Achieving What's Possible with AI | Customer Success Keynote, Dreamforce 2026

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Customer Success Keynote. This is one of my favorite sessions, as you can imagine, of the entire Dreamforce, because for the last couple days, you've got to hear so much about our incredible technology, all this new innovation, all these new capabilities. What this session is about is how our customers are using those capabilities, bringing it to life in their organizations, and really being able to achieve what they— what wasn't possible before. Now, before I dive into these incredible awards and these success stories, I'd like to start with a thank you. I wanna thank all of you. For those of you that are here in the room with us today, and spending so much time with us here this week at Dreamforce, and all of you online who have the opportunity to dial in and hear all this. Thank you for trusting Salesforce to be part of your agentic transformation. I have been working with customers for a very long time leading transformation initiatives along with transforming my own business. And when I now look at what we're confronted with, with a technology like AI, It's both challenging and it's so incredibly exciting. What makes it challenging is the technology is changing incredibly fast, faster than any of us have seen this, but also way faster than our organizations have been able to change. And bridging those 2 things together is the hardest part. But when you do, That's really where you unlock value. And having the ability to do that is what all these customers have represented for our Customer Success Awards. We have been doing these awards for a number of years now. This year, we had more than double the number of nominations. What does that tell you? Well, what it told us is that customers are moving from experimenting with AI with pilots, with doing it in very isolated ways, what we saw was much more transformation, much more bold aspiration, and delivering significantly more value. And as I said, this isn't easy. These customers have demonstrated inside their enterprises that they've learned a lot. They've learned a lot from all this experimentation, and they're bringing together the right resources, the right capabilities to be able to deliver this at scale. Now, before we get into our awards, what is an awards show without a little suspense? At the end of the show, we're going to be awarding one of you out there and a guest the golden ticket, the golden ticket to attend our DreamFest concert tonight with Gwen Stefani and Usher. So Hang on to your seats and we'll do that at the end. But we're also gonna give you some incredible information and a blueprint so that you can take home the lessons learned from all of these customers and bring 'em into your own organization. So speaking of blueprints, one of the things we did was we looked across all our nominations and said, what are some of the real lessons learned? What are some of the things that each one of these customers navigated in making their choices and delivering that value. And we put together a little blueprint for you. So the first thing, and we're gonna take you through this in just a few moments with our winners, but the first thing is this bold aspiration. It's starting with what really drives value. I talked about this technology and you've been hearing it all week. It's unlocking different kinds of possibilities. It's being bold, rethinking, And then engineering that outcome into your business. The second thing we saw was that they were focused on making sure they had the right foundations. This wasn't about just connecting together enough data to do a pilot or launch a single agent. It was about building the foundation so that you could connect together your data, your processes, your org structures, your operations, and deliver sustainable and durable value. And then the other thing we saw was bringing together the right team, the right team that has your business leaders, your technology leaders working side by side, the right partners like Salesforce, our partner ecosystem. But another really important team member, AI. So AI is now part of the team helping you deliver and helping you get the value not just from the agentic transformation you're doing, but how you deliver that agentic transformation, giving you the opportunity to have even more speed and agility how you bring this value to life. So now to get us started, I would like to start with our first Customer Success Award winner, Tottenham Hotspur. Let's roll the video. All right, I'll tell you about this in just a minute. Now, Tottenham Hotspur has been around for— since 1882. And you saw on the video, that just like many of you out there, they had so many disparate legacy systems out there. And what they were desiring to do was have a bold aspiration to create the best connected fan experience. Yet there was a lot of things getting in their way. And that fan experience, they knew if they could achieve that, would allow them to unlock their next level of growth. Now, they've been around a long time, and being able to transform this took some, not only a bold aspiration, but it took somebody with some chutzpah that wanted to really go after this daunting task. So what I'd like to do now is invite Rob Pickering, that executive who took the bold transformation at Tottenham Hotspur, and come tell us the story. So before you, before you get started, you told me one thing backstage when we met was that you don't really have your office all decorated with all kinds of sports paraphernalia. So what we thought we would do is give you a totally transformed football for your office. So this is for you.

Thank you.

Recognize our partnership.

Thank you very much. I definitely don't have any merchandise like that, that's for sure. And I'm pretty excited to get that home.

It's going to look pretty sparkly up on your shelf.

