From HR to Solution Engineer: Rethinking Who Belongs in the AI Era

I am really interested in the intentionality about how we use the time that we are saving. Because it's all very well and good for me to say very genuinely I am saving at least five hours a week not having to search for documents, links, conversations, information. What am I doing with those five hours? They are worthless if they're not being invested in a better way.

Welcome to Tech Talks, brought to you by Harvey Nash and hosted by me, David Savage. On today's show, my guest is Izzy Power, a senior specialist solution engineer at Salesforce, someone who's been with the company now for nearly three years. She was someone that I interviewed at Agent Force, the London leg of Salesforce's world tour of events. Look, In the podcast recently, we've been speaking a lot about what AI is doing to early careers and to more junior talent within the industry.

Izzy isn't junior talent by any stretch, but she is someone who is relatively new to the technology industry. And she's someone who's also come to it from a very non-traditional background. So she was a junior HR business partner at Salesforce before taking a leap into a technical role where she is now looking primarily after their Slack bot agent. Look, AI is doing all sorts to career paths, to how we think about skills, and we are talking about it a lot.

If we're doing that, it makes sense to talk to someone who has recently been through that process. because I'll be perfectly honest, we know that a lot of young people listen to this podcast and they're probably listening to all these CIOs and CTOs and CEOs, etc. talking about how this is impacting them or affecting them or advice. And it's all very useful.

But sometimes you need to talk to someone who's just walked the path that you are about to walk, that someone that you can relate to. And that is exactly what today's show is all about. whilst we've got a couple more interviews to bring you from slightly more senior people within Salesforce over the next couple of weeks, I really wanted to talk to someone like Izzy, who not only is inspiring, super switched on, and obviously going places, but is perhaps a little bit more relatable if you're sitting there going, what the hell does this mean for me?

So that's what today's show is about. Hope you enjoy it. We'll be back on Friday. Izzy, thank you for giving up some time in what is a very busy day.

My pleasure. How are you enjoying Agent Force? As I noticed that it's been rebranded. Yeah, Agent Force World Tour.

I mean, very, very good. There's always so much happening, so it's quite stimulating, but really interesting to get to talk to people from different businesses and different industries and hear about how they're using Slack as the product that I work on, but also Salesforce and wanting to know about it and in the context of AI. So it's always very interesting. How long have you been at Salesforce now?

I've been at Salesforce for two and a half years. I've been at Slack for about eight months. Okay, so let's start with some context settings so people know what we're talking about. What do you actually do here?

So my role at the moment is a Slack solution engineer, which essentially means I work with our account executives, our salespeople, mostly in the pre-sales process. so they will bring us in for more technical kind of discovery and questions but also to basically tell stories using demos so we will as solution engineers create demo environments where we can help paint a picture of what our product could look like in the hands of a customer because it's often really hard to understand what something will be like without using it yourself or just seeing it without your relevant context and problems.

And so we can tailor that and create these demo environments to showcase what that would look like. It's interesting because if you said a solution engineer to someone, particularly someone who's maybe studying and then said, I'm someone who tells stories, that would probably not kind of line up with their expectations. I would say it's not an incredibly descriptive role title. It doesn give you a lot of information about what the role actually does but we basically finding solutions to customers problems and solutions to help them achieve their goals So look your role in oh sorry your route into this role rather is not, maybe it's becoming more typical, but it's not traditionally or stereotypically typical.

No, I think it's still not typical at all, but I think that AI will enable this to happen a lot more. So my original background was actually in HR and operations. So a very different field, non-technical role. That's where I started my journey at Salesforce.

And then I luckily get to work with lots of people from lots of backgrounds. And I was presenting to our solution engineering team. And one of the leaders had said to me, wow, you're a really great storyteller and presenter. You've got lots of transferable skills.

Would you be interested in being a solution engineer? I've got a role open, I'd like you to apply. And so I did. And I'm so glad that I did because it's been an incredible experience.

And it would not have been possible, I don't think, for me to transition across and to learn as much as I have without AI. And I think the tools that we have is only going to further empower other people to do that. So the shift to a technology role happened after you'd walked through the door in Salesforce? Yeah.

