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"You're supposed to be your customer relationship management platform of the era, and you're not listening to your very own customers." — Jacqueline Freedman
Jacqueline and Juan dissect Salesforce's Dreamforce rebranding of all major products to Agentforce, the erosion of its once-strong Ohana culture, and Benioff's billionaire behavior. They unpack the AWS outage, explore operational resilience, and talk about how to overcome analysis paralysis.
Brought to you by Hightouch
On November 13, Hightouch is hosting Has Martech Failed Marketers? featuring Scott Brinker of chiefmartec and Adam Greco to unpack what's really behind the pain and how fixing your data unlocks cleaner reporting and true personalization at scale. RSVP at www.hightouch.com/has-martech-failed
Timestamps
00:23 — Scott Brinker's "You Are the Change Agent" for Martech World Forum.
02:53 — Making QBRs (Quarterly Business Reviews) fun with a "meme wall".
06:41 — What happened to "Ohana" at Salesforce/Dreamforce?.
09:11 — Salesforce product renaming: The "Agent Force" trend.
19:26 — The massive AWS Outage felt by companies globally.
26:01 — Hot Take: Alan Trevor on using AI decisioning backwards.
34:49 — Office Hours Question: Overcoming analysis paralysis.
37:37 — The connection between analysis paralysis and a lack of courage/risk-taking.
40:07 — Confession Corner: Forgetting an elevator pitch in front of the CEO.
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Creators and Guests
What is Making Sense of Martech?
Unfiltered takes on the biggest shifts in marketing technology. We spotlight what matters, who's leading (or lagging), and what's next. In Martech, clarity is power — and we're here to deliver it.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Making Sense of MarTech podcast. I'm Jacqueline Freedman.
Speaker 2: And I'm Juan Mendoza.
Speaker 1: And this is Office Hours, and we cut through the noise and discuss the latest and greatest in the martech landscape. So first, let's dive in.
Speaker 2: Another week. Another office hours. It's great to see you, Jaclyn. How you doing?
Speaker 1: I'm doing well. How is the morning treating you?
Speaker 2: The morning is treating me great. We just finished a production video with the famous Scott Brinker, the martech maestro himself. In the video is called You Are the Change Agent. So a new event that's coming up in New York City on the 18th, 19th of November. And Scott has been tracking, obviously, the martech landscape for more than ten years now, but he's paid a particular focus on the emergence of AI in the martech stack.
Speaker 2: And the title You Are the Change Agent is awesome because it's just this really encouraging statement to say that in the midst of slop and AI automation everywhere, unemployment, insecurity, he's just got a really positive message to say that, like, this stuff cannot work. Like you cannot embed AI into your organization without having some seriously experienced and talented people driving those initiatives in the organization.
Speaker 2: So his keynote is coming up on that event, MarTech World Forum New York on the 18th and 19th of November. Really looking forward to it. Scott's a dear friend of ours and our business and yeah, he's just always got amazing insights. So that's what's really getting me excited this week.
Speaker 1: Understandably, any time we're hearing from the Godfather of MarTech is always a good time in my eyes. Oh, and also shifting gears for a different event. I'm a bit jealous you guys have a boat cruise this week called the Data Regatta and I'm not invited.
Speaker 2: Must be nice unless you want to fly 20 hours to get here, then I highly recommend you don't. We are doing an awesome boat cruise in Sydney Harbor, with our friends Amplitude and Twilio segment. So we are doing it on the topic of the data. Regatta. So all about data and AI, it's going to be awesome.
Speaker 2: About 30 executives, some of Australia's largest brands coming down for an evening of cocktails and a three course meal, and also just an awesome roundtable discussion around using AI using data in your organization. So yeah, really looking forward to that. I may not be a nice evening out and that's coming up this week. So this actually two days away from from about so that's coming up this week on the 23rd of October.
Speaker 2: So yeah really excited for that. Sorry that we're making you jealous, Jacqueline. But there's a lot of people that would love to come, but we've already sort of maxed out our registrations for that. So a lot of people I think are sitting on the sidelines going, love to come, but we'll have more fun stuff for that like that, coming next year as well.
Speaker 2: And in other countries as well. So, so that's something I'm looking forward to, which is quite exciting, but something that actually we did last week, which I thought we would talk to the audience about. Have you ever sat through a really boring QBR, a quarterly business review?
Speaker 1: Jacklin almost all of them. And I sometimes had to lead them as well.
Speaker 2: And how do they go? I mean, what what's the vibe in the room? What is people's positions to acquire?
Speaker 1: Usually rarely excited, often dreaded. And honestly, I think most folks are just waiting for their segment to speak to their slides as opposed to kind of amping up and really kind of being grateful to what you accomplished in the past quarter, because it is typically a higher stress. Recap an environment of what goals did you make? Where do you land on your OKRs, and where does your team land as well?
