How Salesforce Is Transforming Financial Services With Michelle Feinstein
- Quik! News Team
- 3 days ago
- 29 min read
Michelle Feinstein is the General Manager and Vice President, Global Financial Services at Salesforce, a company that provides cloud-based CRM and enterprise software to help businesses connect with customers. She leads global solutions and strategy for the financial services sector, focusing on wealth and asset management. With over 25 years of experience in the industry, Michelle guides firms in digital transformation, data usage, and advisor-client engagement. She works across product, partner, and client teams to modernize the technology and operations of financial firms.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
[2:25] Michelle Feinstein discusses how Salesforce evolved from a CRM to a full business platform
[4:30] The power of Salesforce’s AppExchange and partner ecosystem
[5:59] How RBC improved advisor retention with a consistent tech experience
[8:23] Key growth levers driving profitability in financial services
[10:41] Michelle explains why open architecture and flexibility give Salesforce an edge
[12:57] Salesforce’s AI-first vision and approach to competition
[16:23] Real-world AI agent use cases like meeting prep and voice-to-text
[18:4] Salesforce’s shift to consumption-based pricing for flexibility
[21:27] Michelle’s family legacy in financial services and career advice
[26:54] How firms are adopting AI and building trust in autonomous agents
In this episode…
Financial services firms face challenges in unifying technology, streamlining advisor workflows, and adopting AI to improve experiences. Legacy systems, fragmented data, and slow governance often block innovation. How can firms modernize, improve adoption, and leverage AI while maintaining trust?
Michelle Feinstein, an expert in digital transformation and client experience, explains that success begins with a clear strategic purpose — identifying the specific business outcomes technology should achieve. She shares how leading firms streamline advisor experiences by integrating data, simplifying workflows, and leveraging AI to automate repetitive tasks such as meeting prep and client summaries. Michelle also emphasizes adopting open, flexible systems that allow firms to plug in specialized AI tools while keeping human oversight central to innovation.
In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Michelle Feinstein, General Manager and VP of Global Financial Services at Salesforce, about transforming financial services with AI and customer-centric design. Michelle discusses how firms can build unified experiences, leverage AI agents for automation, and transition to consumption-based pricing models that drive efficiency. She also shares insights on advisor retention, data integration, and the future of AI adoption.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
Quotable Moments:
“Most companies, when they think about Salesforce, the first thing they think of is CRM.”
“We don't want the AI to fully replace any human. Right now, it's more of an augmentation.”
“Anything we do, we have to make sure AI is a part of that solution as a part of that strategy.”
“I like to think of Salesforce as a box of Legos, where every single day you can build a different experience.”
“Leave your ego at the door. Be authentic. Be approachable. Be willing to roll up your sleeves.”
Action Steps:
Adopt AI incrementally with clear goals: Start with low-risk, high-impact use cases to build confidence, reduce resistance, and demonstrate measurable results.
Unify data across systems: Integrate platforms to create a single source of truth, improving efficiency, consistency, and client satisfaction.
Empower employees through AI-assisted tools: Use AI agents to automate repetitive tasks so staff can focus on higher-value, relationship-driven work.
Encourage open architecture and flexibility: Design systems that easily connect with external AI tools, ensuring scalability and innovation without vendor lock-in.
Invest in advisor and employee experience: Streamline workflows and enhance usability to boost adoption, morale, and long-term customer loyalty.
Sponsor for this episode...
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Episode Transcript:
Intro: 00:02
Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast, where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and, in turn, grow their business.
Richard Walker: 00:16
Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins, where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win and how they're focused on customer experience leads to growth. Some of my past guests have included Shannon Rosic of Informa, Michael Jeanfreau of Mariner Wealth, and Mark Gilbert of Zocks. Today, I'm speaking with Michelle Feinstein, general manager of financial services at Salesforce, and today's episode is brought to you by Quik!, the leader in enterprise forms processing. When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms. Instead, get Quik! using Quik!.
You'll be able to generate completed forms and get back clean. Context-rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of 1000 submissions. Visit quickforms.com to get started. All right, before I get to introduce today's guest, I want to give a big thank you to John Feinstein. Yes, that's Michelle's husband for introducing us.
