← The Marketing Millennials
The Marketing Millennials
Building an AI-First Marketing Mindset with Ryan Gavin, CMO at Slack | Ep. 348
00:52:58
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- [00:02]
A
Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS Marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind Marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the off. What is up, Brian? Welcome to the Market Millennials podcast.
- [00:31]
B
Hey, thanks Daniel. It's awesome to be here. I appreciate you making some time.
- [00:37]
A
Could you get a little background who you are? So just to set up the conversation.
- [00:41]
B
For today, I'm middle management overhead brother. I am, I am the CMO for Slack. I've been, I've been at Slack now for about a year and a half. I've been, you can see all the gray hairs. I've been around the industry for a while, worked for about 20 years at Microsoft, worked at AWS where I helped build out the machine learning and AI practice there. And then I went in startup land, which is incredible. I was in the supply chain industry, kind of transforming trucking. Did that for about four and a half years as the chief Growth officer and then, yeah, as I said about a year and a half ago, joined Slack as part of Salesforce to really, really take Slack to the next level. It's been awesome.
- [01:23]
A
I don't really see the gray hairs he's talking about, but he can claim it. He can claim it.
- [01:29]
B
We'll have to rename the podcast the Gen X Podcast or something.
- [01:34]
A
I want to get into. You are really in the front lines of AI and work right now. So what is one thing you think marketers still get wrong about using AI in the day to day?
- [01:48]
B
Oh man. How much time do we have on this podcast? It's hard to say. Get wrong. I think you're just going to start with the understanding that work's going to change more in the next five years than it has in the last 25. Almost undoubtedly some things may stay the same, but it's going to fundamentally shift. And so every marketer, in fact every person inside of every organization really, not just marketing, you kind of need to come in to your job with like a beginner's mindset. It's a bit of a cliche phrase, but you got to think about what would this job or what would this task look like if I was to start this company today in the age of AI and what would I do differently? So if you are working in email automation or you are working in product LED growth or, you know, trying to optimize a conversion funnel or whatever it could be, how would you do it differently. If you had just one person and a whole host of AI tools and what would your process be and how would you go about it? And if you're not kind of starting, you know, all the things that you do with that kind of open ended question and asking like, all right, how do I rethink this entirely? In the age of AI and the age of agents, you really are behind. There's really no, no nice way to say it because it is going to change that quickly. And those leaders and those marketers are going to embrace the latest tools and capabilities are going to just far outstrip those who aren't. And it's, you know, it's change. And sometimes change is a little bit scary. You know, everyone approaches AI with a different mindset. You know, we've done research where there's people who think of AI as like, wow, this is these superpowers of tools. I'm so excited to go use them. And there's others on the other side of the spectrum that have like, is it okay to use these tools? I don't want to tell people I'm using it feels like I'm cheating. So I kind of like hide that I use it. And there's some people who are really nervous and scared to use it and don't want to use these tools. And so, you know, everyone kind of approaches it with their own starting point. But it is going to be pretty transformative. And there's a lot of transformation that, you know, has to happen in the marketing space that we, we're barely scratching the surface of.
- [04:05]
A
I think that you make a good point of like where people are, because they are different point of views out there where some people think if you're using AI for certain things, you're, you're being, you're not doing your job as a marketer or you're not doing your job or you're being lazy at work because you're using something else. But I would argue it's productivity instead of laziness. You're doing more with your time. If you're doing it straight out without using any of your brain power and strategy and experience, then maybe the argument would come into that.
- [04:44]
B
But yeah, totally. I mean, I think the thing I was thinking about, I was talking to somebody the other day and at Slack we have this Salesforce has this incredible platform called Agent Force. And so we have all these agents that we could deploy for employees and they get to kind of use these agents to augment their productivity. And one of the things I was Kind of thinking about is we've had all this explosion of tools over the last 20 years. Just think about the number of new applications and SaaS tools that have launched the space. It's not like anyone's going home any earlier. We're still filling up the day with work. The question is just you're getting more done. Ideally you're doing higher value work. Ideally that work is having greater return for the business. But it's not like anyone's like, hey cool, it's a three day work week. Now you know that that doesn't exist. So we're all being asked to do more. And unless we're kind of someone embracing some of these tools, it's going to be really, really hard to keep up because like the compression algorithm is doing what it always has done, which is expect more for less.
- [05:46]
A
What is a few ways your marketing team at Slack uses AI to get done more with less?
