In our tech-powered world, technology marketers cannot afford to lose sight of client trust. And yet, they do.
On this episode of the Marketing Vanguard podcast, Ariel Kelman, president and CMO of Salesforce, reveals why customer success storytelling matters more than ever, how to ground AI in trusted first-party data, and the key strategies for balancing AI automation with human creativity.
What you’ll learn:
- How to ground AI agents in customer data to drive measurable outcomes
- Why CMO leadership must pioneer AI adoption before mandating it across teams
- AI’s productivity paradox: Why it enables both more output alongside better work-life balance
- How to position your brand’s trust as a competitive moat in the AI era
- The framework for balancing centralized brand strategy with decentralized field execution
- Why “show, don’t tell” beats feature-focused marketing when launching complex products
Ariel Kelman is the president and CMO of Salesforce, leading global marketing strategy across one of the enterprise software industry’s most diverse and expansive product portfolios. With a background spanning product management, startup leadership and tenures at AWS and Oracle, Ariel brings two decades of expertise in B2B tech marketing, customer success positioning and AI-driven business transformation.
His work at Salesforce—from pioneering early SaaS adoption strategies to spearheading the AgentForce platform launch—has shaped how enterprise organizations approach AI implementation and customer engagement at scale, making his POV essential for CMOs navigating the intersection of brand, demand generation, and artificial intelligence.
Episode Highlights:
[12:54] How Show, Don’t Tell Cuts Through AI Hype — Ariel highlights that, in crowded AI markets, letting proven customers tell stories is exponentially more credible than marketing claims about platform superiority, speeds, or power — a lesson Salesforce operationalized through AgentForce City at Dreamforce. Rather than explaining technical specifications, Salesforce constructed an interactive village where attendees walked into real customer implementations: Williams Sonoma using AI agents for shopping, and so on.
This “show, don’t tell” approach succeeds because decades of tech industry overpromising have made B2B buyers deeply skeptical; only peer proof shifts perception and preference. This strategy transforms marketing from persuasion to evidence-gathering, dramatically shortening sales cycles and improving win rates.
[21:50] Leadership Must Try AI Before Expecting Their Team To — Ariel identifies the biggest barrier to AI adoption in marketing organizations as psychological resistance to change, not technological capability. Assigning teams to “find one AI efficiency initiative” fails because it ignores change aversion; instead, executive leaders must become visible pioneers, experimenting with tools themselves and sharing results transparently with their organizations.
