The AI in Business Podcast

Enterprise sales teams routinely let the majority of inbound leads go untouched simply because there isn't enough team bandwidth to work them all. In this episode, Vanessa Tabbert, VP of Agentic Transformation and Sales Development at Salesforce, breaks down how her own team deployed an AI SDR agent to recover leads that would otherwise go cold, without replacing the humans who convert the best ones. The conversation covers how to identify a low-risk first use case, why an AI agent should be coached and measured like a team member rather than launched and left alone, and how the same approach scales down to a small SMB sales team.


This episode is sponsored by Salesforce.
​
To learn the exact strategies we use to help leading AI brands and startups connect with their ideal enterprise AI buyers, visit: emerj.com/AD1

Large B2B operations keep running order entry, invoicing, and other repetitive back-office workflows by hand, years after most companies started investing heavily in AI. In this episode, Chris Bradley, Chief Marketing Officer and Head of AI Transformation at Veritiv, breaks down why legacy systems have kept agentic AI out of these workflows, and what changed once Veritiv began automating a process handling 1.7 million orders a year. The conversation covers the audit-trail controls needed to trust an agent with an end-to-end task, how a supervising AI agent checks another agent's work, and how to pick a first automation target based on headcount concentration rather than project size.
​
If you offer AI products or services into the enterprise, you need to find enterprise leaders with relevance and readiness. Emerj attracts VP+ enterprise audiences who are already convinced that they need to move beyond traditional IT. To learn the exact strategies we use to help leading AI brands and startups connect with their ideal enterprise AI buyers, visit: emerj.com/AD1

Industrial environments run on a different set of constraints than the typical enterprise office — physical risk, standalone factory sites, and workflows where a fragmented handoff can cost time, quality, or worse.
​
In this episode, Scot Burdette, Global CIO of Measurement & Analytics at ABB, examines why industrial AI has to be built around knowledge capture, human-in-the-loop oversight, and frontline usability, and shares how ABB's own tools are helping a retiring generation's expertise transfer to the workers replacing them, with Emerj host Marilie Fouché.
​
He outlines the practical shift underway, from siloed, tribal knowledge toward a shared operational data layer, and from pilots that prove a concept to the design and implementation work that changes how a factory runs.
​
This episode is sponsored by Poka.
 
To learn the exact strategies we use to help leading AI brands and startups connect with their ideal enterprise AI buyers, visit: emerj.com/AD1

Job titles routinely undercount what employees can actually do, especially in fast-moving technical roles.
 
In this episode, Cory Hymel, Head of Research at Andela, explores why mapping skills instead of roles gives leaders a far more accurate picture of workforce capability and AI readiness.
 
The conversation covers how continuous skills assessment, rather than one-time training, keeps pace with a technical skill half-life that's now down to two or three years.
 
This episode is sponsored by Andela.
 
Learn how select AI vendors reach Fortune 500 decision-makers through Emerj's research and media platforms. Download our media kit at emerj.com/AD1

A quarter of enterprise teams have gotten a single AI channel into full production — the rest are stuck somewhere behind it.
In this episode, Arun Chandra, Chief Operating Officer at NiCE, explores why that gap persists and what closes it.
 
The conversation covers getting data, knowledge, and organizational context ready for scale, building the financial case for AI investment with the CFO, and how open protocols like MCP are reshaping enterprise architecture decisions.
 
This episode is sponsored by NiCE Cognigy.
 
Learn how leading organizations approach AI investment more like a venture portfolio, and why interdisciplinary collaboration is critical to defining the right data for AI success. Download our free PDF report, "Beginning with AI," at emerj.com/aik1