AI Is Transforming Marketing From Data to Personalization

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to John Wall, co-host of the Marketing Over Coffee Podcast. Join us as we chat about how new generative AI tools are enabling marketers to get more personalized.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with John Wall.

Six core marketing use cases for AI

Thanks to Agentforce, generative AI has moved from novelty to necessity for most organizations. It’s a key tool for strategic content creation, customer insight, and business transformation. That’s why I sat down with John Wall, co-host of the Marketing Over Coffee Podcast, with guests like Simon Sinek, Seth Godin, and Debbie Millman.

John identifies six key areas where marketers can lean on AI support:

1. Generation
2. Summarization
3. Extraction
4. Rewriting
5. Classification
6. Question answering

These tasks are helping marketers analyze massive datasets, repurpose content, and simulate customer feedback in ways that were previously unimaginable. So my question for John was: what can we, as admins, build to help them out?

Better data, smarter personas

Marketers use personas to help them think about the specific people in their audience that they want to reach. “Right now, that’s four people in a conference room coming up with cute nicknames like Sally Shopper or Wally the Weekend Warrior,” John says.

In the future, however, AI will make it possible to decide on marketing personas based on data-driven profiling. Marketers can extract customer patterns from engagement data and train real models based on statistics, not spitballing.

Even more exciting, these new persona agents are essentially customers on demand. You can ask them questions and get their feedback while you plan your next marketing campaign.

Why you need a human in the loop

As everyone rushes to deploy AI, John emphasizes the importance of the human in the loop. Mistakes are bound to happen, and rushed implementations can harm brand trust. You need to make sure that any solution you deploy has gone through a thorough internal vetting process before it goes live.

As John says, AI advancements are probably not going to put you out of a job, but they’ll definitely make your job easier. “The big thing is you have to be curious,” he says, “go play with something and see what you can make it do and what kind of results you can get from it.” 

Listen to the full episode for more from John about how AI is transforming marketing. And make sure you’re subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

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Learn more

• John’s Podcast: Marketing Over Coffee
• Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: 2025 Roadmap for Salesforce Admins: AI, Agentforce, and Emerging Trends
• Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: How Agentforce Transforms Customer Interactions at Salesforce
• Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: How Agentforce Is Changing the Career Landscape

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Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt:

This week on the Salesforce Admin’s Podcast, we’re catching up with John Wall, longtime marketer, podcaster, and co-host of Marketing Over Coffee. We’re going to dive into the rise of AI in marketing from smart summarization and rewriting tools to full-blown virtual agents. We’re going to unpack how marketers can stay ahead and why AI is not magic, even though it kind of feels that way, and what smart Salesforce admins should be watching for next. Plus, you’ll hear why having a human in the loop is still the secret sauce to marketing. So give this episode a listen and join me in welcoming John Wall to the podcast.

So, John, welcome to the podcast.

John Wall:

Mike, it’s great to be on the mic with you again.

Mike Gerholdt:

I know, it’s been a while. I feel the last time we recorded was in Boston, 100 years ago.

John Wall:

Yeah, downtown Boston. I remember we were live on Newbury Street. That was like the heart of all the action.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yep. We were recording the old style podcast. We had an Edison, it was putting it on a phonograph and some wax tubes.

John Wall:

That’s right. Sitting there with my ear trumpet listening.

Mike Gerholdt:

Ear trumpet, I love it. For those people, like the two people in the world that don’t listen to Marketing Over Coffee, can you give us a brief overview of what you do and what Marketing Over Coffee is?

John Wall:

Yeah, sure. So, my whole career I worked in marketing and tech, and God, going on what, 16, 17 years ago when podcasting was just done with steam engine and hammers and nails. We created Marketing Over Coffee, with my co-host Christopher Penn. And we’ve had this ongoing dialogue of just every week, 25 to 30 minutes talking about what’s going on in marketing and tech. And just like CRM, this space is so insane and changing every week, there’s no shortage of stuff to talk about. But then, and it’s also grown up enough that I’ve been fortunate enough to get a lot of big marketing brains and authors on, like Simon Sinek and Debbie Millman, Seth Godin, folks like that. So yeah, it’s really kind of opened up the world because the family doesn’t want to hear what I have to say about marketing over Thanksgiving, so I have somewhere to talk about that.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, that could be another, you should rename the podcast that for the holidays, Marketing over Thanksgiving.

