Salesforce's $1B AI Bet

Hey, welcome back to AI Marketing Brief, your AI sherpa guiding you through the mountainous terrain of news and insights in AI for marketing. We’ve got a jam packed backpack today.

Here’s what’s on the itinerary:

• Salesforce commits $1 billion to AI investments, reveals Agentforce

• Google’s NotebookLM introduces "Audio Overview" for personalized content

• Slack adds new AI integrations, allowing collaboration with agents

• Practical guide to AI in GTM for research, personalization, and predictive analytics

Salesforce Unleashes AI Agents Into the Wild

Salesforce officially revealed its AI agent product, Agentforce, at Dreamforce. These generative AI agents can act autonomously—with some safety nets—to turbocharge sales productivity.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff calls it "AI as it was meant to be," boasting a 40% spike in case resolutions. Agentforce has a work based pricing model starting at $2 per conversation.

Salesforce Ventures Bets Big on AI with $1 Billion Investment

Salesforce Ventures is doubling down on its AI ambitions, unveiling a hefty new $500 million AI fund. This move catapults their total AI investment to a staggering $1 billion over the last 18 months.

By backing high-growth AI innovators like Anthropic and Hugging Face, Salesforce Ventures is playing kingmaker in AI, offering not just cash but access to a vast enterprise ecosystem.

Google’s NotebookLM Adds a New Dimension with Audio Overviews

Google's NotebookLM just leveled up. Now, it’s not just about reading; it's about listening. The new "Audio Overview" feature turns your documents into lively audio discussions with the magic of AI.

Imagine two AI hosts bantering and breaking down your sources, making connections, and creating an engaging narrative. Perfect for those who learn better on the go, NotebookLM promises a fresh way to digest complex information.

My take: I love how this showcases AI’s multi-modal capabilities. We’re moving to a world of personalization, not just in content, but in medium.

Bring Your AI Agents to Slack

At Dreamforce, Slack shared it’s latest innovation: AI agents within Slack. Imagine taking the "work" out of work within Slack's interface. Seamlessly integrating AI, CRM data, and automation, Slack's agent-powered workspace is set to redefine productivity.

It includes Huddle summaries, a new workflow builder, and Salesforce’s new Agentforce. Now, users can catch up on missed messages and automate routine tasks effortlessly. And there’s more agents coming soon.

My take: I’m increasingly using AI, including OpenAI and Claude, from within my “always-open browser tabs” like Notion. I call this “invisible integration”. My company Atherial creates workflows and tools within your existing tech stack, so you don’t have to buy more app subscriptions or learn prompt engineering.

AI for GTM: What’s Working Now

AI is the new frontier in GTM, but the current chaos in AI tools needs demystifying. What are the best use cases today? Pocus’ new report offers great insights:

• Research—Sifts through vast data, providing actionable insights.

• Orchestration—Automates routine tasks.

• Personalization—Tailors messaging effectively.

• Predictive Analytics—Enhances lead scoring and sales playbooks.

AI can boost productivity by handling tedious, recurring work, freeing your time to focus on creative and strategic activities.

My take: AI is not great at creative or strategic work yet. It also can’t replace human interactions like sales calls yet. Get AI to handle your grunt work so you can focus on higher-impact work.

Here’s a few more insights and hot takes:

• Brendan Short emphasizes that true innovation in AI GTM tools lies in reimagining workflows, not just enhancing existing ones, and doing new things that weren’t possible before. Creativity will be the primary limiting factor.

• Peter Caputa's analysis reveals that despite higher search rankings, median impressions and clicks are down due to Google's generative AI Overview summaries in search results.

• Analysis of over one million keywords by Mark Traphagen found that over 96% of results with AI Overviews have informational user intent. AIOs show in purely transactional queries only 1.2% of the time.

• Jim Kavanaugh, CEO of World Wide Technology, advises leaders to be transparent about AI's impact on jobs, and encourage continuous learning. AI will disrupt some jobs, but it will also create new job functions.

Mike Fishbein