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Inside Dreamforce: How AI, Data, and the Future of Work Are Transforming Business

22 October 2025 · 46 min

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Inside Dreamforce: How AI, Data and the Future of Work Are Transforming Business

Dr. John Oberg just got back from Dreamforce 2025, Salesforce's annual conference in San Francisco. He tells Randy Lorensen and Anthony Marino what he learned about agentic AI, data and the future of work, and how to get the most out of any conference.

Dr. John Oberg shares insights from Dreamforce, Salesforce’s massive annual conference in San Francisco, attended by over 50,000 people. He reveals how AI and data are redefining the future of work, the rise of the agentic workforce, and why humans who use AI will replace those who don’t. The hosts also explore the balance between automation and human relationships, the power of Salesforce’s open architecture, and how leaders like Marc Benioff are shaping the next era of customer connection.

Listeners will gain practical strategies for maximizing conferences, building AI-driven organizations, and staying human in a data-driven world. Whether you’re a business leader, technologist, or just curious about where work is headed, this episode offers deep, actionable takeaways from one of the most forward-thinking events in tech.

Agentic AI, the Future of Work, and AI in Customer Service

What you'll discover:

  • Should you go to a conference, and how to get the most out of it
  • Key takeaways from Dreamforce, and why humans using AI will replace humans who don't
  • AI in customer service and business, and the Starbucks example
  • Using your data well, and keeping human relationships at the center
  • Building agentic processes and an org chart of agents
  • How talking to computers in plain language is changing the sales funnel

Timestamps

  • [00:00] Welcome: John just got back from Dreamforce, Salesforce's conference in San Francisco
  • [00:25] Maximizing conference benefits: should you go, and how to get the most from it
  • [08:21] Key takeaways from Dreamforce
  • [10:07] The future of work and AI
  • [20:43] AI in customer service and business: the Starbucks CEO's "force multiplier"
  • [21:14] Concerts and the fun side of Dreamforce
  • [25:39] Data utilization and AI integration
  • [30:44] The importance of human relationships
  • [34:07] Creating shareholder value through customer focus
  • [41:47] Implementing agentic processes: an org chart of agents
  • [42:30] Talking to computers in plain language, and how AI is changing the sales funnel
  • [45:06] Wrap-up: putting a bow on Dreamforce

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About the hosts

This is a hosts-only episode with no guest: Randy Lorensen, Dr. John Oberg and Anthony Marino. (Host bios are on the host pages linked below.)

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Meet the hosts: Randy Lorensen · Dr. John Oberg · Anthony Marino

Transcript

A full transcript is below. It comes from the episode recording and has speaker labels and time markers, which line up with the published audio. It hasn't been proofread, so expect some errors in names and terms.

Randy Lorensen [00:10]: Hey, welcome to Tales of Abundance everyone. As always, I'm here with Dr. John Oberg and Anthony Marino. And we're going to jump right into it. John, you went to Dreamforce, which is a Salesforce conference in San Francisco, correct? Last week. And I think listeners, we want to go a couple of ways. Like, you know, we're going to start out. Do you want to, should you go to a conference? Is it beneficial? And how does John, cause was that a week long conference, John, or five to three, four, five days? How long was it?

Dr. John Oberg [00:25]: Yep, that's right. That's right.

Anthony Marino [00:27]: you

Dr. John Oberg [00:39]: Yeah, I mean, there's a pre-conference on Monday. The conference goes Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and then most people fly out, you know, Thursday night, Friday. So three-day conference, one day of kind of pre-conference activities, and so then, so four days.

Randy Lorensen [00:50]: Yes. So I think we want to get your mindset on that. then, you know, I had asked you yesterday when we were talking your your three biggest takeaways. So we'll go we'll go into that. And if we have time, we'll get into some other topics. So let's let's jump into it, John, the conference like what. What is your approach to maximizing a conference? Right? Because one of your great abilities is you have systems and processes for everything. So it doesn't shock me that this too, you have Dr. John's way to approach a conference.

Dr. John Oberg [01:15]: Ha Look, I think there's a lot of things you can do to get something out of a conference. think that there's, if you want to go to a conference to learn a whole bunch of things, most conferences have learning tracks and that's really interesting. I think that if you want to go find what's the state of the art, meaning like what's the newest, latest thing that's happening, I think that's the thing you can go and get out of a conference. If you want to go and network with people to make new relationships, I think that's a thing you can get out of a conference. think if you want to go. and you want to deepen relationships, that's a time that you could do that. If you wanna go and meet with people other than just salespeople for a company that's a vendor to you, I think you can do that. And so I think that you have to, and there's probably lots of other things you could do at a conference as well as an attendee. And so I think whatever it is that you wanna do, whether it's one of those five things or something else, I think you just gotta be clear about what you're trying to get out of each day at the conference. Because there's generally events that could start very, very early in the morning, many go late into the evening. It is a, my experience, a very energy intensive endeavor if you allow it to be. And for me, I'm always looking on, you know, the return on my invested time. Like if I'm going to invest time, energy, money into something, what is the thing that I'm going to get out of that time, energy and money? It doesn't always have to be time, energy and money. It could be learning or something else, but I think just being really deliberate about what outcome you want to have is really important.

Anthony Marino [02:37]: Thanks.

Randy Lorensen [02:41]: So John, this conference in particular, was your agenda? How did you maximize this conference? So let's give listeners some specifics. This is how John, doesn't mean it's how they're gonna approach it, but this is how you approached it and with what outcome.