Speaker 2: Yep. You know, what's interesting is that, like if you make some fun elements in a, it actually can be way more successful. So something that we're learning is that we do a QBR at the MarTech weekly. So our team to get together we've done now is a little bit later due to a lot of travel. But we just what I've started doing over the past few quarters is create what we call like a main wall, which is basically taking all the crazy stuff, all the different cities we've traveled, all the crazy things that our customers are doing and.
Speaker 1: Everything on the inside, jokes and things that happen along the way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I create kind of like a collage of all of that stuff. And then I do a big reveal, and then everyone tries to pick out all the references. So, for example, our head of research, Keanu Taylor, he went both to Vietnam and Copenhagen earlier this year. So he did keynotes in both cities. And I put together a Lego man holding a bond me.
Speaker 2: And it took a while for the for the group to guess that was actually Lego is from Copenhagen and the Vietnamese bond. Meh is obviously that some of the famous food from that country, but we try to make it really fun.
Speaker 1: I thought it was a hot dog so, yeah, I think it's just my bad eyes.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And, you know, it's kind of hilarious because what I've noticed, particularly with our company, is that people expect it now. And so when the team comes on onto the cube meeting, they all like, where's the main? And they're ready for it, right. And and we build anticipation around it, but it just kind of flips on its head because then we go through all the boring stuff, our revenue growth and all of the different things we have achieved, the things we haven't achieved and, you know, updates financially and all those things that you normally run through in a cubicle.
Speaker 2: But creating anticipation for QBR is something that I know it's quite fun. I highly recommend if you business has a culture for that. Trying to inject an element of fun because it builds a really positive energy. I actually think the conversation that flows out of cubicles is more productive. Just because people are just having they're having more fun with it, you know, like, why be so serious all the time?
Speaker 2: Sure, we've got revenue we need to deliver. We've got, you know, projects that are in flight. We've got all this complexity to deal with. But if you're not having fun with it, it's really hard to attract people to a really productive conversation, which really is what a cube was all about, is a conversation about where we're at and where we need to be.
Speaker 2: So that was a big highlight for us last week as well.
Speaker 1: You mean you should market to your team about a cube? That seems pretty revolutionary. Yes.
Speaker 2: At the end of every leadership conversation and is something to do with marketing sales. You know, you're selling to your team, you're selling to your customer, you're selling to your partners, you know. But I just find that humor and creating comedy, creating opportunities for people to kind of let the barrier down a bit. It just adds so much value.
Speaker 2: You know, people would dismiss it as not serious or, you know, lacking integrity sometimes. But I would say that if you're not having fun, it's really challenging to get people on board with your vision and where your company is going as well. So anyway, that was a fun week for us. So we got boat cruises, we got Scott Brinker going on about AI.
Speaker 2: We've got cubes and main walls and all kinds of stuff. But let's turn our thoughts to our first topic of the week, which is a little bit multi-dimensional. But I'm going to start with the word ohana. Why are we talking about ohana today?
Speaker 1: So we really are here to ask what happened to Ohana, which, if anyone seen Lilo and Stitch, Ohana means family. So there's a lot of things to talk about in the Salesforce world. Where do you want to begin?
Speaker 2: I want to start with an article from David Giller. He was a lawyer turned Salesforce admin. He wrote a fantastic article. It'll be in the show notes, where he sort of analyzes what was talked about in all the major keynotes at Dreamforce, and he says that the amount of content, or even just shout outs to admins is basically nonexistent in comparison to the years prior.
Speaker 2: Even just 2 or 3 years ago, admins were always the star, the center of Marc Benioff keynotes and their sessions because admins really hold the Salesforce product together in a lot of organizations. It's true. And I had this concept around trailblazers and building a great career with Salesforce.
Speaker 1: And always the ever wanted Golden Hoodie and getting presented it on stage to it was something to aspire. It was a prized possession for many.
Speaker 2: A massive, especially for people that built their whole career on Salesforce. If you've spent 20 years going deep into social CRM, you know that is a huge achievement for anyone, but it's not really considered a prized possession anymore. The audience for the message is definitely more executives and senior leaders, no longer the user, no longer the admin or the actual customer.
Speaker 2: Obviously, the massive topic for a Dreamforce this year was Agent Force. Jax, you talk about the references to new and old products in a minute, but it definitely seems like there's almost like a dark theme going on at Dreamforce, where you used to be all about the user, but now it's all about AI and the AI replacement, and that's probably just adding.
Speaker 2: It's a subtle thing, but it's really adding to the employment insecurity anxiety that a lot of technology people has in business right now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and for me, that that's just really the start of a downfall when the hubris of a company takes over and you forget about your users and those who are actually the ones spending the dollars and building the use cases to spend money with your your company. And also, they are already facing a fair amount of customer backlash from replacing the help search with Agent Force I.
Speaker 1: I have so many screenshots of folks just using Agent Force AI and it doesn't work. And so it costs so much backlash. They're bringing it back mid-November, which is crazy. Rarely does that kind of backlash actually amount to change. Just goes to show how not in touch with their customers they are anymore. For in the irony, it's so rich.
