Salesforce SVP & CMO, ANZ: AI future already here, retailers moving<\/p>\n
Salesforce is centring its entire business around AI and agentic bots. Hence SVP & CMO, ANZ\u00a0Leandro Perez disagreed strongly with Goodwin\u2019s assessment of a technology at peak hype and dismissal of agentic commerce. Perez reckons it\u2019s \u201c80 per cent there\u201d already and claimed he has spoken with \u201caround 10 top tier Australian retailers\u201d in the last couple of weeks about implementing it, some acting defensively as much as offensively.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe’ve gone to several conferences now where they bring in an AI futurist, and it’s more controversial to highlight the perils; that AI is not going to work. Most of the marketers here are being told to adopt, to leverage and they are feeling the need to get on board. So [commentary like Goodwin\u2019s] is entertaining, but not that educational,\u201d suggested Perez.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would say that personal agents are about 80 per cent of the way there, because people are still in the loop to kick it off,\u201d said Perez, citing agent-to-agent travel bookings, where the human tells an agent to \u201cfind a family holiday\u201d is handed a selection of destination deals and is asked by the agent whether to proceed.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the future, most individuals will have their own personal AI, their own agent \u2013 the ChatGPTs, the Geminis, whatever other brands enter the space. Now those agents, it’s not a vast stretch \u2013 there is already some technology that allows them to go and do things on your behalf. They are going to interact with other agents. It’s already possible to have agent-to-agent conversations, and we want our customers to be able to have an agent that can interact with groups.\u201d<\/p>\n
For commerce, Salesforce is concentrating on the brand agents plugged into both internal data and customer data that then interact with those personal agents, as well as brand-to-brand agents and within-brand agents \u201cworking across multiple departments, just like employees talking to each other on Slack \u2026 So we see a future where agents are talking to each other as well as humans\u201d, per Perez.<\/p>\n
Many retailers positioning for agentic and broader LLM-driven commerce, he said, \u201care concerned about decline in search to their websites. So that’s a proven fact. We’re seeing it \u2013 it’s small, but it’s accelerating\u201d. (Which to be fair, Goodwin actually underlined as a key marketing use case.)<\/p>\n
\u201c[Retailers and brands] are trying to understand when and whether they show up in LLMs. When they do show up, how do they get that person to then come to their website to make a transaction? So while some may say that is not going to happen \u2013 it absolutely is happening. Retailers are very focused right now on how they can ensure that they show up and that when someone comes to their website, it’s a personalised experience continuing that conversation. They’re very interested in those intent aspects,\u201d said Perez.<\/p>\n
Fear of missing out is real, he suggested.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are mostly concerned about not even growing but losing market share. Because if they lose market share to brands that jump onto that early, that’s an existential threat for them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Salesforce is implementing its own tech, and Perez claimed the firm is landing \u201c30-40 per cent\u201d efficiencies by using agents to do the legwork on its ANZ events\u2019 queries & FAQs including Agentforce World Tour Sydney. Salesforce is also seeing 36% more leads since deploying Agentforce on its website.\u00a0For those leads that don\u2019t meet the quality threshold to be passed through to sales, \u201cthat agent is now actually outbounding to continue to conversation with the customer\u201d, said Perez, \u201cand that is a whole new world \u2026 It is on every page, it is persistent.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Salesforce SVP & CMO, ANZ: AI future already here, retailers moving Salesforce is centring its entire business around…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":140989,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-140988","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140988\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/140989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}