Director, AI Labs Scouts

AI Labs is on a mission to grow Salesforce into America’s next $1.5T AI mainstay, from ASICs to Agents. This includes building a proactive market intelligence and venture sourcing capability to identify important basic and applied AI companies and technologies before they enter competitive acquisition and strategic investment processes.

As Director of AI Ventures, you will continuously map emerging AI technologies, products, and markets, developing relationships across the ecosystem to identify founders, teams, and technologies that could materially strengthen a market-leading AI strategy.

What You'll Do

• Build and continuously maintain a landscape of companies, labs, founders, technologies, investors, and emerging categories within your focus area.
• Source acquisition, partnership, licensing, acquihire, and strategic opportunities before they become broadly marketed.
• Maintain deep relationships with founders, professors, VCs, accelerators, technical communities, and other ecosystem leaders.
• Attend and sponsor relevant conferences, hackathons, founder gatherings, and industry events to build proprietary market intelligence.
• Produce concise assessments of emerging companies and categories for AI Labs leadership.
• Develop and constantly refresh clear points of view on where AI markets are moving and where Salesforce should build, buy, partner, or continue watching.
• Partner with M&A and Strategic Finance to transition qualified opportunities into formal diligence and deal processes.

What We're Looking For

• Experience in DeepTech and product-centric venture capital, startup investing, company building, or a highly relevant AI ecosystem role.
• Strong network across founders, labs, professors, investors, and emerging technology companies.
• Deep curiosity and fluency in AI markets and technologies, and enterprise software.
• Ability to move between technical trends, business models, founder assessment, and strategic implications.
• Strong executive communication and judgment.
• Ideally a former founder, senior associate/principal/junior partner from a leading VC firm, or equivalent ecosystem profile.

Note

This is not an M&A execution role. Success is measured by the quality of the relationships/access, market intelligence, and opportunities created upstream of the deal process.