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Salesforce GenAI Organizational Design

Designing enterprise-ready GenAI for CRM

When Salesforce announced Einstein GPT, dozens of teams raced to integrate generative AI with no shared standards. I organized the cross-cloud collaboration that built the framework, presented to the CDO, and influenced the reorg that created Einstein Copilot.

Design Manager & Lead Strategist
Sales Cloud AI, Salesforce
2023

A platform-scale coordination failure in progress

After ChatGPT launched, every Salesforce cloud was told to integrate Einstein GPT within a single engineering release. With no playbook, each team invented its own patterns independently — producing a fragmented experience mixing conversational interfaces, prompt-based generation, and inline suggestions, sometimes on the same screen.

Beyond bad UX, this meant platform-scale technical debt, an inconsistent product story, and a missed window to define Salesforce's enterprise AI point of view. The org structure incentivized teams to compete, not collaborate. No one was solving the coordination problem.

Coalition, framework, escalation

Self-organized a cross-cloud coalition

I reached out to design strategist peers across clouds and pitched a simple case: cooperating would let everyone ship faster at higher quality. I organized a kick-off workshop and established a recurring weekly working group of design, product, and engineering leads across multiple clouds — not a committee, but a working session that made decisions.

Built a framework that made the problem legible

Our UX audit revealed teams weren't just building inconsistent UI — they were conflating fundamentally different types of AI interaction. I led the group in defining six distinct modes of engagement with generative AI, each with its own data profile, trust model, risk implications, and design principles. We partnered with Salesforce's VP of Ethics to embed responsible AI as a structural consideration, not an afterthought.

This gave the organization a shared vocabulary. Instead of debating UI, teams could identify which mode they were designing for and apply the right patterns.

Escalated the right strategic questions to the CDO

The framework surfaced two questions no individual team could answer: What is the consistent entry point for Einstein GPT across Salesforce? And is it fundamentally a conversational experience? I presented these findings — backed by weeks of cross-cloud analysis — directly to the Chief Design Officer.

A reorg and a unified product

01

Company reorganization

The CDO advocated for a unified approach, and Salesforce reorganized to create a dedicated team for Einstein Copilot — rather than each cloud building its own version.

02

Unified product experience

Einstein Copilot beta launched with a consistent sidecar UX across Sales, Service, Marketing, Commerce, Slack, and Mobile.

03

Framework adoption

The six modes of engagement framework directly informed the new team's design direction, giving a 70,000-person company a shared language for AI experiences.

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