Roadmap to TDX25 for Admins

The Salesforce Admins Podcast

#Cloud IT #Gillian Bruce #Product Management #Tech #Industries

38:16

Many of us are entering the new year with a similar goal — to build community and connect more with others. To kick off season five, Priya Parker shares ideas on how to be the host with the most. An expert on building connection, Priya is the author of “The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters.” Whether it's a book club, wedding, birthday or niche-and-obscurely themed party, Priya and Chris talk about how to create meaningful and fun experiences for all of your guests — including yourself. For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts . For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts Want to help shape TED’s shows going forward? Fill out our survey here ! Learn more about TED Next at ted.com/futureyou Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.…

about a year ago 25:34

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jennifer Lee, Kate Lessard, and Brittney Gibson from the Admin Relations team. Join us as we chat about what they’re looking forward to at TDX 2025 and the keynotes, sessions, and how to make the most of your time. You should subscribe for the full episode, […]

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335 episodes

The Salesforce Admins Podcast

Roadmap to TDX25 for Admins

The Salesforce Admins Podcast

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published about a year ago

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The post Roadmap to TDX25 for Admins appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

335 episodes

#Cloud IT #Gillian Bruce #Product Management #Tech #Industries

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The Salesforce Admins Podcast

1
Summer ’25 Brings Game-Changing Tools for Salesforce Admins 27:49

5 days ago27:49

27:49

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jennifer Lee, Lead Admin Evangelist at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about what’s coming in the Summer ’25 release and the features that will make your life easier as an admin. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jennifer Lee. The Summer ’25 release is coming soon It’s that time of year again. The time for popsicles, backyard barbecues, and the Summer ’25 Release. So I’ve brought none other than Jennifer Lee on the pod to tell us what’s coming for admins. As always, Jen has a great blog post covering all of the changes with animated gifs that show how they work. I’d highly recommend scrolling through it as a visual companion to this episode, but the big takeaway here is that admins’ lives are about to get a whole lot easier. Jen’s highlights from the Summer ’25 release At a high level, Summer ’25 means fewer clicks and more control for admins. Jen highlights some key changes: The Close Case button: No need for custom buttons—you can add a Close Case button to the Case Details page and save your reps the extra clicks. Better custom object deletion: When you delete a custom object, you’ll see a detailed page listing any relationships it has to other objects. The new Permission Set Summary page: You can now update user, object, field, and custom permissions directly from a permission set’s Summary page, without navigating to multiple pages. Expanded Salesforce Go: Your guided tour for how to enable/configure features in your Salesforce edition, with resources to help you get started. As always with releases, the little things add up. And these changes help you effortlessly manage your org like never before. Powerful new features in Flow Of course, no episode with Jen would be complete without diving into the changes coming for Flow. She draws our attention to a few key enhancements for Flow: Get related records (beta): Instead of dealing with multiple Get Records and Update Records elements, you can now get entire hierarchies of related records, such as an Account and all of its Contacts and Opportunities, in a single Get Records element. Expanded resources search in Flow Builder (beta): When you enable this feature in Setup, you’ll be able to quickly find resources like fields from records and outputs from actions. New Time data type: You can now reference the new Time data type for things like scheduling reminders, routing records based on specific times of day, and triggering time-sensitive actions with pinpoint accuracy. Debug enhancements: Debugging your flows has never been easier, with element-level summaries, and search capabilities within the debug to help get your flow flowing. Approval Wizard: It’s complicated to build an approval process, so we’ve made it easier to get started with up to three approval levels, final actions, and even a recall path. There are a lot more great insights from Jen about screen flow enhancements and other changes coming in Summer ’25, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Salesforce Admins Blog: Jen’s Top Summer ’25 Features for Admins Be Release Ready Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Jennifer on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Bluesky social Mike on Threads Mike on X Full show transcript Mike: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast. This week, Jennifer Lee returns to the pod to break down what’s new in the summer ’25 release. And trust me, it’s more than sunshine and good vibes if you read her blog post that she put out earlier in May. From long-awaited case close buttons to a major user management upgrade, I promise you Jennifer is going to walk us through some features that make your admin life easier. Plus we dig into flow enhancements, better debugging and why thoughtful resource naming still matters. I mean, we can’t not talk flow with Jennifer Lee, that’s just how it works. If you’ve ever been wondering what to focus on with your attention to this release cycle, this is your episode. Super fun to go through. Now, if you enjoy this episode, be sure to hit that follow or subscribe button on whatever podcast platform you’re listening to. So with that, let’s get Jennifer back on the podcast. So Jen, welcome back to the podcast. Jennifer Lee: Always love being here. Mike: I mean, it’s summer already. It feels like it was just spring. We were just talking about spring and now it’s summer. Isn’t this how it always works? Jennifer Lee: Well, now I’m actually feeling summer for real in Boston. It’s hot out, I’m wearing shorts. Mike: Yeah, I mean, every time I’ve been to Boston it’s either snow, really hot or snow. Jennifer Lee: And it was cold probably a few days ago too, so I’ll take it. Mike: Right. Yep, that’s okay. But with summer comes summer release, and we’re a little behind. We’re not terribly far behind. But you did put out a blog post back in May about summer ’25 features for admin. So I figured we could talk through those because sometimes there’s stuff that you learn after you write about it that you wanted to bring up that maybe you didn’t get a chance to bring up. So that’s where we’re going to start. But before we do that, what other things are you working on? Anything fun you want to share? Jennifer Lee: Yeah, I’m always learning more… Like with our admins, learning more about Agentforce. So currently working on a video, should be out shortly, so we’ll say that. And again, working on a new series, we should have that out not too long from now. So a lot of things in the works. Mike: Cool. I know there’s always fun stuff, always fun stuff, but well, let’s talk release stuff. So what were some of your top features this summer? Jennifer Lee: Okay, so for those who have case management, you always had to create your own custom close button. And it’s the little things, it’s the little things in these releases that make it, right. So now there’s a standard close button. You don’t need to go and make your own. You can just bring in the standard close button to your record page layout and boom, on your page layout, you can just say close case and it works. Again, the little tiny things. Mike: But you know what, I mean sometimes release stuff doesn’t have to be like, “Look at this giant 60,000 foot tower I built.” It can be, “Look at this little stool that you can now close your cases with.” Jennifer Lee: Yeah, and another thing I like, so bringing me back to my admin days, is when you go and you tried to delete an object. And it just goes, [inaudible 00:03:50]- Mike: [inaudible 00:03:51]. Jennifer Lee: You got other stuff going on there, you have dependencies, you can’t delete it, and then you had to go and find all the places. Mike: Yeah. Jennifer Lee: That was not fun. Mike: No. Jennifer Lee: Not fun at all. But with this release now when you try to delete an object, it’ll say you can’t delete it, but it’ll show you all the dependencies. So all the object in the fields, and then it gives you a hyperlink so that you can go and click on that and easily find the thing that you have to delete before you can actually go ahead and delete the object. So again, it’s the little tiny things like that. And Cheryl Feldman’s team continues to deliver and make enhancements to user management because we all know user management can be a mess. But she’s delivering stuff to make lives easier for admin so that we can focus on the cooler things that we can build out. But here are some of the highlights on the things that her team is delivering in this release. So when you’re in object manager on an object, you can now go to the access page, and from there you can review and add and remove permissions from custom profiles and permission sets, and not have to navigate away. So your object access is right there, your field level access is right there. Mike: Wow. Jennifer Lee: Yeah, these are huge. Mike: Yeah, I’m looking at the GIFs that you have in that blog post. Jennifer Lee: I love making GIFs. Mike: I know it’s kind of- Jennifer Lee: It really brings a feature to life. Mike: Here’s a pro-tip. As you listen to this podcast, look at the blog post and it’s like surround sound. Sorry, I interrupted you. Go on. Jennifer Lee: Oh, no worries. Another thing is on the permission set summary page, again, it’s not having to click all these places to do the thing, but on the permission set summary, you can now update user object, field and custom permissions right there. Again, you don’t need to navigate away to those places to do it. Same thing with permission set groups, on that summary page, you can add and remove permissions within your permission set group. So that’s great. And then additionally on the user summary page, so on the user record, you click that summary button. From there you can edit tab access directly, and then you can add and remove assignments for the user to perm sets, groups and queues. Mike: I think that tab thing’s probably the coolest thing that if you’ve ever had to go through and figure out- Jennifer Lee: Where it is. Mike: I mean just like, “Oh, where did I stick that tab on these 10 applications?” Or, “Who can see this?” Or why. There was always one user that just randomly had a tab show up. “Sorry, let me go fix that.” Jennifer Lee: And as it relates to user management, if you haven’t tried out Salesforce Go, I recommend you go and do that. That really simplifies when you’re setting up your features. And it also provides access to videos and you can do tours, or it points you to some Trailhead modules and guides you through how to enable features based on your addition that you have in your org, and also whatever clouds you have. So if you have Sales Cloud, there’s a Sales Cloud section, Service Cloud, Service Cloud section. So it really makes enabling features in your org much easier. Mike: So Salesforce Go, you should go check it out. Jennifer Lee: Like that. Mike: Go. Go. Jennifer Lee: All right. And no release would be complete without me talking about flow. Mike: I mean, I feel like at this point it’s the sound of clouds separating, “Flow!” And angels singing. Jennifer Lee: Yeah. Mike: You’re like, “Yeah, okay, let’s talk about flow.” Jennifer Lee: I can talk about flow all day long as you know [inaudible 00:08:10]- Mike: I know, I know. Jennifer Lee: So in the Get Records element, when you’re doing Get Records for whatever object it is, you can now have the ability to get the related records as well. Right before, you would have your one Get Records for the object, and then you would do another Get Records for the related objects. Now you could do it all in one, and then when you click and you say, “Oh, I want related records,” then from there there’s an interface that allows you to select the fields for that record and you still train and all that. Mike: Does that apply to… Obviously it’s master detail, but what about lookup relationship? Jennifer Lee: I believe it’s right now- Mike: Master detail. Jennifer Lee: [inaudible 00:08:57] detail. Mike: Okay, that’s what I figured, but still… Jennifer Lee: Yeah, it’s still big. Mike: Get Records account. Hello. Jennifer Lee: Yep. So when you are finding your resources, let’s say in your flow you have a lot of things you want to look up or related and all that. You now can use the expanded resources search, which you have to enable and set up, and then it’ll be available in your flow to quickly find resources. So one thing to note was we did push this out, so something similar to this in winter and we took it back, and then based on customer feedback, we brought it back and improved it. Mike: Do you have… While we’re talking resources, do you have… Because I was looking at your GIF, and I would imagine you have a methodology for how you name your resources. How would you advise admins name their resources? Because obviously this is super powerful. Jennifer Lee: Yeah, so when I create my own custom resources, I do have a certain name in convention, so if I have variables, I’ll do a VAR in the front of it, if I can easily find those. Or if I have a record collection, I’ll always have the word collection in there, so I can easily find it. Or if you’re using a text template, the word text template or a formula. So I’ll just put those little keywords so that when you’re doing the search and you know it’s the thing that you’re looking for, you can easily type that in and then they’ll show up in the search. Mike: Yeah, no, it’s smart. I like that. Thank you. Jennifer Lee: And then for people who have flows that deal with time, we now have the time data type that you can use, and you can also reference time formulas as well in your flows. So that’s huge for people who have those time dependent flows. Mike: Wow. Jennifer Lee: Yeah. Mike: Oh, that gives me a little bit of anxiety. I see minute is an option. And second, holy cow, second. Bless you people that have time dependent flows. Jennifer Lee: Yeah, I had a few of those as a customer. Mike: Okay. What would be an example of that? Like was it on cases mostly? Jennifer Lee: Yeah. Mike: Because you need to follow up or it needs to do something like hippity hop right now. Jennifer Lee: Yeah, we were a big Service Cloud customer, so yeah. Mike: So based on how old that case is or how long that’s been, yeah, I could see that. Boy! Testing. Jennifer Lee: So the flow team has also made enhancements to debug. So now it has slightly different UI, but it’s so much easier to debug your flows. They now have element level summaries, and you also have search capabilities within the debug. So let’s say you’re working through and you have a variable that you’re just checking to see if the data flows through and the various elements. You can do a search on that variable name and it’ll pop up and kind of highlight where it is in the debug elements so that you can go through. You can also show API names and things like that, so it’s really more interactive than it was previously. Mike: Yeah, that makes sense. Boy, that’s got to be helpful. Jennifer Lee: And for admins who have approvals as part of your process, there’s now a new wizard, will help you build your flow approvals. I never really use approvals, like I never really had a need to use approvals in my business, but the process of going through the approval process seemed really clunky. Mike: I built approvals a few times, and the problem I always had is the company kept changing the approval process and not telling me. So that, or making the approval process something wonky, that was super hard to build. Jennifer Lee: Yeah, I would believe that. Mike: You’re like, “Yep, been there.” “Did you even consult me?” “No, we just changed this.” And so now… And then you always had users that were like, “Well, but that doesn’t go to the right person.” I know, they changed that without telling me. Jennifer Lee: And I was supposed to know. Mike: My time machine… What was that? What’s that… I was thinking of that. Cerebro from X-Men. “My Cerebro is in the shop.” Jennifer Lee: All right, so a couple of screen flow enhancements. So you now have the ability to trigger a screen action without needing a button. So previously we had a button that was in beta, so now that’s generally available. So go ahead and use it on all the places everyone. There’s also now a new feature called File Upload Enhanced (Beta) component. It’s in beta. You can bring in the component and with File Upload, you can now set it to require files to be uploaded. So if you have cases and you have a screen flow, you want people to upload files, previously they could forget about it. And then you’re like, “Oh, well I wanted you to give me supporting documentation,” but there’s no way to require that, and now you can. So note that you do need to enable that feature in Salesforce Files and set up, and then it’ll show up in your screen flows. Mike: So then that puts the file on the record? Jennifer Lee: Yes. Mike: Oh, man. These are all things I needed 20 years- Jennifer Lee: Back then, right? Back then when we were admins. Mike: Oh, I so… Oh, just the number of times I would have… Well first of all, we did have screen flow. I envisioned what a screen flow would look like, and then they’d be like… Then at this point, it should be like a website and you upload a thing that maps out all the sites. And I’d be like, “That sounds really cool, I wish I could build that.” Now it’s 2025, now I could build that. Jennifer Lee: Yes, without a developer. Mike: And the file just goes to the record and away we go. Jennifer Lee: Yep, yep. And then lastly, on screen flows, you could… Like imagine your screen flows, you have multiple columns and fields. Let’s say you’re collecting an address, the street, zip code, state, those are different sizes. You typically don’t have a long field for a two-state drop down [inaudible 00:16:20]. So now you have the ability to adjust the components and the fields on your screen flows to say, “Here’s the width I want to use,” and then do the vertical alignment too. So it really makes your screen flows look so much prettier- Mike: Oh my god. Jennifer Lee: … than before. Mike: And just useful. I’m watching your GIF, and the number of street, city, state zip fields that I’ve had in orgs that are all the same size. And everybody’s always like, “Well, how come you can’t make it look like an address field?” Well, you see there are reasons, but not anymore. Jennifer Lee: Yeah, that’s my wrap up. Mike: Those are cool. Jennifer Lee: But there’s more in the blog. Mike: I mean there is, you scrolled through a lot. There’s always a ton, and it’s a ton… And it’s always based on like, I think it’s fun when you go through the stuff, the release notes every year and you kind of look at it. Because the stuff you always get the most excited about are the things that frustrated you that you kind of knew weren’t hard to fix. It was just like at some point you know it’s going to bubble up on the calendar and somebody’s going to knock it out. I think that styling for flows is huge. I mean flows for the… Screen flows for me are the easiest way I can get into flow and kind of understand it because you can visually see what you’re putting in, but the ability to edit the way that looks has always been not the most easy. But this now… I like your example, you’re like, this is a really long label for a long text area. Yeah, I mean, it spells it out, but it’s really helpful to understand because the end user’s the one that’s going to stare at it all day. You’re going to look at it a few times in testing, and you also talk about, “Oh, icons. Oh, these are cool too.” Jennifer Lee: Oh, those icons that you can use… So if you have a pick list in your screen flow, you can add little icons to make it easier as well. Mike: It’s funny, I was on a related unrelated topic. I was at a car show a couple weekends ago, and I ran into somebody and we were talking. He said, “Oh, well, I code for the university because I live in Iowa City.” And I said, “Oh, cool.” He asked me, “Where do you work?” I said I work at Salesforce. And so immediately he thinks I understand code. I wasn’t going to say otherwise. But the next words out of his mouth really caught me off guard. He said, “You know, your lightning design system is probably one of the most well-thought-out documented systems I have ever had to work with.” And I bring that up because the images of those like, excellent, good, like the way that our iconography kind of looks within the system, I think is really cool. So is a long walk for a short drink of water, but… And it would carry over. Plus anytime that you can mix things up and use images… I mean images, do you remember back in the day, you used to set up a resource library and import all these images, like four star images and five star images and stuff, and then you would show that on the screen. I used to have users that were like, “You’re a wizard. I can now see stars on my account page.” And I was like, “Yes, I am.” Jennifer Lee: I do remember that back in the day. Mike: Because the edit page would just show them a number, but the actual page… Anyway, off on tangents. Off on tangents. Jennifer Lee: Oh, I do have a note. So there’s one thing that is in summer that I didn’t include in my blog because I wrote my blog and then I found out that it’s in this release, but Prompt Builder undergoes a major UI change. So for those who use prompt templates, check it out. It is a better UI right now in summer. So think of the little preview section that you have, the resolution that has its own tab now, and you don’t have that little window that you have to scroll to see everything. Yes. Mike: Okay. I like that. I was going to say it wasn’t that bad. And then I was thinking, “I’ve done a bunch of those Agentforce NOW tours. Jennifer Lee: Yeah, like this itty bitty thing- Mike: Well, there’s always a part… There’s kind of two parts on that. The intro of the Agentforce NOW tour that I do. One of them is shortly after you enable the agent and then you have to show the drop-down open agent and builder. And it’s literally right at the bottom bar of your web browser. So I would always tell people like, “Look at me in the camera,” and I would point and be like, “It’s at the very bottom because you’re probably looking at a screen and you can’t find my cursor. It’s at the very bottom.” And then there was always that. Then the second time was when we would test prompts after we’ve built our first prompt and we brought in some fields in that resolution window, I’d always point on camera down at the bottom. Like, “It’s down at the bottom all the way on the far right.” So sticking those in their own… You said their own window? Jennifer Lee: They’re like little plus and minuses, and then they’ll expand out to show the [inaudible 00:22:42]- Mike: So much nicer. So much nicer. Jennifer Lee: So the preview button has also moved up to the upper left-hand corner. Mike: Okay. Yeah, because where it was before kind of didn’t make sense. Jennifer Lee: So you can hit this little icon and then set your record and then you’ll hit the preview button next to it, and then it’ll do all its magic. Yeah, folks should definitely check that out because it’s a great improvement to what it is today. Mike: Absolutely. Jen, thanks for coming by and pointing out some of the newest features. I mean, I’d read your post, but it’s kind of always nice to hear from the person and you know, like, “Oh, here’s what’s really cool,” because sometimes texts on a page just don’t convey it. Jennifer Lee: Yeah, and I just like geeking out about Salesforce so I can talk about- Mike: I know. Jennifer Lee: … [inaudible 00:23:44] all day long. Mike: I think back to the days of going through the release notes, and now I have this fun competition, and when I say fun competition, it’s fun for me. I like to go through the release notes and then I like to feed the release notes to an AI, and be like, “What do you think are the top features I would like or top features for admins?” And I like to see what it finds versus what I find, kind of like a treasure hunt. Jennifer Lee: And what did it do for this release? Mike: It was kind of a little all over the place. Yeah, it wasn’t as concise as yours. It also doesn’t understand how cool flows are, and so it points things out. I will say this, it’s very helpful in getting through sometimes a lot of release notes and finding things you might’ve not read. I think that one of the coolest pieces of advice I was ever given by somebody was, read all of the articles front end to end that are on the front page of a newspaper. Because most of those articles, very few of them are encompassed all on the front page, but they get you into the newspaper. It’s also a good mixture of topics, so it might be things that you not normally read, and I think it was good advice. That is kind of like… It’s like the AI version of it. Sometimes you got to feed the release notes to some AI and just see what it points out because it might be things that you scrolled past and had no idea. Jennifer Lee: Because there’s a lot to go through. Mike: I mean, the other part of it too is it’s an enterprise level platform, so you kind of want it to be a lot of release notes. I do anyway. Anyway, thanks for coming by, Jen. We’ll be sure to check out your videos on YouTube because they’re always super explanatory, and they’re helping people understand agents and flow, and how agents use flow and how you can put flow into agents. Jennifer Lee: Well, thanks for having me, Mike. Mike: You bet. Big thanks to Jennifer for walking us through the summer ’25 updates. It’s always a treat to hear her perspective, and it gives that blog post so much more life, right? There’s a lot of things that we find out. She walked us through fine-tuning flows and trimming down clicks and user management, and just discovering the magic of the time data type. This release really has something for everybody. You can hear me go through my brain on writing flows with that time data type. That was… I had a moment, I will just say. Be sure to check out Jen’s YouTube videos because she dives through so much stuff and they are so incredibly useful, and I’ll include a link to her blog post as well. And of course, if you enjoyed today’s episode, go ahead and give it a share. Maybe send it to your friends, your admin friends, or other people in the community that would benefit from being up-to-date on the summer ’25 release features. So with that, until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud. The post Summer ’25 Brings Game-Changing Tools for Salesforce Admins appeared first on Salesforce Admins .…

