Description
Overview of the Role
Salesforce Futures, a part of Corporate Strategy, helps Salesforce and our customers anticipate, imagine, and shape the future. Our outside-in, future-back approach organizes thinking and decision-making at a moment of accelerating change. Our team works in the tradition Peter Schwartz helped establish while evolving our practice through the use of AI tools.
We’re hiring a Senior Director to lead substantive futures work from end-to-end: from defining focal questions, to building shared understanding, to hosting strategic conversations with Salesforce leaders and our customers. At a moment when AI is enabling a reimagination of the future of futures, we’re looking for someone who brings a builder’s mindset to an established futures methodology.
Responsibilities
Strategic Leadership & Agenda Setting
Help define the agenda for Salesforce Futures: the strategic questions, the time horizons, and how to achieve the greatest impact.
Partner across the organization to embed foresight into how strategic decisions get made.
Operate as a trusted advisor to senior leaders at Salesforce and customer executives.
Build operational rigor around how futures work gets scoped, produced, distributed, and assessed for impact and quality.
Cultivate and contribute to a network of remarkable thinkers inside and outside of Salesforce. The quality of our work depends on the quality of the conversations we’re part of.
Foresight, Scenarios, and Original Research
Lead end-to-end projects that develop original scenarios and foresight artifacts on questions of strategic relevance to Salesforce and our customers. The work spans the trajectory of frontier technologies, the future of work and organizations, energy and infrastructure constraints of the next decade, and the geopolitical and economic conditions that shape the possibility space over the next 3-5 years.
Build proprietary research methodologies that synthesize signals from academia, industry analysts, practitioners, and primary sources into a coherent view about the pace and dimensions of change.
Executive Engagement and Thought Leadership
Deliver your work directly to executive audiences via keynotes, workshops, customer engagements, and analyst events. Engage with C-suite leaders in high-stakes conversations about evolving futures that position Salesforce as the place people come to see the future first.
Contribute to the published expression of the team’s thinking: articles, reports, presentations, and longer-form work that establishes Salesforce as a leading voice on the future of the agentic enterprise.
Enable others across Salesforce to communicate futures where the team can’t engage directly.
Building, Prototyping, and the Future of Futures
Build things. Prototypes, simulations, interactive artifacts, working software, etc. Help executives feel a future rather than just read about one.
Use AI tools fluently in your own practice. We expect daily, hands-on use and the kind of taste and insight that only comes from putting the tools to real work.
Treat the future of futures as a live question. Evolve scenario planning, strategic narrative, and the rest of the inherited toolkit for a world of abundant intelligence.
Minimum Requirements
12+ years in scenarios, foresight, corporate strategy, or adjacent fields, with deep fluency in the mental models and key decisions of corporate strategy.
Track record working closely with C-suite executives, or having led organizations or business units directly. Comfortable in the room when major decisions get made.
Cross-industry pattern recognition across a minimum of four industries and three global regions, directly or through advisory work. Systems thinking that anticipates second-order effects and holds up under pressure.
A builder. You make things — decks, prototypes, working software, simulations, written artifacts — and don't outsource the production of the work when the work itself is the point.
Fluent, daily use of AI tools in your own practice, with developed taste about where they help and where they don't. Comfortable shipping, learning, and revising rather than perfecting in private.
Extensive experience creating and delivering executive communications, with demonstrated confidence in keynotes, workshops, and advisory settings. You write and speak with a voice, not a template.
Curious, analytical, and well-read. You bring original insight, not synthesis of what's already in the discourse. Global perspective; multilingual or multicultural experience a plus.
Advanced degree in relevant fields preferred, or equivalent practical experience. Familiarity with Salesforce's brand, products, and ecosystem a plus.
For roles in San Francisco and Los Angeles: Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring, Salesforce will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.