Speaker 1: You're supposed to be your customer relationship management platform of the era, and you're not listening to your very own customers. It's a bit disappointing to say the least. But speaking of lots of things that happen at Dreamforce, there are seven different name changes to existing products. Once again, it's always just whiplash in my experience. I mean, everything from what was known as revenue cloud to Agent Force, Revenue Management, Sales Cloud aka SFC, CRM agent for sales.
Speaker 1: We see a trend here, the one that startles and bothers me the most is Agent Force marketing specifically because what happens to if that's the umbrella term, what happens to the parts, the exact targets? Are we actually we've done so many changes. We're going reverting back to the original names I don't know. And how are you supposed to know between the large marketing cloud versus the small marketing cloud, what is it?
Speaker 1: If it's called an agent force for marketing? I have truly no idea.
Speaker 2: It's funny, isn't it? Like Dreamforce has become kind of a punchline to a joke around the hype, the crazy product marketing that a lot of vendors do and often a you pointed out really well the detachment from reality, you know, and Dreamforce is that it's the center of that. It really is the biggest event in the marketing tech industry, really in sales tech in service tech and in marketing tech.
Speaker 2: It is the biggest event on the calendar for most people, you know. But we know that Dreamforce, they still have struggled to get their audience back from pre-COVID. So I think that's still half of the original audience since, Covid obviously closed a lot of events down. But even as a company, I mean, their revenue is only up 10% year on year.
Speaker 2: So like, even with all this investment in an agent force AI, all of this stuff is not driving exceptional growth. So 20, 30, 50% year on year. So certainly nowhere near the growth of, many of the mainstream AI platforms or even some of the platforms that have embraced AI, like for example, meta and AWS and Azure. So it's interesting seeing that, like, there's this narrative around Agent Force is in everything.
Speaker 2: Now, I'm kind of waiting for the day that Marc Benioff renames a company from Salesforce to agent. Of course. That that may actually happen. But on the backdrop of that, we just have incredible criticism right now facing the AI industry. And we have there's been countless YouTube videos and articles, a famous Bloomberg chart that shows basically round tripping around all these AI companies, OpenAI and Nvidia and Microsoft, Oracle, all these.
Speaker 1: Circular schemes.
Speaker 2: Doing the circular scaling. They're taking investments from each other, and they're putting those investments straight into literally hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in data centers and chips and manufacturing. And you look at this and, you know, obviously, Salesforce, they are really famous for capturing the hype in a bottle. Right? And then they try to repackage it for the B2B marketing, tech sales, tech service, tech people.
Speaker 2: But at the same time, the growth isn't really there for Salesforce. You know, this is not a banner year for them. And so I would say that it's a very interesting like repackaging, renaming, but a lot of new product announcements, a lot of ecosystem announcements and partner announcements. But it's not.
Speaker 1: As though they're now partnered with OpenAI. And you think that would be a little bit splashier. But guess what? Every company that's worth their druthers knows to outsource and partner. At this point, it's more about your ecosystem that you're part of.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So large organizations like Salesforce and Adobe, the ones that are really those massive enterprise martech players, you start to think, well, it does start to feel like this is the end of the road. You know, it's not it doesn't seem like a whole new rebirth of the company. It feels very much like Salesforce is just trying to keep pace with all the other players that are out innovating them and, you know, appeal to them and, you know, Salesforce is a mega powerhouse in product marketing, probably the best in the world around B2B product marketing.
Speaker 1: I would beg to differ.
Speaker 2: Know, I would tell you to.
Speaker 1: Keep renaming your products to and be considered best in product marketing.
Speaker 2: I would say that there is an there's an angle there that the renaming, the relabeling as.
Speaker 1: Well it creates. It's so is and creates confusion. It means you're less likely to know what you own or what you rent annually in your contracts, where you have to truly break it down in order to dissect and translate what an invoice or purchase order says versus what you're actually getting.
Speaker 2: Here's the thing. I think Salesforce, particularly Benioff, he's he's the mastermind behind a lot of this stuff. My point of view here is that Salesforce know that novelty will always drive sales. So if they have feeling for stuff, if they're constantly coming out with new products, a lot of them will fail. Novelty is actually good.
Speaker 1: They shouldn't even come out with a new product this year.
Speaker 2: Exactly. And so maybe they.
Speaker 1: Did, but it got buried under the name changes.
Speaker 2: There's not a lot. And so that's the challenge is that I think that's why I say they're very good at product marketing, because they're very good at tapping into novelty and tapping into executive demand for new products, new ideas, new solutions. HBO think about Apple, right? Apple keep releasing the same basically the same iPhone. Slightly improved chips every year, right?
Speaker 2: This year they did the iPhone ER, and they did the iPhone Pro with a new design. And it blew up because of the novelty. Right. But really they just made the same iPhone slimmer. No major updates. They even dropped a lot of their Apple eye, Apple intelligence, as well. There is an angle that that's it's smart product marketing in a way, to continue to release new names and new novelty all the time, because we do have a salacious interest in novelty, and it is a big part of it.