Dr. John Oberg [02:49]: Yes. Totally in different conferences, I have a different approach, right? But for this particular conference, there's 50,000 attendees. There's a number of learning tracks and there are a number of people that I have relationships both at Salesforce and then outside of Salesforce. And so for me, I had the opportunity for me and for one of my team to speak at the conference and get. kind of air time in that way, which was a really wonderful experience. We're very grateful for that to be able to, and that meant that there was a number of things we did pre-conference to get prepared for that new relationships with other Salesforce customers, with Salesforce employees. That was really beneficial for me. I also had some learning tracks that I wanted to go down. There were some technical learning tracks that are really important. And then there were also a learning track I learned about at this. So this is my second time at the conference. There was a learning track I was unaware of at the conference. that I wanna join next year. It's called the Executive Learning Track. I could have been invited to it, didn't know to ask to get invited to it. And so next year when I go, I wanna make sure that I get invited to that particular learning track because it's gonna have access to a different group of people that I want to network with, not Salesforce employees necessarily, but other customers that I wanna make contact with to expand my network. So I didn't even know about that learning track. Then there were a number of things I wanted to learn about the product itself.

Anthony Marino [03:48]: Bye.

Dr. John Oberg [04:12]: would they, they had this kind of trade show like environment. So I wanted to learn a, what Salesforce was doing from a product development perspective, but they also had lots of other vendors that came in and I wanted to learn what other people in the industry were doing as well. So I could understand again, the state of the art. So, you know, the art being how people are using platforms to build their companies. And then what's the state of the latest invention? How are people using AI? How are they using things that aren't AI? And so we literally walked through these booths to find out things like what are people doing to think about. what they're doing and how they're marketing it out to the universe. And so it was a pretty busy agenda. Then there was dinners that I got invited to, advisory boards that I was invited to, happy hours that I was invited to, and so kind of all of those things, and then keynote speeches about product development that I want. And so it was a pretty packed agenda.

Randy Lorensen [05:01]: Anthony, I mean you've been to conferences. What's your approach at conferences?

Anthony Marino [05:05]: Yeah, I'm such a skeptic about I always call I used to call him the boondoggles. And I'm not a fan, to be honest with you. Historically, industry conferences were just that. We're just, you know, kind of meet and greets and, you know, guys going to Vegas and having a good time and doing it. This one's different. This one is extremely well structured. there's a lot going on here. And I think times have changed. these aren't vanity conferences. you know, and doing my research with dreamforce, there were 1500 sessions across three days, know, with keynotes, breakouts, hands-on training and so forth. mean, that is the amount of what struck me was the amount of, planning the, and the cost of this thing. must have been, I mean, they must spend all year putting this thing together. So kudos to these guys for putting this thing together. Now, what they got out of it, what did Salesforce get out of it? With 50,000 people, and I'm sure many of them were customers, they're deepening their relationship with customers and they're learning from their customers what... what changes or what needs that they're not they're not meeting. So. But, my experience with mostly industry and like I said, I didn't get a lot out of them. This one, you know, I almost think I want to go to this next year because it has to be some some learning, some networking that that I could have done, you know, from from the perspective of our listeners, you know, the things that the things that came out of this. John, know, things like agents over co-pilots.

Dr. John Oberg [07:02]: Yeah.

Randy Lorensen [07:02]: Well, let's let's I mean, let me slow you down. We're going to get into it. We'll get into his takeaways. So let's let's let's slow down and you can.

Anthony Marino [07:07]: Okay.

Dr. John Oberg [07:08]: Yeah, I do want to talk about the difference between industry conference and a company conference. Like I do think when I've been to industry conferences, I only found those valuable when I had set up one-on-one meetings at that industry conference before I ever showed up on site. So industry conferences were really helpful for having a highly concentrated group of face-to-face meetings with lots of people from different cities where every 30 to 45 minutes I had another meeting. I had six to 10 meetings a day and it was

Anthony Marino [07:12]: Yeah.

Dr. John Oberg [07:35]: generally very well-agendered meetings. So whether it was a sales call, product development, whatever it was, like that's the only way that I've, I've had a really productive experience at an industry trade show or learning the state of the art where you can go in through and look and see what people are marketing, what developments they're having, but it's always very well curated in terms of my time when I've done it well and I've not done it well lots of times.

Randy Lorensen [08:01]: Let me move us on. I don't want to spend the whole call on about conferences. I did want to hit on it a little bit, but let's move into the takeaways because I think viewers are going to find that more interesting. And if we want at the end, we can circle back if there's more thoughts on this. But John, so I asked you the three biggest takeaways. You gave me five. I think now you have six. So that tells you about your direction following. But I'm OK with that because I'm not a real follower either. So give me your three, five, six best.

Anthony Marino [08:01]: Yeah, it's a lot.

Dr. John Oberg [08:05]: Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yes.

Randy Lorensen [08:30]: Biggest takeaways, or we'll just start with number one.

Dr. John Oberg [08:32]: Yeah, I think for me, if I had to kind of put an umbrella around them, and I told this week prep for this, was the future of work is changing more rapidly than any time in my lifetime professionally. And so I think I've been paying attention to the future of work for a long time. I think I spend a lot of time on the psychology in this part of the world. And I'm seeing a real change in how people's work is changing and what technology's role is in that. And not just AI, but a lot of the promises of data utilization are becoming more tenable and cost effective today. And I also had a lot of takeaways about what that, shocking as I always say this to you, like what that means for me and for my client companies and my companies and what things we have to do to better leverage these tools. And so I think, so it's like, Salesforce is so much more than just CRM. And so if you used Salesforce, you know, 20 years ago when you were getting off of gold mine, like what, what Salesforce is today is entirely different. And then, you know, what I think the way that AI is changing technology, but also the way it's changing the org chart in a company and then data utilization and, and, and just what this means for the humans. Like those were my big, big, big takeaways.

