CEO of Salesforce AI Clara Shih has left

The CEO of Salesforce AI, Clara Shih, has left after just 20 months in the job.

Neither Shih nor the company has made an official announcement, but a source familiar with the matter confirmed to CIO that Adam Evans, previously senior vice president of product for Salesforce AI Platform, has moved up to the newly created role of executive vice president and general manager of Salesforce AI. Evans has already updated his LinkedIn profile to reflect his new job title.

In addition to corporate CEO Marc Benioff, Salesforce has a number of divisional or regional CEOs, of whom Shih was one. Some also hold the rank of executive vice president.

The news of Shih’s departure was broken by investment analyst Patrick Walravens of JMP Securities.

Shih moved into the top AI role at Salesforce in March 2023, having previously headed up the company’s Service Cloud division.

Before that, she ran the AI company she co-founded, Hearsay Systems, a company that uses AI to help investment advisors. She has also worked at Microsoft, Google — and also at Salesforce, much earlier in her career. She’s something of a tech influencer, having published two books about the industry.

As head of Salesforce’s AI activities, Shih led work on Agentforce, a platform for building autonomous AI bots that the company unveiled in September.

Evans has been in and out of Salesforce too. SalesforceIQ, a software development company he co-founded in 2015, was acquired by Salesforce in 2018, while his next venture, low-code platform vendor Airkit, was swallowed up by Salesforce in October 2023. It was following that acquisition that he became senior vice president of product for Salesforce AI Platform. 

Microsoft too

Salesforce isn’t the only one to say goodbye to an AI leader this week: Microsoft lost its vice president of AI, Luis Vargas, who is leaving after almost 16 years with the company to start up a new AI venture of which he will be CTO, he wrote on LinkedIn.