John Wall:

Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

Just see if anybody notices.

John Wall:

That glazed overlook when I’m talking about what I do for a living.

Mike Gerholdt:

So I make ads, I’m like Jon Hamm on Mad Men. No, and I remember the Boston. So much of what admins do I remember, is interface with marketing. And that’s why I love having you on because not only as a personal brand, but also as somebody that does a lot of podcasts and content creation, it just overlaps with what admins do. And marketing is such a big facet of any organization now. I mean, you can’t sit down and talk sales without, well, we should have the marketing person in here, and they always want 5,000 more requirements than what you started with, but that’s why I love having you on.

So, let’s dive in. I feel like we woke up from the pandemic and AI just was everywhere now. I’d love to know on what the world of AI looks like for marketers now.

John Wall:

Yeah, I mean, you totally nailed that, and the world has changed yet again. We were kind of finally, things were finally stabilizing a little bit. Platforms that matured, as far as email and text messaging and advertising and things are fairly solid, and now AI has shown up to destroy everything.

It’s been a little weird though, because our world didn’t change as much. We’ve been working a lot with machine learning to do data analysis for years. So my co-host on the show and partner at Trust Insights, Christopher Penn, had long been using machine learning to measure PR and advertising results. Doing statistical models to prove like, okay, what’s actually working in your branding and your advertising? These things that you can’t easily measure with clicks. And so that has been an area where we were able to kind of provide some value and insight that nobody else could get. But then really, I don’t know, about a year and a half ago when generative AI became the hottest thing going on all fronts for marketing, the amount of interest in that has just exploded.

So yeah, we have a bunch of fronts that we’re applying the technology and it’s just amazing to see the range of how marketers adapt. There’s still plenty of marketers that don’t want to look at it and have their head in the sand, and all the way up to, we have clients that are like, “Hey, we want to reimagine our entire business because we think it’s going to be something completely different in the next five years.”

So yeah, we spent a lot of time thinking about where this stuff is going to go, and it’s amazing how… And literally we have, Christopher works full time on monitoring this space and seeing what’s new and what’s coming next, because it’s just insane when you look at the fact that we’ve had six major models this year. There’s never been a time in tech history where you have six major products show up at once. So, yeah, everything is changing and it’s just a challenge to keep track of what’s happening this week.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I remember not that long ago, thinking how long in the tooth we’ve been working in tech, when I heard some statistic of, today we’ll create more content than was ever previously created in human history. So now with AI, are we exponentially creating more? Are we creating better content? Is that the converse… I always dig into like, what’s that next layer down? Are we really caring about creating better content with AI or are we just creating more content with AI?

John Wall:

Right. Well, of course, marketers ruin everything, right?

Mike Gerholdt:

Right.

John Wall:

This is nothing new. Yeah, there’s a whole army of people that are taking their stuff that was pretty crappy and now we have an exponential amount of pretty crappy stuff out there. So yeah, and it’s going to be really weird to see how all this goes because it’s the classic antivirus defense too. It’s, as soon as people are creating exponentially more junk, all of the search engines or AI powered search engines are adding defenses to pull all that stuff back out. So it’s just this never ending battle and yeah, the level of content, I don’t know, it’s so much so that we’re going to burn more electricity in the next year than the power of the sun. I mean, it’s just insane how this is all changing.

Mike Gerholdt:

But we’ll have better copy for our websites.

John Wall:

Right, you’ll have a better landing page. It’s going to convert for you. But then we do see, as with everything, right? There’s people that are using the technology to automate the foolishness of the past, we have electronic yellow pages being created. But at the other end, there’s people who are using these tools in totally brand new and novel ways to get some insight that they’ve never had before, or automate things that used to be just insanely difficult to automate, and yeah, go to new places and create advantage. So there are ways to win and yeah, there’s going to be a ton of things that we never even expected that will change everything for us.

