Paul Tatum, Salesforce EVP on Agentic AI, Government and Innovation

Grace Gong (0:00)

Well, Paul, welcome to Venture with Grace.

Paul Tatum (0:02)

Great. Thank you, Grace. It's good to see you. Nice to meet you.

Grace Gong (0:05)

I'm so excited about our conversation because honestly, government topics are really hot these days. So, I want to start with-

Paul Tatum (0:11)

Finally, they've never been hot. So, I'm glad to hear you say that.

Grace Gong (0:15)

I feel like the tech community are very excited about how the government works, and then also maybe potentially collaborating with the government on AI. So, since you are the expert here, I want to start with what's your day-to-day like at Salesforce and working with the government?

Paul Tatum (0:30)

Yeah. So, Grace, thank you for spending some time with me. A lot of people even start with the, like, why are you working with the government? Why government? It's so boring. The reality is, it's not boring, but it is mission-oriented. If you work with the government, you very quickly get an appreciation for how hard it is. We have amazing civil servants, we have amazing people in the military, and in public safety, in education. They've given a lot of themselves to serve us as citizens and customers of government. I think for me and I think for Salesforce and what we do for government, we just want to provide them the very best technology possible to make their jobs a little easier.

Salesforce is headquartered here in San Francisco. I'm in Washington, DC. I have responsibility for the technology side of our government business globally around the world.

I think at times, there has to be some translation between Washington and San Francisco. What's going on out there in Washington? This is what they need. Wow, that sounds really weird. I have this saying, my job is to try to make government not so weird. Make it pretty normal. They have millions of citizens are serving. They have lots of things they're trying to do. I believe that the technology industry has a lot to offer. But, you got to do a little bit of translation for them in the process.

Grace Gong (1:56)

I love that.

I feel like for the tech community, as well as any normal human, you need some translation between how does it work inside of the government, as well as on the outside. Since you work with a lot of schools, as well as from the government level, why don't we talk about the innovations Salesforce is doing in this space?

Paul Tatum (2:20)

Yeah. So, it's funny. I've been at Salesforce 13 years. When I have to admit, when I got here, I didn't actually know what Salesforce did. I kind of knew about it, but it's a lot smaller and the work it did in government was really small. And I saw my first demo of Salesforce and I was like, oh my goodness, this is a game changer for government. Because I was used to basically writing code, building custom systems and I saw Salesforce and I'm like, oh, it's a CRM, it's a database, it's a workflow, it's some analytics. Governments do this all day long, whether you're getting your passport, your driver's license, your building permit, etc.

And for decades, government had had to kind of custom build all of that. Pretty expensive, hard to maintain, and along comes a platform like Salesforce, it's low code, pretty well equipped, and it can solve a lot of those services and basic functions of government. So kind of fast forward 13 years later, there's a couple of things that we've had to do for the government. One is security is really important. Compliance is really important. There's things like weird things called FedRAMP that is a compliance. You know what they make us do? They make us scan our code. If we find a vulnerability, we have an obligation to remediate that vulnerability in hours or days depending on the severity. So the obligation we have to the government when we serve them is very, very high as a company, we take that very seriously.

And then we innovate, you know, and this is, you know, I think people forget, like the government is actually very innovative in a lot of ways, right? We wouldn't have the Internet if it wasn't for DARPA, right? You know, we wouldn't have, you know, gone to the moon without NASA, you know, so there is a lot of innovation behind the scenes that we don't really appreciate. But you get inside the government and there are just amazing CIOs and CTOs and government civil servants that are very innovative. And so they challenge us. They're like, how do we do agentics in government? Where can it make sense? How can you deliver it safely?