From Dashboards to Agents: How Salesforce is Redefining Data Interaction w/ Irina Malkova

Are dashboards dead? For complex enterprise use cases, the answer might be yes. In this episode, I'm joined by Irina Malkova (VP Data & AI at Salesforce), to discuss her team's transformational journey from building complex dashboards to deploying AI-powered conversational agents.

We dive deep into how this shift is not just a change in tooling, but a fundamental change in how users access insights and how data teams measure their impact.

Join us as we cover:

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• The Shift from Dashboards to Agents: We discuss why dashboards can create a high cognitive load and fail users in complex scenarios , and how conversational agents in the flow of work (like Slack) provide targeted, actionable insights and boost adoption.
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• What is Product Telemetry?: Irina explains how telemetry is evolving from a simple engineering observability use case to a critical data source for AI, machine learning, and recommendation systems.
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• Why Standard RAG Fails in the Enterprise: Irina shares why typical RAG approaches break down on dense, entity-rich corporate data (like Salesforce's help docs) where semantic similarity isn't enough, leading to the rise of Graph RAG.
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• The New, Measurable ROI of Data: How moving from BI to agents allows data teams to precisely measure impact, track downstream actions, and finally have a concrete answer to the ROI question that was previously impossible to justify.
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• Data Teams as Enterprise Leaders: Why data teams are uniquely positioned to lead AI transformation, as they hold the enterprise "ontology" and have experience building products under uncertainty.