The Salesforce Admins Podcast

1
Use Metadata To Empower Salesforce Agents 31:23

12 days ago31:23

31:23

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Joshua Birk, Admin Evangelist at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about why your metadata is crucial for building effective AI agents. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Joshua Birk. Why multi-tenancy still matters for Agentforce As the Admin Evangelist team has been helping people get started with Agentforce, we’ve noticed that the key to unlocking this new technology is to revisit some of the oldest concepts about the Salesforce platform. That’s why I brought Josh Birk on the pod to talk about metadata and multi-tenant architecture. If you need a refresher, that’s the idea that Salesforce is like an apartment building where each org is an apartment. Your stuff is in your individual unit, but the entire building shares resources like water and electricity. So what’s the difference from 2010? As Josh explains, it’s that every apartment comes standard with an Agentforce-powered robot butler. Quality data leads to better automation Imagine you’re sitting down for dinner, and you want your robot butler to set the table—how does it know where the forks are? And what happens if they’re buried in your junk drawer? Clearly, a robot butler will be more helpful if you keep your apartment organized. And, as Josh points out, the same is true for your Salesforce org. AI agents rely on your metadata, like description fields and field types, to help them respond correctly and find what your users are looking for. With longstanding orgs, there can be an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mindset, but that’s the equivalent of throwing everything in the junk drawer. Doing a little spring cleaning and organizing your metadata helps Agentforce help you. Why you’re already an AI builder The key thing Josh wants you to realize is that you’re already an AI builder. An agent is just another user in your org, and so the work you do to make your data easy to use is also what powers the solutions you build in Agentforce. That’s why it’s so important to fall back on Salesforce fundamentals. Building an agent is the easy part. The hard part is making sure your metadata is in a good place to support your AI solutions, but that’s the work that admins do every day. There’s so much more great stuff from Josh in this episode, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Trailhead: Custom Metadata Types Basics Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Josh on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Bluesky social Mike on Threads Mike on X Full Transcript Mike: Hey, Salesforce admins. Ever wonder what multi-tenancy AI and your junk drawer have in common? Luckily, Josh Birk is back to explain it all, from forks, to metadata. Yeah, we even throw in some robot butlers. This episode’s a ride through the architecture that makes Salesforce magic happen with, I promise you, enough analogies to stock your kitchen. So, if you’ve ever said, “Wait, where are the forks?” This one’s for you. And when you listen to it, that sentence will make sense. So give it a listen, send it to your friends. Be sure to hit that follow subscribe button to get brand new episodes downloaded on your mobile device. And without waiting any longer, let’s get Josh Birk back on the podcast. So Josh, welcome back to the podcast. Josh Birk: Thanks, Mike. Glad you’re back. Mike: It’s been a while, but you’ve been working on stuff. Josh Birk: I have been working on stuff. It’s been a busy little quarter. This thing called AI never really stops sleeping. I guess it’s one of its benefits. But yeah, trying to catch up with all things AI, and data cloud, and especially trying where there’s a wealth of stuff happening before Dreamforce, and we really would like to get our admins community armed with that information. Mike: You mentioned Dreamforce. Dreamforce start till October. Josh Birk: Well, I know, but I thought July was a really far away away, and I realized I have a trip to Montreal next week because it’s June, and it’s like, “Okay, right.” The months, they’re collapsing away. Mike: It literally, it’s like one minute you’re like, “Yay, it’s February,” and the next thing you know it’s like 4th July. Josh Birk: Right. Yeah. And you have a TDX going over. Mike: All the hangovers. The first thing that I think we want to talk about, so what’s crazy is we brought this stuff up, what are we going to talk about, and you’re like, “Let’s talk about the multi-tenant analogy.” And I was thinking back to, whoa, that was like 2010 when I first learned about multi-tenant, and hearing the Salesforce apartment analogy. Josh Birk: Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting. It’s actually, I think, a testament to the platform, that you can use it for years and not really understand. And I used to understand not having to comprehend exactly what’s going on, because one of the, it’s not really a catch 22, it’s this nice cycle because it’s part of the wonder of the multi-tenant structure is that you don’t have to worry about it, because you log in and you’re in, basically, your own space. First of all, I think it’s one of those things that does get bandied about, but sometimes it doesn’t stick in people’s heads. For instance, I was talking to somebody about Trailhead, and they were like, “Well, is that why we have multi-tenancy?” And I’m like, “No, no, no, no, no. Multi-tenancy was the thing, that was day one. That was the magic fuel that was moving our product before anything else was getting built on top of it.” And I think it’s important to kind of have a basic understanding, because every now and then, as a developer, one of the things that people, if you come from Java, or you come from C++, and one of the things you’re used to doing is whatever you want, if you want to spin up a crazy thread in an application and have it run for three days straight, the only person stopping you from doing that is you. And so then people come into Salesforce platform and they’re like, “Well, Apex has these limits to it. You can’t spin up too many CPU cycles, you can’t do too many searches.” You can’t do these things. And some developers are like, “Why are you tying my hands back behind my back?” And it’s like, because part of the multi-tenant architecture makes sure that Mike’s org might be sitting next to my org in terms of hardware. So we’re sharing a CPU. And if Mike misbehaves too much, you might steal CPU cycles from me, and vice versa. You might slow down my application by no intent of yours. You don’t even know I’m on the other side of the wall, but you’re using up all of my power. And our multi-tenant architecture basically makes sure that doesn’t happen. And it makes sure that you can go in and do all the things that we give you the rules to, and I can go and do all the things we get the rules to, and we’re always going to be play safe with each other. Mike: And I remember, it’s so fascinating here you describe multi-tenant that way, because I remember having to describe it as, “No, no, no, no, all of the data that we put in is in our own apartment. And all of the data that somebody other company puts in is their own apartment. And it doesn’t matter what pictures we hang on our walls, they can’t see our pictures and we can’t see theirs.” Josh Birk: Exactly. Mike: As opposed to the amount of boiling water that we have left, because we’re all sharing a water boiler. Josh Birk: Right. Because it’s summer in Chicago, and you take three showers a day sometimes. Yeah. Mike: Right. Josh Birk: Yeah, exactly. Mike: But I mean, perspective wise, I’m thinking through all this, and multi-tenancy, if you’re going through even Salesforce admin one-on-one stuff, like this is the first day, everybody’s thinking AI and agentic, and what can AI do for me. What are you doing talking multi-tenancy when we have this really cool agentic stuff that we should be talking about? Josh Birk: Yeah. And it’s a great question, and there’s a couple of answers. And the first one is to kind of go back to the analogy of an apartment complex. So that experience starts at the front door. You can’t get in through the front door unless you are a tenant in the apartment building. And then the next thing you’re going to do is you’re going to go to your apartment, and you can’t get into your apartment unless you’re a tenant of that apartment. And then start breaking all it down to the stuff that you were just saying. Your pictures are your own, the boxes you have in the attic, they’re all your own. All of that is, so this is why trust is our number one value. You trust us to hold your apartment near and dear to you, and you trust us to keep that security layer, you trust us to keep the powers on. All of that is the same stuff that the agents are building on top of. That is why they’re a very easy to use enterprise solution for AI, because they’re like the robot butler who lives in your apartment. And all of that other stuff, the security, the power, the storage, all of that stuff, it just comes with the apartment. And your agent is able to understand where all your pictures are, and where all your boxes are, and how those boxes are structured. And one analogy I like to give is like, well, if you’re going to ask your robot butler, aka agent force, for a fork, if I’m a guest in your house, like, “Hey, Mike, can I get a fork?” You would know which drawer to tell me. You would be like, “Go to the second drawer next to the stove. That’s where the forks are.” How does the agent know that? And the agent knows that because of metadata. And metadata is the second tier of what makes multi-tenancy work. One of the things back in my workshop days, a question got a lot, especially because I’m talking to old school Oracle developers and Java developers, and they’re like, “Well, what’s your web stack?” What they’re asking is, are you running Java? Are you running Oracle? And stuff like that. I’m like, “I could answer this for you, but it’s not going to be the answer you think it is, because our data structure doesn’t start like a normal database does. Our database structure starts with multi-tenancy with a metadata tier on top of it.” And what that metadata allows you to do is you can put your forks in a drawer, I can put my forks in a different drawer, and metadata can tell the agent, “This is where those forks are held.” And let’s say you ripped your kitchen apart. Now, if you’re going to rip your kitchen apart and put your kitchen back together again, you’re going to get a contractor. You’re not just going to go pay a couple of teenagers with some sledgehammers and just knock everything down. I mean, it might start that way, it could be entertaining. Mike: I mean, if you watch HGTV, that’s how it’s supposed to go. Josh Birk: It does kind of start that way, right. But at some point, you’re going to want to have a plan for how tall the counters are, where the counters are going to stop, all of this kind of stuff. You’re going to have a blueprint. And a blueprint is going to instruct everything down to where your drawers are. And that blueprint is crafted for you in metadata whenever you’re doing things like creating custom objects, and you’re creating custom fields. And everything on the platform basically has this blueprint to it. Now, the great thing about that blueprint is if you invite me over to your apartment and I’m like, “Dude, this is a killer kitchen. I would love to have this kitchen in my apartment,” you’re like, “Dude, I’ll just get you the blueprint.” And then we just package up that blueprint, I take it over my apartment, and then I can just build out the kitchen exactly to your scale. Mike: So, I’m thinking through all of the times that I’ve built and remodeled my kitchen, as admins do, continuing the metaphor, and failed to write blueprints. So now I’m building an agent and I’m telling it forks are in the second drawer from the left of the stove. And that’s the instruction I give it, but it has to go learn what the second drawer is because it doesn’t have a blueprint to look at. Josh Birk: Yeah. So this is a very strange little section of metadata and AI. It was one of the first things that I heard during a workshop, and it’s always stuck with me. So you’ve got your blueprint. Your blueprint knows the size and scale of your kitchen, it knows how many drawers you are, and it knows where the drawers are. Now, let’s say you want to identify which drawer is going to be the silverware drawer. When you’re building out the custom object and you’re building out the custom fields, we know that it’s good to have a description fields. So if there’s any ambiguity, because sometimes you might have a similarly named field, you might have a similarly named object, something like that, and you want to make sure people are guided to the right drawer, so find that fork, well, if it’s a good idea for a human, it’s a great idea for an agent, because when you say, “Get me the largest fork in the drawer,” it’s going to go through what it knows about the data model. And if it sees the word fork in a description, it knows it’s going in the right direction. You’re giving it that breadcrumbs. And this is why it’s like, “Which descriptions fields do you mean, Josh?” And it’s all of them. It’s the ones in the custom actions, and we won’t even get into instructions yet. It’s all the ones in your custom fields, it’s all the ones in your custom objects, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You want to leave that little breadcrumb trail so that when agent force is doing its little agentic reasoning, and it’s like, “Which custom action should I use? Which standard action should I use?” You’re going to end up with a much higher rate of success. Mike: So what I’m hearing is the importance of metadata in terms of describing things, in any possible term that a user could use to give that to an agent, so that an agent doesn’t have to reason, “Oh, date on opportunity means contract date, as opposed to close date, because you have six date fields and you title them date one, date two, date three.” Josh Birk: Exactly. Mike: And the user, because it’s nomenclature within the organization, oh, well, the second date is the date it leaves the warehouse, and the third date is the date it’s expected to be delivered. But if you ask an agent that it’s not going to know that until you tell it through metadata. Josh Birk: Until you tell it through metadata. At best, if it doesn’t know, it will guess, which is problematic for two reasons. One, obviously it might be wrong, but it also might be right two times out of three, but then you don’t know that third time. It makes your testing even harder anytime that the agent has to guess for it. Now, people might be listening to this like, “Well, okay, I understand that, but how powerful can a description field be?” And it’s true. It’s only so powerful, but the great thing is, this is why, and it’s one of the things I think people, I really like talking about this, because one of the things is I think it demystifies agents a certain extent. We treat agents almost like, I just referred to it as a robot butler. So we’re already into a sci-fi. We’ve gone from an apartment complex to Star Wars, right? Mike: I’m thinking Rosey from the Jetsons. Josh Birk: Yes, yes. I love it. I love it. But there’s so much human in the loop that’s involved. And we have to remember when we talk about guardrails, all agents have guardrails. It’s the thing that keeps them from saying horrible things and doing horrible things. And there’s so much we can control over an agent just by text, just by writing to it. And so we’ve been playing with agent force internally. And one of the first things I had to do, because I was trying to make sure that our users could talk to it like they would want to talk to it, right? So when you say my blog post, you mean a blog post that our wonderful Eliza Riley created an object record for, and then added you as an author, and then added Kate as a reviewer. So we’re really talking about contributors. But if you say the word my without giving any context to the agent, it’s going to think you mean the current owner. But instructions, you can say, “Hey, in this topic, when I say my, when I say blog, I mean these different things.” And so that’s the first place that the breadcrumb trail is going to start going, and it can be one of the little behavioral issues. It’s not responding in the right way, or it’s not using the right style and things like that. The prompt builder instructions can solve so much just by writing a few sentences. Mike: So, I’m thinking through the apartment analogy. And I’ve used Rosey before, because I do think eventually at some point we’ll have, I would like to have a robot in my house. Amazon had that little puppy dog thing. Josh Birk: Yeah. Mike: I should have signed up for that. But in hindsight, I don’t think AI was really where it should be. Josh Birk: It was basically an Alexa on wheels, I think. Mike: I know. I was afraid it was going to go downstairs and there goes $2,000. What was that, literally here’s the sound, it was like, “Zoop, zoop, pom, pom, pom, pom, pom, pom.”And then mom would be like, “What was that?” And I’d be like, “That’s the sound of $2,000 falling downstairs.” Josh Birk: Not being able to use stairs. Mike: You can’t use stairs. But I would like to have that. So, I’m thinking through the apartment analogy. And basically what you’re saying is, so Salesforce can roll out the ability to find forks, to all of its agents. And so everybody in the apartment complex benefits, but what’s key is your blueprint, because where you keep your forks is different than where your neighbor in 5B keeps their forks. And so if you are filling in your metadata and Salesforce ups the ability for agents to do things like find forks, like, “Oh, now they have the ability to find spoons,” everybody can benefit all from one action. But just because of that action doesn’t mean that your agent is up and running because it needs the metadata to really target in on what does this action actually mean for me and the customization I’ve done. Josh Birk: Right. Mike: Is that fair? Josh Birk: That’s fair. And remember, your Rosey and my Rosey, they’re the same model. And if there’s upgrades, you’re going to get your Rosey upgraded, I’m going to get my Rosey upgraded. Mike: Kind of like our phones. Josh Birk: Like our phones, right? Every now and then, it’s like, “Oh, yep, you’re three updates behind. Please restart your phone.” Mike: Any more it seems that way, doesn’t it? Josh Birk: It really does. They’re coming faster. Mike: I never used to fall behind. The other day I was like, “Oh, you’re three updates behind,” it was something like that. I was like, “How?” Josh Birk: “I thought you were doing this for me.” But even if I copied your kitchen one to one, but we also then give me the ability to swap out the drawer that forks are going to be in, or to add a new cabinet and things like that. And the great thing is about metadata is my Rosey instantly knows my new kitchen layout because of the metadata. Now, going back to the blueprint and the description fields and the topics, and also the other thing to mention here is the quality of your data. How well-structured is your kitchen when it comes to, do you have all the forks in one drawer, and the spoons in another drawer? Do you have one of those nice slotted trays? Mike: What do you do if you have a junk drawer? Josh Birk: What do you do if you have a junk drawer? And it’s like, what if you have everything in the junk drawer? Well, Rosey’s going to have a really hard time finding your fork if everything’s in the junk drawer. So, all of these things we’re talking about, metadata, description fields, quality of instructions, guard rails, we also have to all go all the way back to the OG. Quality of your data structure, right? It’s great to have a description field to help them guide, but it’s also a really good idea. Do you need three fields that end with one, two, three, and four? Or is it now the time to convert that into a pick list value, which might be easier for Rosey to work with? Mike: Yeah. I’m just thinking through that, because I was also thinking of how many I got stuck on junk drawers. Josh Birk: We’re Midwesterners. Is it a Midwestern thing? Mike: You ever ask a question and then somebody totally answers, and you’re like, “Sorry, I wasn’t listening. I was thinking of a junk drawer.” Josh Birk: Well, see, and that’s now I have to fall back on my old, “Do we have to explain what a junk drawer is? Do people know what a junk drawer is?” Mike: I mean, it’s like everything that doesn’t make sense. My junk drawer is the water filter for my fridge, my owner’s manuals, a pile. And I mean a pile of pens and pencils from various local establishments. And they’re in varying states of operability. So, that’s why you have three, or I got at least 10. 10 pens. Probably three of them work. And the other seven are just there, it’s like a lottery. If you get it and you go to try and write something, and that’s how it gets thrown away. And then straws. Straws, and then packets, ketchup packets. Josh Birk: Ketchup packets. Mike: Hot sauce packets. Josh Birk: Hot sauce packets, hot mustard packets, anything from a Chinese store. Mike: Right. And then here’s where you throw in, it’s a real wild card, this is where the podcast goes completely off the rails. You throw in the occasional thumb tack rubber band. Josh Birk: Just put traps in for yourself. Mike: And the newest thing now is those 3M wall sticky hanger things. Josh Birk: Oh, yeah. Those have escaped. Mike: That’s a junk drawer in the Midwest. Oh, and a flashlight. Got to have a flashlight. Josh Birk: A flashlight. And a flashlight. Mike: Flashlight that may or may not work and may or may not have batteries in it. Does it matter? Still in there. Josh Birk: Still in there. Still in there. Yeah, that’s about it. Mike: But no, so back to the regular scheduled podcast, already in session, I was thinking through the junk drawer of like, the junk drawer to me in any database, or mostly in all of the Salesforce databases I’ve managed was the description field. People throw everything in the description field. And then I can foresee now, God, the nightmare of, “Well, I asked Agent Force, what was the last five calls that I made, and it couldn’t find it.” “Right. Well, did you log those as activities?” “No, I just added it as bullet points in my description.” Josh Birk: Exactly. Yeah, and it’s like, we’re humans. And the amount of interesting human behavior I’ve seen over the years of how people have implemented Salesforce. But there’s kind of the old adage, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And if I’m doing this day in and day out and it’s working for me, great. But the times they are changing. And this is back when we were trying to get people to move from visual force to web components, now aura. I’m like, “Don’t fear it. I’m not asking you to go and delete all of your existing components and start from scratch and build everything up with all of these amazing demos that I’m talking about, but now is the time to start getting your feet wet. Now is the time to start looking ahead. Now is the time to go to Trailhead and tinker with your first agent.” “And now is the time to start asking really hard questions like, how messy is our data structure? And what have people started?” So, I’ll go way off on a tangent, but I swear I’m getting somewhere. Back when I worked for a major retailer as their lead client side developer, we had a problem with pop-up windows. And the problem was, because everybody knows- Mike: Got pop-ups for a long time, were just the bane of everybody’s existence. Josh Birk: Right, and they get hidden behind other browsers, they just do all this behavior you don’t expect. Mike: Pop-unders. There was pop-unders too. Josh Birk: Yeah. So me and my old friend and colleague, Jamie Dehansen, he was the designer. And so we started a project to take that down and turn it into a modal window that would be on the page itself, that Jamie and I could control 100%. The event structure, everything clicks. We launched that thing, we’re so proud of ourselves. This thing is cool, it looks great, it works wonderful. And then the complaints. Started swarming in. I don’t mean two, I mean like 20, I mean like 30, just over and over again. Because people kept asking, “Why did you take your comparison feature away?” And Jamie and I are like, “What comparison feature? We don’t have a comparison feature.” And then we realized that people were going to a product item, clicking the pop-up, going to another product item, clicking the pop-up, taking the two pop-ups, putting them next to each other. They had built their own feature without even asking us. And so we fixed it by adding that functionality in, like the way we wanted it to work, and everybody was really, really happy. But that’s the kind of thing that happens within a Salesforce org. You didn’t think that you gave them the feature of transcribing their phone calls into the long text field that was meant for something else, but you did, and they’re using it. And that’s the kind of, I think you’re credited for saying the walk around the broom style of admin. Mike: Sabla. Josh Birk: Sabla. You need to look over somebody’s shoulder and be like, “That’s not how I meant you.” We need to fix that description, that long text field, and I need to make it work in our data structure so that Rosey can find those calls for you. Mike: So, here’s a fun fact, and this is a deep cut for people that listen. So, I came up with Sabla after watching planes, trains, and automobiles. Josh Birk: Oh, really? Mike: Yeah. Let me tell you how. How does planes, trains and automobiles open? Opens with an ad agency in downtown Chicago. I think, right? Josh Birk: It’s New York. Mike: It’s New York, okay. New York. The CEO is looking at what would be a billboard, except he’s sitting at a chair in a well-lit office room. My friend and I were watching this, because we watch planes, trains, and automobiles every Thanksgiving. And he owns an ad agency, and he just dies laughing every time he sees that, he goes, “So what’s funny about this is how executives look at billboards, but everyone else is going to look at this billboard going 60 miles an hour down an interstate trying to make a corner and avoid a semi.” He said, “Because nobody looks at billboards from the perspective of the person they want to sell to.” And I was like, “Oh, it just dawned on me,” because I had just done a Salesforce deployment. I was like, “I didn’t look at that page that I deployed. I looked at it from my desk with my headphones on, uninterrupted, knowing what I was looking for, not on a phone call with an irate customer because their plant had just died or something, and trying to work through how do I disseminate this information.” So there you go. There’s the history of Sabla. Josh Birk: Love it. Love it. Yeah, the interview I did with Katie Coats, she was like, “Don’t tell me how you’ve used this application. Just show it to me.” Mike: Right. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So put a lid on this. Josh Birk: Yeah. Mike: All the admins out there are sitting like, “I was supposed to deploy Agent Force three weeks ago,” or, “We’re still trying to figure out how we’re going to Agent Force, but my CEO wants it deployed by Dream Force.” Josh Birk: Yeah. Mike: What should I be doing now? Because it feels like I should be learning to build agents, and you should. Josh Birk: You should. But, we go to these workshops and we’re like, “You’re already an AI builder. You’re already an agent builder.” And the reason I can say that confidently, and this is why we’re talking about things as basic as your data structure in your description fields, remember your training, all of these things that you already do when it comes to who can come into the apartment? Who’s allowed in the apartment during certain hours? Who can go to the certain rooms? Who can use the certain? All of these things is the stuff that the agent is going to build up on. So the better you’re already doing your job, the better the agent’s already going to be. You’re already putting in the hard work, that’s the hard work. Building the agent’s easier. Way easier. Like Jen and I have compared notes, and most of the flows we work with agents are fairly intermediate in complexity at bust. I’ve got a few that are five or six steps at all. So, if you don’t even have to be Jen League, Queen of Flow, you don’t have to be a crazy flow-natic. You just need to know how to build flow. Now, you know how to build flow, great: you know how to build custom actions. And when you take that flow and you convert it over to a custom action, all of that work that you’ve put into the apartment leading up to that moment is going to make that agent so much more successful. So it’s like, don’t think of it as this brand new thing that’s off on its own little lonely island, it’s more similar to when we released Flow, or when we released things that are new, but they’re new on top of the platform. And so all of the things you already know how to do on the platform, all of those things are going to be important. In one of the blog posts we have coming out, one of the things Jen reminded me to put in there is, “Remember to think of your agent like a user. It’s a Rosey. It’s another thing in your apartment running around doing stuff.” And so all of your ability to be like, “Oh, what fields should I have access to? What permission sets should I give it?” All of that, it’s all stuff that’s going to make your agent more successful. Mike: That makes sense. I mean, it’s also like cleaning up before you get new furniture. Josh Birk: Right. Exactly. Or maybe throwing out that old sofa. Mike: Yeah. I live in a college town, that happens every May. Every May, at the end of May, you drive around, and people can go sofa shopping because all of the college kids are moving out, and all of the target futons, and IKEA futons are at the corner. And you realize how hard college kids are on furniture. Josh Birk: They’re very hard on furniture, and they usually get it secondhand in the first place. Mike: Right. They got it last year off a street corner. Josh Birk: Exactly. And became anew. Mike: Awesome. Josh, thanks for coming on and helping us understand our apartments, and understand that we should be blueprinting them. But more importantly, I mean, the cleanup of data doesn’t just stop there, it’s also the cleanup of metadata too. Josh Birk: Yeah. Like I said, remember your training, and I shall be successful. Thanks for having me, man. This was a lot of fun. Mike: So that’s a wrap with this chat of Josh Birk. Huge thanks for coming and unpacking the foundation of Agent Success. I can’t tell you how important metadata is, so be sure to check out his blog post that he’s got coming up. And remember, your data structure and metadata aren’t just back end details, they’re the keys to unlocking smarter, more helpful agents. Whether you’re prepping for Dream Force, or just organizing your org, start with a blueprint. Now, if you found this episode helpful, do me a favor, share it with some of your friends. And be sure to hit that subscribe button for new episodes downloaded. And with that, until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud. The post Use Metadata To Empower Salesforce Agents appeared first on Salesforce Admins .…

The Salesforce Admins Podcast

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Curiosity Is the Key to Learning Agentforce 26:47

