Clara Shih

Clara Shih is a Stanford-trained computer scientist who has spent two decades productizing each wave of enterprise technology. She literally wrote the book on Facebook’s business platform — “The Facebook Era” (2009) — the same year she founded Hearsay Systems, a social-selling software company for financial services. She joined Starbucks’ board at 29, then returned to Salesforce to run Service Cloud and, from 2023, to serve as CEO of Salesforce AI, where she launched Einstein GPT, Copilot and the Agentforce agent platform.

From Einstein to Meta’s Business AI

In November 2024, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta hired Shih to lead a newly created Business AI group — building AI tools and agents for the hundreds of millions of businesses that advertise and sell across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Announcing the move, she called Meta’s reach and open-source Llama models “a generational opportunity for businesses” and said the goal was to take business AI “from zero to one to scale.”

Under Shih the group shipped Business AI, an agent that lets small businesses automate customer conversations and sales inside Meta’s messaging apps. In November 2025 HubSpot added her to its board of directors — a signal of how central her brand of applied, sell-something-with-it AI has become to the enterprise software industry.

Shih’s stance needs little parsing: her entire career is a bet that AI agents become the default interface between companies and customers. Skeptics of that vision note most small businesses have yet to see clear returns from AI tools; Shih’s answer has consistently been to ship the next iteration.