Lessons from the Salesforce webinar on building AI-driven, connected enterprises

“Nearly 95% of AI projects never reach production, and that gap is costing businesses both revenue and relevance.”

It’s a staggering reality that Tanmaiy Chandanshive, Senior Manager, Solution Engineering, Salesforce, highlighted during a recent webinar, framing the urgent challenge facing enterprises today. Customers expect fast, intelligent, connected experiences, but behind the scenes, most companies still operate with siloed teams, disconnected tools, and data that refuses to speak the same language.

In today’s hyper-competitive business environment, delivering great service is no longer enough. Customers expect brands to remember them, anticipate their needs, and respond instantly across every channel. Yet for many organisations, sales, service, and marketing continue to function in isolation, creating inconsistent and fragmented customer experiences.

Addressing this widening gap between customer expectations and operational reality, Salesforce and YourStory hosted a webinar titled ‘Unified by Salesforce: Transforming sales, service & marketing into one customer journey’. The session brought together Tanmaiy along with Udit Bali, Solution Engineer, Salesforce; Swaroop Kaja, Regional Sales Director - SMB, Salesforce; and Suchismita Roy, Senior Manager Sales Operations, Acceldata; to explore how organizations can unify teams, data, and workflows on one trusted platform.

The new enterprise challenge: AI everywhere, but impact nowhere

Kicking off the session, Tanmaiy highlighted a striking paradox.

“Customers already experience AI everywhere in their personal lives which include trip planners, recommendations, image editing. But enterprises are struggling to match that experience,” he said.

The reasons are familiar to most modern businesses: scattered data, disconnected tools, limited governance, and the escalating cost of AI experimentation.

“Data is everywhere: documents, calls, social interactions, apps. Every signal matters. The real challenge is making these signals actionable, for every employee, at every moment,” Tanmaiy noted.

This is exactly the challenge Salesforce’s latest innovation, Agentforce 360, is designed to address.

Agentforce 360, the new architecture of the unified enterprise

Tanmaiy broke down the three layers that power Salesforce’s agentic vision:

• Customer 360 (app layer): The backbone for sales, service, marketing, and support
• Data cloud (data layer): Real-time, unified, reliable customer profiles
• Agentforce (AI layer): AI agents embedded directly into business workflows

“This is the future of the enterprise: humans, apps, data, and AI working together on one platform,” he said.

Agentforce unlocks practical, high-impact use cases across functions:

• Sales teams get instant lead qualification and call summaries
• Service agents resolve issues faster with indexed knowledge
• Marketers generate briefs, content, and two-way emails in seconds
• IT, HR, and operations teams automate repetitive processes end-to-end

Importantly, Salesforce also prescribes a three-phase journey for businesses adopting AI: answer questions, take action, and act proactively.

Seeing connected customer journeys in action

In the live demo, Udit walked participants through a unified customer flow, from marketing engagement to sales qualification to post-sales service.

“What you see here is one customer, one profile, one journey, regardless of how many teams touch the customer. That’s the power of a unified platform,” he said.

The demo showcased how insights flow across teams, how automation reduces manual effort, and how a consistent customer narrative is maintained from first touch to support resolution.

Inside Acceldata’s transformation with Salesforce

The highlight of the session was a fireside chat with Suchismita from Acceldata, an agentic data management and observability platform.

Acceldata works with some of the world’s largest enterprises running at petabyte scale, ensuring their data is reliable, business-ready, and, increasingly, AI-ready. But their internal operations weren’t always smooth.

“Before Salesforce, our sales and customer success processes lived across spreadsheets and multiple tools. It slowed us down and limited visibility into both pipeline and customer health,” Suchismita said.

Having implemented Salesforce multiple times in her career, Suchismita was unequivocal, “Salesforce is like a rubber band, you can stretch and shape it to fit exactly what your business needs. Most CRMs give you limited customisation. Salesforce adapts to you, not the other way around.”

Acceldata started with Sales Cloud, gradually expanded into Service Cloud, launched a redesigned customer portal on Experience Cloud, adopted Revenue Intelligence, and is now exploring Agentforce. “Six years later, Salesforce has become the backbone of our go-to-market teams. It’s far more than a CRM; it’s our operating framework,” Suchismita said.

She highlighted three game-changing advantages:

1. Single source of truth: “Sales, CS, and support data now live together. Everyone sees the same reality.”
2. Scalability: “As the company grew, Salesforce scaled with us, effortlessly.”
3. Faster, data-driven decision making: “Leadership gets real-time insights. Teams act faster. Decisions are sharper.”

AI is already here

Acceldata recently launched what Suchismita described as “the industry’s first agentic data management platform”.

“Our AI agents analyze, decide, and act autonomously. It moves enterprises from reactive monitoring to intelligent data management. AI isn’t an add-on anymore; it’s core to customer experience,” she said.

Advising small businesses evaluating Salesforce today, Suchismita offered four recommendations:

• Start small, scale fast: Pick one high-impact use case, prove value, and then expand.
• Invest in data quality early: Bad data means bad decisions. Establish guardrails and governance from day one.
• Focus on adoption: A platform is only as valuable as how much your team uses it. Communicate benefits, train continuously.
• Don’t think of Salesforce as just a CRM: It’s a business platform that can scale into marketing, service, analytics, revenue operations, and much more.

“These principles,” she said, “set up an organisation not just for transformation, but for long-term success.”

The future of customer engagement is unified

As businesses navigate rising customer expectations, multichannel engagement, and the accelerating shift toward AI, the webinar made it clear that disconnected tools cannot deliver connected experiences. Unified platforms can.

Salesforce’s combination of Customer 360, Data Cloud, and Agentforce is designed to help enterprises of every size create faster teams, smarter automation, consistent customer journeys, higher productivity, reliable, AI-ready data. Or as Tanmaiy put it, “When your people, processes, and AI are unified, your customer journey becomes unstoppable.”