Speaker 1: We like new, new, new.
Speaker 2: We love the new new. And so but again, you know, that's why I think it's almost the end of the road for us, because we all know that sales force is not the core of they're not building the next technology here. You know, there are so many vendors building up natively on Agenti platforms, the LMS, you know, Salesforce will definitely live in the old world.
Speaker 2: And so they can't just keep rebranding the same stuff to new names. It really has no substance to it until they actually do some proper engineering and product. So that's what I mean. Their product marketing is so good that they can kind of mask over that, still get a massive amount of attention, still drive a huge audience.
Speaker 1: You can read through the books.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but like sometimes. But yeah, it's just works. It just works, you know? And for a vendor, you know, sometimes doing the best game, it's not necessarily ethical or helpful, but it's not advisable. People want it. People want the fantasy. People want the new product marketing. So that's really the idea there. But you had an interesting comment around, Benioff saying something at Dreamforce.
Speaker 1: I see the parallels of Benioff current mental state and kind of vision of the world and how it directly impacts and relates to the strategy of Salesforce. I mean, he said during Dreamforce that he wanted the National Guard at San Francisco, which, without getting into the politics of America right this second, he said, we don't have enough cops, so if they can be cops, I'm all for it.
Speaker 1: Has he stepped foot in San Francisco once? Has he even really gone down the street to necessitate this? And of course, he received backlash and feedback, and he eventually walked it back with his PR and crisis comms team, saying, having closely listened to my fellow San Franciscans and our local officials, and after the largest and safest Dreamforce in our history, I do not believe the national Guard is needed to address the safety in San Francisco.
Speaker 1: Talk about just pulling a foot out of your mouth, and he needs to pull the phone out of his mouth for his own company as well. Otherwise their trajectory is no longer getting fired for buying IBM. It's going to be you're not gonna get fired for buying Salesforce. And that's not a compliment.
Speaker 2: That's very much so. And you know, again, Benioff he's been very much involved in politics. And in a lot of ways he's been part of a massive part of the history of the city. But you also like there's an irony and a parallel there where I just returned from San Francisco about three weeks ago, and when I'm in San Francisco, it feels like a lawless city.
Speaker 2: You know, you've got this insane homelessness problem. You take one walk down the mission, you know, or the tenderloin. And it is terrible. It is really quite sad. But then on the flip side, you've got these companies that are absolutely pushing the most innovative technology that we've ever seen known to humanity, literally around the corner, like five minute walk away.
Speaker 2: And that juxtaposition of both of those things happening, it sort of it's in the water, I think, in San Francisco, where there's a sense of how far can we push off, you know, how extreme can your lifestyle can be, how far can you push drugs? So the living on the streets is the same mentality of how far we can we push our product, how far can we boost our profits with the shareholders?
Speaker 2: You know, there's this element of lawlessness or this like radical, independent mentality that I think drives a lot of technology companies in the area, you know. So and Benioff been really part of that for a long time. Entrepreneurship is in San Francisco. You know, it's really the birthplace of a lot of technology entrepreneurship. And Marc Benioff has been leading that for 20 plus years now.
Speaker 2: So you know he's always involved in politics. But I would say that, you know, even just with Salesforce, you know, there is this lawlessness that's part of the city, which kind of bleeds into tech quite a bit. So I'm not.
Speaker 1: Angry with you, but I completely disagree with you also. I mean, every city, no matter which city we're talking about, has pockets where it's not as great. I've stayed in the tenderloin. I don't recommend it, but also the same could be said about New York, LA, London, you name it. Around the world, there's going to be pockets that are not the most idyllic, and that is due to other systemic issues that we don't even talk about in this podcast.
Speaker 1: However, it's worth knowing and noting. Yes, lawlessness is true and so was Cisco. But that is really for lack of regulation and lack of the legislature doing their job, however. But that does not equate to San Francisco being all this a shithole country or something like that. It's it's something you have to recognize is part of the fabric of any city.
Speaker 1: And so clearly, he probably also doesn't know what the price of gas or what the price of a milk carton is, which seems to be also appropriate for a number of different billionaires. But I digress. Shall we move on to the next biggest topic that's been stopping the world this week?
Speaker 2: So by now you probably have heard about the AWS outage. I was.
Speaker 1: Working, not heard, felt.
Speaker 2: I felt it as well. I was working in asana, last night doing some marketing work with my team, and then I couldn't access this on them. And then our slack integration stopped working. And then all of our platforms went down at once, and we're like, okay, now this is a great excuse to go to the gym and not work.
Speaker 2: But yeah, massive outage this week affected companies asana, bloom, rage, bras, Clay customer, io, Delta Airlines, United Airlines, iterable. Klaviyo McDonald's. Mo. Engage. Venmo. Zapier. There's.
Speaker 1: A name it runs the gamut.
