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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Michelle Wolfe, Platform Engineer.

Join us as we chat about how she built a Flow-powered user management system to handle requests, approvals, user creation, permissions, communications, and even onboarding.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Michelle Wolfe.

Streamlining change requests with screen flows It's a good thing when your organization is growing, right? For Salesforce Admins, however, new hires need new accounts, and that means approvals, permissions, and onboarding. My guest this week, Michelle Wolfe, found herself in exactly this situation. She turned to Flow to build an automated user management system with no code, and she's here to tell us all about it.

Michelle's company was bringing in 80+ people per new hire class, but the account creation request process was a mess. Managers would email a random member of the three-person admin team, and then they would manually create the account. So the first step was to wrangle the business process with a screen flow to get the correct information into Salesforce and create a case.

But Michelle was just getting started. Now that everything was in Salesforce, she knew that she could use Flow to automate the rest of the process.

New account creation with autolaunched flows Once the new user's information was approved by their manager, Michelle set up an autolaunched flow to spin up the account. This took care of data validation, configuring the correct permissions, and creating a username.

Finally, a second autolaunched flow would close out the case and send two email actions: one to confirm the request, and one to welcome the new user. With help from Flow and Einstein Copilot, Michelle transformed a complicated manual business process into something streamlined, simple, and scalable.

Partner with your training team for a fresh perspective on your org Michelle credits her success with how closely she works with her training team on enhancements. "Because they interact with new employees, they see things differently than someone who's been here for years and knows how we use our Salesforce," she explains. That fresh perspective helps her identify improvements she might otherwise miss.

Listen to my full conversation with Michelle for more on how she used Flow to automate user management—we really get into the weeds. And make sure you're subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

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Admin Trailblazers Group * Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social * Michelle on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on X * Mike on Bluesky social * Mike on Threads * Mike on X

Full show transcript Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I'm joined by Michelle Wolf to talk about what happens when user onboarding stops being a string of emails and becomes a real platform process. So Michelle built a Flow-powered system that handles requests, approvals, user creation, permissions, communications, and even offboarding, while keeping the admin team in control. We're going to talk about the automation behind it, but also the process decisions that make it accurate, secure, and useful for her business. Now, because when admins design access and onboarding well, they're not just saving time. They're protecting trust and helping people get productive faster. So listen in, subscribe, share this episode with an admin who has one too many user requests sitting in their inbox. I'll tell you who doesn't have too many user in requests sitting in their inbox, and that's Michelle. So let's get Michelle on the podcast. So Michelle, welcome to the podcast.

Michelle Wolf: Thank you for having me, Mike.

Mike: I think this is exciting because I can't recall the number of times I've had people on about onboarding users. And I think it's because whatever cool tool we have come out, it's the second thing people do. They're like, "Oh, I could do this, and I need to figure out how to do X, Y, and Z when I onboard people." Because it was like that with Flow. There was stuff with Chatter when that came out, "How do I onboard people and add them to groups?" And Jennifer Lee was at your session at Midwest Dreaming, and she thought it was just phenomenal. So I had to have you on the podcast to talk about it. But before we get into that, tell me a little bit about yourself, how you got started with Salesforce and what you do.

Michelle Wolf: Yeah. So my journey started as a lot of ours as an accidental admin. I was working for a small family-run business who had Salesforce, and they were paying a consultant to basically be their full-time admin. And one day my manager walked into my office and said, "I don't want to pay them anymore. I need you to learn this." And I was like, "Okay."

Mike: "I suppose."

Michelle Wolf: Yeah. Why not? So yeah, that's what started my journey. And I skilled up on Trailhead and I was on it two, three hours a day trying to figure out how to be an admin in Salesforce. And this was back at the initial transition from Classic to Lightning.

Mike: Ooh, fun.

Michelle Wolf: So half of my early batches are on Classic. There just wasn't a ton of Lightning stuff out there yet. So I would build a lot in Classic and then flip it over to Lightning to see what it looked like because they did like the Lightning interface, which was great. So that started my journey. And then when I decided to part ways with that company, I took a different position and paused my admin career. And then about five years ago or so, I had an opportunity to be a product SME for Salesforce. And I was like, "Yes, I miss this product. I miss doing this. I miss being able to make things better with just the click of the button. So let's go do this." And I jumped in both feet and never looked back. And so I've been an active admin for a little over five years now. And I'm a Flownatic. Anything I can automate, I am doing it.

Mike: I love it. Active admin as opposed to passive.

Michelle Wolf: Exactly.

Mike: I don't know. So I love when you started because I remember those times and the reason there wasn't enough Lightning things is we were all writing it as fast as we could.

Michelle Wolf: Yeah, I know it.

Mike: It's kind of like learning to drive with a manual. And then they're like, "Oh, well, here's an automatic." And you're like, "Oh, I already know how to drive with a manual." I mean, if you knew how to do things in Classic, then doing stuff in Lightning was just that much easier, in my opinion anyway.

Michelle Wolf: Yeah. I agree. I agree. And the user experience was better for my users. They liked the layout and the feel. It jived with their personalities better instead of that very formal grid-looking everything.

Mike: I mean, that was the internet at a certain period in time. And then it grew up and it was like your eyes don't have to squint with white space.

Michelle Wolf: Right.

Mike: Every field just went from tight polyester pants to sweatpants. And it was like, "Yay."

Michelle Wolf: Exactly.

Mike: Let's talk about being a Flownatic because I've talked with Jen. I know Jen said she was in your session. I really think, I mean, outside of just it's so incredibly powerful, the amount of things that you can do on the Salesforce platform without writing a single line of code. Flow is one of those. And I remember it was 100 years ago that I saw Flow for the first time at Dreamforce when I was a customer. And I think they called it Business Process Management or something. And it was an app you had to download, and then you had to upload schemas to it. It's since graduated into a much more robust tool. But the nice thing is once you know that, I mean, caveat emptor because AI runs off of all the flows. I mean, if you're good at Flow, there's very few things you can't make Agentforce do. So tell me a little bit about why you built onboarding with Flow.

Michelle Wolf: Yeah. The company I was with found themselves in a really big period of growth, which was really amazing. But the new hire classes were like 80 people. And I just could not bring myself to want to spend a week of my life just filling in these boxes to make new users. It was really so time-consuming. And one typo here, one missed field here. My validation rules didn't check out. It was just a pain. It's just very mind-numbing. And I was like, "There has to be a better way." And I went through the different variations of the Add Multiple Users. It's an out-of-the-box function, except I couldn't put my custom fields on there, which means I couldn't save my users because we had validation rules in place. And then I experimented with a bulk upload, but it was such a pain because if I would typo a field, I would mess up my entire formula.

Mike: Yeah.

Michelle Wolf: And I was like, "There has to be a better way. There just has to be a better way." And-

Mike: Plus then all you're doing is just creating the user.

Michelle Wolf: Exactly.

Mike: With Flow, you can do so much more.

Michelle Wolf: Exactly. So by converting it to a Flow, I had a screen. I used my screen flows, and I leveraged the fact that the onboarding team is already putting that information into an email or something. Well, just go here and put it in a case for me. Just hit this button, pull out the fields. Now I don't have to do this. And then I used that screen flow to make a case so I can track my productivity, when the requests are coming in, when the requests are due by, who's doing the request. We started with just managing cases manually and making the users off the cases. And we had built in the approval process to make sure that someone else was double checking the inputs. Did they spell their name right? Did they put in the email right? Because I don't know these people. They're not going to be reporting to me. I'm not part of the onboarding team. I'm just making a user. So we had the managers do the approvals and make sure all that information's correct, make sure they're requesting the right... We use a field called Team Name that we made custom to make sure they're getting put on the right team, the customer service team or senior customer service team, whatever. So someone else is double checking it and then approving it. And I was like, "From here, I have to be able to automate something because the information's already in Salesforce." And that's when I got into utilizing that approval flow to trigger an autolaunched flow to actually make my user and create the alias and create the username and update the profile based off of what was entered on the request form in my screen flow, and just physically make my user.

Mike: Wow. We spent a lot of time talking about the tech part of it. I want to dive in because I feel like you conquered a lot, but you probably had to sell it. Maybe you didn't. Tell me about all the non-tech stuff that you had to sell. Who did you have to go to, and what were the people you met with in order to say, "Here's how I'm going to onboard users moving forward"?

Michelle Wolf: So the onboarding process had already been moved to our team. And it was just that it was coming to us in a very casual way. We're getting an email request. So it was part of the struggle was they started emailing us individually. We were a team of three, and they would just pick which admin they wanted to work with. Well, if I'm out of office or I have to leave unexpectedly and forget to put my out of office on, then their stuff's getting delayed. And so that was the first big conversation of how do we take out that portion? How do we get them to just put it in so we can decide who does the work? Because if I'm heads down on a project, I don't have five minutes to go make a user. I need to be heads down on my project.

Mike: Right.

Michelle Wolf: So this allowed us to divvy up work more easily and really even just check our own productivity of handling these types of requests and making sure it's not one person that always gets stuck with the work because they're the one that's always being emailed. So that was the first thing. And so the three of us, we were a really tight-knit group, and we're all very aligned with not wanting to be the only human that was pinged or emailed. And so it was like, let's just get it to a centralized place. And so we just went to our manager and said, "We're going to build this. We need this to be more productive." And they were like, "Yeah, makes sense. Do what you need to do."

Mike: I mean, that's awesome.

Michelle Wolf: Yeah.

Mike: Sometimes when I was an admin would happen and sometimes it wouldn't. But I do think some change has to happen that way of, "No, here's how I'm going to be more productive, and here's what I want to set up."

Michelle Wolf: Yeah.

Mike: So then were there... I guess what I'm getting at is, for admins that hear this and like, "Oh man, this is me," were there other checks that were already in place that you didn't have to deal with? There was already a check with HR or the person in payroll in terms of onboarding these people. You didn't have to go and say, "Can you..." Because I was the same way, to be honest with you. I would find out when I was an admin, "Oh, so-and-so needs a Salesforce license," two days after they started when HR sent out the announcement of the new hires. And I was like, "Hey, there has to be some process that you onboard these people to the company. Can I be part of that?" And I kind of had to unwind HR and figure that out because they didn't know that Salesforce was a part of this department and they didn't know that people need to be onboarded for it. You sound like you didn't have to deal with any of that.

Michelle Wolf: We did not. That onboarding process was already handled by a team. And so when the hiring manager said, "Yes, we're going to offer," and they accept, they already knew what systems, what equipment they need, what systems they need access to, and then what types of permissions they would need to ask for from Salesforce. So like what team they were going to, so that that request could be put in. All that hard legwork was already done. So to those who might not have that, I think the biggest selling point could be onboarding experience. A lot of companies are focusing on what that hiring process, what that onboarding experience is. And as someone's starting a new job, I want to prove myself early on. I want to say, "I'm here, I'm ready to work." And if I can't access my systems, even though it's fully out of my control, I still feel like I'm not doing my best as an employee, as a new employee. So you can leverage just even the onboarding experience that they have, the equipment they need, they have the logins that they need on day one, on the day that they need it.

Mike: Yeah. And you don't have to go into detail, but what are the key, I guess I'll call them, milestones in your onboarding flow that the new people get sent? Do you have training materials, or do you have a video that's Michelle being like, "Hi, I'm your Salesforce administrator"?

Michelle Wolf: If only.

Mike: I know. I always say that and everybody's like, "Oh, that'd be a great idea."

Michelle Wolf: It would be. It would be.

