Dreamforce 2025 | Reggie Walker, PwC

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Reggie Walker, PwC

Reggie Walker

Global Salesforce Alliance Leader PwC

At Dreamforce 2025 in San Francisco, Reggie Walker, global Salesforce alliance lead at PwC, joins theCUBE’s Dave Vellante and Gemma Allen to unpack why the contact center is a flagship use case for agentic AI. Walker details how “software-driven service” and AI-powered, agentic contact centers can standardize processes and technology to slash costs by ~70–80% while boosting CSAT by ~10–15%. The discussion explores what’s actually scaling now, how governance and security enable confident deployment and where human agents remain essential as augmentation rather... Read more

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Reggie Walker, PwC

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Dave Vellante

>> Hi, everybody. Welcome back to Moscone South in San Francisco. This is theCUBE's coverage of Dreamforce 2025. The operative word is amazing. I think Marc Benioff used it a number of times in his keynote. It is quite amazing when you see what generative AI is doing generally, but specifically what it's doing to the enterprise. That's where all the hard work is, where you need governance, you need security, you need to have your data house in order. The consumer is one thing, but the enterprise is really where we see the rubber meeting the road. Reggie Walker is here is the Global Sales Force Alliance lead at PwC and the areas that are really getting traction in ROI, we always talk about coding and contact center. We're going to talk about the latter today. Reggie, thanks for coming on.

Reggie Walker

>> Thanks. I appreciate it. You guys are brave by the way, doing this right after Metallica last night. An hour ago, I didn't have a voice. So you said bring the energy, so .

Dave Vellante

>> How was that show?

Reggie Walker

>> Fantastic.

Dave Vellante

>> I missed it. That was awesome.

Reggie Walker

>> Oh, it's classic. They're so good and by the way, it warms my heart that at their age, they're still doing the way they are. I hope to be the same way.

Gemma Allen

>> We saw a real generational divide when you saw people split from Metallica and Benson Booneriders who went into the stadium. It was Funny to watch.

Reggie Walker

>> It was great, but it's great.

Dave Vellante

>> One the best part of these events, they're like rock concerts and the keynote was amazing. I thought it was almost like a Hollywood movie. It was so well done. But let's talk about the agentic contact center, what you were doing there. I point out it is one of the use cases that is driving clear ROI. We talk all the time about scaling without labor. How do you see it playing out?

Reggie Walker

>> Yeah, so appreciate that and appreciate the conversation, guys. And before we came on, we were talking a bit about this idea of software driven service, right?

Dave Vellante

>> Right.

Reggie Walker

>> And I think we're getting there. Look, we see tremendous upside. A lot of our clients are coming to us now and they see this as a real opportunity area. If you think about how much customer interaction today goes through a contact center or call center, it's huge, right? It's a tremendous amount and that presents an opportunity and it also presents a challenge. It's an opportunity because you have customers that are coming to you constantly, especially online commerce. You talk about everything from you're dealing with airlines. If you're dealing with even now in hospitals and everything, you're dealing with contact centers. You have an opportunity with a customer. And so we see that as an opportunity, but at the same time, it presents a lot of costs because it's inefficient. You've got disparate technologies that are being used that you need to rationalize. And so that's where we see the agentic in our minds, AI powered contact center coming in place and agentic technology coming in place to help with that.

Dave Vellante

>> The keynote, Marc, he gave us that, I think it was 50%. He said some huge percentage of in-bounds went unanswered and now they're answering 95%, 99% of them. So you're seeing that both probably internally and externally. What does that mean for a company and their bottom line?

Reggie Walker

>> Well, so let's talk with numbers because specifically a couple things here as proof points, then we'll get to that question. The opportunity we see here is about 70% to 80% cost reduction by the way of going to this approach. And that's going to be from standardizing processes and it's going to be also to standardizing technologies. So if you think about that, that's a huge number for companies to look at from a cost. But we're also seeing 10% to 15% growth in CSAT scores and we really see that as the opportunity because if you look ahead, customer loyalty, being able to use it as a growth engine versus just troubleshooting problems, that's where we see the opportunity and the ability to put information in the hands of human agents and use it as an augmentation to help them handle the most important cases in a way that helps to grow customer loyalty, helps to grow the top line and the bottom line. We see that as being the opportunity. So we agree and Marc himself said it even with Salesforce, what they've seen in their own contact centers, we are seeing it in the use cases that we're deploying out at our client base as well.

Gemma Allen

>> It seems that the buzzword here this week is agent force. Tell us a little bit about the Salesforce journey PwC has been on. I know you guys are a very big ecosystem player. Tell us how are you thinking about the next big bets for Salesforce? What's coming down the pipe from your perspective that you think will have the most impact quickly?