I've worked with John for many years at Skydance, who's a partner of ours, and they're just one of our longest partners and resellers of Quik!, so I'm really proud to represent them. All right. Michelle Feinstein is the global business leader responsible for the strategic planning and delivery of B2B and B2C solutions for wealth asset management and insurance sectors at Salesforce. With over 30 years of industry experience, Michelle has a deep understanding of the wealth management space, client business needs, and best practices for modernizing experiences, operating, and service models. Michelle, welcome to The Customer Wins.
Michelle Feinstein: 01:51
Thank you Rich. I'm so excited to be here. Love the background. Can't wait to jump into the conversation. And for those of you who don't know John Feinstein and science. Science is a company that innovates on Salesforce.
Richard Walker: 02:04
That's right, that's right. All right, so for those who haven't heard this podcast before, I talk with business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they build and deliver a great customer experience, and the challenges to growing their own company. So, Michel, look, I know we all know Salesforce, but I still want to understand your business and especially what you do better. So how does your company help people?
Michelle Feinstein: 02:25
Yeah. So most companies, when they think about Salesforce, the first thing they think of is CRM. I mean, that is our stock ticker, right? But Salesforce has really evolved, especially in the past, I'd say 7 to 10 years to be much more than a CRM. We have become a platform that firms are running their businesses on end-to-end front office, middle office, back office.
And that's a lot for folks to put their head around. So when you think about Salesforce, think about the fact that we are helping customers with the data engagement layer connecting to multiple platforms, making sure there's bidirectional data sharing happening, and then all that rich data is getting surfaced into a unified experience. And having a unified experience for an advisor or an operations or service person is probably the number one ask I hear about when I say to a customer, what's on your North Star? What's on your roadmap? They're trying to solve for that, and especially in financial services, it's not easy because any one of those personas are using upwards of ten, 20, 30 different systems, multiple custodians all the time.
So Salesforce just has brought in a lot of capability, and we're also taking it to the next level with AI. So right now you'll see the term agent force out in the press and on LinkedIn that's Salesforce. And so next week at Dreamforce you're going to see a lot of new names coming out where you're going to see Agent Force for financial services, Agent Force for sales for service. So they're really taking AI and weaving it in through basically all the workflows and all the platforms that they make available. It's pretty exciting.
Richard Walker: 04:02
No, that's super exciting. And man, what a transformation. I don't know if you know this, Michel. I was a user of Salesforce in the year 2000.
Michelle Feinstein: 04:10
Wow. So at the beginning of the beginning.
Richard Walker: 04:13
It was such a different system back then. And I remember working with it and having to get data in and get data out and all these things, but the evolution of it has been so impressive. I don't know if this is true, but I kind of credit Salesforce with the whole app marketplace concept and introduction. Is that actually true?
Michelle Feinstein: 04:30
Yeah, I mean, they have upwards of, I think, probably close to 10,000 apps in their app store. So think about all the partnerships. And this is at a global level, right. You have partners from Accenture and PwC, and Deloitte. And then you have other types of partners, whether it be the custodians like Broadridge, Fidelity, Schwab.
They all have app experiences in there. And what's nice is it makes it so easy. You just download the app and it becomes natively part of your Salesforce experience. So the UI looks seamless. And you know, as Salesforce has evolved, they continue to make more and more their capabilities available to their partners.
So as an example, with Agent Force, right when it came out about a year ago, they opened it up to the partner world and said please start innovating on it. So now all those apps are getting enriched with AI as well.
Richard Walker: 05:15
Oh my gosh. Wow. We've been so far behind. In fact, we are just now putting in place the underpinnings of an app to go into the Salesforce Marketplace. I'm really excited about it.
It probably won't be out until the summer of next year, so don't get me wrong, it's going to take some time, but what we're going to be doing with it, I think will be just helping customers go faster. And so I really want to talk about one of the core problems that I see with customers getting Salesforce. It can be a little daunting and overwhelming for smaller firms, especially, but just because you can do so many things. So what? I'd love to hear from you.
What are some of the best things you've seen customers do, or the most extensive things you've seen customers do to really run their business on Salesforce beyond, hey, I put data in and I can get data out.
