The biggest misconception CMOs have about what AI agents can actually replace today

Most AI agents fail because companies lack proper data context and foundations. Ariel Kelman, President and CMO at Salesforce, explains why 95% of generative AI pilots don't deliver measurable business impact. He discusses Salesforce's trust-first approach with AgentForce, which has generated over $27 million in incremental pipeline and saved $100 million through automated customer support handling 77% of cases. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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  Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world-class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.

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  All right, I want to move on to our next question. What's the biggest misconception CMOs have about what AI agents can actually replace today?

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  I think the biggest misconception is an over-focus on using it to save money and using it to replace people. You know, maybe I'll just put on that last one of that what we're trying to automate are humans as opposed to figuring out a more granular level that what we're trying to automate with agents are tasks. And those tasks often span multiple people and that if you can automate these tasks, you make your employees so much more productive and they can get more done more quickly.

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  I understand the idea of automating tasks and one of the beauties of LLMs is they can shift with no sort of problems between, okay, you're a product marketer, now you're a designer, okay, now you're a copywriter.

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  But the the concept of automating humans is a little fuzzy and confusing to me. Explain what you mean.

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  Well, I mean, people go, oh, well, you know, which jobs can we replace with AI? Okay, oh, this job, this, oh, this, no, no, no, this job we could never do because we can't have, you know, an AI do all this stuff. It's just, it's the wrong level of abstraction.

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  Because if there's a certain job that has, let's say, fifty things that it does, any one of those that you can automate with AI, you are increasing the productivity of that person. And when you increase the productivity of that person, you can do many things as as a business. You can give that person better work-life balance by letting them not have to stay up all night for a crazy deadline, which we have in marketing a lot. You can allow them to say yes instead of no more often, right? Marketing, we're always asked to do like, almost always, three to four times as much stuff as we have, you know, resources to do.

• 3:24Speaker 04

  Amen.

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  Okay, so you can do more things in the same amount of time. Or you can do the same amount of things with with less people, of course. But like, what I've seen mostly is in in the vast majority of cases across marketing, the way that people are are cashing in these productivity benefits is doing more with the same amount of people and doing it more quickly. And then trying, getting a little bit of burnout protection with all these date-driven deadlines that we get.

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  Yeah, I feel like the biggest misconception for me, people fear fear around the new technology as if it is going to replace them. As opposed to thinking what an opportunity it is that they now have the ability to have, essentially, superintelligence, which I know is a broad term that everybody's throwing around right now. But we all can get access to so much more information and have it synthesized to be. Right size for what we can interpret so much faster than ever before in human history. And people are sitting here saying, but it's going to take my job as opposed to this can make me better at my job. And so there's a mind shift around what the possibilities are that I think is

• 4:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, that saying that's become kind of famous now is like, you're not going to be replaced by AI. You're going to be replaced by someone who's great at using AI.

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  I could not agree with you more. All right. And that wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks to Ariel Kelman, the president and CMO of Salesforce for joining us. If you'd like to contact Ariel, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on martechpod.com. Of course, you can always visit his company's website. It's salesforce.com. And if you haven't subscribed and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed next week. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.

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