Communications Keynote: Grow Revenue as an AI Enterprise

 Auto-transcribed on Thursday, September 19, 2024.media and text playback available on this page: https://aliceapp.ai/recordings/GWq1IPLJQw9Rrsjyi0vfoU8KTuXYnFCe

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Speakers:

 Speaker A - 43.74%

 Speaker B - 16.97%

 Speaker C - 19.32%

 Speaker D - 11.11%

 Speaker E - 8.85%

Notes:

- Today is all about growing revenue. We have two special speakers going to inspire you about how they grow revenue using Salesforce and AI. We're going to show you some cool AI innovations. But before that, I would like to thank you.- Today we're launching our new quick quoting AI feature, which is an innovative new AI feature that helps sellers create complexity business quotes faster. This is going to go a long way in helping sellers be more productive because now they can create these complex but accurate quotes in real time.- Today we're launching two new innovations for service teams. First is dispute management, which helps solve complex or helps you solve billing disputes faster. Second is personalized upselling, which can send proactive alerts to customers before they experience any performance issues.- This is a cutting edge analytics tool that can help understand, uh, customers network usage and even predict future. To truly understand the customer and to be proactive, you have to know the customer. If you know your customer well, then you will be able to provide more personalized recommendation and therefore grow revenue.- The last innovation we're launching today is our new offer matching AI innovation. It enables reps and sales reps to analyze the market and understand what's going on and compare their products against others. These three use cases show you how you can improve productivity when you're selling.- Now. I just want to thank our speakers again. Dave and Natalie, thanks for taking the time and uh, uh, be here and share your wonderful story. Now, earlier in the session we talked about 1%. We don't believe it should be 1%. So next time when we meet, we want to show everyone that it has to be more than 1%.

[00:00:00]  Speaker A 
You all. We're delighted to have all of you here, um, in person and uh, on Salesforce plus, today is all about growing revenue. We have two special speakers going to inspire you about how they grow revenue using Salesforce and AI. We're going to show you some cool AI innovations and much more. But before that, I would like to thank you. Um, thank you for being here in person. For those who are watching this recording, this is actually the last day of the conference and it's really early. I hope you guys actually get some rest last night. Many people don't like to present on the last day, but we love it because we know that everything we're going to say today, you're going to remember after you leave this conference. Um, I also want to thank our customers here. Um, a lot has happened in the last twelve months since we met. Um, we saw our adoption increase by 80% compared to last year. Meaning that many of you have achieved great milestones using Salesforce to drive more revenue. Congratulations. Thanks for your trust and partnership. I also want to thank our partners. We also saw industry certification has gone up by 70%. Thanks for helping us to grow our ecosystem. I also want to thank the community as a whole, especially my fellow Salesforce colleagues for helping us to get our product and industry at uh, a better place compared to last year. So thank you for that. I'm very proud and uh, feel privileged to be in this business, uh, especially in our industry, because we are changing the world. Um, think about how many lives we have enriched through our services, ranging from providing essential emergency services to small villages, to Niger, to powering autonomous way. More vehicle here in Salesforce is truly amazing. Um, yet we are seeing our industry has declining growth. Um, I recently read a startling stat that, uh, our industry globally is only growing at 1%. 1% is not very much and there are many factors that go into it. One is about our, um, business inefficiency. We still have our service rep spending too much time hunting for answers. Our sellers are spending too much time on manual, repetitive tasks rather than spending time with customers. Second is about churn and meeting customer expectations. We still have a hard time to understand who our customers are and sometimes a simple checkout process may take 20 minutes even with established customers. So there's more work to be done there. Third is about declining revenue. We are in a very competitive business with low margin products such as wireless and fiber. We are leaving money on the table from our, uh, existing customer, new customer or even revenue stream. But what if I tell you that it doesn't have to be this way. What if I tell you that there's a way that we can boost productivity by having our uh, employees to focus on high value tasks. What if I tell you that there's a way that we can improve your uh, retain 30% more customer by understanding more about them so that you can provide proactive service. What if I tell you that there's a way that we can improve our conversion by ten to 15% by understanding a little bit more about the market and our customers? What if I tell you that there is a formula equation for growth? It all starts with the open platform. It is something that you can take and um, integrate it uh, to your existing ecosystem with automation and scalability at its core. Then we have data. Data helps you to gather all the information within your ecosystem to make intelligent decision based on that, using the platform, using the data, then we have our optimized experiences. It is exposed to internal and external so that you can deliver the right information, the right process, the right experience to the right user. So this is the formula for growth. Now then we add in the secret sauce of generative AI. It supercharges everything with the optimized experience. With the generative AIh, we can grow revenue by 30% EBITDA. Now we have worked with a few customers, and this is not just coming up with a number. We've actually worked with a few customers um, to show you some of the use cases, how you can achieve that. And we're going to show uh, it to you later in the session. So let's um, talk about how Salesforce fits in. Salesforce is part of the equation for growth with our platform, with our data cloud, with our industry specific customer 360. Now I'm sure that you all have heard about agent force by now. Yeah. So Agentforce is a set of tools that allows you to create, customize, deploy agents in both assistive and autonomous fashion. It is intended to help you to get that extra automation and deliver that um, customer uh, experience. Now you see here is that there are agents that are designed specifically for our industries and those will be made available to you soon and we're going to show you some of that a little bit later. Now we talk about platform, um. What I would like to do is to um, bring um, bring our first guest speakers onto the stage. Now many of you have probably heard about BT. BT is one of the most recognized brand in our business in the UK, globally. One thing that is really uh, impressive about BT is this company never stopped innovating I have the privilege to work with BT for the last few years. They've always, uh, looked at ways to deliver the perfect customer experience. So it all starts with the leadership. We are fortunate that we have one of the leaders from BT to join us today and share about their story. So please join me in welcoming consumer CIO at BT. Natalie, please join us. It's so good, uh, to see you, Natalie.

