 Hi everybody, my name is Jason Klein. I'm the director of P20 initiatives at Northern Illinois University. My job is to work with school districts and community colleges throughout Illinois on a whole variety of things, including supporting the work of our students and teachers on the career pathways. We are launching a series of YouTube shows called Career Pathways Virtual Trailheads because we can't be out right now in workplaces getting those work-based learning experiences. So we're excited to bring you a whole bunch of different people and a whole bunch of different careers so you can learn about their work. And so to start with, we've got our first guest. I'm going to let him go ahead and introduce himself. I'm Marco Castellana. I am Senior Vice President of Product Management of Einstein, which is the artificial intelligence component of Salesforce. And for those people who don't know, because many people, while many people, millions of people use Salesforce every day, there would be many teachers and students who would be like, I don't know what Salesforce is and don't understand that it's a Google, Microsoft, Apple kind of company in terms of its incredible importance in the IT space and for businesses and organizations may kind of can tell us what Salesforce does. In a nutshell, Salesforce connects businesses to their customers and that has a couple of different facets. So marketing is part of that. So Salesforce is actually one of the biggest email senders in the world. Although Salesforce itself is not the one sending the emails, rather it's like Banana Republican, Room & Board and Lids and all these different companies that are sending emails through Salesforce. And so you have definitely gotten an email that came through Salesforce today. There's also the sales functionality, so it helps you track your sales from when it's a lead and you just don't know whether they're going to buy to when they're actually progressing through a deal. Then there's customer service. For example, if you call Southwest Airlines and you have a problem with your flight or something like that, they will log that in Salesforce. So Southwest uses Salesforce to track their customer service. And finally there's e-commerce. And so a lot of websites that you see on the internet today, like Echo, The Shoes, Shiseido, The Makeup, there's a whole bunch of these. When you're buying from their websites, that is actually a Salesforce website. Cool, that's awesome. And not-for-profits also use Salesforce? Absolutely they do. A lot of them in the education space, in fact. Can you give us one quick example of that? Yeah, I mean a great example is College Forward. College Forward is a nonprofit that helps underprivileged kids get into and stay in college. And so they use Salesforce to track the journey of the student through middle school to high school and then into the college. And then real quickly to tie this together, tell us about, give us your definition of artificial intelligence and why it's important in a company like Salesforce or to its customers. Well, I take a pretty broad definition of artificial intelligence. I call artificial intelligence anything that learns, learns from your history of data of information. And so that's how I consider artificial intelligence and why it's important to something like Salesforce. Well, it removes a lot of the grunt work from people's days. So you can use artificial intelligence to automatically fill forms or to decide who to send an email to and who not to or what to recommend to somebody. So there's all kinds of different ways where you can kind of remove the grunt work from humans and allow them to do more important things than just these repetitive tasks. Awesome. Thanks so much. So tell us first about what a typical day looks like in your work, where you work and what kinds of tasks you do and maybe even how long you work, how many days a week you work, that kind of thing. Okay. Well, I work in Salesforce West, which is at 50 Fremont Street here in San Francisco. That's where I would normally work obviously outside of coronavirus as it stands today. I'm working from home. And that kind of remote work set up actually works pretty well for Salesforce because Salesforce is a global organization. In fact, I have teams in Tel Aviv, Israel in Grenoble in France, and there is also one in Hyderabad in India. So we're a pretty global team. And so I'm kind of on video calls all the time anyway. So a normal day for me, well, I have a pretty varied job. My job is kind of all over the place. Part of my job is I manage a team of people that are building these artificial intelligence products. And so a lot of my days spent talking to my team about what the next products are, what our customers are looking for and things like that. But I also spend a lot of time talking to our customers, the people that are using our products like Marriott and Southwest and all these different companies. And so I talk a lot to those folks about the kinds of things that they need from artificial intelligence. And I try to kind of synthesize that for my team so that we know what is the next thing that we should be building. So in that kind of work and with your team being spread literally across the world, what would you say are some of the skills that are most important, the most important skills for you to have in your work? There are two that I would consider and they are communication and creativity. So when it comes to communication, you absolutely need to be able to present well, to speak well, to present well is a key skill, I think. And not even just for my job, but you know, all throughout my career, I've been honing my ability to speak, to speak in front of crowds, to speak online like this. And that's been really key, I think, to my own career growth. And so for a lot of the folks on my team, you know, I'll send them to like speaking classes, to presentation classes, how to build a good slide deck and how to give a good demo and things like that. So that they are also good speakers and good presenters, but also creativity. I mean, when I'm looking to interview somebody, that's really what I'm looking for. I'm not even necessarily looking for their past experience or anything like that, but especially in artificial intelligence, all this stuff is brand new. I mean, these things, the kinds of discussions that I'm having every day now would have been ridiculous five years ago. And that was only five years ago, right? So we can talk about all kinds of crazy things