- [05:54]
B
Yeah, I mean, we feel pretty blessed, honestly. I mean, I'll tell you a couple examples. One, my personal example. So when I joined Slack, just like I'm sure many of your listeners, a lot of folks, you join a new company and you're learning the culture, you're learning all the new tools and processes, you're learning the people and all this kind of stuff. And that learning curve is getting daunting anytime you take in a new job and you know, whatever, I'm a middle management executive, whatever. So I have all these people who are like, hey, we're going to help you and we're going to create documents for you and all this kind of wonderful stuff. My number one onboarding tool when I joined Slack and Salesforce, number one without a doubt was Slack AI, which was. So Slack AI basically allows. So if your listeners aren't familiar with Slack, Slack is this incredible kind of work operating system collaboration tool that allows organizations to really kind of orchestrate all of their work. But we one of the most amazing things about it is it also stores your company's long term memory. So you think about, you know, Slack's been around for greater than 10 years. All the conversations that have happened while the company was building, all the conversations that happened when it was having its first customer meetings, all the conversations that have happened since, you know, strategy reviews, et cetera, all those live in Slack and those conversations, because the way Slack is architected, I have permissions to all the public ones. So if you create a channel in Slack, there's permissions you can set and some of them are public means anyone can have Access to, and some of them are private, meaning set of people. And I have access to those public ones as well as some of the private ones. Well, previously those conversations were kind of like just trapped. Like they happened, they went away and then you never really see them again and you never hear from them again. Well, what happened with Slack AI is we're able to query those conversations. So myself as a new employee coming in, someone would be talking about something. I have no idea what they're talking about. I could just quietly rock up to Slack AI and ask it a natural language question. Like an example is one is Salesforce uses this thing called the V2 mom, which is a way of our setting our vision and our values and the measures and methods of our goals for the year. Someone said it on my first day, I was like, I have no clue what you're talking about. So I just go up like what's a V2 mom? And there I get this full rich answer. I also could go do the things like, hey, the founder of Slack was a guy named Stuart Butterfield. I could ask Slack like, hey, show me the original presentation Stuart did to the first set of customers and what was the original visions like he had for Slack? Because all those conversations are there. That long term memory exists and I could query it. I was rocking up to Slack AI like 10, 12 times a day just to get insights and understand. And it was this amazing treasure trove of insights. And those are the types of things where it's one example of AI able to tap into this long term memory of a company which has previously really just sat there and been idle. So that's one example. I could give you like 50 others. We do a ton with agents in Slack, which is basically how every single employee gets their own workforce. And that's pretty darn cool. I'm happy to talk more about that as well.
- [09:01]
A
Yeah, I mean first you want to describe for the people who don't know, if someone says I'm using AI versus using an AI agent, what the two differences? And then what are some cool use cases that people should be thinking about using for agentic AI?
- [09:19]
B
Yeah, I mean it's a great, it's a great clarification. So you know, AI obviously gets thrown around. It's like the, it's the drinking game du jour. So every time someone says you have to take a shot kind of thing. I don't, you know, it's 8am here, so I don't expect you to be doing that, Daniel. But if you want to, if you want to. I'm just saying it might be fun, might spice up the podcast. I, you know, so you think about, like AI capabilities broadly where it can be doing anything from, you know, what you see inside of, you know, ChatGPT or Gemini or here are suggestions for your writing or I'm going to summarize this podcast or I'm going to create a podcast for you. So these broad applications of AI, what happens with agents and where agents get really powerful and there's really kind of a couple elements of it is agents can then go beyond the AI insights and then they can really start to take action on your behalf. And what makes agents really powerful is I can then deploy an agent. Let's say what we do inside of Slack with Agent Force is we deploy agents that have specific tasks and skills, just like teammates. So an example being we have an engineering agent that we built here at Salesforce. One of the challenges that happens at a big company at scale is we roll out all of these products and all these products have lots of technical depth and details to them. And as our sellers go out and sell them, they're working with customers or our customer success teams are working, they'll have questions about implementation details, et cetera. And typically those questions would go back to a Slack channel and we'd have a bunch of expensive, in reality, engineers who would help our customer success and our sales teams answer those questions and then help them take action on it. Well, we built this engineering agent and this engineering agent was then wired up with all the knowledge of all of our knowledge bases, all of the details of these products, all the past history of questions that we've answered on these topics, and this engineering agent, then we deployed it inside of a Slack channel. So now when a sales leader or customer success team is going and they have a question on the product they go into, and this engineering agent is the one that's actually answering the question. And I honestly sit there, you watch it in Slack. It's an unbelievable thing to watch because you're like, holy crap, this is working. And what happened is like in like six months, this thing had to answer like over 18,000 questions. The success rate in terms of being able to answer them was like a 76% accuracy, meaning, like it was able to ask, you know, the question was asked and answered and like closed out. It didn't need to be handed off to a human. And then you can kind of even go beyond these agents can then take actions and say, hey, great, I see you've answered that question. Now can you actually create me a canvas doc that can summarize this for my customer and summarize the next step the customer needs to take. So the agent now has the autonomy to go and take that action on your behalf and is now doing that work for, for you. And you can go to bed, go get a cup of coffee or whatever. The agent does the work and you're ready to rock and roll with the customer. So these agents become incredibly powerful. I mean this one example I just gave you, the engineering agent, you know, we saw it save over like a quarter of a million of engineering hours. Like a quarter of a million. And then you know, we projected if we built that out across all the different topics that we have, it would be like 20 million or $20 million hour saved. We deployed that agent across, you know, a dozen different channels. We're going to deploy it about across 700 million channels and literally like the projection is like it's $20 million of engineering hours saved and like there's not a lot of $20 million ideas just walking around, you know, inside of companies. And so these are the types of things that we're seeing inside of Slack that we're doing as part of Salesforce that you know, every customer out there is, is thinking about and we're working with some really cool ones that are doing the exact same type of stuff.