Speaker 2: It's, Yeah, a massive outage. I think it was a US one data center and had something to do with Dynamo DB. Yes.
Speaker 1: East one.
Speaker 2: Yeah. East one. That's right. Yeah. So and I think that's, that's sort of the core of their the data cloud. But yeah, I, I was following the Reddit threads last night seeing all these people basically going, yep, I've been cold up in the I think it happened at like 2 a.m. in the morning or something. And so eastern time.
Speaker 2: And so a lot of people curl up in the middle of the night, massive outages, a lot of challenges. Actually, one person made it Doughty. He's the CEO of a company called Catch Point. He estimates that the AWS service disruptions over the day is resulted billions of dollars in lost. So you think of every single transaction, every single flight that's been impacted by that for those airlines, all of those, customer service requests, integrations, breaking and apps breaking, there's also a massive vulnerability issue where when developers and engineers, scrambling to get back online, often now take shortcuts to get back on what, which is, security vulnerabilities as well.
Speaker 2: So I saw lots of Reddit threads about that where people like, oh, yep, there's someone that's trying to attack our website right now. It's half online or some stuff's online. It's hosted elsewhere. So yeah, massive outage. And you know, this isn't the first time we've seen, several outages like this in the past, but it's, you know, it's one of those fascinating things where we've got this crazy AI innovation going on.
Speaker 2: But then one outage can really ground, you know, literally thousands of companies and what they can do day to day.
Speaker 1: And Mercury wasn't even in retrograde. Yeah. Usually you're in retrograde when these types of things happen. But in my eyes it's core principle of everything we deal with. And martech diversify everything. Make sure you have second providers, your backup systems. You have always have your redundancies in place because you just never know when it's going to hit.
Speaker 1: And this is true for every marketing platform. You should have a back end. If male gun or cinch goes down, have your backup. Maybe it's Amazon SQS, you name it, you have to have those additional points of leverage in place so that you do not get caught red handed like the majority of at least business for 24 plus hours.
Speaker 1: Not quite 24, but it's impacting everyone to such a great extent and it really just shows the fragility of everything of the internet, anything cloud based, anything that's not on prem. Not to say we should go back to the old days of on Prem. However, there is value in having multiple backup plans. Yeah. To avoid that, that risk and mitigate it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. It actually is interesting that, you know, there are to be an IT person in a lot of organizations today. You're also an AWS person. You know, the amount of training you have to do to be certified at Amazon is incredible. I've done some training in the past. A lot of my friends and colleagues have become AWS certified in Data Cloud.
Speaker 2: A lot of that is yeah, my whole job is learning, understanding the complexity of AWS. It is a massive complexity complex, platform with like, literally hundreds of products. So there's a lot to learn. But at the same time, you know, a lot of organizations right now are probably laughing, going, we're so happy we made the effort to go multi-cloud a few years ago and actually make the effort to go, we're not going to have a single point of failure, you know?
Speaker 2: And as good as these cloud infrastructure platforms are, they are still for a lot of companies. And this goes to show that they're a single point of failure. And so if you're an airline or if you're operating a large enterprise organization, and really everything is running off a single data center or a couple from the same organization, then that's a massive risk point.
Speaker 2: You know, there is like, there's so many overlaps, you with martech vendors, you know, if you put all your eggs in one basket when that platform goes down or when they stop innovating, when their roadmap ends, you've got nothing else to serve your customer. You know, there's there's all these other risks that go around just learning one platform.
Speaker 2: But the challenge that we live in today is that these platforms are so complex that it does require basically your entire career to learn some of this stuff. If you want to work on it, there's a trade off there. You know, like one trade off is convenience. So yep. Is hosting everything convenient, simple one one bill and then a key set of skills that we need to get in our business.
Speaker 2: The convenience factors trade off for this. The risks around failure. You know when one platform goes down it all goes down. You can't serve the customer running away anymore. Is there an argument here to say, well, do you embrace more complexity, multi-cloud, maybe on premise servers? You know, full backs that perhaps outside of your existing cloud provider? There's a great argument for that, but it kind of falls flat when it comes to, you know, the cost out because it increases your cost, increases the complexity in your business, you know, and also increases the challenge around just finding talent that can manage multi-cloud on multiple, multiple instances of a data cloud.
Speaker 2: So it's it's a very challenging conversation.
Speaker 1: I will challenge that. Yeah. Because if the estimates are true and it's going to be hundreds of billions of dollars in loss of productivity for workers, but also actual the mechanics of the business, is that worth your money to mitigate that type of risk? Yeah. And so you have to do that cost benefit analysis of what is the breaking point of being offline for 5 hours or 15 hours?
Speaker 1: Which one is going to be exactly the point in which we we recognize what we need?
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, it's one of those things. No one likes to talk to it until something breaks, you know.
Speaker 1: Well, and the irony to kind of wrap this all up is Benioff has been kind of saying his customer is now it ultimately. And so it's a very interesting interplay how all of this is coming together.
