Peter Coffee

Peter Coffee

VP for Strategic Research Salesforce

Title: Preparing for Opportunity: 2025 Starts Now

Description: Too many organizations are still treating the present pandemic as an episode to endure, or an incident from which to recover. More accurate, as well as more useful, is the recognition that cycles of "creative destruction" that were clearly under way have advanced their "no later than" from 2025 to…now. Crucial skills for contributors will therefore include, according to LinkedIn, readiness to work with blockchain data models, dynamic cloud resources, and increasingly pervasive methods of artificial intelligence. Oh, wait: the World Economic Forum says the top skills for the 2025-that's-now will be analytical thinking, active learning, and creativity. Plot spoiler: both lists are correct. Peter Coffee brings the global perspective of Salesforce, and his own four decades of experience in multiple industries and his observations from almost two dozen countries, to help us prepare ourselves and our students for success.

Peter Coffee has been with the Salesforce for thirteen years. He works with the company's customers, partners and account teams in areas including connected customer engagement, new data models and methods, trust technologies and practices, and business applications of AIderived techniques. He currently spends most of his time with customers assisting their acceleration of digital transformation timelines in response to the global pandemic.

Peter spent his eighteen years pre-Salesforce writing for publications including eWEEK, Computer Language and AI Expert, while also publishing two books and contributing to many others in areas including Java programming, information governance, and nanotechnology developments. Before that, he worked for ten years as an AI applications analyst and desktop computing manager at The Aerospace Corporation, and in project management roles for various divisions of (what was then) Exxon Corporation in locations from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic. He has lectured on innovation practices and AI techniques at Stanford, CalTech, Harvard Business School, and the Sloan School of Management at MIT, along with other institutions in Singapore, India and Spain; he has served in faculty roles in IT management, AI applications, and business analytics at Pepperdine University, UCLA, and Chapman College. He holds an engineering degree from MIT and an MBA from Pepperdine's Graziadio School of Business. His current writing often appears at diginomica.com/author/peter-coffee, and his notes on what he's reading on Twitter @petercoffee.

In the real world, Peter has been a Boy Scout high-adventure expedition leader, choral and instrumental composer/conductor/performer, and chairman of a Los Angeles-area food bank; he is co-founder and President of the Foundation for Intelligent Life on Earth, a Seattle-based nonprofit focusing its immediate attention on food insecurity in that region along with its principal ongoing support for climate-change research and mitigation.