Mike: "It's just 4,792 on my list of things to do."

Michelle Wolf: Exactly. When I have that free minute, I will absolutely get to that next.

Mike: Yeah. And also my other two admins, because it can't just be me.

Michelle Wolf: Right. "Here's your Salesforce team. We're here to support you."

Mike: Yep.

Michelle Wolf: So what we built into our process was, in my Flow automation, there was actually a second autolaunched flow that would close out the case. And this did a couple of things. One, it closed out the case so they had a complete close of the loop and updated the reason as completed by automation because a human didn't have to touch any part of this request.

Mike: Ooh, that's cool.

Michelle Wolf: Yeah.

Mike: I like that.

Michelle Wolf: Clean reporting. Who doesn't like that?

Mike: I mean, for a while, I remember doing approvals or something and somebody asked me, "Well, did you actually do this or did Salesforce, the Flow do it?" And I was like, "Well, the Flow did, but the Flow ran as me." Then it marks that. But I like that you added that completed with automation.

Michelle Wolf: Yeah. But we also added two email actions. And one was to the requester. So the individual that opened the case through the screen flow, it sent them an email telling them that the request had been completed. And then the second thing was, when the user record was created, it then updated the Requested For field, which was just a custom field we made on the case for a user lookup with the new user that we'd made. And we sent a welcome email to them and said, "Welcome to Salesforce. Welcome to our company. Here's how you access our org." And it had the link for the SSO. Yeah.

Mike: Because at the point that the person's creating the case for you to create the user, they've already had an email assigned to them.

Michelle Wolf: Correct.

Mike: I like it. That's pretty sweet.

Michelle Wolf: Yeah. It was just a nice clean way to close multiple loops that ended up getting started.

Mike: So then, not to dig into it, and this is where I wish I should have seen your presentation, do you also have a process for adding them to... I don't know if you guys have Slack or different things like that. How, outside of maybe that user emailing you, do they have not necessarily an open loop, but at least a channel to ping back the admins and say, "Oh, hey, I got everything except this doesn't work, or, "I'm not seeing X," or, "How do I upload a profile picture?"?

Michelle Wolf: Yeah, absolutely. So for our new hires, basically all of that was handled in their new hire training, a lot of that initial setup support. However, in our screen flow, we actually made it a full-service utility where when you went to launch the screen flow, you could say, "I need help with Salesforce. Something's broken." Or, "I need a new user." So it was this full access path to us where they could put in multiple requests depending on what they needed.

Mike: I like that. And I'm assuming it's not Michelle, but you have people in the organization that do training. How much do you have to keep them updated in terms of, "Here's what the new user experience is like for Salesforce"?

Michelle Wolf: As far as?

Mike: Just anything. Anything that would change or anything that they may encounter, new features.

Michelle Wolf: Oh, yeah. So anytime we would build any type of enhancement, we worked very closely with our training department. We knew if we're going to help make starter material for an announcement for the call center for X, Y, Z enhancement, training's also going to need that material and probably a deep dive hands-on demo so that they can incorporate it into their training materials. So any new builds like that, our training department was really involved even from early-on stages of the development because they interact with new employees, and they see that interaction differently than someone who's been here for five, 10, 12 years and knows how we use our Salesforce. Even just how we design and where we put things on the Lightning page, they would often give us input from a new hire perspective to ensure that we're building good things.

Mike: Now, just because we're nerdy here, did you have a way of capturing that? Was that a case as well?

Michelle Wolf: That was just conversations.

Mike: Oh, okay.

Michelle Wolf: Yeah. It was, "Hey, we have this thing. We want a demo for you. Give us feedback," type of stuff.

Mike: I didn't know if you were capturing that in terms of tech debt or things we need to build, things we'd like to build, and things we need more money to build.

Michelle Wolf: Yeah, depending on what it was. It was just good old-fashioned scope creep.

Mike: Okay. Yeah, that usually happens, unfortunately.

Michelle Wolf: Yeah.

Mike: I've talked about Flow and AgentForce. I've been around now. I remember from 2006 when we finally had drag-and-drop WYSIWYG page editors to now we have... Well, I've seen agents build apps now. So I feel like I'm coming full circle. If you haven't already, if you were to bake some AI into your Flow, are there things that you would change or things you'd want to change and do different?

Michelle Wolf: I don't know yet because I spent so much time getting it to do what I wanted it to do with all my magic formulas in that Flow. I don't even know if AI could have helped. Now, AI did help me make those formulas. But I don't know how I might leverage AI to improve this process even more.

Mike: Yeah. No, that's fair. I mean, I have friends, and they always razz me a little bit because I work for a tech company, and they're like, "What'd you put AI into today?" And I think that's a call that admins need to make is, "Where do I need to add it?" Not just for the sake of adding it. I think we always talk about internally when we're creating content, "Well, don't AI wash everything." You don't have to include AI in it if it doesn't make sense because for yourself and your other two admins, that's one more thing you have to update or keep track of. And if it doesn't need it and you could do it somewhere else more effectively, then you should. Which sounds crazy, but it should be in the right places for the right interfaces, as opposed to, "Well, I included it because I could include it everywhere." It's like putting frosting on everything. The bacon cheeseburger doesn't need frosting just because you're a frosting company.

Michelle Wolf: Yeah, exactly. And I think maybe the next iteration that could include AI would just be on the initial request, especially for individuals wanting help with Salesforce. Maybe leveraging an FAQ-type of document for the things we do get commonly asked questions about. But for the user management, I'd really have to sit down and think of how that could apply.

Mike: Yeah. Or even an agent to serve up, "Here are three questions everybody asks and here's links. Do you have any other questions besides that?" And be a little proactive in terms of FAQs and stuff like that.

Michelle Wolf: Yeah.

Mike: So outside of email and stuff, does that seem to work okay? Or are you more leaning towards if we had Slack or anything different, we can maybe change things? I always worried when execs were like, "And then I want it to email me." I'm like, "You do know you have 10 salespeople. And if they have to close four deals a day, that's 40 emails on top of the eight billion you already get." You didn't have any executives with concerns on email velocity when you're onboarding 80 people?

Michelle Wolf: Oh, no, because of the 80 people, the emails from the requesters were really going back to the onboarding team. And so it was a way for them to check off the list that that system is done. So just like they would do it for other systems or other access for Jira or their Microsoft Teams access and all that stuff. It's just closing that loop with the onboarder. We did have one concern when one of the managers was new, and so 20 of the new hires was theirs.

Mike: Oh.

Michelle Wolf: But that's not the norm. You know what I mean? It's not necessarily that all the time you're going to be hit with all of the approvals, but it did happen. "You're new, you're getting a full class of newbies. Good luck."

Mike: "Congratulations. You now have 20 more emails."

Michelle Wolf: Exactly.

Mike: When you presented this, I'm curious, fresh eyes, sometimes you can sit in silence and between you and your other admins, you're like, "This is boss. I can't wait to show people." And then you show people, and they have a lot of questions. Is there questions that people had that maybe caught you off guard or you didn't think they would ask you about?

Michelle Wolf: I don't think any questions really caught me off guard, but the types of questions that came up were, "How did you come up with your approval process?" I was lucky that my approval process was already established within my organization. You get a new hire, it's the direct manager that approves it. Other organizations, it's the system admin that approves that this position and title in human deserves and needs access to do their job function. So it just depends on how your organization slices that cake, but someone should be approving access to an org.

Mike: And you know what's funny is, I probably asked you at the beginning of the podcast, but those are always the questions that I try to get out of people because especially when me and my team are building demos, the process behind what we're building, we just don't even think about. It's like, here's how the tech would do it. But the tech is only there to support the process. And nine times out of 10, everybody in the audience watches your presentation like, "Got it. Now I know how to build it. It's going to take me three months to get this process ironed out because either there's a lack of one or there's a shared understanding of how people think things work." And those are the questions to really ask. Are there questions that they came up with that your company hadn't figured out yet?

Michelle Wolf: No, of course not. I had all the answers.

Mike: Perfect.

Michelle Wolf: No, I don't think so. Because my solution covered 80% or more of the situations. Even in the event of your admins, say your admins are responsible for giving an individual an access to the org, but then they're also responsible for giving them access to some connected program that integrates with your org, but your admins are responsible for providing that access. My Flow included that if a manual comment is added or if a checkbox is selected that they need this access, it adds a comment to the case using the case comments and then leaves the case in an open status, like in progress, so that your admins can go in and finish that process.

Mike: Oh, cool.

Michelle Wolf: And then when they close the case, it just still does the rest of that email magic to tell everybody that it's all done. So we left openings for those situations where manual changes would be necessary to complete the full onboarding from our team.

Mike: That opened up a host of questions in my head. So can you create a user without going through your case and Flow?

Michelle Wolf: Manually. Yeah. None of that's turned off, but we do prefer them to use the Flow.

Mike: Right. I didn't know if you flagged it as, "This went outside the Flow," or something.

Michelle Wolf: Yeah. The only situation where it wouldn't... No. No, we stopped making users manually because the user would still get created. It would just leave the case open. So no, it's physically possible. We do not make users manually.

Mike: Nice.

Michelle Wolf: Yeah.

Mike: That warms my heart to know that. Well, it's always, you build the coolest solution and then the process goes around. And I remember having a manager tell me that. He's like, "Nobody's going to use Salesforce as long as they can put orders in on spreadsheets."

Michelle Wolf: That's fair.

Mike: Yeah, that was the truth. So the opposite of that, do you have an offboarding process? Is it like a similar Flow where if an employee decides to leave, does somebody create a case and that triggers your team to shut down the license?

Michelle Wolf: Yeah. We actually built in a deactivate. We called it remove because our business calls it remove users, but it deactivates the user. When you choose that option in the flow, you get to use the lookup to deactivate the user. And then we also had a freeze, and I call it thaw instead of unfreeze. So we had a freeze and thaw process.

Mike: I like that. That's awesome.

Michelle Wolf: So yeah, we did a freeze and thaw process and we also had an update permission. So if somebody was changing teams, so somebody got promoted from customer service to sales, you can just put in the change request and once it's approved, off it goes.

Mike: See, that's what differentiates what you built from everything else, because nine times out of 10, an admin will, "Okay, I'm going to build an onboarding thing." You're building a user management system, and you have the organization bought into it. "This is how we do this for this system." And it keeps a chain of custody, and it keeps a nice record for you as well. Especially the permissions update stuff, that's got to be handy. Are you ever asked to report out people whose permissions have changed or, for whatever reason?

Michelle Wolf: I don't know that we were ever asked to report that. And the company that I built this for actually had an Apex that did all of the permission and groups assignments. It was built out with metadata and permissions because when they built that out, user access policies didn't exist.

Mike: Gotcha.

Michelle Wolf: So when I built it for my demo, I'm not a developer, I'm not going to build out that Apex solution, but I used the user access policies for providing those permissions and assignments for that portion of the automation and access.

Mike: Yeah. I have a million more questions. I think one that people would ask. Usernames. So I don't need to know usernames, but did you put in a way to make sure that the person submitting the case doesn't have to think about the username and it's still for-

Michelle Wolf: Yes.

Mike: Okay.

Michelle Wolf: Yeah. So I use a [inaudible 00:32:21].

Mike: So you knew the answer.

Michelle Wolf: I did.

Mike: It took me longer to put the question together and you're like, "I already know the answer, Mike. Spit it out."

