💃 AI Is Compound Interest on Experience🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerd!

Every vendor on the planet is telling you AI will transform your business.

They're right 😳.

What they're leaving out is that the transformation is proportional to the experience and judgment the person behind the keyboard brings to the conversation 🤔.

This is the first in a series on how AI creates value at each layer of the org chart. The thesis- AI is compound interest, and the rate it pays depends entirely on the deposit.

SAME LAKE…DIFFERENT CATCH

Why Experienced Leaders Get More From AI

Picture two people fishing the same lake .

Same rod 🎣.

Same tackle box 🧰.

Same weather 🌤️.

One has fished this lake for twenty years. They read the water temperature, know the structure beneath the surface, recognize when bass move shallow. They cast with intent.

The other one Googles "how to catch fish" and casts toward the middle.

That's AI right now 💯.

The 25-year executive feeding AI a scenario loaded with competitive dynamics, margin pressure, and political context gets a strategic sparring partner. The first-year analyst gets a faster search engine. Same technology. Radically different ROI.

An Oliver Wyman survey found 40% of CEOs now plan to reduce junior roles and shift investment toward senior workers, a complete reversal from last year. AI handles junior-level tasks. It can't replicate the judgment that comes from decades in the arena.

The most valuable AI user in your company probably has the most grey hair. Nobody in the vendor ecosystem wants to say that out loud.

YOUR GUT FEELING HAS AN API

How Should Executives Actually Use AI

Most executives who "use AI" are drafting emails and summarizing meetings.

An executive - with their vast exposure, years of experience, and visibility into their business - needs to be leveraging AI in a completely different way.

Strategic stress-testing. Feed AI the full context of a decision- market dynamics, constraints, competitive moves, political realities. Let it find the holes in your thinking. An AI sparring partner has infinite patience and zero political motivation.

Pattern interrogation. You've seen hundreds of deals. That pattern recognition lives as intuition. AI lets you externalize it and test whether the pattern holds or it's a cognitive bias.

Institutional knowledge capture. The real reasoning behind decisions, accepted risks, tradeoffs and why. Every retirement without a structured record is a small organizational lobotomy.

Capgemini found over half of C-suite executives already use AI for strategic decisions, but mostly email and meeting notes.

Executives are expected to use AI to sharpen strategic thinking 💯.

TACKLEBOX vs FISHERMAN

Why Your Salesforce AI Ceiling is Lower Than You Think

Here's where this gets concrete for anyone writing checks to Salesforce 👇

Your CRM is theoretically the institutional memory of your revenue operation. Every deal, every interaction, every won and lost opportunity. If that data is clean and complete, it's the richest context AI could ask for 😃.

Salesforce is betting you'll buy their AI layer on top of your existing data. But a KeyBanc survey found CIOs are unconvinced by Agentforce, citing data too "messy" for the platform to make an impact. Agentforce on a poorly maintained org is a fisherman handed a tackle box full of tangled line and rusty hooks. Confident answers that are subtly wrong 🙁.

The executives getting real leverage are bringing their context to general-purpose AI tools like Claude or ChatGPT, connecting to Salesforce data through protocols like MCP, and combining it with judgment no training data can replicate 💪.

A native CRM AI tells you what it thinks is interesting. A general-purpose AI connected to your data lets you tell it what matters, based on twenty years of knowing what to look for. One requires a mature AI product. The other requires an experienced leader. Guess which one is available today.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

As an executive, can you answer these questions❓

❓ Am I bringing my real blood, sweat and tears context to AI, or the sanitized boardroom version?

❓ Am I using AI to think, or to produce? Content generation is 20% of the value.

❓ What's the actual state of the data my AI will rely on? The fields that are populated, accurate, and current.

❓ Am I investing AI enablement at the right layer of my org?

❓ What institutional knowledge walks out the door every time a senior leader leaves?

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes