Iconic global tire manufacturer Goodyear is shifting gears and hitting the digital accelerator by integrating Agentforce — Salesforce’s digital labor platform for deploying AI agents in business workflows — into its operations.
In a recent interview, Goodyear Senior Director of Global IT Simone Gabbianelli and Senior Director, Global Websites Josh Harris shed light on the company’s ambitious strategy to not only to modernize its systems but leapfrog competitors by embedding agentic AI into the core of its customer interactions and internal processes.
The conversation highlights the company’s plans to leverage its vast data reserves, streamline cumbersome sales procedures that currently consume up to 80% of sales teams’ time, and ultimately demystify and enhance the consumer tire buying experience.
Q. What is Goodyear’s strategic vision for integrating AI agents into its products and services?
Gabbianelli: We see a fantastic opportunity to use AI to drive our customer-facing journey forward.
From a strategic standpoint, we want to accelerate our business with Agentforce. This would include a personal shopper agent that will help Goodyear customers easily find the right tires, a sales agent to help sellers leverage market data and make targeted offers, internal agents that assist our workforce in everything from making tire recommendations to third-party vendors to reducing time on non-sales-related tasks, and finally, post-purchase tire and service reminders that proactively follow up with our customers.
From a strategic standpoint, we want to accelerate our business with Agentforce.”
Simone Gabbianelli, Goodyear Senior Director of Global IT
By providing these solutions to our employees and customers, Agentforce has the potential to significantly differentiate us from the competition.
Q. Goodyear, with its more than 125-year history, has a wealth of data. How are you capitalizing on this data in the initial stages of building out your AI strategy?
Gabbianelli: Our Salesforce implementation addresses the customer-facing space where, from a system perspective, historically things have been a bit disparate. We are in the process of migrating 127 years’ worth of customer data, and we plan to use Data Cloud to unify that data, which will help expedite agent development.
We’ve also traditionally lacked an easy way to transform this data into action, but we see huge potential in Agentforce to help us with this translation. Presenting all of this data on a dashboard already adds a lot of value. The ability to go beyond that and use natural language to ask questions and receive answers is what we’re even more excited about.
Harris: Our long legacy means our technology landscape can be complicated. The amount of data that exists across all of these different pieces has not always been uniform across source A, B, and C. Our people are combing through millions and millions of records or rows of data to create spreadsheets and pivot tables.
When you think about where AI is going, what it’s capable of doing, and the processing power across hundreds of thousands — if not millions of records of data — it can create relationships within those data spaces. Then, it can spit out those insights so we can make informed decisions instead of spending hundreds of hours doing research. The agent can do the research on our behalf.
Q. What is the primary use case you are focusing on in the initial 90 days of implementing Agentforce?
Gabbianelli: Internal efficiency. Today, our sales representatives spend a substantial portion of their time on administrative tasks like legal and financial assessments that can take up to 90 days. This is a perfect example of something that Agentforce can help us resolve by cutting it down to just a few hours. We see a huge opportunity to save them time, and make sure they’re able to spend their time selling instead.
Harris: After that initial effort, we expect AI agents will transform our website and digital space with personalized recommendations, upselling, and cross-selling, offering real-time suggestions and dynamic content where we can display content and pricing specific to the user as opposed to a larger group. While that exists today, agentic AI makes it a lot more flexible and a lot faster.
Customer service and support can also benefit from agentic AI. Call center agents don’t always have complete customer information. AI agents can handle many customer conversations and surface relevant information for the human agent handling more complex calls, making their job easier.
Agentforce can also decrease customer time spent on the phone and increase the speed with which they get answers by providing AI-generated assistance, such as creating multilingual support agents for global support.
Q. What would you say is the biggest barrier to inspiring AI adoption within Goodyear?
Harris: From a technology standpoint, this industry doesn’t change rapidly. It’s not used to the pace of change that occurs in so many other places. We’re also changing the way we operate, and the complexity of what we’re going to do presents its own set of challenges. Not only are we pulling one team through change management, but guiding an entire organization through each piece of change management. Even I’ve got to relearn how to do my entire job.
We got through the transformation of our North America websites in under a year.”
Josh Harris, Senior Director, Global Websites
But my experience with Salesforce has been very positive. We got through the transformation of our North America websites in under a year. That was pretty impressive to move off of a legacy system and on to modern architecture.
Q. Looking ahead, how do you envision AI agents transforming the consumer and retail tire buying experience?
Harris: Retailers don’t want to hold onto inventory. We need to help them purchase the right stuff that’s going to turn through inventory fastest. That’s how you get any retail buyer to buy from you — to show them how quickly they can turn through that merchandise and therefore make money.
Goodyear has partnered closely with Salesforce on their objectives to be global, to be faster, and to be customer centric. Salesforce’s deeply unified platform will allow Goodyear to act on a wealth of data stored across Sales Cloud, Field Service, Commerce Cloud, and Automotive Cloud.
By surfacing the right data at the right time, Agentforce will help retailers precisely match customer needs with specific products. Instead of overwhelming shoppers with numerous options, they can present a single, ideal item tailored to their stated preferences. This targeted approach instills confidence and simplifies the purchase decision, directly driving inventory movement of the recommended product.
Then, whatever we can do to demystify the tire industry. The tire is a piece of technology that exists on a car that most people know nothing about. Most consumers like the fun stuff, like a new stereo or a customization. We have to use AI to create an experience that helps the customer feel confident in a purchase they otherwise aren’t confident in and don’t really want to make.
Go deeper:
- See how leading companies of all sizes and industries are transforming to become Agentforce companies
- Discover Salesforce’s Four Keys to AI Enterprise Success
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