Michelle Wolf: So they only gave us their first and last name, their email address, and then the identifier that we used for our SSO or Federation ID, and then what team they belonged to. So we knew what permissions and then who their manager was so we could get the right approval. Everything else was done through the formulas. And that's the tricky part. That is one of the ways in which the automation can fail. And it's the unique username and the unique alias. Because when you're on the new user record, Salesforce does all that magic for you. They do all the hardlifting to figure it out. And so instead of a one in four, because it uses the first initial, the first name, and the first four of the last names, so instead of a one in four, I made it a two and four for the alias to increase my chances of not having a duplicate.

Mike: Right, because there could be a lot of Susan Smiths out there.

Michelle Wolf: Exactly.

Mike: Yeah.

Michelle Wolf: And so what I did was I also built in on a fault path, essentially a loop. So if it failed, I would add a digit to the end and then have it try again.

Mike: Oh. Would it incremental the digit?

Michelle Wolf: Yes. Yeah.

Mike: Well, that's smart.

Michelle Wolf: And that way I could... I'd still have a chance that it's going to not work.

Mike: I mean, if that poor guy hired 20 John Smiths, we're going to work that formula.

Michelle Wolf: To the bone, for sure. I used Flow. I used the power of Flow to really be as hands-off as possible with it, up to and including, we wanted to keep a minimum of 10 licenses available. We always wanted 10 emergency licenses available. So before I create a user, I have it go get my org data to make sure I have 10 Salesforce licenses at least available. And if I don't, then it won't make the user. It just leaves a note on the case and leaves the case open.

Mike: Saying, "You're at your minimum of 10."

Michelle Wolf: Yeah. So we built in some of those custom safeguards that were special to us. We wanted that. So we put that customization in there.

Mike: I like that. That's really cool. Michelle, you've enlightened me. I'm excited. I want to go build a Flow and onboard people and make perm sets a thing. I don't know. I feel like you probably have some solid time with an AI writing a lot of formulas.

Michelle Wolf: Yes. Copilot and I got real buddy-buddy.

Mike: Yeah. I mean, AI is really good at writing formulas, so thank goodness for that, right?

Michelle Wolf: Yes, yes. I can do them, but those complex ones were a little on the edge of my capability.

Mike: Oh, yeah. I can do with validation rules and stuff, and it requires parens. Once we get past one set of parens, I'm done. I'm cooked.

Michelle Wolf: Yeah.

Mike: That's it. Nope. I bow out early. I can't swim in the deep end of that pool. And I've seen people work with 15 nested statements. I'm like, "I'm exhausted reading this. How do you even know what it's doing?"

Michelle Wolf: Right.

Mike: Well, thanks so much for coming on the podcast and telling us about this. I think it's really cool. I hope you have an opportunity to share that onboarding Flow with more people and present it at more user groups.

Michelle Wolf: I had a suggestion to make it a hands-on training.

Mike: Yeah, it sounds cool.

Michelle Wolf: Yeah.

Mike: That sounds really cool. Maybe you should suggest it for TDX next year.

Michelle Wolf: Yeah.

Mike: Because that's a very technical, hands-on... People would love that.

Michelle Wolf: Yeah. Well, they didn't pick it up this year, but I'm not sure I sold it very well. So we'll try next year.

Mike: I mean, it's all in how you sell it sometimes.

Michelle Wolf: Yeah.

Mike: And also whether or not places have space for stuff like that. Not every track gets certain kinds of... It's a thing. That's a whole other rabbit hole within a rabbit hole that we could go to. I could do a whole series of podcasts on it, and nobody would listen to it, but I would think it would be interesting. And five people who write submissions would.

Michelle Wolf: Yeah.

Mike: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Michelle Wolf: Thank you so much, Mike. It was a pleasure.

Mike: A big thank you to Michelle Wolf for sharing how she turned user onboarding into a thoughtful, scalable Salesforce process. My takeaway for admins is simple. Flow can automate the clicks, but your understanding of approvals, access, permissions, and business context is what makes the process work. Now be sure to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast and share this episode with somebody who is ready to get their user management out of their inbox and into Salesforce. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Nikita Kothari, Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about using Setup with Agentforce to understand and manage record access.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Nikita Kothari.

Setup with Agentforce simplifies sharing Why can't I see this record? It's a simple question but, as any admin knows, finding an answer can get complicated quickly. If you've ever found yourself digging through Setup pages and running SOQL queries to troubleshoot permissions and record access issues, this episode is for you.

This week, I'm talking to Nikita Kothari, a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Salesforce. She's here to tell us how Setup with Agentforce can help solve sharing mysteries. Using natural language questions, admins can trace access across org-wide defaults, role hierarchies, sharing rules, groups, and manual shares to figure out what's really going on.

Troubleshooting permissions and record access issues As Nikita explains, permissions and record access issues are so complicated because they are affected by many overlapping configuration settings. Small changes can accumulate over time, especially in a reorg.

Setup with Agentforce was built to help you detangle these issues with simple natural language prompts. You can put your questions about permissions and record access to an agent, instead of having to wade through 1,300 pages of Setup to figure it out on your own.

Once you've got a handle on what the problem is, you can use Setup with Agentforce to help you implement changes and get everything sorted. And it's built with trust in mind: every write action requires your explicit approval, the agent is bounded by your permissions, and every configuration change is captured in the Setup Audit Trail.

Plan permissions for your org If you're trying to figure out where to get started, Nikita recommends starting small. "It's very difficult to go back and fix something," she says, "so I would highly recommend trying any changes in a sandbox with the minimum set of users to see if it is working as expected or not."

And because Setup with Agentforce makes looking at permissions and record access so much easier, Nikita recommends taking advantage of it to conduct a monthly permissions review. Again, these issues accumulate over time, so an ounce of prevention is truly worth a pound of cure.

Make sure to listen to my full conversation with Nikita for more on Setup with Agentforce and how to get sharing straightened out in your org. And don't forget to subscribe for more episodes of the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Podcast swag * Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more * Salesforce Admins Blog Post: Mastering Your Org's Sharing Configuration with Setup with Agentforce * Salesforce Admins Blog Post: 5 Use Cases To Get Started With Setup with Agentforce * Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Setup with Agentforce Makes Salesforce Admin Tasks Easier

Admin Trailblazers Group * Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social * Nikita 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: Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we're talking with Nikita Kothari, Senior Member of the Technical Staff here at Salesforce, about using Setup with Agentforce to understand and manage record access. Sharing can be one of those invisible parts of the platform until someone can see a record they shouldn't or can't see one they need to. Nikita explains how admins can use natural language questions to trace access across org-wide defaults, role hierarchies, sharing, rules, groups, and manual shares. We also discuss why validation, permissions, testing, and human approval remain essential when AI helps make configuration changes. So give this episode a listen, click that subscribe button, maybe share it with another Salesforce admin who's ever asked, "Why can this user see this record?" Let's get Nikita on the podcast. So Nikita, welcome to the podcast.

Nikita Kothari: Thank you, Mike. It is amazing to be here. I'm from the engineering team, so you'll get my lot of perspective on how we are building Setup with Agentforce on sharing.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, that's exactly what I wanted to talk about. Let's first get a little acquainted with you. What do you do at Salesforce, and what are some of the things that you've worked on?

Nikita Kothari: So it's been close to two years I'm working with Salesforce. And currently, I'm working with access control and sharing space. What pulled me in is the realization that sharing is one of those invisible infrastructure layer. When it works, nobody thinks about it, but when it breaks, it actually breaks the customer trust. And you know how customer-centric Salesforce is, its number one priority is trust. So there is lot of critical issues that we are dealing with and we are trying to make the sharing as the best place for the admins. And we love our admins and we are trying to make things better for them.

Mike Gerholdt: I love our admins too. I used to be one for a while. I'd like to still think I am, but we'll see. Well, let's get into it. So I read your article and I'll link to that in the show notes. Tell me, I mean, before Setup with Agentforce, what did an admin have to do to answer a question of, why can this user see this opportunity and this user not?

Nikita Kothari: Oh, good question. So it's the simplest way of dealing with solving the sharing's toughest problems. So just to enable the Agentforce, you don't have to do anything. It comes along with the Agentforce. So go to the setup page, search for the Agentforce agent and enable your Setup with Agentforce, and then you can start writing those questions. You don't have to know anything beforehand, that's the best part of the Agentforce setup. And sharing is the challenging domain, I won't deny that. It is very, very complex. So answering even the simplest question that you ask, like, "Who this person is having access for this thing," it requires to look into a lot of different domains like OWD, role hierarchy, sharing rules, sharing groups, manual shares, to see which layer actually give that access to that particular user. And looking that information, sometimes it's easier with the UI, but most of the time user has to run lots of SQL queries to get the correct answer. And previously, admin was spending hours of work and sometimes even the afternoons just to deal with that single questions. And with Setup with Agentforce, it just a minute of work. You just give prompt to your chatbots and it'll give you the correct answer within seconds.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I mean, boy, it used to be a lot of archeological digging. I think you called it that in the article. I know I used to have to feel like I was going through a checkbox, but tell me, I mean, walk us through a real investigation where an admin discovers that a user can see a record, they probably shouldn't. How would they use Setup with Agentforce to trace where that access came from?

Nikita Kothari: Yeah, great question. So while building these actions, we particularly divide it into two different segments. First segment is the read action and the second segment is the write action. Just to keep it, things untangled, read actions will help you to investigate. When you ask a question like, "Why Nikita has access for these things?" So our agent will go into the background, it will do all kinds of research and it will come up with the best answer. "Okay, Nikita is part of this group, and these groups provide the access to this particular record." And what a write action on the hand will do, it will help you to solve that problem. Now you know Nikita is part of the particular group. You can go ahead and ask your write action, "Can you please remove Nikita from this group?" And your write action will help you to remove that particular user from that group and boom, your problem is solved within a few minutes. It's reliable, it's fast, and I'm sure admin can save a lot of time with these two things. And you don't need to know which action or which thing you need. You just write the plain natural language and our LLM will be able to guess where to navigate and how to solve that problem.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. No, I hear you. I think you walked us through what a good sharing investigation looks like. But for you, is there a sequence admins should follow so that they don't just jump straight to changing configuration?

Nikita Kothari: I would say I would highly recommend admin to start playing with the read action. There is no particular sequence, I would say, but mostly how the sharing is defined is like first we have the OWD, which provides the base access to the records and to the objects. And then comes the role hierarchy, then comes sharing rules, then we have public groups and queue and we have the manual shares. So at each level, sharing opens up the door for more access. So if you're going below the hierarchy, sharing will provide more and more access to the user. And if you want to close that access, it's not easier that one sharing rule will open up the access and then you create another sharing rule to close the access. It's not how it works. So in that case, you need to spend a strategic amount of time thinking how you can revoke that access. And sharing is accumulation of the small, small, small decisions over the time. Sometimes adding someone to the group, for the reorg, you have to do lot of things with the sharing, and every decision gets compound. So I highly recommend our admins to at least spend 30 minutes a month to refresh and reanalyze their sharing configuration to avoid the future problem. So this is basically the flow looks like, but I would say there is any of sequencing which admins should follow. It's pretty much open and admin can ask any question to our agent.

Mike Gerholdt: No, I think you're right. I mean, Setup with Agentforce can do a lot in terms of explaining the configuration and then help change it. I think you really touched on that last answer of just slowing down for a second, verifying what the answer is to make sure that you're staying in control. My question to you would be, how should an admin validate what the agent tells them?