Michelle Feinstein: 05:59
So I think number one, if you talk about the Raas as an example, what I've seen them do is they have to be very focused and strategic about what the purpose is, why are they looking at Salesforce, what are they trying to solve for? What's the business outcome they want to achieve? Most of the Raas are saying, okay, let's focus on making the workflow and the user experience and the day-to-day of an advisor and doing their work much more seamless, so they'll focus on the advisor experience. Now, when you do that with Salesforce, it oftentimes does not equate to just one cloud, right? In order to improve the advisor experience, data is involved, integrations is involved.
The user experience is involved. So we see a trifecta combination of when they begin, they're like, okay, I think I might need the combination of data, cloud, financial services, cloud and maybe some APIs or some type of integration orchestration. Then what makes it really awesome is they're able to actually reduce some of their total cost of ownership of some of the systems they might have in their tech stack. So we know areas like to offer choice the good, better, best model. They may have upwards again of 30 or 40 systems they're integrating with.
But if they really look at those systems, how much adoption is happening across those, and can they get better adoption by providing a unified experience like Salesforce hooking into key systems for those advisors? So we see a lot of success there, and not just with the Rias. Even as you go up market. I'll use RBC. They're a public example who's done this really, really well.
They were losing advisors in droves a couple of years ago, and the reason was the tech experience was was fragmented and really poor. So they decided to go head on and they said, you know what? We're not going to just put the advisor. We're also going to put anybody that supports that advisor along the way, all on Salesforce in a consistent experience. So Variance.
So consistency is another problem that these firms are trying to solve for. They don't want to have their advisors on one system and then service and ops teams on a different system.
Richard Walker: 07:59
So this is actually a perfect example of something I talk a lot with customers about. That is when you improve customer experience, you improve the growth of your company. You drive profit, you drive revenue, you drive loyalty with customers and the people using the systems. But you just said it because it's about the consistency and adoption level that makes that possible. A bad experience doesn't create adoption and consistency.
Michelle Feinstein: 08:23
Well, and so when you think about growth levers, this is something else. A lot of times in strategic meetings, firms will come to me and say, what are the growth levers that are driving profitability and growth? What are you seeing across all the customers that you meet with? And we often hear these consistent levers of number one, attracting new advisors, retaining the advisors they have, upskilling those advisors. The second goes to clients, so it's attracting new client segments, retaining the clients they have, increasing the lifetime value of those clients.
Then it starts to head into processes. And it's crazy in 2025 that the usual suspects are still on the list. So onboarding, reimagining the onboarding and account opening experience. Number one, it's so shocking right now. AI has a huge opportunity to really finally help us solve that and take on some of that painful process.
So things like onboarding, integrated financial planning and portfolio management are also on the top of their list. And then last one I would mention is marketing. So a lot of these firms they have it's very fragmented, very manual using different systems. And so they'll come to Salesforce and say, can you help us digitize our marketing journeys and our outreach and how we segment customers? Salesforce can absolutely help with that.
Richard Walker: 09:40
Yeah. So I want to echo this because I've seen this trend with my own customers and more so like in the past few years, this just keeps accelerating. The trend is they want the user to stay in Salesforce. They want to keep the entire process. In Salesforce, I refer to it as a bespoke system of how they're going to do business because you know it quickly.
We're about the paperwork. We're about the onboarding, the servicing of accounts and things related where paper is driving that process. So part of what we're trying to do, and we'll be releasing it by the end of 25, is changing the form experience from what looks like a form, a PDF or an image of a form to actually a wizard or web-based process that will live natively in the Salesforce environment. Yeah. And so we can help address that desire that people have to stay there.
And I think that's one of the advantages that Salesforce has with your 10,000 apps, all your different clouds and capabilities, is that people really can get there. What do you think the number one challenge is for people actually getting there, though?
Michelle Feinstein: 10:41
Also, as you were talking, I was thinking about an experience that I had about a year ago working with a partner. So many custodians have the same point of view. They want everyone to stay in the custodial platform. Right? And the difference is that platform is curated.
And the entitlements that you have are kind of dictated by the custodian. And so I was giving some consulting advice and said, listen, we have a partnership opportunity here. Let's go to your customer base, your advisory board of customers and ask them where they're going to spend their time or where the users are. And there was this great debate about which system is going to be the preferred system to spend time the CRM or the custodial platform. And you were right when we started to ask the customer, so many of them said, we want to be able to stay in Salesforce.