Randy Lorensen [09:55]: So I took some notes here. Future of work. So let's go into that one. What's your big, if you were gonna sum it up, the future of work, what is your takeaway or your view after this week?

Dr. John Oberg [10:05]: Yeah. I would say this was developed before this week. And I think I got a lot of confirmation that the direction that I thought things were heading is now actually the direction it seems like some people are heading. Who knows if this will be the direction we end up in. I think it's a temporary direction, frankly. But I think that there are some jobs that are going to be heavily impacted by AI in the short term. White collar, intellectual work. And then there are jobs that are going to be less impacted in the short term. I think landscaping, plumbing, electrical, you know, being an electrician. Now in the future, I think you and I would agree that robotics can take over a lot of that as well. I think there's some debate on the timeline for that, but the right here right now, you know, if you're in jobs like coding for a computer, or if you're in a job like creating content, or if you're in a job that includes legal or CPA or analysis, A lot of those jobs are going to rely on AI more heavily for people that want to be most effective and efficient with their time. And so I believe that individual contributors of the future are going to have an org chart of AIs that run very discrete processes, very effectively and very efficiently and very cost effectively and cost efficient in the future to make the output of a worker, you know, 10 X or a hundred X. Like we just had an unlock for one of our team on the technical side where we got done in two to two hours ish plus a little learning curve time, call it three or four hours total. What took us 90 days two years ago? So think about that for a minute. 90 days of work we were able to get done, start to finish the same A to Z in four hours.

Randy Lorensen [11:50]: It's amazing.

Dr. John Oberg [11:51]: Now think part of that was the work ethic of the person doing the work 90 days ago, because was two different people doing the work. So I think there was some work ethic efficiencies that happened. Let's call that 50 % in a ridiculous world. So you went from 40 days to four hours.

Randy Lorensen [12:04]: But this is, you know, it's funny. I had a call with my team this morning and I was just, we were just talking about AI and how to use it more, right? And we came up with two or three things on that call that I hadn't thought of. You know, I just started asking people like, what don't you like doing? And they would give it to me and I would start taking prompts and putting it in. And there were some things we solved like on that, right?

Anthony Marino [12:13]: Thank

Randy Lorensen [12:29]: My thought was great. Now you have more time to do what you're good at, what you like. Maybe you have more time to prospect or you just got more time to go spend with your family or work on your hobby or do whatever else it is too, right? Like whatever does it flows people's boat. But to me, that's really exciting, right? When we talk about abundance, you know. My vision of abundance in a lot of ways is a place where the robots are doing the work. We've got, you know, probably even robotic farms, the price of food production comes down, everything goes down, down, down. And we are able to work on what we truly want to work on, which I think has some challenges for people that have been focused on work.

Anthony Marino [13:04]: you

Dr. John Oberg [13:06]: Which is not, and that's not a new idea, Randy. Like 120 years ago, people didn't have dishwashers. People didn't like washing dishes. And now most people have a dishwasher and it does the vast majority, but not all of the work. That happens in manufacturing plants with like, you know, all of the different conveyor systems. so like, this is not a new concept.

Randy Lorensen [13:20]: and accompany co- Talk more about the org chart, because you've been saying this. I don't think it's the first time you've said it here, but I don't know that everybody fully grasps it. You're literally talking about a role, like maybe it's a customer service role.

Dr. John Oberg [13:42]: No, it's much, yeah, I mean, I'll just give you real example. So right now we have someone who's going to be doing some marketing stuff for us and there's a whole bunch of, you know, discrete things that they need to get accomplished. And so for each of those kinds of things that we can make agentic, the agent, the AI gets a job description and the job description is slightly different than a human job description because it doesn't have the same company description. The company description is written for an AI to give it context, not written for kind of the same emotional reasons you might give for a job. And then has the job description, which is a much smaller job description, because it's doing one specific thing very, very well. Then we added to the job description a scorecard for that particular agentic process. And then we added a very specific standard operating procedure for that agentic process. And that becomes the context for the prompt to build that process into an agent. And then it gets tested rigorously. And I would say that another thing that we didn't talk about coming out of the conference is there there is a limited amount, not a ton, but there's a limited amount of over confidence with AI that's dangerous. And so I talked to one person and they're like, I can get an AI to do this, that, and manage my healthcare. And that's where I have, you know, domain expertise. And I was like, Whoa, like danger, Will Robinson danger, because if an AI hallucinates there and you listen to that without seeing a medical provider, you can get yourself into, you know, life or death problems, right? Like if you take too much of a drug or a supplement, like it can cause real irreversible product. So I think that, you know, there's high consequence and low consequence ways to apply AI and inside your domain of expertise is lower consequence.

Randy Lorensen [15:18]: Let me ask you a question about that. I'm playing devil's advocate as much as I am, probably more than I believe. But I do want to play devil's advocate with this. Okay, AI hallucinates and it makes mistakes, granted. Well, you know who else makes mistakes? Human doctors, right? We've all heard stories. At what point, like how close are we with something even that serious where the AI, the mistakes will be less than it will be with the humans?

Dr. John Oberg [15:23]: You never do that, Randy. Yeah. I think when you have a human in the loop, think I saw some data that I can't point to directly, but like the AI was in the, in the 90 % for some kind of exotic stuff. And doctors were like in the high 70%. So the AI was doing better with the help of a doctor. The problem is that without the help of a doctor, you don't get past that hallucination potentially. Right. And so what happens is people stop halfway through the process and they take bad advice and run with it. Right, so that's an AI that's incredibly well trained, not a general AI that you and I have access to with like Claude or chat GPT or so. So I do think that AI supporting doctors makes doctors materially better. I think that cutting domain experts out of the loop right now in low consequence scenarios is low consequence. In high consequence scenarios is high consequence. So my guidance to people is like, Just do it in places that aren't going to cause irreversible damage.