19 days ago26:47

26:47

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Amit Malik, the Content Portfolio Lead for AI within Product Education at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about how admins should approach learning Agentforce and bringing AI to their organizations. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Amit Malik. Learning AI starts with filtering out the noise We often get asked where admins should get started with learning Agentforce, so I brought Amit on the pod to get the inside scoop. In his role as a Content Portfolio Lead for AI in Product Education at Salesforce, he’s in charge of planning the courses that are offered globally about Agentforce and Data Cloud. For Amit, the challenge with teaching AI is what he calls the “knowledge explosion.” There are so many different things that Agentforce can do, and that list is growing daily, so it’s hard to know where to get started. What’s needed is “knowledge distillation.” So the key to learning Agentforce is to focus on the core concepts of how AI works before getting into the specifics. A framework for building with Agentforce Amit goes through five questions you should ask when you’re thinking of building a solution with Agentforce: Is an AI agent the best way to solve this problem? Would it be easier to build a flow? Just because you can solve something with Agentforce doesn’t mean you should . What agent type do you need? Salesforce has several pre-built agent templates for specific use cases, like Service Agent, Employee Agent, or Guided Shopping Agents. Consider those options before trying to build something more complicated. What topics do you want to assign to this agent? Define the set of business problems you want your agent to solve. There are standard pre-built topics like FAQ or escalation, but you can make a custom topic if needed. How will you provide data to your agent? AI is only as good as the data you provide it, so you need to make sure you have everything you need in Data Cloud and set up access with the Agentforce Data Library. What actions do you want the agent to perform? “This is where the magic happens,” Amit says. There are four types of actions: Flow, Apex, API, and Prompt Template. Learning Agentforce is about understanding the layers you’re working with. As Amit explains, an agent is really an aggregation of the topics you decide it can solve. Those topics can be broken down into the specific actions your agent can perform, which it does based on the data you give it access to via Data Cloud. The art of learning is to become curious With twelve years of experience as a Salesforce instructor, Amit’s biggest piece of advice for admins trying to learn Agentforce is to cultivate curiosity. Where many people go wrong is that they approach AI as a solution in search of a problem. That can be like trying to jam a square peg in a round hole. Once you start getting curious about the business problems you’re trying to solve, you’ll find use cases all over the place for AI. But that comes from understanding, specifically, how an AI agent can improve the experience for your users. This makes learning Agentforce simple because you know what you’re trying to do with it. There’s a lot more great stuff about learning, teaching, and working with Agentforce in my conversation with Amit, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Architect Courses for Admins with Amit Malik Trailhead: Discover Agentforce Trailhead: Review Agentforce and Data Library Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Amit on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Bluesky social Mike on Threads Mike on X Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast. This week, we’re joined by Amit Malik, a cloud content portfolio lead at Salesforce. Guess what we’re digging into? That’s right. Agentforce and Data Cloud, but we’re going to talk a little bit different. It’s about how admins can confidently navigate AI in their orgs. Amit brings over a decade of instructional experience and delivers a fresh, clear-eyed framework of thinking about AI agents. Trust me, you’re going to want to hear this framework. So whether you’re new to Agentforce or looking to level up your implementation game, I promise you, Amit breaks down the essentials with clarity and care for us. Plus, we also talk about why doing not just watching is a key to learning because as admins, we do some instruction as well. So it’s good to learn from an instructor. Before we start the show, just a reminder to press follow on that podcast platform that you’re listening to us. That way you get new shows right on your mobile device so you can listen to them when you’re out mowing your yard, which is what I will be doing after I record this episode because it is summer and the grass is growing and it is gorgeous outside. So enjoy this episode with Amit. Go walk your dog or go enjoy some sunshine if it’s pretty out where you are at. So with that, let’s get Amit on the podcast. All right, Amit, so welcome to the podcast. Amit Malik: Thank you. Mike Gerholdt: I know a few years back you were on to talk about the architect mindset, so I’ll be sure to link to that episode, but now we’re talking everything Agentforce and Data Cloud and Metadata and Customer 360. But for people that haven’t been around listening to the podcast for three years, and there’s a few of them, could you reacquaint the audience with what you do at Salesforce and your journey to Salesforce? Amit Malik: Sure. I joined Salesforce in 2013 and I have been lucky to teach audiences across the globe on Salesforce technologies every year, and I’ve trained on different topics about Salesforce, like whether it’s about teaching administrators or developers or consultants, architects. So I’ve been fortunate to talk about Salesforce aspects to different audiences. In my current role, I’m working on as a cloud content portfolio lead where I’m specializing in Agentforce and Data Cloud. So my role is to plan what kind of courses should we offer to our customers globally so that we can enable our ecosystem on Agentforce and Data Cloud. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot to learn. I started using the platform back in 2006 and even trying to keep up is a lot, and so I can imagine learning constantly, there’s so much. Amit Malik: It’s easy. I would say nobody cares what we know in the past. What matters is what we are working today and for next 12 months. Mike Gerholdt: Well, there you go. Amit Malik: So I’ve always retrained my mind that what I have done in the past does not matter today. What matter is what I will do in next 12 months. Mike Gerholdt: So let’s talk about what we’re going to do in the next 12 months. I would love to know, this is going to be my first hard question, they’re all hard, I think, not to scare you. I don’t think it’s hard. But I am curious because you’re on a different side of the fence than I’m at. What is different about teaching AI than teaching other technologies? Amit Malik: I would say the interesting part here is there is knowledge explosion in the current times. And when a learner is learning, he has multiple channels to learn from and there is no direction what is the right way to spend your time. So what we need is knowledge distillation. We need to tell our learners, if you only have 10 hours, what should you learn in your first 10 hours. Or if you’re not time-bound, what are the first 10 words should you know to do your project better in next three months. That my suggestion, that we should stop the noise and try to develop our attention span in these current time of knowledge explosion. Mike Gerholdt: I really like that because there is a sense of needing clarity when there is this much noise out in the world. Do you find when individuals come to your classes that they have a preconceived idea of AI that you might have to work past? Amit Malik: Yes, because the interesting part is that, for example, let’s take a word AI agent. If someone is learning about AI agent from Google’s perspective or OpenAI perspective or how Claude thinks about it, how we think about it at Salesforce, we may have different explanations, but at the core, AI agent is an AI system. So once we start getting a clarity of thought that where are we heading, we are trying to suggest how do you build a digital labor who will work along with the human at present. Once you know the goal, I think then it does not matter what is your understanding. You just need to understand why are we learning AI agents. Just because people are saying about it? Or do you really believe in the spirit of, “Oh yeah, it makes sense. If I can get my job done autonomously by a AI system, I can be more productive than I am.” I think that’s where, the why has to start first before you start doing what is what. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Yeah, I often think a lot of times solutions come before people see problems and so they make up problems for the solution when in fact they didn’t need to make up the problem. They already had it. Amit Malik: Very well said, very well said. I would say in a different way that for every problem, Agentforce is not the answer. So we need to find out a use case and say, “Oh, this is fit for predictive AI, this is fit for generative AI, this is fit for autonomous agents.” So when you start as an architect, you start questioning to yourself, “How should you think to arrive at the solution that, oh, this is a use case of Agentforce now.” Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, absolutely. So as somebody that has instructed admins, architects, probably even developers, I mean, you run the gamut, because I know I’ve signed up for developer courses. If you had to describe Data Cloud to an admin and give its relevancy, what would you say? Amit Malik: Very good. So think of Data Cloud as a portion of all your data from multiple data sources. It’s a one repository where we want to bring data from multiple data sources. It could be Snowflake, it could be Databricks, it could be AWS, it could be any data source in your enterprise business. And once we have all this data in Data Cloud, that can act as a knowledge for your agent. As the analogy, think like this. When you join as a employee to a new organization, you need to learn about the system. In the same way we want to give the knowledge about systems to our agent so that they can understand the business and then talk to the customer on our behalf about our business. Mike Gerholdt: And I even think beyond just the customer, I mean, even the employee. If you only set up an agent to look internally within your CRM data, that’s almost like giving them a book, whereas if you use Data Cloud, it’s like giving them a library. Is that a kind of a competent analogy? Would you use that? Amit Malik: Yes. So see, Data Cloud is in simple way exposing all the data sources and how we attach it to the agent technically with the help of Agentforce data library. So we do not want our learners to get worried about Data Cloud so much because in the future or in the present world, we are trying to encapsulate the plumbing of Data Cloud. So if you’re a [inaudible 00:08:50], we just ask you to upload the PDF file to Agentforce data library, and then we take care of all the plumbing behind the scene. So as the admin, you just need to know how to upload your data and we take care of everything. And that’s the beauty of Salesforce platform that we try to make things simple because our engineers have done a complex job for you. Mike Gerholdt: The irony is it’s usually the businesses that make things complex with processes or approvals or reviews. Amit Malik: That’s fine. See, we cannot change the business. I think as a technical person, what I’ve learned over the years is never challenge the business, rather adapt to business. Mike Gerholdt: That’s very good. Amit Malik: Because that’s a very important learning. If you keep on challenging, because as a technical mindset, we always think, “No, business is not right,” but hey, business exist and that where technology exists. So we need to adapt to the business needs and that’s where as you grow as an architect, your fight is not to learn technology because you will have lot many people under you who knows much better than you. But your job is to understand what business value business need to create and how do you bridge that gap with the technology solution. That’s where the real fun is. You tie up the business outcome. Mike Gerholdt: And I feel like, because I was just going to ask you, back to our first question, how do you kind of filter out the noise? I feel like your previous answer is kind of that, right? Really focusing on what the business outcome, the business need is, right? Amit Malik: Yeah. So I would like to give you a very small framework which I have been using for myself as I’ve been learning Agentforce from the front, and I’m lucky to be part of all the teams here whom I interact with internally. Mike Gerholdt: I love frameworks. Amit Malik: The first question I would like to give to my learner is ask yourself, do you need AI agent? If the answer comes yes, that yes, you need AI agent, then move forward in Agentforce thinking, because it could be that you can handle something without AI agent and you don’t need it. Once your first question is answered to yes, then you move to the second question, what agent type do you need? For that, you need to know what agent types are offered by Salesforce. Like we offer, say, customer agent, which is implemented through Agentforce Service Agent. We offer employee agent, which is for employees. We offer sales agents like SDR agent for initial outreach and booking meetings. We have coach agent, which is for coaching and mentoring. So once you understand our offerings, then you see, okay, given a use case where customer says, “I want my agent to answer business questions and handle my refunds, or tell about my loyalty balance,” we know that I need something for service, I need something for customer, so I need a customer agent. So once you start reasoning that I need a agent and I need a customer agent and I can implement customer agent using Service Agent, then comes a third question, what topics do you want to assign to this agent? Now topic is a very interesting vocabulary which we have launched in Salesforce ecosystem, which is how do you define the job to be done? So think of topic as a aggregation of your business process. So if you want your agent to work on, say, loyalty balance check. So that’s all the questions about loyalty balance will be handled by loyalty management topic. So that loyalty management topic is like a grouping of all the actions. Once you know the right topics that do you want to leverage the existing topics like standard topics, like say general FAQ or escalation, or do you want to make a custom topic, your third question is answered. Once you have answered the third question, the fourth question is, how will you provide data to your agent? And here where your Data Cloud come into play. Because agent is dumb. Agent does not know anything about your business. So to provide the value to your agent, you need to connect your agent with the data library. And now with Agentforce data library, we support web search, we support files, we support your knowledge articles. So once you understand how do you want to educate your agent, your agent is now having a data about your business. Once these four questions are answered, the fifth question is, do you just want agent to answer the questions or do you also want agent to act upon it? Customer says, “No, I want agent to act upon.” And then comes the fifth thing, which is what actions do you want agent to perform? Now this action is where the magic happens, and this is where all the administrators and developers can start working on leveraging their past knowledge. So if you’re good in flows, you can have a flow agent action. If you are good in Apex, you can have Apex agent actions. If you’re good in API, you can have new soft calls, you can call external services. If you’re good in prompt engineering, you can use Prompt template. So depending on the use cases, we give you four reference action types, which is Flow, Apex, API, and Prompt template. Once you have answered to this five questions, now you know a lot about solutioning. So this framework will help you through how to position the right solution for your customer. Mike Gerholdt: I really like that. Thanks for sharing that. And I was thinking through as you were talking through that because we have, I mean, internally we use Salesforce on the admin team to manage our content. And Josh Birk built what we call Agent Goat, which helps us answer questions and create relevant records. We even did something fun, I don’t know if you think this is cool, we think this is cool. We uploaded the release notes to Agent Goat and gave that as a resource. Amit Malik: Wonderful. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Because then we can ask it about new features. Amit Malik: And recently we launched our Salesforce documentation action. So we can just plug in that action to our agent and now it can start answering questions based on our Salesforce documentation. We just launched. Mike Gerholdt: I mean, there’s so much to do. Amit Malik: Yes, that’s the fun thing. Once you understand that agent is nothing but aggregation of topics and topic is nothing but aggregation of actions, and actions can happen on your data. So agent, topic, action, data, that’s a master framework. Mike Gerholdt: Right. Amit Malik: Once you start thinking on this four words, agent, topic, action, and data, everything will start falling into place. Mike Gerholdt: So I’m curious, and I genuinely don’t know the answer to this, but have you been to any of our events and happened to see any of the agents that customers have built that you find really inspiring? Amit Malik: Yes, I was lucky to be part of TDX Bengaluru Hackathon. Mike Gerholdt: Ah, yes. Tell me more. Amit Malik: It was so wonderful to see our customers showcasing the real use cases. Let’s say a job application agent, some student is applying for a job, that how we can have a agent which can read the resume and do the shortlisting and send the further steps for the candidate. Or it could be other scenarios which customers were showing in insurance that how we can process the claims with the claim agent. Or as we know in the Conquer, for example, expenses, how we can have expenses being reviewed by agent and auto approve, saving the time of senior management to approve the expenses. So see, once you start thinking of use cases, then the value is derived. The value is not in technology. The value is in applying the technology to benefit the customer and improving the customer experience. Mike Gerholdt: And would you also extend the customer for admins and architects and developers to users of Salesforce, not just external customers of your organization? Amit Malik: Yes. So let me define this. So here, when I say customer, so customer is, say, Marriott who is buying our Salesforce license, or any customer who buys our Salesforce license. And then in that customer, we have employees who are using our product, they’re our end users, and if this customer is further implementing our solution for their customers, then they become end user. Mike Gerholdt: Yep, that makes sense. Amit, I’m curious, in the instructional side of Salesforce and having done instruction for a long time, if you were to look into a crystal ball a year out from now, how do you see AI influencing instruction at Salesforce? Amit Malik: See, it’s very funny. I would say this. Everyone believes that in the future we all will learn through ChatGPT, Claude, and we’ll keep on learning through AI tools. But to me, there’s a need for clarity of thought. Because if you don’t know what to ask, you will never get the answer. So the magic of learning is your curiosity. So as everybody’s moving, we are moving towards AI teaching us step by step, but if you do not know how to leverage AI, then AI will be useless to you. So the art of learning is to become curious, and once you know how much curious you are, then AI or human does not matter. Then you can learn from AI also because you know how to ask right questions. So I think, in my mind, education is not about the instructor. Education is more about the learner. If learner is good, he can extract more from a teacher. If learner is not curious, then teacher or AI does not make a difference. Mike Gerholdt: That’s a really powerful point. Amit Malik: This is my experience of teaching for last 20 plus years that I’ve seen some interesting audience and it changes the whole class when you interact with the different kind of groups. Just a good example, the way you are asking me questions, that is a prompt to my mind and I’m giving you live answers. So you are getting best out of me because of you, not because of me. So it’s just a very interesting phenomenon to understand that it’s all about how much you extract from my mind. My mind is prepared. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I never really thought of it that way of when you go in, because as a customer before joining Salesforce, I’ve taken quite a few of our, I believe five day or four day classes, instructor led. One of those was with Wendy Braid. Amit Malik: This is amusing. Mike Gerholdt: They were all great, but they all, to your point, all of the classes were different. And they’re different, well, one of them just because the instructor is different, but because the people are different and the goal of what the people are trying to get out of the instructor changes, and it also changes based on the level of curiosity, I think you said that, of the learner, right? So if they’re genuinely curious, they’re going to get more out of the learner than if they’re just kind of sitting there expecting to be brought up to speed, right? Amit Malik: Exactly. I would like to add one more point to this discussion here. Mike Gerholdt: Oh, please. Amit Malik: So the role of the instructor is not information sharing. Information is available in abundance through internet channels these days. So the goal of the learner is to help learner connect to their business goals. So when a learner is listening to the instructor, instructor need to understand what is the goal learner trying to achieve in their business goals. And you only get to know that when you’re in the classroom. Before that you don’t know. So how can you plan your speech? And that’s where I believe in dynamic speeches where the real agenda gets opened up when you start engaging with the real audience. Topic remains same. Mike Gerholdt: So I just had a question pop to me that I really thought brings this kind of all the way 360. One of the roles that admins, developers, and architects play is your role. They have to be an instructor to end users. When they roll out a new feature, whether it’s a new application, Data Cloud, an Agentforce agent or whatever, part of their role is to teach their end users what the feature is, how to use it, how to be productive in their role. With your vast experience in teaching and educating individuals, what advice would you give to people that kind of have to temporarily step into that role and be productive? Amit Malik: I would say listen more, speak less, think more and process your thoughts. Articulate your answer well before you speak to the listener, because sometimes we try to propose what we know and what we want, but that is not the winning edge. The winning edge is trying to understand what is the business problem customer is trying to solve, and then within your mind, you know all the products what we offer, and then find out the best solution and say, “This is what will suit you. Use Agentforce Service Agent, and that will solve you in this use case. Let me show you how.” Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, well, that’s powerful advice. You would think it would be the opposite, right? Talk more. But sometimes there’s a reason we have two ears and one mouth. Amit Malik: I agree. And I have learned, again, I’m fortunate thanks to God that I’ve learned this by, I’ve been teaching for more than 20 years now, I’ve learned this skill in real world that the best teachers speak less and personalize to diversified audience where every audience should feel that he is speaking for me. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I like that. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast, Amit. I appreciate these check-ins and really giving us this perspective on what our team is doing to get people up to speed and really also just have admins and developers and architects think about how they can be better educators themselves when they have to demonstrate the platform to their end users. I appreciate this. Amit Malik: Thank you. I will just say at the end, as a good practice, make sure you are spending at least 30 minutes doing something on the Salesforce org. There’s nothing which is better than doing something. People are watching YouTube, people are reading blogs, listening to podcast. But 30 minute of doing on Salesforce org is the most powerful experience. Mike Gerholdt: Absolutely. I mean, if you follow pro sports or any entertainment, all of those players practice for a reason. And it’s not just to be out on the field, but it’s actually the motion and going through it and keeping themselves sharp and the same holds true for us. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast, Amit. Amit Malik: Yes, thank you. Excellent. Thank you for the opportunity. Mike Gerholdt: So that was a fun conversation with Amit. I always appreciate instructors coming on the podcast because not only do they give us insight into instruction, but they also give us insight into how we can be better instructors. So it was great to have him help unpack the agent, topic, action, data. I know I’ve done a lot of Agentforce NOW workshops and I’ve walked through that framework before, but hearing him say it kind of helped me even make sense more, like the knowledge boxes in my head don’t jiggle around. So it’s making sense to me now. I love that he left us with some tools to teach, learn, and lead more effectively. And don’t forget his advice, which is 30 minutes in your org beats three hours of theory. That’s good thinking. If this episode helped sharpen your focus, could you do me a favor, pass along with some fellow Salesforce admins, friends, user groups. I would love if you could do that. And until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud. The post Curiosity Is the Key to Learning Agentforce appeared first on Salesforce Admins .…

The Salesforce Admins Podcast

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Why Secure AI Starts With You: What Admins Must Know About Agentforce 29:56

26 days ago29:56

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Sri Srinivasan, Senior Director of Information Security at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about what admins need to know about Agentforce and how to build secure AI experiences. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Sri Srinivasan. A quick heads-up before we get started: This episode may include forward-looking statements—things we’re excited about, but not yet available. So please make any purchasing decisions based only on products and features that are currently available. For all the legal details, visit salesforce.com . The hidden job of AI security: admins build the brakes Sri gave a great TDX presentation about AI security and the crucial role admins play in the future of Agentforce. “Admins are key to everything that we do,” he emphasizes, “they understand everything that’s happening within their environment. They know which actions, what permissions, what they do, and agents are just another avenue to expose and interact with this crux of it.” As Sri puts it, Agentforce is like a sports car in terms of what it can do with your data. But how fast would you drive a sports car with no brakes? That’s why admins are so important in the age of AI. We can build the brakes for Agentforce to make sure our agents are behaving correctly. Five questions to ask when building secure Agentforce experiences Security conversations can get very scary very quickly, but Sri boils it down to five questions admins should ask when they’re building with Agentforce: What is the agent’s role and scope ? What data will the agent have access to? Which actions should be public and which should be private? Do you need to build any extra guardrails ? Which channels will the agent use? The key here is practicing the principle of least privilege. And for admins, that comes down to managing permissions and profiles in Salesforce and following security best practices. Every agent runs as a user—and that user needs to be tightly scoped. Test before you trust: scaling with the Agentforce Testing Center Going back to the idea of brakes, Sri cautions that just because you built an agent fast doesn’t mean that it’s ready. Luckily, his team has been hard at work on new tools to help you make sure your agents are working as intended. The new Agentforce Testing Center helps simulate and validate agent behavior at scale—without needing a QA army. You’re also able to peek under the hood to understand why an agent made a certain choice—turning debugging into decision-making clarity. Be sure to listen to the full episode for more on what admins need to know about Agentforce. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss out. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Sri at TDX: 5 Easy Steps for Secure Agentforce Implementation More from TDX: Security Best Practices with Agentforce Trailhead: Trusted Agentic AI Blog: Best Practices for Building Secure Agentforce Service Agents Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Sri on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Bluesky social Mike on Threads Mike on X Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re talking with Sri Srinivasan about secure, reliable AI experiences with Agentforce. Now, Sri is a leader on the security compliance customer trust team at Salesforce, where he helps customers understand and implement security best practices. Of course, before we get into this episode, be sure to follow the Salesforce Admins Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. That way you get a new episode every Thursday delivered right to your phone or your mobile device. So with that, let’s get into our conversation with Sri. So Sri, welcome to the podcast. Sri Srinivasan: Thanks for having me here, Mike. Super excited for it. Mike Gerholdt: Well, I love the presentation that you gave at TDX, and I’m sure more people would love to hear about it too, which is why I wanted to have you come back on, because everything now is Agentforce and security is always top of mind. I’ve always preached security ever since I started at Salesforce. I’ve had, I think, Laura Pelkey on quite a few times. But that was the compass of what you talked about at TDX. But I’m jumping ahead. Let’s talk about you a little bit. Tell me kind of where you got started and how you got to Salesforce. Sri Srinivasan: Let me try to make it very sweet and sharp. So I have always been in security. I have a master’s in information management specializing in security. I worked for big four accounting firms, but not doing accounting. I did security for them, data security and data privacy. Then I ended up working for a little gaming company where I really got involved in security, due diligence. Was a small company based out of Reno, but they were not really small. They did almost all gaming systems, all gaming interactions, lottery, all across the world. So that got me exposed to different systems and more specifically around fraud and how systems can be hacked to do things that they shouldn’t be doing. That’s where I got more interested in understanding the lay of the land of security. I spent about five, six years there. Then I got an opportunity to work for one of the biggest tax preparers in the United States. I ran their cyber fraud operations group for two years down there, and then my business teams, product teams came over to me and said, “Sri, you’ve been on the other side yelling at us to do a better job. Why don’t you come on this side and do that?” So I spent a couple of years on the product side as well. Then during COVID, I was looking back at my life when we had lots of time at home, and I realized I’ve done a lot of the security functions in total audit, GRC, red teaming, blue teaming, security operations center, fraud operations. One thing that I thought I did not have was that customer-facing experience, and this great opportunity came about at Salesforce, and my role currently in Salesforce is to interact with customers. My team, security compliance customer trust, is the front-facing team for all customer-facing security inquiries around security, compliance, and trust. So that’s how I got here, and I’ve been here for about five years or so, almost five. It feels like I just started yesterday, and it’s amazing. Every time I meet a customer, I just feel excited. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I mean, if I had to go back in time and pick a career in tech, I feel like security is one that you’re always going to have a job because if there’s a lock out there, I promise you there’s probably somebody trying to break it. Sri Srinivasan: Yep. I hear you. And the frustrating part about is that it’s oftentime not people trying to break the lock. It’s just people forgetting to lock their locks, and then figuring out like, “Hey, how did somebody get in?” Well, you didn’t lock it at the first place. Mike Gerholdt: Yep. Oh, man. Speaking the truth. So it feels like there’s kind of two eras. Well, I mean, we talk about different waves at Salesforce, but to me there’s the pre-AI era and then there’s the post-AI era. And for a long time, up until I saw your presentation, I kind of didn’t think about security with AI, because most of everything that we do on the platform is just so secure, but let’s talk about what your presentation at TDX was. So kind of in a nutshell, bring us into that presentation and what you talked about. Sri Srinivasan: Sure. I think what the intent was, AI is the hype word right now. So everybody’s talking about LLMs, everyone’s talking about how to protect those LLMs, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much more when it comes to implementing AI right. Salesforce provides you with a very secure platform, but is only as secure as you implement it. So that was kind of the crux of the presentation where we actually articulated the shared responsibility model in terms of what is expected is you as a customer, you as an admins, what are the few five or 10 things that you want to question anybody in your organization that is wanting to come up with an AI solution? And we wanted to break it down from a business case perspective, in a sense, if you look at all of our top tracks around Agentforce, we break it down into role, data, actions, guardrails, and channels. Those are the things that your business users are very familiar with. If we can build security into those aspects, by nature of it, we’re building security into the product itself, rather than coming at the end and saying, “Now I’m going to do a security review and I’m going to add security on top of it.” So that’s what we were focusing on during the presentation. Things around being very cognizant on what is the role of the agent, what is the scope of the agent, what will it do? What will it not do? What data it will have access to, and where is that data coming from? Do we need to bring that data into the Salesforce system? Do we need the agent to have access to that? Other critical things, such as least privilege, access controls, designing your actions securely. Those are the things that we spoke about during our presentation, most of which, if you just took it out of context and put it in a paper, none of this should be new words. All of this is standard security practices, but the way it’s applied, the lens through which you look at it, is a little different when it comes to Agentforce. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I think it’s always interesting as we delve into new tech when you think of security as really telling the agent what it should and shouldn’t do. Wow. Because most people, I think, probably encapsulate security into permissions and profiles and data access, but also what it should and shouldn’t do is also security, right? One of the things you mentioned in your answers was guardrails. And I’m wondering, can you give us some examples of what could go wrong if guardrails aren’t set properly? Sri Srinivasan: Yeah. So I’m trying to give a better example here because I don’t want it to be something that is future-looking, but rather what’s in the product today. So when you give your agent guardrails, a simple one could be your agent instructions. Under no circumstances should I ask for your email address or customer name or your order number because I have all that information. If I can validate Mike, I have all that information. I shouldn’t be asking you to give me that information and assume that is right. So that’s a very simple guardrail that you can throw into your system, right? Another set of guardrails could be you shall not perform these actions without having the user verified. You need to know who the user is before you can go and reset his password, or you need to have their second factor. You need to do a step-up authentication before you can trigger these actions, things of that sort. And what agent does with our Agent Builder, you can start providing these as natural language instructions. And the system would know. Mike Gerholdt: One thing I was thinking of, so I’m going to ask a silly question, because when we talk security, I feel like I’m the person that has to ask the silly questions. So I’m going to do that. You mentioned one thing of, well, I’m going to set the guardrail if it shouldn’t have access, or it shouldn’t ask for the order number because the person looking at the screen has the order number. Why is that important if we’re not passing an order number to an agent? Why would we withhold data to an agent? Sri Srinivasan: So we’re not actually withholding the data to an agent. The reason why we don’t want to explicitly ask the user for certain information is not just to ask, but we can ask, but we shouldn’t trust that information. It’s the innate concept of trust but verify. I can ask you for this information, but that’s not a great user experience because I already know your account number, your order number. I have all that information. But rather, what I don’t have is I don’t know who’s on the other side of the system. So that’s more important for me when I say that you shall not ask for it. The reason why I explicitly state that is because I don’t need this information from you. I already have it. What I need from you is to validate who you are. Once I know you’re Mike and this is the associated user ID, I have all the other information. Are you able to connect those dots? Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, no, I totally get it now. I mean, guardrails, I guess I was envisioning guardrails as like those bumpers that you put up when you go bowling and you’re not very good at it so you roll a strike every time. And it’s kind of that, but it’s also kind of that to make sure that the conversation and the agent is flowing in a natural manner so that you’re actually being productive is the way I hear it. So that totally makes sense. Sri Srinivasan: 100%. And what we have, it’s currently in pilot, is we have instruction adherence. So this is basically our systems, our Atlas Reasoning Engine has supervisory elements that are constantly looking at those conversations and getting metrics around key aspects such as instruction adherence, coherence, how factual it is, how grounded it is. These are then used to decide how the user experience should be. For example, if there is an instruction that says you shall not ask for the password through the portal, and if the system has to ask for the password, then the instruction adherence will be low and it will be ungrounded because it’s going to do something that is not grounded in its instructions. So then we can set the system to say, “Block those transactions, don’t do it.” So the agent would say, “Hey, sorry, I cannot help you here.” Whereas on the other cases, maybe we can say, “We don’t have enough information,” so then we can build the system in a way that it starts asking for more information so it has all the information that it needs to help you. So these are some things that are coming out. These are our guardrails that are happening when the system’s executing. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, no, it makes sense. I mean, you wouldn’t have to teach somebody the history of math, algebra, geometry, and trigonometry if all you were going to ask them is what is two plus two? And that totally makes sense to me now. Like I’m rethinking guardrails in a completely different way now. I just learned something on my own podcast. Light bulb moment. Let’s talk about that. You mentioned you’re talking with a lot of customers. Tell me about, you don’t have to be specific, but what were some of the aha moments that stood out when you were working with admins or customers and they finally, I don’t want to say finally, but there’s always that moment where you finally make a really good egg and you’re like, “Oh my God, I know how to fry eggs now,” using that as an example because I’m cooking eggs, but can you kind of give me that, because I feel like I get to see it a lot with some of the workshops, but it’s probably a little bit different for everybody. Sri Srinivasan: So off-lead, one of the biggest aha moments that I have experienced with admins is I do run these AI workshops at these world tours, and it is really eye-opening for them to look at the Agent Builder in the middle section. When they start looking at the reasoning, they now know why an agent does something that it did. So what are the biggest reasons why this whole agents are a little complicated and different is under the hood, agents use LLMs, right? And we all know what LLM is famous for, right? They’re non-deterministic. What do I mean by being non-deterministic? By non-deterministic, I mean that the same input can give you different outputs at different times. And earlier, like I think about a year and a half ago, one of the bigger problems with LLMs were they hallucinate. It’s still a problem, but we have figured out how to solve it. We provide it with more data, we ground it with more truth, so that it is then working within this construct. We have RAG, we have a lot of other things that we have actually provided to solve that problem. But the other problem of being non-deterministic is still there, right? And that is why when you start looking at the Agent Builder and you can start looking at the reasoning sections, our Atlas Reasoning Engine is basically telling you there which topic did I choose, what was the utterance that was provided. By utterance, I mean what the user typed. What topic did I choose based on the utterance. And once I chose the topic, what action I chose and I executed the action. But before I execute the action, I did a plan of executing the action. If I did execute the actions, here are the guardrails, here are the runtime guardrails that I would have triggered or I would’ve violated. And hence, I chose not to provide this answer, or hence I chose to go on to the next step. So when admins look at it, it instantly clicks in their mind. “Okay, this is how the agent worked.” And that also allows them to understand, “Oh, if I were to tweak this one word, maybe the agent would react a different way.” And then they go in and they try that and they’re like, “Whoa, wow. Now I’ve actually cracked the code of agents.” That has personally been one of the biggest aha moments for me. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I mean, for me, it was always, I love when I help admins and myself build a prompt, and especially when we do grounding, and then we’ll bind it to a field on a page, that’s always very simple, and they press this, I call it the sparkle button, and they get a response back and it’s like, “Wow.” And it’s consistent enough, but it’s not like a chatbot, right? It’s not like an email template. It’s a little bit different every time. But that feeling of AI isn’t scary and it’s not hard to do, you can see it sort of start to melt away. Sri Srinivasan: Right. 100%. And in those same scenarios, I’ve seen admins go really crazy when they do the dropdown in the prompt builder and they say, “Oh, so Sri, I can actually bring in data from an Apex class?” I’m like, “Yeah, you can.” And now they’re able to relate AI to the things that it’s dear and near to them, actions, flows, and Apex classes. Admins, that’s their bread and butter, they know that in and out. So now when they’re able to look at that and they’re like, “Oh, it’s as simple as using this in the AI world,” I feel they get very empowered and they’re like, “Okay, let me go play with it more now.” Mike Gerholdt: Yep. Let’s touch on permissions for a little bit because I know you covered that in your presentation… Words. What are some common pitfalls? Because I know that I’ve gotten questions at the Agentforce NOW Tour about setting up permissions and giving people access to Agentforce, but what are some things that are just real easy things that most people trip over? Sri Srinivasan: So one thing to understand when it comes to permissions is every time you create a service agent, those agents are running as their own designated user. We are going to be releasing employee agents pretty soon. Again, forward-looking statement supply. Employee agents actually run as the underlying user that are executing it. So if you are in your CRM panel, the right-hand side, Einstein Copilot panel we used to call it, that, now you can start interacting with it, those are kind of like the employee agents where it runs as Mike. Whereas if I create a service agent and you’re interacting it through any of the different channels through WhatsApp or through an Experience Cloud, you have to designate a running user. And oftentimes, folks will create a brand new user. And good thing is that this user comes with no permissions, which is good, but the downside of it is it will not be able to do anything. So similar to your standard profiles, licenses, permissions, object and record level, all of those needs to be assigned to this user. And sometimes what folks forget, admins forget, is you have organization-wide defaults and role hierarchy that could overwrite this. And over time, these roles, these permissions, because they’re like, “Oh, this doesn’t work. Maybe add this, maybe add this.” And over time, that role could end up having excess permission. So it’s always important to review the access to this agent user periodically to make sure it’s appropriate and make sure that only the right folks have access to even edit the permissions for these agent users. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I always think of, especially when you’re getting started, who are you going to roll it out to? Because you don’t need to just turn it on and let everybody just ask Agentforce whatever question it feels because you’re not set up for that. And that’s probably not the business case, and that’s a lot of the prep, is sitting down and saying, “So we have this really powerful tool, we have this really fast car. Where are we going to drive it?” It’s not like you necessarily have to drive the really fast car everywhere you go, and not everybody needs to have keys to it. So let’s end on kind of a, this not forward-looking statement, but I want to get your opinion on this. What do you think the role of admins will be in terms of shaping the future of AI at Salesforce? Sri Srinivasan: That’s a very interesting question. Admins are key to everything that we do. And admins, literally, they understand the Salesforce ecosystem. From my vantage point, I look at admins as the know-it-all people because they understand everything that’s happening within their environment. They know which actions, what permissions, what they do, and agents should be considered as just another avenue to expose and interact with this crux of it. So admins should take it on themselves to make sure that we are interacting with these agents in the right way. There are right guardrails in place. And I think one thing I want to just quickly peel back, you brought in the example of a sports car, right? So let me ask you, what makes the car go fast? Mike Gerholdt: Could be a number of things, but usually it’s the motor. Sri Srinivasan: Yes, I would say it’s the brake. If I gave you a Bugatti and I told you I took the brakes off, would you drive it at a hundred miles an hour? Mike Gerholdt: Well, you’re asking the wrong person. Sri Srinivasan: So that’s where I feel the admins come in. They have to put the brakes to make sure that agents are doing the right things, agents are responsible, agents are ethical, agents are doing the right things that they’re supposed to do. Yes, Salesforce does provide a lot of these out of the box, but you also need to provide. If the underlying data is biased, then the response will also be biased. So admins play a very important role, maybe not in developing all these things, but being the trusted advisors to their implementation teams to ask them the right questions. Mike Gerholdt: I love your example, because fast is only relative if you understand slow. And fast only matters if you can stop. Great way to frame security. See why I have smart people like you on the podcast because you got to educate us more. Sri Srinivasan: I’m happy to be here and thanks for this opportunity. And I think one thing I also want to emphasize is, just like everything, protecting data is a partnership. Salesforce provides you with the tools, the foundations, out-of-the-box topics, the guardrails. When we spoke about guardrails, we have runtime guardrails, detective guardrails, and then corrective ones too, so that we can actually look at things and make changes to the system. So we have all those things, self-improving guardrails, all of those things, we’re providing that as a platform, but it’s on you as the customer and admins to understand and use them. One of the biggest things that we just released was the Agentforce Testing Center. That’s something that’s very different, because like I said, how do you test non-deterministic outputs? Yes, I can put 20 people in front of the agent and have them test for 10 hours a day or for a month, and we would be able to cover a lot of use cases. But think about it, you’ve built your own agent, right, Mike? Mike Gerholdt: Oh, yeah. Quite a few times. Sri Srinivasan: How long does it take for you to build your first agent? Mike Gerholdt: So that’s a trick question. It doesn’t take long to turn it on, but I wouldn’t consider it built in that time. Sri Srinivasan: So if we have Salesforce enabled folks to quickly churn out agents we would not be able to reap that benefit if we’re going to tell the organizations, “Well, I’ve churned out 50 agents in a matter of three days. Now go ahead and spend 50 days per agent to test it.” It doesn’t scale. So that’s where Agentforce Testing Center comes in. It allows you to use AI to now start generating test cases and to evaluate your agents. So that’s a great addition. And as admins, we should be aware of that, and we should be leveraging that in order to make sure that our agents are secure and does what it says it does. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. No, I agree. I mean, does it take long to spin it up and do some configuration? No, probably faster than most. But is it ready for prime time? You can think of all the car builders. They can build cars really fast, but then they got to test them. And just because it’s built doesn’t mean it’s ready for people to use it. So it’s a great analogy. Sri Srinivasan: Yeah, and we’re bringing in things. One of the other things that I spoke about during my presentation was your need to bring in the user context. You need to do user validations and verifications. We are coming with newer features that we’re going to enable agent variables. These are secure session-scoped variables that capture and store data, and it can only be set by action outputs. So therefore, this is something that you can start using to improve your trust of your agents as well. The other things you can do is that you can have filtering rules now with your agents. So basically you say that only certain topics can be unlocked if you did some other activity. For example, you can only start handling refund when the user is verified. So those are some things that are coming out very shortly. We call them the agent variables, the action bindings, and then filtering rules. These are keywords. I’m just prompting it out so that you can go in after hearing this podcast, go in, search for it. You should be able to find more details in our help articles. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, and our coming up events. I’m sure there’ll be more stuff about that at Dreamforce. Yeah, I mean, so people ask me why this or why that? And you have to think of when you’re building an agent, you’re building something at an enterprise level, and it’s almost like the difference between commercial grade and household grade. When you buy a mower, there’s like for the homeowner that’s going to maybe mow a couple times a month, and then there’s mowers that are made for people that own businesses that are going to run the mower eight hours a day, five days a week, 200 hours a month, and really put it through its paces. And that’s the difference between some of the stuff that we build and some of the low lift, other stuff that’s out there. So I appreciate that perspective. Sri Srinivasan: Yep. I think if we’re still at time, the only other thing that I want to let folks know is we just started pilot with our Interaction Explorer, and I think as admins, this is something that we all like to do. How many times have we gone in, looked into our history or logs and we love that part, right? So Interaction Explorer takes the hard work out. It gives you all the information, one pane of observability across all your Agentforce interactions. How many users, how many sessions, what is the quality score, how many interactions per moment, what are the top ranking topics? What are the top ranking tags? By tags, what we have done is we have taken all these interactions using AI, and we’ve generated tags and we have grouped them together. So what that allows you to do is that now you can trace in cluster sessions with granular log data, and then now you can click down on it and inspect configurations at each and every level so that you can optimize your agents. I can actually go down to a specific conversation you had with an agent at this time, and then look at that specific interaction, that message that you typed, look in the background and say, “How long did the agent take? Where did it spend its time on? How much time did it take on utterances? How much time did it take on doing trust-related activities? How much time did it take to execute another action?” All that information is available for you so that you can take a much more smart decision on your agent enablement and also on how your agent is being consumed. Mike Gerholdt: No, I like it. Thanks for coming on the podcast, Sri. I mean, I feel like we went through all levels and I bet if I had a two-hour podcast, you and I could talk all day. Sri Srinivasan: I would love to. Mike Gerholdt: There’s always something to talk about, right? Sri Srinivasan: Yes, there’s definitely a lot. Again, folks know our security blogs coming out, our security sessions that happen at these world tours and other events. If you ever run into me, feel free to stop by and talk to me. I love to talk to customers. I love to talk to fellow admins. Mike Gerholdt: Okay, I don’t know about you, but my brain’s doing cartwheels in probably the best possible way. Just a huge thanks to Sri for coming on the podcast. I know he worked really hard on his TDX presentation, and security and AI is always a very difficult thing to wrap your head around. But hey, showed up and nailed the seatbelt on your self-driving car and came loaded with car analogies. So I thought it was fun. And if this episode made you go, “Ooh, that’s what guardrails do,” do me a favor, send it to your favorite admin friend out in the community. And to do that, just tap those three dots and boom, share away. You can put it on social, you can put it on the Trailblazer Community, you can text it to a friend. And if you’re hungry for more Salesforce Admins Podcast, be sure to go to admin.salesforce.com. That’s where you’ll find any of the links to resources that Sri shares with us, including other podcasts and a full transcript on this entire episode. So that’s always good. I appreciate that. But one last thing. If you’re looking to bounce knowledge off, ask questions, communicate, interact with other Salesforce admins, you can go to the Admin Trailblazer group that is in the Trailblazer Community and pop over there. There’s a lot of good stuff going on. But hey, until next time, you keep those agents in line and we’ll see you in the cloud. The post Why Secure AI Starts With You: What Admins Must Know About Agentforce appeared first on Salesforce Admins .…

