Salesforce exec tells entry-level workers: 'Hard isn't necessarily bad'

Salesforce senior vice president Andy White says resilience is top of mind for him at work and at home. He oversees Salesforce's implementation of Slackbot, an AI personal agent that generates responses based on conversations, files, and workflows inside Slack.

As he raises his son and daughter, White teaches them to push through moments that don't go as planned. 'Hard is hard,' he told Business Insider. 'Hard isn't necessarily bad.' He added that expectations are the 'destroyer of hope and joy,' and that things that go wrong often turn out well later.

White describes today's entry-level talent pool as 'incredibly capable, very bright, and very driven,' and says they are generally more fluent at leveraging AI tooling in the flow of their work. Still, he sees persistence as an area for growth, noting 'there's more willingness to give up sooner' among some junior hires.

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