Building Corporate Trust in AI

Yuko Araki has spent 20 years working in enterprise technology and AI. Her brilliant career includes leadership positions at ServiceNow, AWS, and now Salesforce. In her current role of VP, AI Product, Solution & Ecosystem Growth at Salesforce, she is responsible for building AI-powered solutions and the ecosystem across the Salesforce portfolio. Critical to her mission is a focus on the Agentforce platform – a proactive, autonomous agentic AI application that provides specialized, always-on support to employees or customers. 

Salesforce is a key global alliance partner as we are a large global customer, provider to Salesforce, and go-to-market partner in every geography from Japan to North America, Latin America and EMEA.

As a trusted Salesforce partner, NTT DATA leverages our industry expertise to take a leadership role in steering organizations through their Data and AI journey, identifying practical and transformative use cases that yield measurable business outcomes. Our team of Salesforce experts enables us to seamlessly implement the latest solutions like Agentforce, empowering companies to not only adapt to the agentic era but to thrive in it, achieving tangible results that redefine efficiency, customer engagement, and long-term success.

Shawn Scott – Alliance Director – Salesforce at NTT DATA.

Araki talks about how Salesforce’s 360-degree vision is driving corporate trust in AI.

Bridges and Barriers

Consumers were the first to get excited about ChatGPT – and they quickly brought it into their workplaces. Araki recalls the enthusiasm of those early days, and how it felt that every company decided they needed to tell their board members and stockholders they were doing something with GenAI.  

“Large enterprises hired data scientists and PhDs and gave them hefty budgets to do POCs which fueled the hype cycle,” she says. “Instead of sitting back and asking what part of their business workflow required improvement or efficiencies powered by GenAI, there was a lot of early adoption with chatbot-like applications built on OpenAI models.” A highly regulated bank, for instance, had 30 GenAI POCs without thinking about trust, guardrails, security, privacy, and permissions required for those enterprise systems.  

Araki believes lessons have been learned and now global companies want to see a return on investment and measurable cost savings or margin improvement from AI. This is where Salesforce comes in. Araki says Salesforce can quickly work with clients to provide measurable operational improvement or time to resolution with integrated workflows across Sales, Services or Marketing. 

“We’ve always had this vision to provide Salesforce customers with a 360-degree view of their business and customers. With Agentforce, customers can unlock cross-functional agentic workflows with data in sales cloud, service cloud, marketing cloud, or industry clouds,” Araki says.  

AI in Society 

We’ve built a robust AI platform that seamlessly serves everyone — from business professionals and consumers to admins and developers who configure the existing enterprise logic, user permissions, and governance on Salesforce into the agentic workflows. We’re uniquely positioned to power both front-office functions (sales, service, marketing) and back-office operations (support, field service, finance, industries) all within a unified platform. This enables rapid value delivery with AI across the entire business.

Yuko Araki, VP, AI Product, Solution & Ecosystem Growth, Salesforce 

Imagine a telecom company facing a complex billing dispute. Salesforce’s Agentforce AI-powered assistant has access to the customer’s billing history, service records, and relevant policies to suggest resolution paths to the service agent supporting the customer. 

Or a sales team manager creating an AI assistant to automatically analyze deal pipelines, identify risks, and suggest next steps: the AI assistant can proactively flag a deal in an early sales stage, pull relevant competitive intelligence, and suggest targeted strategies based on similar successful deals. 

This works because, when building on the Agentforce platform, the agent already understands the business’ rules, logic, and permission hierarchy. The AI agents then understand the unique business needs of the company and its specific compliance requirements in the customer context without having to re-create that logic at a developer level – and AI can be adopted rapidly across the organization.  

Araki sees huge strategic advantages for enterprises that are early adopters of AI agents, including the ability to build institutional knowledge, best practices and cultural change ahead of competitors. 

This might mean training service agents to effectively prompt AI assistants, or teaching managers to think about process optimization with AI agents. In addition, Araki says, driving rapid adoption of agentic workflows by leveraging data within existing Salesforce clouds fosters a culture of experimentation – with a built-in layer of trust with security access controls, compliance, and governance. “There will be missteps in adopting these new tools, and teams need to feel safe treating these as learning opportunities rather than failures.”