The Salesforce Admins Podcast

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How Salesforce Is Transforming Certification for New and Experienced Users 26:58

5 weeks ago26:58

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Dana Walton, Senior Manager of Credential Programs and Operations at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about how the certification experience is evolving with smarter personalization, easier access, and a learning journey built just for you. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Dana Walton. Certifications are moving to Trailhead Academy Dana has been working on the certification team since 2015. When she started, Salesforce had nine certifications. Today, they offer 83. I sat down with her for this episode because her team is finishing a two-year project to overhaul the certification experience. The biggest change coming is that certifications are moving to Trailhead Academy. While you can still go completely self-guided with your learning, Dana and her team are making it easier to find the help you need—whether that’s an instructor-led course or curated Trailmixes and modules. Why skills are the most important factor in choosing new certifications One thing that Dana wanted to know during testing was how her team could help people figure out which certifications they should work on next. She asked Salesforce MVPs how they choose new certifications to target: are they looking for things that fit a specific role? A particular product? The answer was none of the above. The Salesforce MVPs in Dana’s testing group look for certifications based on what new skills they can learn. Armed with that knowledge, her team added a skills breakdown for each cert to make things easier to browse. They’re also adding more personalization to your Salesforce learning journey, with AI recommendations to help you plan your roadmap. Dana emphasizes that these are recommendations, not requirements. Your certification experience can still be completely self-guided; they’ve just added a helping hand. Why certification is the final step on your learning journey If she could give one piece of advice to admins looking for the next steps in their Salesforce learning journey, it’s that you need to look at every possible pathway. “Certification is not how you learn,” she says, “it’s how you prove the skills and knowledge that you’ve already learned.” Go to Trailhead, reach out to the community, or find a mentor who can help you understand what you’re getting into and create achievable goals for yourself. And then, when you’re ready, certification will be a breeze. Be sure to listen to the full episode for more from my conversation with Dana about what’s coming next for the certification experience. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you can catch us in your feed every Thursday. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more New Salesforce Certification Experience FAQ Certification: Salesforce Associate Certification: Strategy Designer Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Dana on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Bluesky social Mike on Threads Mike on X Full show transcript Mike: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Today we’re sitting down with Dana Walton from the Salesforce certification team. Dana is here to share how the certification experience is evolving. I want you to think smarter personalization, easier access, and a learning journey built just for you. We’ll talk about the exciting move to Trailhead Academy and how it’s making certifications more accessible than ever. Be sure to stick around. I promise you’re going to walk away and be ready to take your next step in that Salesforce ecosystem. And hey, if you enjoy this episode, go ahead and give us a follow wherever you listen to podcasts. So with that, let’s get Dana on the podcast. So, Dana, welcome to the podcast. Dana Walton: Thank you. I’m excited to be here. Mike: I’m excited to talk about certification. I’ve been talking about it ever since 2008 when I first got certified, which is a super long time ago. But let’s get started with you. Tell us a little bit about how you got to Salesforce and what you do at Salesforce. Dana Walton: Happy to. You predate me just a little. Yes, but I mean, I think in terms of longevity, I hit Koa this year, so I’m very excited. Mike: Congrats. Thank you. And for those of you that don’t know, Koa is 10 years. Dana Walton: Yes. So my 10-year anniversary will be in June, and I have been a part of the certification team for almost all of my tenure. I joined in October 2015 because I started as a contractor and then got hired on through the certification team, and I have been a part of the growth of this program since then, and it’s been really excited to see when we first were in a very… When I joined, we only had nine certifications. Mike: Only. Only nine. Dana Walton: Only nine. Now we have 83. It’s been quite a journey. Mike: Wow. I didn’t know that. I’m having a moment. 83. Holy cow. Dana Walton: Through natural growth and then through mergers and acquisitions, we are now up to 83. Mike: Yeah, I didn’t really think about that. I always think of the homegrown. Somebody reminded me the other day that my Salesforce experience would be graduating from high school. I’m like, “Oh.” Dana Walton: It hurts when people talk like that. That’s not fair. Mike: Oh, well, okay. Maybe we’ll get into a good college, grow up. But honestly, I do remember that first time I took the certification. This was ’08. It was a long time ago. I had to drive 90 miles one way to a testing center. I also live in Iowa, so look, it’s fair. Salesforce was like, “Look- Dana Walton: It’s still extreme. Mike: I don’t know. We’re used to it in the Midwest. They only need one spot. I could see somebody saying, “How many people besides Mike are really going to get a certification in Iowa anyway?” But I remember taking the test. I was the only one in the room. I got done. And then there’s that moment where you’re like, “Okay, I think I’ve answered all the questions.” I click Submit, and then you’re expecting a result, and at the time, I think it asked you a followup question, “How was your certification experience or something?” I was like, “I don’t know. Just tell me if I passed or not.” I was like, “It’s great.” And then I clicked and it was pass, and I remember I stood up and shout. Really loud. I was like, “Woo-hoo,” really loud, and I kicked the chair over and the proctor ran in. I was like, “I passed.” And she’s like, “Be quiet.” I was like, “There’s nobody in here.” I was so excited. Dana Walton: If you did 2008, you must have been one of our beta testers because the program didn’t officially launch until 2009. Mike: Yeah, I was one of the first 500 for admin and for advanced admin Dana Walton: My goodness. Congratulations. Mike: Yeah. So very exciting. So this is what we’re talking about, the new certification experience. Dana Walton: Yes. This is- Mike: Go ahead. Go ahead. Dana Walton: Sorry. I’m really excited about this product because I’ve been working on it for two years. Mike: Wow Dana Walton: And so we’re at the finish line. We’re so close. We’re about to start user acceptance testing, so I’m really anxious to see how people are responding to what we’ve built. And the whole experience that we are building is really with the end user in mind. We rethought the entire journey of what a user would experience when it comes to how they would get started with Salesforce certifications. Where would they go to find information? And we realized that it’s a really disparate journey that we offer to our users. We assume a lot on their behalf, and we wanted to roll that back and really come at it from both an expert and a beginner mindset. So first things first. It’s moving to Trailhead Academy, which is the learning platform of Salesforce, and we’re really excited because it brings a combined experience of both instructor-led training and certification onto the same platform. So when you go to Trailhead Academy, you are first introduced to both instructor-led courses, instructor-led training, and then you can also look up certifications, and you can start your journey wherever you choose. If you feel confident in your certification goal, you don’t have to take any classes. You can go ahead and get started and register right away, but if you want to brush up on some skills or if you’re net new, we also provide the learning resources on the exam pages that will help you out. And it’s not just instructor-led training. We still link out to Trailhead modules and Trailmixes, and those are curated by the certification team and aligned directly to the exam objectives. So we don’t forget the learner in all of this experience, but we bring it together in a new platform that then uses single sign-on through TBID so we can continue building that journey out for you as you grow in experience through Salesforce. Mike: Nice. I like that. I mean, the goal is the certification, but the journey is learning and understanding everything so that you not only have the certification, but you have the knowledge behind that certification. Dana Walton: And we’re building in personalization too, so it’s not just you have this certification, but it helps you figure out what’s the next one on your roadmap. So if you already have started building some skills, we’re going to use algorithms and AI to suggest new skills or new certifications for you to focus on next, because a lot of questions that we get from our users is, “I’ve done this. Where do I go to after that?” Mike: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s always the discussion around certification. It’s always the question I get is, “Where do I start?” Even with Trailhead modules, where do I start? Dana Walton: It’s a lot. There’s so much that’s offered these days that figuring out that entry point can be really challenging. We have a new format for our catalog where we also highlight exams without prerequisites, so that way we’re not sending you to focus on something that you’re not ready to take. If you haven’t earned that prerequisite, you can start at the entry level and then work your way up or stay wherever you’re most comfortable. Mike: So in your initial introduction, we talked about 83 different certs through acquisitions and just growth, which still amazes me. I thought it was 18 or 20. I was like, “Oh, 18 or 20.” No, 83. I’d love to know, when you looked at that whole family of how everything had grown organically and through acquisitions, what were some of the challenges or opportunities that you were looking to solve in this new experience? Dana Walton: I think the biggest opportunity or challenge that we were focused on is the fact that our audiences are so different. When you just look at it purely from an M&A perspective, you have Slack. You have Tableau. You have MuleSoft. You have accredited professional. All of those users come from a different experience for how they get certified, for how they maintain their credential, and then we have to bring them onto the Salesforce way of doing things, which is jarring in a lot of ways, because as you know with Salesforce, we like to do our own thing. We don’t necessarily like to follow prescribed paths, and so trying to bridge the Salesforce method versus the history that those programs have can be really challenging for the audience. And so we’re trying to be mindful in how we roll that out with the, again, challenge of the fact that we’re still going to do it this way. We’re going to try and bring you on slowly. Mike: You also mentioned that learning journey, the personalization, and I think that’s one thing where you always have to think of… And I was a learner. I still am a learner. You’re never not a learner. Where you’re trying to go and the questions you’re trying to ask. How does that personalization work for an individual who may only know the next year or two? Dana Walton: Well, with all the personalization, it is recommendations, not requirements. Mike: Got you. Dana Walton: And so we will look at the skills or the product areas that overlap between credentials and really say, “Okay, based on where you are, here’s where we think you may be going.” But it is not a requirement. It is not a checkbox that you have to complete. If you decide that, “I want to pivot and do something else,” you are absolutely more than welcome to do that, and we will still support you through that journey as well. Mike: Got you. Yeah, it’s always trying to understand where you want to go, because the platform is so big and so vast at some points that I don’t know if there’s any one person even on your team that knows everything. Dana Walton: I would not assume that at all, and I think that that’s where the community is still going to be a great resource for users because we can only tell you from our experience of what we think aligns, but somebody else may out there may say, “Oh, actually, because of this really interesting job path that I took, I had these different certifications that you wouldn’t think would overlap, but they serve me really well.” Mike: Absolutely. I believe you said at the very beginning you’re in user feedback beta testing. Dana Walton: We are about to start. Mike: About to start. Dana Walton: We haven’t officially started yet, but that is our next goal. Mike: Okay. Okay. I was going to ask you what kind of feedback you were getting. Dana Walton: Well, actually, when we first introduced this project, we brought it to our MVP audience first, because before we built anything, we wanted to make sure that what we were building made sense for them. Mike: Okay. Dana Walton: Now, they are the experts, so we had to caveat that a little bit because they know Salesforce so incredibly well, and we still had to think about the people who don’t know Salesforce that well. For instance, something that I thought was really interesting from MVPs, when we were trying to segment our certifications and show different filters in the catalog, one of the things we asked them was, “What do you focus on when you’re filtering? Is it skill? Is it level? Is it role?” And I thought it would be role or product. And they completely flipped the script on that and they said, no, they want to build skills. So whenever they’re looking at a certification, they want to know what skills that aligns to and then they’ll fit it where it needs to fit. But that’s where they are in their journey. And so we added a skills option. We put it on each certification page that this aligns to these skills to help bridge that gap of knowledge area that we hadn’t highlighted previously. We still have the ability to segment by role or segment by product, but we added this new feature as well because it was missing from the previous experience. Mike: Yeah. Funny story: when I did get back after taking the certification, I ran into my boss’s office, and at the time, as the admin, I reported to the president of the division. That’s a long story, but I ran in and I was like, “Is So-and-so in?” And his assistant was like, “Yep, just go ahead. Go inside.” And I ran inside. I was like, “I passed. I’m certified.” He was like, “Great, what does that mean?” And if it had been a sitcom at that point, the sound of all of the air rushing out of a balloon would have been made. Because it’s like, ah. But the reason I get at that is a lot of career building, a lot of what you do and skill shows through the certification. So I’d love to know how this new experience helps admins, developers, members of the ecosystem track their career and grow their career. Dana Walton: I think that is definitely something that we will focus on for the next iteration. We have not really focused on the career side of the house yet. Well, I will say that everything that we’re doing will still integrate and update your Trailblazer profile, so we’re not taking that away from you. When you have your certifications on your Trailblazer profile, that is still the source of truth or your certification history. But when it comes to how this experience directly impacts how that reflects on your career, we’re not quite there yet. I think it is a great question and a great lens to look at, but in phase one, we’re just building the brand new platform and make sure that it functions. Phase two is really about, okay, now that this is live, what else can it do? Mike: Yeah, and I love pivoting off of the skills thing, because then you can also look at adjacent skills and maybe a certification will stand out to you that you weren’t previously aware. I think I did a podcast a couple episodes ago and there’s a strategic design certification. Dana Walton: Strategy designer, yes. Mike: Strategy designer, thank you, that Melissa Hill Dees brought up, and I had no idea that certification existed. Dana Walton: Yes. And for instance, somebody may look at strategy designer and say, “I don’t think that really applies to me,” but maybe you’re business analyst, and why wouldn’t that apply to you? Just because you’re not actually the UX designer doesn’t mean that you’re not involved in the strategy of whatever project or company or direction you’re working on. Mike: So let me ask, because there’s 83 and I can’t possibly know them all. Maybe you don’t. I am hearing from you that there are certifications that also include non-technical skills. Dana Walton: Not a ton. Mike: Not a ton. Dana Walton: But there are a few. Mike: Okay. Dana Walton: Yes. So for instance… Well, I will say our certification names are going to be changing as a part of this experience. Mike: Well, of course it’s Salesforce. Dana Walton: Of course. Mike: We change the name all the time. Dana Walton: So I’m going to reference the old name right now, but if people are listening once the experience is live, those names may have changed. Quick caveat. But for instance, sales representative. That is not a technical focus. That is an end-user focus. It is about what key skills, core concepts, do you have as an end user in Salesforce that you need to be able to apply to your job? Mike: I like it. Dana Walton: Then, similar… Well actually, I would say business analyst does have some technical overlap. Even though we did take away the admin prerequisite, you still need to know some admin skills as a business analyst. Strategy designer would be another good example. It’s more knowledge-based, and not knowledge in skills, but knowledge and capabilities that you need to be able to be successful in that certification. I feel like I’m just now going through all of the different things that we offer, and I’m trying to think. You put me on the spot. Mike: Right. Dana Walton: The majority of our exams are technical-focused. The vast majority are. Mike: But I think it’s also good to know that there’s non-technical ones out there to really grow that skill. Dana Walton: I mean, this is definitely something that most of your admins, I don’t know if it applies to them, but for folks who are not admins but are aspiring to be, getting started with our associate certification, so we have Salesforce certified associate, that really is not technical at all. It’s just understanding, how does Salesforce work? How does Trailhead work? And then if that’s something you want to keep growing in, admin may be the next logical path for you. Mike: Yeah. No, I’ve seen that one. I think it’s great. It also helps explain things when you have a friend that’s like, “I hear you do Salesforce. What’s that?” and they look at you. Because Salesforce is a platform, if you introduce it to most admins, they fundamentally see it as a B2B CRM platform, and, “That’s just alphabet soup you threw at me.” “No, here’s how this works.” And then once they conceptualize it, “Okay, great. A lot of people buy this?” You’re like, “Yes, a lot of people do buy this.” So it’s an actual conversation I’ve had with a friend, I suppose. Dana Walton: You’re right, because it’s overwhelming, so it’s nice to be able to break it down into digestible portions. Mike: Well, yeah. I mean, most people already assume they’re going to go in overwhelmed when you start talking about technology in a platform. “Oh, I’m probably not going to understand this anyway,” because for a myriad of reasons that they’ve told themselves, they won’t understand it. You mentioned the MVPs flipping the script on you and bringing up skills. Was there any part in the design or testing process that maybe, other than that, caught you off guard? Dana Walton: Oh my goodness. I had a feeling you were going to ask something like that. Mike: No, no. Oh, you gave me the easy one. I want to find out the other ones. Dana Walton: We have learned so much. Honestly, it’s the boring stuff, because as a part of this, we are bringing on a new exam delivery vendor, and I think the biggest learnings are transitioning away from a platform that we’ve been on for 15 years, and that’s been really hard. But I think as well, we are still trying to understand, what are the pain points that our users encounter when it comes to any part of the certification experience? Where do we need to provide more clarification, more information? And so we’re still learning. We are still figuring out, okay, so like I said before, once this is live, where do we go next? Because it is not just going to be static. It will keep growing and keep improving and iterating. I think that there are definitely more opportunities to integrate with more of Salesforce, especially Trailhead, to build out the full comprehensive journey for users. That is a gap that we still haven’t quite evolved for. We point to Trailhead, but we don’t have an integration with Trailhead yet, and so with the experience for our users and where we’re trying to meet them at their needs, I think that would be our next logical path forward, but we will need to get so much feedback from audiences as well. So hold us accountable, reach out, open cases, reach out to us in the community, because we want to hear from our users. We need that feedback, because we don’t want to assume we know what’s best for them. Mike: Yeah. I hear you. I had a question pop in my head and I’m just going to run with it because I think it’s fun. You’ve also been in the certification space for a long time, so I recently did a podcast with some hackathon participants, and I asked her a question, what’s one piece of advice you could give admins as they’re building agents? And we were talking about AI. And she said, “Well, look ahead, the next 5, 10, or 15 years. Will this still be here? And frame your decision-making around that.” And that added a lot of gravity to the situation, because is it just adding a field or is it more than that? You can spin off into that. But where I’m going, so bring the car home, Mike, AI is everywhere, and we’re still building tests that are very static questions, static answers. Do you, 15 years from now, see us or certification getting to a point where perhaps it’s more interactive with, say, an AI agent as opposed to an exam? Dana Walton: That is the million-dollar question. I definitely think that the landscape of certification is going to change. It has to. AI is so revolutionary, it completely upends the way that people experience how they learn. There will need to be a balance that we have to put in place between memorization or recall skills, which is a lot of what certification does, versus practical application. I don’t know if that practical application will involve an AI agent or if it’ll involve something more like hands-on challenges in Trailhead that are in a secure environment that can be that kind of idea, where we can still see you implement skill, actually have you go through and solve a business use case in an org, for example, or some environment that is not just you answering questions. But I am also grateful that I am not on that side of the house where I have to develop that. I just have to implement what they say to do. Mike: Yeah. No, I do think it’s interesting the way that AI is evolving, and we even see that with Agentforce, how you can really be conversational with it and actually give it more context and meaning than… There’s been times when I’ve been taking a certification and I was like, “It’s really A, B, and C, but that’s not one of the answers, and I need to talk you through my thought process. I don’t know. I’ll just put D.” That’s usually where I end up. Dana, if somebody’s listening to this and they’re like, “I should probably get on the ball. I should start thinking about certifications. I should plan my career growth,” if you were to give them advice on taking advantage of our certifications and all of that, what would you say? Dana Walton: I think that certification is a really great tool to prove the knowledge that you have. It is not the tool to learn, and I think that’s a distinction that some people don’t always grasp. And so if you are trying to learn something new, absolutely go forward and do that, but certification is not how you learn. It’s how you prove the skills and knowledge that you’ve already learned. So if you have a goal in mind of where you want to be and you’re not quite there yet, go to Trailhead, reach out to the community, find a mentor of somebody who knows that job, knows that role, or can at least help you put it in a format that is approachable and has achievable goal as you work towards that and then get certified. I think so many people just jump to certification, and that’s not always the right path forward for them at that time. But once you are ready, please get certified. We love our certified audience. Come see me at Dreamforce. If you have questions, I’m there to help. Mike: Oh, that’s good to know. I mean, to me, I remember 2011, standing on Dreamforce stage and talking about the importance of certification as just a common language. It’s a way to, in the community, connect with other people and say, “Well, I’m a certified Salesforce admin,” or, “I’m certified advanced,” or now I suppose you probably have Data Cloud and Tableau, MuleSoft. Dana Walton: You do. Mike: And it’s also a great way to introduce yourself in a short way that somebody goes, “Wow, MuleSoft. You’re certified in that. I would like to know more. Please tell me,” as opposed to trying to explain all of the tools and products that you use. Dana Walton: I think that’s a really great lens to look at it from as well. It starts the conversation. It’s not the end of the conversation. Mike: Right. Unfortunately, we’ve reached the end of our conversation, Dana. Dana Walton: Ah, look at that. Mike: So thank you for coming on the podcast and giving me a great segue at the end. Dana Walton: Happy to. This was a lot of fun. Thank you, Mike. Mike: Big thanks to Dana for helping us get through the maze of certifications and understand all of the behind-the-scenes changes that are coming in the new Salesforce certification experience. I love how the new experience keeps the learner front and center while helping you chart a clear path forward. That’s something I’ve always wanted. If you found today’s conversation helpful, be sure to share it with a friend or a team member. Maybe somebody you know is looking to get into the Salesforce ecosystem or get certified. And remember, you can always find more resources on the admin site at admin.salesforce.com and connect with us in the Trailblazer community. So until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud. The post How Salesforce Is Transforming Certification for New and Experienced Users appeared first on Salesforce Admins .…

The Salesforce Admins Podcast

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Building With Agentforce and Flow: A Developer’s Hackathon Experience 33:03