What did you originally join as? so I joined as a junior HR business partner okay yeah so I was working with leaders to help them on the people and culture side of their business how have you found that transition I mean obviously you're speaking very positively and I wouldn't expect anything else but when you're coming into a team that I suppose the makeup of it in terms of their background is very different to yours yeah well I think within Slack you know our values are stemmed a lot around curiosity so we're much more higher people based on their mindset, their attitude, being humble and hard working and some of our values.

And so having the, I guess, the fundamental skill set is more important to a lot of people who are hiring at Slack rather than the actual knowledge you can know, because you can learn that, you can find that. So I was very lucky in that regard that somebody took a chance on me definitely and was able to see that. But also, you know, I think it helps people be really engaged because you get to learn, you get to be creative, you know, that people have trust in you. And I was hired not with the expectation of knowing everything.

So it was nice to not have imposter syndrome because I knew everyone knew how much I knew, which was nothing. But it's meant that I'm so able to grow and evolve and it's been a fantastic experience. I would imagine as an HR professional, you would describe that transition to people as an opportunity. Totally.

When you're doing it yourself, it must be a different set of emotions. Honestly, it really did feel like an opportunity. I think a really exciting one. Oh, granted, you wouldn't have taken the role of me, didn't?

Yeah. I suppose when you're describing that, you can describe the opportunity, you can describe the excitement to someone and go, look, this is a really great step for you. When you're doing it with your own career, there must be a little bit more of a, oh God, is this the right step for me? To anyone who's, I suppose my question is, So anyone who is considering that kind of career change, when it actually comes down to it and it's your career, how do you handle any kind of nervousness about that pivot?

I think it's like anything in life. You know, trying new things is always a bit scary. But if you've got a bit of a tingle that makes you think, oh, this is a bit exciting, you've got to take risks, right, to grow, to learn more. And so I think as well, I at least know I never want to get to a position where I'm hating what I'm doing because I'm sick of it.

I'm bored. I've outgrown it. I don't want to get to that stage. I would love to be able to be, you know, OK, I feel like I've learned a lot here, but now I'm I'm interested in other opportunity.

And it's always going to feel risky and scary with anything, but it's so worth it. So, in terms of the fundamental, you said there are fundamental skills and you mentioned curiosity, so I'd imagine that is one. But what else are we talking about in terms of the skills that you think make you well suited to the role that you're in? Yeah.

So, well, I love presenting. I've gotten to do a lot of presenting in my life and career. And I think really enjoying speaking to people and in front of people is definitely a skill that as a solution engineer you often have to get up and speak to people and demonstrate different things to them and explain to them about things And so loving that is something that really helps. On the curiosity piece, I think to ask questions, like knowing the right questions to ask, and it's not even knowing them, but genuinely being curious about what people's challenges are or what their goals are.

That's definitely a really big piece. and then just people skills, you know, being able to read body language, understand if people are not really landing with the message that you're communicating, knowing to switch gears. There are all some fundamental skills that are very transferable into this role, but many others for so many roles a customer face in. You know, way back when, when I was at university, my career started in beauty.

And so I was, I had customers who were coming for their beautician kind of needs and getting their eyebrows done. And just learning to speak to people and remember who their families are and, you know, work with them in that way. It really builds a lot of transferable skills that I think set you up for the rest of your life. It's interesting to hear Salesforce talking about the trailblazers and talking about this kind of mission or backing a government mission to train 10 million people in AI by 2030.

because I suppose understanding what people really need skill set wise to thrive in this industry is not overly clear like there's a lot of organizations who feel reticence I suppose at the minute towards training people around AI skills because they're not they're not comfortable with what that is and they see the industry moving so quickly that they think well hang on a minute if we train someone on this in three months six months time that'll have been wasted because they've moved on.

So understanding who to reach and what they should really focus in on seems to be somewhere where the industry isn't quite sure yet. Yeah, I personally believe that no learning is ever wasted. You get something out of everything that you do. And all of that is just stepping stones to be able to lead to something else.

But a people department might look at their P&L and go, hang on a minute, we can't afford training in this if it's moving on a certain rate. I suppose the point is understanding how you deliver something that is impactful and gives people the building blocks to be successful. Yeah. Well, I'll come and talk to the P&L kind of piece.

There are lots of different ways to approach learning. You don't have to have structured training where you're investing lots of money in it, like maybe for certain roles. So for instance, at the moment, as solution engineers, we're doing a lot of training in a variety of different AI tools, that's certainly something where you would pay and invest in that. There are so many times where getting together with a group of people from a bunch of different industries or different roles and teams and talking about how they're using something, what they're finding, completely free and hugely beneficial.

