Building an AI-First Marketing Mindset with Ryan Gavin, CMO at Slack | Ep. 348

0:01Welcome to the marketing millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray. And join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the up. What is up, Brian? Welcome to the Mark Millenials Podcast. Hey, thanks, Daniel. It's awesome to be here. I appreciate you making some time. Could you give a little background who you are? So just to set up the conversation for today. I'm middle management overhead, brother. I am the CMO for Slack. I've been at Slack now for about a year and a half.

0:51I've been, you can see all the great hairs. I've been around the industry for a while. I worked for about 20 years at Microsoft, worked at AWS, where I helped build out the machine learning and AI practice there. And then I went to startup land, which is incredible. I was in the supply chain industry, kind of transforming trucking. Did that for about four and a half years as the chief growth officer. And then, yeah, as I said, about a year and a half We've joined Slack as part of Salesforce to really take Slack to the next level. It's been awesome. I don't really see the gray hairs he's talking about, but you can claim it.

1:27You can claim it. We'll have to rename the podcast the Gen X podcast. I want to get into, you are really in the front lines of AI and work right now. So what is one thing you think marketers still get wrong about using AI in the day to day? Oh, man. How much time do we have on this podcast? It's hard to say get wrong. I think you're just going to start with the understanding that work's going to change more in the next five years than it has in the last 25. Almost undoubtedly. Some things may stay the same, but it's going to fundamentally shift. And so every marketer, in fact, every person inside of every organization, really not just marketing, you kind of need to come in to your job with like a beginner's mindset.

2:20It's a bit of a cliche phrase, but you got to think about what would this job or what would this task look like if I was to start this company today in the age of AI? And what would I do differently? So if you are, you know, working in email automation or you are working in, you know, like product led growth or, you know, you know, trying to optimize a conversion funnel or whatever it could be. How would you do it differently if you had just one person and a whole host of AI tools? And what would your process be and how would you go about it? And if you're not kind of starting all the things that you do with that kind of open-ended question and asking like, all right, how do I rethink this entirely in the age of AI and the age of agents, you really are behind.

3:10And there's really no nice way to say it because it is going to change that quickly. And those leaders and those marketers are going to embrace the latest tools and capabilities are going to just far outstrip those who aren't. and it's you know it's changed and sometimes change is a little bit scary you know everyone approaches AI with a different mindset you know we've done research where there's people who you know think of AI as like wow this is these superpowers of tools I'm so excited to go use them and there's others on the other side of the spectrum that have like is it okay to use these tools I don't want to tell people I'm using it feels like I'm cheating so I kind of like hide that I use it and there's some people who are really nervous and scared to use it and don't want to use these tools.

3:52And so, you know, everyone kind of approaches it with their own starting point. But it is going to be pretty transformative. And there's a lot of transformation that, you know, has to happen in the marketing space that we're barely scratching the surface of. I think that you make a good point of like where people are, because they are a different point of views out there where some people think if you're using AI for certain things, you're you're being you're not doing your job as a marketer you're not doing your job or um you're being lazy at work because you're using something else um but i would argue it's productivity instead of laziness you're doing more with your time um if you're doing it straight out without using any of your brain power and strategy and experience then maybe the argument would come into that um but yeah i totally i mean i think the thing i was thinking i was talking to some of the other day and um it at slack we have this uh salesforce has this incredible platform called asian force and so we have uh all these agents that we get deploy for employees and they get to kind of use these agents to augment their productivity and one of the things i was i was kind of you know thinking about is like we've had all this explosion of tools over the last you know 20 years like just think about the number of new like applications and sas tools that have launched the space it's not like anyone's going home any earlier.

5:14Like we're still filling up the day with work. The question is just you're getting more done. Ideally, you're doing higher value work. Ideally, that work is having greater return for the business. But it's not like anyone's like, hey, cool, it's a three-day work week now. You know, that doesn't exist. So we're all being asked to do more. And unless we're kind of embracing some of these tools, it's going to be really, really hard to keep up because the compression algorithm is doing what it always has done, which is expect more for less. What is a few ways your marketing team at Slack uses AI to get done more with less?