Mike Gerholdt:

I mean, the biggest thing before AI, the wave of AI hit, the biggest thing we were dealing with was data lakes and these massive data volumes. And I think even marketers were dealing with that too, because you have people going to their website and they’re unauthenticated and we’re assigning a profile to them. How do we dig through when you’ve got millions of impressions on a page? What was that journey of that person? How did they actually get to the pair of shoes that they bought? Now with AI, are we getting smarter at doing that? Is that kind of the data that we’re digging into?

John Wall:

Yeah, absolutely. And so yeah, when you look back, step back and look at the landscape. Generation, we consider that one of only six different options to use AI for to help get you places. And two of them extraction and summarization, that’s just what you’re talking about. It’s like to finally be able to have all of these different data sources all over the place, load them up into a system and have it do the heavy lifting of, okay, find the commonalities between these things.

And yet it’s just, we had been promising this for decades, this idea that when people in marketing talk about personas, that’s just because four people in a conference room came up with cute nicknames and an idea of who these people should be. They’re like, oh yeah, Sally Shopper and George Weekend Warrior, or whatever. But now you can get actual summarizations based on the data itself. And you actually know that, okay, we do see that 40% of the buyers look like this, and they have these things in common, and it’s all based on statistics, none of it’s based on gut. So yeah, those kinds of insights are really interesting.

And we’ve actually been pushing another level. You can go ahead and create these profiles of who these people are, but then use those profiles to train the large language models. So now that you can actually treat that as a customer on demand that you can survey and ask questions to, instead of emailing everybody with every purchase of $0.35 to ask for feedback on what’s going on, you just go to the large language model and say, “Hey, here’s the next four marketing campaigns. Tell us what you think about those and does this resonate with you?” And you can get similar insight but not cause as much trouble and not have to wait.

Mike Gerholdt:

You mentioned six, I think you gave us one or two. What were the other four?

John Wall:

Yeah, so obviously generative AI, you’ve got generation, we just talked about extraction and summarization. The other three, rewriting, which is just something that can easily raise your productivity, right? If you’re somebody who’s having to, okay, I wrote this white paper for the construction industry. I want to write about the same kind of stuff for the food service industry. Rewriting is very easy and instant for generative AI to do.

Classification is another use case. We see this a lot where people that have multiple products, they don’t know how they fit in together, or even if you just have large amounts of data. A good example is for a call center, you’ve got 30,000 calls a month. To have AI transcribe those and go through and find the 20 features that you should fix to make 10% of your calls go away. That kind of stuff is a huge benefit, huge lift.

And then out of the six, yeah, the last is just question answering. You can really get better insight into topics than search engine results by asking AI to not only give you the answer, but explain how it got there and educate you on, what do you need to know to kind of understand the space a little bit more.

Mike Gerholdt:

And I think we’re seeing, I mean, from the Salesforce side, we’re showing a lot of use cases and we have a lot of customers that are standing up agents on public facing sites. Are you seeing that more and more as a trend for marketers to work with? I think one of the things, as I say this, one of the stereotypes that most marketing falls into is, how do we drive more sales? But I think a lot of marketers are also, how do we divert service cases as well and drive sales through service? Are you seeing agents on public-facing websites as something marketers are paying attention to for that?

John Wall:

Yeah. I mean, everybody wants that, right? And unfortunately, we’ve all seen this cycle. This happens where there’s the board meeting and the board is saying, “Hey, we got to get onto this,” and so now somebody’s like, okay, I need to get me one of these shiny object things. And unfortunately, it’s mostly disaster-ville, right? We were seeing these things of people hooking up a chatbot or whatever, and it’s starting to just spout off lies and crazy answers and it just becomes a train wreck. So yeah, that is one thing that’s going to be huge over the next couple of years. The idea of, okay, yeah, you’ve got these bots or these agents, but which ones are enterprise-ready? There’s a huge difference between something that’s been vetted and tested.

