How Growing Businesses Can Prepare for an AI Future

 Auto-transcribed on Thursday, September 19, 2024.media and text playback available on this page: https://aliceapp.ai/recordings/IxEtJR2NM4ayODsAVLUn0Sb8GmqhP7ul

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Words: 	1,907 	
Duration: 	00:10:02 	
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Uploaded on: 	2024-09-19 21:01:23 UTC 	
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Speakers:

 Speaker A - 27.37%

 Speaker B - 27.06%

 Speaker C - 45.57%

Notes:

- Growing businesses lose an average of an hour and 36 minutes each day for every employee doing unproductive tasks. Salesforce is not just an enterprise company. We help businesses of all sizes and meet organizations where they are.- Grammarly is a trusted AI assistant that really helps people do their best work. It's serving 30 million people, 70,000 businesses. What were some of the challenges you all faced as you grew at that pace?- Salesforce foundations gives sales, service, marketing, commerce and data cloud for free to every enterprise edition, customer and beyond. In October we're layering AI and agents onto foundations so you can have your first thousand conversations with AI on us.- Luke, what advice do you have for other growing businesses exploring Salesforce as part of their AI journey? Be very clear about the business metrics that you're going to measure and make sure it returns that ROI before you take that big step to train your workforce.- When you start with Salesforce, you never outgrow Salesforce. And we continue to deliver you value, especially through the unification of data and the ability to layer on AI. It's no switching cost.- Chris: Can you talk about the opportunity of AI for growing businesses? Luke: We see all of these repeatable tasks that can be taken over by AI so customers can focus on higher value things. To learn more about Salesforce foundations and how it can help your growing businesses, get ready for AI.

[00:00:00]  Speaker A 
You know that growing businesses lose an average of an hour and 36 minutes each day for every employee doing unproductive tasks. That is according to a recent Slack survey. Guess what? Salesforce has got you. We are not just an enterprise company. We help businesses of all sizes and meet organizations where they are. I'm Carrie Chow, joined by Salesforce SVP and GM of self service and growth products, Chris Billmeyer and Luke Benke, VP of product management at Grammarly. So blessed to have you all guys here. Chris, first of all, you're always talking to execs, owners at these rapidly growing businesses. Uh, how is Salesforce rethinking our products to help these rapidly growing businesses?

[00:00:41]  Speaker B 
Yeah, well, it's really exciting to be here. First off, thanks for having us. Um, uh, we're trying to make things easy for everybody. We started out building what we call our starter suite and our pro suite, really making these products and services simple for customers to use to get started with. And what we realized over time was we were building out the customer 360 and we were building that out with data cloud underneath. So these customers are actually AI ready today. So really out of the box, we're delivering a ton of value to these growing businesses. And we recently announced actually two days ago, Salesforce Foundations, which is taking all the learnings that we have in starter and pro and taking all the apps and tools there and delivering it to the enterprise because we feel like unified data is the core and critical thing that we need to do and give our customers so that they are AI ready. So when you see kind of the AI, the data and the customer 360, we're trying to deliver that simply for our customers.

[00:01:38]  Speaker A 
Simply, that's the key right out of the box. We're going to talk more about Salesforce foundations in a second.

[00:01:42]  Speaker C 
Luke.

[00:01:43]  Speaker A 
At a high level, let's just remind our audience, tell us what Grammarly does really quickly. But also as a rapidly growing company serving 30 million people, 70,000 businesses, what were some of the challenges you all faced as you grew at that pace?

[00:01:56]  Speaker C 
Yeah, absolutely. So Grammarly is a trusted AI assistant that uh, really helps people do their best work. Uh, it's all about helping you improve your writing. And with the advent of LLMs and modern AI technology, we've been able to help you from the brainstorming process in communication all the way through to generating on brand, on style content for your organization. And uh, then of course revising it so that before you hit send on that critical email, we all have that feeling of like, oh my gosh, I hope I get this right, it's a big customer. You can be confident that what you uh, have in that email or in that slack message or really in any uh form of written communication uh, is your best work. And we think when employees succeed, businesses succeed. And we've seen so much success from those 70,000 businesses now deploying Grammarly, uh across their user base, their employee base and really seeing like measurable improvements in ROI. Uh, as far as challenges, those numbers you throw out are real and they're like, it's an incredible challenge to scale to that level. The amount of data that our customers trust us with. We're built on an extremely secure and really transparent data platform but our customers trust us with a lot of data and we have so many customers using Grammarly at any moment of the day. Scaling to that level, keeping uh, performance snappy, making it just work, uh, has been a huge challenge but it's been fun to ride that wave.

[00:03:20]  Speaker A 
I love ride the wave. Surf it right. Don't let it crash on you. I mean you use uh, when it comes to Salesforce you're using sales marketing slack. You already talked about the Salesforce impact but I'd love to know like maybe anecdotally or like from a metric standpoint what impact has Salesforce had on addressing those challenges?

[00:03:39]  Speaker C 
Yeah, it's honestly immeasurable to some degree. We are a huge slack house. I actually have slack socks on today. I was in the Slack developer partner program a while ago and I so I wore them today. We love slack at ah Grammarly. We send like a bajillion messages a day and it helps us get so much more work done. Uh, employees at work spend 88% of their day communicating and Slack has made that so much easier for us. Uh and then of course like our go to market teams run uh on sales cloud marketing, cloud sales cs. They couldn't get their job done without Salesforce. We use flows to make sure that reps are uh logging everything that's happening on a deal. They're giving me a lot of insight as a product leader about what our customers are saying about the product. So we use Salesforce to actually pool all of our customer feedback so that we can be really data driven uh and respond to customer needs. And I can look at a report every quarter before we go into planning at ah, the things I need to deliver for our biggest customers. And Salesforce has made that honestly simple.

