Case, SF AI Joint Ventures
How might we give the world's largest banks access to AI that doesn't exist yet?
#ai_gtm#joint_venture#innovation_architecture#financial_services#hcd#research#salesforce#2024Every major financial institution is trying to safely open the AI Arc of the Covenant. The ones who get there first aren't buying software. They're building partnerships.
The competitive landscape for enterprise AI has quietly become unrecognizable. Salesforce no longer competes primarily against other CRM or SaaS specialists. It competes against Google, AWS, Microsoft, Meta, and Palantir — companies that are more than willing to make a short-term investment in standing up a system that will earn it back year after year. The demo-and-close motion is over. The new buying behavior is simple and uncompromising: show me, don't tell me.
For the world's largest banks, this creates a specific kind of tension. The pressure to lead on AI is existential. The risk of getting it wrong — regulatory exposure, data governance failure, reputational damage at scale — is equally so. Technology alone doesn't resolve that tension. A partnership structure does.
That's what a Joint Venture engagement is built to be.
It starts with people, not product. Building trust with a senior leader whose charter is to accelerate the business through AI — sometimes an anointed AI czar, more often a senior business leader entirely outside of IT. Speaking the language of business strategy rather than technology capability isn't historically native to enterprise software sales. It's where I come in.
From that first executive relationship, the work unfolds in a defined sequence. We use Human-Centered Design to co-create a transformative vision for the business, rooted in customer needs and employee experience. We recruit representative user groups to define the most actionable innovation spaces — ones that can prove high-value utility and deliver measurable business results simultaneously. Then we accelerate the governance work that typically stalls these partnerships: data governance, legal review, regulatory alignment, and risk assessment, moved forward on behalf of the bank so the potential revolution doesn't die on the side of someone's desk.
From there, we help the institution assemble an elite blended team — their internal resources alongside our Forward Deployed Strategists and Engineers — and stand up an Innovation Factory designed to drive not just the pilot, but the continuous innovation engine that will scale from proof of concept to enterprise capability. Last, we align executive stakeholders across both organizations, matching personalities and expertise to sustain the partnership through the long arc of implementation.
My role throughout is that of an Innovation Executive. Not quota-driven. Fluent in user-focused innovation, AI ethics, experimentation design, and implementation architecture simultaneously. The person who can hold the strategic conversation and the technical one in the same room.
The value flows in both directions. The bank gets access to pre-market AI functionality before it's publicly available. They get to shape Salesforce product roadmaps to fit their anticipated needs. They get embedded consulting and implementation support, and the executive alignment that a management consulting engagement at this level provides. Salesforce's AI Research team gets something equally rare: qualitative and usage feedback from real production environments at the world's largest financial institutions — real-world consumption patterns, cost data, and the marquis case studies that will drive future adoption when the functionality eventually reaches the market.
Neither party gets this from a standard enterprise deal. That's why the structure exists.
The JV Partnership is...
> Built on executive trust, not technology demonstration
> Governed by a defined innovation sequence from vision to scale
> Accelerated through embedded legal, regulatory, and data
> Designed to feed Salesforce AI Research with insights
> A mutual advantage — pre-market access for the bank, ground-truth insight for research
→ This project took place while Jad was in his current role at Salesforce.