[00:07:10]  Speaker B 
Oh, thank you. Thanks for having me.

[00:07:11]  Speaker A 
How's the conference so far?

[00:07:12]  Speaker B 
Oh yeah, it's been great. Uh, I've been kept pretty busy, starting to lose my voice from all the, uh, talking. Done a lot of listening as well. And of course I've had a cuddle with Cody as well, so I've enjoyed myself. It's been good.

[00:07:24]  Speaker A 
That's great, that's great. Thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule to spend some time with us. Um, now, you have recently launched a new ee at BT.

[00:07:32]  Speaker B 
That's right.

[00:07:33]  Speaker A 
Um, tell us about what you did, uh, and why ee is so unique.

[00:07:38]  Speaker B 
Yeah, well, firstly, thanks so much for the opportunity for asking me to come and talk about our, uh, ee and BT stories. Um, ee or new ee is quite an interesting, um, business conundrum, if you like. So in the UK we have, um, under the consumer, um, uh, area we have two very iconic brands. You talked about Beatty, uh, and we have eevtained. Ee is renowned for its, uh, mobile, um, it was launched as a 4g brand. It was the first, um, UK based 4g network, uh, and that was launched in 2012. And we have, um, a lot of mobile customers equally, uh, the brand that you think about, uh, when you think UK is bt for household, um, and we were really starting to struggle with driving that household convergence that we wanted to and really delivering that value proposition for our customers and uh, then really understanding kind of what was the opportunity for them. So we really had to decide what we were going to do when we decided that Ee was going to be our prime brand in the UK. But what we needed to do was create all of the right products and services and all the right customer journeys and experiences that were going to make our customers start to think that EE is the brand for household provision too. Um, and so what we had to do was, um, in fact what it gave us was a real opportunity. It was the catalyst for us to move into our new strategic architecture. Our legacy systems would just never have been able to deliver those new products and services and customer experiences that we really needed in order to launch a new and different brand. Um, so it was that catalyst, we moved into a API driven, cloud based, modularized, platform based uM architecture. And what we did was put our customer information at uh, the very heart of that. Um, we introduced a new secure authentication framework, our new Eeid, uh, in order that that platform would allow our customers to safely and securely interact with us in the digital channel. We put our customers data at the center so linked that id that ability to see the products and services and the recent interactions, both sales and service that we'd had with our customers, um, in order to drive all of the right um, journeys, um, and interactions with our customers. And we also implemented of course Salesforce comms cloud, um, and uh we've introduced a new product, um, catalog, uh, the CPQ and order orchestration. We've implemented it in a slightly non standard way in a headless um, interaction, but that has worked well for us, uh, and that enables us to do our own um front end journeys with our customers. And we've seen um, really um, great results from what we've done so far on ee. I think we're well in advance of a quarter of a billion interactions that we've had from our front end systems into the salesforce comms cloud. That translates into a large number of customer orders across our products of um, fiber tv and um, voice services, um, and of course that also translates into a large number of customers, uh, reveal the exact number, but that we've been able to move on to that brand new ecosystem which is going to drive all sorts of benefits for our customers. We're also seeing really strong NP's on that. So when customers, we acquire customers onto that brand new platform, we're seeing great NP's. Uh, we're also seeing much better convergence. So customers are enjoying that value proposition that we've got on offer, um, and we're also seeing higher numbers of uh, sim connectivity on top of that household provision that we've provided together. Um, so it's been a really successful story um, so far on ee. We're really proud of what we've done, um, and really kind of making the new Ee brand sing to our customers. And thank you for all of the help and support that you've done. And of course thank you to the wider team that sit way outside this room, uh, out there that have done so much to make it such a great thing.