6 weeks ago33:03

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Melissa Hansen, Co-Founder and Principal Architect at HiFi Consulting Group, RAD Women Curriculum Lead, and Salesforce MVP. Join us as we chat about her journey from fixing printers to developing an agent-powered scheduling tool in the TDX Agentforce Hackathon on Team MH 4 . You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Melissa Hansen. How Melissa started her career as a Salesforce Developer Melissa started her career at a nonprofit, where she was the go-to person for troubleshooting tech issues. “You just become the person who’s best at fixing the printer, and then fixing the database, and then, before you know it, you’re a database administrator,” she says. These days, Melissa is a developer, a consultant, and a Salesforce MVP for her work with RAD Women. She’s also a member of Team MH 4 , and I brought her on the pod to hear what building a conference scheduling agent in 16 hours was like from the dev side of things. Building an agent-powered scheduling tool at the TDX Agentforce Hackathon Melissa is not someone who wants to be up until midnight coding, but she was so excited about the solution they were building that it was worth the sacrifice. Like most people on the team, it was her first time making something with Agentforce, and this was a great use case to learn more about it. One of the biggest challenges for Melissa in going from building with code to grounding an agent is that the output is nondeterministic. In other words, if you run an automation, you expect to get the same results every time you give it the same data. Agents don’t work that way, they’ll give you something slightly different every time, and so you need to account for that in how you build and test your solution. To code or not to code, that is the question We don’t always have a chance to talk to devs on the pod, so I wanted to hear what Melissa thinks about admin and developer collaboration. For her, the most important conversation to have is around automations. Flow is a powerful tool for automations, but it’s not the only game in town. Melissa’s seen her share of scary flows for things that would be fairly straightforward in Apex. For her, the biggest determining factor is who will maintain the automation after it’s up and running. As no-code tools like Flow and Agentforce continue to improve, it’s especially important for admins and devs to help each other out. There are so many more great insights from Melissa on where Agentforce is headed and how to work with developers, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you can catch us every Thursday. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: When Collaboration Meets Agentforce: The MH4 Hackathon Story Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Transforming Conference Scheduling With Agentforce MH 4 ’s presentation at the TDX Hackathon Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Melissa on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Bluesky social Mike on Threads Mike on X Full show transcript Mike: Ever gone from changing printer ink to writing Apex code? Melissa Hansen has and she’s here to tell us all about it. So, today’s episode, I am chatting with Melissa Hansen, Salesforce MVP, RAD Women Curriculum lead and longtime champion of nonprofit tech. We talk about her journey from, well, fixing printers to architecting agent-powered scheduling tools and what she learned working on the team of MH to the Power of Four at the TDX Hackathon. Now, she shares her thoughts on building ai, designing for users, and what every admin should ask their developers. So, you don’t want to miss this one. Now, be sure to follow this podcast on whatever platform you listen to so that you never miss an episode. And with that, let’s get Melissa on the podcast. So, Melissa, welcome to the podcast. Melissa Hansen: Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here. Mike: I’m excited. This whole series of talking to the MH to the Power of Four team has been such a thrill because I know we’ve done hackathons… by the time this episode comes out, we’ve done a hackathon at TDX in India. I know there’s a virtual hackathon we’ve done. I feel like we’ve done hackathons everywhere, but it’s such an interesting perspective because I was at TDX in San Francisco. I saw some of the teams working, but to sit down with each of you, and hear the perspective and what happened through your eyes is such a neat way of hearing the story and getting the full vibe of what’s going on. So, before we get into that though, Melissa, tell us a little bit about yourself, and what you do in the Salesforce ecosystem and how you got on this Power of Four team. Melissa Hansen: Oh, sure. Yeah, I’ve been in the ecosystem for quite a while now. I think just over 15 years, which blows my mind. I was on a path that I think a lot of nonprofit listeners would be familiar with, which is I was in-house at nonprofits starting at the very beginning of my career and slowly moved into the technology side of things. You just become the person who’s best at fixing the printer, and then fixing the database and finding the data. And before it, you’re a database administrator. And I was at an organization that was adopting Salesforce in 2010. Yep, 2010. And that’s how I got started. I began as an admin and I was at an organization who had some really incredible developers who were really encouraging and mentored me as I started to pick up Apex and the developer side of things. And I just loved it so much. I loved the platform and that has really been my whole career from then becoming a developer. All the way to, in 2020, after being a developer at a nonprofit for about almost 10 years, a coworker and I split off and started our own consulting group to work with other nonprofits and build out Salesforce solutions. So, that’s been my overall arc. Also, I’m a Salesforce MVP Hall of Fame, and a big part of that is because of my work with RAD Women Code. Mike: Ah, a connecting Factor. I’ve talked to a lot of RAD Women coders. Melissa Hansen: Yes, it’s such a cool organization. I was a coach in the very first round of RAD Women. Angela Mahoney, who Is an incredible connector in our ecosystem, and a lot of your listeners may know of her, invited me to coach. And I had some feedback on the curriculum and ended up taking over the curriculum as this wanted to happen. Yeah, so I’ve been with RAD since the very beginning. I work on the curriculum. And it’s one of my very favorite things that I’ve done, just working with so many women and non-binary folks who are on that same developer journey I was, and who want to learn more about coding. I know this is an admin podcast, but this is our target audience for Rad, too. Mike: So, let me talk about that for a second because I feel like that’s an unnecessary division that people have sown. There’s admins that know how to code. Just because you code doesn’t mean you have to identify as a developer. Melissa Hansen: Yeah, no, and that’s a great point. And I think in Salesforce in particular, there’s a ton of overlap because the declarative automation tools have become so sophisticated. If you’re building some of these more complex, complicated flows, I mean you’re a developer. Mike: And vice versa, too. So, how did you get connected to the other MHers? Melissa Hansen: Yes, I do all of them from for quite some time, mostly through the community. I think they’re all MVPs as well. Marisa is a developer. I think she does more on the consulting side now outside of development. But Michelle and Melissa are both people who are at a lot of conferences. And we’ve just been really good friends and colleagues, but we’ve never actually worked directly together prior to the hackathon. So, that was a really cool opportunity. Mike: Yeah, it brought a lot of people together. Melissa Hansen: It really did. And I’ll admit that I had initial reluctance because I am not a person who wants to be up until midnight coding. Not really my happy space. And so, I was a little, I don’t know, and I’ve got a lot of other stuff to do. But boy, Melissa Hill Dees is very good at convincing you. And I was happy to be convinced because once we started talking about what we might build if we were to do this, we’ve found some really great use cases. And that’s what I got really excited about actually, building something. Mike: Yeah, I mean, I talked with Melissa on previous episodes and Marissa about the conference scheduling app, which I’ve worked a lot in scheduling environments with Dreamforce and TDX, and it sounds like such a cool thing. And so, obviously we don’t need to get into the app, but it’s an agent that helps you schedule. I would love to know, because you mentioned developer. And that’s the cool thing is I love that each of you had different roles in this team. And yes, some were overlapping, but because Melissa did call you out, she’s like, Melissa, it sounds like I don’t know who I’m talking about. Melissa Hansen: I know we didn’t use last names- Mike: Melissa called Melissa the developer, like what? Melissa Hill Dees specifically was like, “Are you going to talk to Melissa Hansen?” I was like, “Yes.” She goes, “Well, you got to talk to her about the developer perspective.” And so, I want to start there. From your developer’s perspective, what was the most technically challenging or exciting part of the agent that you built? Melissa Hansen: Well, it was the first time I really got hands-on building an agent outside of things like trailheads or quick little workshops. Which was a big draw for me because of our clients, we don’t have anybody who’s actively using it yet. But we want to be a little bit ahead of them and able to guide and lead when the time comes. So, I was super interested in that part. And I much more motivated when I have a real use case. I wander off if things are too theoretical or sort of like, oh, just learn it for the sake of learning it. I really need something I’m trying to get done. And I loved this use case because we have a similar one for RAD Women about matching up all of our schedules for our coaches, and our learners and our Zoom rooms. So, I could see on the other side of this some really cool applications. I think the most challenging thing conceptually is getting used to non-deterministic results. Mike: Tell me. So, before you get into that, because that’s awesome. Please tell me what non-deterministic results mean. Melissa Hansen: Yes, definitely. So, typically when you’re writing code or configuring a flow, a lot of times you have inputs and you have outputs, and you have the automation in the middle. And so, if I am taking in a set of inputs, let’s say a few contacts, and maybe some opportunities, and I have some logic in the middle, and then I want something to come out the other end, maybe some contact roles, or who knows? And if I’ve configured everything, and I give it a set of data and I get a result, I expect that if I give it that same set of data again, I will get the same result every time. I could run it a hundred times, I’ll always get the same result. Whereas with these agents and large language models, it’s not giving you the same response every time. It’s trying to come up with the right… if you could see me, right in quotes, the “right” answer for you, but that answer might change, ordering might change, the way it presents, it might change. And that is a very different paradigm than what I’m used to. Mike: Yeah, I think one of the things early on when we were talking Agentforce with customers and admins was it’s not a bot. You’re not plugging in if A then C, if B then D. You build upon it as opposed to having exactly follow the same path. So, now I get what you mean. Melissa Hansen: And learning how to give it instructions and natural language. When you’re building out these topics, I’m starting to tell it things like, your job is to match these speakers with these time slots. And then you’d start to fill things in of you have to pay attention to the dates of the conference, and leave an hour for lunch, and make sure there’s a passing period and just the series of instructions. And it almost feels weird to just be like, I’m just going to put it in a sentence. That’s no syntax. Okay. Mike: Because math class, when you got to the story problems never felt like math class. Melissa Hansen: Well, maybe to me it did. Mike: I know. Math class always felt like math class to me. Don’t kid me. So, I would like to know in the hackathon, I mean it’s a finite time. And part of that is just you can’t run a hackathon forever because you could run out of people and there’s only so much that we want to see built. I’d love to know in that time, how did you prioritize what to do, what to configure, what to simplify, what to include, what to exclude. Melissa Hansen: Yeah. I mean, I think the goal that I have personally and I think that we shared as a team is we wanted to get to something at the end that was… we knew it wouldn’t be perfect in a final product, but something that was really, really working. And it’s fine if it’s messy. It’s fine if we have things we want to go and fix later, but we wanted something that was working. We obviously wanted to learn the tool set and we wanted to work together. So, those were the defining goals that told us where we wanted to go. We had discussed what our use cases were and we had a loose data model in mind, and then we divided and conquered. We had Michelle and Melissa Hill Dees were working on loading data from their respective conferences. And Marisa was participating in that so that they could be getting the data model and the data loaded together. Well, I was working a little bit with Melissa on actually building the agent. What does this thing even look like? The time crunch is real. One of our first questions was like, okay, how do we get the data once we’ve got it in the org accessible to this agent so that we can ask it to do all this stuff? And I think I started to build a flow. I don’t build nearly as many flows as I write Apex. Mike: I mean, that’s what I think every time I go to build a flow, oh, I feel like I’ve not built a flow in, I don’t know, 16 minutes now. Melissa Hansen: It’s different. So, I tried for a little bit and then I was like, given the time crunch, you go to the tools you already know and that you’re fastest with. So, at a certain point I was like, I think what’s going to work best is if I just build some Apex methods that pull the data query for the data, filter down to what we want, and then conserve that up to our agent. And one of the things I’m curious about as, because we’re going to continue to develop this thing and hopefully get it to the point where it’s a useful product for lots of conference organizers. Mike: Oh, that would be cool. Melissa Hansen: Yeah, I’m super excited. So, we have a little bit of a roadmap here, but I’ve got a couple of parts of it that I’m most interested in or that I have the most to do. And one is how much of the work I did was unnecessary, because you go to your comfort zone. I was like, let me write Apex that does this, gets this data, feeds it back. I was like, did I even need that? Can I configure the agent to get the data on its own? Or can I do it in a more lightweight way so that it’s more flexible? Because I definitely went in with my own biases and tool set, and as I was building the agent, I was like, okay, I would think about this differently next time. Mike: Well, that leads me to the one question I was thinking about, which is… and I always do this with everything I build. There’s always one part of it that I’m still thinking on, that I’m still like, if I had time, I would do X. One part of that are you still thinking about? Melissa Hansen: I’m thinking about the user interaction piece. So, our final product was a conversation that you were having within that sort of agent panel. And you say, “Okay, figure the schedule out for me.” And it would output a table, but right in the chat that would show you who’s scheduled for which room. And you don’t have enough space really in that chat window. You could ask it to make modifications, but it’s not always clear what’s happening. So, it’s just not the right visual paradigm. And so, the thing that I’m thinking about is getting it into a flow, into a screen flow so that the user- Mike: [inaudible 00:15:55]. Melissa Hansen: Oh, sorry. Mike: No, I was just thinking this through. Melissa Hansen: Yeah. So, that the user could launch their screen flow, maybe answer a couple of questions up front, and then we invoke the agent to do the really cool automated scheduling template for us, feed it back to the flow, and then the user has a table that they can actually work with and make modifications to make adjustments here and there. I’d really be able to see the whole thing in a way that makes sense before they sort of agree and commit, and then save that scheduling. Mike: Yeah, I think one thing for us to consider is you go and listen to this podcast when I was talking to Marissa of five years from now or 10 years from now, we’re going to say, “Oh, wow. So, that’s like back when Agentforce, they just had a prompt window.” Back when we talk about Salesforce. Do you remember when the interface was WYSIWYG, and we could finally drag and drop fields onto a page and see them? Melissa Hansen: Oh, yeah. Mike: [inaudible 00:17:00] years ago. Melissa Hansen: It has changed so much. Yeah. I was at a presentation recently and somebody had a screenshot of not just classic but classic from a long time ago. Mike: With tabs. Melissa Hansen: Yes. And you’re just like, “Oh, yeah, that used to be my every day.” Mike: Yeah, yeah. Yep. And that used to be new. Melissa Hansen: Yes, it was [inaudible 00:17:23] new. Mike: Wow, that’s the future. I was going to joke, you mentioned your gateway to becoming a developer was learning how to change printer ink, perhaps don’t do that or do. I think it’s interesting, I have a friend. I asked him, “How did you get into…” he was a consultant and he’s now a CIO for a company. I said, “How’d you get into all this?” He goes, “Well, when my company got Salesforce, I was really good at Facebook.” And I think even another 10 years from now, it’s going to sound really interesting for a bunch of people when they ask us, “How did you get into Salesforce?” I was good at Facebook. I knew how to change the printer ink. Melissa Hansen: How are these things related? Mike: Help me out. But I do think, so I came from a non-technical background. I came from a sales background. I don’t want to say a lot of admins, but a fair share of admins who really embrace the non-technical side of Salesforce that use the standard platform tools, understand it at its base level and look at things differently than perhaps a would who’s been trained in code or looks at the platform first. I’d love to know, what’s one thing you wish admins asked when working with developers? Melissa Hansen: We’ll see if this answers your question. I think the conversation, especially since flow has become so robust, so the conversation between admins and developers is often, not exclusively, but a lot of times about what is the best place for this automation to live? Because there’s way more things now that really could go either way. You could do it in a flow, you could do it in Apex. And I think there’s sometimes a bias on the admin side to if you can build it in flow, build it in flow. And I have definitely seen some Flows that are a little bit scary. And not scary because the person who built them didn’t know what they were doing, or did it poorly or anything like that. It’s just the sheer complexity and management of a flow to do something that in some cases would be very straightforward if done in code. And so, I think especially in an organization that has code already, that has the ability to support programmatic automation, having good conversations about what is… not just can it be in flow, but should it be in flow? And that is going to continue to change as features come in and shift. But I think that’s a fun conversation that’s ongoing. And it goes both ways because my bias is probably to put more things in Apex than I should. And so, I need someone to say, “Actually flow’s getting really good at that. We should look at it again.” Mike: Well, and it’s the maintainability, too. If I was an admin, and I’ve worked with consultants before where you sit down and it’s, well, who is going… at the end of the day, who’s going to maintain this? Because for some stuff we could have built a trigger. They’re never going to be able to maintain a trigger. And so, if you build it in flow, it’s harder, yes, but it’s maintainable. Melissa Hansen: Yeah. Yeah. And that who’s going to be in charge of it? Is one of the biggest questions because absolutely, if there isn’t a developer on staff or on retainer than taking more time to build a flow to have a chain of declarative automation. Yeah, that’s going to be the right answer. Mike: Yeah. So, I’ll ask you this. As a developer, how do you see AI tools like Agentforce changing what the day-to-day is for admins and developers? Melissa Hansen: I mean, it’s changing so much so quickly. Most of my actual hands-on usage is with Agentforce for developers. That tool set and related AI tools that are geared towards developers have already changed my day-to-day so much. I have conversations with them about code that I’m refactoring, or writing tests. Or a very common thing for me is I’m going into a new environment and now I can have the agent summarize what is happening in these classes and give me something that would’ve taken me quite a lot longer to just try and pour through, and read and synthesize on my own. It gives me a good jumpstart. And you’re starting to see that more on the declarative side as well, where we’re going to have agents where you can say, “Summarize this data model for me,” or, “How are these objects related?” And my favorite would be, what automation is happening after I save an opportunity to have something that could look across your system, summarize both declarative and programmatic automation and say, well, there’s this flow that fires, and these two triggers and a field update. You’re like, wow, [inaudible 00:22:50] a bit of a much harder question to answer. And it feels like that’s the direction we’re going in. It’s like this little assistant that you have that you can ask all kinds of questions. Mike: Yeah, I mean, because there’s such a big platform behind it. So, I want to ask the next level question for one of those. Internally on our team, I did a ChatGPT demo for some of our marketing people to show them, here’s how I do this, and essentially, here’s how I use this to make me a better writer. And one of them very astutely asked me like, “Mike, how many hours a day do you think you save?” And I don’t know. I mean I use it extensively to help me write and edit better to compare. It’s easy to compare big blocks of sentences and paragraphs together. What I’m getting at for you is you mentioned having it and having AI compare code and tell you what’s going on in the class. How long would that have normally taken you? What’s the time saving you’re getting by just dumping in some code and saying, “What’s going on here?” Melissa Hansen: I mean, it’s definitely on the order of hours. It very much depends of course. If I’m looking at something pretty straightforward, take me a few minutes. Or just made it a lot more pleasant potentially. But for something that is pretty gnarly and I need a lot of context to even get started, it can absolutely be, I’m like, wow, that helping me refactor and summarizing things cut two hours off of what would’ve been a six-hour project. Mike: Holy cow. Melissa Hansen: Possibly more. And there’s some days where I don’t end up needing a lot of that, and things are as usual. And then there are some days where it’s like, that would’ve taken me twice as long. Because you still need to validate with telling you. We’re not at the point, if we’ll ever be, where you could just say, “Refactor this class, compiled, I’m done.” Mike: Right. Well, I mean that was exactly one of the use cases I was going through with our team. She pointed out, she’s like, “Yeah, but that’s still not right.” And I was like, “I know. That’s the human in the loop part.” And I told her, I go, “That’s where you’re the human.” And we kept rewriting a sentence and it just never got right. It got really good, but it just never got right. And I was like, well, that’s because it’s not there yet, but it got us 80% of the way there. It’s like Google Maps. When you put in an address and it’s like when you get here, you just got to figure out the rest of the way how to get to the front door from the parking lot. Melissa Hansen: Yeah, address is on the wrong street, but actually the entrance is over there. But yeah, figure that out. Mike: Yep. Yep. One of the questions, so this came happenstance during the Melissa Hill Dees episode. And when I asked it, I realized I got to ask everybody this question. So, I asked everybody this, if you could build an agent to help every admin do one thing better, what would it be? Melissa Hansen: That’s a good question and I really need to think about it. I’d probably go to data model. Mike: Oh, all right. Melissa Hansen: Yeah, something that is aware enough of your organization, what it does, packages you’ve got, the objects you’ve got, that when you’re solutioning and you’re proposing, maybe we’re creating some new objects or maybe it’s existing objects and we’re going to create some fields. Something that can ride along and really help you make sure that the way that you’re architecting that object in those fields makes sense. And I would take it a step further and have it really help with the self-documentation side of that as well. Mike: Yes. Oh, my God, Somebody finally said it. I was hoping somebody would say it. You said it. Melissa Hansen: I think those labels, those descriptions, the help text. It’s always been helpful and important to have those things for different people coming in and learning the organization for helping users. But as we use more and more agents, it becomes even more important because those tools are using your documentation, that metadata to understand and give you better answers. So, I can ask it, “Hey, give me all the contacts who are this and this kind of member,” and it can give me a good answer if the fields that tell you what that means and what kind of memberships are, if those things are annotated and filled in, it’s going to give me a really good answer. If they’re not, it might be guessing and it might pull an old field from a package we don’t use, and give you a really wrong answer. Mike: I would totally use your agent and ask me, based on the data architecture I’ve given you, can I build this report? Melissa Hansen: Oh, that’s a good one. Mike: Because we all have an Achilles heel. Reporting is my Achilles heel. And for as much as I’d love getting reports out, I’m always afraid when I’m architecting an app, that I’m building it in such a way that I’m not going to be able to get the reports that I want. I would love that. So, I would love to use your agent to be like, okay, before we commit this, I’d love to have it say, “Here’s the reports you can build and give me some sample reports.” Melissa Hansen: And that’s such a great example as a time saver too, because typically that’s always a validation step after you’ve built, can we get the report? Can I build the report? But if you can answer that question before you implement the data model and make all those connections, you can fix things a lot earlier and a lot quicker. Mike: Or have to make all of those really crazy custom report types. Yeah. That was it. Melissa, this is a fun conversation. I’m glad you came on and gave us some perspective on the agent that you guys built and some of the things you’re working on. And I had a million more questions, but- Melissa Hansen: Time is finite. Mike: Time- Melissa Hansen: Our time is finite anyways. Mike: Time like the hackathon isn’t on our side. But I think it’s really cool what you guys built, and I would love to see something like that come out. I think for people that have listened to the podcast and they’re like, “Oh, it’s a conference schedule thing.” Yeah, I don’t think we’d use that. Folks, it’s like meetings. If you’ve ever got two or three people, you got to schedule meetings for this thing, there’s so many relatable uses for it. Melissa Hansen: Yeah, absolutely. I can think of a lot of places where this would come in handy. And even, I think just learning it is such the case that once you get into it and see how it was built, then you start to see the other applications. It’s like, oh, but we could use this for managing our conference rooms or a whole variety of other things. Once you see the kinds of questions that can answer for you, given data that would take humans a long time to munch through and align. Mike: Yeah. And you only had a finite amount of data to work with as opposed to what an organization may have after even a few years. Melissa Hansen: Right. Yeah, there’s some rich data sets out there, which is great because yeah, we’re going to continue to develop this thing and hopefully have a useful tool that other members of the community can utilize. I’m thinking about taking it to the next community sprint, and seeing if we can get some more help and more use cases over there because such a cool, cool event. Mike: Yeah, everybody needs to share out those use cases. Let’s end on a high note. What’s one word your teammates would use to describe you? Melissa Hansen: It’s a hard question. Let’s go with analytical. Mike: Oh, I feel you were very analytical in coming up with that answer. Melissa Hansen: That’s fun. Mike: That’s great. Well, Melissa, thank you for being on the podcast. This is wonderful. I feel you’ve done a lot to inspire people to just sit down and be curious with an agent, and see what they can and can’t do, and just be creative with it. Melissa Hansen: Well, cool. Thank you so much for having me on, Mike. This was really fun. Mike: Big thanks to Melissa for joining us and sharing her thoughtful insights, not just on building with AI, but on collaborating across roles and using tech to empower others. If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with a fellow admin or developer. And don’t forget, you can always find more resources at admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript of today’s show. Be sure to connect with other Salesforce admins in the Trailblazer community. And as always, until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud. The post Building With Agentforce and Flow: A Developer’s Hackathon Experience appeared first on Salesforce Admins .…

The Salesforce Admins Podcast

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Transforming Conference Scheduling With Agentforce 23:30

