CMO interview: What Salesforce's lead marketer sees AI and IoT doing to customer engagement

Fourth industrial revolution technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) will not only force marketers to be more scientific, they'll also require them to think beyond their function and to next best actions for customers across an organisation. That's the view of Salesforce global chief marketing officer, Simon Mulcahy, who caught up with CMO during the recent Dreamforce conference in San Francisco to discuss the key product and industry messages from the event, and the growing importance of customer advocacy as a strategy. There's no doubt AI and IoT are going to be massive game changers, opening up more data sets and actions in real time and enabling the next level of personalisation, Mulcahy said. "And it will force marketers to be even more scientific," he said. "The best way I've found of internalising this is to stop thinking of it in raw terms of marketing. How you know when a customer needs the next touchpoint from you as a company? And what are you packaging up and delivering to them? "That IoT data is going to trigger the next best action.