[00:12:10]  Speaker A 
That's amazing. Putting customer right in the center. A billion interaction, that's awesome. Um, I also know that you have um uh, done a lot of rethinking in the b two b in terms of how to deliver better automation, better customer experience. What has been done there?

[00:12:29]  Speaker B 
Well again, the way in which we've implemented the product model, we did a real kind of stand back and think about how can we utilize um the EPC uh and make that a pan BT um, model. And so what's great about that is we've created a three tier model uh and we've been consistent um across the group. And what that means is that the business team can reuse anything that's been done in the consumer space, essentially inherit all of that product catalog and uh of course everything flows off of that product catalog as you know. Um uh, and that's provided a faster time to market for the business team really capitalizing on what we've done across consumer in order to get to market far far more quickly, which is brilliant. Um, we've also gone from having seven instances of Salesforce down to one instance of Salesforce. Um, and that was uh, great because what it meant was sales motion enabled us to start to standardized a bit more in terms of those interactions with our customers, but still allows us enough personalization um across the segments in order to make it meaningful and interact correctly with the different sorts of customers we have across business. So um, it's been a great journey. Um, we've done btnet, uh uh, um, we've done operator connect, uh and of course we've inherited broadband. So already again that build of the products across this sales um, comms cloud has been a really great um, result for the business team too.

[00:14:05]  Speaker A 
Yeah that's great. BT business actually cover quite a wide spectrum of small medium business, enterprise and wholesale.

[00:14:13]  Speaker B 
They go all the way up. Yeah. So yes it's a big set of customers and a diverse set of products as well to support.

[00:14:20]  Speaker A 
Yeah that's awesome. Um, we've been working together quite a bit for the last few years now in the, the partnership but anything you can share with the audience about how Salesforce has enabled you through this journey?

[00:14:31]  Speaker B 
Yeah, I mean I think what we've done together is work well together but we've pushed each other forward all the time and I think that's what a great partnership does. It can, you know, continues to make you want to do better and support each other in that journey. And of course we, you know we've had some tough times together and you know when it's come up to launches we've been um, nervous together but you've put all of the hypercare support in that we've asked and actually we've had a really stable platform in terms of everything that we've launched, um, so far. So again, massive. Thank you for that and uh, privilege to work with the team.

[00:15:05]  Speaker A 
Uh, it's a pleasure for us to work with you. Um, you've always uh, made us better so we appreciate that. Um, what is next for BT?

[00:15:13]  Speaker B 
Um, well I think some of the things that you were saying earlier, we now need to really harness what we've created with this new platform based architecture, get it kind of singing together. And for me it's about how do we do more proactive service journeys with our customers? How can we leverage the information that we have about our customers to create those great customer experiences. And of course there's a need to think about how can we reduce our cost base, um, and introduce more genai, um, into that environment. It really is a case now of the platforms are kind of in place. What do we do with it now? How do we leverage that capability to um, bring the technology advancements really to fruition?

[00:16:00]  Speaker A 
Awesome. Thanks for um, continuous to innovate and continue to push us. We would love to uh, invite you back, uh, and so that you can share with us uh, your journey here. I'm sure that many of us here would be very interested in uh, knowing uh, what you have done. Thank you so much.

[00:16:17]  Speaker B 
Thank you so much.

[00:16:18]  Speaker A 
Thanks, Nabi. I hope you enjoyed um, that story. Pretty amazing. Um, customer is always first and um, it's a good example in terms of how salesforce can help power the platform across all the different segments. Consumer um, SMB, enterprise wholesale and global services. Um, now we're going to switch gear a little bit. We're going to talk about AI. Now before we talk about to give you a sense of um, what you're going to see is that um, earlier I asked aihdeme to help me to um, give me a picture in terms of what this keynote will look like. So I asked AI to create an image for me with myself and two special guests. Um, I was just curious to know what that would look like. Um, and it's actually pretty funny. So this is what AI generated. Now, um, you can see that it is not very accurate. Um, Mark has often shown up here and spotting a mustache and beer, um, both um, guest speakers with men. So that is off a little bit. Um, um, the only thing that look um, um, remotely closed is the gentleman on the top left whom you're gonna meet, Thomas. So just remember that, um, um, but this is just an example to show you that AI is great, but if you don't um, um, ground AI with trust. It could go wild. Right. So that's why we believe that AI needs to be treat it with trust, and connected data will help the AI to be more accurate. So now, um, today we are announcing four innovations purpose built for the communications industry to help you to drive productivity, to help you to reduce churn, and help you to grow revenue. So instead of me describing what they are, I'm going to invite meredith and Thomas so, uh, that we can show you what they are. Meredith Thomas. So, Thomas, do you agree that the AI did a pretty good job on you?