Nikita Kothari: Oh, that's a good question. So for the read action, the information, we have mostly the links added to our prompts. We call it as a clickable link. So if investigation is saying that Nikita is part of this group, actually, there is a link of that group. So you can go to that group by clicking on that link, and you can actually see I'm a part of that group if you want to re-verify the stuff. So, that will give you more confidence that you know how admin is investigating the information or if admin is saying, "Nikita is part of the sharing rule and you'll have the link for the sharing rule." So you can actually go and verify whether that sharing rule contains the group or the users where it is providing that access. And with the write action, I think more critical is the right action. I mean, you don't want somebody, AI is coming to your system and randomly making changes to your system. So to do that, we have the validation layers. The first validation we generally come up with is for every write action, we explicitly ask for the approval, approval from the person who is making the changes. And we also have the permission boundaries, and if particular user doesn't have the permission to edit OWD, the agent won't be able to edit OWD for that person. And then the last part is the accountability. Every change we are logging into the setup audit trail saying that whether the AI agent did it or actual person did it. And then admin can verify it, whatever changes is made by the AI agent are trustable or not. So we will always advise admin to go and do as much as possible testing on the sandbox before making changes into the production. And another backup system is the Einstein Trust layer. We always say trust is our number one priority. So, Salesforce has built trust everywhere to make sure that we are not blindly making any changes, and as this is a very, very critical domain to our customers.

Mike Gerholdt: No, that's great. You talked a lot about sharing, and I always feel like making a change with sharing, you want to make sure that you're doing it right. In your opinion, what is the most important thing an admin should review before making a sharing change?

Nikita Kothari: So I would say, as I said before, we have some of the steps that I also wrote in my blog, that we have OWD sharing rule, rule hierarchy, and everything opens up the more access. So to close that access, it's very difficult to go back and fix something. So, I would highly recommend whenever our admins are making the changes, try it out first thing on the sandbox if it is working as expected or not. Or have some verification system or another set of eyes whenever you create some rule hierarchy or you're providing some access to the rule, rather than giving access to all of the user, first try with the minimal set of the user. Try with the one user and see if that user are getting right access to the right record. Because even if you fail to provide a single user a wrong access, that means that you're leaking your data. So having those, another, just starting with a small and then going into the bigger and bigger data, that would really help admin to build the reliable system.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, absolutely. I think it can do a lot and I've seen it do a lot, but what is something that Setup with Agentforce can help with today that maybe admins may not realize?

Nikita Kothari: I feel like still adoption, it's tricky because people are quite a lot thinking that Setup with Agentforce will replace their job. But I would say rather than replacing, it will provide you a lot of capabilities and it will remove a lot of overhead from your day-to-day work life, rather than going and looking into the SQLs or doing everything by yourself, just give it a try. And then you can see how much opportunity it is opening up for you to save time. And that time you can actually use for building a more structural, and because structure mattered a lot when it comes for sharing. How your roles are getting access or how your groups are getting access. And if you're just blindly following the steps and not thinking much, then you are in a trouble. So you can spend more time and thinking about, how can you better make a structure for your organization? And you can get more time to think about your business. And I feel like most of the troubleshooting cases we have covered into the Setup with Agentforce flow. Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. You mentioned a lot, admins should get out and use it and try it, and I'm a big proponent of that. So I'll end on this question. What for you is one kind of low risk question that an admin could ask Setup with Agentforce today to better understand their sharing configuration?

Nikita Kothari: I think my one of the favorite action among all of it is record access, to ask why this person is having access to this record. And you see how much it can do, it will give you the whole list of the OWD configuration for that particular record, or it will look for the sharing role, it will look for the group membership, it will look for the manual shares. And it will do all kind of investigation for you just when you type a one single natural language to your agent. So you can always think about someone which is having more knowledge about the setup. It's sitting with you and helping you to deal with all of the setup configuration. Because setup, again, we have like 1,300 setup pages, which is lot. And going through all and learning the capabilities of each setup action, it's difficult. So, that's why we built the Setup with Agentforce, which will give you the capability that you don't have to learn everything on the go. And you can start asking question to our bot. If it won't be able to answer, it will guide you in the right direction to help and analyze your queries or your concerns.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I am so glad that we have Setup with Agentforce. I feel like I could have used it 20 years ago. I know I had a lot of questions and would have to dig through my notes on org-wide and sharing and group sharing and all kinds of that stuff. So, I appreciate it. And I appreciate the article and you taking time out of your day to talk to admins and share your knowledge about sharing and setup and how we can do things better.

Nikita Kothari: Yeah. I think admins are always on the top of our list. I would love to hear from our admins how they like this Setup with Agentforce, specifically with the sharing, how it is helping them or what they are looking forward to, because I feel like most of our critical projects and best solution came up with the admin feedback. And we really want to make admin life easier. We always have meetings internally, our engineering team, our product is always so much focused about thinking about our admins, thinking about the newer way to introduce some more features to make their lives easier so that they can focus on building a reliable solution. So, it was great talking to you.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, no, I'm glad you could share your knowledge with us today. Thanks so much.

Nikita Kothari: Yeah, thank you so much. And one more thing, we will be at Dreamforce. Larry Sherrill is our Product Manager. They're having a lot to share at Dreamforce. So, feel free to stop at user access booth. I'll be there too, so come and say hi and share your feedback. We would love to hear back from you. And we keep making a lot of progress on Setup with Agentforce, so stay tuned, follow our blogs, and it will be something will be really helpful in future for you guys. Thank you so much.

Mike Gerholdt: Thanks again to Nikita for helping us understand how Setup with Agentforce can make sharing investigations faster without taking judgment out of the Salesforce admin's hand. And the takeaway is just really simple, use AI to uncover the source of access, validate what it tells you, and test changes carefully before they reach production. Now, if you enjoyed this episode, and I bet you did, I hope you did, you should subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Share this episode maybe with your team, fellow team, user group. Oh, I like that, if you'd share it with the user group, that would be awesome. And then, how about this? Start with one low risk question about your own org sharing configuration and ask that to Setup with Agentforce. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jean Velonis, Senior Technical Program Manager at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about the new Superbadge Cohort Learning pilot program and how you can get involved.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jean Velonis.

Improvements to Superbadges I have to confess, I've always found Superbadges to be a little intimidating. They're locked behind requirements, without clear step-by-step instructions for how to work towards them. That's why I sat down with Jean Velonis, a Senior Technical Program Manager working to improve the Superbadge experience.

The first thing Jean wants you to know is that they've overhauled the Superbadge UI. Instead of being locked behind a list of requirements, Superbadges now have a Recommended Learning section. These Trailhead modules and badges are organized into units, giving you a much clearer path to work towards your goal.

What is the Superbadge Cohort Learning pilot program? In addition to the UI changes, Jean and her team are launching a new pilot program called Superbadge Cohort Learning. These sessions let you connect with other learners and subject matter experts to work towards a Superbadge together, guided by a facilitator.

For now, the pilot program is focused on two of the most popular Superbadges. For admins, the Data Quality and Validation Superbadge gives you the knowledge you need to prep your org for AI. And if you're a dev or looking to improve your coding skills, there will also be groups for the Apex Callouts Superbadge.

They're running both in-person and virtual versions of these sessions, so look out for them at a Dreamin' event or community group near you.

Volunteer as a subject matter expert or facilitator If you already have these Superbadges, Jean highly recommends volunteering as a subject matter expert or a facilitator. When you're working with new learners, you'll run into questions and situations that deepen your understanding of the topic more than you ever thought possible.

The other thing about students is that they keep learning. Teaching is an incredible opportunity to make strong connections that will last throughout your career. As Jean explains, two of her former students are now her go-to people when she has code or Flow questions.

Make sure to listen to the full episode for more from Jean about the Superbadge Cohort Learning pilot program. And make sure you're subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us in your feed every Thursday.

Podcast swag * Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more * Sign up to be a subject matter expert or facilitator: Superbadge Cohort Learning Pilot Session * Salesforce 360 Blog Post: How to Stand Out in the AI Era with Superbadges

Admin Trailblazers Group * Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social * Jean on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on X * Mike on Bluesky social * Mike on Threads * Mike on X

Full Transcript

Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I'm joined by Jean Velonis to talk about the Superbadge Cohort Learning Pilot and what happens when admins stop learning alone and start solving problems together. We're going to dig into these cohorts and how they bring experts, beginners, and everyone together in the same room to work through real challenges, build confidence, and get comfortable being uncomfortable. Because for Salesforce admins, knowing how to troubleshoot, test, fail safely, and ask better questions matters just as much as knowing where to click. And as AI and agents become part of everyday platform work, well, those fundamental skills help admins validate what is correct, keep data reliable, and make sure that the platform reflects what the business actually needs. So listen in, subscribe and share this episode with an admin who learns best by rolling up their sleeves and figuring it out. Let's get Jean on the podcast. So Jean, welcome to the podcast.

Jean Velonis: Thank you so much for having me. I think this is the second time I've been here, but it's been a while.

Mike: I know. Well, when you do the podcast for almost 14 years now, I try not to have guests back, only if they're important like yourself.

Jean Velonis: Ooh, thank you.

Mike: We were Salesforce MVPs together a hundred years ago when the internet was still tubes and wires, and now we're both at Salesforce. And you're on, I would call, what, the curriculum side, the learning side?

Jean Velonis: Yeah, I would categorize that. It's more Trailhead, right? So long story short, certification was my jam for so long, and superbadges were part of that. But over the last couple of years, we've decoupled from certification. We're still with Trailhead and we're still considered an assessment, but we don't have all the guardrails of certification on us anymore, which is really exciting.

Mike: Gotcha. And just for reference, if anybody thinks they might have met Jean at a Dreaming event or a Salesforce event, you tend to usually have purple hair and a bedazzled Ranger hat. Is that an accurate description?

Jean Velonis: These are facts. These are facts. I've had purple hair probably since six months of coming into Salesforce. And if anybody knows the famous Chris Duarte out there, she taught me everything I know about bedazzling. So I made a Ranger hat.

Mike: Yeah. A lot of people bedazzle now because of her.

Jean Velonis: Yes.

Mike: Well, let's talk about this new Superbadge cohort learning pilot that you've kicked off because I think you're trying to bring the best of both worlds together.

Jean Velonis: Absolutely. This isn't a new concept either. I'll just throw that out there. We had some amazing trailblazers before the pandemic and even through the pandemic doing Salesforce Saturdays or Salesforce Sundays and they would get together in person or virtually and work on Trailhead. So this is kind of piggybacking off that concept and really bringing some of the community magic to superbadges because I think we can all look at a superbadge and be like, oh, that's kind of intimidating. There's no step-by-step instructions. This looks really hard. There's multiple steps to it, and that just looks hard and I don't want to do it. But the cohort learning brings a facilitator, like a community group leader or a Dreamin event person to come in and help bring people together virtually or in person and work on a Superbadge together. And we've been running a couple of pilots of these. We did one at TDX and WITness Success in Indi. And it's been really successful in person just because you can pair experts and newbies together at a table and make people really uncomfortable, and then they start talking to each other and learning from each other. And I think that's what gets really excited about doing this cohort learning. And then we've done a couple of virtual events as well where we've brought community group leaders, kind of like train the trainer of like, here's how you should run this virtually to be successful, because that virtual is a little bit different beast. It's really easy to hide and stay on mute and turn your camera off where we really try and get people excited to share their skillset with each other.

