A (3:20)

Yeah. So I think the unique perspective for us, there's lots of companies talking about AI agents. Right. And usually when I hear that conversation, you're talking about essentially a front end for an LLM. We obviously have that with our Agent Force product, but our Agent Force product is also grounded where your humans do their work. Right. So for the world of marketers and cx, we sit in the marketing console where you build your segments and you send out your messaging. Right. We sit on the service console where your service agent, your human service agent rather I have to specify, that does their work. So what I think is really different and unique about us is we are grounded in not only the workflow that your humans do, but also all of the rich CRM data that comes with that. Right. So I think it's a really interesting and unique place versus some of the more point solution or LLM driven agentic framework features that people have. And I've been really excited about some of the success we've been able to drive for customers in that space because of that richness of data and context that comes with being in the application layer where your humans do their work.

B (4:29)

Yeah. So along those lines then, why don't you walk us through what's a real life case study of how Agent Force is delivering.

A (4:38)

Yeah, I'll give you a really interesting one. So I can't give you the company obviously, but I'll talk a little bit about sort of like types of work that we do. So let's say we're with a company that makes, you know, hardware for your home. Right. Actually, one of the companies I was with a couple of weeks ago, they have a part that fails. It's a top 10 complaint in their service center. They're talking about putting Agentic against that process so that when Devin calls in and says, hey, my, my part has failed, I need to find it, the agent can go look up which part I'm talking about. The agent can automatically ship that out if my warranty claim works. And it can also collect and enrich my customer profile so it can say, oh hey, this is Devin, he's calling from this phone number. We didn't have that phone number before. Do we think he's matching to that DevinMail email address that we probably have? And he can start to build this really rich trail of data but also just automate all that work. So it actually takes all of that warranty claim that's a top 10 complaint for them and essentially eliminates it so that it never has to be seen by a human. Obviously you're still going to have humans in the loop, you're going to review that, but at the time it frees up a ton of time. So we're seeing people handling 60, 70, even 80% of interactions autonomously, which in my opinion frees up humans to do more interesting work. Right. Because responding to my warranty claim 24 hours later is really frustrating. And the other thing I think is really cool is it actually is a better cx. Right. I think a lot of times people talk about agentic, especially in the concept of service. They're like, oh, that's about like getting rid of a CX and reducing the CX down to like the least common denominator. And I would actually say that's a better CX for me than having to call it 800 number and tell you about my problem if it's not 9 to 5, if my faucet is definitely going to break at 7:30 at night, not when your service center is open. Right. It's just how the world works. I was telling this to a golf company the other day about drivers and when they break. So this is all about bringing it together and actually giving me the option of self service that works. Then you can also have your humans deliver even better service experiences like calling to follow up, hey, did that that come through or sending that off? So that's how I see this transforming the world of cx, if that makes sense.

B (6:58)

Yeah, yeah. And definitely, I mean I, you know, I, I look at it as similar, similar to what you're saying is, you know, it's, it's elevating the human customer service reps in that case to be doing more valuable work. And you know, that's valuable for the customer. It's Also valuable for the employee, which also really matters, right?

A (7:17)

Yeah. I mean if you think about like that's where you know, when Ikea did their initial thing, they had 4,000 people that they essentially made redundant with AI. But then they re skilled them, right. So they turned them into advisors on your furniture, which is an experience that is valuable because I still think in the world of AI we're going to value human experiences and interactions even more because it's going to be so non traditional. So hey, how.

B (7:42)

Yeah, yeah. And so you know, in, in this scenario when an agent can what AI agent can, you know, reach out, manage objections, book meetings, all of this stuff before a rep can even open up their email client, you know. So in other words, all this stuff kind of, that you're talking about and more, where does the, the value of the human lie? In the, in this. Let's talk about the sales cycle here as well.