Well, it'll make my office a bit more personality, give it a bit more personality.

Well, thank you so much for joining us. And we saw the video, which was incredible, but we really want to hear the details of the story. Tell us, tell us what was behind this aspiration and why you knew it was going to create so much value for the team.

Yeah, we touched a little bit on it in the video before we started there. We think we have the world's best fans, and so for the world's best fans, you want the world's best fan experience. And in a world where we were coming from, where we had disparate systems, disconnected systems, for our fans, that was a lesser experience than we wanted to deliver for them. And so as we looked at where we wanted to go and where we wanted to go next, we wanted to make sure that our fans, when they engaged with us, had the best possible experience, and our employees who service them have an incredible experience in terms of their work so that when they're working with our fans, they get the best experience. And all that in a world where agentic AI is possible means that connecting that data into singular systems and building that in a way that allowed that data to be surfaced, not just for our fans to ask a question and that question to be answered, but for them to ask a question and that question be acted upon in our systems of record was a tremendously big change for us and one that allowed us to do the things that we've talked about.

Well, I think that what you all did was really incredible. Let's show it to everybody.

Whether I have a question about matchday, merchandise, or my season ticket, I can turn to the Ask Spurs Agent for one connected fan experience. And because AskSpurs is connected to my Golden Record, it knows who I am and brings together my membership, ticketing, and account information to give me an answer grounded in my context. So when I can't find my digital pass, I don't have to start over or explain my situation again. AskSpurs already has the context and helps me with what to do next. And if I need more help, that same context carries into the human handoff. The service team can pick up right where Ask Spurs left off. One fan, one golden record, one connected experience wherever I engage with Spurs.

It's super exciting, and I really want to thank you for the partnership. Our teams work together so incredibly well, and you gave us really ambitious goals, the entire team. So talk about how were you able to go as fast as you did to be able to take on this pretty daunting transformation and get these kinds of results?

Yeah, I was talking to our board about this a couple of weeks ago, and I actually ran the maths on the time that we ran the project for, and it was just a little bit under 18 months exactly to effectively moved to more than 10 Salesforce clouds to roll out a new ERP, a new identity platform, and a whole new digital assets from a web and app perspective for our club and stadium. And when I think about how we did that, I think the first part is a clarity of vision in terms of where we wanted to go and why we wanted to go there. So what our North Star was, I think working with tremendous partners and having those same conversations about shared values and what it means for both of us to be successful. was the second part. And then obviously leveraging the best of technology in terms of how we build, what we build, how we get there has allowed us to be so optimistic from a timeframe perspective. I know when I first outlined it to the board that I thought this would be an 18-month project, they're kind of like, yeah, sure, it'll be 3 years and you'll come back to us in 6 months to ask for another 2 years. But actually we stuck to the timeline because we were working with great partners who shared our values. and allowed us to use the best in technology, not just in terms of the platforms, but also how we built those platforms together in a very agile, iterative, and AI-based way.

Yeah, I mean, you were one of our early pilots for what we do as AI-native delivery. We got both teams in the trenches. We all learned how to operate in a completely new way, and the results have been incredible. You know, everybody here is loving to hear all these lessons learned from our customers that are kind of making things happen so quickly. Is there anything you'd like to share with them that was kind of your aha moment and the lessons that you learned throughout this?

Yeah, I made a comment earlier today. I had a session on Data360 earlier today, and I said that I've done 5 transformations in a row now, which is why I'm utterly bald and look older than I am. But the reason— every time I do a transformation, I always spend more time and money on data migration, data governance, data quality. And every time I get to the end of the project, I always wish I spent more money and time and effort on those things. And so as you think about transforming and as you think about building the next generation of what you want to deliver for your customers or your fans, it's about thinking about what sort of data matters to you, what will matter to them, and how do we get that over in a structured sense. The last point I'd make about that, which is really important, is you have to have a why for why you're going to undertake that transformation and something to rally people behind. So to get a team of people that are— that can be enormous, not all of which who work for you, not all of which maybe share that vision, to come behind such an ambitious vision with such an aggressive timeframe, we had to paint a very clear picture of what mattered to us and why we wanted to get there. And when we had both of those visions and those visions shared and encouraged and enabled by our partners, we could deliver these world-class experiences in such ambitious timeframes.