- [13:05]
A
I want to also ask you is like, I know you said you use Slack AI to query past conversations so you can stay up conversations and meetings and have the history and be able to create more alignment in the team. But what are some things that if you were talking to other marketing leaders, what would you suggest they should use in their day to day to make them more productive as a marketing lead? Or the other question is like, how would you suggest them empower their team to use AI in more of an efficient way?
- [13:43]
B
Well, yeah, I mean that's another one where I mean there's so many incredible tools out there that you can be looking at. You know, our team recently redid like, you know, we have an email system. Our team recently kind of redid all of our, our email stack essentially kind of with an AI first mindset like I was talking about a little bit earlier to go through and think about not only just who we send emails to, the copy that we use, how do we optimize the timing, all that kind of stuff. And you can go back and take something as simple and as antiquated. I kind of hate email, honestly. But we still have to send them, you can take something as antiquated as sending emails and you can go through and really go and build out a full optimization. And despite all the work that's been done in something like email optimization over the last 10 years, there's still way more that can happen. And AI actually takes it a whole nother level. So we're seeing incredible results with that. The other one, maybe on the other end of the spectrum that's a little bit more out there, is how do you start to reimagine your customer experience in an agent first world? And what I mean by that is what happens in the world where no one's ever going to go to your website anymore. There's going to be an agent first Internet and there's estimates out there. There's a Mary Meeker report I read recently. It talked about this idea of there's a billion people who are about to go over the next five, 10 years or whatever it is and experience products and experience without ever going to your website or ever going to any content that you've created. Like it's all going to be behind agents. And so what does a website look like that's agent first or where the interactions and experiences someone's having with your brand are all through an LLM and then they're making a decision to purchase based off of all that information? We're seeing that right now inside of Slack. It's one of the interesting trends. Marketers talk about SEO and all the funnel optimization and bringing people in, blah blah, blah. The reality is people are doing more of the research in ChatGPT and Gemini and Anthropic and all these other tools and then they're coming straight in and they're ready to sign up for Slack. And so like the traditional optimization of how do you get someone to your website and then click on this button and move through that like all that's getting passed through. And so what would your website look like if it was just agent based and started with a search based experience that was conversational? That's a lot of what we, we, we do inside of Slack is, you know, you start with like a conversational first experience. So, you know, there's two ends of the spectrum. Like one is like the traditional the T's and Z's of marketing and all the wonderful stuff that people do. And how do you reimagine that with AI, all the AI tools and capabilities. And then the other one is like, hey, how do you get ahead of where the puck's going and really think about a Totally different experience on some of the things that have been pretty fundamental for the last, you know, two decades. I know. Does that make any sense, Daniel?
- [16:44]
A
No, it makes, that makes total, it makes total sense because for example, I bet you a lot of marketers out there are searching like what is the best productivity tool to like for a marketing team to chat with their like internally. And probably Slack was probably coming up there and then they go deeper like what is Slack? And they're asking, they're not even like going on Google to search that. They're going, they're just having conversations. I mean I do it all the time just to see what conversation, like what pops up to stay ahead just to say like, and then what I do is like reverse engineering saying like what sources are they tracking back to to see what websites are they querying.
- [17:31]
B
Yeah, totally.
- [17:32]
A
That's a question I had for you is like, so if you like work backwards from like all those people who are searching Slack in these tools, what are some ways you are thinking are helping you show up more in traditional like all these AI chats?