[00:18:43]  Speaker B 
I don't know.

[00:18:43]  Speaker C 
What does the audience think?

[00:18:47]  Speaker A 
I think AI did a pretty good job. And Meredith m. It's so good to see you.

[00:18:53]  Speaker D 
It's great to be back with you again.

[00:18:55]  Speaker A 
Yeah, last year, we had a lot of fun. Last year, we talked about, uh, some of the innovation that we leverage AI and, um, uh, in a context, troubleshooting and building inquiry. Uh, manager, what's new this year?

[00:19:07]  Speaker D 
Yeah. So, going back to the challenges at the start of our session, we know that there's many inefficient business processes, and this is especially true for sales teams. Right? So what if I told you we can help you boost employee productivity? Today we're launching our new quick quoting AI feature, which is, uh, an innovative new AI feature that helps sellers create complexity business quotes faster. Now, Thomas is all teed up with our demo. So, David, can you share what your team's developed?

[00:19:38]  Speaker A 
Yeah, we're here to look after all the sellers, because selling in our industry is very complex. So Thomas is just asked to provide a budgetary quote to a customer. Um, so what Thomas has got is got a list of location that he's trying to figure out what to sell to the customer. Um, but AI is here to help, um, Thomas. So Thomas got the location. Thomas is going to ask AI to help analyze these locations. Now, AI will start to ask, uh, Thomas a set of questions because, uh, we want to provide a different way for the sellers instead of the traditional, you need to browse through the catalog and then configure what you need. Let's, um, just figure out what the customer really need. Um, so, AI will ask Thomas about, like, how many employees do we have in a location? Do we need to have into office connectivity across those locations, and whether the customer has, uh, in house support in those locations. Now, so Thomas doesn't have to remember all this. Thomas would just provide this information, and AI would turn around and look at the information provided. And in this case, here, um, Thomas, you got a recommendation to talk to the customer about SD one, and I.

[00:20:55]  Speaker D 
Can see how this will be so beneficial, helping guide the seller's conversation with the customer even while they're on the phone with them. Like you said, they don't have to remember what to ask.

[00:21:04]  Speaker A 
Yeah, there's actually a lot of things happening behind the scene. But the best part about this is there's a button here. With a click of a button, um, we can make this actionable. So taking this will take the configuration, understanding the feasibility, uh, and serviceability of those locations. You will come up with a recommendation of what you should be selling to this customer.

[00:21:26]  Speaker D 
But I see that last location actually does not have anything recommended. There's no product there. So what's going on?

[00:21:33]  Speaker A 
Yeah, good catch. I think that's why data is important. Um, in this case, here at this location, it's not serviceable. So AI will let Thomas know that, hey, take a look at this location. Um, uh, and Thomas can, um, um, override or augmented what AI is recommending. So now, um, Thomas can simply by clicking on a button of adding the products to a quote, it will create a quote with the right pricing. And then Thomas can, uh, create a proposal and send it to the customer for review.

[00:22:08]  Speaker D 
This is going to go a long way in helping sellers be more productive because now they can create these very complex but accurate quotes in real time with fewer clicks. So this is going to go a really long way in helping increase, um, that customer experience too.

[00:22:24]  Speaker A 
What does the audience think about this? Do you think it's going to help? Awesome.

[00:22:32]  Speaker D 
So, speaking about improving customer experience, we know that there's a need to reduce churn, and we know that we can do that by better understanding our customers. So what if I told you there's a way we can help you increase retention? Today we're launching two new innovations for service teams. The first is dispute management, which helps solve complex or helps you solve billing disputes faster. And the second is personalized upselling, which can send proactive alerts to customers before they experience any performance issues. And it can also give them upgrade options. So let's start with dispute management, because I know bills and disputes are huge reasons people are calling into your call centers. Right. And this is a continuation from last year. So David, what has your team developed for this year?