Well, I'll tell you, it has been remarkable. to see both a very bold aspiration that the football club had not taken on in many years and breaking through that, but also the pace with which you operated, getting the results, and now you have a foundation that you're ready to run, right? So congratulations, and I'd love to give you— this is your gift, but you're gonna get a real award. So a real award that— oh God, you make these heavy. The Real Customer Success Award. So congratulations to you and your entire team, and thank you.

Thank you.

I think we have to take a picture now. Okay, well, fantastic and congratulations. And now I'd like to bring up Julia Foster for our next Customer Success Award winner.

Thank you, Lori, and congratulations again to Tottenham Hotspur. I've been working with our partner ecosystem for over 10 years, and one thing has always remained true. It is the envy of the industry.

Why?

It's diverse, it's innovative, and it has kept pace evolving as the pace of innovation has happened here at Salesforce. And that's why I am so thrilled to talk about the next awardee, The Grout Guy. This isn't a story about tile grout guys. This is a story about powerful growth in a business who had the insight to build the right foundation and do that with multiple agents to scale. But it didn't just stop there. They then became a Salesforce partner. They started a brand new business because they were seeing so much success. Think about it. Brand new business became an AI business and then started a second business on top of that. That's incredible. This is the story about what is possible when you become an agentic enterprise. Let's roll the film. All right, The Grout Guy, an Australian tile and grout restoration company, was seeing profound growth, 40% year-over-year growth, but they were facing a challenge. Their work orders and the way that they were working wasn't keeping pace. It was taking up to 2 days to fill those work orders. And think about that as a customer, you might not like that. But what they did was rather than building AI on top of their processes, they went down into the foundation of them. They looked at their processes, their operations, their data, and their technology to make AI work for them and to transform. And those same work processes that are work processes that took 2 days now take 2 minutes. 24/7, and they've saved thousands of hours of manual data entry for their workers. It's just incredible. So let's hear directly from them. I'd love to welcome Brad Young and Anthony Messina up from The Grout Guy.

Welcome.

Thank you.

I saw you rode in style here from Perth, Australia. If you guys check them out on Instagram or LinkedIn, you'll see what I'm talking about.

The new jet.

The new jet.

Grout Force One.

Grout Force One. Rad, I want to start with you, but I first want to understand your title. Talk to us a little bit about being the Chief Grout Officer, and then talk to us about the early days of Grout Guy.

The name's just a bit of fun, right?

We are—

we have a Head of Grout, Warranty of Grout, so hogs and dogs and things like that as well in the office. So Yeah, I guess 19 years ago it was, we started and it was just myself in a van with the world's previous number 1 CRM.

Little prop.

Yeah, it was running around the van, the map book on the steering wheel, like there's no Google Maps, and that was sort of the day-to-day. getting in, doing the jobs, trying to deal with customers and so on. We then went to other sort of like little job management software along the way and we got to that dispatch ratio sort of like 1 to 4, 1 to 5 maybe if we were really lucky. But as we started to scale, we broke that really badly.

What was happening when you decided you needed to scale? The way that you were working wasn't keeping pace with the growth.

Yeah, I'm getting there. We had invoices that were getting sent out. Like, so, you know, Mrs. Smith got their invoice for, you know, $500, but it was missing half the invoice. So it should have been $1,500. So then someone needs to call Mrs. Smith and go, you know, 2 or 3 weeks later going, oh, Mrs. Smith, you owe us $1,000. And that's a difficult conversation.

Yeah.

And so, Anthony, you were the brains behind getting AI to work for The Grout Guy. Why don't you talk to us about that?

Yeah, sure, sure. So look, we're pretty lucky. We're on the world's number one CRM now. So we had all our data in the right place, right? So you can kind of see up here, page from the old diary. Now we're on Salesforce. And so things are running really, really smooth for us. We're seeing fantastic growth, 40% year on year. But we wanted more. We wanted to push things even further and see how we can take things to the next level. And that's kind of where AI came in, I guess. We were exploring what was possible at the time, and we wanted to see what are the pain points and the problems that we can now solve for our customers and for our team that we couldn't solve beforehand? And so we dabbled with Salesforce Foundations. We did some workshops at the Towers, and we figured out that, you know what, there's some cool stuff that we can do here. So we ended up actually building out 5 agents for our initial deployment over 18 weeks. And they were targeted. We did things like Casey, We have our own Casey. Casey doing cases, obviously. And we had leads being done, triage, prioritize, things like that. We have Walter doing the work order processing, which is a really, really good one. And so, yeah, since that time, we've just been pushing harder and harder and just trying to make more agents, more skill sets, and continue to improve both the customer experience and also the staff experience as well.