Mike: Yeah. No hiding in the dark corners. So I really like the idea of this. I've always really enjoyed Trailhead because I'm the type of learner that likes to do it at my own pace. Sometimes I even crazily go back and redo a badge just because I feel like if I've rushed through it, did I really learn it or was I just trying to get it done? And when I'm really trying to learn it, I really take my time. I will agree with you, I've written superbadges. I also enjoy the freedom. They're kind of like, "Here, go, do. " And you're like, "Oh yes." It's almost like the days of driver's ed when you get out from behind the desk and you finally get to drive the car in the real world. It's a little more of trying things out. So are these cohorts that you're doing now, are they open to any superbadge or are they just specific ones?

Jean Velonis: That's a really good question. We looked at our whole library of Superbadges and we wanted to pick one for admins and one for developers. And that doesn't mean it's just if you have that skill set. It's more of like, here's two of the main roles we see in the community. So we have data quality and validation, which is really for anybody prepping you for this agentic ecosystem that we're in, cleaning up your org.

Mike: I mean, to be honest with you, that's what we've needed to do this whole time. Even before AI, it's sweeping the floors, you know?

Jean Velonis: Yeah. I mean, it's been that way for a long time. I think I made my whole Salesforce admin career of going in and cleaning up orgs, to be honest. So that was a great place for us to start. And then now we've started looking at the developer side of it and we picked Apex Callouts superbadge for all of our developers. And I was very intimidated by trying to put together a superbadge in a box for that cohort because I'm not a developer. But going through this process, I'm like, "You know what? I think I can actually do this," And that's because of all the great learning badges on Trailhead and being able to go at your own pace. Because that's a whole nother skill set for an admin to try and figure out, right?

Mike: Right. I've often thought of, this is just how Mike's brain works. If I had children, I would for sure name one of them Apex because then you just gave them a shout-out.

Jean Velonis: That's hilarious. I would've never thought-

Mike: That's how I work. My brain today is like, "Oh yeah. Hey, did you hear you were mentioned on a Salesforce podcast?" "Of course I was. I'm an Apex Callout."

Jean Velonis: I'll tell you a weird secret. I do put my children's names in superbadge content. All of us over here under the superbadge team put little-

Mike: Easter eggs?

Jean Velonis: Easter eggs, yeah-

Mike: Yeah, I love it.

Jean Velonis: ... out there. It's either in the org or it's in the content. We're all moms over here, so we would like to give our kids a shout-out.

Mike: Well, I will see your Easter egg and I will call your Easter egg. In almost every admin keynote demo, we have put our pets' names.

Jean Velonis: I love that.

Mike: So you can go back and figure out whose pets were whom. The only time, the only exception was we had Einstein Voice rollout and my dog's name was yet to be used and we couldn't use it because it wouldn't recognize it. It was too hard to say. And so we had to go with something easy and punchy with hard consonants in it. So anyway, yes. I think there should be, I'm sure there is somewhere, a whole forum of Easter eggs found in Trailhead material.

Jean Velonis: 100%. And I think that's what Trailhead is, where it's the weird, it's the hanging out, it's the learning something new, it's the being uncomfortable. Because it really is, learning can be really uncomfortable.

Mike: I mean, it exposes a weakness and people don't like feeling weak. It's also the thing I always think about whenever I was doing training because you're changing something. And the person that told me how to do training gave me a very well-rounded, concise piece of advice, which is people don't like to go to work and feel stupid. And when you change something, even in a CRM, that's what that comes from. And people don't like to feel stupid. And I feel that way. You change something, you're like, "Oh, this was here yesterday. Why isn't it here?" And you blame yourself and that's not the point. You do a lot of training. So let's go through just some scenarios of I'm a new Salesforce admin. I stumbled across this podcast. Also, hello. You have a lot of episodes to catch up on. That's okay. You have a lot of time. What should they do to prepare to come to one of these learning cohorts?

Jean Velonis: I mean, the easy answer is get on Trailhead and start earning badges, that's number one. Step two is take a look at the new look and feel for superbadges and that will bring you to our recommended learning. It used to be required to unlock the superbadge, but we've just now come onto what I would say the Trailhead UI. Superbadges are put into these units now where the first unit is like, let's get ready. Let's get your developer org. Let's do the recommended learning. Let's connect it to your superbadge now. That's all a little bit different than what we used to do with superbadges. You had to unlock it and then you had to go down all the way to the bottom of the page to hook up your org. Now it looks like a regular module or badge, which is nice because as somebody who struggles with reading and keeping my place on Trailhead, this new guy is really going to help with that. But also doing the recommended learning I think is key even though it's unlocked now and you don't have to do it. I will tell you I am the first person to start doing something and being like, "Oh, I have no idea what I'm doing with this. Maybe I should have done-"

Mike: I should have done those recommended modules.

Jean Velonis: Yes. And then I will have to go back and learn and figure things out. I did that with the prompt template superbadge. I thought I knew what I was doing.

Mike: No.

Jean Velonis: I did not. And that's falling, that's failing forward. That's realizing I don't know what I'm doing. Let me go figure this out and then come back to it. So I think that's step number two. Go and read through the superbadges, look at them, look at the recommended learning. And then if you see that there is a Dreamin event or a community group doing one of these superbadges, join them. Even if you've done the superbadge, that's okay. You can go help the other people that are there.

Mike: Oh, I almost think that would be the next best thing after doing a superbadge is going and volunteering to help train. Because never will you ever learn more about something than when you have to train somebody about something or walk around the room and answer questions. You're like, "Hey, I didn't run into that when I was doing mine, but let's figure it out." And it's super fun because then you're like, "This wasn't a problem for me, but now it's a problem that I get to work through."

Jean Velonis: Yeah. I mean, bringing you all the way back to SABWA.

Mike: Oh, sure.

Jean Velonis: Call out, Mike. I mean, geez. Yeah, that is my favorite thing to walk around, especially I live in these superbadges every day. Our team builds them. We maintain them. We have to deal with all the product changes that are very quickly changing and trying to keep up with everything. So being able to walk around the room and see how trailblazers are doing things, that not only helps me figure out, okay, here's some of the common pitfalls or where people are getting stuck and I can write some hints to help, but also maybe we don't do that in the next superbadge or maybe we call it out in a different way or let's go update the help article and call this piece out if somebody's getting stuck somewhere. So it's super helpful. But also you get to meet a ton of different people, which we do virtually every day, but it's easy to hide behind the keyboard again. And to be able to connect with somebody and see their aha moment of where they're like, "Yes, I figured this out," that's super gratifying.

Mike: Oh, that's almost the time that you make a friend.

Jean Velonis: A best friend.

Mike: Yeah. I mean, because you're always going to be like, "Well, let's continue chatting while you work through this." And then the next thing you know, they're building Apex Callouts, and you're like, "Oh, I didn't get that far." And then they're teaching you stuff. I promise you it'll happen.

Jean Velonis: It will happen. I can say 100% certainty it will happen. I have two people that I call on all the time or that I met through a conference or doing something, and I'm like, "Okay, I know this person knows code and I know this person knows flow. I'm not good at those things, but I can text or call or Slack and be like, I'm stuck."

Mike: Right. So I mean, I have a thousand questions, but let's go to the opposite end of that where if you're a community member, maybe you're a user group leader or a Dreamin event person and you're like, "This sounds like a super fun thing for me to include in my agenda," What would their steps be for possibly including, I know it's in a pilot, but for including this or what's your vision for it moving forward?

Jean Velonis: Yeah. We have a facilitator signup forum-

Mike: Sweet.

Jean Velonis: ... which I'm sure you would be happy to put that in the bio or the show notes.

Mike: It is in the show notes as we speak.

Jean Velonis: Perfect. But yeah, just signing up to raise your hand to be a facilitator is huge. Because I'm going to have this superbadge in a box ready very quickly for people to take to a pilot. I have two Dreamin events that are already wanting to do this in August and a community group that also wants to bring it to their local people. So signing up to be a facilitator and doing this on your own, love that. And I wish I could go to every one of them, to be honest. I looked at a couple of them and I'm like, "I might be able to make this work and just show up." But there's also a piece in that form too to sign up to be a subject matter expert and help if there's somebody locally that wants to do this. And selfishly, I put that in there that if you want to help us build superbadges, that would be awesome too.

Mike: Right. And this sounds rhetorical, but it is honest. They should have probably already completed that superbadge that they want to facilitate or host.

Jean Velonis: I mean, I'd advise it. And with the new UI, you can redo a superbadge. You can retake it now. So you can do the superbadge over.

Mike: To refresher, because maybe you haven't done it in a while and want to see what's new.

Jean Velonis: I mean, the facilitator that did WITness Success told me she still had her notes when she originally did the Apex Callouts in 2017.

Mike: Wow.

Jean Velonis: Right?

Mike: I probably have notes from somewhere of 2017 I have nowhere. That's awesome.

Jean Velonis: No, that notebook's gone.

Mike: Yeah. I always think of admins listening to this and I don't want it to be a pitch session for your cohort, but this is really a neat way to get involved with the community. From all of your work, and this is just stepping out of your role and what you're doing in this superbadge cohort. Out of all of the work that you've done at Salesforce and what you create for Trailhead, what are some of the biggest themes that you run into that really, when that light bulb turns on for an admin, they suddenly just become, I don't want to say instantly become successful, but they really start to click and feel confidence and have that aha moment?

Jean Velonis: I think being a Salesforce admin for such a long time, being able to fail and problem solve is probably the best skill you can have. You can learn any technical skill. I can go into a dev org and break things and figure out how products work. But if you don't know how to problem solve through something, getting to that aha moment is going to take you a long time if you're too afraid to break something. And I have broken things. And I think I've told you, I've deleted records from an org before and went, "Uh-oh, how do I get those back?" So that is one of my favorite things is to go into a playground or dev org and just break it, pull things apart, see how it works and be like, "Okay, I know where I want to go, but how do I get there? And I don't know how to get there, but if I go in and break everything, I'm going to learn a lot more than if I follow step-by-step instructions of how to do something."

Mike: Right. If it works out perfect the first time.

Jean Velonis: Yeah. What did you learn? Oh, I know how to do that. Okay. Well, what's next then?

Mike: Do you find that you have to remind people that it's okay to fail when building and it's okay for things to not work the way you want them to the first time?

Jean Velonis: Yeah. And I mean, that's how we build superbadges. I mean, we have all these SMEs and we look through different use cases and we go into an org and build it out and we're like, "Well, that's not going to work for this unit," or, "That's not going to work for this use case," or how do we find those different tasks to lead the witness basically in the challenge to get to where we want them to go, but without telling them? And you can do it 97 different ways. There's not necessarily always a right way to get there.

Mike: Right. I know I've sat down. We used to have, it was Dreamforce long, long time ago. And I was paired up with Josh Birk and we were helping a customer through a situation. And it was interesting because both he and I came up with a solution. Both he and I came up with a very different path to the solution. Mine was using, at the time, Flows, and his was using some code and some triggers. And the customer's like, "But which one's right?" And we're like, "Both of them." I mean, never could you ever run into a situation where both solutions are equally correct. It's based on what you want to maintain and your knowledge.

Jean Velonis: 100%. And now you also have this agentic thing that will try and tell you the right path to go and you can be like, "Well, I don't want to do it that way." And it's like, "Oh yeah, you're right. Let's try it this way." So I think even having that fundamental base of an admin or a dev is really going to serve you well in this ecosystem. So problem solving, having a foundational skill set, and then also knowing where you want to go and problem solving your way to get there.