- [17:52]
B
Yeah, I mean there's, there's, you know, everything from some of the traditional elements of like, you know, what is the, are you adding the right schema to your pages? Are you, are you doing the right indexing your pages? Some of like the, you know, what I'll call like really, really good traditional SEO work. But there's also, there's a lot of companies out there now and you know, a lot of good resources you can go read of. Like what does an LLM look for that's different than you know, traditional, you know, Google search engines or you know, Microsoft search engines. And you know, there you're really getting into longer form descriptive content. You're getting into places where like you've got better built out answers and you've got that index really, really well and you can go and build out that content set that is going to be more appealing. And for an LLM that's looking for the next best word and the next best answer. And so you really have to kind of get into this like next wave of like what is the LLMs looking for and how do you optimize for and the reality it's it anyone's lying if it says it's not a bit of a black box. It's a total black box. Like there's no formula thing. Like these LLMs are evolving every single day. No one can tell you exactly why it picked what it picked, but you can look at the patterns and practices and you can go and then try to optimize for those patterns. But that's kind of the game that you have to kind of be in nowadays, particularly as web traffic is going to most likely continue to drop in favor of kind of where things are moving with LLMs. The other one just to kind of you just jog my memory a little bit on the big one that I'm seeing. Where a lot of customers are leaning in for or marketers are leaning in is kind of the age old challenge of hey, I generate all these leads and I generate all this marketing opportunities and my sellers never follow up on them. Like probably, probably the, one of the biggest areas I'm seeing customers deploying things like Agent Force is on this like lead routing, lead optimization where you can go through like Box I think has like a, you know, did, did a bunch of work with Box and Agent Force and they did like a 500% improvement in like their lead optimization and you just get far better signals on what are quality leads and then you can do a lot of the qualification work with agents. It actually gets to the sellers and that, that, that becomes pretty powerful as well. Like basically the SDR role gets replaced with agents in many cases and that, that becomes far more effective.
- [20:23]
A
Yeah, I remember back like, I mean even just like 10 years ago where like our lead routing formulas were all in Google sheets and they took like weeks and weeks to like like optimize based on new data that you had to pull into like a Google sheet or Excel and then have to like feed it back in to keep changing. But now like you could just feed these things into AI and it does it in like two like five minutes for you, which is like, which would took you three, four weeks 10 years ago, which is crazy to think about.
- [20:58]
B
I was just talking to an anthropic. They, they have like a deal desk where they deployed agents working with humans and they increase like their deal desk velocity be like 60% with like agent Force and agents. Like it's, it's, it really is nuts how how fast you can move on some of this stuff now.
- [21:13]
A
Yeah, I mean one thing I also think is, which I think is an advantage for like companies that have been storing data is like how are you using these like past internal basically like first party data or like first party like content that you have created for the last 10 years and then deploying that now as like content for your customers. Because back in the day you would have to like sift through all these conversations you've had with customers. These Salesforce records, Slack conversations, whatever you've having with group conversations you've had with customers. And it took hours to sit there just to make a testimonial or case study or anything, but now, like, what are some things you're using it for, like internal Slack things that you've, you built up knowledge bases to deploy for marketing material now?
- [22:11]
B
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's not exactly what you're, you're poking on, but it kind of, it triggers for me a little bit. There's one of the, you know, again, really cool uses of AI, again is there's so much knowledge that's trapped in these conversations. Like conversations are context and context matter. So, you know, we have Slack channels for everything. Obviously. It's like. And we've got all these account channels for all the teams that are, you know, working with IP or EasyCater or Slalom or whatever it is. And you think about all those conversations are happening in those channels and there's tons and tons and tons of context in those channels. Well, one of the things we've done is we've also taken all that conversational context and we've connected it to what's, you know, considered structured data. So look at like the data that actually sits in the CRM and we brought that into Slack with a new capability called Salesforce Channels, where it's basically bringing all those opportunity records, all those contacts, you know, where's the deal at, where's the process to. With all the conversations that are happening, you know, hey, we're getting ready for this meeting, how do we Prep for it, etc. And now with AI, you can go through and you can look at all that and say, cool agent, you know, sales agent, which we have generate for me a customer brief that is ready to go for this meeting. So when I'm, you know, getting asked to go meet with a customer, etc. The, the past process oftentimes would be, hey, some account team member or many account team members are going to spend four or five hours creating a briefing doc for me. Here's everything you need to know. Here's what the account's up to. So now with like, with AI, with these sales agents, we can just point it at this structured data and this unstructured data that all lives inside of Slack and say, create an account brief for Ryan. Make sure it emphasizes the latest opportunities, make sure it gives an overview of what's going on with the executives. And please give them a summarization of the account history from the last three years, boom. Like I get this beautiful canvas in Slack, it's ready to go. No one had to spend any time working on it. Agent did all the work. And honestly, you know, no offense to all my lovely sales teams, it's way better than the breaching docs that I used to get from the sellers. So that is an example. You talked about more like customer evidence and stuff like that. But that same thing, that same applies to customer evidence. You can just roll that out.
- [24:25]
A
Yeah, it's all this context that you've missed for a long time. Like when you ask like sellers, sellers are not going to be able to like remember every conversation for the last three years or. But that also makes me a point. Like, what are, what are some things that inside? Because some of these things are as good as how people enter it into their CRM or the questions they ask in the conversations with the customers. Because if you asked bad questions or you don't get enough information or you put bad data into Salesforce, it's just, it could be spitting out things that are, and it's not like anybody's fault, but it could be spitting out things that are going to lead you down the wrong path. So what are some ways now that are you like, are you encouraging like better questions or better data entry? I mean before, like, I remember we used to have like, like rules, like you have to enter these fields and we would go like as marketing ops, I would have to go audit, like did they put enough data into the field and stuff like that, which agents probably can do now. But like back in the day you had to audit like all these records at weekly of like, did you put in the right data? Is this the right information? Yeah.