Reggie Walker

>> A couple days ago at the executive summit, I led a roundtable around the future of AI and where it was going, and it was a very lively discussion and the roundtable was a lot of clients. Here's where I think we see it going, and particularly with agent force, we're seeing companies starting to move away from science experiments to actually now scalable deployments. And where we're seeing that are companies that really embraced early on, experimenting with the technology, applying it to some limited use cases, getting institutional learning around the technology. Those are the ones that are starting to get to a point where they're starting to scale deployment and development. So that's what we're seeing. In the next two to three years.,I think you're going to see more organizations starting to scale deployment cross-processes, cross-functions. And in fact, we had one customer that was even talking about, I think it was in the sanitation industry. They actually now, and this goes back to the contact center discussion, they're now able to predict using AI and agentic technology, where they're going to have customer service complaints based upon the ability now to get other data, bring it in, use agents to prompt their human agents and prompt their operations to say, "We need to get on top of something beforehand." And that way when the calls come in, they've got the answers for the customers.

Dave Vellante

>> Why do you think, Reggie, there's so much dissonance now in the market? Is it the media hype? Michael Dell stood up and said, "I stood up in front of my company and said, if we don't disrupt ourselves, we're going to be toast. And so he's going hard after it." We see that at Dell, but he also said not everybody gets it right now, but you're talking about 70% to 80% cost reduction and a 10% to 15% improvement in customer satisfaction. By the way, that's huge. 15 points and it's got upside there. The MIT study says nobody's getting ROI. We know what the problems are with that study, but generally, there's a sentiment of it's fun to play with ChatGPT, but we're really not seeing it. Why the dissonance when you have such clear proof points?

Reggie Walker

>> Look, I think we've all been around technology for a long time. I've been doing it for 30 years. There's always a hype cycle and you have to get past that, right? You have to get past the hype cycle and get to where the practicality comes in. The actual real practical use cases can be deployed. And look, I think a lot of companies are dealing with a lot of things these days. Let's be honest and look at the world around us. They're worrying about where they're going to locate operations. They're worried about some of the geopolitical risks that they have to deal with and regulatory risk. And so it's very easy for us to sit here and say, "Well, this is a clear use case. You're going to save a lot of money." There's a lot of competition for their mind share right now. But all it takes, and this is I think where we're getting to, you start seeing a wave of companies beginning to deploy it and the last thing an executive wants to be or a CEO wants to be is behind in their industry when they all start to see others getting real gains out of it. So I think we're slowly getting to that point. I just think right now, there's a lot of competition for mind share. There's a lot of competition for capital inside a lot of enterprises, and they want proof points much like they've wanted with other technologies. And again, that's why I go back and say those companies now that we're seeing that embraced it early, got to the proof points early, they're starting to see real results and they're starting to scale it. By the way, last year this conversation was interesting, right? Because agent force was new to everybody. The whole concept's new. This is all moving so quickly. Our conversations this year, much more substantive and it's because a lot of companies have experience with it now and now they want to get to the next level.

Dave Vellante

>> I think you nailed it. We had Crawford Del Prete on earlier today, he's the head of IDC. He was saying that vendor revenue's going to grow 14% this year, but we know from our surveys that the budgets, CIO budgets are growing low single digits and why is it growing 14%? It's because it's all the hyperscale CapEx build outs. And so to your point, there are day-to-day problems that people are having and challenges and so it just takes time to get there. So my question is what specifically do organizations need to do, get their data house in order or their cultural things? What top-down edicts do they need, or at least encouragement? What has to happen to get on that experience curve so that they can scale without labor, so that they can bring software like marginal economics to their business?

Reggie Walker

>> Look, the way we look at it is this is the same regardless. I'll go back again, been doing this a long time and the same approaches work. First and foremost, you got to begin with an outcome-based mindset. What is the outcome that you're trying to achieve? What are we trying to do from a business perspective? What strategy we're employing and then what are the outcomes we need to use to get there? And then what are the processes that are put in place to help us get there? That's the first step because when you break it down that way, then you'll know where to focus. What is your highest and where are you going to get your highest ROI for that capital deployment that is now so critical to everybody? So start there. Then you have to put in the right governance because a lot of people are worried about it, right? Let's be honest. They hear about things whether it's bias in the models, but you put in the right governance or security for instance, put in the right governance, build that in, and then you can begin to scale and build it with confidence. So you go there next, but you've got to do use cases. You've got to go out and pilot it. You've got to take those spots like in this instance, contact center where we see great benefit and great return, pilot it and start building from there and learn from it, and then you'll build the confidence to scale it and deploy it. I think again, it's going back to, and nobody likes to talk about measured responses, but the reality is we all know this, folks go out, they come out of the gate hot and then they have to come pull it back because they didn't do it with a real plan and an outcome-based mindset. Start there. It's the measure twice, cut once mentality.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah.

