As someone who’s spent years watching CX professionals wrestle with the impossible balance between personalization and scale, I found myself captivated by what Steve Hammond shared at the Salesforce Agentforce World Tour 2025. Hammond, EVP and GM of Agentforce Marketing, didn’t just describe a product roadmap. He painted a picture of a fundamental shift happening right now in how brands connect with customers, and more importantly, he offered a pragmatic path forward for leaders who feel overwhelmed by the pace of change.
The energy on the show floor was palpable. Marketing leaders weren’t asking if they should adopt AI agents. They were asking how to start, where to begin, and what they could accomplish. That urgency tells you everything you need to know about this moment. But to understand why this shift feels so significant, we need to look at the problem marketers have been trying to solve for the past two decades.
The 20-Year Personalization Problem Finally Has an Answer
For two decades, marketers have chased the same dream: true personalization that makes customers feel genuinely understood. The challenge has always been execution. How do you capture meaningful data and interpret it accurately? How do you create the right content and deliver it at the right moment across multiple channels, all at scale?
Hammond explained that previous approaches forced marketers into educated guessing. “We’ve had different technologies that can do some kind of personalization, but a lot of that is based off of trying to derive based on your click patterns. It’s inferred, it’s derived, it’s kind of forced,” he said.
What makes AI agents fundamentally different is their ability to understand intent directly rather than inferring it from behavior patterns. Large language models can now interpret meaning, tone, and intent directly from customer interactions. Rather than creating hundreds or thousands of content variations and hoping to match them correctly to audience segments, marketers can now break content into atomic elements—libraries of images, copy, and calls to action—and let AI assemble infinite variations dynamically based on individual customer profiles and behaviors.
The Pandora case study Hammond referenced during the keynote demonstrated this perfectly. Instead of manually crafting experiences for each channel, brands can deploy agents that design experiences on the fly across email, web, mobile applications, SMS, and WhatsApp. This dynamic assembly approach solves both the content creation bottleneck and the matching problem that have plagued personalization efforts for years.
Yet even the most sophisticated AI can only be as good as the data it has access to, which brings us to the foundational infrastructure making this transformation possible.
Data 360: The Foundation That Makes Agentic Marketing Possible
When I asked Hammond about the infrastructure enabling this transformation, he pointed to Data 360 as the critical foundation. For AI to make intelligent decisions, it needs a unified view of customer data, even when that data lives across different systems and data lakes.
“What you’re doing with Data 360 is harmonizing a common view of your customer along with other relevant data in order to facilitate optimized decision making for personalization, for AI, for customer experience.”
This zero-copy approach means data can remain in its original locations while AI gains visibility across all sources. That centralized decision-making capability is what allows agents to learn from every channel and continuously improve their understanding of what content works best for individual customers.
Without this unified view, Hammond emphasized, AI struggles to determine whether data is relevant or whether interactions are successful. The fragmentation that has characterized most enterprise data architectures becomes a critical barrier to AI effectiveness. But even with the right infrastructure in place, many organizations still hesitate to deploy AI in customer-facing roles. Understanding why reveals as much about organizational psychology as it does about technology.
The Fear Factor and How Salesforce Addresses It
Despite the excitement Hammond witnessed on the show floor, he acknowledged that fear of the unknown remains the biggest barrier to adoption. Legal concerns, regulatory worries, and the risk of embarrassment or fines keep many organizations from putting AI on their websites.
These concerns aren’t irrational. A single AI misstep that goes viral can damage brand reputation built over decades. The stakes feel impossibly high, particularly for regulated industries or consumer-facing brands with millions of customers.
Salesforce has built comprehensive safety controls to address these concerns. The platform protects customer data by ensuring large language models never access sensitive information or learn from it. LLMs operate with what Hammond called “goldfish memory,” processing queries and then deleting the data immediately. No personally identifiable information passes through the system, and all responses undergo evaluation to prevent insensitive or harmful content from reaching customers.
Beyond data protection, Salesforce enables gradual rollouts. Marketing teams can deploy AI to specific audience segments, starting with just 10% of one audience group, testing results, and scaling up incrementally. This phased approach with built-in guardrails gives organizations the confidence to experiment without risking their brand reputation.
Hammond was quick to point out that these safety measures aren’t just about risk mitigation. They’re about enabling action.
“With these safety controls in place, with the ability to have moderation and control over the ramp up and deployment, these safety nets are there, and it’s really time for companies to start trying more and more of this.”
The implication was clear: the infrastructure exists to protect brands, but hesitation itself has become a competitive liability.
This becomes even more apparent when you look at the traffic patterns Hammond has been observing across the customer base.
The Traffic Shift No One Saw Coming
Hammond shared a striking statistic that should make every CX leader pay attention: companies are now reporting that 10% to 20% of their web traffic comes from AI agents rather than humans clicking through pages. In some cases, that figure reaches 40%.
“The end consumer expectation is a far more curated experience,” Hammond said. “They’re looking for that agent to do the work for them, to discover and look for the patterns they’re asking to find and come back with the answers. If a brand isn’t providing that experience for customers, their customers are going to go to those who are.”
This shift represents a fundamental change in how customers interact with brands. It’s no longer enough to have a well-designed website with good SEO. Brands need to provide experiences that AI agents can navigate and extract value from on behalf of customers.