For most of our clients we’re saying, no, you need to have a human in the loop. A great… The use case that you just talked about would be, yeah, have the AI generate the top 2,000 answers for problems that it sees, but then that goes through the product manager for verification to prove that they’re all real. You can’t go live with that, but yeah, there’s definitely going to be a lot of, unfortunately, we’re going to see a lot of scary news as people pull the trigger on something that goes awry.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, that’s kind of like we saw like the, we’re not ready for the self-driving cars. We’ve seen that in San Francisco, but they still have somebody in the passenger seat or in the driver’s seat just in case. The human in the loop.

John Wall:

Right, and that’s always been, even you look back in history and it’s like, yeah, escalators and elevators. There used to be people that was their job just to make sure that nothing went wrong.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, and of course not to be predictive, but I don’t know the last time I rode an elevator where there was a person there to press the buttons for me.

John Wall:

Right, exactly. And yeah, there are… Well, yeah, it’s just so much of that is the media and the way information gets presented to us as news. It’s like, yeah, okay, these three automated cars got in some kind of weird accident, but we’re not getting the story of all the ridiculous stuff humans did over the past month in cars. That’s just not news for us anymore.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right, contextual. You mentioned at the beginning, sort of the great spectrum of marketers with their head in the sand, all the way to, we want to revolutionize our business. Where do most marketers fall, in terms of thinking with AI, thinking about AI? And where should that be?

John Wall:

Yeah, that’s a great question because it’s really, in a lot of ways this is a retooling for everybody. You have to go back and look at all your processes and figure out which ones apply. And because, and you’ve talked about this in the past, the fact that it’s not about AI showing up and it’s just like the marketing department’s going to get wiped out. What’s going to happen is over time, there’s going to be three or four marketers that have added AI to a bunch of their workflows, things that they’ve hated doing, and so they’ve figured out how to automate them. And those people are going to be exponentially more productive than the folks that are avoiding AI and trying to stay away from it.

So yeah, where people should be. The big thing is you have to be curious. It’s just like with every other major tech change. Go start playing around with something and see what you can make it do and what kind of results you can get out of it. Because at this stage of it, you’re going to find these really crazy things. You’re like, oh man, I never thought that I could use that to come up with an intelligent email address predictor. Every sales and marketing person has this where they’re like, oh, I have to get in touch with this person and they haven’t put their email up on the social networks that I normally follow. And so getting some suggestions to do that kind of stuff.

And the other one is, yeah, so much of marketing is combing through spreadsheets and trying to prove results or manage copy and things like that. So much of that stuff can be automated and give you hours back in your day. So yeah, it’s a matter of having… Be bold, play around and kind of see what you can break.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I think back to, and I’ve tried to look this up, but I’ve heard the story of in the late-1800s, I forget who it was. I want to say Thomas Jefferson but that’s probably not right, writing a letter to the US patent office saying, “You can shut down because everything that’s been invented has been invented.” And correlating that to, we can’t let cars happen in the world because they’ll put wagon wheel manufacturers out of business. And the labor force of wagon wheel manufacturers, it’ll be devastating to the economy that all these wagon wheel manufacturers will go out of business. And I think back to, well, they just didn’t understand. If you’re a wagon wheel manufacturer, you’re just really good at making things with wood. And if cars come around, then make things with wood for the car, as opposed to making wagon wheels.

And I feel like we’re in that age now where people are, if AI comes out, AI’s going to take my job. AI can generate an image, there’s no more graphic designers. No. Have you seen AI’s images? Graphic designers are going to be around for a while, but there will be a point where I feel we’re riding on the elevator where it’ll be pretty good, but the really good stuff will be the boutique stuff. And you think about it now, probably what, 90% of the furniture in your home probably was made by a robot. I mean, it’s slapped together really good, but the craftsmen, the people that know how to make that stuff, they’re still in high demand. There’s just a smaller labor force of them.

John Wall:

Yeah, right, and that’s the, we see this all the time, is the expert tools versus tools for experts, right?

Mike Gerholdt:

Right.

