Technology as a Force for Good: Salesforce’s Paula Goldman

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:02)
AI ethics are easy to espouse, but hard to do. How do we move from education and theory into practice? Find out today when we talk with Paula Goldman, Chief Ethical and Humane Use Officer at Salesforce.
Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence in business. Each episode, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI. I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Information Systems at Boston College. I'm also the guest editor for the AI and Business Strategy Big Idea Program at MIT Sloan Management Review.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (0:36)
And I'm Shervin Khodabandeh, senior partner with BCG, and I co-lead BCG's AI practice in North America. And together, MIT SMR and BCG have been researching AI for five years, interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and to deploy and scale AI capabilities across the organization and really transform the way organizations operate.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:04)
Today we're talking with Paula Goldman, chief ethical and humane use officer at Salesforce.
Paula, thanks for taking the time to talk with us today. Welcome.

**Paula Goldman** (1:11)
Thank you. I'm really excited to have this conversation.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (1:14)
Hi, Paula.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:16)
Our podcast is Me, Myself, and AI.
Let's start with a little about your current role at Salesforce. First, what does Salesforce do and what is your role?

**Paula Goldman** (1:25)
Salesforce is a large enterprise technology company that if I had to really summarize what we do, we put out a lot of products that help our customers, which tend to be companies or sometimes nonprofit organizations or whatnot, connect better with their customers, their stakeholders, whether that's from a sales process, service, marketing, you name it. And data plays a really, really important role, like understanding, giving them the tools to understand their customers and what they need and serve them better. Within that, my role, I'm Chief Ethical and Humane Use Officer, which I know is a bit of a mouthful. It's a first of its kind position for Salesforce.
And I work with our technology teams and more broadly across the organization on two things. One is as we're building technology, thinking about the impact of that technology at scale out in the world, trying to avoid some unintended consequences, trying to tweak things as we're building them to make sure that they have maximum positive impact. And then secondly, we work on policies that are really about the use of our technology and making sure that we are putting sufficient guardrails to make sure that our technology is not abused as it is used out in the world.

**Sam Ransbotham** (2:38)
Tell us about your background. How did you end up in that role?
Pretend you're a superhero. What's your origin story here?

**Paula Goldman** (2:43)
Well, I guess, you know, I have the short story and the long story. The short story is essentially, I am super passionate about how technology can improve people's lives.
And I spent a long time thinking about the tech for good side of that. Like I worked for a while under Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, working to build an early stage investing practice that was investing in startups that use technology to serve underserved populations, whether that meant like getting, you know, financial services to people that otherwise would be excluded in emerging markets, alternative sources of energy, or whatnot. Having done that for a long time, I think we started to see this shift and the role of technology in society. For a long time, I think the technology industry viewed itself as a bit of an underdog, a disruptor. And then all of a sudden you could sort of look and see the writing on the wall and technology companies were not only the biggest companies in whatever financial index you want to name, but also technology was so pervasive in every aspect of all of our lives. And even more so because of COVID.
And I think we just sort of saw the writing on the wall and saw that the sort of famous adage with great, oh, I'm going to mess this up. With great power comes great responsibility.

**Sam Ransbotham** (4:13)
Perfect tie into my superhero origin question because that's the Spider-Man quote, go ahead.

**Paula Goldman** (4:18)
It's time to think about guardrails, particularly for emerging technologies like AI, but kind of across the board, how to think about what do these technologies do at scale? And like any industry that goes through a period of maturation, that's where I think tech is.
That's kind of like my motivation around it. And as part of that role, I was leading a tech ethics practice. I was asked to be on Salesforce's ethical use advisory board. And through that, they asked me to come lead this practice.