[00:23:19]  Speaker A 
Yeah, let's recap a bit, uh, what we talked about, uh, last year. Um, if you look at the screen, you will see billing and usage tab. In this tab, we are pulling information from the billing system so that you can look at the customer's, uh, account balance, usage and past invoice. Now, in this case here, um, we want to simplify what a, uh, service rep needs to do. So a customer calling in and say, hey, one of my bill is a little bit more than what I expected. And in this case here, Thomas is not going to go look through all the bills. He's just going to ask AI to tell them what needs to be done. So you can see that Thomas just clicked on AI. Pick the bill that is high. And notice that, hey, in this bill, there is a, uh, balance forward and there's also late payment fees. So the customer missed the bill last month. It happens to us from time to time. Now, all this information about the customer is available to Thomas. Thomas knows that, hey, this is just an exceptional case for this customer. So Thomas can start the dispute process and help to make some adjustment to keep the customer happy. So within the same console, um, Thomas can click on the bill, look at all the charges on the bill, select the late payment fees, and then the system will guide Thomas through. And, um, Thomas can, uh, decide what should be the right adjustment amount. And then, uh, behind the scene, the system will also check, is this customer, is it the first time the customer doing this, or has the customer already requested a dispute for the same transaction? This is all done behind the scene. So Thomas can capture the reason for the dispute, um, uh, and, uh, submit this for approval. And then once this is done, we can also automate and, uh, update the customer by an email summarizing in terms of what happened. And this is a great way to recognize the value of the customer and, um, address the issue raised by the customer.

[00:25:19]  Speaker D 
And I like that they were able to use generative AI also to help them write that email. That's pretty cool. So now that that customer's issue is solved, um, for the time being, I also mentioned that we are launching personalized upselling. So this is a cutting edge analytics tool that can help understand, uh, customers network usage and even predict future.

[00:26:01]  Speaker A 
Yeah, to truly understand the customer and to be proactive, you have to know the customer. So in this case, here, we are using data cloud. We create a data model object so that you can pull information from outside. In this case here, we pull in usage information so that we know how the customer is using the service. We'll match it against what the customer described so that we can anticipate and provide better, uh, recommendation to the customer.

[00:26:26]  Speaker D 
That's really cool. So going back to the service console, we can see in the timeline on the left, the message that was sent to the customer and the context. But the rep doesn't have to analyze this alone, they can invoke the help of AI to provide an analysis. So in this case, it's come back with the understanding that this customer has had an increase in their bandwidth usage and they're predicted to continue this increase. Now in this situation, a customer is an SMB customer, they are growing and they have more employees coming into their office. AI has also been able to work with Tableau to generate this really awesome graph that they're able to see and visually see what's going on. And it's also suggested that the customer upgrade their plan so they don't experience these issues in the future. So the rep is able to capture all this information and send the graph and the upgrade option to the customer. So now this service rep not only is able to proactively solve a customer's problem, but they're also able to generate more revenue for your company.

[00:27:26]  Speaker A 
Yeah, this is really good. Um, this is a good example showing if you know your customer well, then you will be able to provide more personalized recommendation and therefore grow revenue.

[00:27:37]  Speaker D 
That's awesome and really cool what your team's developed here. So we're talking a lot about growing revenue and we know that we're in a pretty competitive market. So what if I told you we can help you increase conversion rates? The last innovation we're launching today is our new offer matching AI innovation, which enables uh, reps and sales reps to analyze the market and understand what's going on and compare their products against others. So let's jump into the demo here and we can see that this rep has had a customer call in because they want to match a competitor's lower broadband offer. This happens a lot of right, so the rep is able to actually start this right within their quote flow by selecting the new offer match capability. And David, I know that this is another great use of data. So what's going on today?

[00:28:33]  Speaker A 
Ah, yeah, I think this is one of my favorite. Um, in order for us to be um, competitive, we need to understand what is happening in the market. And this is a great example of how platform AI combined would give you that, give um, you that ability. So in this case here, you can see that uh, we are comparing two offers. The customer calling in and say hey, um, I am not sure if I want to go with this offer. Um, so for Thomas, he want to understand what should I say to this customer? And you can see on the right hand side. The AI knows that this customer is very sensitive to price. And you can see that in this case here, the price is lower, but the service that we are providing is not as good as competitors. Now, using this, the power of configuration, Thomas can go in and change the, um, download speed here in this case, just so that we can be more competitive to what is in the market. Uh, now, when Thomas changed the speed, you will notice that the price has also changed.