5:53Yeah, I mean, we feel pretty blessed, honestly. I mean, I'll tell you a couple examples. One, my personal example. So when I joined Slack, I'm sure many of your listeners, a lot of folks, you know, you join a new company. And you're learning the culture, you're learning all the new tools and processes, you're learning the people and all this kind of stuff. And that learning curve is kind of daunting anytime you've taken a new job. And, you know, you know, whatever, I'm a middle management executive, whatever. So I have all these people who are like, hey, we're going to help you and we're going to create documents for you and all this kind of wonderful stuff.

6:29My number one onboarding tool when I joined Slack and Salesforce, number one, without a doubt, was Slack AI, which was. Because so Slack AI basically allows, so if your listeners aren't familiar with Slack, Slack is this incredible kind of work operating system collaboration tool that allows organizations to really kind of orchestrate all their work. But one of the most amazing things about it is it also stores your company's long-term memory. So you think about, you know, Slack's been around for greater than 10 years. all the conversations that have happened while the company was building all the conversations that happened when it was having its first customer meetings all the conversations that have happened since you know strategy reviews etc all those live in slack and those conversations because the way slack is architected i have permissions to all the public ones so if you create a channel in slack there's permissions you can set and some of them are public means everyone can have access to and some of them are private meaning a set of people and i have access as those public ones as well as some of the private ones.

7:30Well, previously, those conversations were kind of like just trapped. Like they happened, they went away, and then you never really see them again and you never hear from them again. Well, what happened with Slack AI is we're able to query those conversations. So myself as a new employee coming in, someone would be talking about something I have no idea what they're talking about. I could just quietly rock up to Slack AI and ask it a natural language question. Like an example is one is Salesforce uses this thing called the V2 Mom, which is a way of our setting our vision and our values and the measures and methods of our goals for the year.

8:01And someone said it like on my first day, I was like, I have no clue what you're talking about. So I just go up like, what's a V2 mom? And there I get this full rich answer. I also could go do things like, hey, you know, the founder of Slack was kind of Stuart Butterfield. I could ask Slack of like, hey, show me the original presentation Stuart did to the first set of customers. And what was the original visions like he had for Slack? because all those conversations are there. That long-term memory exists. And I could query it. I was rocking up to Slack AI like 10, 12 times a day just to get insights and understand.

8:34And it was this amazing treasure trove of insights. And those are the types of things where it's one example of AI able to tap into this long-term memory of a company, which has previously really just sat there and been idle. So that's one example. I could give you like 50 others. We do a ton with agents in Slack, which is basically how every single employee gets their own workforce. And that's pretty darn cool. I'm happy to talk more about that as well. Yeah. I mean, first you want to describe for the people who don't know, if someone says I'm using AI versus using an AI agent, what the two differences?

9:12And then what are some cool use cases that people should be thinking about using for agentic AI? Yeah. I mean, it's a great clarification. So, you know, AI obviously gets thrown around. It's like the, it's the drinking game du jour. So, uh, every time someone says you have to take a shot kind of thing. Um, uh, I don't know. It's 8am here, so I don't expect you to be doing that, Daniel, but if you want to, if you want to, I'm just saying it might be fun. It might spice up the podcast. I, you know, so you think about like AI capabilities broadly, where it can be doing anything from, you know, what you see inside of, you know, ChetGPT or Gemini, or, you know, here are suggestions for your writing, or I'm going to summarize this podcast, or I'm going to create a podcast for you.

9:55So these broad applications of AIs. What happens with agents and where agents get really powerful, and there's really kind of a couple elements of it, is agents can then go beyond the AI insights, and then they can really start to take action on your behalf. And what makes agents really powerful is I can then deploy an agent. Let's say what we do inside of Slack with AgentForce is we deploy agents that have specific tasks and skills just like teammates. So an example being we have an engineering agent that we built here at Salesforce. One of the challenges that happens at a big company at scale is we roll out all these products.

10:35And all these products have lots of technical depth and details to them. And as our sellers go out and sell them, they're working with customers or our customer success teams are working. They'll have questions about implementation details, et cetera. And typically, those questions would go back to a Slack channel, and we'd have a bunch of expensive, in reality, engineers who would help our customer success and our sales teams answer those questions and then help them take action on it. Well, we built this engineering agent, and this engineering agent was then wired up with all the knowledge of all of our knowledge bases, all of the details of these products, all the past history of questions that we've answered on these topics.