Randy Lorensen [16:43]: Well, I'll just tell you how I think about this. One, we've talked before with Tesla, right? I have a self-driving car and people tell me all the time, like, I wouldn't trust that thing to drive. Well, you're not going to convince me that a human drives better than that car. And yes, there have been Tesla self-driving cars that have crashed, but the odds are it's like one-thirtieth of a human or somewhere in that range. Like the number of accidents on full self-driving is minuscule compared to human driving.

Anthony Marino [17:03]: you

Dr. John Oberg [17:08]: The numbers I I think the numbers I recall top my head and I could be wrong, but I think it's like, there was like one type of accident in every 37 million miles or every 370,000 miles. And that same type of accident for Tesla was like one in every like 1.3 million miles. It was like 4X or 75 % reduction. Could be, and by the way, my data is old and it could be different, like a different type of accident we're looking at. But the bottom line is that right now,

Randy Lorensen [17:23]: I thought it was more like nine. I thought it more like nine million is the most recent stuff miles

Dr. John Oberg [17:36]: pretty hard to argue the data that Tesla is not a better driver than the average human.

Randy Lorensen [17:43]: Yeah, it's by the way, the way most we live with the three of us live in or around Austin, Texas. I was in Austin yesterday going to a coffee shop and. In a less than one block area. saw four way most right. Like in less. Yeah. Right.

Dr. John Oberg [17:59]: I rode in one in San Francisco. We were up those hills, downhills, curvy roads. It got into four nasty situations. We had one car make a three point turn right in the middle of a Waymo, unexpectedly, not a place you would see it. Human driver did something totally out of character. Waymo handled it perfectly. My only gripe about Waymo was that it took five times longer than a black car and was 30 % more expensive than a black car. And so was like, I can go take a limousine.

Anthony Marino [18:16]: right back. Thank

Dr. John Oberg [18:25]: for less cost and less weight. so think that's just a, there was a miss on Waymo's part when I was there.

Randy Lorensen [18:29]: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, but you know what, anyway, what I was going to say to the way I was thinking, I'm actually working inside one in my business on a AI answering a machine to starting out to answer calls after hours. Right. And we got the first version and we tweaked it I got version two and three and four and five. And I was kind of frustrated the other day because it still said something that was just not right. And I thought, my God, what standards do I have for this thing? Like this is better than almost every human in my organization right now, right? With all the tweaking we've done and yes.

Dr. John Oberg [19:07]: There's the key. Hold up. That's the key. Don't don't skate over that you've done how many hours of tweaking for your prompts and to get it all right

Randy Lorensen [19:13]: I know, I got somebody else doing it. I've spent an hour and somebody else has spent several hours though, but to your point, yes.

Dr. John Oberg [19:15]: B-B-B-B- Yeah, and so that's, think one of the great things I heard at Dreamforce was you should treat an AI like it's a fresh out of college, never been trained before, has wet behind the ears, never done it before intern. And if you took an intern and put them into a job that has never been done in your company before and didn't give them instructions, you would expect them to fail. Well, an AI is a brand new intern, probably in a job that's never been done in your company before, right? or if it is a job that's been done in your company before, train them as if they've never seen it before. If you give an AI that level of training, you're going to get an infinitely better outcome probably.

Randy Lorensen [19:56]: Well, we're doing it for a job that we know and we have numbers and data and everything else, right? And, and at the, point was that my standard and expectation for AI, even what I just got done telling you about a self-driving Tesla, my standard was much higher than it is for a human, right? Like I would let the human, I would have let the human that was at that level of competency start doing the job along like three versions ago. They would have been going up to do the job.

Dr. John Oberg [20:00]: Yeah, sure. Yeah, and the humans, the humans going to have more human touch though, they're going to get more grace than a computer will, because they're going to recognize a mistake potentially, and they're going to have an easier chance of adjusting than an AI does. Like, AIs just don't adjust as well as humans do. Yeah, yeah.

Randy Lorensen [20:38]: Understood. So, all right. Anthony, have you got questions on this before we move on?

Anthony Marino [20:43]: Well, not so much a question. I just wanted to get John's feedback on two things. One, at the conference, the CEO of Starbucks spoke. And based on a little research, he saw AI in his company as a force multiplier for customer service, which I thought was interesting. And the second thing. probably from this, know, we, fun is one of the five F's for us. How was the Metallica concept?

Dr. John Oberg [21:19]: So, no idea. I went to see Benson Boone. He's a new 20-something kind of pop, looks like Freddie Mercury does backflips off of a piano during his concert. Dude must have done like five or six backflips and a front flip. And he's like a teenage heartthrob. so the people I was with wanted to go see Benson Boone, which I was happy to do. He is an entertainer. Like I don't know his music, but in terms of like just entertainment value,

Anthony Marino [21:23]: Who's Benson Boone? I don't know those guys.

Dr. John Oberg [21:48]: You talk about high energy. Like I felt like I'd had caffeine for two hours after watching that dude. like he was, and I got to tell you, like I'm, he, he's a good looking man. Like the dude is in like water polo shape. Like, like, and he's got to be a former gymnast because the way he was, he literally flipped off of a grand piano on top of like a two foot platform and like landed a back. Like it was crazy. So talk about great entertainment and you know, Metallica was good too.

Anthony Marino [22:16]: Interesting. Yeah.