Speaker 2: Definitely. So if you were affected, you know, hopefully your website's back on line by now. And everything is smooth sailing again and you integrations are no longer broken. Let's just hope that and.
Speaker 1: Also make sure your lawyers review your service level agreements to see what compensation you might get and receive.
Speaker 2: Love that. Let's move on to our hot take the hot take of.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Week. So, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Right. You're it.
Speaker 2: So fantastic article. By a person. His name is Alan Trevor. He's the CEO of Pega. Fun fact he has been the CEO of Pega for 42 years. Pega is one of the most well known, our most established decisioning platforms, AI decisioning customer decisioning platforms in the world. They work a lot with financial institutions, insurance companies, large regulated organizations, but they've been around since the 80s.
Speaker 2: So Alan has obviously seen a lot of this world over many, many years, probably from the early ideas of AI, right through to the hype cycle we have around AI decisioning in the customer experience. But he has a few hot takes which are quite good. He has a great article, as would be in the show notes, but right now we're seeing a lot of interest around AI decisioning.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of new vendors that have come into this space recently, and that their goal is to automate marketing, particularly lifecycle marketing using AI decisioning. So you've got the customer experience platforms building. They've been building things in this space for a while, and then you've got CDPs that are building this as well. And it's been interesting. Like just AI is really kicked off this whole domain.
Speaker 2: Obviously, we've seen just recently the acquisition of off of it by braze. You know, last office hours, we saw the major announcements by braze about AI decisioning and AI agents. But Alan Trevor has a different perspective, which I thought was quite helpful given that he's experienced in the space for many, many years. So he says that most enterprises are using AI backwards.
Speaker 2: So that's his first thing he says, you know, so bold statement. It is a bold statement, you know, and he says that there are different limits, like taking an AI decisioning model and then applying it to your life cycle marketing or a customer experience program. It's probably a terrible idea. Because the technology's just not quite there yet, you know?
Speaker 2: So you can be applying like reasoning AI equals appraising AI in live customer settings. Make it super dangerous because it can be unpredictable. There can be huge compliance risks. Recently I did a talk on this where, you know, Canada Airlines got under fire for this, where they were offering discounts to customers that didn't exist. You know, there was a famous one early.
Speaker 2: Yep. Around an AI chat bot that was produced by, I think it was Chevrolet at a car dealership. And then someone used the chat bot to do that, and that's help with homework for them. And so there's this argument to say, well, deploying it in a live customer scenario is still very unpredictable and it makes it extremely dangerous.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I definitely agree with his sentiments. And thoughts. It's kind of cart before horse. We got to wait a little bit more for a lot of the components. That said, I do agree with him that using reasoning and some decisioning makes a lot of sense. However, of course you still need that human intervention and he would just check ins and guardrails.
Speaker 1: It's not a quick and easy switch or format or way of thinking either.
Speaker 2: Because it's interesting. Like when I think about the customer journey, I don't know how many customer journey maps I've created over my time. Some massively complex, some are very simple, you know, acquisition interest and then conversion. Then you got your lifecycle motion around retention and win back and all of that. You know, what is the purpose of a customer journey map?
Speaker 2: I think most people get it wrong when they say, oh, this accurately reflects the customer's journey. Of course it doesn't. The purpose there.
Speaker 1: Is no singular.
Speaker 2: There is. There is no. Like Google said this years and years ago, they said it's a messy middle. There's always going to be this interplay. Customers see a product, they visit the website, they come back, they talk to a friend. There's all this offline stuff that you'll never be able to learn about your customer. They never, you know, no matter how much we want to surveil a customer, I put a camera around their neck and follow them around wherever they go.
Speaker 2: We'll never know exactly where, you know. But, you know, I'm sure that that would be helpful, right? So. Okay, well, the customer walked through the store who they talk to next, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I see customer like journey mapping is actually a blueprint internally just to know what the touchpoints are. Yeah. And a practice I enjoy doing is like once a quarter identify ten random users of some sort and identify what you can track of, what their journey was to see if you can learn or glean anything from it. And similarly, you should do the same thing for your, you know, top ten.
Speaker 1: Close one deals or, you know, ten highest paying customers. See what's working for them and see if there are trends or aspects through analysis that you can replicate and implement as a result.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And sometimes it really is just that simple. You want to grow as a business. Well, where do your best paying, most reliable customers come from? You know.
Speaker 1: People forget that often.
Speaker 2: Yeah. But I there's this argument, this philosophy that says that, you know, well, if you're dealing with like all these different types of customers and massive complexity of millions of different customers, there's no way you can learn that, you know, there is no list of I'll just do more of that, especially for multi-channel, multi-brand, you know, different SKUs, all kinds of stuff.
Speaker 2: You know, if you're going into, for example, if you're going into Walmart and you're buying groceries, it's very different from buying a TV. It's very different from buying alcohol. It's, you know, those journeys are all different based on the product. And so I think that is the argument here that's being made is that generating an ideas, brainstorming, improving your systems is great for AI, but when you're using what he calls, semantic AI.