And part of that is we're a bit more open architecture, flexible, like, I like to think of Salesforce as a box of Legos, where every single day you can build a different experience, whatever experience you want, you're not locked in. So I think you're right on the money that building your capability set into the flow of work naturally into the work flow where it presents itself natively. Instead of making that user go outside and launch a separate window or experience the preferences, just make it native and present it to me along my work journey.
Richard Walker: 11:58
Yeah, so a friend of mine kind of said this. He said, SaaS software is going to die with AI because nobody wants your dashboard. You can build it yourself. And so I'm seeing this kind of trend of I just want to keep it within this one platform because I can build it out there and I can get the experience I want. I don't want to log into your third-party system and go view it over there.
Right. So I want to talk more about AI, but I want to ask you about AI in a slightly different manner than I typically do. I want to ask about competition in a way because I'm seeing new firms. We have a partnership with a company called Avatar. Robbie was on my show recently.
But I'm seeing new firms that are AI-first. They have the opportunity to start their company now and build everything with this AI-first principle. Building the code with AI, infusing it with AI, driving it with AI, creating a massive amount of flexibility. How does Salesforce view this AI? My own coined phrase of AI first principles?
How do you guys view it over there?
Michelle Feinstein: 12:57
So we recognize that we have competition at all different levels within the industry and the enterprise side commercial and the SMB side of the market. Our view is we're very open architecture, and we want our ecosystems to communicate with any agent, in any AI tool, so that our customers don't feel put against a wall to make a choice. As an example, we you know, I participated in some customer advisory boards, both on the insurance side and the wealth side this summer somewhere in Europe. Some were here. What was consistent in both of those advisory boards were the customers were saying, because we were describing the agents, we were building the templatized agents for financial services.
And they basically said, don't try to be all things to us. There are things you're really good at and we'll use those tools from you. But as an example, maybe there's an AI-driven estate planning tool out there and that's all they do. Or there's another one that does tax planning or another one that does financial planning. We just want to plug and play that AI tool with Salesforce.
So the message was very strong. Just be open. Make it easy for us to connect to those different AI tools. And Salesforce is going there. So you probably hear the term in the industry, MCP for multi-agent collaboration.
And we are launching MCP servers here at Salesforce, and actually a platform that will support that because we know that every firm is going to have an army of different agents, that they're going to be deploying for different purposes, and not all of the agents will be Salesforce.
Richard Walker: 14:27
Yeah. So for listeners who've never heard that term, MCP, I equate it to being kind of the interface for AI agents to talk to different systems. It's more than just an API. I mean, it's essentially kind of like an API, but it is a methodology to conform communication so that APIs can work together. Would you think that's a fair representation?
Michelle Feinstein: 14:46
Yes. That's correct. I saw a good description the other day. It's basically when you think of your iPhone, it's like the USB plug for AI apps. So it's creating a universal highway in connector-type methodology so that anybody can easily plug in.
And then underlying that is a trust platform and data and security to make sure that as those communications are happening, that we're following that strict protocol of trust.
Richard Walker: 15:12
Yeah. For people who are not in software development like myself, oh my gosh, MCP is so easy to use. You tell the AI, go talk to this MCP server. It's like okay, does it comes back, does its thing. There was no setup.
There was no configuration. It just knows it's. Yeah.
Michelle Feinstein: 15:28
And I think, you know, coming from our industry right. API was the term that was the way you would integrate. But we've seen over ten years a lot of firms don't do that very well, or they have APIs that are really antiquated, and they didn't keep up with them and they didn't modernize them. So when they want to do a partnership, all of a sudden they're like, oh, I can't integrate with you easily because my APIs don't talk to your APIs because they're different versions.
Richard Walker: 15:49
Yeah, yeah. And how much effort and how much time and oh my gosh. Yeah, yeah. So let's go back to agents. You talked about the AI agents that are coming into the play here.
And I think about, you know, Salesforce is a really great data system in terms of I can put my data there. I can see what's going on, I can follow processes. But really, what people ultimately care about in doing their job is to automate their processes and make it easier. So where are you guys seeing agents play this role to streamline workflow and and play within the ecosystem of Salesforce?