11:15and this engineering agent and we deployed it inside of a slack channel so now when a sales uh sales leader or customer success team is going and they have a question on the product they go into and this engineering agent is the one that's actually answering the question and i honestly sit there you watch it in slack it's an unbelievable thing to watch because you're like holy crap this is working uh and what happened is like in like six months this thing had to answer like over 18 000 questions the success rate in terms of being able to answer them was like a 76 % accuracy, meaning like it was able to ask, you know, the question was asked and answered and like closed out.

11:48It didn't need to be handed off to a human. And then you can kind of even go beyond. These agents can then take actions and say, hey, great. I see you've answered that question. Now, can you actually create me a Canvas doc that can summarize this for my customer and summarize the next step the customer needs to take? So the agent now has the autonomy to go and take that action on your behalf and is now doing that work for you. You can go to bed, go get a cup of coffee or whatever. or the agent does the work, then you're ready to rock and roll with the customer. So these agents become incredibly powerful.

12:17I mean, this one example, I just gave you the engineering agent. You know, we saw it save over like a quarter of a million of engineering hours, like a quarter of a million. And then, you know, we projected, if we built that out across all the different topics that we have, it would be like 20 million or$20 million hours saved. We deployed that agent across, you know, a dozen different channels. We're going to deploy it about across 700 million channels And literally, the projection is it's$20 million of engineering hours saved. And there's not a lot of$20 million ideas just walking around inside of companies.

12:51And so these are the types of things that we're seeing inside of Slack that we're doing as part of Salesforce that every customer out there is thinking about. And we're working with some really cool ones that are doing the exact same type of stuff. I want to also ask you, I know you said you use Slack AI to query past conversations. so you can stay up conversations and meetings and have the history and be able to create more alignment in the team. But what are some things that if you were talking to other marketing leaders, what would you suggest they should use in their day-to-day to make them more productive as a marketing leader?

13:32Or the other question is how would you suggest them empower their team to use AI in a more efficient way? Well, yeah, I mean, that's another one where, I mean, there's so many incredible tools out there that you can be looking at. You know, our team recently redid, like, you know, we have an email system. Our team recently kind of redid all of our email stack, essentially kind of with an AI first mindset, like I was talking about a little bit earlier, to go through and think about not only just who we send emails to, the copy that we use, how do we optimize the timing? all that kind of stuff. And you can go back and take something as simple and as antiquated.

14:18I kind of hate email, honestly. But we still have to send them. You can take something as antiquated as sending emails and you can go through and really go and build out a full optimization. And despite all the work that's been done in something like email optimization over the last 10 years, there's still way more that can happen and AI actually takes it to a whole other level. So we're seeing incredible results with that. The other one, maybe on the other end of the spectrum, that's a little bit more out there is how do you start to reimagine your customer experience in an agent first world?

14:53And what I mean by that is what happens in the world where no one's ever going to go to your website anymore? Like there's going to be an agent first internet. And like there's estimates out there. There's a Mary Meeker report that I read recently. it talked about this idea of like, you know, there's a billion people who are about to go over the next, you know, five, 10 years, whatever it is, and experience products and experience without ever going to your website or whatever going to any content that you've created, like it's all going to be behind agents. And so what does a website look like that's agent first, or where the interactions and experiences someone's having with your brand are all through an LLM.

15:33and then they're making a decision to purchase based off of all that information we're seeing that right now inside of slack it's it's one of the interesting trends you know you know you marketers talk about seo and all the you know funnel optimization and bringing people in blah blah blah the reality is people are doing more of their research in chat gbt and gemini and anthropic and all these other tools and then they're coming straight in and they're ready to sign up for slack and so like the traditional optimization of how do you get someone to your website and then click on this button and move through that, like all that's getting, you know, um, passed through.