Mike: Right. So let me ask you, you've brought up agents and AI sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally, but I mean, it's definitely something that it's our every day now. From your perspective as building a lot of content and in the learning space, what is the most important thing you think admins should learn about AI and agents? I

Jean Velonis: I think the most important... Well, there's two. Learning when to trust that the AI is telling you the right thing and knowing how to ask the prompts and the questions. Because you may not know where you want to go, but if you have your fundamental base of the system, you can ask it the right questions to get you where you're going. And as somebody who struggles with writing content, I know where I want to go, I know what the tasks are for the superbadge. And I can say, "Okay, now help me write an error message," or, "Help me write a hint for a help article that's going to help them get unstuck." And you can ask AI that too. You're like, "Hey, I'm using this Flow element. I'm trying to go here and make this system do this. It's not working. Help me untangle this."

Mike: Right. Help me. Teach me, don't tell me.

Jean Velonis: That's key. Teach me, don't tell me. I don't need step by step.

Mike: I do that all the time with Wordle. Don't tell me the answer, just help me figure out what this word is. I'm stuck. Jean, last question because I know you have to go. It's 2030 and the Superbadge Cohort Learning program is out of pilot. What does it look like?

Jean Velonis: It looks like all of our trailblazers getting together, helping each other learn something new, experts and newbies and everybody in the middle taking something away from that hour or that day that they spent with each other and everybody having their own aha moment. Whether it's I helped somebody get unstuck or I got a new superbadge or I made a new contact or I'm out of a job and I made this whole partner and I handed them my resume, those are the things that make the community go round. Those are the things that makes learning so important. And it's okay to break things.

Mike: Right. Very well. Very well said. Thank you, Jean, for being on the podcast.

Jean Velonis: Thanks, Mike. Happy to be here.

Mike: Big thank you to Jean Velonis for joining us and reminding us admins that getting stuck is not the end of learning, it is usually where the useful part begins. Now, whether you join a cohort, you facilitate one, or you know what, you simply just help another Salesforce admin work through a challenge, teaching and problem solving are powerful ways to strengthen your platform judgment. Be sure to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins podcast. Share this episode with somebody who is ready to learn and really earn that next aha moment. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jay Hurst, Senior Vice President of Product Management, and James Ferguson, Senior Director of Product Management, at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about MFA step-up authentication and what it means for Salesforce Admins.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jay Hurst and James Ferguson.

Step-up authentication protects sensitive actions Starting next week, Salesforce is requiring all users to use Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). If you're a privileged user like, for example, an admin, you'll need to use a phishing-resistant MFA. That's why I sat down with Jay Hurst, VP of Product Management, and James Ferguson, Senior Director of Product Management, to talk about why these changes are vital to protect your org's data.

The first thing to know is that AI is making it easier than ever to launch targeted phishing attacks at scale. So while the MFA requirements provide a good first layer of protection, we want to make extra sure you are who you say you are before you're allowed to perform certain actions, like downloading a large number of records or running a big report.

Phishing-resistant MFA uses a passkey, like a fingerprint or facial recognition biometric, to verify that it's actually you and not just someone with access to your email account.

Balancing security with user friction As Jay and James acknowledge, these changes will add some friction to your users' experience. However, with the pace at which these kinds of attacks are evolving, it's more important than ever to get serious about your security posture.

"We're trying to introduce a little more friction right now so that people start to think," Jay explains, "and start to build those habits of understanding when they're doing something that potentially could be considered a malicious attack, such as downloading that All Opportunities report."

They're also building out compensating controls that should make things easier in the future, allowing you to trust users from a certain IP range, for example.

Security is a journey, not a destination The most important thing to realize is that these requirements are about more than just jumping through some extra hoops. Phishing and man-in-the-middle attacks are growing more and more sophisticated, and you need better protections than "Well, that hasn't happened yet."

Instead, James and Jay recommend viewing this as an opportunity to partner with other stakeholders in your org to develop a comprehensive security plan. As Jay says, "Security is a journey, not a destination. What is 100% secure today is not as secure tomorrow." The trick is to develop a security-focused mindset throughout your business that will protect you now and in the future.

Make sure to listen to my full conversation with Jay and James for more on step-up authentication and how admins can reduce friction for users. And make sure you're subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Podcast swag * Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more * Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: What Are Security Essentials for Salesforce Admins? * Salesforce Admins Blog Post: Securing Your Org: From Reactive to Proactive * Salesforce Help Article: Prepare for the upcoming Step-up Authentication requirements on Report Actions * Salesforce Help Article: Prepare for MFA Enforcement for All Employee Users * Salesforce Help Article: Prepare for Phishing-Resistant MFA Enforcement for Privileged Users including Admins * Salesforce Help Article: Security-Related Product Updates to the Salesforce Platform: User Identity, Data Protection, and Access Controls

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Social * Jay on LinkedIn * James on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on X * Mike on Bluesky social * Mike on Threads * Mike on X

Full show transcript Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we're talking with Jay Hurst and James Ferguson from Salesforce Product Management about MFA step-up authentication and what it means for Salesforce admins. As you know, security isn't just a front-door login decision anymore. It's about protecting sensitive actions, understanding risk, and designing systems users can trust. So Jay and James are going to help us unpack phishing-resistant MFA, compensating controls, IP ranges, SSO, and why these changes matter in a world where data, automation and AI are all working together. For us Salesforce admins, this is a chance to think beyond features and really look at how we steward the entire system. So listen in, click that Subscribe button, and of course I would love if you could share it with fellow Salesforce admins or, hey, you know what? Let's make some friends in that security team. So with that, let's get Jay and James on the podcast. So Jay and James, welcome to the podcast.

Jay Hurst: Thanks for having us, Mike.

James Ferguson: Great to be here.

Mike: Absolutely. Jay, let's start off with you. We kind of want to get to know a little bit about you, and James, we'll call on you second, but before we get into our topic today, can you just tell me a little bit about how you got to Salesforce and what you do?

Jay Hurst: Sure, yeah. So I have been with Salesforce for almost 22 years now. I started in our customer support department, one of the first 12 phone support reps here at Salesforce. Did that for a couple years and helped found our Tier 3 organization in support. Eventually moved over to our customer-centric engineering department, stayed in there for a while. And then in 2012, had an opportunity to join the product management group for platform, and I moved over and ran a team called Force.com Canvas. And for the last, I guess, 12-ish years now, I've been kind of weaving my way upwards through platform. Currently, I lead our platform services subcloud, so all of the core foundational pieces of platform that you might think of are schema and metadata, APIs, eventing systems, connectivity systems, and also our identity area, which is what brings us here today to talk about MFA.

Mike: Yeah. Boy, flashback. You called it the Force.com platform.

Jay Hurst: Well, that's what it was called back then.

Mike: I know. I know.

Jay Hurst: And I can't remember all of the names we've had for it.

Mike: Oh, that's okay. I'm sure there's a website that tracks all of them.

Jay Hurst: I'm sure there is.

Mike: James, fill us in. How'd you get to Salesforce, and what do you do here?

James Ferguson: Well, I am, I guess compared to Jay, one of the newer members of the team. I've only been at Salesforce for about 16 and a half years, almost 17 years. Pretty much entirely on the platform product management side, working on various things people know and love like sharing and big objects and event monitoring and those things. And most recently I've taken over responsibility for the identity product team, responsible for all the login and auth and SSO and all of the wonderful things we'll talk about today.

Mike: Oh, wow. Okay. So then just to be clear, I'm actually the newest person on this call. I've only been at Salesforce for a little over 12 years now, so I guess I still have my rookie stripes.

Jay Hurst: Combined we're almost at 40, or just over 40.

Mike: Yeah, combined. We almost get our AARP discount, right?

Jay Hurst: Yeah, exactly.

Mike: Jay, let's kick off. I know I did a podcast ... and I'll link back to it ... not that long ago with Laura Pelke talking about some of the new things that were coming out, and of course security is always big on admins' mind. She did a wonderful job of explaining step-up authentication to me, which was basically the airport analogy of you have to show your ID to get in and then you have to show your boarding pass to get onto the plane. I thought that really made sense to me, but let's talk about the new authentication that's coming out, if you call it that, and the new step-up concerns that Salesforce admins have.

Jay Hurst: Sure. So I think as we move into the continued proliferation of agents and AI across the industry, security is obviously top of mind for a lot of our customers and for Salesforce as well, specifically because we have to help protect our customers. And so when we're thinking of that and how we ensure our customers' data is protected, with step-up authentication, it's really focused around in that same analogy, making sure you're providing your boarding pass at the right times when you're doing things. So just like you need to show your boarding pass when you go through the TSA gate and when you're on the plane and probably to the gate agent after you're on the plane, when you're doing certain things within Salesforce, we want to make sure you are who you actually are and your session hasn't been compromised. So when you're doing certain higher sensitivity-type actions such as I want to download 10,000 records out of my system, maybe run a report, putting that end user through another verification of, "Hey, is this actually you? Prove it with your step-up," so that we have that confidence that we can release the records. And so this kind of helps prevent some of those man-in-the-middle phishing attacks where somebody gets you to log in and then steals your credentials or steals your session in the background. So it's kind of that second or third or fourth level of protection in the runtime.

Mike: Wow.

James Ferguson: I think that's an important shift that's worth calling out, because it's no longer about just putting a stronger lock on the front door and making sure somebody has better passwords, or even the later stuff, the more recent stuff with verification. But it's when sensitive things happen, we need to do a little extra even once you're inside the airport, if we want to continue that analogy. And so it's a shift from that front door to moving forward.

Mike: Yeah. James, help me understand that a little bit more, because I think one of the things that admins always fight is user friction. How hard is it to do something? And now we're introducing something when it could disrupt their flow of work, but it's for a good reason.

James Ferguson: Exactly. I would say that we are constantly balancing that. We're constantly balancing the need for security with the friction it does. And so we aren't expecting to do every click, for example, but just when you're exporting data from a report, which is potentially pulling a large amount of data out, we want to make extra sure. We're looking at some other things in the future around maybe when you're an admin changing some security configurations, we want to make sure you are who you are. And frankly, you see this more and more even in consumer websites where sometimes you're asked. If you're going to change a phone number, change a thing, you need to go back and sort of double-proof who you are. But it is a trade-off. It is a trade-off.

Mike: Yeah. It's like once you're logged in, it's, "Oh, if you're going to change." I was trying to order tacos the other day through an app and I needed to update my credit card. And then right after I did that, they're like, "And you need to put your password back in." I'm assuming that was kind of the same situation.

James Ferguson: Kind of the same situation.

Jay Hurst: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And the other thing I'll add to this too is on the friction point. We always have to balance that. Like James said, we don't want people to become overly frustrated and not want to use Salesforce because it has too much friction. But the reality is over the last 20 years, we've edged so far on the line of not causing any friction that we've led admins down the path of not having that understanding of what their users are doing, and really not getting into that proper security-conscious mode. So we're trying to rubber band a little bit back on the other side, introduce a little more friction right now, so that people start to think and start to build those habits of understanding when they're doing something that potentially could be considered a malicious attack, such as downloading that all-opportunities report. So starting to get customers to think through that while we are continuing to build out what we call compensating control. So the end goal here is not to provide friction and it's not to force you to do these one-time passwords for everything you need to do in the system. It's to give admins that layered capability of saying, "Well, if I have these five or six different controls I can put into place, then they can kind of compensate for one another." So where the most friction might be having to open up your email to get that one-time password to do the step-up, maybe we can compensate that through things like having a trusted IP range or already having a phishing-resistant authentication put in, or other controls that we will layer in. So we ultimately get to a posture where the admin can both reduce friction while choosing the proper set of controls for their needs.