Randy Lorensen [22:16]: I'm with Anthony, would have went to go see Metallica, but

Dr. John Oberg [22:18]: Yeah, well.

Randy Lorensen [22:19]: now this guy sounds interesting, but whatever.

Dr. John Oberg [22:22]: You gotta go check out Go-

Anthony Marino [22:23]: Let's recap though. Hang on. Let's recap. So you chose a teenage heartthrob. mm-hmm. Okay. If you can use that as a, I hear you. I got you. So tell me more about the Starbucks. know, Starbucks is an interesting case study. And I know it's a little bit.

Dr. John Oberg [22:30]: I chose to be with people that I knew I I chose to go, I chose to go, I'm gonna go back to my first answer. I went to a conference to be with certain people. They wanted to go see Benson Boone. I went and saw Benson Boone, so.

Randy Lorensen [22:40]: You

Anthony Marino [22:51]: on the edge of what we got started here, but I'm interested in, know, they're struggling, quote unquote struggling around the stock price. I don't think they're personally, I don't think they're struggling in terms of their customer service or in terms of the quality of their product, but they're trying to grow the company. And I'm wondering, you know, AI, automation, robotics, and all those things could come into play in a company like that. Do you have anything to say about that?

Dr. John Oberg [23:22]: You know, I had a 1500 different sessions. I didn't see that one. So that was not one of the ones I attended. Yeah. So, but, but I will say this, think about a consumer business like Starbucks and the number of visits they have and how much data they can collect with humans versus how much they can collect with an AI in terms of like what the product needs to be in the future. They had a, when they started as a company, they, they wanted to become the Italian coffee shop that people could come and sit and have an experience they were willing to pay for, which is how they justified their premium.

Anthony Marino [23:27]: yeah. Mm-hmm.

Dr. John Oberg [23:52]: That's how that's what they started as a company. Then what they did is they had some problems and they started shutting off internet, not letting people sit down, taking all the comfortable furniture out of there. And it really had a negative impact on the experience and the brand. And then people moved away from it because the call the coffee for a coffee connoisseur is not a high quality coffee. Now to me, it's great. I go to Starbucks all the time, love the coffee, but I'm not like my friends who love coffee, who don't appreciate that level of coffee. So I think they, really have to invent. reinvent their experience or whatever it's going to be that people are paying the premium for. But it's certainly not where they started. They moved away from that deliberately. some people might call that a strategic mistake. Other people might say it was an evolution that had to happen. I don't have an opinion about that. But AI is going to allow them to take infinitely more data points than they could take with human analysis from both a collection perspective and a consistency of collection perspective, and also get an analysis that's more objective. than if they tried to pay for that with humans, in my opinion.

Anthony Marino [24:52]: Yeah, that's one of the things that Marc Benioff talked about in terms of he called it data is a moat. And he had another way of approaching it that you can have all the data in the world, but if it's not well organized and your AI isn't being fed clean

Randy Lorensen [24:52]: So that...

Dr. John Oberg [24:58]: Benny off Benny off. Yeah

Anthony Marino [25:22]: data, it's really, you could create tremendous problems for yourself by doing this.

Dr. John Oberg [25:27]: Let's get in, I don't know if now's the time, Randy, but let's come back to that exact point because data and data is, that's right. Yeah. Yeah.

Randy Lorensen [25:31]: Well, data utilization was one of your topics. So I thought this was a natural transition into data utilization is what I was trying to say.

Anthony Marino [25:39]: Yeah.

Dr. John Oberg [25:40]: I mean, look, here's the thing. One of the things that I fear about a non-Salesforce platform is that if I go to a place that has a singular model that I have to use and I commit to that model, the chances of another model bypassing that model and skip stepping, it's just, there's a very high likelihood that's going to happen. like, and so the, thing that Salesforce is talking about right now is the agentic workforce. And that's an appropriate message. It's an exciting message. It's the right message. The thing I don't think they. beat their chest about enough is that they have a platform for AI that I can go and I can plug in chat GPT or Claude or llama or Gemini or my own that I've rolled my own or I can take a small language model and plug and they all can get plugged into that agentic layer of Salesforce. And then all of the Salesforce data that then becomes available, which by the way is not just data inside Salesforce itself. They have data cloud, which allows you essentially to grab data from wherever. They have MuleSoft connectors that allow you to get data from, I mean, I can't imagine a place it can't connect to. And they have something called a zero retention, zero copy model. So what they do is they go out, they grab the data, they create metadata, they bring it in, they process all of it, do it, but they don't force you to store it, which means they don't force you to pay for it inside of Salesforce. And so it creates a very high level of trust and a very cost effective way of going to process data. Right. And you don't have to have all of it in one place. So if you want to have a data lake on your own, if you want to have like, I've really drunk the Kool-Aid on this particular architecture, because you can keep your data wherever you want. And it's able to go grab it from wherever process it using whatever engine you want to use. If you want to use Salesforce's engine thumbs up, you can, should do that. I can't do that for some parts of my medical data. I've got to do something where I've rolled my own. And so therefore we use our engine where it's highly. um, autonomous and, um, highly customized and highly protected because it's patient data for us. And so they give me that flexibility to not have to like use only their stuff. All it's almost, it's not open source, but it has that same feeling of like, I have so much flexibility. Like, and I think that's going to be one of the keys for a company like Salesforce, where they have a platform that's essentially, I don't want to call it open platform because you got to get into it. but it really is a platform that allows you to play with it however you need to play with it to make your business work. I get nervous about like other places where it's like you have to come use all of our agents, all of our platform. Like I just, really nervous about that going forward in the future with all the innovation that we're having.

