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Leavey Alumni Meir Amiel understands transformative technology. He joined Salesforce in 2010, recognizing that software as a service (SaaS) would transform the software industry and that Salesforce was at the cutting edge of that change. His goal then was to learn how to build and sell SaaS from the industry leader and ultimately start his own SaaS business. Amiel ended up staying for 12 years, recognizing he was at one of the best companies in the industry.

After leaving Salesforce for a couple of years, Amiel once again saw a dramatic transformation poised to overturn the industry: generative AI. So he decided to rejoin Salesforce, explaining, “There are not many companies that are better positioned to capitalize from the next chapter of our industry than Salesforce. I wanted to be part of that revolution. We are reimagining enterprise software, pushing the bouhndaries of what’s possible with AI-driven automation.”

As the Chief Technology Officer of Customer 360 Applications at Salesforce, Amiel and his team launched Salesforce Agentforce in October 2024. The Agentforce platform enables businesses to create and deploy autonomous AI agents designed to perform specialized tasks across various departments, including sales, service, marketing, and commerce. These AI agents operate independently, utilizing large language models (LLMs) to understand context, make decisions, and take actions without human intervention.

Agentforce allows businesses to customize agents to their specific needs, ensuring seamless integration with existing workflows. Salesforce is enabling a world of digital labor where humans and AI collaborate to improve the customer experience cost-efficiently.

For example, Amiel explains, “Today if a customer calls a retailer to change their delivery date or order, they are talking to a human customer service representative. Very soon—actually now—a bot agent will be about to converse with the customer as if it were human. The bot will understand its role, what it can and cannot do, and what the corporate guardrails and policies are. The bot can effectively be the interface to the customer and fulfill all the customer needs with zero wait time because it's an unlimited resource.” Customer service teams will decide when to escalate from a bot to a human.

The vision is exciting and to make that vision a reality, Salesforce executives like Amiel need to be both strategic and operational. “In a typical day, we may be talking about where the industry is going and our role in the future of technology in the morning, and the second part of the day may be completely operational and in the details.”

Amiel learned the ability to understand all aspects of a corporation at the Leavey School of Business. As an undergraduate, he studied science and math and spent the early part of his career as a developer in very technical roles. He recognized that if he wanted to grow beyond engineering, he “really needed to understand all of it, and the most effective way to get there was to get an MBA.”

Amiel appreciated attending the Leavey Evening MBA Program in the heart of Silicon Valley and “getting a lot of exposure to individuals, including the professors, who have real, relevant experience across various functions and industries that is directly applicable to the work you will do in the Valley from Day 1.” Working with individuals from different backgrounds and putting together a whole business plan during the Capstone project helped Amiel meet his MBA goal of becoming a well-rounded executive.

In addition to the education, networking, and exposure he gained at Santa Clara, Amiel credits finding the right individuals to mentor him and “pull him up” critical to advancing throughout his career. Amiel says he’s been fortunate enough to have two kinds of mentors, “individuals that are your sounding boards and will tell you the truth even if it’s not what you want to hear” and ones that “are in your corporation at a point of influence and can point at you as a person with potential and advocate on your behalf.”

As a senior executive, Amiel gives back as an active mentor both inside and outside of Salesforce. For the first type of mentors, those typically outside your organization, Amiel finds it beneficial for mentors and mentees to bounce ideas off each other. In particular, he’s been able to share how Salesforce has developed a very specific methodology on scaling, and says, “When I discuss that with people, it’s often an aha moment for them as many companies aren’t good at scaling.”

Amiel reflects that “it's always been incredible to talk to individuals that are at different stages of their career and just learn from them both at Leavey and throughout my career.”