As we start to see AI advance in business, the ways in which we interact with machines are beginning to change. Companies like Salesforce are looking for new opportunities for AI to have a more direct impact on customers.

While using AI to surface the customer most likely to churn or most likely to buy is certainly useful, it's just a step in the process, and it's only the start of how AI could change how we work in the future.

Salesforce's AI journey began in 2016 when it launched its AI framework called Einstein. In reality, Einstein was never meant to be a product so much as a set of intelligence capabilities that had the potential to touch every aspect of the Salesforce stack. The original crew that brought that to life has mostly moved on, but the work continues.

The company brought in former Stanford professor Silvio Savarese to be its chief scientist a year ago. One of the reasons he was willing to leave academic life behind was the ability to pursue advanced research with vast datasets, a big staff and the resources of a company like Salesforce.

He said that he wanted to continue to pursue the research he had been doing for the last two decades with the goal of putting skills within reach of people who lacked specific training. "One of the major directions that I'm pushing here is really to bring AI to empower people in business in new ways, and I'm really excited to deliver that power with experiences that are so simple that anyone can use them," Savarese explained.

To achieve that broad goal, one of the main initiatives he and his 100-person research team have been pursuing is the voice-driven programming approach the company has dubbed CodeGen. The idea is to let people simply describe in plain spoken language what they want to do, and the AI will produce code based on the natural language instructions.

But it's not simply telling the AI tech what you want; Savarese said it's more of a conversation. "CodeGen really provides a new way of developing software. Rather than writing code directly, users would simply describe the problem they're trying to solve in plain English in a conversation. So the conversation part is very, very important," he explained.