A (8:09)

Yeah, so and I think sales is a really interesting case, right, Because I think a lot of that is human to human interaction and it's kind of like people buy from people that they like. So I think what this does is it allows the reps to focus on the higher value tasks. Like higher value tasks. I'm going to go back to that over and over because I just firmly believe that. But I'll take a, I'll take a deep dive into that. Right. The appointment setting is not the value that I have. The back and forth conversation is not the value that a sales rep has. Even like providing pricing and going back and forth with your, you know. So I'll give you an example that I'm working on with a customer right now. They have reps that talk to chefs all day. They're in. They have a bag that has 500 items in it of different products. Actually I started my career working at Heinz selling soup and other like, you know, Heinz products. Right. We had hundreds of items in my bag. I didn't know the item number for every single one. I didn't know the unique selling points of each, each item. What I was good at is that human to human interaction. And so what the agents are going to provide is if I'm talking to a chef about a soup or a pack of bacon or any other product. Hey, how many slices come in this case? Oh, it's 144, Devin. Great. What's the Cisco item number again? Oh, it's 059243. Okay, perfect. Now I can provide that information live. I never have to go back and write my follow up email at home instead I can go to my kids baseball game. Right. So I see this. There's, there's more work than anyone can do in a day and that's just a reality of the world that we're always in. So this is allowing you to free up that work and then you're able to do either really interesting work or to spend a little bit more time doing something that you're more passionate about instead of working till 7:30 at night. So I see agents being really interesting for employees and freeing up time and that's where I'm seeing the sales cycle. It's really about retrieving information because if you're selling anything the odds are your bag is too big for you to memorize all the key things. And so the sales agent can act both as a handling some of the mundane tasks but also surfacing more detailed information. For example, actually in my Slack I have a little bot and when I go into a meeting I say hey, I'm meeting with so in the blank customer in 15 minutes like what do I need to know? And it'll actually go through and it'll even find what it thinks. My unique role is based on my title, all of the messages in the Slack channel. It's very, very cool and it frees up me to not have to have a 30 minute prep call. So it saves my calendar too and I have more time to do interesting conversations like this, which is awesome.

B (10:51)

Want to learn more and join the discussion About Marketing and AI? Attend a premier conference dedicated to marketing and AI. That's Meacon, the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Conference from October 14 through 16 in Cleveland, Ohio. MEACON brings together the brightest minds and leading voices in AI. Don't miss this opportunity to connect with a dynamic community of experts, visionaries and enthusiasts. The Agile brand is proud to be the lead media sponsor of this important event. Register today@marketingai institute.com that's marketingai institute.com and use the code Agile150 for $150 off your registration fee. I can't wait to see you there. You know Salesforce recently launched a library of like pre built skills. So you know similar to the meeting example, you know things like proactive mainten, sales agreement management, maybe talk a little bit about these and also what guardrails are in place so that the agents are doing the right thing and focused on the right thing.

A (12:03)

Yeah so I mean the pre built skills essentially are just things that we know people are going to want the agent to do right. So it lets you build out a template. I often talk a little bit about configuration versus customization when I'm with a customer. The pre built skill is probably going to get you 80% of the way to what you need to do. Right. You're still going to have to configure a little bit to say, okay, well my sales agreement looks like this or it needs to be grounded in this particular interaction. My sample request looks like this. My service warranty claim has to reference this document. But we know that you're going to need warranty claims. Right. I know that if you have assets out in the field, you're going to have IoT on those assets and you're going to want that IoT data to surface an alert proactively to your service person. Right. So that's what we're trying to do is we're trying to templatize things to get you to value faster. Because the reality is a lot of these projects are moving slowly because it's so much integration. And I think what we're finding is our approach is helping people get there faster. So. Right. Like I'm not going to say minutes, but weeks versus months. Right. I've seen people. We had a concept for a while called 90 Day AI, which was a concept I've talked with customers about. I can stand up an AI agent in 90 days with you. It's probably less than that if I'm being honest, but we'll claim 90 and we can get something. So because of all those pre built skills you're leveraging and then in terms of guardrails, I mean, trust is our number one value as a company. I think the biggest guardrail that we have in place that's built across our platform is that none of the data that goes through our platform is used to train models. And I'll give you a really scary example that I think illustrates why this is important. I was with a customer and we were showing them an RFP example in our sales cloud. The CRO looks over at me and goes, hey, where'd you get that information from? I was like, oh, we, we use ChatGPT to write a demo script for us and it deal seems roughly right. What's our competitor's RFP that's in your demo environment? So ChatGPT had clearly been used by someone's sales rep to write an RFP response and then had trained itself on that RFP response and was then selling that with the open Internet. So that's why I think it's really. That's one of the guardrails that we put in place. The other guardrail is really just. It's dependent on the workflow and process that you're building out. Right. So it's the human in the loop concept. Like I would not suggest for most people fully identifying a process. Right. You want to have a human who signs off on this. If it's something very simple like shipping a part that costs you $1.50 for a $500 thing, sure, maybe go ahead and identify that. But you still want a human in the loop to make sure the part actually ships. Like reviewing. It's more about humans becoming reviewers and approvers versus doers. That's my other guardrail. But that's a build. That's not something that I build in. That's something that the brands and the people build into their process. So it's not. We give you the tools to build that.