like like image recognition, like being able to read the text right off of forms like automatic recommendation and things like that, that we couldn't even do just a few years ago. And so you really need a lot of creativity to understand how you can take what's coming fast and furious, you know, these new technologies are coming at us very quickly. And use those in such a way that they're useful to our users in businesses. Awesome. So thinking about those things and having a team that is spread across France, Israel, and India. And here in the United States, one of the questions I have, you probably have team members who are from beyond those four countries as well, correct? Absolutely. In fact, I always say that the Einstein team ranges from A to Z because our head of marketing is from Azerbaijan. And we have one of our development managers is from Zimbabwe. So we actually have people from all over the globe, both here and all around the globe. That's awesome. So one of the elements of the career pathways work in Illinois is that we want students no matter what kind of career they're going to go into to develop this cross-cultural competence. So I would imagine that's pretty important on your team. Can you talk a little bit about what that looks like and then layer in the fact that you're not even all physically together to be cross-culturally competent? Yeah. So one major example of that is, you know, so as I mentioned, we have a team in Tel Aviv and, you know, barring coronavirus actually would have been in Tel Aviv last week, in fact. And we have to set kind of ground rules for working with the folks in Tel Aviv. You got to bear in mind that people in Israel and Tel Aviv is in Israel, you know. People in Israel, their weekend is actually Friday and Saturday and also they're 10 hours separated from San Francisco in terms of their time zone. And so when we're working with Tel Aviv, we have to plan these meetings out in such a way that they're in the morning in our time so that they're not too late in their time. And also, you never want to make a meeting on a Thursday because that's a Friday in Tel Aviv and that's not going to work. That's their weekend. So they're not too thrilled about that. So you do have to be aware of these different cultures. Meanwhile, actually, tomorrow I would have been on my way to Japan had I not been quarantined due to coronavirus. And I actually have recently had business cards printed in Japanese because Japan is very much a business card centric culture. And so, you know, one of the first things you do when you get into a Japanese meeting is you all pass around your business cards and you kind of observe them and stuff like that. And you have to be aware of that. It's a very different setting when you're in Japan. And so it's something that does take a little bit of getting used to. Now, do you speak Japanese or Hebrew or French? So tell us about how you overcome that then when you're interacting with people from other places. So I don't speak Japanese at all. And there in Japan, I usually have an interpreter, which itself is fascinating, by the way. Sometimes I have a team of interpreters that rotate. So I'll have three interpreters that'll take turns because it's very exhausting work to interpret, especially to interpret me. Well, I don't have to speak Hebrew because frankly, most people in Tel Aviv speak English and that kind of works in a lot of countries. Certainly in India, a lot of people speak English. In the low countries like the Netherlands, a lot of people speak English. So I don't have to speak Dutch there. I do actually speak some French and some Spanish and some Italian. So I can kind of get away with that. I used to have a customer called SFair, which is a phone company in France. And we would have these funny meetings there. I didn't really have an interpreter or anything like that. And I understand French pretty well, but it takes me a while to form the words. And so we would have these meetings where they would speak to me in French, which I understood fine. And I would speak to them in English, which they understood fine because they had the same problem with English as I had with French. So when you do speak another language, I think it really helps. So if you do speak French or Spanish or Japanese or certainly Mandarin Chinese, I always wished I spoke Chinese when I had a Chinese team. That I think is very beneficial. So here we are. Salesforce is really a software and services company. And we haven't talked about coding at all. And let me add, we're talking about artificial intelligence, which is on a bleeding front edge of even software development. So that is not a skill we've talked about as being one of the most important skills here. If you were going to talk to someone who was interested in getting into this space, into a career that you might be hiring for, and they're in 8th grade or 10th grade or 12th grade. What would be the kinds of things that you would be telling them in terms of that they need to focus on in terms of school? And what educational experiences do they need to have? For example, do they need to have a bachelor's degree or not? So kind of walk us through the advice you would give a middle school or high school student. Well, certainly math and computer science and science in general are pretty key to a career like this. I myself have a bachelor's degree in computer science. Ironically, I have probably the lowest degree of anybody on my team. Everybody else has got all PhDs and stuff like that. I have people on my team with PhDs and mathematics and bioinformatics and all kinds of things like that. So educationally speaking, I'm the least educated on my team probably. But nonetheless, I do have a significant background in computer science. And part of that was, I mean, I've been interested in computer since I was 6 years old. I got my first computer when I was 6 and I started kind of coding it when I was 8. So if that's your passion, that's a wonderful thing because it makes it much easier to make that your career. But certainly, yes, coding and the ability to code. And I don't just mean scratch here, but learn some language like Java or Swift or something that's actually in actual use today. Being able to code is kind of key even to my job today. When I'm talking to my team and the engineers on my team, it really helps to understand what's going on. What kind of code we're talking about. When we're talking about scaling, today we're doing like 10 billion predictions per day. And so the scale