Randy Lorensen [28:21]: For me, this is a privacy freedom. You know, there's a lot of things in the world where people are infringing on that in different in multiple different ways that we won't get into today. But anything that's a step toward people being able to keep their information private and not. you know, be the customer as you are on social media and everything else I'm a fan of. By the way, Marc Benioff, if you're listening, we would love a sponsorship from Salesforce because John is more than happy to promote your company and is a big believer in those are the types of sponsors we're looking for. So just a shout out in he's listening.

Dr. John Oberg [28:43]: Not being the product, you mean? Not. Hahaha I was going to send it to him now, I'm not sure I can. Teasing, choking, I'm still happy to send it off. Look, think that they've made some architectural decisions that to me were incredibly forward looking and they did that both inside their product with the way they've designed the product that we're using. It appears to me they've also done that kind of more holistically and broadly for the person consuming and using the product.

Randy Lorensen [28:57]: Okay.

Dr. John Oberg [29:21]: And that's just really refreshing for me. Like I just, don't see every company doing that. think, you know, I think they, much as any company want wallet share and mind share and that's understandable. They're a company. They've got to drive shareholder value, but, I do appreciate, they have, not sure if you guys have watched the session online called true to the core. but they've had like 20 something dream forces. My favorite session is true to the core because all they do is have an open mic and they take feedback from people.

Anthony Marino [29:34]: It's something I do appreciate. They have a lot of ways of watching this stuff come on.

Dr. John Oberg [29:48]: And they have like some people that are like now well-known feedback givers, like they know them by first name. And one of, you know, it's a group of very senior executives who get up there and they take it. They take the product feedback, good, the good, the bad and the ugly, and they respond to it. And last year when I went and watched it, they took a bunch of feedback and this year they came back and reported back on what they did about it. And some things they did a really good job on and some things they failed at, but like, I think that's really smart. You know, Benioff in one of his keynotes talked about like all the different customers he was with the last three weeks. He seems to be tirelessly.

Anthony Marino [30:07]: I've been bringing you the bottle, I've been bringing you the bill, and it's a great system. It's really exciting. I'm going talk about it in one of your videos, about it. I already have a few of these, I'll them later. These are the entire relationships.

Dr. John Oberg [30:18]: out there talking to people to improve the product. Look, I think he's a great visionary for

Anthony Marino [30:19]: So, I'm to about the relationships between the two

Dr. John Oberg [30:23]: what's happening inside this space. you know, like any founder, I'm sure he has quirks I don't know about, but I mean, gosh, in this particular space for the architecture and the things that I'm seeing with my company and the companies that I have as clients and who I consult for, they're doing a lot of smart things. There's things they can do better, but they're doing a lot of smart things.

Randy Lorensen [30:44]: What are your other takeaways? what humans? What it means? Am I missing one? I think I wrote down four and I think you had five or so, so I might have missed.

Dr. John Oberg [30:54]: Yeah, think, I think humans, and this is, this is not something I've said, this is something that I've heard somewhere else, and I'm repeating it, but, you know, AI is not going to replace humans, humans won't be replaced by AI, humans will be replaced by humans using AI. Like, I think that that is a really, really true statement. And so I think a lot about what this means for my kids.

Anthony Marino [31:13]: I think that is really important. I think a lot about the things that said, and what I need to be talking about about citizenry.

Dr. John Oberg [31:21]: who are 22 to 14 at the time of this recording and what I need to be talking to them about their career development. And even the way I was thinking about that six months ago has changed. And two years ago, I was telling my son, you need to either get into writing computer code or getting into things where you really, the interface with other humans outside the company. And now I'm like, man, forget that part about coding. You really need to be being part of that really, that critical human interface where wisdom is the actual currency of the day rather than intellectual processing. So I think it's changing super fast.

Randy Lorensen [31:58]: Yeah, I think it's...

Anthony Marino [31:58]: Well, he said the CEO talked about the human touch, even in support, even as support and back office tasks are getting automated. But his quote was, whatever you automate, keep your relationship time sacred. So it's to your point, John, of humans using AI, replacing humans. AI can do the things that we don't want to do. But your relationships, AI is a machine and we don't have, it still has to be prompted. It still has to be talked to. It can improve upon itself after the first set of prompts and so forth. So I that interesting. I want to go back to something you said, which is

Dr. John Oberg [32:32]: Yeah. Well, let me hold, let me react to that. You said something real quick. relationships are key. It's also the skillset that's atrophied in our society over the last 60 years. And one way that AI can help with that, Randy, I'm now going to quote you, you know, it's like one of the great things about AI is if you give it a shitty prompt, it gives you a shitty answer. Like, and so if we're willing to learn from that in terms of our communication skills and take accountability for that, I think we can actually improve our human communication skills by using AI as a communication lens.

Anthony Marino [32:54]: Struck a nerd. Okay.

Dr. John Oberg [33:23]: And we can strengthen some of those relationship skills that have been such a problem for the last 60 or 70 years in our society. And we can improve our relationships that way. And I'll tell you what, the number of C-level executives who said about Benioff while they were on stage speaking, yeah, Mark was texting with me last week. yeah, when I had dinner with these executives two weeks ago, like he may be using AI a ton. He is also meeting with customers, like again, tirelessly. And my understanding is he's like texting them nonstop. Like he's calling them nonstop. He's talking, and these are really busy people running very large organizations we're talking about. So they prioritize relationships. There's a big lesson there. So anyway, sorry, I just wanted to make sure I underscored that.