B (15:05)

Yeah. And the subject matter expert would understand where those checkpoints would need to be because. Yeah. I mean, as much as there are similarities between companies, every company is different. Right. So every process is a little bit different, but the tools have the ability to put those checkpoints in place.

A (15:26)

The tools are very well. And it's a lot of drag and drop. Honestly, it's kind of cool to be in today's day and age where language becomes the primary interface. Right. I don't know. I can't write code personally. I've been around people who write great code. But I can go into replit and I can build a vision of what I want and then I can hand it over to a person who does write code, who will also probably use replit to write that code and build it out and drive it for me. So it's a really. It's fun to watch language and your natural language become the driver of your interaction with software and technology. And I think it's a really interesting space that we're in now.

B (16:05)

Yeah, yeah, definitely. So let's talk a little bit about the retail scenario too. So visit Management agents can now handle, you know, store call scheduling, briefing and briefing preps automatically. Maybe for those a little less familiar, you know, compare. What does that look like today versus, you know, how does. How does agentic kind of change those interactions between field reps and store managers?

A (16:32)

Yeah. So I think it'll be really interesting. And this applies to both the world of retail and the world of consumer goods. Right. So I'll give you an example. When I was. A long, long time ago in my very first job, I would Go and call on stores, mostly c stores for PepsiCo and I would pop in and I'd say, okay, I'm here to talk about, you know, our new serumist flavor of like, who knows, all of that is going to be very different, right? So I think what we're trying to build out is a world where the Republic is a lot more paint by numbers, right? Because the rep doesn't have time, they have maybe 10 minutes in that store, right? By the time they get done facing all the product, they get done delivering all the things, signing all the invoices, maybe you have five minutes to talk about manager, you might be able to talk about one, maybe two things. So in that example I gave earlier of how I use my Slack bot, that same functionality is available to the rep to say, hey, I'm talking to a C store, it's in Los Angeles, it has this assortment, you know, all those things because you service that store. What are the top two or three things I should talk about? Well, you know, you should probably talk about our holiday promotion coming up and make sure that they've got space on the floor for us to build an end cap. You know, we have this really exciting new innovation and it's being supported by a promotion. They've accepted it. Chain wide is the shipper there, right? Like that's the, and that's the two text. It'll surface and so it knows a lot about your organization and then it can paint by numbers for the rep and then the rep can solve it and then that updates the data and the CRM on the back end to say okay, we visited. So that's the difference right before, if I was a rep I would go in. If I was lucky, someone in sales strategy would have built me like a five step thing I should do. But that's probably built on like A stores, B stores and C stores, not specific zip code geographic information. And then I would manually say like yes I did this, yes I did this, yes I did this. So in an agentic future, which we're headed towards pretty rapidly and you can read the Wall Street Journal article we have with PepsiCo about how they're rethinking the way that they go to market with their retail execution magentic future, it's going to be hey, you can do all that. Or if you have, if a store is too low volume to merit a visit, right? So the bottom 20% of most people's portfolio get visited twice a year, that store can have a online agent who interacts with them and Says, hey, this is what's coming. All the same things that my sales reps know because again it's guided. So it's hey, here's two or three things you should be thinking about. Oh, you want samples of that? Sure. Click this button right. So it becomes, it gives you. And again it's about bridging gaps in your CX and your pro to market that are created by headcount challenges. It's just not profitable to serve some of the very smallest stores and customers. And the same thing can be done with retail. I managed a team of district managers at Starbucks. I had a team as part of my remit at Starbucks which we had 6,600 of our licensed stores. Those district managers needed to have tasks that they accomplished. Right. So I could do the exact same thing for retail district managers. Anybody who's in charge of like franchising and auditing that type of population, which is a really interesting group to handle and briefing and interactions and all that can be done automatically. But also it's about access to sites and serving up that like really powerful data grounded activity to do versus more of like I think we talk about visit schedulings, it's so easy. But it's really about like these more robust like selling activities that the agent is suggesting. And then you are using your human brain, again human in the loop to go pick something cool and say okay, I accomplished that. And then updating that into your CRM so that you're actually capturing the data on what's working out in the field.

