Salesforce CMO Amber Armstrong at Connections 2026!

**John Wall** (0:00)
Today's episode is brought to you by Framer and Miro.

**Christopher Penn** (0:10)
This is Marketing Over Coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall.

**John Wall** (0:18)
Good morning, welcome to Marketing Over Coffee, I'm John Wall.
Today our guest is Amber Armstrong. She's the CMO of Agentforce Applications at Salesforce, which is over $20 billion of the business of the segment. Yeah, and I am just thrilled. So we are at your show, you know, having worked in the industry forever. I know how lucky we are to get a CMO at their own event, because normally you're running around like a maniac, and at least this is only two days, it's not a whole week or something like that. But so thank you for taking time. We appreciate that.

**Amber Armstrong** (0:46)
Of course.
It's so fun to get to just talk about the kind of futures and where everything's headed. It's a fun conversation.

**John Wall** (0:55)
Yes, right. We can get into the interesting stuff. Now, and looking into your background, it was amazing to see starting off at IBM because they had been the leader in so many areas.
I saw that you were in charge of AI Internet of Things. But then, you made the jump, you were at LivePerson. I also saw that we have competed against them back in another age, and then finally up to Salesforce. But that's like the LinkedIn profile. Give us your story. Did you go to elementary school and want to be a CMO or a SaaS product? How did this all start?

**Amber Armstrong** (1:28)
It's actually a fun story. When I was about 15 years old, my aunt was in sales for Apple, and she took me on vacation with her, which was a work trip, but I was going to babysit her son at the time.
I got to go to some of her work events at night, and I was like, this is cool.

**John Wall** (1:49)
Yeah, really?

**Amber Armstrong** (1:50)
This is really cool.
From that moment, I was like, I want to go into marketing for sure. I did one job at First Union outside of undergrad that was my first kind of experience in marketing. I was like, you know, I did tech. Tech was like, that's what I fell in love with. That's where I'm going to go, and I've been there since.

**John Wall** (2:13)
Apple, so you're like second-generation tech, and always, was that in the Bay Area or where did you come out?

**Amber Armstrong** (2:18)
No, she was in Charlotte. I was in South Carolina.

**John Wall** (2:20)
Okay. Well, so then IBM, just give us a little bit there, like what got you in and then what got you out?

**Amber Armstrong** (2:26)
Yeah. I have a huge amount of love and affection for IBM. It was the best training ground I ever could have gone through.
I went to business school in Chapel Hill, and I mainly did that because I wanted to go work for a really big company. I had kind of had that experience with Apple as I shared, and I was like, big companies, where I want to go? How do I get there? Someone told me to go get an MBA, so I did that.
And at IBM, I showed up as part of a leadership community, the Marketing Leadership Development Community, and I rotated through jobs. They kind of say, this is what you're going to do now, this is what you're going to do in two years. And I always say something really new and interesting and fun to do. And so I absolutely loved it. And at the end of my time there, I think I know enough to go and do this outside, and I want to go try that. And I loved the AI space.
Maybe we'll come back at some point maybe about the IOT and the AI application space, because there's some interesting things that I think are actually some parallels for now.

**John Wall** (3:31)
Coming today.

**Amber Armstrong** (3:32)
Yeah. And then I went to LivePerson and stayed in the AI space, did some of just the best work of my life. I was just so excited about it. I launched this brand called Curiously Human.
And the whole idea was that when you're engaging with these, you know, at the time we talked about it more as chat, if it feels really natural, like, oh, it kind of creates this, like, curiously, oh, that's, like, curiously human. And it was so much fun to launch that brand. It was so much fun. But when I was at LivePerson, I ended up working with a guy named Tony Owens, who was a president at Salesforce. And I got to learn a lot about how Salesforce worked. And I was like, that sounds like fun. Like, I like the speed, I like the rigor.