There are 1.6 million cases supported and about 55,000 customer support conversations per week, handled by Salesforce’s AI agents - this sets the stage for this episode with stage for this chat with Ariel Kelman, President & CMO at Salesforce. Ariel walks us through how Salesforce is building the agentic enterprise, where AI agents (Agentforce) work alongside humans across sales, service, and marketing. The real magic, he says, isn’t just the AI, but it’s data readiness with Data Cloud so the agents actually know your customers and context. We get into Salesforce’s Customer Zero mindset (use your own product first) and why modern marketing wins on education over persuasion. The secret plug - Arial shares lessons from dogfooding that enabled 700k+ website conversations and approximately 14k formerly ignored leads followed up every week. With all the buzz around AI, Ariel reckons that the biggest risk is getting left behind as a marketer. As CMOs question how to keep up with the pace of change, especially around AI, Ariel’s answer is to be in the arena: use the tools, test them internally, and find real use cases fast.
In this episode of Scratch, Ariel Kelman, President & CMO of Salesforce, shows how a category leader can still think like a challenger through the power of education, not persuasion. Education beats persuasion when you make community the flywheel: by pairing product truth with peer proof through events like Dreamforce, Trailhead, and forums, so customers learn how to win with your product (not just why it’s great). That mindset turns advocacy into momentum.
But teaching only lands if the tech actually works in the flow of “work”, so Ariel’s rule is being able to put data before demos. He emphasizes the need to harmonize and govern customer data in Data Cloud so AI agents have context, then deploy them where they matter. For example, a product Q&A agent spun up in weeks drove 700k+ customer chats, and their website/service agents have resolved 1.6M cases because they understand real customer history, permissions, and next best actions.
Finally, as a brand, you need to be Customer Zero and balance quick wins with long bets. Dogfood your offerings first to iterate fast and convert internal proofs into external playbooks, then scale what works.
Watch the video version of this podcast on YouTube ▶️: https://youtu.be/92Rfv19ypQE
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Scratch is a production of Rival, a marketing innovation consultancy that develops strategies and capabilities that help businesses grow faster. Scratch is hosted by Eric Fulwiler, and he’s joined by Ariel Kelman, President & CMO of Salesforce, in this episode.
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