B (20:10)

Yeah, yeah, well. And I guess similarly, you know, back to, back to the customer service scenario, you know, customer service reps are, they're carrying quotas now too. Right. So how does, you know, how does some of those agentic skills keep everything positive? You know, not only, you know, sales numbers but also the customer experience.

A (20:31)

Yeah, I'm going to get a little visionary for a second if you don't mind.

B (20:35)

Yeah, please.

A (20:36)

The way I see this changing is really, it's so yes, it will solve all of the basics. Right. And I think we've actually undersold what Agentic can do in customer service because we're like, oh look, it can reply to a customer, it can tell them where their order is. But realistically I have where is my order? Because as soon as something leaves the warehouse I get a text message. As soon as it's out for delivery I get another one. And if it shows up, it does what I think is going to be even more interesting about Agentix. So I'll give you an example. Let's say that you have a lawnmower that you lose a bolt for. Right. Agentic is going to be awesome at solving that problem for me because today this may or may not have happened to me recently. So I'll give you this real example. Lost a bolt, went on the Internet, used LLM to find out what bolt I was missing. That did a great job of finding it. How did I have to solve it? Well, I could do one of two things. I emailed the company a response. They had to call an 800 number. I was like, zero percent, am I doing that? Or I can go or. The other suggestion from my LLM was to buy it on eBay for $23. I can guarantee this bolt does not cost $23 to the company. But for me to have the lawnmower serviceable within a reasonable amount of time and not have to interact with the 800 number, it was worth it to me. So ebay shipped it to my house. An agentix service experience for that company could solve exactly that. Right. So then when I land, I am, hey, I lost this bolt. Well, what's your model number? Okay, it's this one. Great. It's not registered. Who are you? Right. Like, that's the type of. So I actually think this is going to be really interesting for companies. It's going to improve the cx. It's also going to improve the data that you have. And one of the things I've been talking to our customers about is the consumerization of B2B. Right. Like a lot of these companies are built around, like I ship it to the dealer and I never worry about it. But they'd love to get a rich data on who their end user is. Right. I've talked to so many of these companies. They're like, yeah, I wish I knew more about my end user, but I just don't have the bandwidth. So that's some of these things that can do it. And it's a much better experience for me because then I'm like, oh, that was really easy. I can launch it. I can solve that problem. So that's where I see this going. It's a bit more visionary than just like, yes, it can do X, Y or Z. But I think it's going to be really powerful for that service experience to automate all these friction points that still exist because we just haven't really built customer service for the, for the modern age. Right. We still had 800 numbers. Right. How many brands don't even have an email address to send to. Right. Like we have 800 numbers. You could start to build really interesting process around that and Agentix is going to unlock all of that in my opinion. So yeah, that's what I'm excited about.

B (23:16)

And being someone who will do almost anything to avoid calling one of those 800 numbers, I, I feel your, I feel your pain there.

A (23:22)

I mean anybody under the age of, I don't know, I won't pick an age but there is a certain age cutoff, let's just call it directionally 40, where like anybody under that's not calling an 800 number. Right. There's no chicks. Like I'm going to interact with either a text line or an email line and that's my preference. Or ideally an agentic AI chat would be the powerful way. So yes, that's where I see it going. Yeah.

B (23:44)

Yeah. Well, continuing on, just looking ahead a little bit for those out there that, you know, I think it's hard, it's, it's impossible to escape talk of AI. It's getting really hard to escape Agentic at this point. But for those that still haven't really started down that journey, you know, we've got a lot of CMOs, a lot of marketing leaders listening to this show. You know, how would you recommend that they start with Agentic? You know, is it in a single area business, part of a journey, you know, where, where's some direction there?

