• Key Takeaways Customers increasingly expect brands to support back-and-forth conversations, according to 83% of marketers Yet just over half of marketers say they’re able to reliably reply to email and SMS/text communication 81% of marketers would trust AI to respond to customers to help scale efforts - but are held back by disjointed or irrelevant data Customers today want brand interactions to feel like interacting with an LLM: instant, conversational, and personalized. • Yet 69% of marketers still struggle to promptly respond to customers and 84% confess to running generic campaigns, according to nearly 4,500 marketers for Salesforce’s Tenth EditionState of Marketing report. • “We are using the most powerful technology in history to send more one-way spam, faster,” said Bobby Jania, Salesforce Agentforce Marketing CMO. • “You can’t give a customer a personalized recommendation or reply if your AI doesn’t actually know who they are.” The research suggests the culprit isn’t lack of effort: it’s lack of usable data. • Siloed systems and poor data quality remain the top barriers to the promises of AI-driven personalization. • The good news is: marketers with unified customer data have an early advantage over those with disjointed data sources.

Article Summaries:

  • Salesforce’s latest State of Marketing report shows that while 75 % of marketers have adopted AI, most still rely on generic, one‑way campaigns. Customers now expect instant, conversational, and personalized interactions, yet only about half of marketers can reliably reply to email or SMS. The main barrier is data: siloed, low‑quality information prevents AI from delivering relevant context. Teams that have unified customer data are 42 % more likely to respond promptly and 60 % more likely to use AI agents for scaling. The study highlights that the technology exists, but effective AI‑driven personalization hinges on integrated, high‑quality data.

Sources: