# Shubham Goel

Shubham Goel is a company builder who co-founded Affinity, a CRM company, and says they are now building a new AI company. Goel also shares lessons from conversations with CIOs about enterprise AI adoption, governance, and technology change.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/shubham-goel/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shubham-goel-7b723419
- LinkedIn followers: 6,765
- Topics: artificial-intelligence, startup, ai-governance, change-management, enterprise-ai-adoption
- Based on 16 dated posts, latest 2026-10-07

## Summary

Shubham Goel is most useful for enterprise AI adoption and governance content from CIO conversations.

- Best for: Enterprise software brands targeting IT and AI adoption leaders for interview-led content partnerships.
- Not for: Consumer fintech reach campaigns measured by follower count or broad brand awareness.
- Check first: Confirm audience demographics and engagement results for comparable CIO-conversation posts before budgeting.

### Takeaways

- A team builds an app in two days but waits two weeks to ship.
- A CIO's toaster method pairs enthusiasts with eager learners and gives late adopters tested examples.
- A lead-scoring process had 17 customizations nobody could explain three years later.

## Main ideas

- **Building AI faster does not mean companies can put it to work faster**: Goel argues that AI development is running into limits in approval, security, adoption, and support. More tools can add to an already crowded IT backlog, while unclear ownership makes risk harder to manage. The question is not just whether a tool works, but whether an organization can safely deploy and maintain it.
- **Adoption works better when people get different kinds of help**: Goel presents technology adoption as a staged process, rather than expecting everyone to experiment in the same way. Find eager early users, let interested colleagues learn alongside them, then give less adventurous users relevant examples they can use without starting from scratch.
- **Organizational complexity can become process debt**: Goel argues that avoiding difficult decisions across departments can leave a company with exceptions and workarounds that become hard to understand or change. Companies can limit this by putting shared interests ahead of team preferences and giving a leader authority to make cross-department decisions.
- **AI depends on the systems and context behind the interface**: Goel’s Dreamforce recap focuses less on a new screen than on the infrastructure behind AI interactions: data, context, governance, and agent management. They connect that shift to a practical question: whether enterprise systems can work together well enough for AI tools to be reliable.

## Work to read

- [Back in the arena: a new AI company with Affinity co-founder Ray](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shubham-goel-7b723419_ray-and-i-are-back-in-the-arena-looking-activity-7511440132898742274-Fhkz)
- [How Affinity started: a Harlem Shake site and a Stanford dorm partnership](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shubham-goel-7b723419_before-ray-and-i-built-affinity-we-built-activity-7510738592940490752-nGbx)
- [Five lessons from CIOs at large banks, telecoms, and tech companies](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shubham-goel-7b723419_5-lessons-from-cios-at-the-biggest-banks-activity-7506422465833644032-66ng)
- [100+ CIO conversations: build speed is not shipping speed](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shubham-goel-7b723419_ive-had-100-cio-conversations-over-the-activity-7513269571294822400--fqi)
- [The toaster method for rolling out AI across a company](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shubham-goel-7b723419_toaster-method-to-drive-adoption-activity-7506778124836229120-jfub)
- [Dreamforce Day 1: Salesforce positioning itself as an AI company](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shubham-goel-7b723419_dreamforce-df26-dreamforce-activity-7506020825544970240-LGVs)
- [Politics will kill your company: process debt and enterprise agility](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shubham-goel-7b723419_politics-will-kill-your-company-a-cio-i-activity-7511101151208046592-xMT-)
- [Twelve open CIO roles, listed for people asking about the market](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shubham-goel-7b723419_chief-information-officer-activity-7513637557511880705-vv4V)

## Brand relationships

- **Affinity** (owned_business)
- **maketheharlemshake.com** (owned_business)
- **Salesforce** (mention)
- **Anthropic** (mention)

## Partnerships

Shubham Goel’s posts do not describe a sponsorship offer, media kit, rate card or partnership terms. Across eight LinkedIn posts published between mid-September and early October 2026, they write about enterprise AI adoption as a founder who talks regularly with CIOs, and about building companies. None describes sponsored content, paid placements, affiliate arrangements or a route for brands to inquire, so partnership formats remain unconfirmed. The posts offer themes a co-marketing or content partnership could draw on: CIO priorities such as AI governance and oversight, shadow AI, change fatigue, process debt, and the gap between building fast and shipping fast, alongside a founder narrative around Affinity and a new AI venture. Buyers should treat any partnership as bespoke and ask Goel directly about scope, deliverables and disclosure before planning around it.

## Alternatives

- Vernon Keenan: Choose Keenan when the campaign needs dated, source-linked analysis of Salesforce's own roadmap and commercial posture rather than interview synthesis. The two posts read the ServiceNow acquisition of Sweep as a strategic signal — a "Delivery Digital Twin" that lets ServiceNow govern Salesforce estates without moving customer data — and reconstruct Salesforce's AIforce launch as a timeline of five acts across 168 days, quoting the co-founder and the release and noting that pricing and packaging are subject to change. A sponsor selling platform governance, release management or agent oversight could place its message in this kind of long-form analysis, where readers are already thinking about how enterprise systems are governed and what a vendor's announcements actually commit to.
- Felix Markman: Choose Markman when the sponsor wants an operator-voiced counterweight to launch messaging. The posts state flat return on investment as a personal mission, argue that small teams with the right tools can outrun larger ones, and challenge the claim that AI replaces the interface: they predict under 20% of users will be independent of logging in a year after Dreamforce, name KPIs, clean data and permissions as the real barriers, and describe the cost of a premature production bet as a year of cleanup, a trust hit and a board question. A vendor selling data quality, governance or production readiness could use that skepticism as the frame for its own offer.
- Adam Mansfield: Choose Mansfield when the campaign's decision point is a renewal or contract negotiation rather than adoption. The posts treat Salesforce news as commercial news for customers: the reported $2 billion purchase of Listen Labs at roughly 67 times annualized revenue, and the new suites that bundle Slack, Tableau Next, Premier Success and AI consumption credits. Mansfield urges customers, especially those with renewals coming up, to get ahead of the changes and ask their representatives what they mean. A sponsor selling procurement advisory, license optimisation or third-party support reaches buyers as they weigh cost and lock-in.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/