Michelle Feinstein: 16:23
So a couple different places. So just when talking about AI generally what we've seen in the past year is firms have gone slow, especially the larger the firm the slower they're going. And that's because there's a lot of approvals and data governance and things that the gates they have to pass before they can launch AI. So we're seeing progress with predictive AI, generative AI and then autonomous agents on an agent side. A lot of it is around employee-facing use cases.
So usually sales service or financial advisor is what I've seen the most as an example for FSC Financial Services Cloud. Our first step into delivering an agent was an advisor assistive agent. Think of it as a junior advisor that's doing these activities to help you with meeting preparation. So we focused there because that was the number one area where most firms were saying, yeah, we're going to start anywhere. We waste so much time pre-meeting during meeting and post-meeting follow-up.
So this assistive agent will go out and say, Okay Rich, you're preparing for a client meeting. Give me a full summary on the customer. Everything that's happened in the household. What's changed in the portfolio. How are they meeting their plans and goals?
It'll create a sample agenda for the meeting. It'll take notes during the meeting and even create an action plan after the meeting. So that's one example of the kind of work this agent can take on. And what we did is we built a template. After interviewing many different wealth firms to give any firm that wants to use it a head start, so they're not creating the template themselves from scratch.
Another good use case we're seeing is voice to text translation. So there's some public examples of that like Prudential just launched this. So they want their agents that are on the road to be able to use natural voice language capabilities, but then it automatically uploads and creates the same kind of capabilities, tasks and actions and lists and follow up and summary recaps of what was discussed. Wow. But I would tell you, we're going in other directions.
Like another example of an agent would be lending. So in the loan process, like we've developed an agent that can actually take on some of the tasks associated with starting a loan application.
Richard Walker: 18:36
Man. So did these cost more? Are they part of the product? How do people engage.
Michelle Feinstein: 18:42
Their part of the Financial Services Cloud offering? Yeah, there is a little bit of separate pricing because they're viewed as premium. That would go along with the general FSC licensing.
Richard Walker: 18:51
Okay. So does that mean it is competitive with all these darling startups in the note taking space jump? Yes.
Michelle Feinstein: 18:57
And it's the consumption based model. So I know that today everyone's used to this license based model with Salesforce. In the past year we've really started to shift to more consumption based pricing. So you hear terms like credits looking at the number of data pieces that are getting processed and how many calls are happening. That's all part of consumption based pricing.
But the idea is, for each use case, we work with a customer to determine how much of the data and how much power is going to get consumed there to determine the pricing. Racing, and we're getting a pretty good reception towards that now in the Ria space. Another thing we did to get creative and to be more competitive, right. Because on the Ria side, we're going up against Wealthbox or Redtail, right? Or some of the AI tools like vanilla or Xbox is we've kind of looked at FSC and said, how much of FSC is being used by the Rias and how much is not.
And we created a scaled down version at a price point that's very competitive, packaging the top workflows they would use and the top templates that they would use as well.
Richard Walker: 20:04
This may not be a fair question to you, because I know a large company like yours may have totally different people on this project. To figure this out, for my question, I'm going to ask, but what was the driver? How do you guys say to yourselves, let's change our pricing model because we're doing it here at Kwik. We actually we're looking at pricing. We're going to announce it very soon here.
That is intended to incentivize the behavior that creates a better customer experience. In order to do that, we had to change our pricing model. Yeah.
Michelle Feinstein: 20:31
Well, a.
Richard Walker: 20:31
Lot of it is.
Michelle Feinstein: 20:32
It's learning from our customers. I mean, you've got to know we receive a ton of feedback, not only by our customers, but also our partner community who's innovating on Salesforce. I mean, they're out there selling the platform as well. So we hold partner advisory boards, customer advisory boards, product advisory boards, and through all those channels, we've asked the questions. And even as we were heading towards the consumption based model, we did a lot of testing with them on the scenarios and got a lot of feedback and have made adjustments along the way, and we continue to do that.
Richard Walker: 21:01
Pricing is so hard though. I mean, you said people look at you.
Michelle Feinstein: 21:05
Live, learn, live, learn, react, adjust. Yeah, yeah.
