As companies rethink how they train early-career workers in a job market shaped by AI, Salesforce executive Andy White said resilience is top of mind for him — both at work and at home.
White oversees Salesforce’s implementation of Slackbot, an AI personal agent that generates responses based on conversations, files, and workflows inside Slack.
As White raises his son and daughter during a period of rapid technological change, he said he preaches to his kids the importance of powering through moments that don’t go as planned. He said resilience is pivotal and that it’s important for people to focus on doing the hard things and being OK when things don’t go as expected.
The senior vice president of business technology said he recently spoke with his daughter about the importance of dealing with situations rather than merely labeling them as “good” or “bad.”
“Hard is hard,” White told Business Insider. “Hard isn’t necessarily bad.”
Expectations, he said, are the “destroyer of hope and joy,” and that when things don’t go as planned, it often turns out to be a good thing down the line, even if it doesn’t seem that way in the moment.
“It’s when we look back, and it’s like, ‘Oh man, I’m glad that didn’t go the way I expected,'” White said. “But when you’re in it, it’s really hard.”
The importance of persistence
The resilience lesson is one White also thinks is relevant for entry-level workers. While junior hires often arrive ready to use new tools and deliver a “pretty high output,” he said, persistence is an area where some still need to grow.
He described today’s entry-level talent pool as “incredibly capable, very bright, and very driven,” with a stronger grasp of how to use AI tools to solve problems.
“They’re much more fluent at being able to leverage AI tooling in the flow of their work,” White said.
However, he said the group sometimes struggles when it comes to working through challenges.
“There’s more willingness to give up sooner,” he said, adding that this trait doesn’t apply across the board.
Finding confidence
White said he’s seen AI tools, such as the company’s recently upgraded Slackbot, help boost entry-level workers’ confidence. He said they could help reduce feelings of imposter syndrome by helping early-career workers navigate challenging situations that arise at work.
With that said, White added that workers need to stay balanced and not let tools make them “overly confident.” He said workers need to bring skepticism to “any kind of information” they get, and be diligent about reviewing sources and citations when using AI.
“If you don’t believe something, read the citation, and if it doesn’t have a citation, you have to assume it’s a hallucination,” White said, adding that he tells his kids the same thing.
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