Mike: Yeah. No, that makes sense. You mentioned phishing-resistant MFA. Can you help me explain that if somebody's never heard that before?

Jay Hurst: Yeah. So maybe I'm going to try and wiggle this airport analogy in. If we think way back in the day when you had your IDs, before REAL IDs and all of this, you didn't actually have good authentication on them. You might have a really bad picture, or in some cases IDs didn't have any pictures on them. They just had your name and your information, but they were accepted. Now, the problem with that is anybody could steal it if it doesn't have your picture, and they can pretend to be you. So phishing-resistant MFA is kind of that same thing. Where a normal MFA might be a one-time password on your phone where you get that push notification that says, "Hey, your code is 123456, enter that code in," that's great because it means you have to have your phone in order to get that one-time password, but it's not as secure because it's sent over SMS. It doesn't really verify that you are who you say you are. It's only that you have access to that phone. Phishing-resistant adds another layer on top of that, so it's not just over SMS or in an app. It would be through what are called passkeys or other more cryptographically secure passes. So think of your face ID, your touch ID, some of those passkey-type implementations that you might see, where it's not just getting a code, but you have to unlock a vault that has your information in it and then you provide that information out. So it's taking it from that ID that anybody can use if they just happen to steal your wallet into more of a REAL ID that also has some biometrics attached to it. So you can actually guarantee it's not just that you have the thing, but you have the thing and you are the person that should have the thing that identifies you. And so that's what we're implementing today that's starting to roll out tomorrow in production. We've already started pushing it into sandbox for admins where we want all of our administrative users across the system to enroll and use these phishing-resistant MFA capabilities, so that they're more secure.

Mike: Yeah. I never even thought of that. All the time there's apps I log into and they send me a one-time passcode and I'm like, "Well, of course I have access to it." Never did I think that, "Oh, what if somebody already has access to my email, requests that code, and now they're essentially spoofing me?" And it never dawned on me until you think of, well, they're not really verifying that it's you, Mike. They're just verifying that whoever requested that code also has access to your inbox. And you're like, "Oh."

Jay Hurst: Exactly. And that may not be a nice person.

Mike: Right. So James, what are some questions that admins are asking online that we can kind of help answer for them, or equip them for when they get this rolled out to them?

James Ferguson: They're certainly asking questions about phishing-resistant MFA versus regular MFA and the different sort of authenticators that are out there. I'll shift this around a bit. One of the things they aren't asking about, it's actually something that Jay mentioned in passing, which is the alternate controls. And for things like step-up, if you have login IP ranges on the org or on the user profile, or there's some session settings which force you to always be coming from the same IP address in your session, which is the case for most of us who are at a laptop at work or whatever it is. Those avoid step-up entirely because we have more certainty about who you are and where you're coming from. If your session's bouncing between Eastern Europe and Middle East and North Carolina and keeps hopping around, we start worrying more. So you can do some things around IP ranges, which takes that friction away from the user altogether, and so those are some of the things that I would encourage admins to look into. Now, sometimes it doesn't work because of mobile providers or other network infrastructure, but it's also potentially a low-calorie way of really sort of avoiding at least the step-up part. They'll still have the MFA requirements.

Jay Hurst: And one thing I'll add to that. When we add these types of controls to ... admins are human like the rest of us and we always want to make it as frictionless and easy as possible, but we don't want to trade off the security for it. So IP ranges specifically have been a little bit of our bane for the last six months, because we have a lot of customers who have said, "Well, I will just put in the entire internet range of IPs and go 000 to 255, 255, 255, 255. And then no matter where I'm coming from, I'm not going to get challenged and it's going to be great." And that works, or worked, but it's not secure. And so we don't want to trade off security for just checking the boxes. There are reasons for us doing this. Now, with that one specifically, we have put in changes in place where we won't let you use such a broad internet range to get around it in that respect, where you actually have to put though into like, "Well, what is the internet range that I'm actually coming from and using?" And we have some friction still with that, I would say, with admins using very global deployments or salespeople that travel around a lot and using different VPNs. So we're working through that as one of those compensating controls rather than the primary control. But again, it is up to all of our admins to really think through. We don't want you to just do the check the boxes that we're telling you to check because we want you to check a box. We really want you to think about these changes and what it means to your organization, why we're actually trying to implement these, and ultimately determine what makes the most sense for you and your company. And include your security officers and your CISOs to really validate what meets the requirements that your company has, so that everybody is protected both from a security perspective and ultimately a legal perspective as well.

Mike: Yeah. No, absolutely. I mean, we did a security day at TDX, our team did, and we had a CISO in there and a Salesforce admin as one of the kind of breakout topics, and they were in lockstep with each other, and I've always said that. I remember the instance I was managing, once it grew beyond 10 users, I was like, "I really need to figure out what our security posture is and who's in charge of this, who sets password complexities," at the time and stuff like that, and it's not adversarial. It's you want to be in alignment with what the rest of the company's doing and also fall in line if there's a SSO requirement. Boy, I was quick to jump on that, because it also made logging in simpler for my users.

Jay Hurst: 100%, and that's the other side of this. All of these things do play with SSO. If you have implemented SSO that has phishing-resistant capabilities already built into it, great. We will take advantage of that from the Salesforce side. We'll trust your provider. We'll trust that your security team has already set up what is needed for your company and we'll let you log in. So we don't want to add these additional duplicative type of controls for you, but we also recognize that a lot of our customers, maybe they're smaller customers, maybe they're not the enterprise size of Salesforce and don't have as structured of a security posture. So in those cases, we want to partner with our customers and really help them define what this should look like when they're thinking about internet security and their data in the cloud.

Mike: Jay, I'm going to continue with you because James brought up a really good point. I was thinking of, "I'm going to ask him the common questions that admins are asking online." And James, you flipped the script, and it's, "Well, here are the questions that worry us that they're not asking." Jay, I'd ask kind of the same question to you, is you've seen a lot of the questions that our community's asking online. What are the questions they aren't asking that you really hoped they would ask, or you're there to provide an answer for?

Jay Hurst: Yeah, I think the biggest ones, James talked about the compensating controls. That's a good one. I think a lot of our customers, as they're approaching it from the first standpoint is really they're looking at this as a Salesforce tax. They're really looking at it as like, "Oh, gosh, this is another thing Salesforce is putting me through. I don't know why. Why don't you just let me get my job done?" That type of attitude, which is completely understandable, but I do think one of the things our admins aren't seeing at that first cut is really the threat landscape that exists out there. I think if you haven't been attacked, if your org hasn't been compromised, it's very easy to fall into complacency and just think, "Everything's perfect, I'm secure, nothing's going to happen." And like everything, security and protection is a spectrum and it's a journey. You are never 100% perfectly ready for every outcome, and you also can't assume that what worked yesterday will continue to work tomorrow. So what I would love to see more of our admins and customers look through is how do I build the security and the continuing advancement of my security posture into my day-to-day, into my development scenarios, into my admin scenarios, where the first thing we should always be thinking about is, "Is this change I'm doing helping or degrading my security posture? And if it's degrading, how do I increase it? What do I do to make it better?" So I would love to get to a point where our very wonderful and vocal admins out there are also pushing us to do even more things to help protect them. What are the other controls that they're seeing across other enterprise systems that they want to take advantage of? How can Salesforce make it easier for you without lowering that security posture? How can we make it so that the friction can be lowered faster because you acknowledge the acceptance of the controls, or something like that around really getting back to a true partnership with more of our customers that I wouldn't say we've lost, but it's easy to forget about when you're focused on the headless 360s of the world or how can I get more agents into my system. And we also still have to think about, "And how do I keep it protected and managed?"

Mike: Right. Yeah. I mean, it's more people in your house, but also making sure that everybody shuts the door and locks it.

Jay Hurst: And wipes their feet.

Mike: Right. Takes shoes off.

James Ferguson: I think Jay also touches on what maybe I would consider the elephant in the room, because I think, when going back to the original question you asked in terms of what are admins asking, most of them aren't asking the why. Most of them acknowledge the value of these things and the need to do it, but they do push back on the why immediately and why under these compressed timelines and why, and sort of those kind of questions. And I will acknowledge that the rollout of some of these controls has not been as smooth as we all would've hoped, and so there's been some schedule things bouncing around from a timing perspective, and so we're definitely working on all of that. But it does play to that level of risk, and these are the things we really felt we needed to roll out sooner rather than later, and so that's why some of these timelines are compressed. I will add another, the flip side of that, to your point about what should admins be doing. We do find when we give notice, of like advanced notice of asking people to change things, they tend not to do it until the week before the enforcement date.

Mike: Imagine that. Procrastination? Come on, now.

James Ferguson: And so that's sort of, when our executives are looking at adoption rates or whatnot, it's sort of blunted. The desire to extend those out is blunted because, well, people are just going to wait anyways. But that said, I don't want to sort of ... We are pushing fast. We acknowledge that. We are making people a bit even uncomfortable, I would say. And we acknowledge that, but this is something, again, in the balance of the security posture we feel is important for the overall trust in the Salesforce platform and product.

Mike: I mean, the one thing that I've always learned through all of the work that I've done with various teams at Salesforce is for every time you roll something out, another lock, there's always 10 people there trying to pick it, if they haven't already picked it. And so you both have mentioned that unfortunately it's compressed timelines, but it's timelines because we need to make sure that you're building locks and putting that stuff in place before people just have it to where they can blow through it, you know?

Jay Hurst: Absolutely. The best defense is a good offense, I think is a very adequate app saying in this instance. We want to continue to make sure everybody is at a baseline security level, which is the phase we're in right now. It's this horizon zero of how do we get everybody to the minimum baseline, where we feel very comfortable that your data is going to be protected on the Salesforce platform? And it is painful, and it will be painful for the next couple months as these changes really roll out. Once we get there, we start thinking about what's our horizon one and our horizon two look like where we can start to add in the extra controls, give customers more levers to pull for their specific use cases, really focus on the experience around this, because I will also fully admit and not try and gloss over the fact that sometimes the wordings of things in the UX that we provide you to turn them on and turn them off is confusing and it's not as easy as it should be, and we're sacrificing some of that ease of use right now for speed of deployment. But the efforts that we have with the Salesforce Trust platform, which is an expanded group that we now have here that is purely focused on how do we not just get everybody secure, but continue to add more and more security features to make sure that Salesforce is the premier example of how an enterprise SaaS company secures their customers' data. So that is the journey we're on, and we're taking our customers with us. And as painful as it is, James and myself and the whole team here, we are looking for active feedback. We're engaging with the community on a day-to-day basis just to try and sand down these rough edges as much as we can until we can get the front door built, locked, and then we can really talk about how do we decorate our house now.

Mike: Yeah. But also you mentioned, well, we're doing it and it's going to be painful. I guess I'm on the flip side of that, thinking, "Boy, if I had other applications and they're not going through this as well, that actually is more of a red flag to me," because then now I'm thinking like, "Well, do they not care as much about making sure all of my data on their platform is as secure as possible?"

Jay Hurst: Absolutely. Like I said, it's a journey, not a destination. What is 100% secure today is not as secure tomorrow. With all of the new attack vectors that come out and these capabilities like Mythos and Fable and all of these really, really smart and frankly scary AI capabilities, we have to double and triple down even harder to make sure that we stay as far ahead of that as we can.

