Dreamforce 2025 - the importance of human intelligence in the agentic mix, according to Aum Lifetech

Agentic AI technology can free up human beings from repetitive tasks that can be automated, leaving people free to apply their creativity to bigger challenges facing humanity. That’s the view expressed by Veenu Aishwarya, CEO of Aum Lifetech, and one of the tools his firm is using to pursue this goal is Salesforce’s Agentforce platform.

Aum Lifetech is a Philadelphia-based bio-tech company. Its mission is to advance bio-medical research and drug development through innovative genetic research products, specifically gene therapy with a focus on RNA silencing. It has global customers in about 38 countries, including universities and pharmaceutical companies supporting research applications in genetically-defined diseases, including immunology, cancer and various diseases of the nervous system. 

As part of its day-to-day operations, the organization attends a good many scientific conferences each year, events that provide many of the sales leads for the firm. That’s a good source of business opportunities, but it can be overwhelming, Aishwarya explains:

We collect leads from these conferences...Once we attended a conference and collectively took 2000 leads go back to our offices. Being a small company with limited resources and limited team members, it's a bit challenging to reach out to everybody at the same time. Otherwise a few people can just email and it may take multiple weeks to reach out to everybody. We always needed something which is more automated. 

Agentic

That something is Salesforce Agentforce, which caused Aishwarya to wonder if agentic tech could be used to the firm’s advantage: 

We have been using Salesforce since the beginning of the company. In the CRM, we have all the data for customers already, so it was an easy extension...AgentForce has enabled us to scale outreach to thousands of leads weekly, monthly and turning cold contacts into personalized engagements over months which is essential for a high-value consultative sales model in bio-medical research. We can also do faster client service turnaround so we can answer the questions of clients much faster. Automated meeting summaries, tailored follow ups also allows us to compete with industry giants despite our limited resources.

Agentic tech is also enabling productivity gains around developing new systems, adds Aishwarya:

I'm a cancer researcher by training.  I work at University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. So I'm not a coder per se...if we can ask an agent to do those things for us, we don't have to wait for programmers...If you have an idea as a biotech CEO you can ask an agent to do this for you, provided you have the governance and knowledge in place. That's something which I think is the biggest power for non-coding CEOs who don't come from a non-coding background. So it gives that immense power to people like me who can now execute their vision without waiting for a big implementation by a 20 people team, which is of course good.  

That compliance and governance aspect is very important to organizations operating in a highly-regulated space. Aishwarya explains:

We work with a lot of biotech, pharmaceutical companies, big companies. We have to be compliant. We deal with a lot of patient data also....This is where Salesforce Data Cloud comes in, where we can ground all our responses to our existing knowledge so that we do not say anything which is incorrect, because in scientific field, scientific credibility is extremely important. For me, knowledge and governance and putting proper guardrails in all of my agents is also very important. 

Trust 

Trust is a factor cited by organizations across all sectors as a factor in making agentic adoption decisions, of course. Aishwarya argues that this is “a solvable problem”, noting:

You have to do the risk analysis as well. I mean, at this point of time, there are some risks, but I think as we are improving the technology every day, every week, this, in the next few weeks or months or maybe a year, this is a solvable problem. 

At this week’s Dreamforce conference, trust has been ne of the most frequently mentioned terms, along with the idea of Digital Labor, with humans and AI agents working together to transform the workforces of tomorrow. That’s something that Aum Biotech has factored into its thinking, says Aishwarya:

Agents are allowing us also for the humans like myself and my team to do much bigger tasks and the repetitive tasks can be outsourced to these agents. The first one is of course reaching out to thousands of people in parallel and then doing a Q&A also. For example, we made a very nice web app which is linked to our Salesforce where somebody comes to a website and we can do Q&A. If somebody has questions on the product and the protocol, it can be answered. If somebody wants to order something, we can provide the information. Again, the most important thing is when you are working with biotech scientists and with any company which are selling complicated products, the information is extremely important....For us, credibility is extremely important. We cannot make even a single mistake because then the credibility goes away.

He adds:

Acquiring a customer is the biggest thing for us, so if I can free up my people not to email manually they can do more innovative tasks. They can also target high-value clients as well. They can do tasks which are not easily be performed by the agents, like we can go to more complicated meetings. We have to do experimental design and in some cases we have to do a lot of high level consultation which cannot be performed by agents at this time. 

Keeping the human touch  involved is crucial, he argues:

People still crave for human interaction. I'm not saying that AI is going to replace humans because now we can spend that time in creating more human contacts where they need it. If you have 10,000, 200,000 leads, the agents can try to convert from cold to warm to hot and in that fashion and the scientific team can spend more time innovating. 

Just the start 

This is just the beginning of AI and agentic AI, Aishwarya concludes, urging other organizations to engage with the potential of the emerging tech:

Don't be scared. Take a deep breath and just engage yourself into learning more. Try to empower your people with AI. There will be two types of people - people who use AI versus people who don't use AI. Of course we talk about [impact on] jobs and this and that, but I think human jobs will be there because what will happen is that more repetitive tasks - I don't like to use the word low level, but more tasks which are more mundane and can be automated - will go to these agents. 

But then humans will do bigger tasks, he says, and that’s incredibly important:

We still have to discover so many things. We still don't have a cure for cancer. We have to figure out space travel. I wish I could go to Paris in five minutes instead of six hours. We have still so many problems to solve. So if humans can spend their time in figuring out those bigger problems...We have to do a lot of things, so don't worry about jobs getting lost because there are still a lot of things to do for humans. We can just utilize our human minds in finding solutions for this bigger problem. 

Check out diginomica's dedicated Dreamforce event hub here