I love that. So the best part, my favorite part of the story is this next picture, and I want you to explain a little bit about what this means. What's the significance of this picture?

So this is World Tour Melbourne last year, and we were sitting in the front row. We watched the demo, and we sort of looked at each other going, you know, we can do this, or we can do as good a job as what these guys, these big companies are doing, right? So, yeah, came away from there and tasked Anthony with doing it all. And it's sort of the birthplace of Servly as well. So Servly is that, you know, we're now an OSP partner with Salesforce. We want to give back to the tradie sort of community or trades, I think you guys call it in the States. But yeah, there's plenty of other businesses out there that can benefit from how we've configured what we've got now.

I love it. Thank you. Anything to add, Anthony, on becoming a partner?

Yeah, it's been a good journey. And we've spoken to lots of other businesses now. And I suppose one thing that we can really see is that this technology is really, really beneficial and helpful for us. And we really want to help other people. And it doesn't have to be just for the big players, right? Like, we're from Perth, Western Australia. It's the most isolated capital city. We're a tile and grout company. We're not high tech, right? Like, we're not. But—

You are now.

We are now, yeah.

You're here.

And look at us, here we go. So yeah, thanks for having us, Dreamforce. And thank you very much.

Well, it's my privilege to award you guys with our Customer Success Award. It's heavy, but you look strong, so I'll give it to you. Congratulations again. And I think we need to update that selfie picture.

Yes, please.

Did you bring your phone?

We'll take one.

Yep. Oh, no, I didn't.

Oh, no.

Okay.

Well, we'll still get it. Congratulations, guys.

Thanks.

Thank you.

You ready?

Yeah?

Okay.

I completely forgot about this.

All right. Thanks again. Thank you for sharing your story. And we've got one more story to tell, and I'm going to welcome Jim up to stage.

Thanks, Julia. And congratulations, Spurs and the Grout Guy. Incredible story. Well, we're making our way through the blueprint, and we've reached the most important part. The people, because none of this happens without amazing teams wrapped around these projects. The difference between a pilot and real production value is that team. You need the right people from across your organization that can execute. You need partners that can deliver, and you need AI on the team, just like Lori said. When you have that team together, then there's only one question you really need to ask. What is possible now? What can you do today with AI that you could never have gotten done before? And our next Customer Success Award winner is a great example. Sammons Financial Group assembled the right team, asked what was possible, and decided to focus on customer experience. They decided that they should be available for their customers all the time. Not just during business hours. And because they had the right team assembled, the rest was magic. Let's roll the film. Sammons Financial Group has been around for almost 100 years. They're based in West Des Moines, Iowa, and they're in financial services. They focus on life insurance and annuities. And as you can imagine, in that business, when life happens, their customers reach out. They need to reach Sammons Financial Group. Unfortunately, the Sammons Financial Group contact center was only open during business hours, so they saw an opportunity. They decided to implement Agentforce Voice so they could be available for their customers all the time. An amazing story. So to click a little bit further into this, I'd like to welcome to the stage Betsy West and Christina Lepkowski.

Hi.

Come on up. Welcome to Dreamforce. Amazing story. Thanks for being here so much. Betsy, let's start with you. Before you implemented the AI voice agent, tell us about the experience your team was delivering and what your vision was for the future.

Yeah, so I'm the leader of the contact centers at Sammons Financial Group. And really what we needed to find a solution for was how we're going to continue to grow for the future. We have lofty goals to continue to grow our business, and that means more customers, that equates to more phone calls. And then you throw in a sprinkle of maybe a peak season, then things can go crazy, right? So we were thinking, all right, maybe I'll talk about a former solution or a previous solution first. Well, we've got this great website, why don't we just promote the website? That's a good idea. Talked to my reps about that, talked to the team, they got on the phone. What's the website? Customers would call us. We started to promote the website. Yeah, go out there. That's great. It takes more time on the phone call to do that. And then the industry we're in, they could call us one day and not call us for maybe 6 more months. So how effective was that? Not super effective. So we needed a solution that was scalable, that was going to also meet the customer where they're at. They're on the other end of the phone call. Let's get them a solution that's happening right where they're at. And that's where the voice AI agent came in and really just transformed the call center.

