AMD Appoints Salesforce's Ariel Kelman as Chief Marketing Officer to Capture AI Data Center Market

AMD has a new marketing chief, Salesforce's former president and marketing boss, and he's all in on data centers and AI

I suspect the new hire won't be tasked with solving Radeon's dire marketing, though. Ask any long-term PC tech enthusiast or hardware journalist what they think about AMD, and you'll probably be met with endless praise for its products and engineering know-how. Prod them for the negative aspects, and they'll probably grumble about its marketing decisions, but perhaps that's all set to change, as there's a new bod in charge, freshly poached from Salesforce. When I say 'freshly poached', I really do mean that, because Ariel Kielman was listed in Salesforce's executive team as recently as yesterday. Not any more, though, because AMD has snapped him up as its senior vice president and chief marketing officer (CMO) with immediate effect. Kelman has a history of working with tech companies, having been the CMO at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Oracle, though he's most well-known for being at Salesforce. He's not the only person to have left that company, as there has been a bit of a reshuffling of executives at the top. But why did AMD want to employ him? "Ariel is a proven marketing leader with deep experience building brands, driving marketing impact at scale and connecting innovation to customer value," said Ruth Cotter, AMD's chief administrative officer. "As AMD continues to expand our portfolio and deliver industry-leading high-performance and AI solutions across data center, embedded, client and gaming, Ariel's leadership will be instrumental in sharpening our storytelling, advancing our marketing organization and accelerating our momentum." In AMD's press announcement about the new hire, Kelman is quoted as saying, "I'm thrilled to join AMD at such an exciting moment in the company's journey. I'm looking forward to working with the team to elevate the AMD brand, deepen engagement with customers and partners and capture the massive AI data center opportunity enabled by AMD's uniquely differentiated products. That combination is what energizes me most." Ah, of course. AI. Salesforce went all in on it right from the start of this decade's exponential artificial intelligence growth, launching its LLM-powered Agentforce back in 2024, so it's only natural that AMD is expecting Kelman to help boost Team Red's AI ambitions, rather than anything gaming or consumer-related. Which is a shame, because AI hardware is in such hot demand right now, AMD could release a three-legged tortoise with an embedded NPU, and someone will still buy it. What the company really needs is someone to handle things like the debacle of the RDNA 4 launch, though if I'm going to wish for miracles, I might as well just expect Kelman to magic affordable graphics cards out of thin air. But hey, you never know: Kelman could be a secret PC gamer, and he might just start asking his new colleagues when RDNA 2/3 support will be officially added to FSR 4, especially now that modders have been getting it to work for some time now. He might have a sudden burst of altruism and pester AMD's chiefs as to why there's no truly budget RDNA 4 card, or where's the Radeon equivalent of the RTX 5090, when Nvidia manages to sell its monster card without issue. Alas, pure gaming is just chump change for tech companies these days. All the mega profit margins are to be found in the world of data centers, thanks to the seemingly endless amount of money being thrown at AI. And given Kelman's background and obvious remit, it's clear that AMD has eyes on only one prize at the moment. When that will change is anyone's guess.

AMD Hires Salesforce President Ariel Kelman As CMO To 'Deepen' Ecosystem Engagement

AMD hired Salesforce CMO and President Ariel Kelman as it pushes to win over developers, partners and customers with its Instinct GPU platform in competition with Nvidia and as it ramps up marketing investments with partners for its CPU business. AMD said Monday that it has hired Salesforce CMO and President Ariel Kelman as its new marketing chief, a role that will see him "deepen engagement with customers, partners, developers and the broader technology ecosystem." The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company made the announcement as it pushes to win over these key constituencies with its Instinct GPU platform in competition against Nvidia, which dominates the AI infrastructure market. AMD is also several months into the launch of a new partner program meant to put pressure on Intel and other rivals. [Related: AMD CEO Expects Server CPU Supply Ramp To Help Boost Revenue] Salesforce didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. A statement by Kelman indicated the outsized importance of Instinct and related products to AMD's future growth. AMD CEO Lisa Su said at an investor event last November that she sees a "very clear path" to double-digit share growth in the data center AI market, which could drive an average of 80 percent revenue growth over the next several years. "I'm looking forward to working with the team to elevate the AMD brand, deepen engagement with customers and partners and capture the massive AI data center opportunity enabled by AMD's uniquely differentiated products. That combination is what energizes me most," said Kelman in his statement. In his new role as senior vice president and CMO, Kelman will lead AMD's global marketing organization, "overseeing brand, communications, events, developer relations and go-to-market strategy," according to the company. Reporting to AMD Chief Administrative Officer Ruth Cotter, the new CMO is expected to "work closely with the AMD executive team to deepen engagement with customers, partners, developers and the broader technology ecosystem as AMD continues to scale its product and solutions leadership," the company said. While AMD views Instinct as its biggest growth opportunity going forward, the company continues to invest in its traditional CPU business, pushing against Intel and other rivals in the PC, server, gaming and embedded markets. The chip designer is making this CPU push with channel partners, particularly when it comes to marketing. The company told CRN last year that it made a more than 40 percent increase to its overall channel investment budget, which included marketing funds. Partners have been taking notice of the funding boost. "Within the last few weeks, they were engaging in marketing programs with us, so that seems to be improving," said Dominic Daninger, vice president of engineering at Burnsville, Minn.-based systems integrator Nor-Tech, in a recent interview with CRN. However, the partner program is mainly focused on CPUs for now as AMD continues to prioritize high-touch engagements for its Instinct platform with large and influential customers such as OpenAI, Microsoft Azure, Meta and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Kelman is taking over from longtime AMD marketing executive John Taylor, who left the company last December after leading the launch of its "together we advance_" brand platform that continues to dominate marketing materials. Before Kelman became Salesforce's president and CMO in mid-2023, he held top marketing posts at Oracle and Amazon Web Services. Prior to that, he served in various marketing roles for several years in a separate stint at Salesforce.