Gemma Allen

>> I thought it was interesting. I read a piece last week from PwC where you talked about in the new vanguard and how there's been some surprisingly fast adopters of AI. Industries that weren't expected to get the value as quickly from other technology cycles that are really leaning in on AI like financial services and others. Tell us a little bit about the industry quick wins that you've seen. Where do you feel there's just excellent hunting ground, improving ground for this technology?

Reggie Walker

>> Well, listen. So in financial services, it's all about personalization because they want to provide much more personalized services to their customers. We all see it with everything now in our app, we do most of our banking on our app. How are you going to grow your top line as a bank where you're going to do it through those personalized experiences that you apply because they've got access to all your financial data, so they know what they can do there. For retailers, it's around customer journeys, it's around they know from your past buying experience and how you're buying patterns are working. So how they get you on that customer... I mean, I'm sorry, the customer journey to take you along that journey and take you to the next experience that you might want. And then by the way, contact center, we see a big opportunity in retail because with all the online buying now and you get something, it's not the right size or you're not sure or they begin to anticipate what your needs are. So that customer journey there we see as a big one. Healthcare, another area by the way, because the patient experience is really important. And so we see healthcare as being another place with rapid deployment around building around patient experience and that ability to give patients more control or more insight into their health information available to them. I know I use MyChart for mine and it gives me a lot of good information. It prompts me when I need to do things. So I think the patient experience is another area we see it.

Dave Vellante

>> Are there any patterns that you're seeing within highly regulated industries either in terms of faster adoption because they have the governance and frameworks in place, or maybe slower adoption because it's so risky? Are you seeing any patterns there?

Reggie Walker

>> Seeing some faster adoption. I'm smiling because again, the round table I was talking about, this came up and we had a couple of regulated industries that were in there. And on the one hand, they did talk about the need to be more measured and they have to worry about governance and security because they are regulated. But it's the opportunity for them to standardize at scale and know that if they put the right controls in place, if you're putting mechanisms in place to constantly be checking the models for bias and the output for accuracy, they actually can get better consistency across so they can adhere to the standards that whatever it might be from a regulatory perspective that they have to. Another example, talk about highly regulated industry, pharmaceutical development. We had one person there from pharmaceutical. They are now can develop far more rapidly. Product life cycles shorten, but they can do it now with confidence because of the repeatability and the scalability and the ability to put structure in the process the way they didn't before.

Dave Vellante

>> You know what it reminds me of, Gemma? If you have a security organization and you build that into the product cycle, if you can have that ingrained in, you can get products to market faster. It's really what you're saying here, Reggie.

Gemma Allen

>> And also I think there's so much power in sentiment analysis. What you're talking about in the CX journey, and we've heard a lot from some very interesting guests we've had on this week, is this idea of CX becoming not so much a reactive force than an enabler across the business. That you can create so much data and profiling like in a data-360 world on a customer. You had Shark Ninja on yesterday and we had some jokes about even what they're learning about their buyers, because they sell so much across your home and your aesthetic preferences, et cetera. So tell us a little bit about how PwC is preparing clients to really gain from that to be the predictive world where you can use recommender systems and personalization technologies, et cetera, to help grow businesses.

Reggie Walker

>> So again, so what we're known for more than anything else, our foundation has always been tremendous industry expertise and a lot of knowledge about how industries work and the underlying business processes that work with industries. And so we start first with that. We have real intimate industry knowledge because it matters. You can talk all you want in generalities to someone, but when you want to take it down to banking or you want to take it down to healthcare or you want to take it down to retail, they want to know what it matters for them. So we start there. Then we take it to what outcomes do they need to drive. I keep coming back to that, because that's so important to keep the end in mind. And then how do we build it to get there. And then look, we build it on standardized frameworks. We then take it from there and build standardized frameworks across the board so that it's repeatable so they can do it at scale. Look, AI gives us the ability to do things we couldn't do in the past. And I'll go back to the context center is a great example of this. We can build a modular way of doing it and be able then to deploy that at scale globally. We've got language models now where you don't have to worry about the fact that you've got language capabilities sitting in a lot of different places. And by the way, when you do that inherently, you're going to get inconsistent processes because people are going to do it in one call center one way, they might do it in another call center way simply because language, that goes away. So now we have standard processes we can cut across the world using the language models that we now have available to us and the language recognition to be able to speak with different customers using the exact same process of different languages. And so we take all of that, that provides a real opportunity. So that's the way we look at it. We start with the industry, we drive the outcomes, and then we look at the technology and what it can do to help enable all of that. And we try to standardize it at scale so it's repeatable.

Dave Vellante

>> Am I correct that you, Reggie, led the Salesforce-driven go-to-market transformation inside of PwC before taking on this -

Reggie Walker

>> You have really good information. That's fantastic.

