Speaking at Vivatech in Paris, Emilie Sidiqian, Salesforce France’s CEO, told Euronews Next how companies should embrace AI and why leaders must drive its adoption from the top.
Once best known for its software that helps businesses track customers, sales leads and service requests, Salesforce says it is now moving deeper into artificial intelligence (AI).
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The US company has been promoting what it calls the “agentic enterprise,” a model where AI agents work alongside human employees across business functions.
In 2024, Salesforce launched Agentforce, its AI-agent platform, and this month announced a $3.6 billion (€3.14bn) deal to acquire Fin, a customer-service AI company whose agent can answer customer questions and resolve support cases.
“We moved from a standard Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to data, data to AI, AI to the agentic enterprise,” Emilie Sidiqian, Salesforce France CEO, told Euronews Next at the tech conference Vivatech in Paris, France.
“Our positioning is to reinvent the way all enterprises need to embrace the AI revolution,” Sidiqian added.
Salesforce says Agentforce can deliver “real conversational AI” across service, sales and marketing workflows, citing 66% autonomous case resolution, 15% more marketing pipeline and 1.8 times higher lead conversion.
Its AI agents are already being used by clients, the CEO says, such as SharkNinja, a US home appliance company that uses them for 24/7 customer support across 30 countries.
She also says Swiss staffing company Adecco has used AI-powered candidate conversations to reach 1.2 million conversations and help accelerate 50,000 job placements.
The Salesforce executive said enterprise AI is “for everyone,” from small companies to mid-sized businesses and global corporations.
“This is not a tool,” Sidiqian said. “This is a small wave of a new kind of innovation. The pace is massive. You can see that it impacts all types of jobs, all types of activities.”
Job transformation in the AI era
Sidiqian underlined the goal is not to replace humans, but to build a form of “hybrid” work where people remain “at the centre” while agents take on more routine or repetitive tasks.
She believes the shift should be treated as a leadership question, with CEOs and executive teams deciding how AI reshapes jobs across the company.
“AI is AI, it is a technology. When you really reinvent your business model, it is the leaders who need to understand how they will transform every single job in the company,” she said.
“This is a leadership question and it should be carried by the CEO and by every single executive committee,” she added.
Sidiqian said she uses AI tools every day, including a Salesforce-owned Slack, where Slackbot acts as a “concierge” to summarise overnight activity across teams from the US to Japan and flag what needs approval.
She said the aim is to avoid moving between several different tools and instead use AI as a “cockpit” to organise work with the right permissions and data. She also encourages her teams to use AI, arguing that adoption has to be led from the top.
“When you have like the right leadership, when you had the right adoption, when you carry this revolution at the heart of your business model, there is a huge opportunity to have growth for your company”.
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