of that is gigantic. And so you kind of have to understand the inherent trade-offs that you have to make in any kind of computer science environment. So computer science is pretty key, I would say. But I would also point to just math. If you think about it, if you play games, and I started really in this vein, I was really a gamer and I still kind of am a gamer to be honest. I play lots of games. And if you think about things like Fortnite or Far Cry or Just Cause or these kinds of games, all of those graphics are actually matrix math. And so we call that discrete algebra. But that's what's really going on when you're playing these games is that your computer is doing a whole ton of matrix math. So you really want to pay attention to that mathematics because it'll benefit you later. Whether you're doing computer graphics or neural nets or statistics or whatever, it's going to come out later. What is the most exciting part of your job? I mean, I think the most exciting part of my job is traveling to meet with customers. I am disappointed that I wasn't able to go to Japan this coming week because I was looking forward to meeting with a lot of the customers there in Japan. But it's really interesting that I meet with people in all kinds of different businesses. I met with the CIO of Kraft Foods not that long ago and I learned all about how Kraft works and how they sell. And it's more than just ketchup and pickles, believe it or not. But I've met with businesses all over the place. I met with the third biggest bank in India last week. I meet with all kinds of different businesses and it's just fascinating to see all the different things that people are doing. What is one of the frustrating things about your job that other people wouldn't know you encounter in your work? That's a tricky one. You know, prioritization is the tough part of my job. We have a fairly large, the Einstein team is, I don't know, five, six hundred people at least, so it's not a small team. And yet there are still limited resources and there are all these things that I want to do, that I and my team want to do. These kind of advances that we could do. And we have to choose just a few of them for each release. You know, we have three releases a year, so we basically bring out new versions of the Salesforce software three times a year. And so three times a year, we're bringing these major advances. And yet there's always more that we could do, always more that we want to do, and we can't do it all. That's great and obviously there's a lot of advice that comes from that. And I think that's another example of something that's true in a lot of jobs. That's certainly been true in all of my professional experiences. Last thing, how would you say your job or the work that you and your team are doing has a positive impact on the world? Well, you know, a lot of these capabilities, as I said, they kind of remove the grunt work from a lot of people's days. And at the same time, we can add real value. And I mentioned College Forward earlier, and College Forward is actually one of the pilot customers for one of the Einstein things that's coming next, which is called Einstein Recommendation Builder. And in the case of College Forward, they're going to use it to recommend colleges to students. So we're using a machine learning model in the background there to learn what kinds of students go for what kinds of colleges. And that machine learning model is going to populate those recommendations. In that sense, you know, we really can use these capabilities to improve the world. But, you know, on a more micro scale, you can think about the fact that, I mean, I mentioned that prioritization can be a difficult exercise. Well, in everybody's job, they kind of have to prioritize what am I going to do first? And so a lot of the artificial intelligence that we have today helps people prioritize these things. Like, which customer should I call first? Well, artificial intelligence can help you decide who is most likely to buy. Because you should call the most likely people first. Or, again, Southwest Airlines, right? What is this customer service case about? This person, they're complaining about their bill, they're complaining about a canceled flight. Which department should that go to in Southwest? Well, artificial intelligence can read the case and predict which department it should go to. And basically take away the kind of grunt work of somebody just sitting here reading it and routing it off. So there's all kinds of things that we can do. And, you know, we can make the world better, but we can also just make people's days a little bit easier. So I'm going to ask one last question. This is our first one. We're going to do a new final, final question. Hopefully I'll remember to ask everybody this question. What general advice would you give someone who's between 14 and 18, 20 years old today and kind of thinking about what they might want to do career-wise as a next step? Well, think about the things that you're passionate about. You know, as I said, for me, I was a big gamer. I was really into computers. And so it was a fairly natural fit for me to go into computer science and into this realm. But different people are passionate about different things. If you're passionate about cooking or baking, then maybe you should think about something like chemistry, food science. If you're passionate about music, well, you might think about actually music as a career or a friend of mine works at a company called Digi, which makes Pro Tools, which is the system that a lot of music producers use to make music. So there are lots of career paths available to you, but really look at what you're passionate about today. And that can often help guide where you're going to go. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for your time. For those of you who've watched this, if you have ideas for careers that we should investigate further or specific questions you'd like us to ask people in different careers, hit us up on Twitter at P20 Network. Again, that's Twitter at P20 Network, all one word. And we'll be happy to take those questions there. We've got lots more of these coming, and we're not only going to help people get through this time in the short term, but we're looking to continue this series long into the future when school is back to normal. So thanks again, Marco, for your time. Good luck with everything out there in San Francisco. And thanks for your work and your advice today. All right. Thank you for having me, Jason.