So I don't think you have to have the structured, fully polished. I think the whole thing with AI is we're all learning. We're playing around. It's evolving really quickly.

You can't master it. You have to just get in there and give it a go. In terms of your day-to-day work alongside agents and AI, how is it evolving your role at the moment? Totally.

So in virtually every way, to be honest, I think the way that feels most impactful, honestly, is admin. Admin I find so tedious and so boring. I don't think a lot of people love it. but being able to tell Slackbot, for instance, to look at all of the opportunities that I'm assigned to that I've not updated next steps on and look through all of the conversations that I've had because I've been working on these opportunities but I just haven't put them into Salesforce yet.

And with the click of a button, Slackbot can provide really comprehensive answers that I can then edit and approve and send straight to Salesforce. That's now taking me five minutes. That used to take me hours. logging my time to see where I've been investing my effort and energy hours has gone to minutes that means that I can use that time to actually understand customers in more depth I can build more tailored demos that more realistically target customers problems or what they want to try and achieve I can spend to be honest a lot of the time that I save on how to learn how to use more AI because keeping on top of that is completely impossible.

So that is really how it's changing day to day. But your experience would certainly support the narrative around AI isn going to take away a role it going to lead to more time spent on higher value tasks There been examples this morning from the keynotes from the panels of your customers saying, if I get the right example, it was a healthcare client of Salesforce. Simply Health? Simply Health.

Yeah, they're fantastic. Who they're actually ending up paying some of their staff more because they're doing higher value tasks. Yeah, exactly. Which is great.

I do still have concerns when you hear that of, well, where are the opportunities for juniors? The one bit of the market where we do seem to have a bit of a problem is that, yeah, we're upskilling people who are already in the industry. We're creating new roles, again, for people who are already in industry. But are we creating a little bit of a drawbridge or pulling up a drawbridge to juniors who are not yet in the industry?

Yeah, I think it's a really important thing that we need to focus on. And I think with the future trailblazers piece, that's an example of how we're trying to work with younger people to start getting AI skills and get into the industry or to get into jobs in general. It's funny, particularly with certain LLM models being so expensive and using lots of tokens at the moment, they've actually gone back to starting to use more junior engineers to review code and to do tasks rather than putting that money into the AI to do it.

And so, you know, that's certainly an example of where it's going to go both ways. I think that we'll need to really rethink a lot of things in the way the world works. I think education is really one of them. You know, when I was at school and university, being able to do an assignment and just hand it in, it took a lot more effort than perhaps just being able to ask a question with AI.

We're just going to need to get way more creative about how we think about education, the way we think about upskilling and the way that we get people into the industry. And I know that a lot of bigger tech companies have got really great apprenticeship programs where people can get involved and build up their career. I know our head of sales for Slack in the UK, she came up through the apprenticeship program and now she's the head of sales. That's incredible.

So we just need to keep creating more opportunities like that. Look, this is a busy conference. There's maybe tens of thousands of people here. It's a big show.

what are the conversations that so far you haven't heard that you wish we were talking about a little bit more? I am really interested in the intentionality about how we use the time that we are saving. Because it's all very well and good for me to say very genuinely I am saving at least five hours a week, not having to search for documents, links, conversations, information. what am I doing with those five hours?

They are worthless if they're not being invested in a better way. I would love to know how people are being intentional about how they are using the savings that they're having. Do you think that time is spent building? Do you think that time is spent learning?

Do you think it's... For me personally? Yeah. How would you want to use that time?

I think learning is a really big component of it. It's really important for me in my role to know what's happening in the market, know what's happening with our customers, know what's happening with our own product, for which there is a lot. So learning to stay on top of things massively is a really big component. I think sometimes it also opens the door for me to do things that just wouldn't have been possible before.

Sometimes I've got not a lot of time to put together something for a customer. and AI enables me to do something way more powerful and impactful and polished that I wouldn't have been able to do beforehand. So produce better output and learn more stuff. Look, it's been a pleasure to spend some time with you.

You too, Tessie. Thank you for putting up with my rangy questions in the middle of a busy day when you're getting asked lots and lots from lots of different people. Not at all. Thank you for having me.