[00:29:35]  Speaker D 
I like that. Not only the price has changed, but also the AI generated sales pitch has changed as well. And in this case, we know that this customer, based on segmentation, is very price sensitive. So it's adapted what to say back to the customer too.

[00:29:49]  Speaker A 
That's right. That's right. AI also give tools to Thomas. Uh, you will see that on the bottom left there's another tool, it's additional discount. Now, we know that the customer is very sensitive to price. Now our service is better. But, um, in order for Thomas to help Thomas to close the deal, Thomas can give additional discount just to incentivize the customer to go ahead, um, um, with this quote.

[00:30:12]  Speaker D 
That's awesome. It takes some of the math and computing out of the rep's head and they can just go with what AI suggested. So here the rep can accept the discount, they can convey that back to the customer, and then we can go back into the quoting screen where we see the discount's already been applied and they can send this quote over to the customer, which will help them close more new customers.

[00:30:35]  Speaker A 
Yeah, that's right. Uh, you will notice that the margin is also available, uh, for the sellers as well. Uh, if the margin could be an indicator in terms of how much discount you can provide, it will alert the, uh, seller as well.

[00:30:48]  Speaker D 
That's pretty awesome.

[00:30:49]  Speaker A 
So I hope you enjoyed this. These, um, three use cases show you how you can, uh, improve, um, your productivity when you're selling and, uh, help to reduce the customer churn by understanding the customer and provide, um, proactive service, and also help you to be more competitive and, um, improve, um, the conversion rate. Thanks, Meredith and, uh, Thomas for walking us through and all these innovations. Um, will be coming to you soon. And, uh, you will also see that the antonomous agent version of it will be also available to you as part of the industry products. I hope you enjoyed it. Now, while we are on the AI topic, um, I would like to take this opportunity to, uh, introduce our next guest speaker, um, Lumen. It's, uh, a company many of you are familiar with. They grow revenue leveraging the AI, uh, and also use AI to improve sellers productivity. I'm going to invite Nicole to help us to understand more about Lumenhouse. Nicole wedeby, area vice president.

[00:32:05]  Speaker E 
Thank you, technology. Hi everybody, and thanks, David. That was an awesome demo. And I just want to say I'm proud of all of you for showing up today, the, uh, morning after the concert. And you guys look great and thank you for having your caffeine. Um, Nicole Weatherby. I have the privilege and pleasure to work with some of our largest comms accounts globally. Um, and everything that you heard in the beginning of this session is what I'm hearing from my customers, which is margins are tight, competition is extremely high, and every customer wants a highly personalized experience at every touch point. Super easy to provide to them, by the way. Um, just ask Disney. So with that being said, I think that the AI that David just showed, especially the quick quoting, will really go a long way in helping my customers achieve that. And I've really leaned in with my customers to help them with revenue and profitability. And a customer near and dear to my heart that I believe is at the forefront of this AI revolution is lumen. And over the past few years, we have partnered with them extremely closely to help them increase their productivity, their revenue. They have streamlined business processes with us, um, across field services. I also just absolutely love our partnership with their sales team. They have really leaned into Salesforce generative AI and it has helped them with upsell and cross sell. They are also doing some amazing things with the network. Um, so I don't want to occupy too much space here because I know everyone wants to hear from the godfather of the network, the CTO of Lumen, Mister Dave Ward. So come on up. Thank you, Dave.

[00:34:08]  Speaker C 
Thanks, Nicole. Good morning, the godfather.

[00:34:10]  Speaker E 
Good morning. Um, and just to give you guys a little bit of background on Dave, he has over 25 years experience really iterating on and reinventing our global network. And I do want to share a fun fact. I'm going totally off script. I'm kind of a wild card. I'm going a little rogue. So Dave was actually on National Geographic for multiple episodes. He invented the shark network tracking technology. So all of the really cool shark week content that you see is due in large part to Mister Dave Ward. We're both surfers. So I found this very intriguing because I have this, like, macabre interest in, like, what's underneath me. Am I going to die? So, yes, I just wanted to share that with you. So how's dreamforce been?

[00:34:57]  Speaker C 
Super fun. I, uh, really thought that the keynote was incredibly impressive. And all we've seen about agent force, that's really captured my interest, in particular how fast and how easy the no code model can work to be able to suddenly augment an agent. And maybe as we chat a little bit this morning, we'll talk about how, how that's really relevant to us and our business.

[00:35:18]  Speaker E 
I love that. I'm more interested in the dinner that you had. So if you could just share with my friends here some of the people you were with at the mark dinner.

