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Case, SF PRISM

#ai_gtm #innovation_architecture #financial_services #prism #hcd #research #salesforce #2024

A top 3 bank in North America wanted a leapfrog moment. We gave them a framework that's now how Salesforce approaches AI prioritization across every industry.

The ask was clarifying in its ambition. A top-tier North American bank, second in size on the continent, had decided that rapid AI adoption was their pathway to first. Not through cost-cutting alone — through deepening wallet share, going multi-product with more of their corporate and retail customers, expanding margins through automation, and reducing compliance exposure. They approached Salesforce and Microsoft simultaneously with a single directive: design a user-focused pilot that would produce insights, business results, an innovation architecture, and a three-year enterprise AI roadmap.

They wanted to begin where their users already lived. The question was whether we could meet them there better than the competition.

We started in the field. A series of Human-Centered Design workshops across 26 user groups and 12 cities — Private Bank, Wealth Management, Commercial Banking, Corporate Banking, Real Estate Banking — with one goal: find the innovation spaces that were genuinely desirable to users and viable to the business. Every workshop designed and facilitated from scratch. Every session recorded, transcribed, and fed into a growing corpus of signal.

Then the problem surfaced. Each line of business had distinct needs. The Venn diagram of shared pain had almost no center. Which meant, taken at face value, that any solution we proposed would have to be bespoke per line of business — complex, expensive to implement, and fundamentally weaker than what a more vertically focused competitor could offer.

We couldn't win that fight. So we reframed it.

I built a research partner agent to analyze hundreds of hours of workshop audio, thousands of user-authored ideas, and transcripts from hundreds of calls, cross-referenced against known service blueprints for each role type. The goal wasn't to find what each group wanted. It was to find what they all shared without knowing they shared it: the high-friction moments that carried heavy business impact and could be addressed with low-barrier technology on data that already existed.

They were there. Hidden beneath the surface-level variation in vocabulary and workflow was a set of common pressure points that cut across every line of business — moments where the absence of the right information at the right time cost bankers relationships, deals, and compliance standing simultaneously.

That insight became the foundation of the pilot. And the method I used to find it became something more durable: PRISM, a composite innovation prioritization framework that maps every AI use case against two dimensions — how quickly it can gain traction, and how much strategic and business value it creates. The result is a simple, defensible matrix that tells teams exactly which use cases to start with, which to incubate, which to defer, and why — without politics, without gut feel, and without the endless internal negotiation that usually accompanies AI investment decisions at this scale.

PRISM turned a complex portfolio decision into an objective, repeatable process. Salesforce has since adopted it as the official AI prioritization approach across all industry GTM.

The bank signed a $64M TCV engagement. We beat Microsoft.


The engagement is...
> Built on 26 workshops across 12 cities
> Powered by a purpose-built research agent
> Anchored in shared human friction, not feature comparison
> The origin of PRISM — Salesforce's AI prioritization standard
> A three-year roadmap for enterprise AI acceleration


→ This project took place while Jad was in his current role at Salesforce.