Richard Walker: 21:10
All right, Michelle, tell me if you don't want to do this on this conversation in public, but I want to switch the gears entirely because you and your husband are both in financial services, and you have children who are now professionally working in financial services. What is it like to have a whole family in your business.
Michelle Feinstein: 21:27
It's pretty cool. I feel like we should write a book about it. When you. When I tell you the brands we all represent. You know, my kids grew up knowing, hey, mom works at BNY Mellon Pershing.
And it was really hard to explain to them when they were young, what is a custodian? Right. So as they were exposed along the years, they also saw that Pershing was a technology company. And then when I went to Salesforce and they were getting older, they saw more of that as they were all going through college. And if you have children of your own, you probably see the same thing.
It's a really hard question to answer. What do you want to do when you grow up? And many of them don't have the answer. They don't know. They just they want to do something valuable.
They want to learn and contribute to society. So I started to get very involved in their career planning and exposing them to things. As an example, I made each. Most of my boys go through Envestnet Institute just to get exposed to financial services and what it means to do financial planning, and that's something that's like a learning module about eight hours. I helped guide them to internships.
That would be interesting. So some of them did internships at BNY Mellon, some did internships at Broadridge and other companies. And I kept saying to them along the way, if this doesn't interest you, you can step away. But they didn't step away. So today I have my oldest son at Blackrock doing implementations for Aladdin.
My middle son is working for an RA as an ops analyst named Vazgen. My stepson is working for private Advisor group, also as an ops analyst. My other stepson is at Prudential, also as an ops analyst. It's really, really fun. And my daughter will be the one to see.
Where does she go? She's in international business and marketing. So I hope she does something a little bit different, maybe global and AI-oriented.
Richard Walker: 23:10
No, that is so phenomenal. Wow. I fell in love with financial services, probably through movies. I mean, I forget the Wall Street movie of the 80s, that Gordon Gekko, all those things. KKR Our stuff.
I fell in love with it, especially going to college, and I really wanted to work for a stockbroker, and I did that. I worked at Weber, I worked at John Hancock I.
Michelle Feinstein: 23:32
I worked at Painewebber too.
Richard Walker: 23:34
Nice. I was there actually, at Kidder Peabody when it went through the Xojet debacle, and it got taken over by Painewebber. So I saw that whole transition. I worked at Dlj Investment Banking.
Michelle Feinstein: 23:45
I did to.
Richard Walker: 23:46
Transamerica in the four one market. I got all this exposure and then I got my degree in finance. And then what did I do? I went into tech.
Michelle Feinstein: 23:54
Well, you know, it's funny, Rich. I think part of it was they met some really nice and great people as they were interning there. Like, these people are so normal and nice. And when they started to ask them, what did you go to school for? Oh, I went to school for graphic design.
Oh, I went to school and I was an English major. Oh, I was in the Army before I came here, like so. That really surprised them, that everybody wasn't an investment banker or didn't have a business degree. And I think that started to make them comfortable. As an example, one of my sons that's now in financial services was a graphics design major, and he was panicking.
He's like, how am I going to translate this? I said, hey, what you've done in graphics design, you could translate that in the future to product management and strategy in financial services. So it's really, really interesting to watch their journeys. In fact, one of them today is at an industry event, I'll do a call out by Mike Partnow and the Wealth Mosaic. And so he is in that community, in that audience today as, as part of the community.
Richard Walker: 24:53
It's so cool. That is so cool. So what's your Thanksgiving dinner going to sound like? The conversation.
Michelle Feinstein: 24:59
So yeah. So it's interesting because now the boys are comparing experiences. They help each other, right? There are a few of them in their roles that are learning the differences between the Schwab platform versus Pershing versus LPL because they're dealing with advisors and transition. So I love hearing them talk, and it gives me such pride Ride because they actually sound like they know what they're talking about.
And it's only been a few months for some of them that they're talking our language. Right. They're living these challenges.
Richard Walker: 25:30
So if anybody's listening to the show and they're thinking, oh man, I want my kids to fall on that that path or help them through this, or they're just graduating college and they're worried about the workforce. What kind of advice, guidance, or tips would you share with them?