[00:35:25]  Speaker C 
So, uh, Mark had an executive dinner. And when you have a dinner with Mark, you don't really know what's going to happen. You don't know who might be there with you. It was pretty fascinating, um, because I had not been able to be in a room with Jane Goodall before as an example, and hearing her speak and speak about AI and Matthew McConaughey and Brandy Carlisle and will I am and a whole bunch of joint chiefs, it was really, really fascinating to get that insight.

[00:35:48]  Speaker E 
So, yeah, I was saying my dinner was very different. I had a gyro, um, and some shawarma. I was like, this is not. I hung out with Jonathan Linzell and Infosys. That was cool. Um, not as cool as your dinner. So I'm so glad you had such a blast and thank you for your partnership and your time. I know how busy you are. Um, so Lumen and Salesforce have had a very long partnership. Any highlights you want to share at some of the amazing innovation that we've broached together?

[00:36:15]  Speaker C 
Well, most recently, um, Lumina's decided to present the entire portfolio through a digital platform. And so those here are, you're in a communications and service provider telco session. You understand what the world used to look like. Trouble tickets, post it notes, you know, avian carrier, that was a really, really legacy system. And when you decide to present your portfolio through a digital platform, you have all new and different problems as well as all new and different opportunities. And so we do use Salesforce. Uh, we use the platform Launchpad. And I've gone into Einstein, because when your customers are interacting with you again through APIs or through a portal, you have a whole different idea about deal registration, upsell, how to guide the customer through their own experience. And so I'm going to take a quick tangent for a second. The great examples we saw from Meredith were interesting. The only thing I want to add to that is the discussion about a sales rep interacting with the customers, whether it's consumer, our sales rep is now their mobile app for quantum fiber. And our sales rep, uh, and our goal for our sales reps in the enterprise space is really that digital platform and self service. Now for large complex deals and large multinationals, it's a different story when you're building something bespoke, but when you're going for mid market, down market, or even at the smaller end of large enterprises. Uh, and we've moved to create a portfolio of composable products. This means that a customer needs to understand the options of great. I have an access technology and I love the fact that Meredith had fiber access available to all twelve sites that she had in her example. But if you've been in uh, the communications industry, it is all about address, it is all about line, um, of sight, and there may not be fiber everywhere. And so part of the digital experience and part of what we can do and have done with Einstein and what I really want to do with agent force is have an understanding all the way down to know physically where the customer is. And then not just street address, but what floor, what room, what riser, I mean, all the things that are necessary to build a communications network. Because the more I understand my customer and the more specifics I know about what they need to accomplish, then we can create a digital experience towards that. And so utilizing the tools, um, of uh, agent force I think is going to help us get there. Now, flipping this on the consumer side, as I mentioned with quantum fiber, uh, we now are doing digital marketing and really going for an extremely low friction sale with, with uh, the consumer. And so the entire experience is through the app we just launched uh, let's say 45 days ago. Multi gig fiber access where it's different rates, uh, up and down. And so we needed to do exactly what David and Meredith showed, understanding the usage profile of those customers and say, hey, we got a special deal. Let's upgrade you to multi gig. And that interaction and that um, movement back and forth digitally with a customer. Not only is what we had to do to create a digital platform, but what we needed out of the toolset and infrastructure, uh, like Salesforce, that can be brought to bear to enable us to sell in this motion. So it's really a super interesting time. Sorry, I'm kind of rounding.

[00:39:43]  Speaker E 
No, please.

[00:39:43]  Speaker C 
It's a super interesting time in technology where the technology has matured. Even though AI is very early going, um, the way we can use it to unlock the data we know about the customer and how we interact with the customer. For me that's the most important part. And I think we do know how to turn the experience, um, into the selling experience we want. But our data, like every enterprise and every service provider, is completely trapped into silos of data stores that something like data, uh, cloud can unlock and using a rag architecture can unlock. That was described, uh, a couple days ago. This is the path forward. And so technology and business actually are hitting a transition at the same time.

[00:40:26]  Speaker E 
Through the AI, ah, movement I'm calling it. He's going to be the keynote next year with Mark putting it out there. Thank you so much for being so leaned here. I do, I want to give you the opportunity, um, to talk about what Lumen is doing.

[00:40:42]  Speaker C 
I get to talk about me, you.

[00:40:43]  Speaker E 
Get to talk about Lumen. Because I think everyone underestimates how critical connectivity is to all of the amazing AI that's coming to market. So if you can talk a little bit about all of the IP that you're iterating on and why the stock is so hot, um, I think that'd be fantastic.