John Wall:

The idea that the tool is just going to do all the things for me. But yeah, no, the real neat, interesting stuff, like you said, the master woodworker who doesn’t have to deal with all of the paper instructions and measuring things. They can just work on picking the right wood and thinking about the design of the furniture itself, rather than the more mundane tasks. And yeah, that’s where things are going to… And you hit another great point of freeing resources up. I mean, yeah, okay, the big one is stock photo. Stock photo takes a huge hit if people are able to generate and just kind of get images that they want. But now it’s the thing of, okay, all these companies that really had a hard time having quality graphics and images on their website, what happens if they finally have the ability to create a better website and be able to kind of do more with less? What kind of lift can they see from that?

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. So I’ll ask a big question. Does AI make us better?

John Wall:

Well, it’s like any tech tool, right? That’s the problem. It can make us better and it can make us worse. It’s all about whose hands is it in and what are they trying to do with it and where are they trying to go? But it is weird in that it, again, tech, it makes everything faster and bigger and accelerating. And unfortunately, our kind of caveman brains are already having enough difficulty handling the speed and volume of everything that’s going on around us in the world. So yeah, it’s going to get a little bit wonky and weird, and the idea of me even trying to predict something is kind of silly.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Well, I think that’s the hardest part of it is, great tech appears as magic. Right? Isn’t that the saying? And we’re getting to the point now where we can’t tell magic from great tech. So, I guess that’s always where we’re going, but we’re always trying to out-invent ourselves. You know?

John Wall:

Yeah, and ultimately, it just comes down to the good news is, okay, what are people actually willing to pay for? I mean, we can do a lot of weird and crazy stuff, but what’s actually going to find something that fits? And that’s funny, that’s something that’s kind of evolved over the past 10 years too, is that we’d always thought about sales as kind of guiding people to your thing and moving the river to go in your direction. But really what we’re seeing is that business is more about, what is the existing system already there and how do we move our business so that we can get in front of whatever’s coming next and where to go? And so that idea of being able to strategically see what’s coming next and already be there waiting for the customers as they show up with the money, that’s a different approach and kind of changes everything for sales and marketing. Right? It’s not about just banging the drum, it’s more about listening ahead and figuring out where to be.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, and that’s the part that I think all of this and we’ve never touched on, is the economics of AI, right? So we’re approaching all of this now because almost everything has some sort of freemium model, which means we’re the product. And it’s free because they need our data, they need our prompts, they need to be able to comb the internet. They need to be able to read our blog post and our white papers. But when they don’t need that anymore, then what is the economics of AI? Will there quickly become a have and have-nots layer? Because the have-nots can’t afford the AI, because there is a cost to it now.

John Wall:

Yeah, that is a gigantic question that I think is just underappreciated, is the fact that AI has taken all the oxygen out of the room as far as VC. And we normally would kind of see money being sprinkled across a whole bunch of places, but everybody is just putting all their chips on this and it’s, yeah, the-

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, everybody wants to have the iPod. They want to be the one that invested in the Facebook and the one that wins.

John Wall:

Right, yeah, yeah. Everybody is going for the top. But I can’t think of a period of time where we’re getting more powerful, free stuff than ever before.

Mike Gerholdt:

True.

John Wall:

And so, yeah, yeah, there’s huge questions as far as like, okay, when this shakes out and suddenly maybe there’s three winners or one winner or whatever, how does that change? Yeah, unfortunately, marketing again, has a horrible track record for like, yeah, it’s great and free at the beginning, but then once it starts getting tuned for ads and traffic, yeah, it gets expensive fast, and a lot of people get left behind.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. I mean, that was just as you were answering that, that was something I was thinking of is, at some point, and I suppose we thought about this with social networks too, at some point they’re going to start charging. And we didn’t think that day would come, and I actually thought the model would be very different. Now, the social networks charge to verify you’re a human, which I wouldn’t have expected. We thought everything on social would go to a subscription price. We’re seeing AI be subscription price early on, but I don’t even know if in five years AILB subscription price, because there could be a completely different cost model to it because of, I don’t know, right? Could you have predicted that Facebook is going to charge you to become a verified Facebook user, as opposed to a monthly subscription, which was the traditional magazine model?

