The most dangerous thing a marketer can automate without human oversight

AI agent implementations fail when companies lack proper data foundations and change management. Ariel Kelman, President and CMO at Salesforce, explains how his company achieved measurable results with AgentForce across customer service and marketing operations. The discussion covers Salesforce's trust-first approach to AI context, their $100 million cost savings from automated customer support, and the 20% increase in sales pipeline from website AI agents. 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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  Okay, let's move on. What's the most dangerous thing a marketer can automate without human oversight?

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  I mean, there's a lot of things you can think of, but maybe I'll sort of reframe that to say the things where it's most important to have a human in a loop. I think messaging, like, you know, we do a lot of work on creating derivative assets with AI, and I think the mistake is to think about it as a message generation, you know, factory as opposed to thinking about it as it's going to do 80% of the work for you to create new messaging. So it's like, you got to read it.

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  Yeah. It's hard because it spits out so much information so quickly and you actually have to read it. People just want to-

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  Yeah, I mean, look, I call my team, like, don't ship any messaging as done, whether email, website, whatever, until you read it out loud to another human and does it sound like something you want to say? That doesn't go away just because we can use AI to help us generate five times as much stuff in the same amount of time.

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  Yeah, to me, creativity is, that's my answer, is that you can't automate the uniqueness, right? That the human thought, just fundamentally, large language models are great at predicting what humans would say in this scenario. It doesn't mean they're creating something that new. And so there is that initial spark that actually-

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  Don't use it to create the spark, use it to bring the spark to life.

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  Yeah, to fan the flames.

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  Yeah.

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  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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