Build Your Salesforce AI Roadmap: The Crawl-Walk-Run Framework

Use a crawl-walk-run approach. In the crawl phase, identify high-value, low-complexity use cases in sales and service, address security and compliance foundations, and validate ROI with concrete numbers. Walk expands AI to other departments and begins process reengineering. Run embeds AI into your product offerings, customer experience, and SLAs.

Data quality is the most common blocker. Enterprises typically have hundreds of systems with duplicated, inconsistent data. Beyond data, security and privacy concerns, ethical considerations around bias and hallucination, and organizational change management are the other major gates.

Start with a specific use case like case summarization. Calculate how many reps you have, how many interactions they handle daily, how many minutes per interaction could be saved, and their fully loaded hourly cost. Even conservative assumptions across a 100-person team can show hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual savings.

Use a security layer that masks PII and sensitive fields before data leaves Salesforce. Bring your own model hosted on a locked-down, dedicated cloud instance. Enforce TLS or mutual TLS in transit, control access at the user profile and record type level, and address data residency by connecting to AI models hosted in specific regions.

Focus on cases where the technology can immediately reduce manual work without requiring model training: case summarization for service reps, personalized follow-up email drafts for sales, opportunity summaries for pipeline reviews, and account 360 insights that pull together related records.