A (24:15)

Yeah. I think the most important element of, of getting started is pick a real problem. Yeah, right. Like I, I, I, I know it sounds so cliche but like pick a pain point that you actually have. So I'll pick one for them. Right. Let's say that we have a huge problem with the customer experience around our website. Right. I think I'll get, I'll go back to visionary for a second to tee this up. I think that the role of the website is going to change pretty dramatically in the post AI world because our funnel has essentially blown up. Right. We were pretty good at the world of digital where I buy an ad on a digital property, I track you around the Internet, I eventually get you to click and my website is a conversion engine. AI is going to eliminate 30 to 40% of the clicks, which means that the funnel has dramatically changed. So if I was a cmo, the first thing I would think about is building out a rich AI experience around whatever my website now needs to deliver. And that's going to be different depending on what brand it is. Right. For a high consideration brand, it's Probably a lot more education than it was previously for a low consideration brand. Maybe it's just know getting them to the, the nearest retailer and you're, that's all the experience you want to give. But I think what I see a lot of brands doing right now is they say, well, you know, it's, it's really early and the LLM will solve that for me. And I would, I'm here to tell you I, I don't think the LLM is going to solve that for you unless you start paying the LLM because the LLMs are going to have to fund GPUs in the future. And so I think if I was a cmo, I would be considering what part of my experience could I improve and what's the role of my website and my branded properties. I think we're going to see an explosion of branded AI experiences, right? Like if you're a furniture company or an apparel company, I mean Ralph Lauren just launched their shop with Ralph or their Ask Ralph experience. I think you're going to see a lot more. Actually the Old Navy did something really cool. They just integrated AI into their dressing rooms. So I can actually go, if you haven't seen this, it's really, really cool, go out and check it out. They put AI in their dressing room and they can literally ask like, show me this outfit. What other things would look good with this? That's the type of experience that AI unlocks. But people are kind of still focused on these very basic things. And so I think it's about what part of my experience needs to be improved. And it might include the physical world with AI in it. Because AI is going to be in every element of ours. So I would say I got very visionary. Let me bring it back to a closing thought that I think is a little bit less visionary. I'd start small enough that it feels achievable, right? Because I think sometimes picking a personal shopper or a customer service agent is very achievable. You know what that looks like, you know what you're trying to solve fully identifying everything from segmentation down to messaging delivery down to like the website down to the service is probably harder to achieve and crosses multiple silos. And so what I would say is picking up one domain that is that you have a lot of digital process built around that you have rich data built in and then go address whatever the top three pain points within it is a really good like dig site to build and your vendors can help. Right? Your vendors have a lot of case studies and knowledge I think Salesforce has deployed. The last number I've heard said publicly is over 5,000 agents. Right. So we have a lot of expertise built out in this space and I'm sure so do other vendors. And so I would say dig in and see what, see what is built out for you already so that you're not doing science experiments on your website. I would build those out into real projects. So love it. Love it.

B (28:00)

Well Devin, thanks so much for joining today. I've got one last question for you before we wrap up. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?

A (28:10)

Yeah, it's a great question. Honestly. Such a cop out. But I'm super curious. I use every new AI tool that comes out. I mean I'm a go to market guy, but I use replit. Right. I'm always pushing the boundaries of what my AI can do and I'm asking it to solve problems. And if it can't do it in three months, I ask it again. I make little calendar reminders to myself. My most recent one is I learned that Gemini can update my calendar for me. So anytime I get an email with a date, Gemini just does it for me, right? Like hey Gemini, add this to my calendar. That's super cool. It saves me 15, 20 minutes a week and it lets me have that 15, 20 minutes back for curiosity. So that's my best advice is push the limits of AI because it's such a rapidly expanding space and every time you experiment and it can't work, three months later it can work with it much better. So that's my way I stay agile.

B (29:00)

Love it. Well again I'd like to thank Devin Kunisch, Senior Director, Industry GTM Consumer Goods and Retail at Salesforce for joining the show. You can learn more about Devon and Salesforce by following the links in the show notes. Thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well. You can access more episodes of the show@theagilebrand.com that's the agile Brand and contact me. If you're interested in consulting or advisory services or are looking for a speaker for your next event, go to www.gregkilstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay Agile.

A (30:07)

The Agile Brand.

B (30:12)

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