Introducing Intelligent Automation Everywhere With Shalini Mayor, Salesforce Senior Director of Enterprise Automation

Before Shalini Mayor ( @smayor ) brought her background in automation to leadership roles in the private sector, she "almost became an astronaut." As a subcontractor to NASA's Langley Research Center, Shalini worked on various coding and algorithm development projects. She may have moved on from NASA before experiencing space travel, but much of her work as a director of Enterprise Automation at Salesforce is not unlike observing Earth from a distance. "With the explosive growth that you've seen at Salesforce, it's very easy to get disconnected," she told the crowd at a C2C 2Gather event in Sunnyvale, California. "Everything runs as a little startup within itself - when I was brought in, my primary role was to bring some structure to this madness."

"Since then we've been scaling out," she continued, "trying to figure out 'where do we have the most repetitive processes?'" Finance, HR, and IT operations are the major sites of repetitive processes at Salesforce, according to Shalini. What does it take to automate processes in so many different areas at a company with over 77,000 employees? In Shalini's opinion, it takes more than just robotic process automation (RPA). "What we're looking at really is a business process end to end," she told Sunnyvale. "RPA is a small part of it. What about the rest of it? How do we reduce manual intervention in any process? How do we actually take that away so that it will just run?"

To answer these questions, Shalini is thinking beyond the scope of the automation currently adopted at most organizations, sometimes back to the math and science she studied in graduate school as the basis for her education in AI and ML. "Anything that you look at all the way back down to the rudiment, it's still exactly the same," she said in an interview after the Sunnyvale event. Even though the extent of what's possible with automation today is "mind-boggling," the automations themselves are still based on the same linear algebra as the first AI and ML models Shalini encountered as a student. For Shalini, thinking about the foundations of automation makes it possible to look beyond RPA bots and straightforward rule-based models, incorporating approaches like decisioning and illuminating new opportunities.

"What we're looking at really is a business process end to end."

At Salesforce, these new possibilities include Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technologies like Google Cloud's Document AI and other solutions in high demand at the company's contact centers, which Shalini sees as high-priority contexts for automation use cases. Despite her enthusiasm for automation, however, Shalini is careful not to forget the human factor of workplace processes. She is not interested in reducing or combining job roles, as some workers fear executives may plan to do with automation in place. "If I can take some of these mundane tasks off people's lists," she told Sunnyvale, "that's where the growth comes in."

This human factor is also what Shalini recognizes as the value of a customer community and open spaces for peer-to-peer discussion like C2C's events. At Sunnyvale, she particularly appreciated "the fact that I could speak with so many people and help them learn something" and "learning that people are facing similar issues." on November 10, 2022, Shalini's colleague at C2C Partner Automation Anywhere, Vice President of Commercial Sales Ben Wiley, will appear alongside a diverse panel of guests to elaborate on some of what Shalini discussed in Sunnyvale, face-to-face, with a fresh group of Google Cloud customers and partners looking to automation to solve their business problems. To join them, use this link to register today.

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