Salesforce’s Chief Data Officer on Diversity, Becoming an Author and Helping Other Adoptees

In 2008, the global financial system was in shambles. The vertiginous drop in the stock market had brought Wall Street to its knees.

Years later, in 2014, the reverberations of The Great Recession were still being felt within the walls of Wells Fargo. Global banking regulator The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) introduced regulation 239 to enhance risk management and decision-making processes at large banks.

Wendy Batchelder, Salesforce’s current chief data officer, was leading the corporate risk divisions data office at Wells Fargo at the time and was tasked with complying with the regulation.

“It took us 18 months to get compliant,” she told Adweek. “It required us to think about what reports are important, which risk reports go to regulators and which go to the board.”

This experience led to Batchelder becoming Wells Fargo’s chief data officer in 2017, although it wasn’t plain sailing.

“I faced a lot of impostor syndrome at that time because I was new in the data space [at Wells Fargo],” she said.

Now at Salesforce, Batchelder’s experience has prepared her to guide the company to mature its data management practices, including understanding what kind of data the company has, where that data is and how it’s classified.

Now, Salesforce is a company with a revenue of $26.49 billion in 2022, per its earnings, and is building the foundation for a generative AI-driven workflow structure. This includes Einstein GPT, a generative AI tool similar to ChatGPT, its warehouse tool called Data Cloud, previously known as Genie, and Flow, its workflow tool. The company’s global investment arm, Salesforce Venture, also launched a $250 million generative AI fund to bolster the startup ecosystem, the company announced in March.

Working Mostly remotely from her home in Iowa, Batchelder holds data management conversations with the company’s various stakeholders, including its sales, marketing and product teams.

“I also have the opportunity to meet with some of our customers,” she said. “Several of them are chief data officers because we own [data analytics platform] Tableau. And I get to have CDO-to-CDO conversations.”

A published author

Throughout her academic career, Batchelder has sat in the sweet spot of data, IT and regulation, with an undergraduate degree in accounting from Miami University, a master’s degree in accounting at Drake University, and an executive MBA from Harvard Business School.

She’s also a published author. Batchelder’s first book, Finding Family, was “accidental” and was published in 2020, during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic.

A lot of adoptees have really tough stories

Wendy Batchelder, chief data officer, Salesforce

Adopted as an infant, Batchelder set out on a journey six years ago to find her biological parents, journaling her experience in the process. Soon, she realized she wanted to help other adoptees to have hope about their own experiences, turning her journals into a book.

“Adoption starts from some hurt and pain,” she said. “A lot of adoptees have really tough stories.”

Little did Batchelder know that she and her husband, David, would end up adopting three children, plus bringing home a string of pets. As a parent, that means playing multiple roles, including taxi driver and cheerleader mom, rooting for her kids at sporting events.

Now, she’s working on her second book on data governance, expected to publish later this year.

“I find the need to be able to help other individuals who are trying to get into the data space,” she said.

Navigating privacy and diversity challenges

Chief data officers and chief privacy officers work as “close cousins,” often providing complementary stances to each one’s responsibilities.

Salesforce’s chief privacy officer, Lindsey Finch, provides all the legal interpretation of the smorgasbord of laws and regulations the company is required to comply with. While Batchelder’s team of 30 enables the company to be compliant with those requirements.

This involves processes like “tagging of data, auto-classification, inventorying systems and policies, and making sure that the company can, in fact, comply with those regulations,” Batchelder said.

Still, navigating a patchwork of statewide privacy laws is a challenge, she added, especially for a B-to-B company like Salesforce.

“You have to be thinking about not only what you are doing to serve your customers, but what you’re doing to enable your customers to serve their customers,” she said.

Aside from data and privacy challenges, there is still a lack of diversity within the data ecosystem, an issue Batchelder is working on changing through her mentorship, making sure half the people she hired last year at Salesforce were women.

“Talent is spread evenly but opportunity isn’t,” she said. “That’s why I’m so passionate about finding ways we can help make opportunities more equitable.”