7 weeks ago23:30

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Marisa Hambleton, Chief Delivery Officer and Founder of MH2X, and a member of the Salesforce MVP Hall of Fame. Join us as we chat about her experience in the TDX Agentforce Hackathon as a member of team MH 4 and why clean data is essential for AI. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Marisa Hambleton. The intense Tetris of conference scheduling Marisa is a co-leader of the Phoenix Developer Group and the lead organizer for Cactusforce, a community conference for Salesforce Developers and Architects. In other words, she knows how much work goes into scheduling speaker tracks and getting everything organized. Juggling speaker availability and placing them in the correct conference rooms without double-booking anyone takes up hours of time behind the scenes. “It’s an intense game of Tetris,” Marisa says, “and that’s a gross understatement.” So she was thrilled when Melissa Hill Dees asked her to join team MH 4 and build a conference scheduling agent for the TDX Agentforce Hackathon. Why data hygiene is foundational for Agentforce With only 16 hours to build a working agent, the team had to split up responsibilities so they could hit the ground running. Marisa’s focus was on the data, which they brought in from Cactusforce and Midwest Dreamin’. Marisa’s biggest takeaway from her first time building an agent is that data quality is foundational for any work you do with AI. That needs to be the starting point. Even though they were working with a relatively small data set, they had a lot of cleanup work to do if they wanted their agent to work right. How to get your org ready for advancements in AI If you’re looking to implement Agentforce in your org, Marisa recommends starting with the Salesforce Well-Architected Framework. We’re only scratching the surface of what will be possible with AI, but you need to do everything you can right now to make your data easy to work with. There’s a lot more great stuff from Marisa Hambleton about data hygiene and what’s next for Agentforce, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you can catch us every Thursday. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: When Collaboration Meets Agentforce: The MH4 Hackathon Story Trailhead: Salesforce Well-Architected Framework Cactusforce Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Marisa on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Bluesky social Mike on Threads Mike on X Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt: Welcome to the Salesforce Admin’s podcast. Today, we’re chatting with Marisa Hambleton, Chief Delivery Officer at MH2X, and a longtime leader in the Salesforce ecosystem. Now, this is part two of the MH to the Power of Four episodes where we talked to the team that participated in the TDX Hackathon about the agent that they built. Boy, I got to tell you, if you ever organized a community conference or just wrestled with a gnarly spreadsheet, Marisa’s insights into scheduling and automation using Agentforce technology we’re really going to hit home. I love that she’s going to walk us through how she and the Hackathon team built the agent from her perspective and what she did. Plus, she shares why clean data and a well-architected mindset are must haves for any admin looking to build for the future. Make sure to follow the podcast so you don’t miss out on more great conversations like this one. With that, let’s get Marisa on the podcast. Marisa, welcome to the podcast. Marisa Hambleton: I’m glad to be here. Mike Gerholdt: You are the second MH of the MH, I believe it’s MH quad, right? Isn’t that what Melissa Hill Dees told me? It is MH to the Power of Four. Marisa Hambleton: MH to the Power of Four. Mike Gerholdt: Power of Four. Marisa Hambleton: Yes, or MH four. You can just read it MH Four, but MH to the Power of Four, to the Fourth … Mike Gerholdt: I know, but I like the Power of Four. It sounds a little more strong. Marisa Hambleton: Yes. Mike Gerholdt: We talked with Melissa Hill Dees on the last episode about the TDX Hackathon and the agent that you built, but just per chance, if somebody didn’t listen to that episode, can you tell us a little bit about, well, first, who you are and what you do, and then a brief overview of that project that you built at the Hackathon. Marisa Hambleton: Sure. Marisa Hambleton, I am the Chief Delivery Officer of MH2X. That is my consulting firm. I’ve been in the ecosystem over 15 years. I’m a Salesforce MVP Hall of Fame, and I am also the Phoenix developer, one of the leaders. I am the lead organizer of Cactus Force, a community conference for Salesforce developers and architects. My role in Cactus force is one of the things that led me and Melissa to connect around this agent that we built for the Hackathon. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, so tell me a little bit about that agent. Marisa Hambleton: Yes, so one of the difficulties in organizing a conference is scheduling, and most of our conferences we have different volunteers and we’re part of a team of organizers who come together to put these conferences on for the community, the trailblazer community. Once we get all our submissions, we go through our speaker selection, we’ve got all these speakers, and we have all of the space, the conference space, and we’ve got to put the two together. It’s calling it a intense game of Tetris would be a gross understatement because there’s always somebody that maybe if they’re flying in from across the country or if they have some other commitment, or for whatever reason, they cannot go into the slot that you put them in. We plan out our agendas and the program. It is very time-consuming. I can’t remember exactly the number we came up with, but we had written out on our submission at the Hackathon how many hours, because we all got together as organizers of conferences and ask, okay, us individually, the time we spend on the scheduling is quite extensive and we hadn’t even really accounted for then our co-organizers, who then also spend time and we go through as a team for each of the conferences, how much time we spend on scheduling. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, no, I hear you, schedule. Oh, man. The intense game of Tetris because you think you have everything put together and then a speaker comes back and says, “Oh, by the way, I’m flying in on such and such date,” and you’re like, “Ah, I just had everything figured out.” Marisa Hambleton: Yes, yes. You have room size limitations or all of a sudden you’re coming into the event and you need a bigger room or just all the different things of scheduling a session. We thought that this was a fantastic idea for the agent. The other, my partners in this effort, this Hackathon, Melissa Hanson, she’s one of the RAD Women founders, and the scheduling that she does for RAD Women is at a whole other level because we are Michelle Hanson, Melissa Hill Dees and myself. We’re scheduling speakers and rooms. Melissa Hanson is scheduling coaches with the cohort members and time zones and time slots across many weeks. That’s a whole other, it’s just highly complex. Our solution, our agent that we wanted to build really was able to handle all, at least at a minimum, let’s try to get one set in because that is very time-consuming for the RAD Women team. That was how we came up with the idea. Melissa Hill Dees has a wonderful heart for nonprofits and the community and helping organizations, and we all agreed that this was a well-worth effort to spend our Hackathon time on. Mike Gerholdt: No, I can. Tell me about that process of creating all of the things that you needed to get done to build that agent. I’d love to know, was there any happy accidents you’d repeat again? Marisa Hambleton: Gosh, I can’t think of happy accidents. There was this fast and furious effort on all our parts. There was little things that I feel like they were very Hackathon specific. The org setup, right, where everybody had a job. Melissa Hansen was our Apex Rock star. Melissa Hill Dees, the visionary. She built the agent before and then Michelle Hansen and I were primarily the data part of it. There were some of the org settings that we were like, “Oh, wait a minute. We’re trying to use this object and it’s not turned on in the org.” I had gone in and was doing some of the initial configuration. I spun up the org and was just doing that initial setup, adding the rest of the team as users and making sure everybody had all the correct permissions, doing some of the admin admin things for the project. We’d be chugging along, getting things taken care of and all of a sudden, you hit a roadblock or Melissa’s like, “Oh my gosh, I’m getting this error.” Okay, let’s all get it, jump in and troubleshoot. I feel like I didn’t have time to really think of, I guess the reflection for me was more of the experience and not the technical part. I feel like the technical part, especially with something like Agentforce is, it’s still new and I’m very much in the exploring like, oh, what else can it do, versus like, oh, okay, I’ll know better not to do this next time. I was more on the support side. I would ask Melissa Hansen those questions because she definitely had things that she’s like, “Okay, now I know.” Mike Gerholdt: You talk about the experience. I’d love to know, what did you learn about agent design based on that Hackathon experience? Marisa Hambleton: The data modeling, the data and the data modeling really are, you have to have that first. That has to be foundational. One of the things that comes to mind is the well-architected, the Salesforce well-architected. Cactus Force is very much, we work really hard as an organization. Our organizers work really hard to always be at the forefront of what Salesforce is doing so that we can prepare content to share with our attendees and with a Salesforce well-architected, that’s really become foundational to our conference, but those principles for Agentforce, for this Hackathon and really having that mindset of an architect of like, “Okay, you’re starting from the ground up and you’re building that theoretically you’re modeling out what do we want the data to do? What kind of results are we looking for,” before we ever start building anything. That would be the thing that played a biggest part of the design for me outside of the mechanics of it. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, no, it’s good. You mentioned you were in the admin role on this team and support. Let’s talk about just giving Salesforce admins some general wisdom and your thoughts on innovation. What do you see as an admin best practice that you think gets overlooked but has a really big impact on an organization? Marisa Hambleton: I would stick with data. I think that data really having, again, thinking in a well-architected mindset, but as an admin, really thinking about your data. Before we started recording, we were chatting about Michelle Hansen and I being organizers with her, with Midwest Dreamin and myself with Cactus Force. We needed a data set to work through this project and make sure that we had some, we could make up fake data, but we decided we’re going to go and use the real data because it’s already public, it’s our speakers and our sessions and we did a lot of data work. It is looking through our data and really asking ourselves, “How clean is this data? How reliable is this data?” It really forced us to see something that we as organizers probably wouldn’t have looked at just a regular scenario, but building an agent that relies on this data, well, we have to make sure that that data is, it’s clean, it’s correct. Even though, again, we were working with a very small data set, which was our speakers and sessions and rooms that are available for the conferences and we did. We made up some fake rooms to mirror that, okay, your conference and my conference, we have different spaces. Mike Gerholdt: Sure. Sure. Marisa Hambleton: It did. It came down to the quality of the data that we were feeding it that the agent could then work with and give us back something that was usable of, here’s our space, here’s our list of speakers, and feed it all that information. I think as an admin, I think an admin really has the ability to be at the forefront of that conversation in the business. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, a lot of it, people get hung up on what the tool can do, but you forget data is what powers everything, all of the responses and how good those responses are. You kicked off, when we started the podcast, you talked about the years that you’ve been in the ecosystem and how you’re in consulting. I would love for you to give admin some advice on how you help balance innovation with maintainability when you’re building on the Salesforce platform. Marisa Hambleton: I love that question. I am a big look to the far future person. Mike Gerholdt: Okay. Marisa Hambleton: I always think, is this something, if my team is working on a solution, is this solution going to be part of this organization for the next 10 years, 15, 20 years? I think really far out there to challenge. It’s fun to be innovative and it’s fun to use all the new, coolest, latest technology, all the newest features, but what is it going to look like in 10 years? Is it still going to look the same? Is it still going to be needed? Is the company still going to be around? I think it challenges me. It challenges my team to really think ahead that far so that you’re not just looking at an immediate, oh, I need this field. It’s like, okay, why? I think that is typical, I think, with admins, especially their experience they’ve been in the ecosystem is to question and maybe put a BA hat on and question that and then be innovative within that vision. I think with Agentforce, it is revolutionary and I believe that it will revolutionize a lot of business. I believe Salesforce believes that as well, but it’s also allowing people to do more of the work that matters. Back to our community solution for scheduling, as organizers, these are passion projects. We’re volunteers. If we used to spend 10 to 20 hours on scheduling and now we can spend 10 minutes on it, it’ll give us more time to spend on our conference, on more valuable activities, giving our sponsors more attention, giving our attendees more attention, and just being able to be present with the people that are there and letting the agent take care of the busy work that we would prefer not to do. I think that that also comes back to the innovation and for myself, I guess a principle of innovation is create a solution that’s again, not only innovative, but lasts a long time and is maintainable and flexible and well-architected, using those buzzwords. Mike Gerholdt: No, I mean, that’s exactly the whole … I love what you said, think about the solution being there for the next five or 10 or even 15 years out. I think we’ve seen in tech a lot of features and innovations come and go. I don’t know that what we’re seeing with AI is a short-lived thing. I really think we’re on the early days of it and it’s only going to continue to grow, mostly because it’s only got everywhere to go in terms of what it can use and how it can help us. I would love for you, thinking big picture, can you give an elevator pitch that you would provide to a business leader on why every admin needs to understand Agentforce? Marisa Hambleton: Build for the future. Yeah. Building for the future. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Marisa Hambleton: I know. Mike Gerholdt: Your elevators are really fast, by the way. Marisa Hambleton: Yes. Mike Gerholdt: Built for future, and we’re there already. Marisa Hambleton: Build for the … Yes. Build for the future. Mike Gerholdt: Holy cow. We don’t have to worry about Keanu Reeves coming to save you or anything. Nope, we’re done. Marisa Hambleton: Yes. Well, I love tech. I always have loved tech, and I think that working in technology is always a forward-looking, always looking to the future. A lot of change and AI, Agentforce, that’s part of it. Sometimes it is scary. Skynet, is it possible? Okay, maybe because anything’s possible. Likely, I don’t know. Again, coming back to the data conversation, if you don’t have the data for something and there’s still a lot of humans involved. I think people forget that there’s still a lot of … I mean, it took four of us, four humans to build the solution. There’s still a lot of humans involved. It’s a helper. It’s a helper. It’s like a workmate, a little digital workmate. Yes, build for the future. Mike Gerholdt: I like it Marisa Hambleton: As a company, if I was in front of my customer, I’m like, “Build for the future.” Mike Gerholdt: One of the things that I asked Melissa Hill Dees about, and I stumbled upon the question, and I think now, I have to ask all of you. If you could build an agent to help every admin do one thing, just one thing better, what would it be? Marisa Hambleton: Oh, gosh. Well, I’m going to keep coming back to the data thing. Mike Gerholdt: Okay. Marisa Hambleton: I was having a data hygiene conversation earlier today, and I feel like users in any system, but in Salesforce, you want your sales forecast to be correct. You’ve got to have that data and that hygiene, so a little agent that’s always running in the background, that goes the step beyond your validation rules and any other automation that you might have running. Let’s say you have a very large organization and you have people that are just doing a lot of different things. I think that data hygiene would really go a long way. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I’m thinking of, did you ever watch The Jetsons as a child growing up? Marisa Hambleton: I did. I did. Mike Gerholdt: Remember Rosey, the maid that would go around. I’m envisioning every org needs a little Rosey. Marisa Hambleton: Yes, yes. Mike Gerholdt: It’s got to make those little sounds. Remember, she would just go around and dust. By the way, it was crazy. I don’t even know what year it was, like 2450 or something, but apparently, robots still use feather dusters. Marisa Hambleton: Yes, yes. Yeah. I think that’s probably more general. I would say the next thing is building the flow with voice commands and just talking through. This is, again, I’m thinking far into the future. Mike Gerholdt: That’s okay. We’re in the future. Marisa Hambleton: Yeah. It’s like my plane and I know there’s some AIs that can, it’s like mid-journey. You’re giving it this. You’re like, I have this. I’m looking at data from the last 10 years and I need to build an automation that pulls in quarter by quarter the delta of some of my projections or something big and just talking through the use cases and the scenarios, and here’s what I want to automate. Then, okay, here’s your automation. Here’s the flow. You wanted to write it in flow, and here’s the apex. Mike Gerholdt: I like that. I think that would be … I’ve often thought of if I could just click on a record and write a path that I need it to go, that would be really cool. We talk about that now, it’s 2025, and who knows? Somebody’s going to resurrect an old recording of this podcast maybe in five or 10 years and be like, “Wow, that was the future for them.” Marisa Hambleton: Yes. Mike Gerholdt: Yes. It’s going to be like us talking about pencil sharpeners. Marisa Hambleton: Oh my gosh. I still have an old manual pencil sharpener in my garage that I’ve had forever. Mike Gerholdt: I mean, they were commonplace in my school. Marisa Hambleton: Yes. Now, I don’t have as many pencils that need sharpening anymore. Mike Gerholdt: I was going to say, I couldn’t name a pencil in my house right now. Let’s end on a fun note. What’s one word your teammates would use to describe you? Marisa Hambleton: Oh, energetic. Mike Gerholdt: Okay. I like that. Marisa, thanks for coming on the podcast. This was insightful and it’s such a neat way to get a view into what a team did and worked together in the Hackathon and the problem they solved, and I really like getting each of your perspectives. This is a fun little series of sitting in and having these conversations. Thanks for coming on and sharing with us. Marisa Hambleton: Oh, thank you for having me. Mike Gerholdt: Big thanks to Marisa for joining us today. Such a thoughtful perspective on innovation, data and what it really takes to build something that lasts. I love the thinking ahead into the future. If this episode got you thinking, really, I’d like for you to share it with a fellow Salesforce admin or, hey, how about a conference organizer? Bet they could ask you to build their first agent for them. You never know who might be wrestling with their own speaker schedule. Bet it’s somebody. For more tips and tools, head over to admin.salesforce.com. There, you’ll find links and a transcript of this episode, and be sure to connect with us in the Trailblazer community. Until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud. The post Transforming Conference Scheduling With Agentforce appeared first on Salesforce Admins .…

The Salesforce Admins Podcast

1
When Collaboration Meets Agentforce: The MH4 Hackathon Story 27:15

8 weeks ago27:15

27:15

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Melissa Hill Dees, nonprofit Salesforce consultant and Salesforce MVP. Join us as we chat about how her TDX Hackathon team built a conference scheduling agent from scratch in 16 hours. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Melissa Hill Dees. How to help nonprofits define goals for Salesforce Melissa majored in computer science back when you still programmed with punched cards. However, she didn’t really start her career in tech until 2008, when the nonprofit she was working for started using Salesforce. She was hooked on how she could help these organizations use technology to do more with less, and quickly pursued an MBA in digital entrepreneurship. One thing that came up in our conversation was the difference between how nonprofits and businesses approach Salesforce. In particular, Melissa emphasizes the importance of defining measurable goals for any tech project so you have common ground when prioritizing requests. As the capabilities of Salesforce continue to grow with Agentforce, admins need to help their organizations maintain focus. Building an agent in 16 hours at the TDX Agentforce Hackathon Melissa is fresh from the TDX Agentforce Hackathon, where she put together an all-women team of Salesforce MVPs called MH 4 . Why the name? Because everyone on the team has the same initials: Melissa Hill Dees, Michelle Hansen, Marisa Hambleton, and Melissa Hansen. Together, they had 16 hours to make a working agent, but Melissa was the only person on the team who had built one before. However, from their experience as Dreamin’ event volunteers, they had a pretty good idea for a problem they could solve: scheduling a conference. Finding the right-sized room for each talk when there are several concurrent speaker tracks gets complicated, especially when people are presenting more than once. It’s a problem that everyone on the team could rally around. As Melissa explains, building the agent wasn’t the hard part. It was setting up the backend to make sure it had the right information and permissions to accomplish its goal. Why admins should get the Strategy Designer Certification If you’re looking to learn more, Melissa highly recommends getting the Strategy Designer Certification. You can learn tons of valuable tactics, like consequence scanning, that help you align a group of people around an idea and allow everybody to feel like they have input. Finally, Melissa emphasizes how crucial it is for admins to start learning Agentforce now, even if your organization is hesitant. “Admins have to see the big picture,” she says, “so start learning it now so you don’t have to play catch-up when everybody comes around and wants to use AI.” Be sure to listen to the full episode for more from my conversation with Melissa, and don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you can catch us every Thursday. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Certification: Strategy Designer MH 4 ’s presentation at the TDX Hackathon Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Melissa on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Bluesky social Mike on Threads Mike on X Full show transcript Mike: You’ve got a dream team when everyone’s name starts with MH, and you’re building a functioning AI agent in 16 hours while laughing and having fun at it. This week we’ve got Melissa Hill Dees on the pod, and the vibe is totally Agentforce, nonprofit tech, and I even talk about the future of Salesforce admins in the era of AI. And we also talk about the little thing that she built at the hackathon. It’s just a scheduling tool that is really cool for all the dream and events. But let me tell you this, if you’ve ever said, “I’m not a developer, but …”, you’re going to feel right at home. So with that, let’s get Melissa Hill Dees on the podcast. So Melissa, welcome to the podcast. Melissa Hill Dees: Thank you, Mike. I’m so glad to be here. Mike: Well, I’m glad to have you on, and we’re going to kick off … I’m going to call it a few weeks of MH4s. Melissa Hill Dees: I love that Mike: All of the MH4s because you guys were such a cool little group that got together for the hackathon at TDX, which we’re going to talk about. But before we get into that, Melissa, which spells out some of the MH4, tell us a little bit about yourself. Melissa Hill Dees: Oh goodness. So a little bit about myself. I found Salesforce in 2008 after becoming a stay-at-home mom for a little while and not knowing what to do with myself and trying to help small businesses improve what they were doing from a customer relationship management side. I didn’t really get very deep into Salesforce then but a couple of years later, I went to work for a nonprofit and they had Salesforce and I became the classic accidental admin. Which was ironic considering that back in the dark ages when dinosaurs still roamed the earth I had majored in computer science. Mike: That’s back when they were inventing dirt, because I was also back in that era too. Melissa Hill Dees: They were literally inventing the internet. When I went to university, we still had punch cards. You remember punch cards? Mike: Uh-huh. Melissa Hill Dees: So I felt like I had come full circle. But I really loved what Salesforce was doing with nonprofits and giving them the opportunity to use the best technology that was out there to make a more impact, to improve their mission. And so the more I worked in nonprofits, the more I saw that they thought differently. They didn’t think like a business, they thought like a nonprofit, and they didn’t always use Salesforce like a business, they used it like they thought a nonprofit would. So it was really interesting. I studied. I did a lot of research and went back and got my master’s in digital entrepreneurship because I really wanted to understand the best ways to help nonprofits leverage technology because they have to. That’s the only way they can do more with less. So that’s really become my passion. How do we make it simple, easy, welcome even. Everybody fusses about technology, but it can do so much that we don’t have to do, so we have time to do the things that we really want to do. Mike: Well, that’s a great intro. Holy cow. Could you ever have imagined back in 2008 that you would be at a hackathon building an agent? Melissa Hill Dees: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Again, once upon a time, I could write a little Cobol or a little Fortran, but I’m sure I can’t even do that anymore. And certainly not a developer by any stretch of the imagination. And you say hackathon, I immediately think developers. Mike: I know. Melissa Hill Dees: That who goes to hackathons, right. But I had learned early on from attending the nonprofit community sprints that you didn’t have to be a developer. You didn’t have to even be a hardline admin. If you wanted to help in a sprint, you had input and you could help in so many different ways. So it made the hackathon a little less intimidating. Mike: Absolutely. So let’s get into that. First of all, I need you to explain the MH4s. What’s the MH4s? Am I saying it correctly? Melissa Hill Dees: Well, I say MH to the fourth. Mike: Oh, okay. Sorry. MH to the fourth. Melissa Hill Dees: Yeah. Because we’re exponentially awesome. And ironically, a couple of things were going on with that. One thing, ever since I’ve been involved in the ecosystem, I’ve been involved with the women in tech groups and WITness Success and all the different groups working with women in minorities. And especially when it comes to AI, I am just adamant, everywhere I speak, I tell everybody they need to get in there and help train the AI. And so I wanted almost as a social experiment to have an all female team for the hackathon. And I started thinking about what we would need on that team. And I knew we’d need a good developer. And so Michelle Hansen is who immediately came to mind. I knew we would need somebody who could write flows at the drop of a hat, do the adminning, and of course Michelle … Michelle Hansen. I’m going to get confused here. Michelle Hansen is obviously that person. She’s so good at those sorts of things. We also needed someone that was more of an architect view. And Marisa Hambleton runs Cactusforce and does that work and so I invited her. And then I was the only one of the group that had actually built an agent before we got to hackathon. Mike: Oh, wow. Melissa Hill Dees: So it was a really exciting opportunity. And it was funny that I didn’t consciously think we need everybody named MH, initials MH. But it worked out that way. And in fact, I was going to ask Maham Hassan to be on our team as well, and she couldn’t because of the rules and regulations about folks out of the country. Mike: Okay. Melissa Hill Dees: We would’ve been MH to the fifth power. And five was all you could have. But I’m so glad I did that. It was everything I dreamed it would be. The collaboration between us. None of us have ever worked together. We’ve never been even employed by the same company, let alone in the same room to sit down together and have 16 hours to go from zero to a working agent. And I loved it. We talked and we talked and we talked. We got all the consequence scanning done and the road mapping done and everything done because we just talked and talked and talked and talked. And we didn’t have to go back and do that after we built the product. That was built into the way we thought and building the product and building the agent. So both Melissa and Marisa and even Michelle did a little bit. We’re all like, “Oh, I don’t know if I want to go to a hackathon. I’ll have to take two days out of my work.” And I really twisted their arm a little bit and I said, “We could do something really awesome.” All of us are involved in community driven events, and we talked about could we do scheduling? What could we do? And then when we got there, of course actually, that’s what we built, was a scheduler for presentations based on the rooms that they would be in based on what we had available. And literally took what … Marisa said took her and Steve about 40 hours combined to do, and the agent does it in seconds. Mike: Oh, wow. So tell me … You’ve teased it out. Tell me a little bit about what you built at the hackathon. Melissa Hill Dees: Yeah. It was great. So we started thinking about what … All of our driven events we’re all volunteers. Nobody gets paid to do those. And so it was a situation of what can an agent do for us that will save us time? And that’s one of the huge tasks. After you actually go through all the submissions for presentations and you decide which ones you want, then how in the world do you schedule them in these different rooms? The tracks are running at the same time. You’ve probably got four or five different tracks running at the same time. Somebody may be presenting more than once. You don’t want them to overlap. The rooms, depending on how big they are and what else they’re being used for. So it just seemed like a really great idea for an agent. And we decided to build it. After we were done we thought we probably could have done this with a flow, but because we had that 16 hour time constraint, Melissa Hanson whipped out a … She said, “I can do this with code.” We’re like, “Okay. Do it. Because we want a product when we leave here and we can update it later.” So literally … And the demo that we had to make to submit for the hackathon is on my LinkedIn page and shows you how quickly it goes to, you’ve already got all that data in your Salesforce instance, you’ve got the speaker, the session, the titles the rooms, and you hit that agent and it creates a schedule for you. Mike: Yeah. No. I believe me more can relate to what you’re asking that agent to do as somebody that’s involved with a lot of the events and stuff that Salesforce does. Melissa Hill Dees: And the best thing, I think for us about the hackathon, and it was ironic because the very next day I was invited to an executive listening session. And I said, “I would’ve come to TDX just for the hackathon.” I learned so much. And I’m a very kinetic learner. I need to do it. I don’t need you just to show it to me or tell me about it. I need to do it myself. And because I had already built some, that’s why I knew that the hard part was not building the agent, the hard part was writing the code if you needed something invocable there or getting the permissions correct on the back end for the agent itself and applying all of that. So deep dive into that agent. We were learning from each other and with all of our different skill sets, we’re all MVPs, but each of us has such different skill sets. And then we could really actually create something that would work in the real world, say in less than 16 hours. To me that’s amazing. Mike: Oh, absolutely. You’ve done so much to encapsulate that weekend, and I’ll point people to that video on your LinkedIn page. I’m wondering if you could bottle up one moment from that weekend and share it with the world, what would it be? Melissa Hill Dees: Oh, goodness. The word that comes to my mind again and again and again is the collaboration with those women. And there was not arguments. And there could have been, and that would’ve been fine because it’s okay to disagree. But we didn’t. We really aligned on what we were trying to accomplish and we knew what we wanted to do. And that level of collaboration was just like I say, everything I ever imagined something like that would be, Mike: Yeah. Let’s transition out of that because you’ve been in the community since we’ve invented the cloud. I say that because I’ve been around since 06 so we’ve been there a while. And I started, the first question was, could you imagine an AI agent now? How do you see the Salesforce admin role evolving in an AI forward world? Melissa Hill Dees: Ooh, that’s very interesting. I am fascinated by AI and how we can leverage it to do things. I think I really believe even now, admins need to at least learn how to use the agent and how to build an agent. Because right now it’s relatively simple to do, but I think about 2008, Mike, what was there of Salesforce? It was one product. It was one thing. I could learn it then. There were times when I could tell you that I felt like I knew everything you need to know about Salesforce. Now, no way. With all the product acquisitions and the different clouds and the different architectures and the different information, there’s just no way possible that I can be an expert at Field Service and at Marketing Cloud and at Slack and at all those things. So I always think of admins like architects. They have to see the big picture. And with the AI I think that’s important. Start learning it now. Don’t wait. Even if your company says, “Absolutely not. We’re not going to use AI. We don’t trust it, we don’t like it, but start learning it now so you’re not trying to play catch up when everybody comes around and is using AI.” Mike: Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. And to your point, I remember as an admin trying to pass my certifications and thinking, oh, but my company doesn’t use Service Cloud. I don’t know Service Cloud. And the certifications … Forced is a bad word to say, but required that I learn it. And I remember thinking to myself, but it’s good that I know it now so that when the company’s thinking about it, I’ll be ready. Or at least I’ll have a base foundation. And a lot of that is realizing where you sit between technology and strategy within an organization. So my question to you is, what’s something you wish more people understood about the intersection of being a Salesforce admin and strategy? Melissa Hill Dees: I think that Salesforce admins probably have the best view of what the strategy might be like. I think it’s important. I love the strategy designer certification. Mike: Tell me about that. Melissa Hill Dees: Yeah. If you’re an admin and you haven’t looked at that, you should because it’s less technical and more people management. And one of the things that I learned studying for that and from the design team from Adam Doti’s team was consequent scanning. I’d never done that before. And it was so fantastic to do that and be able to align a group of people around an idea. It wasn’t a threatening way. It wasn’t, I’m the boss and we have to do this. It wasn’t that I’m the admin and we have to do this. It was an opportunity for everybody to have that input. And I think that’s so important for admins. They have so many jobs and they’re not just the technical side of things. They’re the ones that get the complaints because the button didn’t work or it’s not where it would be easy to use or whatever, the report’s not pulling correctly. And it’s just so much responsibility when you do Salesforce admin and do it really well. That’s why I recommend that to everybody. I don’t even think you have to have your admin cert. I don’t think that’s a prerequisite. But it’s definitely worth doing and learning. At least do the trailhead on it. Mike: Yeah. No. I didn’t even know about now it’s on my list. Thank you. Melissa Hill Dees: Yeah. Mike: So you brought that up because the admins are responsible for a lot and they do often have that first line of reaction or giving some sort of an answer to a user and looking up an issue, whether that was something they found in discovery or not. But I’d love to know, when you think about best practices, is there something underrated that has maybe made a huge impact in one of the organizations that you’ve managed or worked on? Melissa Hill Dees: That’s a great question. There are a lot of things that are underrated. And right now what I’m encouraging … Especially if you’re a sales organization, encouraging folks to do is to use the agent summary function in sales. Working in a implementation partner, you don’t always talk to the customer when they’re in the sales process. You may not even talk to them when they’re in the delivery process, so you really don’t know them that well, but you’re going to write a customer success story. Well, how do you go back and capture three years worth of work or three years worth of interactions? And I’ve seen it done with the agent summary. And to me, that is the most impactful thing from an ROI. Do you want to pay me to spend five or six hours trying to track down information for something or do you want to pay me for writing a customer success story? So if I can get that summary at the click of a button, then I can write the success story, then I can write five success stories, six success stories, whereas I’d only be able to write one in the same timeframe if I were having to do it all manually. That’s just a huge thing, I think. Mike: And you always bring it up. There’s so many underrated things because there’s very powerful things in setup that sometimes get overlooked. Melissa Hill Dees: The design. The user design. There are a lot of ways to improve it significantly, and most people don’t take the time to do that. And you talk about user adoption, we all know that that’s the easy route to user adoption. It doesn’t matter how complicated it is on the backside, I just want to click a button. And we don’t think that way always as an admins, and we are the ones that would do that. Mike: No. Absolutely. You think about keeping up on technology, and you often talk about technology as a tool for social good. I’d love to know how do you keep that front and center when building in Salesforce? Melissa Hill Dees: Well, personally, I love the V2MOM. And you’re probably going to think this is crazy, but I use it with customers to suss out what the important aspects of any project we’re working on are. Something that we can set up a goal, make it a measurable goal, and that makes it so much easier to start fleshing out requirements and user stories and you turn it over to delivery and they’ve got metrics to build against. So thinking about with nonprofits, if you want to double your online donations this year, maybe that’s your goal. Then we build a new donation interface in Salesforce or in an experience and then create the report as well to be able to track that so that we can see did we accomplish that? And I don’t know if you make it purple and they’re like, “No. It needs to be pink.” And you say, “Well, so is Pink going to help increase the number of donations?” And if they say, “Okay. Let’s put that in the parking lot. Let’s go to phase two with that.” But they may say, “Well, it has to be pink because we’re breast cancer, and so pink is our signature color. People won’t even recognize us if you don’t do pink.” Then yes, it probably would help increase the donations. And so that’s worthwhile to include in that. Just helps not get out of scope, but to be able to focus on what they’re really trying to achieve before they get to the end of the project and then go back and say, “Well, was this a successful project? Did we build something good in Salesforce?” Well, who knows? Mike: You said a lot. And you actually answered my next question because I do think a lot of … I was going to ask you about an admin superpower, and I think you brought it up, which is really having that critical eye and being able to look at how easy is it to use the thing that I just built, and does it align with what we’re using it for? Melissa Hill Dees: Right. You have to ask why. Why is my favorite word. And the five whys, that’s part of the strategy certification too. But customers don’t … And I say customers. Whether they’re internal customers, users, or if you’re a partner and working with external customers, they don’t always know what they want it. Like children. You never say to a child, “What do you want to drink?” You say, “Would you like milk or would you like juice?” And so understanding their business and what they’re trying to accomplish I think is critical to being able to help them and then asking why. The best example I have of that, we were in Prague, my husband and my daughter and I. I was speaking at CzechDreamin a couple of years ago, and we’d been there about 24 hours and my daughter came to me and she’s like, “Mom, there’s nothing left to see in Prague.” Mike: Wow. Melissa Hill Dees: I was like, “Why would you say that?” It’s a great old city. There’s tons to see in Prague. She said, “Well, there’s nothing left in walking distance.” I was like, “Okay. So why don’t you take public transportation? You’re a huge one to use public transportation.” She’s like, “Well, I can’t read the language.” And of course know Czech is not even our alphabet. So she was really struggling with that. I said, “Okay. So why don’t you take a Lyft or an Uber?” And she said, “Because I’m out of money.” So that was what she really needed. It wasn’t that there was nothing left to see in Prague, it was that she didn’t have the money to get to the places that she wanted to go to see the things she wanted to see in Prague. But you don’t get that unless you get to the root of what it is they’re trying to accomplish. Mike: Yeah. Wow. It’s like reaching the end of the internet. No you didn’t. You didn’t reach the end of the internet. Boy, we covered a lot. I’d love to go back. Just one thing on agents as we close it out. And this has been lingering with me. I think maybe since I’ve got all the rest of the MH4s coming … MH to the power of four coming up. Maybe I’ll ask him this. If you could build an agent to help every admin do one thing better, what would it be? Melissa Hill Dees: Understand the error messages in Salesforce. Mike: Oh, I like that. Melissa Hill Dees: In fact, a partner and I have been working on this. It’s not an Agentforce agent. We started it before Agentforce came out. But again, because admins speak a different language than developers do, and they both speak different languages than users. And so what we’re working on actually looks at your metadata, tells you what the problem is and speaks to you based on your role. I do. I think that that’s the most time consuming challenge that admins face. You get that error message that says, “If this error persists, contact your Salesforce administrator.” It’s like, I am the administrator. Mike: I love getting that message with the administrator. That’s me. Don’t you know that’s me. Melissa Hill Dees: And it gives you no helpful thoughts at all. And now that there’s an agent in the help, that’s fantastic because used to, I’d be like 57 tabs later and I still didn’t have an answer to fix whatever the problem was that I was getting that error message. So yeah. That’s what I would build and I am building. Mike: Okay. Well look at that. I asked the question that’s already stuff’s in flight. Melissa Hill Dees: Right. Mike: Melissa, this is a wonderful conversation. You need to come on the podcast more often. Talk about nonprofit tech and equitable technology. I feel like that’s a whole other podcast. Melissa Hill Dees: It is. It is. And so important. So, so, so very important. Mike: Yeah. Absolutely. And I’ve done podcasts before, but asking why … I love your example of you didn’t see everything in Czech. You’re just out of money. Melissa Hill Dees: Right. Mike: That was great. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast, Melissa. Melissa Hill Dees: Thank you. Mike: Big thank you to Melissa Hill Dees for joining us and sharing her journey of nonprofit tech advocate and AI hackathon hero. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to share it with a fellow Salesforce admin or a community member, maybe both. For more great resources, of course, head on over to admin.salesforce.com and be sure to check out that trailblazer group and let’s hope Melissa is working on building that decoding error messages agent, because I think I’ll be the first in line when that launches. Anyway, until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud. The post When Collaboration Meets Agentforce: The MH4 Hackathon Story appeared first on Salesforce Admins .…

