“Mid-sized companies have an enormous lack of knowledge about what to do with AI”

In a climate of great enthusiasm for generative artificial intelligence (AI) agents — which, for all that, is not being reflected much in the company’s stock market valuation — Salesforce has quickened its pace in recent years and made “a 180-degree shift to adapt” to the market’s evolution. Known for developing software that helps companies manage their customer relationships, it now wants “to put humans to work” side by side with machines and “increase the productivity” of employees, the country leader of Salesforce in Portugal, Fernando Braz, tells ECO in an interview.

Weeks after the European Commission presented a strategy to increase the integration of AI in European companies, with official figures pointing to low take-up rates, above all in Portugal, the Portuguese manager stresses the need to convince companies of the merits of applying AI: “What is challenging, and more relevant, is not the 20 or 30 big companies, but the mid-sized ones. That is what can be the engine of the Portuguese economy. We have any number of companies with 300, 500, 700 employees, and that is where we feel the most difficulty. There is an enormous lack of knowledge in those companies about what to do with this. For many of them, digital means having a website,” says Fernando Braz.