Michelle Feinstein: 25:42
Number one, call me. I've gone through the journey now four times. I've lived through students changing schools three times on their journey, changing their majors. I think the number one piece of advice is as a parent, lean in, teach them about your experience, and expose your network. I have to say, in my case, everybody in my network, whether it was just having a conversation with them, even as like a mentor, went a long way with no promise of an opportunity, but just giving them access to your network and people to talk to and learn from that is not mom and dad goes a long way because they actually will tell them things to do, or things about themselves that they wouldn't listen to if I said it.
Richard Walker: 26:24
Yeah, yeah. No, that is brilliant. That is brilliant. So let's go back. Sorry.
I wanted to take this detour because I love family and stuff, and I've got three boys who are all really young, and I just keep thinking, like, how am I going to help them move along? But I actually still had another question about AI I wanted to bring back to this. Sure. You talked to a lot of customers. What stage are these customers in, in the adoption and the the use of agents or just AI in general?
What are you seeing in the marketplace?
Michelle Feinstein: 26:54
So I tell you, at the beginning of 2025, it was shocking how many firms that I would speak to that were still learning, figuring out all the differences between these different types of AI and kind of still doing workshops internally with their executives and their business users, about which, where should they start? And so you saw firms struggling 250 use cases, 100 use cases, I would say by the spring they started to realize that's too many and you started to see some acceleration where now there were more firms, I would say by June that were actually going to move into a proof of concept with 1 or 2 use cases, and that makes a lot more sense. So they had figured out, let us start with an employee focused use case that's going to have high impact but low risk, where our compliance and steer codes are going to let us pass it through. And the other challenge for them was figuring out which AI. So are we going to put all our eggs in one basket with Salesforce?
Are we going to be hybrid? I would tell you I've started to see a lot more hybrid. So a lot of the wealth firms are saying we're going to try lots of things. We're going to try Microsoft and Salesforce, we're going to try vanilla, we're going to try Xbox, we're going to try jump. So you start to see their ecosystem starting to look like that for sure.
I would say as we head into the second half of the year firms are now understanding the opportunity with autonomous agents. It does scare them a little bit. Like how much power are we going to give this agent? So what we've done at Salesforce is we've kind of put together these exercises of let us help you buy business process, break it down every step of that business process. You know, maybe it's financial planning as an example.
All right. How much of that business process are you going to allow the agent to take on? Red, yellow green. Some of them. It's all green.
Some of them it's a mix. So we see firms wanting to keep human in the loop. That makes them comfortable. I haven't really seen anybody yet go fully autonomous. Like we're just going to trust this agent end-to-end.
But I think we will get there by next year.
Richard Walker: 28:58
Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's happening for sure. You've expressed what I've been seeing as well, and really my own company has gone through this evolution. I think we started much earlier though, because in 23 I was saying to all my team, start using ChatGPT, start trying any and all software that has AI in it. Let's see what's going to help us.
And so we went through that process of kind of popcorn like, ooh, we don't know what's going to stick to the wall. Let's just try it all. But I was really trying to get people in a mindset of embracing it and trying it and using it. And I would say that there's a core mindset most people have about AI, that it's an assistant. It's going to amplify my work.
There's another one, which is if I bought it in a product and that product is doing the job, I can trust it. But I don't see a lot of people saying this AI is an elite performer and I'm going to fully trust it.
Michelle Feinstein: 29:48
Well, like is an example. Even when we were ideating for our first set of agents, you know, the question by some of our product leaders was what job will this replace? Will this replace the advisor? Will this replace the sales assistant. And there was a lot of conversation around that that we're not there yet.
We don't want the AI to fully replace any human body. Right now. It's more of augmentation, scaling their productivity. And that's been the focus of Salesforce is this AI is meant to be a scale, like a massive scale enabler, a personalization tool, someone that can take on a lot of these manual administrative tasks that the human in that seat shouldn't have to take on. The other thing I was thinking about is, you know, as you were saying, how do you get people comfortable with AI?
And I can use the example of Salesforce, where we have some amazing AI accessible to us. For instance, notebook LLM in Gemini is just weaved right into our workstations, right into slack. It's a super powerful tool. And all across the organization, especially in the product teams, we use notebook LLM all the time now to share information. Right.
It's really an amazing experience how you can upload and consume information and then listen to a podcast about what's in there. Like if no one's used that tool, you should absolutely try it.