The Salesforce Admins Podcast

1
Level Up: The Admin’s Action Plan for Thriving in the Agentforce Era 39:14

9 weeks ago39:14

39:14

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Dorian Earl, Salesforce Admin and Founder of Development Consulting Partners, LLC. Join us as we chat about the 5 steps admins can take today to lead the charge in the Agentforce era. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Dorian Earl. Admins are at the center of the Agentforce era I always love having Dorian on the pod because he has an amazing origin story. He started out as a traveling sales rep for medical and dental equipment. He had to keep track of over 100,000 products and 300 clients, all in paper notebooks, until one day he left his Franklin planner on the roof of his car and realized he had to find a better way. That’s when he started looking into a new digital CRM platform called Salesforce. These days, Dorian helps organizations with digital transformation through Salesforce, and he sees admins as the linchpin for driving organizational change in the Agentforce era. In fact, he flagged me down at a recent event because he was so excited to share his 5-step action plan for how Salesforce Admins can lead the charge on AI. 1. Build awareness beyond the buzz While most people have talked to an LLM by now, Dorian has noticed that most of his clients don’t quite grasp what it could mean for their organization. Admins are in a unique position to translate the buzz into action. Start by educating your teams, surfacing practical use cases, and bringing the conversation into team meetings. This isn’t about replacing people—it’s about making everyone 10-20% smarter, faster, and more capable. 2. Prep your data for Agentforce AI is only as good as the data you give it. And we’re not just talking about client data, though that needs to be in a healthy place. As Dorian points out, consumer-facing agents need to know things like your operating hours, company values, and brand voice. Prepping your data for Agentforce makes it easier to try new features and build something that works. 3. Identify the quick wins Admins don’t need to wait for long-term projects to start making an impact with AI. Agentforce comes with ready-to-use features that drive value today. Dorian points to two in particular: Record Summaries: AI-generated account overviews save time and provide instant context, especially for reps managing hundreds of accounts or taking over a book of business. Quick Reporting: Need to know how many leads are in New York with a certain status? You can just ask. No more report-building marathons—admins and users alike can get insights on demand. These tools aren’t just time-savers—they’re credibility builders. They show stakeholders the value of AI quickly and easily without much heavy lifting. 4. Find internal processes to improve The biggest thing that should be on your radar is how Agentforce can overhaul internal business processes. There are so many places where an internal-facing agent can save clicks and smooth out a workflow. Dorian brings up the example of processing a return. An agent can take care of all the little steps, like creating a case, logging information, and authorizing a refund, instead of that being a multi-person business process. 5. Lead the AI transformation Admins are no longer just behind-the-scenes builders—they’re transformation leaders. You understand the org’s data, its pain points, and its goals. That makes you the ideal person to customize and scale AI across departments. As Dorian puts it, success with Agentforce isn’t just about features—it’s about alignment. Help your teams adopt AI by showing them how it can support their goals, simplify their day-to-day, and elevate their performance. There were so many great tips in my conversation with Dorian for how admins can thrive in the Agentforce era, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday morning. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Keeping Processes Fresh in Salesforce with Dorian Earl Salesforce Admins on YouTube: Agentforce Decoded Trailhead: Einstein Work Summaries for Service Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Dorian on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Bluesky social Mike on Threads Mike on X Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I’m thrilled to welcome back Dorian Earle, founder and CEO of a thriving consultancy that has over 450 clients and just a massive wealth of Salesforce experience and knowledge. Dorian has been the Salesforce ecosystem for nearly two decades. He started as a sales rep who needed a better way to track his deals and opportunities and really turn that into a career empowering companies to embrace better CRMs and smarter systems. Now in today’s episode, we dive into Dorian’s five steps to prepare for Agentforce and AI. Now, from understanding the buzz around AI to implementing quick wins and long-term strategies, Dorian shares invaluable insights to help you, the Salesforce admin, and/or organizations you work for stay ahead of the curve this year in 2025. Now, of course, before we jump in, I want to make sure that you’re following or subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so that you never miss a great episode like this. New episodes drop every Thursday morning. That way you’ve got them, boom, right on your phone before you head off for your dog walk or your commute to work. So with that, let’s get Dorian on the podcast. Dorian, welcome back to the podcast Dorian Earl: Though this is an absolute pleasure more than you know and good to see you again at all of the events. So good to see you and good to chat with you again. Mike Gerholdt: You’re one of the people that I’m happiest out in the world and we get to run into each other at different events, and you and I are such easy people to miss out in a crowd. Dorian Earl: Well, I don’t know if that’s the case. I’m the tallest person. You have the best beard and the most charismatic smile. Everybody who sees you go, literally. Mike Gerholdt: I don’t know about that. Dorian Earl: Yeah, well, yeah. When you walk past, and for the listeners who don’t hear this, Mike had walked past us at the World Tour and two people at the table said, “I don’t know who he is, but he has to be somebody.” I said, “You don’t know who Mike Gerholdt is?” And so you have a reputation. I’m surprised there’s not three people following you carrying your briefcase and just kind of handling all of it. Mike Gerholdt: There used to be. I say I’m kind of in my late ’80s John Travolta stage of Salesforce celebrityism where I’m doing the really bad B movies and nobody knows who I am. Dorian Earl: But that’s not true. Mike Gerholdt: I’m hoping for the next Pulp Fiction level role to come up and then I’ll be dancing around like a Santa Claus selling Citibank cards and stuff. Dorian Earl: I was going to say, if you just come out with a good costume, which at every event there are people with a really good… And dance moves, I guarantee you, you’ll be more relevant. Mike Gerholdt: And don’t forget, I got to shave my head. Travolta had that whole time where he shaved his head too. Dorian Earl: Ah, that’s true. I would just tell you, you should keep yours. You got good hair. Mike Gerholdt: I think so. Dorian Earl: You got a lot happening. You got a lot happening. Mike Gerholdt: You know what everybody who subscribes to the podcast didn’t want to listen to? Dorian Earl: What’s that? Mike Gerholdt: Was all of that conversation. So let’s talk about something that’ll provide business value to our customers again, and that is getting ready for Agentforce and AI. And when you and I ran into each other, well, to be fair, when you beelined through a hotel restaurant to find me horsing down my chicken fingers at the bar, you had this wonderful thing, you were like, “Mike, we got to talk about this on the podcast. I have these five things that I’m helping companies do to get ready for AI.” And I said, “You’re right.” So Dorian, let’s get into that. But let’s start off just because sometimes people don’t listen to all of the episodes of the podcast. What do you do? How did you come to be in the Salesforce world? Dorian Earl: Yeah, so I started almost 20 years ago as a sales guy. I needed a way to track my deals and opportunities, and if anybody’s around in the mid, I’m not going to give my age, in the mid 40s, we all used Franklin portfolio, Franklin Company Planners, and I would leave them at my client’s office and set them on top of my car and drive off and there goes my pipeline and all of my stuff and I couldn’t do that. So kind of being a forward-thinking salesperson, I said I need to have a way that I wouldn’t lose my notes, my deals, my opportunities, everything I had worked hard to build. Then I went to purchase programs and databases and lo and behold, I found a web-based CRM called Salesforce. That was 20 years ago. That was really became my secret sauce, Mike. I was an average salesperson and getting good, but really my secret sauce was organization and to be able to stay on top of deals. And in my line of work as a salesperson at that time, we had over 100,000 products to keep track of. So what kind of promotion was going on? Who needed what? What was going on? I was a sales rep in the medical dental supply space. So we had a lot of manufacturers and four or five different manufacturers for each line. Like gloves, we had five or six brands of gloves and masks. So who had the promotion? Which one did my customer like? Oh, my doctor liked the left-handed glove from Crosstechs or from MedTech or from all those kind of companies. And I had to keep all those things straight because I had 300 plus clients. The doctor would like one and their front desk would like another and the assistant, that kind of… And so all those things became really difficult for me to keep track of and I needed a better way to do that. And so lo and behold, I purchased Salesforce for myself, started to get some success. The down economy hit and I was of the few people that I could actually forecast my sales to my boss. I can go in and say, “This client mentioned this to me earlier on in the year. I think we can close them if we do these things.” I was one of the few people at our branch that could do that. Long and short of it, that grew to me going independent, started my own firm and then working with other companies, help bring in their sales or their product in the market. It was always, “Hey, I can help you lead your sales team, but you need to have a database or CRM.” Again, 15 years ago, it was, “I have this in some spreadsheet or somebody in our office has this in a spreadsheet.” And I said, “You need to have one, a better way to track your sales and deals.” And I would tell them, “You need to go out and buy the Salesforce thing.” And so I worked in tech startup helping companies take the product in the market. One of those products was acquired by Google. And so I became a contract sales manager for Google for a while and Apple for a little bit, and that’s part of my story. And six years ago, a company actually just reached out and said, “Can you help us with the CRM and sales thing?” And then my career helping companies from the inside out versus the outside in kind of worked. And so now, I’m the founder and CEO of a company with 450 plus clients and about 20 plus team members and things are really fun. So that’s the long story short, right? Mike Gerholdt: Right, right. It’s interesting because we’ve known each other for a while and we’ve both been the ecosystem for a while and we’ve CRM and Salesforce change and add new features to the time. I think what we’re seeing now with AI everywhere, what is your level of, let’s start off with your five things, what is your level of awareness that you’re seeing with your clients on being AI ready or even having thoughts of how they would use that? Dorian Earl: Everybody knows about it. As I said, I see articles at my desk. My team is using this. There are everyday products that they are seeing now that are becoming more intelligent or adding AI. You can’t turn on a TV today every… If you’re watching football and there’s a break, one commercial will say, “This is the product with AI now.” So there’s a lot of buzz and really awareness, and now it’s starting to really be embedded into other products. What I’m finding out with our clients is they don’t understand the real impact of what this means for their business yet. They know it’s out there, but they just don’t know how to leverage that, how LMMs work, which ones to use, use cases, but they are seeing AI being embedded into their everyday tools. They are seeing email plugins, they are seeing these things and they’re starting to encounter it. So our role is really just to say, “Look, let 2025 be the year of intelligence at your company. Let’s make everybody 10% smarter. Let’s make everybody roll in your work, let’s make everybody 10, 15, 20% smarter this quarter, this six months this year.” And they’re really getting excited with that. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. It’s kind of like the early 1900s with cars. I mean, there’s how many people making an AI product right now? And I guess we’ll find out how many survive and don’t because the early 1900s, there was over 300 car manufacturers and now there’s what? 5, 10 arguably? Dorian Earl: Right. Maybe. Right, yeah, maybe. Right. Mike Gerholdt: I’m sure more, but you know. So in the five things admins can do to get ready for Agentforce and AI, you list number one is awareness. So I feel like maybe last year that was like, “Oh, we kind of need to wake up.” And most people, I don’t want to say most people, most people I know became AI aware at the consumer grade level. I think it’s another to think of AI at the enterprise level, which is where Salesforce operates because we’re an enterprise CRM. We’re operating immediately with millions of rows of records and sometimes even data lakes or multiple organizations. So I’m sure that you probably run into a few that are aware. Let’s go on to number two, which is the preparedness. Where do people fall there? Dorian Earl: They are not because one, if they are aware, and I think you hit it on the head, and I don’t want to bury what you just said. Mike Gerholdt: Sure. Dorian Earl: Really, most technology comes out as a consumer facing application to catch what’s called a user adoption, right? And I remember when I was in college and Google first launched and literally people going out and say, “You can ask Google anything and it would just come back with an answer.” Or as Amazon, you can go put in any book you want. Well, it took a few years for people to understand the business implication of having all the data on the internet to ask a question. It even took Google really by storm or Amazon if you would’ve asked them when they started what their business would look like. They didn’t know. So we are in early days, but the people that are understanding, okay, there is an entity or there is a program out there that can ingest data and then come back to you with patterns, use cases, ideas, analysis, and that could have some ramification for us as a company. So how do we get prepared to use this? And so when we start telling our clients about this, they said, “Wow, this could be really exciting. What do we do then to prepare to really turn these features on?” And so I’m going to mention this. I’m going to kind of go backward and start to go forward. This analogy I start to tell is I think it’s maybe going to ring true. So I was a previous athlete, and if I was going to ask you, Mike, “Hey Mike, my knee is swollen and it’s a little sore.” You would probably tell me rest it, elevate it, ice it. These are common things that… this is generalized intelligence, right? If my three-year-old son falls and scrapes his hand and it’s bleeding, you’re going to go wash it, you’re going to go let it air, obviously you’re going to put some things on it, you’re going to wrap it up in a Band-Aid. That’s generalized intelligence. Now, if I told you as a 40-year-old male that’s 50 pounds overweight, that played basketball at a very high level for many years, that over exercises in my yard and my knee swells probably once a month. And you would say, “Given that relative information about you, you should probably go see a doctor. You may have a micro tear, you may have tendonitis, you may have some other things. All I did was I just gave you further background and relevant information versus general. And that’s exactly how AI works. Most people are just going asking it generalized questions and getting generalized answers. But the more relevant information you can give AI, just in general, through prompting, then it can come back and say, “Based on information you told me and the background and the person and this issue, I’m going to recommend these things.” And really AI in general is as good as the data you give it. And so one of the things we are telling our clients is to prepare to use lists. In order for this to work at an enterprise level, where are all of your company data? Are you giving AI all the background you can on your company? Where would it find it? Do you have it in PDF? The origin story on your company, the history, the industry, how you service, the founders. So all of those things, the company data, the user. Tell us about the sales reps, their roles, their unique skills, the images on them. Products and services, where does that data set and how do we adequately get it into a place where AI can read it? One, if it’s not, obviously of course, on the internet, then we should put it there. But two, it should be in a place that’s up-to-date so AI can go in and read those things and answer questions. And so we just want to give it as much relative information as you can. That way, it doesn’t give general answers or general information, which of course could be issues. So we want to prepare our clients and say, “If you don’t have this, let’s start to gather it. If you need help gathering it, we’re going to help you put it in a way that AI can read it. Your company data, the user data, your products and services, your customers, and any systems you would like AI to have access to.” The good part of it is a lot of this should be in their CRM. It should already be in Salesforce. What most people don’t know is you can go into the user records and pretty much put in these custom fields about roles and background and info. And obviously, you can fill out information on the company. This is actually the good part, what a lot of people don’t really know. Your company data is stored in Salesforce, your NAP, your name, address, phone, number of the business, the website, the social. We can start enriching Salesforce with your company data. Images, logos, all of those things. And so if we do that, we are really preparing AI, we’re really just teaching it. So what can we teach it and how much can we get AI to know about your company? And then this is what I call that preparedness stage, Mike. It may take people weeks to do this. They may say, “Wow, how much data should we give AI?” As much as you want given the relevant tasks. So sometimes it takes our clients weeks to do this. Sometimes we’re putting together an entire process on what do we want AI to have access to and learn on. So that’s kind of step two. Mike Gerholdt: No, I like that. I’m thinking of all of the use cases my team puts together. When we put out the Agentforce Decoded series, a lot of it is thinking from the sales or service perspective of, hey, how do you summarize this account or summarize this case. One part that you brought up that’s very salient that I think is, not to look ahead, but is like a good quick win is also what is your company about? What is your brand voice? Dorian Earl: Yes. Mike Gerholdt: What are your, kind of if you had a front door, what are your window information? What’s your address? What’s your mailing address? What’s your hours? I say that because if you’re thinking of creating an agent to help your salespeople write better emails, well, it needs to be grounded in some information that it knows what it is and it knows what company you are and how to sound, right? I think it’s always important that brands have a voice, and even the admin relations, we have a brand voice. That they’re constructing that so it’s sounding cohesive. And that can just be a simple PDF or a knowledge article that an agent could reference. Dorian Earl: Absolutely. Mike Gerholdt: A lot of things, including data cleanup is important, but it’s also where do we go to get repositories of this information that’s just kind of the basic window sticker of your company? So that’s really good. Dorian Earl: Well, and that’s that preparedness phase. Because if you do this well, now again, I’ve thought this through because as every company you work for, you start with, “Let me give you background on the company.” Mike Gerholdt: Right. Dorian Earl: And then, “Let me tell you what we do.” And, “Let me tell you who we service and who our ideal customers are. And then let me tell you about the task you’re going to be doing.” AI is almost no different. “Let me tell you about the company that you’re going to do this work for. Let me tell you about our background. Let me tell you about our products and services.” So if this data is not in a place where Agentforce or an agent can read it, then the challenge is it’s going to make it up. It’s going to make up the answer or it’s going to say, “I’m sorry, I don’t know.” And both of those items you don’t want. And so exactly to your point on brand voice, imagine a sales rep says, “I want to craft an email.” And you don’t tell the AI what the brand voice is, so then you have to prompt it. So if you can pre-ground Salesforce or your AI in this data already, then it’s that much further ahead, which is really kind of the secret sauce of this though. Yeah. Mike Gerholdt: Thinking ahead, moving on step three because we’re in a five-step program, got to get through our steps. But rightfully so, and even my team tries to do this, we try to come up with super complex use cases and stuff and really show the breadth of what some of these tools and features can do. But we all live in the real world. And in the real world when you’re a project manager, it’s what are the quick wins? What is the low effort, high result stuff that we can return? I think implementing Agentforce, we’re looking, as an admin you’d be looking for that too. So when you talk through quick wins and usage, what do you talk through as examples with some of your clients? Dorian Earl: Yeah, so this was really the thing that kind of got me excited about this because as I look at all new pieces of tech, I said, okay, who can use it and what’s the level of effort does it take to really get something out of it? And so when I turned on Agentforce and trails, one of the first trails, one of the first examples I saw were record summaries. And my mind immediately went back to, “Wow, as a sales rep, I wish I had this.” And those that haven’t seen this yet, you can literally, inside of Salesforce, pull up a record and prompt and say, “Summarize this record.” And it will read the record and it will read the related records and then give you a summary of what that record is. Now, I’m going to go back to my previous example. I was a sales rep with 300 clients. Some days my boss would say, “This is a new client, go visit them.” I wish I could click and summarize what the previous rep was doing with them in the last three, six, nine months. How do you do that? And so if you are a sales rep, this is great. If you’re a sales manager and somebody says, “You need to do an account plan for this client.” And you haven’t seen them, or a classic, the client is upset, “I want to talk to your manager.” They talk to the sales manager or service manager. And of course, we’ve all made that phone call of, we’re calling in and they say, “Please hold. I need to look at the notes.” Record summaries save us… I know you’re laughing, but even when I’m happy, I called in and I said, “Hey, I have a question.” “Hold on please, sir, I’m going to pull up your account. Let me read the notes.” Mike Gerholdt: Let me get up to speed really quick here. Dorian Earl: Exactly, exactly. Let me get up to speed. And that person skims through as quick as they can to try to answer, “Oh, I see you called in on January 6th and you were asked about this issue. Was it ever resolved?” Do you have an open case about… ” Well, you have the data sitting right in front of you. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Dorian Earl: So record summaries are the quick wins, I think at every company you can use. And as an admin, it’s great because it comes out of the box. As a user, these things are huge because if you’re working with a mass amount of records, any individual record, or again, a large amount of related records to a parent record. Cases, tasks, notes, all of those things, and related to an account, opportunities, the record summaries are huge. It’s actually one of my favorite features if I could say. That would be one of the very first quick wins. The second one, I would say quick reporting. I know it’s a little bit lower on my list, but I found this out just by accident. You can just query, you can ask AI to say, “How many accounts do I have in New York?” And it could come back based on the state that’s on the account. It will say, “You have 967 accounts in New York, you have 300 in Illinois.” Now imagine if you are the Salesforce admin, and I used to get this question, “Can you pull a list of leads in this city for me? I’m just curious.” I would get those questions all the time from an executive or from a manager or somebody. Mike Gerholdt: Oh, yeah. Dorian Earl: Now, you don’t have to ask your admin. You don’t have to go in and learn how to build a report. You can just ask, “How many of certain record do I have?” And AI can answer that question, which is pretty cool. How many leads do I have in nurture? How many leads do I have in New York? That’s in the working status? These are huge things when it comes to quick reporting. Marketing should be able to do this, sales should be able to do this. I mean, just a sales rep, “How big is my pipeline based on this product?” It could answer that question for you. So really cool. Those are just two of the quick ones I would say, which are huge. Mike Gerholdt: I think sometimes people confuse like, “Well, that should just be a list view.” Yeah, it could be a list view, unless it’s the one time you need that data or you also need that data plus something else. Because everything you were asking for, I could create as a list view. Why have AI do it? Well, because it can probably do it faster and I can also just add a quick filter to it. And it’s a one-off use case that’s just faster than creating a list view in your example. Dorian Earl: Well, yes, yes. And one of the things our clients always ask is, should I build a report for this or should I build a list view for this? Again, if you’re just doing analysis, just build the report. You may say, “Okay, there’s 900 accounts in New York.” You say, “Okay, based on that, I can assign those accounts to a person to do certain action.” To call, to follow up, to send a postcard, to do certain things, invite to an event, start targeting for this. Then you would create a list view then to take action against that. However, before you get to the action stage, you still need to do some analysis. Not every report is going to turn into a list view, something to take action on. Mike Gerholdt: And I’m sure you’re finding too that a lot of the quick wins are, the examples you gave, somebody could be listening like, “Well, that’s not going to work for me.” Right, the quick wins, I anticipate for what you bringing up are department specific and/or company specific. So as an admin, I may go to a department and show them record summary, and they’re like, “Well, but that’s not going to work for us.” Great. Well, here’s three other things that we can do as quick wins. That might not work. So record summary may be a quick win for a customer service team or a salesperson, but might be completely different for somebody else that has to do deal ops or a deal desk kind of thing. Dorian Earl: Well, you know what? I’m going to challenge your users because I’m going to ask them, send me a message on LinkedIn and tell me when a record summary would not work, would not be relevant. Mike Gerholdt: Okay, good. Please do. Dorian Earl: Because I’ve never pulled up a record of Salesforce and said, “I don’t want a summary of everything happening here.” I’ve never had it happen. I’ve never pulled up a record in Salesforce and said, “I don’t want to see everything related to it and really have that knowledge.” Now, not every single time, but I can foresee anybody that’s ever used Salesforce, you want to pull up a record and you want to know as much as you can about that record. Now, you don’t have to know everything and to take action, but I can see every user in Salesforce can take advantage of the record summary feature. That’s really my point there. Mike Gerholdt: No, it’s good. Dorian Earl: And so somebody could say, “You know what? I’m using Salesforce. I would never want a summary of a record.” I’m like, intriguing because I’ve never worked with anybody in Salesforce that would never find that feature useful. Mike Gerholdt: I don’t know. We’re going to find out. I’ve got some edge case listeners, man. There’s dark corners of the internet. Dorian Earl: Yes, please find me on LinkedIn. Now, if somebody is like a lawyer doing auditing, “Yes, I never get in there and do it.” Okay, okay, I got it. But again, I am really, really curious who would not use or who does not find that feature useful. Mike Gerholdt: So I guess my point was quick wins could be different wherever you go. I’m betting number four is the thing you probably run into a lot, which you have down as internal process improvement. Dorian Earl: Yes. And so this is what really gets people to start moving. They’re really not adopting technology for record summaries, even though it is important. I would say internal process improvement is the first place AI will show up. It’s what everybody’s talking about in articles. We are becoming so much more efficient. We don’t need to hire that many people to do this now because internal process improvement would mean you could cut tasks down from eight or nine clicks down to two. You can have AI augment the workflow or work that is being done because it is doing things on the background that would cost you time, energy, effort, all of that. This is where the big ROI is coming in AI that a lot of people do not understand. You could say, “Please create a case. Please schedule an appointment. Please create a record. Please send a sample. Please issue a return for this record.” And just speaking of the last one, chargebacks, returns. Those usually take multiple records being opened up, some analysis being done, five or six clicks, related optics, and then emails going out, approvals. AI can handle that stuff, which is really cool because they could say, “Great, this is all done for you.” As opposed to, “Okay, give me one second, let me see which order this is from. Let me see what product this was. Let me find this view. Okay, how did you pay? Would you like a return on your card?” You could say, “AI, please go in, issue a return for this item and credit it back to their credit card.” Okay, done. And so instead of eight or nine clicks, five or six minutes of downtime on a call, all those things. And in some companies I worked with, they just was one person that just issued returns, which is crazy. Now AI can do those things or create a case. So now you’re talking about imagine one person having the benefit of saying, “I can do my job and a quarter of another job.” If you have five people doing that, you really have five people working, getting the benefit of six. That’s huge. Mike Gerholdt: Wow, I wasn’t thinking about that. But your point five. So expand on this. External tasks outsourced to AI. Dorian Earl: Yeah, so what I mentioned for number four, this is where a lot of companies are a little scared to say, “I would not have AI talking to my clients.” Okay, I got it. But if you have internal process, if AI is handling, if an agent, and we’ll mention the Agentforce in this case because it has all the relevant context on your company, all the relevant context on your products and services, the people using it and your clients. You can enable it to do narrow tasks such as, “Hey, here are a list of leads.” So imagine this workflow, Mike, and then I’ll get the external case in. You would say, “Pull up a lead, summarize the record, draft an email based on the record summary and their needs for this lead.” Okay, email draft. “Okay, put the email and send it out for me please.” So that could be five or six clicks. Pull up the record, click summarize the record, click draft an email, click send the email, right? Mike Gerholdt: Uh-huh. Dorian Earl: And then move along. Or you could just say, I will have an agent. I will program an agent or ask an agent in Salesforce to do that for all of my 30 leads in the New York area. Pull up, summarize, create an email, send off. Now, if it’s watching you do it for the next year, it would’ve learned what you’ve liked, what you don’t like, what the replies are like, information to add in because it gets smarter. This is the thing a lot of people aren’t realizing with AI is that it becomes smarter over time. And so you can allow it to do these narrow tasks. “Hey, follow up with these 30 leads that were nurturing in New York and do this for me.” Those are external facing AI agents that are taking action on your behalf. And then you can say, I will have an agent for those that are interested that reply back. I have a second agent that’s just a scheduling agent. So the Salesforce Scheduler, which allows people, external people in your email to look in, look at your calendar, look at your availability, schedule blocks of time based on their availability. All you do is really send the email with the link in there. They schedule. Now, do you have to send an email, Mike, or can you have an AI agent send the email? Okay, great. Now that’s a narrow task, but that’s an external client facing that you don’t have to be involved. They can schedule. So now we have two agents. We have one that’s doing the nurturing, we have one doing the scheduling. Okay, great. Now imagine previous to this appointment scheduling, you can say, “Summarize the record. Give me some bullet points. I want to do an account review.” Maybe that’s not a lead, maybe it’s an account in this case. Let’s do an account review of what they previously ordered or most likely to order, our recent comms, open tickets, open cases, anything that’s going on with them and give me three things that could be beneficial for us to mention. Maybe have an AI to summarize the record, come up with those things, pop that data into a field for you. So now we have the third agent that somebody nurtured, somebody followed up, somebody scheduled, somebody summarized records, prepped in account plan for you. We have three external facing agents just in the sales motion or maybe account planning motion. Those are external facing AIs because they’re dealing directly with your clients or your accounts. And just in the sales motion, those are three. Now you can have one agent to do all three. You can have three different ones. So imagine having an external facing AI that just does those three things. That’s huge, right? Mike Gerholdt: Absolutely. Dorian Earl: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, again, I’m talking about just sales motion, but there’s a whole nother workflow in there. The marketing motion, there’s a whole nother workflow and the service motion. But those are just really, really cool things though. Either way. Mike Gerholdt: Well, going back to point three, it’s always looking for the quick wins. How do you make sure you go through each department and get them up and running and then come back? Because that’s what I always like to do as opposed to spend too long in one department and they’re fully vested, and another department is like, “Well, where’s our love?” Dorian Earl: Well, true, true. And this is where if we can step back, I know this is kind being prepared for Agentforce. To my understanding, there is not an agent that can prepare a client for Agentforce. It would be great if it could, but it’s not. But there is one. It’s called the Salesforce Admin or the Salesforce product order, or whoever is in charge or forward looking for the client and saying, “Hey, in 2025, what are we going to do with our technology stack center it around Salesforce to grow our business, make us more efficient?” This is where some intelligence, some wisdom, some understanding some business analyst skills, some requirements gathering skills. This is what our team is doing with our clients. Actually maybe this new era of really intelligence, this is where Salesforce is really excited for all of us working in the ecosystem because they are saying, we now have a tool that you can make yourself more efficient. And we are all kind of shepherding them into this new era of really intelligence. So this is really fun. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s why you work in tech, right? Every day is a little bit something different. I never would’ve predicted this, but I remember back when it was social and mobile and it’s like, where are we going? And we’re talking about connected toothbrushes, and now I don’t know. Now the toothbrush maybe is going to start giving me advice. Dorian Earl: Well, it could. I mean, with all the things that are happening, obviously I used to work in the medical dental space. I give you a lot of thoughts and advice there, but I cannot wait to see in the next year as we enable customer facing agents that have been trained. There is something to that. Now, I wouldn’t put a customer facing agent out there without training. I wouldn’t put regular people out there without training. But in the next year or two, with every company that I deal with becoming smarter, the places I order pizza from, they say, “Hello, how can I help you?” I’m like, “You don’t know what I previously ordered?” “No.” That’s a lack of intelligence, right? Mike Gerholdt: Right. Dorian Earl: And so how many places that we go to and solicit, and they’re not as intelligent, that an agent can help the person on the other end do their job better, which is really cool. So I am super excited. I wish every company that we worked with, big and small, would adopt technology like this. And trust me, I’ve been singing the song to everybody going, “Hey, hey, I don’t know what systems you have internally, but let me help you.” And everything from athletics, to restaurant, to food, to the travel, to all of those things. So I’m looking forward to it. Mike Gerholdt: It’s going to be good. Dorian, thanks for coming by and helping admins out again. You’re always in our corner giving us advice and setting us on the right path. So I appreciate it and can’t wait to connect with you again later this year at all of our events. Dorian Earl: Yeah. Well, and I’ll let you know how this goes because as we shepherd clients into this new era of intelligence, I’ll tell you which ones on step two, step three, and step four. And Salesforce is really doing a good job of telling the story of what people are doing with agents and AI, which is really cool. I cannot wait. This is really, really fun. But thanks for all you do with helping us in the ecosystem. I think I mentioned to you, when I started with Salesforce 2017, I was listening. I went back and listened to all of your previous podcasts and just to get caught up, and I listened to one a day, one every other day and listened to them on one and a half or two speed. And so it was a really, really, really cool thing. One, you’ve got a great obviously voice, and you know- Mike Gerholdt: Even at two speed, I do? Dorian Earl: Even at two speed, you’d be surprised what Mike sounded like at two speed. Yep, yep, yep. Mike Gerholdt: I sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks. Dorian Earl: Mike, and Gillian at one and a half or two speed was something, right? And so yeah, that was really good. But still having a place where people can stay up to date and knowledgeable. On behalf of me and everybody else, we thank you for having a place that where we can learn and obviously stay up to date here. This is really cool. Mike Gerholdt: I appreciate it. Thanks so much. Dorian Earl: Yep. Yeah, thank you. Mike Gerholdt: Well, that was another fun discussion with Dorian. I always love running into him at events. And if you’ve ever checked out his breakout sessions, they’re one for the books. He is an incredibly powerful and passionate presenter and knowledgeable, huge fan of Salesforce Admins. I really loved his five-step approach for preparing for Agentforce. I think it gave us some actionable insights for us to think about and look forward to bringing more intelligence and efficiency to our organizations. Now, have you found this episode helpful? Hey, do me a favor, share it with somebody. Put it out on social. I’m on Bluesky. Everybody’s on Bluesky. And if you’re on Apple Podcasts, all you have to do is tap the three dots to click share episode, and it’ll take care of posting the rest. Now, don’t forget all the links, everything that we mentioned on the episode, including a transcript, is available at admin.salesforce.com. You can find everything there, including a lot of blog posts. Tons of information. Now, as always, if you’d love to join in the conversation, and I’d love to be there with you, jump over to the Admin Trailblazer Group. That is in the Trailblazer community. You know where the link is. It’s in the show notes, which is at admin.salesforce.com. Look at that. It’s like, “Toot, toot, toot, here we go.” Anyway, thanks again for tuning in and we’ll see you next Thursday in the cloud. The post Level Up: The Admin’s Action Plan for Thriving in the Agentforce Era appeared first on Salesforce Admins .…

