AI for Growth: Key Takeaways from Salesforce’s Brisbane Breakfast

This morning I attended Salesforce’s AI for Growth: Work Smarter, Scale Faster breakfast in Brisbane, hosted by Merlin Luck and Hannah Shorter. The event showcased how businesses can harness AI to transform customer experience, empower employees, and grow sustainably.

Customers Expect More, Faster

One of the clearest messages from the event was that customer expectations are higher than ever:

• 60% of customers drop off if they don’t hear back within two hours of making an enquiry.
• One bad experience is enough for many customers to choose a competitor next time.

For businesses, this means responding quickly, personally, and consistently is no longer optional - it’s essential.

How Businesses Can Adapt

Salesforce outlined four priorities for companies looking to keep up:

• Personalise at scale
• Do more with less
• Consolidate technology
• Leverage AI and data

The benefits are clear. Among SMBs already using AI, 92% report improvements in customer experience, while 90% say AI makes operations more efficient and 86% believe it helps them compete more effectively.

Practical Guidance for AI Success

The Salesforce team shared three key takeaways for businesses starting or scaling with AI:

1. Define your use case first – with thousands of potential applications, clarity is crucial.
2. Prepare your data and processes – AI is only as strong as the data you feed it.
3. Start small and scale – quick wins build confidence and momentum.

Demos in Action

Lauren Nolan from Salesforce gave us a look at just some of the the ways AI can already be used across the Salesforce platform:

• Slack: AI can generate conversation summaries, helping teams catch up quickly after time away.
• Agentforce for Marketing: create campaign briefs, draft email copy and subject lines, and build audience segments directly in Salesforce.
• Agentforce for Sales: provide lead summaries, draft personalised emails, capture and summarise discovery calls, and help teams stay aligned on opportunities.
• Agentforce for Service: manage live chat (including WhatsApp), summarise customer interactions, suggest resolutions, escalate approvals via Slack, and even auto-generate Knowledge Articles for future cases.

These demos brought to life the “smarter, faster” theme of the event - showing how AI can take away admin burden while giving teams better tools to connect with customers.

Spotlight on Baidam

The session closed with a fireside chat between Emma Quinn (Salesforce) and Beau Hodge (Baidam), a profit-for-purpose cyber security company.

Baidam’s growth story is underpinned by purpose - creating impacts for First Nations Peoples in technology. They shared how Salesforce has supported both their early, reactive growth (proving credibility and responding to RFPs), into a new phase of proactive growth, by providing the tools their team needs to reach new opportunities, leverage customer data, align their teams, and implement marketing into their business for the first time. A key takeaway from Beau was that involving the Sales and Service teams in Salesforce discussions not only improved the system for their needs but also encouraged adoption, as the teams could see the direct value for themselves.

What This Means for Nonprofits

While many of the examples at the breakfast centred around businesses, the lessons are just as critical for nonprofits. Supporters, donors, and service users all expect the same fast, personalised experiences they get from the best consumer brands.

AI can help nonprofits:

• Respond faster to donor enquiries and service requests.
• Personalise engagement at scale, ensuring every supporter feels valued.
• Make better use of limited resources, freeing staff from admin to focus on mission-driven work.
• Consolidate fragmented systems, bringing together fundraising, service delivery, and communications.

Nonprofits face the same risks as for-profits if they don’t develop an AI strategy: staff may turn to personal tools, missing the chance to use AI in a way that aligns with the organisation’s values, data, and processes.

Final Thoughts

The message was clear: AI isn’t a future concept - it’s already shaping how we work and connect with customers, supporters, and communities. Nonprofits that embrace AI thoughtfully - by starting with clear use cases, preparing data, and scaling gradually - stand to deliver faster, more personal, and more impactful experiences.