Richard Walker: 31:06
Yeah. When when that came out, I put all of our API guides through it and built podcast intros to all of our API guides. Yes, it's stunned. Like, oh my gosh, five minutes, I can get an overview of this whole thing. This is awesome.
There was one other premise I wanted to present here. Actually, I have to wrap up this call. But the thing is, there's another step in the evolution that's happened in my own firm, and that is the acceptance of AI. So when we said, hey, should we use Zendesk AI a year ago, it'd be like, that's too expensive. We don't know today.
I mean, we just talked about it like a month ago. It was like, oh yeah, of course that's going to save us time. Do it. I don't care the cost at this point. Do it.
And that mindset is of of adoption and acceptance is happening for us. Do you see that happening?
Michelle Feinstein: 31:49
Oh yeah, 100%. If you look at a North Star from last year to this year of any firm, what you're going to see on there is we must identify our tech stack. We must identify the advisor experience. We're seeing it all over the place. So instead of being careful now they're saying it's full steam ahead.
Anything we do, we have to make sure AI is a part of that solution as a part of that strategy?
Richard Walker: 32:13
Yeah, yeah. Oh, man. Well, I appreciate that insight. So before I get to my very last question, what is the best way for people to find and connect with you?
Michelle Feinstein: 32:23
Sure. Well, number one LinkedIn for sure. Feel free to message me on LinkedIn. If you want information about Salesforce, you can certainly go to their website. There is a lot of information that's always refreshed and kept on the lookout for Dreamforce announcements.
Next week you're going to hear a lot. And then lastly, if you're out there in the customer world or partner world, you can reach out to me at Salesforce. So M Feinstein at Salesforce.com.
Richard Walker: 32:47
Nice. Okay. Here comes my last question. Who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?
Michelle Feinstein: 32:56
Okay, so a couple people come to mind who have been big influencers on me. The first one is Brian Shea. Brian Shea was the head of BNY Mellon. He was the head of Pershing. But no matter how high he got into the organization, he never forgot the people and the relationships, and just to be one of us.
And so I've always carried that with me. Like, leave your ego at the door. Be authentic. Be approachable. Be willing to roll up your sleeves and really jump into a client situation or a product situation.
He always did that. I always appreciated it. The other was Mark Tibergien. So Mark Tibergien is really big in the Ria industry. He ran the RA business for Pershing for a long time.
He sat on the executive committee. Mark was wonderful and still is a wonderful mentor to me. He would sit down with me, especially if I was getting ready to do interactions with the press, because he was so good at that. And we would go back and forth, and he would redline a lot of what I had prepared. There was no other executive committee member who would give me the time and his brainpower like he did, and he would sit there and let me rehearse with him so that accessibility always remained with me.
And today I have lots of people who approach me that want help, and I never make them feel bad about it. I make myself accessible as I can and I make sure it's meaningful.
Richard Walker: 34:20
I have very high regard for Mark, actually. I met him when he was at Moss Adams prior to going over to Pershing, and even when it went to Pershing, he'd still talk to me and take my call. And I was this little always. He's one of the most real people that you ever meet in life. Like.
Michelle Feinstein: 34:37
Well, the other is his presentation skills. So, you know, my whole career I have been a presenter on large stages, small and medium, and I presented with Mark Tibergien any times. And I've always admired his public speaking ability, and he would always bring something very he wanted to make it memorable. So he would always do his prep and his research. And I remember he gave me feedback and complimented me, and it was the highest compliment I could have ever received.
If he's complimenting me on my presentation style. I was like, then I must have been okay.
Richard Walker: 35:08
You better believe it. Yeah. Oh, that is so awesome. All right, I have to wrap this up. Unfortunately.
So I want to give a big thank you to Michelle Feinstein, general manager of financial services at Salesforce, for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out Michelle's website or really Salesforce's website at Salesforce.com. You've all been there, so just go do it again. And don't forget to check out Quik! at quickforms.com, where we make processing forms easier. I hope you enjoyed this discussion.
We'll click the like button, share this with someone, and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Michelle, thank you so much for joining me today.
Michelle Feinstein: 35:41
Rich, thank you. This was a lot of fun. I really appreciate it.
Outro: 35:46
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