Franny Hsiao
19 Jun 2026Live from Agentforce World Tour London
Franny Hsiao (Salesforce): Circular AI & the Second Brain
Franny Hsiao, who leads Salesforce's EMEA team of AI Architects and has worked in AI for over 25 years, traces the field from the Watson/Deep Blue era to today and introduces her 'circular AI' framework inspired by ecology. She describes a personal 'second brain' that flags stale knowledge and feeds team-wide and federated corporate brains, so new joiners contribute learning from day one rather than after months of onboarding. She also argues Europe leads on digital sovereignty and governance-by-design, with customers embracing green, frugal AI by right-sizing models instead of defaulting to the biggest ones.
Franny Hsiao on Frugal AI, Local Models & Human-Centric Design
Franny Hsiao criticizes 'token maxing' as artificial consumption at the climate's expense and champions small, local, open-weight models for tasks like auto-organizing screenshots, plus RAG and batch processing over constant retraining. She predicts a hyper-personalized experience layer where each user works with one chosen agent and the complexity of the wider agent ecosystem is hidden from view. Her core architectural principle for AI-native founders is human-centric design: stalled projects usually fail on psychological safety and resistance to change, not on the technology.