From AMPscript to agents: automating SFMC with AI
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is powerful and unforgiving. Here's how I've been wrapping AI around it to kill the manual work.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud rewards expertise and punishes everything else. AMPscript, SSJS, data extensions, send logic — it's a deep platform, and most of the friction in a marketing team comes from the gap between people who know SFMC and people who need to ship campaigns.
Most of my recent work has been closing that gap with AI.
EDBS turned campaign briefing from scattered spreadsheets into a platform that creates content, emails and segmentation in SFMC through API — without the user ever opening Marketing Cloud. The QA Agent validates emails and journeys before launch: links, dynamic content, rendering, data integrity — the checks a human does last, done automatically and consistently.
If you're starting down this road, three things I'd tell you:
- The API surface is your friend. Most of what people do by hand in the UI can be driven through the REST/SOAP APIs. That's where automation lives.
- AMPscript isn't going away — it's getting generated. I still write multi-language AMPscript frameworks; I just increasingly have AI scaffold them and then review.
- QA is the highest-ROI place to start. Errors in high-volume, multi-market sends are expensive and embarrassing. An agent that catches them pays for itself immediately.
SFMC isn't the bottleneck. The manual work around it is. That's the part worth automating.