[00:41:01]  Speaker C 
Excellent. So um, look, we have a unique position at this point of transition, but now I'm going to talk to the nerds in the audience for a second, um, because all these great things that we've talked about in Salesforce and how to get to data collection cloud and how to get to Salesforce, you understand it's a connectivity problem. And we know that there's over 2000 private data centers being built in the continental us today. If you've been following the industry at all, you'll understand the movements of power, uh, corridors that are being built in the country and therefore new data centers being built. And these data centers are not your uncle's data center. They're not 30, 50 mw, which would have blown our mind just eight years ago. They're now multi hundred megawatt and gigawatt in speed, sorry, in power. And they're not being built in metropolitan areas. They're being built where renewable energy can be captured, or where land is cheap. And that often is in the middle of nowhere, or the middle of a desert, or the middle of wherever. And so this is uh, we partnered with a number of extremely large, ah, AI data center construction, CSP's and others. Uh, because we have unique ability, because of the conduit we have in the ground to construct backbone, uh, of the AI economy in the continental us, because of the unique position we have with conduit and our fiber and fiber route capability. And so, okay, that was a bit on the networking side, but really the net message is for an AI strategy with Salesforce and with others is a cloud strategy, a partner strategy. First you need to select your partners, you then need to understand your data because it's a data movement strategy and that then turns into a networking strategy. And to put it in perspective, um, in July we announced um, uh, a deal with ah, CSP's and a new construction effort to put it in perspective that one movement alone, uh, is the same number of fiber miles to get halfway to Venus from Earth. So it's the largest expansion of the Internet in our lifetime right now. And it is a really interesting piece that GPU's are here, AI algorithms are here, fiber capabilities are here. And again, just talk about uh, down in the details for a second. Um, started my career in getting eight fibers per cable. Was a big deal 20 years ago and then I was 144, was great, 288. But now fiber manufacturers are able to put 1728 fibers in the same size cable that they were before. So when I say it's the largest expansion of the Internet in our lifetime, it's because an order of magnitude more fiber can be put in the same cable. Now correspondingly, all of the AI deals that we're seeing are coming at us to the tunes of tens and hundreds of 400 gig waves at a time. So the, the amount of bandwidth is immense. And so as, and now I'm going to move the conversation back to Salesforce. Second, so as we work with Salesforce, not only do we use it for our own business, really, we're trying to build the AI on ramp for enterprises to effectively use data cloud, to effectively use all the GPU and data center resources. And that's our position in the theater and the transition of the economy right now, and that's where we want to lead.

[00:44:21]  Speaker E 
Thank you.

[00:44:21]  Speaker C 
You bet.

[00:44:22]  Speaker E 
You're the best. Thanks Dave, and thank you everyone for coming. Um, I want to give it back to David Fan to talk through what's next in the industry.

[00:44:30]  Speaker C 
David, take it away.

[00:44:31]  Speaker A 
Dave.

[00:44:33]  Speaker B 
Good, Dave.

[00:44:38]  Speaker A 
Thank you Dave. Thank you Nicole, amazing uh, story. Um, so what else can we, can you expect from us? We talk about AI quite a bit today. Um, what you expect to see is that we'll continue to focus on to deliver more value to you through the industry integration. One other thing that you also see us do is that we will move beyond the middle office into areas such as fuel, service and the retail experience. So there's going to be lots more things coming to you and we can't wait until uh, we can show you all these things um, next time when we meet. Now, one other thing that we know that is top of mind for you is about performance in scale. Now, as you heard from BT, this is one area that we have been investing a lot. Now with our more on core strategy, you will find our application will continue to be more automated, more prescriptive. Our uh, user experience will be more responsive, more intelligent, better yet, will be more scalable to address your largest sales and service needs. Needs. Now, I hope all this is, um, useful to you, um, but the learning doesn't stop here. Um, uh, in addition to, um, the industry state of service report, I also want to draw to your attention about a special segment that we are doing on women in tech featuring Natalie. Make sure that you check it out on Salesforce plus, uh, today's the last day, but the campground is still open. Please take advantage of that and go to the campground and check out the uh, AI in action. Now. I just want to thank our speakers again. Dave and Natalie, thanks for taking the time and uh, uh, be here and share your wonderful story with us. Thanks Nicole, uh, meredith and Thomas for presenting with me. Now, earlier in the session we talked about 1%. We don't believe it should be 1%. So next time when we meet, um, we want to show everyone that it has to be more than 1%. And better yet, it will be great to have you here to share your success story, to learn about how you drive growth using salesforce. So thank you for taking the time, uh, and um, enjoy the rest of the conference.