Yeah, it's great about meeting customers right where they are. Should we show them what you've built?

Let's do it.

All right, let's roll it.

I recently met with my tax advisor, and I have some follow-up questions. I call Sammons Financial Group, and the AI-powered voice agent answers right away. How can I help you today? What is an RMD? A required minimum distribution, or RMD, is the minimum amount you must withdraw each year from retirement account. Would you like to know when your RMDs start or how much your RMD might be? Yeah, what is my RMD? Your RMD is $13,042.73. Is there anything else I can help you with today? Yes, I would like to take my required amount out. One moment while I connect you to the next available service representative. The representative has the full context of our conversation, so I don't have to start over. AI handles what it can. People are there for what matters most.

We all got to learn what an RMD is too, so that's really, really good.

There'll be a class after this. We all teach next time.

So you run the contact center and then you introduced AI into the fold. How did you bring your people along and how did they feel about it?

Yeah, it's, it's important to do this early. And to make sure they're involved along with the process. So one thing we did right off the bat, we named our agent. Sounds like we're all kind of doing that. Our agent's name, kind of use this internally only, but we call her Clara because she provides clarity to an account. So it's very easy to talk about her. We have a SharePoint site that our reps can go out and kind of see Clara's progress. You know, we have huddle boards that show all of their progress and their KPIs and where they're landing. So we've got that for Clara as well. Another thing we wanted to make sure we did is know anytime you're on a team, you've got a different role to play on the team. So Clara's role is not the same as our specialist's role. She has her own role on the team to answer certain types of phone calls to allow our reps to spend more time on those phone calls that really matter the most and need that human touch.

Yeah, I think it's great to show the reps what the agent's doing so they kind of understand exactly what's going on. Chris, I know you care a ton about the customer experience that you're delivering. You've got some amazing stories about that journey that you went on. So how did you think about customer experience in your implementation, and how do you make sure it's always getting better?

Yeah, we, like Betsy had mentioned, we spend a lot of time working with our product and business partners to be able to really work on identifying what good looks like for us, really working on our data. I know some of the other people have spoke about that, like what data really do we want them to have access to? What do we want that experience to be for them? And how do we make that extension of the service that we're already providing? You know, keeping along with that same idea of having that persona of like how we service and work with our customers, but keeping it separate from those service calls that get escalated to a human rep. That's great.

Tell us the story about what you did to tune the voice agent.

Sure.

Walk us through what's on the screen right now.

Yeah, absolutely. This is really fun for us, actually. Our leadership team really enjoyed this. So we got the opportunity to build out what Clara, A persona of Clara. We gave her personality. We really wanted her to be an extension of what we are. We landed with middle-aged, husky-grounded for the Midwest, like really trying to extend that out and making it the personality, the voice, the service that she extends, that feel, meeting people where they are, putting as much empathy into those calls, and escalating where it was needed. So that was a fun experience.

The voice tuning always lets you put a little bit more Iowa into your agent, right? That's what we said. That's great. Well, it's my distinct pleasure to present Sammons Financial Group with a Customer Success Award. Congratulations to you and your entire team. Thank you, guys. Thanks so much. Thanks. Congratulations to you. Okay, there's one more customer I'd like to spotlight today, Florida Prepaid. Now, Florida Prepaid is a state agency in the state of Florida, and because of ethics regulations in Florida, we are not allowed to give them an award today, but I do want you to hear their story. So Florida Prepaid is a 529 provider in Florida. If you're not familiar, 529 is a savings plan that allows parents to save for children's education. And as the parent of a college freshman and high school triplets, College. That's right, college. I got a good response. High school triplets, college tuition is the source of a lot of anxiety in my house. So I am very inspired by the mission of our friends at Florida Prepaid. So Florida Prepaid is trying to reach more customers, provide better service, and wanted to introduce some new channels. So they too turned to Agentforce to make it happen for their customers. So I'd love to invite up to the stage Will Thompson and Ashley Falls to tell us a little bit more about the experience. Welcome to Dreamforce, Will and Ashley. Thanks for being here.