- [25:45]
B
I feel like, Daniel, you have some scars from that. I'm sensing pain from your past. Totally. Like garbage in, garbage out is, is, is always going to be a challenge. And you know, at least in my experience, telling people they have to do something or you know, putting rules in place only gets you so far and typically just makes people resentment because they're like, I'm actually trying to do my job and like, why do I need to. Like, I'm not a data entry person. So the real question is how do you make it just brain dead easy for whether it's a marketer or marketing ops person or a seller to share the data that's important and have that data get updated to a system of record. So, you know, in the future, like I've got an agent in Slack and I would say you And I just got out of a customer meeting. Well, shouldn't I just be able to tell the agent like hey Daniel and I just met with plaintiff. Plaintiffs got an opportunity and they need help on these five things. I'd like to do a follow up call with them in three weeks. We think the opportunities may be a million dollars for you know, these three products. Please make sure that these five people are aware and schedule that follow up call for me. Done. Right. The CRM gets updated, the meeting gets scheduled. The right people get an email or a note in Slack from the agent and like you're onto your next thing versus before I'd sit down and say, all right, now I gotta launch my CRM, I gotta up at the opportunity. Then I've gotta go into my calendar and, and set up that meeting. Now I need to send the follow up notes. Now I need to send the Slack message to the other people. Need to be aware. Like that is the, the level of kind of reimagining with things like Slack and Asian Force that companies are able to start to go do. And I picked plative because I literally there's a customer that we're working with that's doing exactly that. They have agents that they built and deployed in Slack that basically they think about, all right, we have an account research agent, we've got a call prep agent, we've got a summary agent. And they built all these agents with agent force that say how do we take all the things that when our seller is not selling and have agents go do all that work and you know, marketers can go support that and they've cut their like their sales and their, their prep time for meetings like in half from all the, the work that they previously seemed to go do. And that's all that, you know, that, that's time that all can be deployed to generating more value for the company.
- [28:12]
A
So that makes, I mean it makes a sense. I remember like, I think the stat, I think it was like five years ago that 40% of sales people's times are just like that, manual data entry, call scheduling, all that stuff. So if you take 40% done by an agent, now they're selling 100 of the time, let's say 90 of the time because there's some work they have to do, but that are outside. But like 90 versus like 60% is a huge like productivity jump for a sales rep to be able to sell.
- [28:46]
B
It's one of the number one reasons why so many customers have come to us with the same story, which is, hey, despite all these tools, technologies, even the advent of AI over the last several years where it's really exploded, at least work is still broken, man, People are still wasting time on the work of work. There's stats out there, you can read them all over the place. 40% of time people are spent just looking for stuff, looking for information. Context switching is a massive work productivity challenge. People are switching between anywhere between like 11 and 13 apps every single day. And you think about like all that context switching is lost time and you get distracted, you get pulled into something else. And it's one of the reasons why Slack has continued to do so well because it really serves as this command center, this kind of work operating system where employees are like, all right, this is where my people are. I'm deploying my agents to my people, I'm bringing the agents to them. I'm not asking people to go someplace else. I'm connecting in all my enterprise applications. And then I just, this is the work hub. And that's how you start to get to this kind of agentic productivity levels that have really escaped us for quite a while because we are still wasting a lot of time every single day. And many, many companies are.
- [29:57]
A
What are some ways let's go into Slack? Because I've used it since it's came out in every company, so I know I've been in Slack. So what are your top three things.
- [30:12]
B
That.
- [30:15]
A
Like if you're structuring a marketing team in Slack, like communication wise or like any type of channel, what are the top three tips that you would give to a marketing team to do in Slack today that will help them be more productive?
