Attendees of this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos will be able to use an artificial intelligence (AI) “concierge” from Salesforce within the event’s official mobile app.
While the Financial Times has advice for its readers to negotiate Davos physically – with advice to wear sensible shoes for the snow and ice on the pavements, not to stray too far from the main lounge in the congress centre and, this from the FT’s chief economics commentator Martin Wolf, “look out for the ‘Davos moment’ … when you learn something genuinely fresh” – Salesforce is offering a generative AI agent said to democratise the experience of rank-and-file attendees. While the top-level leaders have personal assistants to keep them on track and get the most out of the event, others do not.
The sales and marketing software-as-a-service supplier said: “The real Davos challenge isn’t logistics – it’s cognitive overload: dozens of meetings, hundreds of sessions, and constant context switching.”
The same could be said of any IT conference, including the supplier’s annual Dreamforce event in San Francisco.
The agent is called EVA, which stands for Event Virtual Agent, and is built on the supplier’s agentic platform, Agentforce. Salesforce said EVA can reason across WEF’s trusted data and institutional knowledge, “surface what matters to each attendee, and compress hours of preparation into moments – keeping leaders informed and relevant even as plans shift by the hour”.
The agent derives from the supplier’s Slackbot technology, billed as a personal AI agent for work, a co-pilot in all but name. The conference agent is said to be able to help “leaders operate with a level of preparedness and decision support that wasn’t realistically possible before”, while offering “a blueprint for other complex global enterprises trying to move from co-pilots to agents with real governance, privacy and security”.
Asked by Computer Weekly why Salesforce believes the agent offers this blueprint, Erin Oles, senior vice-president of strategic events and executive marketing at the supplier, said: “When you think about the enterprise, it’s not just about all the information, but it’s what you do with the information. Instead of overwhelming a human with that information, how do we make them operate better?
“So it’s leaning into that trusted infrastructure of their permissions, the regulations, the data, making sure that we’re surfacing information that is appropriate to the right person. It’s a reasoning engine that can connect those thoughts between your interests, connected to their historical behaviours through complex workflows.
“It’s a strong parallel for a lot of business systems. In the future, we’ll need to move from just making recommendations … to taking actions, and that’s how enterprises are going to be successful moving from systems that require people to operate them, to operational systems that elevate people and allow them to focus on the strategic items they were hired to do.”
EVA is said to generate for its users “instant, context-aware briefs for sessions, surfacing what’s most relevant next, cutting through data overload in real time”. And it handles coordination when changes happen, “so attention stays on substance, not logistics,” according to Salesforce.
The WEF takes place this week in Davos, Switzerland, with 450 sessions.
EVA is far more than a chatbot. It’s an agentic concierge, grounded in trusted data, that helps leaders move faster, prepare better and take action Marc Benioff, Salesforce
One man who will be using the agent on his Davos app is Marc Benioff, chair and CEO of Salesforce, Oles confirmed.
Benioff said: “As we power the largest Davos ever, we’re excited for every attendee to experience what it means to have an AI agent working alongside them, and how Agentforce elevates what people and organisations can achieve. EVA is far more than a chatbot. It’s an agentic concierge, grounded in trusted data, that helps leaders move faster, prepare better and take action.”
Børge Brende, president and CEO of the WEF, said it was also deploying AI agents to support its staff in event preparation and to augment the experience for participants.
“We aren’t just optimising agendas,” he said. “We are unlocking the full depth of the World Economic Forum’s institutional knowledge and putting it directly into the hands of every single attendee.”
The deployment of the “concierge” on the conference app is being done by Salesforce’s forward-deployed engineering team, and is said to be part of a broader infrastructure that undergirds the Alpine conference and ancillary events the forum hosts throughout the year.
Meanwhile, Salesforce’s MuleSoft automation and integration software is in use to connect the forum’s customer relationship management system, also supplied by Salesforce, to its third-party finance, HR, travel and operations systems. Salesforce’s Tableau visualisation software is also being used, to track engagement, participation and account activity across WEF initiatives.
