In this episode of AI Heroes & Headaches, host Vivienne Wei sits down with Andy White, SVP of Salesforce on Salesforce Technology, with over 16 years at the company, to explore what it really takes to drive agentic AI transformation at scale. Drawing from his experience across major acquisitions, product evolution, and enterprise leadership, Andy shares candid lessons on why AI adoption is less about technology and more about people, mindset, and change management. The conversation dives into how organizations move from traditional automation to truly autonomous AI agents, the importance of accountability and experimentation, and why curiosity and adaptability are the most critical skills in the age of digital teammates.

Expect to Learn:

- Why agentic AI transformation is fundamentally an adaptive leadership challenge, not a linear technology rollout.

- How organizations must rethink ownership and accountability by treating AI agents as digital teammates, not IT tools.

- Why successful AI adoption requires deep collaboration between IT and line-of-business teams, especially during testing and tuning.

- How Salesforce prioritizes fewer, high-impact “hero agents” over agent proliferation to drive real business outcomes.

- Andy White’s advice for leaders: start with low-risk, high-upside use cases, experiment quickly, and build a culture of curiosity and continuous learning.

Episode Highlights and Timestamps:

[00:00] - Teaser

[01:45] - Welcome & Introduction with Andy White: Vivienne Wei welcomes Andy and sets the stage for a conversation on agentic AI, leadership, and enterprise transformation.

[01:55] - Andy’s Journey Through Salesforce Acquisitions: Andy shares his 16-year journey at Salesforce, including lessons learned from major acquisitions and organizational evolution.

[02:55] - How Andy Evolved His Leadership for the AI Era: A discussion on how leadership mindset must shift in response to rapid AI and agentic transformation.

[05:06] - Why Agentic AI Is a People Problem, Not a Tech Problem: Exploring why AI success depends more on mindset, culture, and change management than technology alone.

[08:58] - Re-Engineering Teams for AI Agents: How teams must be redesigned to work effectively with AI agents as digital teammates rather than traditional tools.

[11:20] - The Skills Business Leaders Need to Manage AI Agents: The new capabilities leaders must develop, including accountability, measurement, and prompt-based experimentation.

[15:44] - How Leaders Should Learn Prompting and Experiment with AI: Why hands-on experimentation with AI and natural language prompting is essential for modern leaders.

[21:41] - How Salesforce Decides Which AI Agents to Build: Andy explains how Salesforce prioritizes high-impact “hero agents” over agent proliferation.

[28:53] - How AI Agents Unlock Capacity Humans Never Had: A look at how AI agents expand organizational capacity by handling work humans never had time to do.

[31:45] - The Most Important Skills for the AI-Driven Future:Final reflections on curiosity, continuous learning, and adaptability as core skills for the future of work

🔗 Follow the guest, Andy White: 👉 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andy-white-8003904/

🔗 Follow Saleforce: 👉 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/salesforce/ 👉 Website: https://www.salesforce.com/in/

🔗 Follow the host, Vivienne Wei: 👉 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/weivivienne/ 👉 Website: https://www.theviviennewei.com/ 👉 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vivienne.c.wei

🔗 Listen to AI Heroes & Headaches on your favourite platform: 👉 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@theviviennewei 👉Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6VdE8SqhZhhLHexxzx3gfB?si=f74b0ad0bf2549e4 👉 Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ai-heroes-headaches/id1832607443

In this episode of AI Heroes & Headaches, host Vivienne Wei talks with Anant Kale, CEO of AppZen, an Artificial Intelligence platform for modern finance teams. With over 15 years of experience in developing complex software and a background spanning engineering, finance, and product, Anant discusses how unstructured data creates massive bottlenecks in business processes. He shares his journey from corporate planning to founding his company to solve the problem of unstructured data in finance, emphasizing the shift from automation to autonomy with AI agents.

• Why unstructured data is the primary bottleneck where "any process, any work, stops" in finance.
• How AI agents are designed to execute work autonomously, moving beyond mere assistance.
• The strategic value of AI for the CFO goes beyond cost savings to maximize human potential across the entire organization.
• How the AI Agent Studio converts existing manual work instructions (SOPs) into deployable AI agents.
• Anant Kale's advice to CFOs: Focus on use cases with a time to value of "weeks" and run a pilot for no more than two months.

• [00:00:00] - Unstructured Data, The Bottleneck: Introduction to Anant Kale and the core problem of unstructured data stopping business processes.
• [00:01:46] - Anant's Journey & Motivation to Start: Discussing Anant's transition from structural engineering and corporate finance (Fujitsu) to founding an AI company.
• [00:07:48] - Building Trust in AI for Finance: The challenge of introducing nascent AI technology to a risk-averse finance organization and the importance of increasing compliance.
• [00:09:20] - Strategic Advantage, Beyond Cost Savings: Discussing how AI augments capability, saves money, and, more importantly, gives back time to highly compensated employees (engineers, sales).
• [00:14:45] - The Mental Load of Process and Policing: How AI removes the "policing" work, allowing high-value employees to focus on their core tasks and innovation.
• [00:16:20] - The AI Agent Studio Explained: Diving into the new Studio, which allows finance managers to convert their existing manual work instructions into autonomous AI agents.
• [00:22:49] - AI Agents in Finance, Accuracy and Guardrails: The need for domain-expert models (Zen realm models), deep enterprise integrations, and absolute guardrails to avoid mistakes and hallucinations in finance.
• [00:27:48] - Managing the AI-Native Hybrid Team: Navigating the workforce impact, creating the "AI Agent Boss" role, and setting a top-down vision to inspire transformation.
• [00:30:49] - CEO Recognition & The Power of Inspiration: The story of a practitioner who was called out by the CEO for leading AI agent deployment, setting an example for other teams.
• [00:33:17] - Final Advice: Short Time-to-Value is Key: Anant's single piece of advice to CFOs: look for areas of low risk/high ROI, and insist on a pilot with a time to value measured in weeks.

🔗 Follow the guest, Anant Kale: 👉 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anantkale/ 🔗 Follow AppZen: 👉 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/appzen/ 👉 Website: https://www.appzen.com/

🔗 Follow the host, Vivienne Wei: 👉 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/weivivienne/ 👉 Website: https://www.theviviennewei.com/ 👉 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vivienne.c.wei

🔗 Listen to AI Heroes & Headaches on your favourite platform: 👉 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@theviviennewei

#AIAgents #FinanceAutomation #CFOLeadership #UnstructuredData #DigitalCoworker #FintechAI #AgentStudio #BusinessTransformation

You will love this podcast if you like shows such as Founders, Acquired, Diary of a CEO, Joe Rogan and topics surrounding Elon Musk, Sam Altman, ChatGPT.