- [30:29]
B
Oh, that's interesting. I've had my, I'll tell my own journey with Slack. I will. And just in full transparent, I'll answer your question, but I'll show you how I kind of got there. Obviously I was 20 years at Microsoft, so use teams and things like that. Aws, when I joined there, had its own solution. It now uses Slack, which is great, but back then it didn't. And then I joined the startup and I remember that was my first exposure to Slack and I came in there and I'm all right, I'm going to be the chief growth officer, blah blah, blah, and get into Slack and I'm like, what is this thing? And I was like, you know, all these conversations are going on and there's all these, everyone's just in there and there's emojis flying everywhere. And I was kind of like, huh? I'm like, we're here for like a serious purpose and this doesn't feel like a serious tool. And I don't know man, and someone's like, hey, we've got the service issue with this customer. We're spinning up a Slack channel. I'm like, you can't resolve a customer issue in Slack. What are you talking about? This is like important work. And man, I just, I, how little I knew, I knew nothing. I was such an idiot. And so I kind of got exposed and I grow. I was like, wow, you know, over this course of this four years I was like, holy cow. This is like this tool that when used really, really well is like this ultimate, not just orchestration hub, but it's a place where you know, people can like bring the company together. It's like a culture builder. You can, you can swarm and bring people in very, very quickly and then disband and like it has this like connective tissue because it's built like this consumer grade software. It's not built like an enterprise piece of software. It's like built for consumers that people actually just generally love. And so I became this fan of Slack for the four years that I was there. And then I got the chance to work and come to Slack and man, I had no clue how little I knew how to use Slack before I joined Slack, the company. Like I thought I was like, hey, I'm a power user, I use it every day, blah blah. No clue. So you know, to answer your question in terms of like how to set things up and tips and tricks, I obviously, you know, we are really, really heavy. Like channels is the backbone for, for everything we do. So if we're starting an effort initiative, a project, a planning session, it all starts with a channel. You know, we really try to not be in a bunch of like multi person messages. Those are like just one off if you need a quick have a conversation with, you know, you or a handful of people. But if it's going to be something that's going to be, you know, longer than a week or two weeks, we spin up a channel and I, or you know, I spend a lot of time organizing my channels because we have a lot of them and it can go prioritize them and then you know, those channels become the life beat of the organization. And so one of the things that we see a lot of customers do, we certainly do is quickly give the channel context. So we have a capability called Canvas, which is kind of synchronous document that you can build out, you populate with all the details of everything you want going on in that channel or the resources or everything that's related to it. You can build out the tabs of that channel so it has additional context that's needed. Workflows that are associated with et cetera. So once that channel's set up, that's the lifeblood for that effort. So you know, whenever you're working on it, I just do a quick like command K and I can go in, I find that channel, I jump in there, I can get updated. And then we have tools like AI tools that if I'm like out on vacation or if I'm not being paying close attention to that project, I get channel summaries. So I can use AI to quickly say hey, catch me up. Like give me the AI summary of what's been happening for this and I'll get like a 5 or 6 send bullet point overview of like all the activity of maybe like 150 channel messages. I can just get caught up in those in like seconds through AI. So channels is one like if you orient your work around channels, it's a game changer. You know. The other things you know, I look at is workflows. Workflows are like these no code workflows where you can just simply set up and automate processes. I, I knew what workflows were. I used them lightly before I got to Slack. We use them extensively here and they're incredible from a time saving. Now you do AI generated workflows. You can actually have AI create the workflows for you versus you know, what was before was kind of just like describing the workflow that you wanted. Those workflows do everything as simple as like automate questions for our all hands meetings when we want to get people together to you know, basic things that we need to go do. Like hey, we need to go complete the survey all the way through to way more complex work that we want to go do that's like automated on the back end. So workflows and heavy use of workflows would be another one. And then the third is as I talked about is agents. Every, every. The cool thing about what we've done with Agent Force and Slack is we said hey, you know a design principle of Slack that I love is don't make me think right. And so the product and engineering team that build Slack, which did an incredible job really start off and said hey, how do we have features that just I don't, I shouldn't have to think about, shouldn't have this cognitive load and we took that. Same with agents. Agents should just feel like teammates. And I know how to work with a teammate. Daniel, you're my teammate. I know how to DM you. I know how to add you to a channel. I know how you ask you to do something. Agents should work the same way. So in Slack we have like all of this repository for. I can click on a button called Agent Forest and I can see all the agents that are available to me and I can see just like a person, I can see what's their skills, what they can do, what's their role. So I can easily go through and find an agent that has like a sales agent or engineering agent or an onboarding agent. I can, I can know what they're doing. I can add them to a channel just like I would you, Daniel. I just add that agent in. I can ask that agent questions just like I would you and I can ask it to take actions in Slack. So create a canvas or create a new DM or send a message. And those agents just have the same skills that humans would. And so they really start to feel like human teammates and human collaborators. And you can use them right inside of Slack. And it's really like every, every single employee gets to get this capability upgrade. And that's the cool thing for marketers right now. If I step all the way back, if you think about where you're at in your career or what your job is or what your role is, my, I don't know, encouragement, I guess is step back and say, put that down for a second. So maybe you identify yourself as a social marketer, or maybe you identify yourself as someone who does marketing ops or whatever. Well, the reality is with agents now, you get to be whatever you want. So maybe you're someone who is really good at design but not really good at content. Well, it turns out you can hire an agent, have it work for you, and be incredible at content. Or maybe it's a vice versa. You're great at content, but you're stink at design. Turns out you can hire an agent, have it work for you, and you can be incredible at design. So every employee in marketing and in fact across every line of business just got a capability upgrade with things like agent force. And when you deploy those in Slack, every employee who says, hey, I want to manage a team, turns out you can't. You've got a whole team of agents that are going to work for you. And that's pretty exciting when you think about the capability upgrade that everyone's about to get with things like Agent Force.