John Wall:

Yeah, that’s a turn that is bizarre. And I don’t know, part of me too is still hoping one day we get to that point where it’s more about verified users. Because when you get back to all these platforms, the problem is, they do violate the laws of communication. Right? Anybody can go on any platform and just say whatever they want and it can be unchallenged. Whereas for all of human history prior to that, if you were talking some crazy stuff, there was instant ramifications, whether it was somebody throwing a tomato at you or whatever, but there were repercussions for this. And so we see this as a crisis to entrust across the board in all institutions and yeah, I kind of think at some point somebody’s going to get the bright idea that by verifying who’s real and what’s fake and what’s not in anybody’s best interest, when that stuff gets filtered, how does that make it different? But I [inaudible 00:24:35], I thought that that would’ve happened a long time ago and it’s not here yet, so I don’t know. Can it even happen?

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, selfishly, I know I’ve had a friend have a YouTube video of his transcribed and turned into three online magazine articles, all without his consent. And then posted to Facebook via a bot, and the bot 100% had an AI-generated profile image. So, I’d be afraid. Yeah, verified users, that would be.

John Wall:

Yeah, it would be.

Mike Gerholdt:

It’s like when you get pulled over by the police, you have to hand them your ID. We need some sort of digital ID for that.

John Wall:

Yeah, that use case that you’ve described as crazy when you think about it, right? Because that’s playing under old SEO rules. Somebody’s thinking like, oh, I’m going to get in three or four more different channels and I’m going to take that traffic. And the reality is, all the search engines now, the first five things they’re throwing up are their own internally-generated AI. Organic traffic just continues to crater.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, yeah. Well, especially when you take other people’s stuff and you duplicate it, at least they’re not rewarding that bad behavior.

John Wall:

Yeah, right.

Mike Gerholdt:

John, it was great having you on the podcast. I’m sorry it took so long, but I promise I’ve not stopped drinking coffee since then, nor will I ever, usually.

John Wall:

That sounds great. Yeah, no, it’s good to be back. We haven’t had a chance to hang out at Dreamforce like I used to do all the time, so it’s good to catch up.

Mike Gerholdt:

I know, but there is still the Dreamforce Marathon. I don’t even know what people are wearing now for wearables. You remember, it used to be Fitbits, and-

John Wall:

Oh, yeah. Right, yeah, yeah-

Mike Gerholdt:

I mean, we were all Fitbits and everybody had that, and it was the Dreamforce Marathon. I think, to be fair because I am Salesforce, we did hear that. And there has been a very long look at, how do we not necessarily keep people in the same space, but reduce the amount of-

John Wall:

Yeah, [inaudible 00:26:35]-

Mike Gerholdt:

… the 30-mile across San Francisco. Because it can be banned, there’s a few of them hills that you just look at and be like, yep, I’m just going to stay at the bottom.

John Wall:

Always a fan. I just get the cable car pass for the week and take care of that.

Mike Gerholdt:

There you go, there you go. Well, it was great having you on. I promise to have you back on sooner, because I’m sure we’re going to have more AI to talk about as it’s ever evolving so quickly.

John Wall:

Yeah, yeah. Hopefully it’ll still be us and not just avatars of us having to do it for us.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, that’ll be fine too. We’ll see. Maybe people won’t know the difference, and then you and I can be riding a cable car in San Francisco.

John Wall:

Right, right, as they’re watching the video of me with my third arm wave.

Mike Gerholdt:

Don’t forget your sixth finger. It always gets the fingers wrong too.

Huge thanks to John for joining us and bringing his insights on AI marketing trends and why curiosity is your greatest asset right now. I know I’m always curious to hear his podcast, Marketing Over Coffee. And it being summer, I like to listen to it while I’m on my yard. That’s just how I listen the podcast. How do you listen to this podcast, mowing and walking the dog? I’d love to know. Shoot me a message on social somewhere.

If this episode got you thinking or questioning some AI landing pages, hey, as an admin, time to meet with your fellow marketing peer and learn more about what we can do with Agentforce and everything else. Until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.

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