Salesforce retail CMO explains how brands can enhance their use of AI
When Kelly Thacker found herself surrounded by marketing leaders in a session at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference this week, it was clear her peers were excited at the company’s latest foray into artificial intelligence (AI).
The other CMOs also seemed to have a high-level understanding of how the technology works.
Instead, the common question was, How do we take this on?
“I think when you try to approach it from the whole end to end experience, it can probably be too overwhelming — too many stakeholders involved, too many approvals, too much design,” Salesforce’s CMO for retail and consumer goods told 360 Magazine.
Salesforce
Thacker’s recommendation is to start small with an existing pain point, which may make more sense as retailers brace for the upcoming holiday season and contend with a challenging economic environment.
“When I say start small, you see (other CMOs) let their shoulders drop and they exhale as if they’re saying, ‘Okay, you’re giving me permission not to upend everything.’ Also, a lot of retailers just don’t have the money right now.”
Salesforce is trying to make AI adoption in retail both simple and financially viable with the launch of Agentforce, a platform that debuted at Dreamforce in San Francisco this week. (Disclosure: I provide content marketing services to Salesforce in Canada and was their guest, but the company does not assign, review or approve any of my editorial work.)
Agentforce is designed to let retailers avoid having programmers develop AI capabilities and use a low-code approach instead, where line of business employees could type and click buttons instead. Agentforce also allows those who have already invested in Salesforce solutions like Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud to easily integrate customer data with AI virtual assistants, which it simply calls agents, to handle common customer service queries and other tasks.
“Now all of a sudden that customer experience representative who was focused on basic service issues can take on a lot across the entire life cycle,” Thacker explained. “They can be the merchant, they can be the personal shopper. They can be whatever you want them to be.”
Salesforce + Saks
The potential for Agentforce within retail was best showcased at Dreamforce with Saks, which created an agent it has called Sophia in the space of a week. The keynote session provided a demonstration of how Sophia could manage returns and exchanges, as well as how staff could add further capabilities such as directing an item to a nearby location instead of having a customer wait days for shipping.
Of course, many retailers are probably eyeing the promise of AI in CX while also dealing with apprehension from their existing staff about the technology’s impact on their jobs. Thacker advised encouraging team members to experiment with company-approved generative AI tools to help them become accustomed to it.
Thacker has even done this herself, looking at how AI can assist with common CMO tasks around messaging and positioning. Rather than lean on focus groups, she said she and her team have created “persona channels” within Salesforce that break down the needs of B2B customers such as chief data officers or other CMOs. Retailers could do the same thing.
“They can create these personas in AI, and then just feed it a bunch of information about the customer, and then just start to test situations like, ‘Okay, if I were to launch this new product, or this new product line, or I’m looking thinking about different colors for my customer, would they respond well?” she said.
Repositioning retail AI for customers
Customers may have preconceived notions of AI based on negative experiences involving basic chatbots retailers have thrown up on their web sites. Thacker said Agentforce will help brands change customers’ outlooks by having AI that doesn’t require them to repeat the same information but greet them with their order number, loyalty program tier and other details that make them feel recognized.
“There are no decision trees,” she said. “You have this agent working on behalf of your brand. It knows the brand tone because it has all those guidelines and is pulling from them. And then it has data, so it knows exactly who you are and can deliver exactly what you want in very conversational way.”
Dreamforce 2024 wraps up on Thursday.