- [37:51]
A
One thing on the. I love that I also think that. Also think that for like people who are not. Also don't necessarily love doing certain things.
- [38:03]
B
Yeah.
- [38:03]
A
Or like that's like something they hate in their job. They say they. They hate documentation because that's something I hated as like an ops person. But now, like I wish I had agents back then to help me. Like I could talk through what I'm doing with this process and it documents what I do and they put it in the documentation doc and that would have saved me so many times where I had to like spend a day documenting like what this email flow does. Like what. What it should be doing. Like the buttons and clicks. It's just so like now I can hire basically a documentation person, a process person under me. Instead of like having to. Or back then you would have to hire someone to like their whole role would be documentation flows.
- [38:53]
B
Yeah. It's incredible. Yeah, totally. It's a game changer and it's a good example because it frees in that scenario. It gives you a day back to go do the stuff that you actually want to do and the things that will add real value for the company.
- [39:08]
A
And also it gets you more excited employees. Because that aspect of the job made me not pick companies that weren't necessarily heavy on that stuff. That's why I love startups because it was scrappy and I started Document but it wasn't like the whole thing was like, oh, document, document, document. Now I could. I would have loved any size company because I could document, document, Document. An AI. But I. Two more questions for you. One is like, I know you said like, if you're good at design you can hire a content person or something. But like how much do you think like actual like experience and context and taste comes into like, like knowing that content person is doing a good job for you? Because like, I think like you have to have some level of it to be like, this is actually a good piece of content, like a decent piece. Or they writing a good piece of content for me versus not.
- [40:11]
B
Yeah, I mean it. There's a. You remind me of a story that I was previously when I worked at my startup. This is not at Slack, but. But we were working on a project and we were using heavy applications of machine learning models for a particular pricing algorithm. And I remember someone who worked for me, I was questioning a bunch of reasons, like what was going on here? What was going on here? Something didn't feel quite right in terms of what pricing was generating and the individual said, well, that's what the model said. And I was like, that's never an acceptable answer. So, like, kind of what you're getting at is this idea that, you know, we can't turn our brains off in this process. Like, we are going to have this unbelievable set of capability upgrades, we're going to have all these agents who are doing work, but we absolutely cannot turn our brains off and just assume that what those digital teammates created is right or is as best as it could be. And, you know, we kind of the human curators of all this need to continue to be very, very present and curious and intellectually curious of like, oh, so it came back with that. Why is that the right thing? And if you think about our roles, particularly as marketers, I think of we need to switch in many cases, not all, but in many cases we need to switch from, like doers of the work to orchestrators of the work. So if, you know, if you just imagine yourself of like, you just became the CMO of whatever you're responsible for. So, you know, what do I get to do all day long as the CMO for Slack? Well, I like to do some things, but the reality is I most of my time is in meetings looking at stuff that other people have done and providing perspectives on it, input on it, direction on it, helping to craft strategy, helping to encourage people to go a little bit further here or think a little bit differently over here. Most of my time is spent in orchestrating and coaching and setting direction. Well, that should be now everyone's job. So everyone starts to become an orchestrator. And when you're becoming an orchestrator of work, it's your job to question the work that's coming back to you. It's your job to inspect it. It's your job to understand is this good or high quality and define mechanisms to see is this accurate or not accurate and how are you going to do that? So that is one of the new next challenges that we have, is we all become orchestrators of work. If you outsource that document processing that we talked about earlier that used to take a day on, how would you audit it to know it was good before you handed it off to your boss to say, hey, cool, this is done and we have to find ways to answer that question. And there's no simple answer. There's no kind of, ah, just do this. Because the reality is these models are a black box and you can't quickly go and see exactly what it did, why it did it, and so you have to be intellectually curious and present in all these types of things. And your question was on taste, and I kind of took it a little bit more broadly. But, you know, taste comes back to like, well, cool. How are you going to judge the quality of that? One of the things my team now has to do religiously, like, so if they're producing a piece of content or they're producing a piece of blog, one of the things I expect is when it comes to me for review, I want to see the grade that they got from Gemini or ChatGPT. So, like, one of the things that is take that piece of content, write a pretty robust prompt about, like, who's the content for? What's the intent, who's the audience, obviously, what's the goals of the content? And then have the LLMs grade, like, tell me the key messages, tell me the things, the top takeaways, give me a grade of this content relative to these best in class pieces of content. And so you can and sometimes use these tools to grade your work and to evaluate your work. And that's something I expect my team to do before something gets to me. They have better gone through and use these tools to really not just refine the writing or refine the outputs or refine the design, but actually grade the design. And actually then you use that to uncover potentially some places where maybe something's wrong or something could be better. So not a simple answer, but that's no.
