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

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.