The competitive implications are significant. Organizations that optimize only for human visitors are missing an increasingly large portion of their audience. Meanwhile, brands that embrace agentic experiences position themselves to capture demand from customers who expect their AI assistants to handle research, comparison, and even purchasing decisions.
This evolution in customer behavior is being reflected in the channels where interactions take place, revealing another important trend in how people want to engage with brands.
Channel Evolution and the Conversational Future
Analyzing patterns from Salesforce’s management of over 2 trillion customer engagements annually, Hammond identified clear trends in channel usage. While email remains stable and delivers the highest conversion rates, brands are increasingly engaging customers through direct conversational channels like WhatsApp and mobile push notifications.
“The brands we talk to all the time are telling us they will never get rid of email because it provides the highest rate of conversion for them. But these emerging channels where we have more of a conversation are very important.”
Salesforce has enabled brands to deploy agents across any channel, ensuring consistent experiences whether customers engage via WhatsApp, SMS, mobile applications, or traditional email. This omnichannel capability means marketing teams don’t have to choose between channels or build separate experiences for each one.
The shift toward conversational channels also reflects changing customer expectations. People increasingly want to interact with brands the same way they communicate with friends and family—through messaging apps that support rich, back-and-forth dialogue rather than one-way broadcasts. AI agents excel in these environments because they can maintain context across multiple exchanges and respond naturally to the conversational flow.
Looking ahead, Hammond sees this trend accelerating as the technology itself evolves to support richer, more immersive interactions.
Adaptive Experiences: The Next 12 Months
When I asked Hammond what excites him most about the near future, he pointed to adaptive experiences, a new feature Salesforce is releasing this month. Current agent interactions tend to be text-heavy and functional but not particularly beautiful. Adaptive experiences will blend agentic capabilities with the visual richness of traditional web experiences.
“Agentic experiences will start to look a lot more like web experiences have in the past, but they’re going to feel like some kind of a blend between a web experience and an agentic experience, it’s far more fluid and dynamic and beautiful.”
Imagine asking an agent to help schedule an appointment and seeing a fully interactive calendar interface appear, or requesting product recommendations and receiving beautifully formatted imagery that matches your brand aesthetic. This evolution means brands won’t lose the creative work they’ve invested in over decades. They’ll enhance it with intelligent, responsive capabilities.
The technology works by connecting agents to content management systems, allowing them to pull in immersive elements dynamically based on what customers need in the moment. Rather than defaulting to plain text responses, agents can now present information in whatever format best serves the interaction, whether that’s a scheduling interface, product gallery, or interactive comparison tool.
This convergence of beauty and intelligence represents the maturation of agentic experiences from functional tools to fully realized customer touchpoints. But getting there requires organizations to take the first step, which Hammond believes is simpler than most teams realize.
The Practical Path Forward: Start Small, Move Fast
Hammond’s advice for marketing teams considering agentic campaigns was refreshingly practical: pick a small campaign and start there. Don’t attempt a complete transformation. Choose an SMS campaign, an email initiative, or a microsite and add an agent to it.
For channels like WhatsApp or SMS, teams don’t even need to build user interfaces. The agent technology operates on the backend. Marketing teams simply define what the agent should do, select the audience, and deploy. The built-in guardrails and safety conditions handle the rest.
“Start small, but go fast, because if you don’t go fast, you’re going to get left behind.”
That urgency isn’t hype. It reflects the reality that Agentforce has become Salesforce’s fastest-growing product ever. Salesforce now ranks among the top five token users at OpenAI, processing over a trillion tokens. The adoption curve is steep, and the competitive advantage goes to organizations willing to experiment now rather than waiting for perfect conditions.
The key, Hammond stressed, is to approach these initial campaigns as learning opportunities. Deploy to a small segment, analyze the results, refine the agent based on what you discover, and then expand. This iterative approach allows teams to build confidence and capability simultaneously, developing expertise in agentic marketing while delivering measurable business value.
For organizations that follow this path, the rewards extend beyond immediate campaign performance. They gain first hand understanding of how agents work, what customers respond to, and where the technology can deliver the most impact. That knowledge becomes a strategic asset as agentic experiences become table stakes in customer engagement.
Ponder This: The Window Is Open, But It Won’t Stay That Way
Sitting with Steve Hammond’s insights, I’m struck by the inflection point we’re experiencing. For 20 years, personalization at scale remained an aspiration more than a reality. Now the technology exists to deliver it, complete with safety controls, phased deployment options, and proven results.
The organizations that will thrive in this new landscape aren’t necessarily those with the biggest budgets or the most sophisticated technical teams. They’re the ones willing to start small, learn quickly, and iterate based on real customer feedback. They’re the CX leaders who recognize that 10% to 40% of their traffic already comes from agents, and that percentage will only increase.
The question isn’t whether agentic marketing will transform customer experience. It’s whether your organization will be among the leaders shaping that transformation or among those scrambling to catch up after the window of opportunity narrows. The tools exist. The infrastructure is proven. The competitive dynamics are clear. What remains is the decision to begin.
Join the conversation with 40,000+ CX professionals in our LinkedIn community and subscribe to our newsletter for weekly insights on the trends reshaping customer experience.