- [44:31]
A
I like that. I think, I think I do it all the time with, like, I've done it with, like, hiring like a writer before. Like, I, like, had my, like, all my stuff that I. I know is good. And like, we asked them to do stuff and I asked, like, based on all this content, how close is it to like, all, like, my audience, my tone of voice? This, this, this. Yeah, and like, some people came back with like, Cs and some people came back with like A pluses. So it's like, it's crazy when you do. You do that as like a QA process too. It helps a lot. The last question I have for you is, and I ask everybody on this podcast, is, what is a marketing hill you would die on?
- [45:12]
B
Ooh, meaning like something that would be like, hey, this is like a principle or. Yeah, wow, marketing hill. I would die. I firmly believe in the line, the marketing is the product, the product is the marketing. And so I will never be part of an organization or I'll never be a part of a team where there is a divide between marketing and product. And if I ever felt that that was the case, that would be the first thing I would be like, hey, cool, cool. Like, that's not. That's not the place for me. Like, any chuck it over the fence kind of stuff doesn't work. Like, the reality is, like, modern marketing is about understanding deeply, like, the usage of the product, the telemetry of the product, why a customer clicked on this part of the product or not. And like, marketing goes all the way through the depth of usage of whatever you're selling and understanding that intuitively. And then every moment inside the product is a marketing moment. Every opportunity you have to merchandise a new feature is a marketing moment. Marketing is not the stuff that sits at the top of the funnel or sits on the outside or just gets somebody in the front door. It has to be deeply woven through. And you have to have a company and a culture that wants to experiment at every little stage of product usage and funnel. And. And unless you have that, you know, marketing gets pretty boring pretty quickly, in my opinion. You get to, oh, we kind of are sitting out this, in this outer tier and we help sales and all that stuff's fine and good, but that's not the lever. Like, you know, the levers for any business are the product and then obviously kind of the sellers that are out there, you know, dreading customers. And marketing is really this, you know, thin thing in the middle. And, you know, oftentimes is only as good as the ideas that we bring to impacting those levers. And if you have any divide between those two, it's a pretty unfulfilling thing to go do. So I think if the marketing is not the product and the product's not the marketing, if that's not the ethos of the organization, that would be the hill I go to die on.
- [47:24]
A
Just one more follow up on that. Like, what is something that someone could audit when, like, in the interview process that the company is not, that connective process is not there? Like, what is something you. You've asked about to make sure, like, they are connected?
- [47:40]
B
Yeah. I mean, you can kind of look at. You can look at like something like cultural, and you can look at like, something more systemic. One question is asked, like, hey, show me the last, you know, or talk to me about the last 30 or 40 in product marketing tests you've done for optimizing usage and engagement. Like, talk to me about, like, what's your testing model and testing matrix for changing these words or this engagement layer or notifying users at this moment in Time. And if they don't have a good culture of like, oh, yeah, we've got this experimentation culture where we can go in and our marketers can help us ideate on what are the next best action for anyone to go take, that's a sign that they're probably not doing what I just talked about. The other one is to ask, like, hey, who, what are your best, you know, marketers that sit in your product reviews? Like, so if you don't have great. If marketing's not on a seat of the table in like, product strategy, product reviews, all that kind of stuff, it's another good sign that they're not thinking that way.
- [48:45]
A
I think those, those two are great. And last question I have for you is, where could people find what you're doing or anything? You're up to me personally or for you or Slack? You could talk about any.
- [49:00]
B
Yeah, I mean, you can always bang me up on LinkedIn. I'm happy to say hi and connect with anyone, but I would say keep watching the space closely with Slack and agentforce. As I kind of said, I think at the beginning, this work is going to change so much over the next five years. And you know, what is the crazy stat? It took like chatgpt 17 months to get to like the 500 million users and it took like netflix 10 years to get to 100 million users. Like, we're moving at light speed now. And so I really just say, watch this space closely. You know, we feel really fortunate with Slack and Salesforce that we're out in front of this movement. We feel like we're really helping to set it for, you know, companies like, like Easy Cater and Box and Remarkable and IBM and all these others. And so it's a fun but evolving space and just encourage folks to stay really plugged in and engaged on it because it is going to change quickly. And those who are staying really connected to the latest opportunities are going to be the marketers that are going to distinguish themselves. Those marketers that are showing up every single day and saying, how would I reimagine what I do in an AI and agent first world? Those are the marketers that, you know, employers like myself are going to be like, yes, I want that individual on my team because that's what we have to go do right now.
- [50:18]
A
Well, thank you so much. And yeah, go check out Slack and what they're doing and also Salesforce, because I know you guys are together now, but thank you so much for coming on.
- [50:30]
B
Yeah, Daniel, man, I really appreciate it and continued Best of luck and congrats on all your success as well. Man, it's been fun.
- [50:39]
A
Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community.
- [51:04]
B
Sam.