[00:04:40]  Speaker A 
Uh, that's music to our ears obviously.

[00:04:42]  Speaker C 
Chris.

[00:04:42]  Speaker B 
Yeah, that's awesome.

[00:04:44]  Speaker A 
We hear, we all know the stats about how AI helps productivity. But we talked about Salesforce foundations. How does foundations help companies like Grammarly take advantage of all the AI powered tools available from Salesforce?

[00:04:56]  Speaker B 
You know what's really exciting is in my role I get to talk to companies of all sizes. And so the one thing I hear a lot is how do I get to great AI? How do I get to great AI that doesn't hallucinate? And my answer is pretty similar every time. Great AI comes from great data and great data comes from our apps harmonized by data cloud. And so what Salesforce foundations does is it gets every company AI ready. It gives sales, service, marketing, commerce and data cloud for free to every enterprise edition, customer and beyond so that when their data is harmonized and they are using our apps, they will have the best AI experience possible. And oh, and by the way, in October we're layering AI and agents onto foundations so you can have your first thousand conversations with AI on us. So I think we're teeing it up to make everybody ready.

[00:05:47]  Speaker A 
Everybody loves that word free.

[00:05:48]  Speaker B 
Absolutely.

[00:05:49]  Speaker A 
Great word. Uh, Luke, what advice do you have for other growing businesses who are exploring Salesforce as part of their AI journey?

[00:05:57]  Speaker C 
Yeah, well anytime you're taking a look at any AI vendor, uh, it's really important to start with like what are your goals here? Right? Everybody's trying, it's like you can drive up and down the 101 here. Every billboard is AI something, something. But you gotta go with uh, a proven solution like a salesforce or a Grammarly. Someone who's been out there, who's vetted from a security and data privacy perspective I think is really important. Obviously there's a lot of upstarts doing really interesting things and starting a pilot, making sure you're dipping your toes into it makes sense, but really thinking about someone who's been around and has that data.

[00:06:32]  Speaker B 
Morning.

[00:06:32]  Speaker C 
Good security data, uh, privacy stance really clearly laid out. Um, I think that's the first one. I think the other one, like I said, is what's the Roi of this? Going into it, understanding everybody's trying it, everybody's running a pilot, uh, but they're like am m I actually seeing the results? If your AI vendor or your software vendor can't prove that you're actually getting real AI, real uh, Roi. And that means um, improving real business metrics, not just saying we save you x hours per day, which of course Grammarly does, but we actually want to show we can improve your customer satisfaction scores, uh, we can improve other key metrics that your business cares about. And I think anytime you're evaluating an AI vendor, be very clear about the business metrics that you're going to measure and make sure it returns that ROI before you take that big step to train your workforce and really roll that out, uh, across the board.

[00:07:28]  Speaker A 
Excellent advice. Uh, if there's one thing organizations, businesses need to know about Salesforce and growing businesses, hm, what would you tell them?

[00:07:39]  Speaker B 
Man, it's really an interesting world out there right now. I think when you start with Salesforce, you never outgrow Salesforce and to me that's one of our key values. You start with us, you grow up with us and you never outgrow us. And we continue to deliver you value, especially through the unification of data and the ability to layer on AI. So you uh, never outgrow Salesforce. It's no switching cost.

[00:08:01]  Speaker A 
No switching cost. One thing I kind of wanted to ask you though, it seems as if in this time, a lot of times companies are a bit nervous to dip into the AI realm, but it seems also AI can be that ultimate equalizer.

[00:08:16]  Speaker B 
Absolutely right.

[00:08:17]  Speaker A 
Can you kind of talk about how the opportunity of AI for these growing businesses as opposed to um, of course after you do the proper research and so forth in the vetting?

[00:08:27]  Speaker B 
Yeah, I think the opportunity of AI is amazing. I mean, uh, you know, we see all of these repeatable tasks that can be taken over by AI so customers can focus on higher value things. We see AI coming together to make our sellers better, our service people better, our marketers better because they can take care of the mundane and go focus on the higher value and ultimately that's better for the customer experience. So we're really excited with what's to come with agent force.

[00:08:51]  Speaker A 
Yeah. And Luke, that's exactly what you're talking about, right? Like how AI has helped, um, just exacerbate all the conveniences, all the processes that we just talked about.

[00:09:01]  Speaker C 
Yeah. When we talk to customers Grammarly customers, they tell us all the time. Grammarly makes me feel more confident, almost super human in some ways. And it is true when you have something that's really important on the line. We have ah, a bunch of customer support teams that use our AI to check a message before they send it back to a customer. And when you need to get that message right, it's AI. And the power of like just a well integrated tool. It's really inspiring for me to hear kind of like what AI is doing to really like support them in their day to day life. Uh, it's been great to hear.

[00:09:37]  Speaker A 
I love that. And it's just, it's like a burden off the shoulders, right? When you can get that AI to work with the human and just save that time. I love it. Uh, thank you, Chris and Luke, for your insights. Uh, and thank you all for watching. To learn more about Salesforce foundations and how it can help your growing businesses, get ready for AI, scan the QR code on your screen or head to the Salesforce newsroom@salesforce.com. newsheen.