What Are the Top AI Use Cases for Modern Marketers? With John Wall

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to John Wall, co-host of the Marketing Over Coffee Podcast.

Join us as we chat about how tools like generative AI are reshaping workflows, strategies, and content creation for marketing.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with John Wall.

AI and the future of marketing

Most Salesforce Admins need to work hand in hand with marketing to give them the tools they need to do their jobs. As we continue our conversation about Agentforce and the impact agents can have across an organization, I thought it would be great to hear from John Wall about the future of AI and marketing. He co-hosts the great Marketing Over Coffee Podcast, with guests like Simon Sinek, Seth Godin, and Debbie Millman.

Most marketers are already using AI for data analysis and insights, with a little help from their admins. However, the game is changing fast with the proliferation of LLMs and the ability to build custom AI agents.

How AI will revolutionize marketing personas

Recently, we’ve been hearing a lot about how Agentforce can help you manage your documentation or take the load off your customer service reps. So what can admins build for marketers?

John brings up the idea of marketing personas. “Right now, that’s four people in a conference room coming up with cute nicknames like Sally Shopper or Wally the Weekend Warrior,” he says. But with AI, you can use its classification and summarization abilities to pore over your customer data and generate personas based on statistics, not spitballing.

Where it gets even more interesting is how you can use that information to create customers on demand. John suggests building an AI agent for each marketing persona, which can answer questions as that type of customer to give you insights or plan a new campaign.

The human in the loop

Just like with any new technology, some businesses will rush to adopt the new shiny tool and mistakes are bound to happen. John emphasizes the importance of “the human in the loop,” which is a key role for Salesforce Admins going forward.

AI advancements are probably not going to put you out of a job, but they’ll definitely make your job easier. “The big thing is you have to be curious,” he says, “go play with something and see what you can make it do and what kind of results you can get from it.” 

There’s so much more great stuff in our conversation with John Wall, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss out.

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Learn more

• John’s Podcast: Marketing Over Coffee
• Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: 2025 Roadmap for Salesforce Admins: AI, Agentforce, and Emerging Trends
• Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: How Agentforce Transforms Customer Interactions at Salesforce
• Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: How Agentforce Is Changing the Career Landscape

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• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

• John on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on X
• Mike on Bluesky social
• Mike on Threads
• Mike on Tiktok
• Mike on X

Full Transcript

Mike Gerholdt:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re joined by John Wall, co-host of the long-running Marketing Over Coffee podcast. That’s right, we’re starting 2025 off on the right foot, because John shares with us insights into the ever evolving landscape of AI in marketing, including how tools like generative AI are reshaping workflows, strategies, and even content creation. I bet admins, you know about this.

Now, before we jump into the fascinating discussion that we have with John, I want you to be sure to jump over and press that subscribe or follow button, depending on what kind of app you’re using. It’s probably on your favorite platform. And then that way you don’t miss a single episode, because new ones come out every Thursday and I would hate for you to miss something like this discussion that I’m going to have with host of the ever-popular Marketing Over Coffee podcast, John Wall. Let’s get John on the podcast.

So, John, welcome to the podcast.

John Wall:
Mike, it’s great to be on the mic with you again.

Mike Gerholdt:
I know, it’s been a while. I feel the last time we recorded was in Boston, 100 years ago.

John Wall:
Yeah, downtown Boston. I remember we were live on Newbury Street. That was like the heart of all the action.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yep. We were recording the old style podcast. We had an Edison, it was putting it on a phonograph and some wax tubes.

John Wall:
That’s right. Sitting there with my ear trumpet listening.

Mike Gerholdt:
Ear trumpet, I love it. For those people, like the two people in the world that don’t listen to Marketing Over Coffee, can you give us a brief overview of what you do and what Marketing Over Coffee is?

John Wall:
Yeah, sure. So, my whole career I worked in marketing and tech, and God, going on what, 16, 17 years ago when podcasting was just done with steam engine and hammers and nails. We created Marketing Over Coffee, with my co-host Christopher Penn. And we’ve had this ongoing dialogue of just every week, 25 to 30 minutes talking about what’s going on in marketing and tech. And just like CRM, this space is so insane and changing every week, there’s no shortage of stuff to talk about. But then, and it’s also grown up enough that I’ve been fortunate enough to get a lot of big marketing brains and authors on, like Simon Sinek and Debbie Millman, Seth Godin, folks like that. So yeah, it’s really kind of opened up the world because the family doesn’t want to hear what I have to say about marketing over Thanksgiving, so I have somewhere to talk about that.

Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, that could be another, you should rename the podcast that for the holidays, Marketing over Thanksgiving.

John Wall:
Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:
Just see if anybody notices.

John Wall:
That glazed overlook when I’m talking about what I do for a living.

Mike Gerholdt:
So I make ads, I’m like Jon Hamm on Mad Men. No, and I remember the Boston. So much of what admins do I remember, is interface with marketing. And that’s why I love having you on because not only as a personal brand, but also as somebody that does a lot of podcasts and content creation, it just overlaps with what admins do. And marketing is such a big facet of any organization now. I mean, you can’t sit down and talk sales without, well, we should have the marketing person in here, and they always want 5,000 more requirements than what you started with, but that’s why I love having you on.

So, let’s dive in. I feel like we woke up from the pandemic and AI just was everywhere now. I’d love to know on what the world of AI looks like for marketers now.

John Wall:
Yeah, I mean, you totally nailed that, and the world has changed yet again. We were kind of finally, things were finally stabilizing a little bit. Platforms that matured, as far as email and text messaging and advertising and things are fairly solid, and now AI has shown up to destroy everything.

It’s been a little weird though, because our world didn’t change as much. We’ve been working a lot with machine learning to do data analysis for years. So my co-host on the show and partner at Trust Insights, Christopher Penn, had long been using machine learning to measure PR and advertising results. Doing statistical models to prove like, okay, what’s actually working in your branding and your advertising? These things that you can’t easily measure with clicks. And so that has been an area where we were able to kind of provide some value and insight that nobody else could get. But then really, I don’t know, about a year and a half ago when generative AI became the hottest thing going on all fronts for marketing, the amount of interest in that has just exploded.

So yeah, we have a bunch of fronts that we’re applying the technology and it’s just amazing to see the range of how marketers adapt. There’s still plenty of marketers that don’t want to look at it and have their head in the sand, and all the way up to, we have clients that are like, “Hey, we want to reimagine our entire business because we think it’s going to be something completely different in the next five years.”

So yeah, we spent a lot of time thinking about where this stuff is going to go, and it’s amazing how… And literally we have, Christopher works full time on mon