16:08And, and so what would your website look like if it was just agent-based and, you know, started with a search-based experience that was conversational? That's a lot of what we, we, um, we do inside of Slack is, you know, you start with like a conversational first experience. Um, so, you know, there's two ends of the spectrum. Like one is like the traditional, the T's and C's of marketing and all the wonderful stuff that people do. And how do you re-imagine that with all the AI tools and capabilities. And then the other one is like, hey, how do you get ahead of where the puck's going and really think about a totally different experience on some of the things that have been pretty fundamental for the last two decades?

16:42I don't know. Does that make any sense, Daniel? No, it makes total sense because, for example, I bet you a lot of marketers out there are searching what is the best productivity tool for a marketing team to chat with their like internally and probably slack was probably coming up there and then they go deeper like what is slack and they're asking they don't even like going on google to search that um they're going they're just having conversation i mean i do it all the time just to see what conversation like what pops up to stay ahead just to say like and then what i do is like reverse engineer and saying like what sources are they tracking back to to see what websites are they querying yeah totally that's a question i had for you is like so if you like work backwards from like all those people who are um searching slack in these tools what are some ways you are thinking are helping you show up more in traditional like all these ai chats yeah i mean there's there's you know everything from some of the traditional elements of like, you know, what is the, are you adding the right schema to your pages?

17:59Are you, are you doing the right indexing your pages? Some of like the, you know, what I'll call like really, really good traditional SEO work, but there's also, there's a lot of companies out there now and, you know, a lot of good research you can go read of like, what does an LLM look for that's different than, you know, traditional, you know, Google search engines or, you know, Microsoft search engines. And, you know, there you're really getting into longer form descriptive content. You're getting into places where like you've got better built out answers and you've got that index really, really well.

18:34And you can go and build out that content set that is going to be more appealing and for an LLM that's looking for for the next best word and the next best answer. And so you really have to kind of get into this like next wave of like, what is the LLMs looking for and how do you optimize for? And the reality, anyone's lying if it says it's not a bit of a black box. It's a total black box. Like there's no formula thing. Like these LLMs are evolving every single day. No one can tell you exactly why it picked what it picked, but you can look at the patterns and practices and you can go and try to optimize for those patterns.

19:09But that's kind of the game that you have to kind of be in nowadays, particularly as web traffic is going to most likely continue to drop in favor of kind of where things are moving with LLMs. The other one, just to kind of jog my memory a little bit on the big one that I'm seeing where a lot of customers are leaning in or marketers are leaning in is kind of the age-old challenge of, hey, I generate all of these leads and I generate all of this marketing opportunities and my sellers never follow up on them. Probably one of the biggest areas I'm seeing customers deploying things like Agent Force is on this lead routing, lead optimization.

19:51where you can go through like Box, I think has like a, you know, did a bunch of work with Box and Agent Force, and they did like a 500 % improvement in like their lead optimization. And you just get far better signals on what are quality leads. And then you can do a lot of the qualification work with agents before it actually gets to the sellers. And that becomes pretty powerful as well. Like basically the SDR role gets replaced with agents in many cases, and that that becomes far more effective yeah i remember back like i mean even just like 10 years ago where like our lead routing formulas were all in google sheets and they took like weeks and weeks to like like optimize based on new data that you had to pull into like a google sheet or excel and then have to like feed it back in to keep changing but now like you could just feed these things into ai and it does it in like two like five minutes for you which is like which would took you three four weeks um 10 years ago which is crazy to think about i was just talking to an anthropic they they have a like a deal desk where they deployed agents working with humans and they increased like their deal desk velocity but like 60 with like agent force and agents like it's it's um it really is nuts how how fast you can move on some of this stuff now yeah i mean one thing i also think is which I think is an advantage for like companies that have been storing data is like, how are you using these like past internal, basically like first party data or like first party, like content that you have created for the last 10 years.

21:32And then deploying that now as like content for your customers, because back in the day, you would have to like sift through all these conversations you've had with customers, these Salesforce records, Slack conversations, whatever you've had with group conversations you've had with customers. And it took hours to sit through just to make a testimonial or case study or anything. But now, what are some things you're using it for, like internal Slack things that you've built up knowledge bases to deploy for marketing material now? Yeah, I mean, it's not exactly what you're poking on, but it kind of triggers for me a little bit.

22:17There's one of the, you know, again, really cool uses of AI, again, is there's so much knowledge that's trapped in these conversations. Like conversations are context and context matters. So, you know, we have Slack channels for everything, obviously, at Slack. And we've got all these account channels for all the teams that are, you know, working with IBM or EasyCater or Slalom or whatever it is. and you think about all those conversations are happening in those channels and there's tons and tons and tons of context in those channels well one of the things we've done is we've also taken all that conversational context and we've connected it to what's you know considered structured data so look at like the data that actually sits in this crm and we brought that into slack with a new capability called salesforce channels where it's basically bringing all those opportunity records all those contacts you know where's the deal at where's the process with all the conversations that are happening, you know, hey, we're getting ready for this meeting, how do we prep for it, etc.

23:12And now with AI, you can go through and you can look at all that and say, cool, agent, you know, sales agent, which we have, generate for me a customer brief that is ready to go for this meeting. So when I'm, you know, getting asked to go meet with a customer, etc. The past process oftentimes would be, hey, some account team member or many account team members are going to spend four or five hours creating a briefing doc for me. Here's everything you need to know. Here's what the account's up to. So now with like with AI, with these sales agents, we can just point it at the structured data and this unstructured data that all lives inside of Slack and say, create an account brief for Ryan.

23:51Make sure it emphasizes the latest opportunities. Make sure it gives an overview of what's going on with the executives. And please give them a summarization of the account history from the last three years. Boom. like i get this beautiful canvas in slack it's ready to go no one had to spend any time working on it agent did all the work and then honestly you know and no offense to all my lovely sales teams it's way better than the briefing docs that i used to get from the sellers so that is an example you talked about more like customer evidence and stuff like that but that same thing that same applies to customer evidence you can just roll that out yeah it's all this context that you've missed for a long time like um when you ask like sellers sellers are not going to be able to like remember every conversation for the last three years or um but that also makes me a point like what are what are some things that inside because some of these things are as good as how people enter it into their crm or the questions they ask in the conversations with the the customers because if you ask bad questions or you don't get enough information or you put bad data into sales flows it's just it could be spitting out things that are and it's not like anybody's fault but it could be spitting out things that are going to lead you down the wrong path so what are some ways now that are you like are you encouraging like better questions or better data entry i mean before like i remember we used to have like like rules like you have to enter these fields and we would go like as marketing ops i would have to go audit like did they put enough data into the field and stuff like that which agents probably could do now but like back in the day you had audit like all these records at weekly of like did you put in the right data is this the right information um yeah i feel like daniel you have some scars from that i'm sensing the pain from your past um totally like garbage in garbage out is is is always going to be a challenge.

25:56And, you know, at least in my experience, telling people they have to do something or, you know, putting rules in place only gets you so far and typically just makes people resent it because they're like, I'm actually trying to do my job. And like, why do I need to like, I'm not a data entry person. So the real question is, is how do you make it just brain dead easy for whether it's a marketer or marketing ops person or a seller to share the data that's important and have that data get updated to a system of record. So, you know, in the future, like I've got an agent in Slack and I would say you and I just got out of a customer meeting.

26:34Well, shouldn't I just be able to tell the agent like, Hey, Daniel and I just met with a plative. Um, uh, plative's got an opportunity and they need help on these five things. Uh, I'd like to do a follow-up call with them in three weeks. We think the opportunities may be a million dollars for you know these three products um please make sure that these five people are aware and uh schedule that follow-up call for me done right the crm gets updated the meeting gets scheduled the right people get an email or a note in slack from the agent and like you're on to your next thing versus before i'd sit down and say all right now i'm gonna launch my crm i gotta apply the opportunity then i've got to go into my calendar and set up that meeting.