Anthony Marino [34:07]: Yeah. No, I get it. But you said something about creating shareholder value. And I wanted to ask you, know, about, cause you have a little, you know, inside baseball on Salesforce. Do you, it doesn't sound like that's his number one objective. It's an outcome that will occur because of everything you just said about him. I think, I don't think he's, he, he is, you know, gets up in the morning and says, what do I have to do to create shareholder value? I think, I think, and I'm looking for either a thumbs up or thumbs down. I think his philosophy and his day-to-day approach to running a business is about how do I solve problems for customers? And that's going to lead to increasing shareholder value because when I solve a problem for a customer, they're going to be a customer, stay a customer and expand as it. customer. And as we used to say back in the old days, you can also grow a company, you know, wind by breathing, which meant, you know, as your company, as your customers grow, you'll grow. am I on? Is that the way you see his, his philosophy or am I off base there?

Dr. John Oberg [35:29]: Yeah, I think, you know, I don't have any information about Salesforce as far as this conversation goes that you don't have. I think here's what I've seen. They had an activist investor that came in a couple of years ago, very publicly, and they did some things. And Parker Harris, who is one of the co-founders of Salesforce and that she he's the CTO of Slack right now, which is owned by Salesforce. He said, you know, with as active activist investors, we made a lot of decisions and some of those decisions we undid because we found there are mistakes like we were reactive. And so I think what he's saying is like, we need to go back and like really think through what we do that creates shareholder value as a byproduct was the way that I received that comment when he was talking at true to the core. And so I, so I do think that these guys are focused on doing something really phenomenal. And even, even Benioff said with Jim Kramer during dream force on Kramer's show that people don't fully understand the importance of this agentic shift for Salesforce that is part and parcel with the company or his words. And basically he was telling Jim Cramer, people don't fully understand it yet. And I think that's probably reflected in some of the stock price, right? Their stock price was in the mid-200s as we're doing this recording, but a lot of the experts are having price targets that are much further north of that. And so I think that the way that I see it at least is that he's certainly sensitive to shareholder value. I think he's got a massive part of his fortune tied up in the shareholder value. But I think he's doing the right thing by trying to do what's right for the company. But they're also in true to the core. They talked about the fact like, hey, it's true that we've got budgets we've got to hit and we've cut back on the amount of swag that we're giving out, but we're increasing dollars to invest in this part of our community. And so, and there are people that are upset about that because they love the plushy toys. And there was a line around the block a year and a half ago or a year ago, whenever it was where people were lined up for hours to get a free sweatshirt by giving an online review. And then. an even longer line to get this little plushie like zebra. Things that aren't that important to me, but mean, clearly important to lots of people. And so that swag and what they've done. So I think they've been really smart about investing in things that drive shareholder value. I do think like any company that's grown super quick, they've found some places they went too far and they're trying to correct course.

Anthony Marino [37:46]: Yeah, I bring it up because I think for our listeners and creating an abundance in their life, whether it's financial or otherwise, that you've got to understand what your real number one focus is. as I look, as I think about the great companies that I like, the ones that serve me, they think about the customer first. I'm a Starbucks addict. I'm an Amazon addict. These companies, yeah, they're product companies and they're trying to get you to buy whatever you got, what you're gonna buy, but their success lies in problem solving and serving customers first. Yes, they're highly efficient. They do all the back office work the way they do it. They do what they do, but they think about Toyota. They create a product. Sony, Apple, they create products that you didn't even know you needed. Apple and Starbucks are at the head of that class. one thought they needed a thousand songs in their pocket or an iPhone that could take pictures. So I just think as people listen to this, know who you are and know what you want to do and what the reason you're doing what you're doing. what is it going to lead to? It's not all about just thinking about dollars and cents.

Dr. John Oberg [39:14]: Yeah, but let's, I agree with everything you said. And I want to pull the curtain back on that because these media shows like we're doing are so great at like, think about the customer. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. For sure. And you also need to ask at some point in the process, what's the impact cashflow? Like think, think about the untold number of conversations we had when you were running Pella of Austin. It's like, you know, you would say customer customer, like you were, you had a fanatical customer first approach and At one point, one of us would ask, okay, and what are the financial implications? Sometimes the implications we were gonna lose money in a certain area because it was the right thing to do. But more often than not, we had to have enough profit, right, to justify the investment. But there are sometimes we made mistakes that were costly to the company. it wasn't like we said, well, screw that customer, we're not gonna make money. We actually said we're gonna spend the money and make it right because it's the right thing to do. But then we're gonna make sure we don't ever make that mistake again and we're gonna be profitable that point going forward. And so like, I if you're running a company, think it's really, I heard one CEO say to me, we're not going to invest in a sales team because we're going to be a product led company. And it was so misguided based on a set of books they had read. They just didn't understand the full scope of the comment.

Anthony Marino [40:30]: Yeah, I you've got to understand the whole package for sure. I always use the domino metaphor that the first domino is going to lead to the second domino, the third domino, the fourth domino. You better be prepared to understand how many dominoes are going to tip over because of this decision you make right now. So anyway, as you said, I really believe in if you make people happy,

Dr. John Oberg [40:53]: Yeah.

Anthony Marino [41:00]: your life will be full of abundance. And that doesn't, that's not just in business. That's in anything you do.

Dr. John Oberg [41:06]: I tell people that happiness is a byproduct of a life well lived and a profit is a byproduct of a company well run. And that's everything from structuring the business model correctly to executing it correctly, to having a good product, all those things. But you do have to think about the business model and being profitable if you want something sustainable, right? the customer doesn't owe you money unless you provided services. so I think that like, we just got to be careful about the... You know, if you build it, they won't come necessarily. Anyway, we're off topic. Sorry, Randy.

Anthony Marino [41:36]: Sure, no doubt about it.

