that Shih would be stepping down, but it was not known at that time where she would be going.
Shih revealed in a LinkedIn post yesterday that “There was only one call I knew I would answer, and it was Meta’s”. She wrote:
“I’m thrilled to share today that I’ve joined Meta to lead a new Business AI group.
“Our vision for this new product group is to make cutting-edge AI accessible to every business, empowering all to find success and own their future in the AI era.
“200 million businesses each month turn to Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to connect with billions of consumers around the world.”
She added that Meta’s Llama models have more than 600 million downloads to date, and Meta AI now has more than 500 million monthly actives. “Meta’s global reach and leadership in AI represent a generational opportunity for businesses, and I couldn’t be more excited and grateful to help take this from zero to one to scale,” Shih said.
Shih said that social media had been the “cornerstone” of her career, having been the foundation of her startup Hearsay Social, which is now part of NASDAQ.
“Today truly feels like a full-circle moment,” she added. “Thank you John Hegeman, David Wehner, Javier Olivan, and Mark Zuckerberg for the opportunity! Now the fun begins.”
A Win for Meta… and Salesforce Too?
Shih’s new role will likely be a pivotal one, as social media giant Meta has one of the biggest opportunities to deploy a widely used AI.
The company’s flagship product Facebook is understood to have more than 3 billion monthly active users, while WhatsApp – which was acquired by the company in 2014 – has 2.7 billion. Instagram – which was bought by Facebook for $1B in 2012 – has 2 billion monthly active users worldwide.
While there is obviously a degree of overlap between these figures, it’s certainly no small feat to be able to boast that your company’s social media users almost total the entire population of the planet.
This means a huge amount of training data – generated by these platforms – might be available to any grand AI projects Meta wishes to spearhead.
But Shih’s departure from Salesforce to run Meta’s AI team may actually benefit the cloud giant in a roundabout way. Salesforce could be described as somewhat “LLM-agnostic”, allowing users to connect LLMs from different companies for different tasks.
This means that if Llama – released by Meta AI in 2023 – becomes a major LLM in the future, there could be a collaboration between the two companies, with Shih’s work for Meta slotting in nicely to her former employer’s software.
Shih, who was formerly at the helm of Salesforce’s AI efforts, led the development of Agentforce – the platform for building autonomous AI bots.
Adam Evans, formerly the senior vice president of Salesforce AI, will take her place. Evans co-founded RelateIQ in 2011, before Salesforce acquired it in 2015 and changed it to SalesforceIQ. It was later retired in 2020.
Shih, a Stanford University graduate with a master’s degree in computer science, had been at Salesforce for four years in total, starting as the CEO of Service Cloud in December 2020 before switching to become the CEO of Salesforce AI in early 2023.
Final Thoughts
Shih’s move comes at a pivotal time for Salesforce as the cloud giant leans more towards autonomous agents with less focus on copilots.
Her considerable experience in the sector is likely to serve Meta well as Silicon Valley giants battle for supremacy in the field of artificial intelligence.