Douglas Hollinger

💥💥BREAKING💥💥 A team of technical aces just dropped a 500+ page book on how to design and build Agentforce AI agents using common patterns. Here's why it's a holiday Kindle must-have: Co-authors Cynthia Q. and Andy Forbes (from Capgemini) do a heroic job moving the Agentforce conversation to another level, detailing primary patterns for AI agents, how they differ & thrive ... [FYI: I wrote the foreward ... and another holiday must-have book called "Agentforce: Harnessing the Agency of AI to Grow, Scale and Win Any Industry" (Wiley).] The patterns apply to Agentic AI in general as well as Agentforce. As they say the patterns are "abstract enough to apply anywhere" and reference common tools and frameworks beyond Salesforce like LangChain, Microsoft AutoGen, OpenAgents / CrewAI, #MCP etc. Since launching Agentforce in 2024 SF has been chanting "Don't DIY Your AI" -- which just means that agentic success is not as easy as it looks. Startups can show incredible brio but not a trusted, grounded, audited, governed, multi-#LLM platform that provides tools to help build and test agents & a Command Center to monitor the hybrid human-robot workforce ... such as Agentforce. Among the 8 patterns presented there are: 💥💥Sentinel (monitor-react): as an example, could monitor internal channels for policy violations and alert HR 💥💥Conductor (orchestration): coordinate the creation of a marketing campaign from brief writing through audience definition, media planning and optimization 💥💥Presenter (UX optimization): pull data from multiple disparate systems and present a rolled-up real-time view 💥💥Action (Task doer): automatically handle routine returns for an online retailer 💥💥Coach (insights/advisory): analyze a salesperson's upcoming pitch and suggest improvements And for each the authors provide detail around use cases across the enterprise -- Finance, Customer Care, HR, Marketing, etc. -- and event sources, evaluation logic, agentic actions, tools and tech. The latter spans platform events, Apex/Flow, Agent Builder, MuleSoft, #APIs and more, at times including actual code. In some ways, this is the design-thinking "handbook" that Agentforce users have been looking for ... And after detailing patterns, the authors delve deeply into topics like trust, handling memory and context, designing & governing multi-agent systems; and some sage hard-won counsel on deployment & staging ... There's no doubt Marc Benioff is right and the Agentic Enterprise is the present and future of business. There's plenty in here for readers from the merely agent-curious to the agent-adept, business-line users to architects and admins. Happy agentic holidays! (Link to buy Kindle edition in the comments; hardcover coming soon.)

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Even the best CDPs can feel abstract without clear success metrics. Merkle's Pete Rogers shares practical steps to track the KPIs that matter—so you can show impact, drive adoption, and fuel business growth in this blog: https://bit.ly/3YVMH87

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Large enterprise CMOs are facing a critical challenge: Drive AI transformation while doing right by the teams that built your organization. The C-suite wants AI transformation yesterday. Their teams—many with decades of institutional knowledge—are skeptical, exhausted, or both. Here's what I keep hearing: "I know we need to move fast. But I can't just blow up my team in the process." These leaders aren't stuck because they don't understand AI. They're stuck because they understand people. They need a plan for that first and foremost when the org gets to a certain size. They know that legacy expertise is still valuable and long-tenured employees deserve honesty about what's coming, not false promises. Transformation that breaks trust isn't really transformation—it's just chaos with better tech. This is the real leadership challenge of AI transformation - navigating the human complexity of change in organizations where relationships, tenure, and culture run deep.

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Big shifts are happening in AI‑powered shopping. Tarun breaks down Google’s new Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and what it means for brands, retailers, and the future of product discovery and checkout. Great read for anyone following agentic commerce 👇 https://lnkd.in/gP75cuKz

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CMOs Are More Focused On Growing Revenue Than Brand Awareness https://lnkd.in/g8jyVmuY Chief marketing officers are increasingly prioritizing direct revenue outcomes over traditional brand awareness efforts, influenced by economic pressures, performance measurement demands, and AI‑enabled tracking. This shift reflects a need for more measurable impact on business performance, with revenue growth becoming a leading strategic metric for modern marketing leaders. #CMOInsights #RevenueGrowth #MarketingStrategy #BrandVsPerformance #BusinessImpact #DataDrivenMarketing

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Saurabh Vijayvergia, Roland Ehi, and I coauthored a new Deloitte and The Wall Street Journal CIO article on agentic commerce and what it means for retail brands. As AI agents begin to handle search, comparison, and purchasing, the mechanics of commerce are changing in very real ways. The article focuses on the strategic implications for brands, including data readiness, system integration, and decision ownership in an AI-mediated buying environment. Sharing for anyone thinking about how commerce models and value creation are evolving. https://lnkd.in/evhrKFwE