Speaker 2: So semantic AI when it's running, it's still automating. But it's for approved workflows. So going back to this idea of the customer journey, the customer journey is really about the workflows and the paths that you set down for the customer. So instead of it going oh, okay, which roads are the customers go down. It's actually I'm saying, no, this is the road that we want customers to go down.
Speaker 2: We want them to convert this way. We want them to buy on this website. We want them to click on this email. We want them to do these things right. And it's more of an intent from the business of what the journey could look like, as opposed to following what the actual customer does. But without having those paths.
Speaker 2: I call the pathways in place AI decisioning. It's just way too unpredictable. You have to give it guardrails. Yeah, and I don't think any vendor would argue with me and say I'm wrong there. I would say that, you know, guardrails are really important, especially for big organizations. But at the same time, you know, I think there's an argument to say here that unleashing an LA lamb or and a AI decisioning model without having absolute clarity of your content, your channels and what you actually want for the customer will probably end in a lack of results, because there is no focus and even worse, disaster.
Speaker 2: You know, you do not want to be like Air Canada. You know you do not want to be like many companies that have hit the headlines where they've received something random or weird or even slightly creepy because we've unleashed an AI platform to go and do it. My challenge to the industry is that we can do better, you know, like having.
Speaker 1: Without.
Speaker 2: Having platforms hallucinate and give wrong information or false information to a customer or even worse, you know, promise things that don't even exist. We're better than that, you know?
Speaker 1: What about those future looking statements we love? So what do you mean?
Speaker 2: Yeah. So you know, but I think his argument is trusted workflows is a bit of a hot take. I really like this perspective because, you know, this person is a veteran like he's been in this space, seen it grow for longer than I even I've been alive. So you know, so that's, it's very fascinating. So and I.
Speaker 1: Agree with that. You need to apply the AI where it belongs and not just kind of cram it and jam it into things because we want it to look and sound nice when in reality makes your life that much harder and your customer is less likely to be happy. Yeah.
Speaker 2: The argument I make right now when we talk to our customers on the advisory side, I said, well, do you want to be in your career? Do you want to be executive first, or do you want to be customer first? And what I mean by that is if your executives, your leadership is saying we have to embrace AI and you're scrambling trying to build AI initiatives to please them, that's not serving your customer.
Speaker 2: No matter how which way you spin it, no matter what arguments they're giving you, they are giving you pressure to adopt AI for whatever context they have. It's not customer centric. So always go back to what is going to serve our customer in the best possible way. Which leads us to our next question. So we actually have an anonymous question this week for approval.
Speaker 1: Can I interject to build off what we share with our advisory clients? It's very similar echoing to folks I know in the space who are like, hey, I need to integrate AI, what do I do? And that's the wrong question. It what do we want to accomplish? What are our gaps? Have we performed a gap analysis? Do we even know where we could automate things more than because not everything can be automated, but some things can be and some things can leverage AI to automate.
Speaker 1: So it's really understanding what you need to do to accomplish what your customer ultimately is looking for. And so with that, I believe we have an office hours question.
Speaker 2: Yes. And this one is an anonymous question. So this person didn't want to expose their team or their business. But she says this. She has this question. I feel like my team is struggling with analysis paralysis. We spend a lot of time analyzing data, deliberating between correlations and figuring out attribution. And it's getting worse with AI adoption pressure, but it's actually impacting our ability to execute new experiences for our customers.
Speaker 2: What are some ways we can actually overcome this challenge? Jacqueline, I'm sure you've seen this in your prior work in so many ways. I see it every day with our library customers. What would bots would you have for this person?
Speaker 1: I think of a few things. So, I mean, I'll give a horror story first. I've been in a situation where there was nine months worth of analysis that equated to just what common sense is. So I love to first off, think through common sense of what is my initial reaction, then really breed a culture of experimentation of like, let's just try it, have a very immediate quick goal, and then hopefully easily track the long tail end of it.
Speaker 1: Similar to what the Shopify team does. Every single thing they resurface and check a year later. But beyond that, we've talked about experimentation. We've talked about common sense. But I think one item that gets very much overlooked, except for with really excellent leaders, is gut instincts. If you're a marketer, it's art and science and science can only get you so far.
Speaker 1: You have to tap into what your customer is wanting or yearning for that they don't even know they want, and oftentimes it's not going to be in your data because that's already old, it's already past. And so you really have to be creative and combine the gut instinct with experimentation. But also never forget common sense. What are your thoughts?
Speaker 1: What is what's missing?
Speaker 2: I'm reminded of, last night dinner, a family dinner around the table. So I made a spanakopita. It's a very beautiful. Delicious. It's kind of like a pie with filo pastry. It's a Greek recipe. An amazing meal. I absolutely love it. But I've got young kids, and they are so risk averse when it comes to eating food. So what?
Speaker 2: I gave them a slab H and I said, okay, you know, I want you to try this. It's going to be really yummy. And you know what they did? They nibbled around the edges, right? They picked off stuff from the top and they nibble around the edges. The tiniest little bites you'll ever see right. And my kids remind me a lot of this question, and I'll tell you why.
Speaker 2: When a company or a marketing team nibbling around the edges, they're deliberating around data. They're not making any decisions. Or do they have absolute clarity? It's kind of like my kids. They're not just willing to take a bite and take a risk, you know? And what's the underneath this is often analysis paralysis is a symptom. The root cause of it is a lack of courage and a lack of risk taking in your organization.
Speaker 1: Yes. Or and yep, a lack of courage and risk taking from above. Oftentimes that is a top down, approach and just a misunderstanding and misuse of a team.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And so you could be nibbling away at something and looking at it and correlating it and never actually try it. And so at the end of the meal with my kids, I was like, you guys didn't actually ate that? No. Like, yeah, we did, daddy, we did. You know, I'm like, no, you didn't actually take a bite.
Speaker 2: And I think marketing is I actually sat down with a brilliant CMO two weeks ago, and we were talking about attribution and we're talking about analytics. And I said, well, you know, there's some stuff that you just cannot measure, like there's some stuff that impacts your brand or builds visibility or, you know, really works well, but you won't know it for 24 months.
Speaker 2: You might know it for 12 months. And then the CMO came back to me and said, that's why I have a job. My job as a CMO is to find those opportunities that are not immediately measurable, that are not things that we can directly correlate and to encourage the business to take risks in their marketing. And I thought that was a brilliant summarization of what a CMO can actually be in an organization, is that sometimes you can spend all the time doing attribution analytics and all of that.
Speaker 2: There's a place for that. Don't get me wrong. You know, you should definitely learn as much as possible about what's influencing your customer, but at the same time, it's holding you back from actually taking a risk. Then what's going to happen is that your organization will only do the same old thing. You'll never get to the next opportunity.
Speaker 2: I'm sure most of us in our careers, we want to be the marketer or the leader in the marketing tech organization that is taking the Comcast.
Speaker 1: Take a risk.
Speaker 2: Yeah, taking the company to the next hundred million dollars or the next $10 million incremental return this year. That's what we want. We don't want the next 5 to 10, you know, nothing. We want the next hundred thing to happen in the business. And the only way you can get there is sometimes just taking a leap of faith.
Speaker 2: So often when I talk to my customers, I'm like, this is all great. No, but we're but this is your leap of faith. Will you take it? And I hope more customers do it. So maybe this conversation going back to your team and who's driving this analysis focused questions and asking them like, how's your risk tolerance? Should we be taking more risks?
Speaker 2: How would you feel if we took a risk here without having all the perfect data and see what happens?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that. Well, next up we have a confession corner submission this week. It's not from anonymous, but juicy J. The CEO asked to hear my elevator pitch and event as I was speaking to a prospect a couple of months into my role, I had to turn to him and kindly ask him to leave because I got too nervous and forgot the elevator pitch.
Speaker 1: I think we've all been there at some point in our lives. I mean, brain farts are a thing, let's be honest. And also, just like pressure freeze, freeze, fun flight. You never know what you're going to get. I can definitely relate to this very much.
Speaker 2: So maybe tomorrow what.
Speaker 1: You want to.
Speaker 2: Thanks for that confession. I think it's great. I mean, if your executive is a wise leader, they would recognize that, this person doesn't need criticism. They need encouragement, you know? Yeah. And often people that feel quite nervous, you know, I've dealt with plenty of people in the past that have really struggled to do public speaking or pitching.
Speaker 2: And the best thing to do is, is just to be as kind as possible in first for you guys, because that's really all you can offer is a go, you know, so very good, very good, very vocal kindness. Yeah. Yeah, I was late. I would encourage them, you know, I wouldn't criticize them, would encourage them to go do what you need to do to get your first few out, you know, and then we can improve from there.
Speaker 2: So it's sometimes it's really just starting, you know, and actually tied up with your previous question. Starting something is way more valuable than talking about it constantly, you know, and, an executive that encourages you to take that, that risk and to do that pitch and to try it even though you're super nervous. Courage is a massive part of marketing.
Speaker 2: You know, more than people realize. I think often taking that first leap of courage is a really encouraging step for people. They can go, I did that.
Speaker 1: You know? You got to be brave.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you got to be brave, you know? Wait, there's always the first time when you do an executive presentation, there's always a first time you do an onstage keynote, you know, and on the first time, often it's never going to be amazing, but it's amazing that people would still go ahead and do it, even though they know that they're not fully skilled or ready to do that.
Speaker 2: So go up to them, I think.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, well, with that, don't forget to submit your confessions or your questions to us. We'll include you potentially in the next office hours, but roll us out quite well.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for joining us again. For another making sense of my tech office hours. If you'd like to subscribe, you can go to the MarTech weekly.com/podcast. Drop your email in there and you get an update for every episode that goes out. But until then, we say stay curious.