The Salesforce Admins Podcast

1
How Data Cloud Enhances Contextual AI for Salesforce Admins 26:11

10 weeks ago26:11

26:11

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Mehmet Orun, SVP, GM, and Data Strategist at PeerNova. Join us as we chat about how to use Data Cloud to create trustworthy AI experiences. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Mehmet Orun. How Data Cloud powers trustworthy AI experiences The last time we had Mehmet on the pod, the big concern with AI was hallucinations. How can we be sure that the agents we create don’t start making stuff up? What’s more, how do we know that they won’t share data they shouldn’t? In short, how do we create trustworthy AI experiences? As we’ve learned time and again, AI is only as good as the data you give it. But, as Mehmet explains, Data Cloud has changed the game for admins in terms of control over who sees what and in what context. Admins can create personalized experiences with Agentforce, constrained by the permission model and capabilities of Flow to ensure that everything is working as intended. How data management best practices have changed with AI One thing Mehmet reflects on is the way that data management techniques have changed over time. Several best practices no longer make sense in today’s context of AI. For example, duplicate records that used to be a mortal sin make more sense when you’re trying to constrain what a customer can see vs. your employees vs. your vendors. However, the personalized engagement that is possible with Agentforce requires a complete understanding of what’s happening with someone. At the same time, you want your agents to only act on information they’re “allowed” to see, or generate insights that are relevant to the outcomes you want to achieve. As Mehmet explains, “good” data and “bad” data is really about making sure your data is structured in a way that makes it easy to use. Data unification made easy with Data Cloud The good news is that it’s never been easier to take care of your data with Data Cloud. Mehmet’s seen this with the nonprofits he works with. Data unification projects that used to take months or even years are now relatively simple affairs. You can identify bad data, filter out irrelevant data, and put the right data standardizations in place all in Setup. Mehmet’s biggest piece of advice is to measure your data quality in terms of the business outcomes you are trying to achieve. As he points out, the amount of data you need to open an opportunity is different than what you need to close an opportunity. The same principle applies to AI agents. If you make sure they get everything they need and nothing extraneous, you’ll get good results. There are a ton of great insights about data management best practices for AI in our conversation with Mehmet, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And make sure you’re subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you can catch us every Thursday. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Understanding the Importance of Data Health in Salesforce Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Mehmet on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Bluesky social Mike on Threads Mike on X Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt: Welcome back to the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Today we’re catching up with Mehmet Orun, longtime friend of the pod and true expert in data and AI. I’m going to tell you, a lot has changed in the world of artificial intelligence since our last chat. And Mehmet’s here to break it down from hallucination risks to the role of data cloud in creating trustworthy AI experiences. If you’ve ever been wondering how to make your data more meaningful and your AI outputs more reliable, well, you are in for a treat. So, make sure to follow the podcast so you don’t miss a single episode. And with that, let’s get Mehmet back on the podcast. Mehmet, welcome back to the podcast. Mehmet Orun: It is wonderful to be back, Mike. Mike Gerholdt: I know. You just come by with all these wisdoms and knowledge that you have in the world. Last time we were on, and I’ll link to that show, we were talking about hallucination risks. And it’s been a year. And boy, I tell you, a year in AI time, everything’s changed. So, what’s new in your world? What are you paying attention to in terms of AI and Agentforce? Mehmet Orun: To be honest, one of the interesting things about having been around a while is while the technologies are new, our overall objective haven’t really changed. And one of the things I’ve been really trying to look back to is what were past challenges we overcame, what were the parallels, and what were some of the best practices that people newer to the field around data integration, artificial intelligence, may not know about, so we can share this knowledge while absolutely picking up new ways of doing things? Also, because we definitely have new tools under our belt. And having a organized way to assess what may cause hallucination risk and mitigating it has been a truly hot topic. I have been visiting old friends, making new friends as I’ve been traveling across different Salesforce events as well. And the good news is people are excited about the potential. People are also excited about having tangible methods they can take back to their organization. I’m looking forward to sharing some of these with you today. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. It’s interesting, you look at some of the stuff that’s out in the world and the spectrum for people looking at what’s going on with AI goes all the way from everything that it says is right to nothing that it says it’s right, and somebody falls somewhere in between there. But I feel like I did podcasts in 2024, early ’24, I think in ’23, even talking about hallucination. The one thing that it came back to, it seems to have gone away, because I think more of the conversation is around the quality of the data and what we’re feeding Agentforce and getting your data ready. Am I right? Mehmet Orun: So, given you mentioned ’23, ’24, a lot of the hallucination- Mike Gerholdt: This was a long time ago. Mehmet Orun: Yeah, in the AI world, right? Mike Gerholdt: Uh-huh. Mehmet Orun: A lot of the hallucination risk conversations that were happening, and this was mostly around ChatGPT, was because the information that was available was up to a particular date. It was predominantly unstructured data available on the internet. So, if something was published past a certain date, it was not going to show up in answers. One of the big changes I think in the ecosystem is in the past we talked about IT solutions, data warehouses, analytics, which was separate than marketing segmentation and engagement. And then we had these really interesting LLMs and generative AI for the past several months, it feels like years. The focus is the idea of a truly enterprise scale data platform that can power automation, that can power analytics. That can look at structured and unstructured data in order to provide complete, compliant, and contextual information that can also power AI. I know we both like storytelling. I had a really interesting experience with my father a couple of weeks ago. Do you mind if I tell that story? Mike Gerholdt: Oh, please, tell me. I love a good story. Mehmet Orun: She’s a 90-year-old retired brigadier general. He’s a military engineer. Mike Gerholdt: 90 years young, you mean? Mehmet Orun: Oh, man. I still barely keep up with him. Mike Gerholdt: See, that’s what I’m saying. Mehmet Orun: And as a military engineer, you are always given a mission and you have what you have. That is the typical mindset. And in every country, in every place, people are talking about artificial intelligence, what it may mean. And he said, “Okay, look, I think this is your field. Help me understand what is new versus what he was working with in older computing days, and why are people worried? Why are people excited?” So, I sat next to him. We brought up ChatGPT, and I asked a series of three questions. The first question was, I said, “Tell me what you know about my dad’s name, Sunday Orun, a retired engineer, a retired soldier, not even rank.” And it gave what rank he retired at, what branch of the military, where he went to school. Simple question, limited context. I said, what else do you know about him? I said, him without the name. And I got information about article field-working for magazines in a couple of his books. Post-retirement, he did poetry, which is a wonderful way to retire. And he’s like, “Oh, it’s interesting. How does it know that?” I’m like, “Well, can people find your books in online storage?” He’s like, “Yes.” So, it’s available information. It can leverage all of these as it searches. He’s like, “Okay, it makes sense.” Then I asked the question, “What do you know about his son?” And ChatGPT says, “I do not know who his son is.” And he’s like, “So, why doesn’t it know we are related?” And I said, “Because the fact that you and I are related would be in a government database. It would not be in public records. It’s not something that’s on the internet.” And for him, this was an obvious separation. So, you asked a question, this is a long-winded way of getting there, perhaps, so what has changed? A year ago, I could dump a bunch of knowledge articles or perhaps a meeting transcript and say summarize, or I could use knowledge articles to power chatbots. Now I can look at what do I know about a person in their transactional context based on their order history, based on their case history, based on their knowledge of the product. And I can give much more personalized recommendations, because the AI platform idea, as opposed to an LLM technology idea, is bringing together matching technology where we used to think about as duplicate management and CRM. That mindset has evolved, and it is there to provide contextual interactions. Data cloud is not just powering the generative AI capabilities for Agentforce. It’s also providing the unified insights that can even be constrained to only what a person is supposed to know about, where admins and architects can control this, given the permission model and capabilities of flow. Which for me is incredibly exciting, because that means we can deliver more value. We can use the technology we are already deeply familiar with, and we can show the true potential of AI while minimizing risk to our organizations and minimizing confusion for our end users. Mike Gerholdt: That’s a fabulous story. I feel you’re spot on. Just the level of understanding why and what we have available to us is huge. In the email you sent me, I want to pull out a sentence, because we’re talking about data and we’re talking about a lot of things. But I feel this is a good foundation. You said, “Part of this helped them realize why historical CRM data management techniques do not scale versus benefits of data cloud.” To the uninitiated, and I’m one of them, so I’m asking this question for me, can you give me what you mean by historical CRM data management techniques and help me understand that versus the benefits of data cloud? Mehmet Orun: So, if I think about what is in the Salesforce admin data management toolkit, we talk about a distinct set of areas we expect admins to do. They configure objects, object fields with validation rules and some data management rules, such as, do you want a default value or not, if it’s required or not? We talk to them about duplicate management rules, which led the impression that all duplicates are bad. And we talk about storage optimization more around performance, because every org had a storage limit, you wanted to think about when you may want to offload storage either for cost savings or build skinny tables for large data volume handling. Those were the domains of data management we got to, which was fairly technical, focused on mostly data entry operations. Let’s fast-forward to even two years ago. If you have a Salesforce CRM org with Experience Cloud, you need to have intentional duplicate records because the records and end user maintains their information should be separated, then how that customer’s information is maintained by employees. You may also have records maintained by partners using Experience Cloud that’s still about the same customer. So, already thinking that for a customer that should have one record is no longer sufficient and acceptable, because partners need to have their view of the information. Customers want to maintain their own perspective of what they’re called, what’s their best contact information. And companies want to be able to have their internal view as well, such as customer segment, customer risks, so on and so forth. But personalized engagement requires a complete understanding of what’s happening with an organization, where you only act on information you’re allowed to see and you act on insights that is relevant to the outcomes you want to achieve. So, three things I really, really like that data cloud brought in to our solution kits is, first, I can provide a holistic understanding of the individual or a business contact, even though I have multiple contact or lead records in my CRM, even in the simplest of architectures. Let’s talk about a nonprofit example. Let’s say that we’re talking to Sam Smith, and Sam is a donor. Sam was a board member. Sam worked for an organization that gave us grants. That is us interacting with Sam, the human, into a business context and in a donor relationship. We are going to want to track these through different departments, probably through different records. But when we want to know what do we know about the people we engage with, how do we send them a personalized thank you, this is where data cloud powers that unification perspective. Does that example make sense before I tie to the AI specific examples that extends this? Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, no, it does. I’m following along. Mehmet Orun: So, let’s say that we are now in a data model that we have accepted, we should maintain contextual transactions in our business applications, whether we have one or multiple CRM orgs, and of course, other systems. We first unify it around individuals’ business contacts and accounts. So, now, related transactions, related emails, donation history from external systems or cases, regardless of your industry, can come together in one umbrella. Now, if I want to create a personalized thank you message, we can look at overall interaction history and not just think that we have seen someone for the first time, because they’re using their new email address in their new corporate role, but they’ve been a lifetime member. So, generative AI solutions work better when interactions across a person’s contact points can be made accessible within compliance rules, of course. And agentic solutions work better when it can understand what are all of the different type of transactions that may be associated to an individual or an account, even when they’re distributed across multiple account records, multiple contact records, even multiple CRM orgs. You can see me, I’m pointing to things on the whiteboard in front of me, but this is something that used to take organizations months, if not years to put in place. And having done this now for real with a few nonprofits as part of my pro bono work, I know we can do assessment and planning in a few days. We can then onboard the data and configure data clouds, data unification capabilities in less than a month. And that includes identifying bad data that is in the system. Na@na.com, they’re still present, whether your org is three years old or 20 years old, by filtering out irrelevant data, by putting the right data standardizations in place. These are all part of a single umbrella of capability. Whereas an admin, you just worked with the admin tools in the past. And now many of these transformation capabilities, configurable rules are accessible still under the setup tree, still under the Salesforce tabs. That allows us to be more productive Salesforce professionals and allows us to decrease the total cost of ownership as we support our organizations. Mike Gerholdt: I mean, I’ve always thought when I’ve asked people a rhetorical question, what is the most important thing that your company owns? And 99% of the time when I ask people that question, they get it wrong, because they mention a patent or a brand, or a product that they produce. And I say, “No, it’s your data.” The data that you have is the most important thing for you to take care of. And ironically, it’s also the most least paid attention to, because we just throw things in, and we’ll sort it and figure it out later. Hurry up, move on to the next thing. And now, as you bring up the unification of all these systems, where we’ve put all this data and the management or mismanagement of it, now is the vital importance, because now we can truly link all of this information, and have AI sort through it and give us the relevant information that we need by just thinking through a few more processes. Mehmet Orun: I think what’s important in what you said is AI is additive to what we have had, because I agree data is the most important asset. And the fact that no organization I’ve ever been a part of or helped had perfect data. It’s something we just need to accept, but not live with. Mike Gerholdt: Right. I have a friend that has a small marketing agency. He probably has 200 people in his little CRM. I promise you, his data isn’t good. Even in that, I mean, nobody’s got perfect data. Mehmet Orun: So, what matters, and this is what we talked about last year, is we can’t assess data quality as a technical concept. We can’t just look at what is in my object. Is it good? Is it not good? We always need to look at data in context of a business outcome. I think an example I give often is how much data you need to start an opportunity is different than the amount of data you need to close an opportunity. What you want to gather if you lost a big opportunity is different than what you probably would ask people to capture if you lost a small opportunity. So, these are all proportionate to the business benefit, where I don’t think historically we did a great job explaining as professionals, whether we are admins, architects, business analysts. But when it comes to AI, because agentic AI puts so much focus and emphasis on use cases and the persona we are empowering. If it’s a sales agent, we want to find out what is the job a sales agent is supposed to do. What is the information they need? What are the rules they should follow? And whether you have 100 fields or 800 fields in your constant opportunities objects, we still need to look at what data is reliable today, if that’s sufficient. If it is not sufficient, we need to go through some type of a data improvement process or when to look at a different use case. If we have sufficiently reliable data, we need to look at how do we ensure our prompts both use data from those fields that have reliable data and sufficient metadata, and also know when a subset of records don’t have sufficient data quality in those very same fields. And then third, just because it works today, we shouldn’t assume things are going to be the same tomorrow because processes are changing, configurations are changing, people habits are changing. So, by monitoring what’s happening in our business applications and catching deviations, we can avoid unexpected batch surprises, also in the flows. Honestly, these are things with a time machine we should have thought of and incorporated into our automation flow, into our reports, but the attention wasn’t there as much as it is today. So, people being excited about AI, but worried about hallucination risk is one of the best things that happened to ensure we can provide reliable data for all types of decision making through Salesforce. Mike Gerholdt: Right. Well, I mean, what do they say? 2020’s hindsight? If you could go back and know the future, then you’d obviously plan for it, but it also creates opportunity for us to be creative and corrective in how we move forward. Which means that every solution you’re thinking of today moving forward is going to look very different than before Agentforce. Mehmet Orun: One of the things I’m still noodling on, and I’ll probably spend a few more years noodling is how do we make sure we can take better advantage of unstructured data that is the vast maturity of all interactions. I remember being excited about Einstein Activity Capture, which was a few years ago. And it’s still an untapped potential, but now we are analyzing that data, we’re incorporating that data. The more we can streamline the end user experience to capture information, know when information may be missing, incomplete, potentially out of date, so they can improve it in a tactical, surgical way, and then be able to explain to them why we’re making certain recommendations in AI assisted suggestions. I think that’s also going to increase the confidence for agentic experiences, where humans are engaged in a secondary level. I know that I would like AI tools to give me results I can believe in when I’m directly engaging first, before I’m willing to expose it to perhaps less savvy or less aware of my underlying processes end user. I think a lot of people are going to go through the journey, so thinking about process mapping, thinking about testing strategies are also going to be important considerations for all of us. Mike Gerholdt: I mean, that’s the whole point, is to test. You want something reliable and to ask why. I think that the important thing is people get things wrong, too. We sometimes look at some of these technology solutions as infallible, as they’re always perfect and they’re not. They’re imperfect because they’re built by imperfect people. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t constantly iterate on your solution. I remember long time ago when I was an admin, I feel like it was Josh Burke or it was another developer who was always like, “Every year, I look at the code I wrote for the previous year and wonder why did I write it that way.” And it’s because you’re a year smarter. Mehmet Orun: 100% agree. I have 13 years of Salesforce presentations in my Dropbox folder. And when I look at it’s fascinating to see what is still true. And it’s interesting to see when some recommendations have completely changed over the course of the last 15 years, because we are learning. And I think we need to be honest about, look, yes, this was the recommendation based on what we knew, here’s what we learned since, and here’s why we are recommending X today that is different. I think on the other side, as professionals, we need to remember none of us have all the answers. And what we knew yesterday might have changed today. So, look, I love your podcast. I love some of the things that come out of the various blogs, because people share what they’ve learned at a level of frankness, including what we stopped doing. And that is a sign us being learning humans. And it’s the best way to be. Mike Gerholdt: Absolutely. Mehmet Orun: How do we learn to be better every single day? Mike Gerholdt: Well, I feel like that’s a really good place to end this episode on, because I always want to learn more. And I appreciate you coming on the podcast and helping everybody else learn more. Mehmet Orun: It’s my pleasure. I know that there are so many thoughts we can always get into. I hope these sessions enable more personal connections. And if you’re listening to it and we run into each other at an event, let’s grab coffee. Let’s talk about data or life, because we’re going to learn from each other. We will make each other better. And thank you, Mike, for this opportunity. Mike Gerholdt: Absolutely. So, Mehmet took us for a ride from a 90-year-old general, his father, all the way to data that doesn’t quite behave. And the takeaway, well, AI is like a great intern. It’s only as good as the notes you give it. So, let’s feed it well and ask better questions. But anyway, a huge thanks to Mehmet for the wisdom and the stories. If you learn something today or you just enjoyed the ride, can you do me a favor and just share the podcast and spread the data love? Now, until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud. The post How Data Cloud Enhances Contextual AI for Salesforce Admins appeared first on Salesforce Admins .…

The Salesforce Admins Podcast

1
Building Secure AI Agents with Salesforce Agentforce 29:56

11 weeks ago29:56

29:56

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Sri Srinivasan, Senior Director of Information Security at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about his recent presentation at TDX and how to build secure, reliable AI experiences with Agentforce. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation […] The post Building Secure AI Agents with Salesforce Agentforce appeared first on Salesforce Admins .…

The Salesforce Admins Podcast

1
Real Talk for Admins on Content, Conferences, and Agentforce 26:13

12 weeks ago26:13

26:13

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Joy Shutters-Helbing, Senior Manager of Salesforce Practice at Captech and Salesforce MVP Hall-of-Famer, and Mike Reynolds, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Slack. Join us as we chat about creating community content, navigating conference submissions, and their new podcast, The JAM. You should subscribe for the full […] The post Real Talk for Admins on Content, Conferences, and Agentforce appeared first on Salesforce Admins .…

The Salesforce Admins Podcast

1
AI-Powered Dynamic Layouts for Salesforce Admins 24:02

13 weeks ago24:02

24:02

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Brinkal Janani, Director of Product Management at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about the future of AI-powered customization that’s coming with Generative Canvas. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Brinkal. Build dynamic experiences for […] The post AI-Powered Dynamic Layouts for Salesforce Admins appeared first on Salesforce Admins .…

The Salesforce Admins Podcast

1
What Role Does AI Play in Consulting and Salesforce Admin Work? 27:59

14 weeks ago27:59

27:59

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Megan Tuano, Sr. Business Analyst at Accenture Federal Services and an amazing YouTube content creator. Join us as we chat about how she uses AI in her consulting and Salesforce Admin work, and how she’s built a career in tech without a traditional tech background. You […] The post What Role Does AI Play in Consulting and Salesforce Admin Work? appeared first on Salesforce Admins .…

The Salesforce Admins Podcast

1
The Power of Agentforce and Slack for Building Custom AI Agents 36:25

15 weeks ago36:25