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Lauren Evans and I recently were interviewed by Akash Pathak on his Growth Amplifier podcast about how marketing teams can Futureproof with AI. We covered a lot of ground in 20 minutes: - how experimentation velocity is becoming a critical KPI for organizations - how we’re using an AI + Expert workflow called Grounded Intelligence to harness the power of synthetic audiences and accelerate our path to insight by 80% - why and how leading brands are using AI to drive customer obsession - how Traction is building an agencyOS to operationalize how we’re using creating superhumans consistently empowered by AI at Traction and helping clients do the same - how to overcome fear and turn the revolution of work happening right now into your own competitive career advantage Definitely worth a listen with your morning coffee! Thanks, Akash, for having us on! #aimarketing #experimentationvelocity #syntheticaudience #agencyoperatingsysytems #groundedintelligence

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In today’s fast-moving markets, building a product platform, not just one-off products, is what separates market leaders from followers. In this week’s article, I break down why platform strategy matters, how to build it, and the common pitfalls to avoid when scaling across products, markets, and teams. If your team is struggling with product strategy and need some input, reach out and let’s start a conversation. https://lnkd.in/eKzt-rDg

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Most companies today still give lip service to the idea of putting customers first. They resist making the transformational changes required to truly improve CX quality. Until they are willing to become more stakeholder-centric, argues renowned CX expert Michael Lowenstein, they will struggle to win greater customer trust. https://lnkd.in/gdq9mz9h

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Bruce Shields from Carhartt joined us on the most recent episode of The Frictionless Experience podcast, and he gave Nick Paladino and me a masterclass in how data and design actually come together. Here are some of the biggest takeaways: - UX maturity is a spectrum. Carhartt started with “UX = design.” Today, it’s about testing, personalization, and optimization at scale. - Data before design. Wireframes now get modeled against revenue goals before a single creative decision is made. - Confirmation bias is real. Early testing was used to prove assumptions. The shift came when Carhartt reframed “failed” tests as wins that brought them closer to the truth. - Benchmarks change the game. Two years of homepage interaction data turned into predictive models that can forecast component performance. - The metric to watch. Conversion rate between category pages and product detail pages is one of the most reliable predictors of revenue. - Clicks aren’t the enemy. An extra click that gives users clarity is better than a shorter, confusing journey. - Segmentation matters. New customers and loyal repeat buyers need completely different experiences. - Culture counts. A low-ego, high-curiosity environment made it possible to embed testing and data into everyday decisions. Every one of these points could have been its own episode. Big thanks to Bruce for bringing so much depth (and for making me jealous of Carhartt’s framed jackets).

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In complex ecommerce environments, shortcuts rarely pay off. The teams that perform best over time tend to be patient, disciplined, and deeply focused on fundamentals: clean data, clear structure, and honest measurement. It’s not flashy work. But it compounds. And in these industries, compounding wins.

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CMOs demand guaranteed delivery, lowest CPMs, strategic flexibility, and outcome-based pricing. Physics says you can't have all four simultaneously. Principal media delivers three of them. The question is which three matter most. Forrester's new principal media report from the inimitable Jay Pattisall is very much worth a read, and it's going to trigger the predictable debate. Critics will argue agencies are creating conflicts. Evangelists will tout cost savings. Both will miss the strategic reality: CMOs facing compression don't have the luxury of perfect markets. I've watched boards push CMOs for guaranteed outcomes while slashing budgets. In that environment, academic arguments about strategic flexibility mean nothing. The anti-principal media argument assumes unlimited client patience, perfect information, and rational markets. Reality looks different. Reality is: your board wants cost certainty so they can model P&L without media volatility. Reality is: your CFO wants guaranteed delivery so you're not scrambling for Super Bowl inventory in scatter markets. Reality is: your CEO wants outcome-based pricing that ties media spend to business results. Principal media trades strategic flexibility for the three things boards actually care about: cost certainty, delivery guarantee, and outcome alignment. The Forrester report shows 80% of marketers are interested in principal media advantages. That's not because CMOs are naive about conflicts of interest. It's because they're making rational trade-offs under real constraints. The criticism of principal media comes from people who've never faced the impossible triangle. They can afford to optimize for strategic flexibility because they're not accountable for the P&L impact when media costs spike or inventory disappears. Yes, principal media requires transparency. Yes, it needs contractual controls and performance accountability. Yes, clients should cap how much spend flows through principal arrangements. But the mechanism itself? It's agencies finally building inventory positions that enable the outcome-based pricing we've demanded for years. I'm a big supporter as, for two decades, I've watched CMOs demand that agencies move from billing hours to pricing on outcomes. "Put skin in the game," they said. "Share the risk." Now agencies are doing exactly that with principal media, and the industry is calling it a conflict of interest. We can't have it both ways. Forrester predicts principal media will grow to one-third of billings by 2026. Read their report, then decide which three variables matter most for your business. https://lnkd.in/eKHg5qmk #PrincipalMedia #MediaBuying #CMO #MarketingLeadership #MarketingStrategy

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