speaker-0: You know, I think what it it does is allows retailers that really want to like really customize and and sort of like think about their front end in a different way and the other type of you know, code it on their own, but still use the structured data, the governance rules, the security permissions, everything that lives in Commerce Cloud, I feel like that is going to drive tremendous impact and I'm having so many conversations around our Cloud Force strategy
speaker-1: Welcome to Coffee and Commerce. I'm Kayla Schwartz and I'm joined by my colleague Celeste Richards. Thanks for coming on the podcast.
speaker-0: Hi Kayla, thanks for having me. Thanks for us. Always happy to be with you and Kayla whenever we can.
speaker-1: Well we're here at Dream Force, the first day and it's been really exciting, so much energy and Celeste, I'm curious, what are your first thoughts? What are you seeing and hearing out there?
speaker-0: Honestly, there's just like there's so much innovation at this Dream Force and what I think is really cool is all of it is like easy to sort of grasp and see in real life and see the impact that it's happening on businesses. And so I just have been so excited to see the the commerce innovation. We have so much coming out of marketing and with the contentful acquisition, there's just there's so much for retailers to get excited about.
speaker-1: Well, you work really closely with our customers. Just for the audience, tell everyone what you do at Salesforce and and yeah, just give us a quick background. Yeah.
speaker-0: For sure. I've been with Salesforce for six years, but prior to that I spent my career in retail, working in product development and merchandising. And so I'm on the retail industry advisory team and our group is an ex group of ex industry practitioners who are now here at Salesforce to help our customers navigate these digital transformation strategies, share customer stories, transformation stories, and kind of help make sure that Everything that we do, we're speaking the their language, not the Salesforce language, which can be hard with, you know, AI force and cloud force and things like that, but to really help tie it back to use cases that really make sense to the retail landscape.
speaker-1: So you're super close to how our customers are using our product and what they're thinking about. I'm curious what you're hearing from them on AI and all of this development happening this week.
speaker-0: Yeah, I think when I speak to our retail customers, We're we're at a point where they've done a lot of experimenting and they kind of know where they want to place some of their bets, but they still need to do things in a really streamlined, smart, efficient way that's going to produce results. And so I think what is getting the exciting excited is we have higher conversion rates with shopper agents. We're seeing the impact of what agent agenda commerce search, formerly known as Simulate does for the business. And so to really be able to talk about This innovation that also has real revenue attached to it I think is really impactful and that's where so many of my conversations have been sort of going over the last couple of days.
speaker-1: You know, I got a question earlier today. Like what is the most impactful thing if I were an SMB that I could do today to improve my either my customer experience, my AI visibility? What's one thing you would recommend, especially we're headed up on the holiday season. Yeah. It's right around the corner. What's one thing a brand could do that could be really impactful?
speaker-0: Yeah, I mean There's a lot of things that like I'm sure brands have done that are table stakes, like making sure that we're following up with customers based off of things that they've browsed and you know, that type of thing. But I would say being able to be discoverable in the LLM is going to be really critical this season because as you mentioned in in a previous podcast, we're seeing tremendous growth in the traffic and first time stops at at LLMs. And so being able to just show up in that first sort of answer, that you know customers are having to sort of discover a new product, put together a gift list, it's gonna be really important. So product data is gonna be the key and how you get that syndicated to the LLMs is is definitely I think one of the number one priorities. There's a lot of things that retailers need to do right, but I would say if you haven't done that, that's a big big thing to do before the holiday.
speaker-1: Absolutely. Yeah. We're hearing more and more of that this year, especially in the last month, and how, you know, not not to go too down too far down that rabbit hole, but bots, crawlers, how all that plays into your Cyber Week experience, how you manage all of that traffic, where you send it on your site. We could probably do two hour podcasts just on that. So I won't go too deep on that. But before I let you go, Anthropic has been everywhere throughout Dreamforce and big news this week and the last couple of weeks. but Claude for commerce, I wanna pick your brain on that. What are what are your thoughts? What are you hearing?
speaker-0: You know, I think what it it does is allows retailers that really want to like really customize and and sort of like think about their front end in a different way and the other type of you know, code it on their own, but still use the structured data, the governance rules, the security permissions, everything that lives in Commerce Cloud, I feel like that is going to drive tremendous impact and I'm having so many conversations around our Cloud Force strategy in general and you know, all the way from like B2B businesses to D2C businesses as well of just like what how how can I leverage this today? people want to be builders, like there's options for them. If they want to leverage MCPs, there's options. So that's been really fun to just go through different use cases and how to you know be able to leverage leverage everything that they've built in the application layer and and use it in quad.
speaker-1: Absolutely. One last question. Would you say that they're more like what are you having more c conversations on? They're shopper agent or their merchant?
speaker-0: I would say it's more on like the internal side. So yeah, I would say more internal merchant agent and then for B2B sales teams like how they follow up on leads and things like that and orchestrate all their account data.