27:19Now I need to send the follow up notes. Now I send you to send the Slack message to the other people need to be aware. Like that is the, the level of kind of re-imagining with things like Slack and agent force that companies are able to start to go do. Um, and, and I, I picked Played up because I literally, there's a customer that we're working with us doing exactly that. They have agents that they built and deployed in Slack. And basically they think about, all right, we have an account research agent. We've got a call prep agent. We've got a summary agent. and they built all these agents with agent force that say how do we take all the things that when our seller is not selling and have agents go do all that work and you know marketers can go support that and they've cut their like their sales and their their prep time for meetings like in half from all the the work that they previously should to go do and that's all the you know that this time that all can be deployed to generating more value for the company so that make i mean it makes sense i remember like i think the stat i think it was like five years ago that 40 of sales people's times are just like the that manual data entry call scheduling um all that so if you take 40 done by an agent now they're selling 100 of the time i will say 90 of the time because there's some work they have to do but that are outside but like 90 versus like 60 is a huge like productivity jump for a sales rep to be able to sell it's the it's one of the number one reasons why so many customers are come to us with the same story which is hey despite all these tools technologies even the advent of ai over the last several years with where it's really exploded at least work is still broken man like people are still wasting time on like the work of work you know there's stats out there you can read them all over the place like 40 percent of time people are looking spent just looking for stuff like looking for information um people you know context switching is a massive work productivity challenge people are switching between anywhere between like 11 and 13 apps every single day and you think about like all that context switching is lost time and you get distracted you get pulled into something else um and it's one of the reasons why slack has continued to do so well because it really serves as this command center this kind of work operating system where employees are like all right this is where my people are i'm deploying my agents to my people i'm bringing the agents to them i'm not asking people to go someplace else i'm connecting in all my enterprise applications and then i just this is the work hub um and that's how you start to get to this kind of agentic productivity levels that have really escaped us for for quite a while because we are still wasting a lot of time every single day and many many companies are um what are some ways like let's go into slack because i i mean i've used it since it came out in every company so i know like i've been in slack for um so what are like what are like your top three things that um like if you're structuring a marketing team in slack like communication wise or like any type of channel what are top three tips that you would give to a marketing team to do in slack today that will help them be more productive Oh, that's interesting.

30:30I've had my own journey with Slack. I will, just in full transparency, I'll answer your question, but I'll show you how I kind of got there. So, obviously, I was 20 years at Microsoft, so I used Teams and things like that. AWS, when I joined there, had its own solution. It now uses Slack, which is great, but back then it didn't. And then I joined this startup, and I remember that was my first exposure to Slack. and I came in there and I'm all right I'm gonna be the chief growth officer and blah blah blah and getting to slack and I'm like what is this thing and I was like you know all these conversations are going on and and there's all these everyone's just in there and there's emojis flying everywhere and and I was kind of like huh I'm like we're just we're here for like a serious purpose and this this doesn't feel like a serious tool and and and I don't know man and someone's like hey you know we've got the service issue with this customer where we're spinning up a Slack channel.

31:29I'm like, you can't resolve a customer issue in Slack. What are you talking about? This is like important work. And man, I just, I, how little I knew, I knew nothing. I was such an idiot. And so I kind of got exposed and I grew up. I was like, wow. You know, over this course of this four years, I was like, Holy cow, this is like this tool that when you use really, really well is like this ultimate not just orchestration hub, But it's a place where people can bring the company together. It's like a culture builder. You can swarm and bring people in very, very quickly and then disband. And it has this connective tissue because it's built like this consumer-grade software.

32:09It's not built like an enterprise piece of software. It's built for consumers that people actually just generally love. And so I became this fan of Slack for the four years that I was there. And then I got the chance to work and come to Slack. and man i had no clue how little i knew how to use slack before i joined slack the company like i thought i was like hey i'm a power user i use it every day but i had no clue um so you know to answer your question in terms of like how to set things up and tips and tricks i obviously you know we are really really heavy like channels is the backbone for for everything we do so if we're starting a effort initiative, a project planning session, it all starts with a channel.

32:53You know, we really try to not be in a bunch of like multi person messages. Those are like just one off if you need a quick have a conversation with you know, you or a handful of people. But if it's going to be something that's going to be in a longer than a week or two weeks, we spin up a channel. And I or you know, I spend a lot of time organizing my channels, because we have a lot of them, and it can go prioritize them. And then, you know, those channels become the life beat of the organization. And so one of the things that, you know, we see a lot of customers do, we certainly do, is quickly give the channel context.