Dave Vellante

>> Okay.

Reggie Walker

>> So I was the executive sponsor for it. By the way, this is at a time that I did not know Salesforce interestingly enough.

Dave Vellante

>> Oh, really?

Reggie Walker

>> No.

Dave Vellante

>> Okay. So curious as to what you learned from that and what we can take away broadly. Because you hear things like go-to-market's going to completely change, BDRs are going away, and there's a debate about that. What did you learn and how are you applying it in your new role?

Reggie Walker

>> It's funny. It's not the technology. That's what you learn. Technology works. Look, yes, of course there's improvements that are going to be made. Of course anytime like we all talk about the hype cycle, some things work, some don't. But ultimately, the technology is going to work. It is about the people and it's about how we're changing the way people are going to be working and about that change management and that journey that needs to go on because we can deploy the best technology in the world. But the reality is that if people don't know how to use it or they don't know how to interact with it. And certainly in this world where we're going to be shifting work, right? We're changing the way organizations work fundamentally, because you're going to have an agentic workforce and you're going to have a human workforce. And teaching the humans how to interact with that agentic workforce and how it can augment what they do is going to be so important to getting the results. So yes, the biggest thing I learned, we deployed Salesforce, great technology, works very well for us. But if we didn't teach our partners and our people how to appropriately use the technology, one, they're never going to get the benefit from it. And two, we weren't going to see the ROI that we needed to see out of it. And so that to me is the one biggest learning. And I think that's true. I think that's especially true when we're talking about the agentic wave and AI. And it was true then with what we were doing. It really comes down to what are you doing to help your people learn how to use the technology and use it in their normal workflows in a way.

Dave Vellante

>> So you as the executive sponsor, had to put in place some kind of training and adoption program?

Reggie Walker

>> Yes.

Dave Vellante

>> And how did that go? Was that a team of people that led that? Train the trainer type of thing, or how did that work?

Reggie Walker

>> Yeah, let me tell you, I'll give you... Listen, if y'all share all dirty laundry here. First of all, it is a big team. It was first understanding the roles that we needed and how we were going to change those roles. But then it got down to how are we communicating what was coming to our people and coming and what their role and their responsibilities were going to be in that. So we shifted it. It wasn't just us, it's not our responsibility. It's also their responsibility to learn, to train themselves, to take advantage of the learning opportunities that were going to be available to them. And so we're very clear about that. But we did get to a point, we were getting close to a go live date. We decided to pause because we said we're not there yet. We need to do some more to get our people where they need to be in order to take advantage of this. So we delayed it for another month and we spent more money and we deployed more training and got them to where they needed to be.

Gemma Allen

>> I think-

Reggie Walker

>> So that's a key learning. I would say don't get-

Dave Vellante

>> It paid off, it sounds like.

Reggie Walker

>> Listen, it paid off. It was one of those things where people are like, "Oh, how can we delay?" Well, I'll tell you why we can delay it because I've seen far too many implementations that didn't. We have to go back six months to a year later and fix something. We're going to fix it now.

Gemma Allen

>> I think people really appreciate that candidacy, right? That you can admit that nothing is perfect and this is a journey and it's happening very fast. What do you say when, and I'm sure you get asked this a lot, when people ask you about the world of AI as it relates to consultancy and advisory services, right? Some folks might think you're a Turkey voting for Christmas, others, there's obviously very mixed views on this. How do you respond to those thoughts and questions?

Reggie Walker

>> Well, first of all, I think the benefit is you're using and interacting with people that have done this many times before and bring a specific expertise to the table. And we are there to help. I always say we're the bright lights when you're driving down the road. We're there to help you anticipate and see the things that are coming and help you be able to plan for that, adjust for it, and be able to implement. And then when the curveballs do come, we should have the experience having seen it before, of how we've managed and get through it, right? But I would say for those companies that are, especially with AI and everything that's around it that are concerned about or worried about it, you got to get started. There's a lot of people doing it now. There's a lot of people that are learning from it now. There's a lot of people seeing success from it now. So the time to move really is now. But you don't have to start huge. You know your organization's better than anyone, start small. Do it in the way that works within the context of your organization and how you work. But learn. It is the most important thing right now is you have to learn because you're going to have to train your organization how to do it.

Gemma Allen

>> That's .

Dave Vellante

>> Shining the bright light on the speed bumps and navigating through the detours. Reggie, I know you got to go. I really appreciate your time.

Reggie Walker

>> Thank you.

Dave Vellante

>> Sure.

Reggie Walker

>> No, thank you.

Dave Vellante

>> All right, this is Dave Vellante for Gemma Allen. We're here at Salesforce, Dreamforce 2025 from Moscone South. We'll be right back from San Francisco, right after this short break.