speaker-1: Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Celeste. That was super great. I hope you have a wonderful dream force and we'll have you back on the podcast.
speaker-1: Welcome to Coffee and Commerce. I'm Kayla Schwartz and I'm joined by my colleague Celeste Richards. Thanks for coming on the podcast.
speaker-0: Hi Kayla, thanks for having me. Thanks for us. Always happy to be with you and Kayla whenever we can.
speaker-1: Well we're here at Dream Force, the first day and it's been really exciting, so much energy and Celeste, I'm curious, what are your first thoughts? What are you seeing and hearing out there?
speaker-0: Honestly, there's just like there's so much innovation at this Dream Force and what I think is really cool is all of it is like easy to sort of grasp and see in real life and see the impact that it's happening on businesses. And so I just have been so excited to see the the commerce innovation. We have so much coming out of marketing and with the contentful acquisition, there's just there's so much for retailers to get excited about.
speaker-1: Well, you work really closely with our customers. Just for the audience, tell everyone what you do at Salesforce and and yeah, just give us a quick background. Yeah.
speaker-0: For sure. I've been with Salesforce for six years, but prior to that I spent my career in retail, working in product development and merchandising. And so I'm on the retail industry advisory team and our group is an ex group of ex industry practitioners who are now here at Salesforce to help our customers navigate these digital transformation strategies, share customer stories, transformation stories, and kind of help make sure that Everything that we do, we're speaking the their language, not the Salesforce language, which can be hard with, you know, AI force and cloud force and things like that, but to really help tie it back to use cases that really make sense to the retail landscape.
speaker-1: So you're super close to how our customers are using our product and what they're thinking about. I'm curious what you're hearing from them on AI and all of this development happening this week.
speaker-0: Yeah, I think when I speak to our retail customers, We're we're at a point where they've done a lot of experimenting and they kind of know where they want to place some of their bets, but they still need to do things in a really streamlined, smart, efficient way that's going to produce results. And so I think what is getting the exciting excited is we have higher conversion rates with shopper agents. We're seeing the impact of what agent agenda commerce search, formerly known as Simulate does for the business. And so to really be able to talk about This innovation that also has real revenue attached to it I think is really impactful and that's where so many of my conversations have been sort of going over the last couple of days.
speaker-1: You know, I got a question earlier today. Like what is the most impactful thing if I were an SMB that I could do today to improve my either my customer experience, my AI visibility? What's one thing you would recommend, especially we're headed up on the holiday season. Yeah. It's right around the corner. What's one thing a brand could do that could be really impactful?
speaker-0: Yeah, I mean There's a lot of things that like I'm sure brands have done that are table stakes, like making sure that we're following up with customers based off of things that they've browsed and you know, that type of thing. But I would say being able to be discoverable in the LLM is going to be really critical this season because as you mentioned in in a previous podcast, we're seeing tremendous growth in the traffic and first time stops at at LLMs. And so being able to just show up in that first sort of answer, that you know customers are having to sort of discover a new product, put together a gift list, it's gonna be really important. So product data is gonna be the key and how you get that syndicated to the LLMs is is definitely I think one of the number one priorities. There's a lot of things that retailers need to do right, but I would say if you haven't done that, that's a big big thing to do before the holiday.
speaker-1: Absolutely. Yeah. We're hearing more and more of that this year, especially in the last month, and how, you know, not not to go too down too far down that rabbit hole, but bots, crawlers, how all that plays into your Cyber Week experience, how you manage all of that traffic, where you send it on your site. We could probably do two hour podcasts just on that. So I won't go too deep on that. But before I let you go, Anthropic has been everywhere throughout Dreamforce and big news this week and the last couple of weeks. but Claude for commerce, I wanna pick your brain on that. What are what are your thoughts? What are you hearing?
speaker-0: You know, I think what it it does is allows retailers that really want to like really customize and and sort of like think about their front end in a different way and the other type of you know, code it on their own, but still use the structured data, the governance rules, the security permissions, everything that lives in Commerce Cloud, I feel like that is going to drive tremendous impact and I'm having so many conversations around our Cloud Force strategy in general and you know, all the way from like B2B businesses to D2C businesses as well of just like what how how can I leverage this today? people want to be builders, like there's options for them. If they want to leverage MCPs, there's options. So that's been really fun to just go through different use cases and how to you know be able to leverage leverage everything that they've built in the application layer and and use it in quad.
speaker-1: Absolutely. One last question. Would you say that they're more like what are you having more c conversations on? They're shopper agent or their merchant?
speaker-0: I would say it's more on like the internal side. So yeah, I would say more internal merchant agent and then for B2B sales teams like how they follow up on leads and things like that and orchestrate all their account data.
speaker-1: Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Celeste. That was super great. I hope you have a wonderful dream force and we'll have you back on the podcast.
