Clara Shih

Clara Shih’s worn more hats than a Broadway costume rack: Stanford valedictorian, 9-figure-exit startup founder and CEO, Salesforce AI chief, Starbucks board member, and now Head of Business AI at Meta.

In 2007, Clara Shih coded Faceforce. The first-ever business app on Facebook.

She built it as a side project while working at Salesforce.

When it took off, she quit her job, teamed up with an old classmate, and launched Hearsay Social.

She was 27.

Over the next decade, she scaled Hearsay into a global SaaS company used by 170,000+ financial advisors across 22 countries.

The company helped financial services firms modernize how they engaged with clients through social, mobile, and digital.

She raised capital and ran the company as CEO for 11 years, until she stepped down in 2020 and became Executive Chair.

In 2024, Hearsay was acquired by Yext (NASDAQ:YEXT) for $125M.

But Clara wasn’t even close to being done.

In 2021, she rejoined Salesforce, just as AI was starting to explode.

She led Service Cloud, a $5B business, and grew it to $9B, surpassing Sales Cloud for the first time in company history.

Then she became CEO of Salesforce AI.

Her first move? Turn a prototype (called Gucci GPT) into a full AI platform to help service reps write accurate, on-brand responses.

It cut resolution time, boosted NPS, and increased sales.

When ChatGPT launched, she already had the data and internal tooling to scale.

So she built Agentforce, a generative AI suite that became the fastest-growing organic product in Salesforce history.

Clara led product, engineering, applied research, go-to-market, and customer adoption.

She built…
- The Trust Layer (prompt injection defense, toxicity filters, monitoring).
- Prompt Builder and Model Builder for LLM orchestration.
- Agentforce Studio for app creation.
And the Atlas Reasoning Engine to support custom workflows.

Then, in late 2024, Meta poached her.

She was hired to lead a brand new division: Business AI.

Now she oversees engineering, product, P&L, and strategy for a portfolio that serves 200M+ businesses across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

She also runs Meta’s genAI backend platform across monetization.

And works closely with Meta’s Superintelligence Labs on enterprise use cases for Llama.

Clara’s mission: make cutting-edge AI accessible to every business, not just the Fortune 100.