Randy Lorensen [41:37]: So, yeah, let's move on here. John, what is your biggest or not biggest, what's the first thing you're gonna implement? So you went to this conference, whether it was something you learned in learning, you learned through networking, what are you taking home and implementing in your business or your life? Like what's the number one thing?

Dr. John Oberg [42:00]: We're immediately finding small wins where we can make things agentic. And so we're taking little tiny processes and going through the exact same process. We're creating an org chart of agents underneath a person with standard operating procedure for that agent where we can measure the success and implementing it fast. We're moving very quickly and we're gonna like, and we're doing it in very low consequence areas. So we're taking places where there's not a safety issue. There's not a privacy issue. There's not like, and we're implementing very fast to figure out how to build agents more successfully. And this is only going to get easier. I think before we go, let's make sure we talk about the interaction with the computer and what's happening on the user interface. But I think we're trying to get ahead of that. And what that means is we've got to have data on paper that gives the agent context in the same way we talked about with interns earlier.

Randy Lorensen [42:46]: Is that you getting into this before we move on or do you want to go deeper into it?

Dr. John Oberg [42:52]: whichever way you want to go. Like you, tell me, just, don't want to miss the user experience conversation I had at Salesforce. Cause it was one of the most interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I was, yeah. Yeah. was, I was in a conversation with one of the design, one of the designers of Salesforce. And I said, Hey, look, tell me, tell me what you see around the corner for like user design and experience with the computer. As we look, you know, two, three years ahead, our belief inside of our medical practice is that we want a zero keystroke data entry system.

Randy Lorensen [42:56]: Well, let's talk about it. Go deeper. just wasn't sure if you had more to say there or not.

Anthony Marino [42:59]: yeah, yeah. I was just in a conversation with one of the designers, one of the designers, I said, hey look, tell me what you see around the corner for like user design and engineering.

Dr. John Oberg [43:20]: Meaning that an AI listens into a conversation, the entire thing gets put into the patient chart and the provider can see the screen, but if they don't choose to hit a key, they don't have to. Like it just, it just all shows up appropriately in natural language. We're, deploying that, that alpha version of that today in our practice. Like, and so we're pretty excited about that. And he said, yeah, one of the challenges we face as Salesforce is that like all of the things that are happening agentically become harder and harder and harder to show the customer.

Anthony Marino [43:44]: things about it, it can become tough. So, that's not, because it all just happens. And soon we're going to have a user interface that just works. It's a perfect, it's hot hand set. That's not just one of the things that we've been telling you that's safe, because it becomes so straightforward when you're in the line. You're just going natural language about it, and just part of it, and you're able to

Dr. John Oberg [43:49]: because it all just happens. And so pretty soon we're gonna have a user interface that's just simpler and simpler and harder and harder and harder to demonstrate. And that becomes one of the marketing and sales challenges that we have to face because it becomes so straightforward and streamlined. You're just showing natural language better. And so it's harder to differentiate,

Anthony Marino [44:11]: it's

Randy Lorensen [44:11]: Until there's

Dr. John Oberg [44:11]: which is great.

Anthony Marino [44:12]: going to be a point where the biopsy

Randy Lorensen [44:12]: going to be a point where the AI will be making these, we'll be training our AIs to make these decisions. And I think, I think the sales process, I don't know, I'm not putting a timeframe on that, but so I get there's a transition, but there will be a point where the sales process will transfer to how do you convince an AI that you're the best option for their, for their product.

Dr. John Oberg [44:30]: I think you're already seeing that. Like, so that's already happening in marketing, right? Because you've gone from search engine optimization to AI optimization. so I think, think that's, we're already starting to see that at the top of the funnel. Like you're seeing traffic on websites go down. Top of funnel traffic primarily is my, that's my opinion. I don't have data for that, but I think you're seeing less traffic to actual company websites. That's higher intent traffic, which to me, the leap is your top of funnel traffic is being handled by AI and AIs are doing a lot of the educating.

Anthony Marino [44:38]: I that's super important. The Gibson traffic on websites today, that is top of funnel traffic, I'm great with my business night, I'm using the data. I think you're seeing less traffic in actual company websites, that's higher intent traffic, which to me, the loop is your top of funnel traffic is being handled by AI and AI is handling it.

Dr. John Oberg [45:00]: And then people are showing up on the website with higher intent to actually move through

Anthony Marino [45:00]: And then people are filling up on the website with high intent traffic.

Dr. John Oberg [45:04]: a lower funnel, a lower funnel process. And again, don't have data on that. That's just what I think I'm seeing.

Anthony Marino [45:07]: I think.

Randy Lorensen [45:12]: Let's put a bow on Dreamforce. Any last words or Anthony, any other questions you want to dig in? Put a bow on this thing.

Anthony Marino [45:18]: Well, really, um, it was eye opening doing the research on what went on there and then hearing John, it sounds like a terrific use of time for for people. And, know, you're surrounded, you're being you're surrounded by tomorrow at this thing. So, yeah, quite interesting.

Randy Lorensen [45:41]: Listeners, thank you for listening. As always, download, subscribe, tell your friends, tell your neighbors, give us thumbs up, whatever you can do. There we go. Yes. Salesforce, we are looking for a sponsor by the name of Salesforce. Would be great. John's already giving you commercials anyway, though. So I don't know why you need to pay us. We're just going to do it. We're just going to do it for free. But anyway, Anthony, John, it's been a pleasure to have everybody have a great day and to our listeners have an abundant week.

Dr. John Oberg [45:47]: Someone tell Mark Benny off. That's That's right.

Anthony Marino [46:08]: Great, thank you.