Hey, Jim. Thank you.

Yeah, it's great. Will, let's start with you. You shared with me that your journey didn't start from some sort of tops-down AI mandate. You really wanted to send birthday emails. Tell us about the birthday emails and why those are important to your experience.

Thank you. And how many times do you start off with a simple question or requirement that just sprawls. You get a much more complex answer because that was our question. Let's send a birthday email. We know Jim has triplets. Let's contract. The birthday is coming up. Let's wish them happy birthday.

Do I get one email or 3 with that?

Oh, see, already the complexity. Point proven. Thank you, Jim. So that led us into a question. But the reality that came to was that our system was highly transactional. That's what it was optimized for. And that led us on the digital transformation journey into Salesforce to combine not just the transactional, but that relational experience. And that has made all the difference for us. Now, instead of having that simple question of, can we send an email? Our teams are talking about what types of journey, what type of relationship do we want to have with Jim and Jim's family? Because it's going to span decades, and we're hoping the next generation beyond that. So how do we grow that? And so now we reach out to families 30 days in advance of that birthday and suggest, hey, instead of more presents, more gifts, what about a lifelong gift of college? How about contributing to that 529 college savings plan? And we're starting to see family and friends starting to respond to that, and that leads to more savings for our families.

You need to send those to all the grandparents in my family. That would be great. I could use all the help I can get. So you had the CRM foundation in place. Ashley, tell us about kind of your thoughts around taking the experience to the next level and the role of agents.

Yeah, so I don't know about you guys, but I hate making phone calls and talking to people on the phone. So really wanted to make sure that we gave that experience to our customers as well. So wanted to have that off-hours, 24/7. So really similar to Betsy and what she was talking about with Clara, We have a SAM. And so really wanted to give our customers the ability to communicate with us on their terms through our chat, through our voice, and even email recently. So really expanding kind of that customer 360 and interaction process.

Yeah, it's great. Amazing story. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for what you do and for your inspiring mission to help families send more of their kids to college. So thanks again. Let's give it up for our friends at Florida Prepaid. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. Thank you so much.

All right.

So we've made our way through the blueprint and just want to recap it a little bit. We talked about starting with what drives value. Make sure you're crystal clear on the problem you're trying to solve. It makes everything else easier. Almost every customer you saw up here talked about building the right foundation, the right workflows, the right processes, and especially the right data. Incredibly important, and it's kind of a no-regrets move right now. The technology above the data may change and evolve and improve, but the data And the quality of your data is going to be valuable forever. And then the last one, bringing together the right people. We talked about none of this happens without the right teams. You saw a lot of the right teams up here today. Super important in asking that right question. What is possible now? That's the question to ask. So that's the blueprint. Lori mentioned earlier we were going to have some resources to share with you to take home. So if you take out your phones right now, there's a QR code up here on the screen. with a link to the Customer Success Awards Yearbook. You might be thinking, what's in the yearbook? Well, it's got write-ups and details on all the folks you saw up on stage today, the winners and our friends at Florida Prepaid. But it's also got write-ups on all the nominees. Lori mentioned record nominees. All the information on the nominees is in here as well. So this is a great resource to take back to your organization next week. It's also the only yearbook you'll ever find with a category of most likely to stay up all night and never need a break. So you've got that going for you as well. There's one last order of business that we need to get to here, which is that DreamFest VIP experience that we talked about earlier. Now, some of you were probably at Mark's keynote yesterday and saw Gwen Stefani on stage. Usher was actually supposed to be here right over there, but he got caught at the sound check and so couldn't be here. He was also going to give out this award, but couldn't do it. He asked me to fill in. So now's the moment. If you are able, please reach under your seat. And if you have an envelope on your seat, raise your hand, reach up, jump up and down and scream. We're looking for the winner right there. Please stand up. All right. Look at that. Congratulations. So you and a guest Is anybody interested in being his guest? You have a guest in mind, sir, or not?

No, it's okay.

Anyways, just in closing, I want to thank everybody for being here today. Congratulations again to Spurs, The Grout Guy, and our friends at Salmon Financial. Amazing stories. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for all— to all of you for being here, and have a great rest of your Dreamforce. Thank you.