Mike: Right. And as I've been reminded, security isn't always about being scary. Security is about being informed and making the right choices so that you have that protection and that understanding, which is really good.

James Ferguson: It's risk management. It's risk management.

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. James and Jay, I want to thank you guys for coming on and walking us through some of this. I know anytime that we offer anybody in our community, whether it's developers or architects or admins, a change, it's always extra work. But I feel like you're right there in answering the questions and helping through some of the hard parts, because I'll be honest, there's not a day that goes by that I don't learn something in security, at my current job and even when I was a Salesforce admin.

Jay Hurst: Absolutely. And thank you, Mike, for helping amplify the message. One of the challenges I think we have at the product side is making sure our customers understand and get the information. We have our blog posts and our help documentation and we send out emails, but any extra we can do to megaphone this and get people aware is definitely valuable, so thank you for this opportunity.

Mike: You bet.

James Ferguson: And thank to all the admins who are out there who are also helping amplify this and helping support the rest of the community. It's one of the great things about Salesforce from the very beginning. It's the huge community support that exists. We couldn't do it if it was just the six PMs on my team. We need everybody involved.

Mike: Yeah. And I think the part of that you take away is while I'm glad there's so many questions online that we had the idea to do this podcast, because that means there's so many people that are engaged and caring, as opposed to rolling something out and, "Hey, did anybody have any questions," and it's crickets. The reverse of that would also be kind of scary too, is there's questions because people care and because they want to understand. And also I think the one thing that I always had to do as an admin was I had to translate all of that from whatever the document said, or the podcast like this or the blog posts, to my users and to my executives, and it's a lot different once you have to take something in and digest it and then be ready for a Q&A. So there's always more to learn, but thank you guys for coming on. We'll definitely have to have you back on.

Jay Hurst: Sounds great.

Mike: Talk more security.

James Ferguson: Appreciate it. Looking forward to it.

Mike: Big thanks to Jay and James for helping us understand MFA step-up, phishing-resistant authentication, and the role admins play in protecting business systems. Now, of course, we know security is a shared responsibility, and admins are right in the middle of making it real for users, executives and, well, everybody in the organization. So be sure to listen, subscribe and share this episode out, and work through those security changes. You got this. Don't worry. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Mofeyi Oluwalana, Director of Product Management at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about MuleSoft, Flow, Agentforce, and what happens when agents need to take action beyond Salesforce.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Mofeyi Oluwalana.

MuleSoft creates agent-friendly business processes Agentforce can be truly transformative for our business processes, but sometimes it's easier said than done—especially when multiple platforms are involved. That's why I sat down with Mofeyi Oluwalana, Director of Product Management for MuleSoft.

As Mofeyi explains, a problem many businesses run into when they're trying to implement AI is how to enable an agent to engage with something like a process that starts on a payment platform, goes through an OMS, and then ends up with a request to a warehouse for shipping. You can't just hand them the APIs and expect them to figure out the rest.

That's where MuleSoft comes in. It gives you the building blocks you need to codify your workflows into something an agent can understand.

Data mapping for real-time app integration Building an agent-friendly business process begins with data mapping. What do you need and where is it located? You also need to understand the triggers that kick off each part of the process. Does it start with a Slack message, or when an order is created?

Often, these types of business processes don't start in the Salesforce ecosystem. MuleSoft allows you to translate these business requirements into APIs that an agent can use to take action.

How to present to stakeholders As a product manager, Mofeyi frequently gives presentations to stakeholders, so I wanted to know if she had any advice for admins. "The most important thing when I walk into any room, regardless of the stakeholder, is who are they and what do they care about? Your ability to persuade and influence is largely due to your understanding of the three things that the people that you're talking to care about and how you align what you're talking about with those three things," she says.

Make sure to listen to my full conversation with Mofeyi for more about MuleSoft and mapping your business processes. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast for a new episode every Thursday.

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Full show transcript Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, we're joined by Mofeyi Oluwalana, product management director at Salesforce to talk about MuleSoft, Flow, Agentforce, and what happens when agents need to take action beyond Salesforce. Now, for Salesforce admins, this conversation matters because agents are only as useful as the data, the actions, the permissions, and the business logic they can safely reach. So Mofeyi's going to explain to us why integrations are not just about moving data from one system to another. They're about helping Salesforce connect to the real processes your business depends on. We'll talk about the questions that admins should ask when working with other platform owners, how to think about triggers and data mapping and why business context is so important when you're designing actions for humans and agents. So give this episode a listen, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, share it with another Salesforce admin who's maybe thinking about how Salesforce could connect to the rest of their business. And with that, let's get Mofeyi on the podcast. So Mofeyi, welcome to the podcast.

Mofeyi Oluwalana: Thank you so much.

Mike: I'm excited. We don't do a whole lot of episodes outside a core platform. And I know my Salesforce admins ... My ... The Salesforce admins of the world work everywhere and especially now with Agentforce and agents and really just the whole bringing people together and giving a complete view of data, integrating data and working with MuleSoft and tools like that are super important. So I'm glad to have you on. I'm glad we got connected, but let's start off and learn a little bit about you. What was your path to Salesforce and becoming a product management director?

Mofeyi Oluwalana: Yes. So I started at Salesforce a little over four years ago. I actually came through the APM program, also known as the Associate Product Manager Program. It's a two-year rotational program for folks coming out of university, getting their start in product. So I was able to come in through that program. I did three rotations all across Salesforce. I spent some time in Commerce Cloud working on how to run promotions on Black Friday.

Mike: Oh, holy cow.

Mofeyi Oluwalana: And I spent a lot of time in experience services, thinking about how we can make it easier for marketers to build nice looking emails. And I ultimately landed in MuleSoft, which is where I continued working with the MuleSoft team on how to make it easier for our customers to connect the systems that they need to, both for traditional use cases, but also for the agentic ones as well.

Mike: Yeah. It's funny, for the longest time in my career, I worked retail and the day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday was always the busiest day. And then I got into tech and I was like, "I don't have to work Black Friday."

Mofeyi Oluwalana: Guess what? [inaudible 00:03:17].

Mike: And then realized that like, "Oh man, I was a retail associate. There's still computers that have to be had." So I have a soft spot in my heart for all of the people that on Black Friday have to sweat it out and make sure that servers don't go down so that checks and barcodes and everything can happen on the other end.

Mofeyi Oluwalana: Yeah. I never realized how complex it could mean to calculate hundreds of thousands of carts when there were promotions running on Black Friday, but certainly it's more complicated than one may think.

Mike: Right. And then there's people like me that add stuff to a cart and I'll come back to it a little bit later like, no, there's somebody ... You're using up the last bit of ... I don't know. He probably doesn't know that. And then I'm also old school retail when you used to have to verify checks and put them through little check readers and now everything's a credit card or a tap or thumbprint.

Mofeyi Oluwalana: All of the above.

Mike: All of the above. But it's all of the above because we're integrating data and we're doing stuff with MuleSoft. So I threw together some questions, but let's start off with where should admin start when thinking about products like Flow and MuleSoft and Agentforce together?

Mofeyi Oluwalana: Yeah. The journey with MuleSoft starts the moment that your agent wants to do anything outside of Salesforce. I think MuleSoft is the connector, so to speak. If you have data that your agents need to reach in your ERP, if you have actions your agents need to be able to take with your payment provider, how exactly will they be able to do that? Now when agents and agentic technology became a thing, a lot of people were of this opinion that, well, agents are smart enough to just understand platform APIs or where agents can read the specifications, figure out the commands that they need to execute and do all the things that they need to do to be successful. We very quickly realized that agents are really smart, but at the end of the day, they're limited by the information that they know and the tools that they have access to. So it's not sufficient to just give your agents a platform API spec. That's not going to cut it. Your agents need integrations and APIs that they can directly invoke that map to your business logic. They need this because not every organization operates the same. For one retail provider, creating an order is very different from other retail providers. And understanding that business vocabulary is really important when building agents that actually bring value. And that's really where MuleSoft and Flow come into the picture. You have actions that your agency to be able to take in order to execute a certain business process. Well, that action is really just an API and we serve those APIs so your agents are able to do those things.

Mike: Yeah. I've always thought of Josh who's on my team keeps us in check with helping us understand stuff. And what you just described would be like as if you brought somebody new on and said, "Well, here's a phone and a phone book. And if you have problems, the phone number's in the phone book." And the agent's the same way. If you're just saying, "Here's all the specs and the APIs you can call, go figure it out." It's almost like handing them this giant phone book and just saying, "Well, you're smart. You'll figure it out."

Mofeyi Oluwalana: Yeah. Exactly. And the thing is that for a retailer, creating an order may not just be creating that order record. Creating an order may be, oh, I create the order record and then I send a notification out via email that says, "Hey, this is your order." And then after that, I create an invoice. There are a number of steps that happen. And how do you codify those steps? Well, it's not enough to just give an agent, again, the phone book and the numbers. It's much better and much more reliable to give them the actual workflow or the API they can use to execute that entire process.

Mike: Yeah. Now, one thing that I've run into, so back when I was doing some integrations as an admin, we had different third party tools that were being used. One thing that I didn't know to ask ... And I'm hoping you can help Salesforce admins like, here's the questions you need to ask. We had an instance and we need to connect it to our financial backend, which ran not on Salesforce. I had to find the owner of that, which I didn't know existed. The other thing I didn't know to ask was I didn't know what to ask. And so as we work through different scenarios, you brought up like, well, they want to take the cart and order the stuff. The orders could be fulfilled in a different system. There could be a warehouse system. What are some of the questions that when the admin's sitting down with a business owner and they're saying, "Here's what I want in Salesforce and I'd really like to be able to pull up the orders." And the admin's like, "Okay, now I need MuleSoft because I need to integrate another system and I got to go talk to that systems' owner." What are some of the questions they should ask and what is some of the information they need to provide so that they can start setting up that relationship?

Mofeyi Oluwalana: Yeah. I think it first starts with defining what data are you actually looking for? A large part of building integrations between these two systems is I have some data in the financial system. I have my CRM data in Salesforce. How do those two things map together? So I think the first step is what data are you looking for? And what is the mapping between what you're trying to do from a CRM perspective with whatever may be happening in that financial system? So to me, it starts with the data. I think the next question to ask is what is the trigger? It starts off this process. Is it someone sending a message in a Slack channel? Is it this order being created within your ERP? What is it that triggers this process to happen? You build the trigger, then you identify what the data mapping is between the source being that financial system and the target. And that's really how you get towards that working integration.

Mike: Now, when I sit down with another platform owner and I talk about using MuleSoft, we can bring ... And so this is where you're going to quickly hear Mike's knowledge run out of gas because here's where Mike's knowledge hits the wall. But we can bring that data in and it can be like a pane of glass. We can just view that data or we could actually copy that data over so that we can use it in reports. And then we could also extend that conversation with the platform owner and say, "Well, if somebody wants to change something, they could change that in Salesforce and then Salesforce with MuleSoft can push that data change back to that platform." How'd I do?

Mofeyi Oluwalana: I think you're almost there.

Mike: Okay. Fill me in because what I don't know is what I don't know and I feel like there's other admins that may not know this as well.

Mofeyi Oluwalana: I think the best way to think about MuleSoft is that real time app integration layer. So not necessarily the data that you want to live in Salesforce. Getting that unified customer view is really important. And so you'll need the data connectors in place to get data from external systems into Salesforce. That is one use case and one that Data Cloud solves really well. The problem that MuleSoft solves really well in tandem with Agentforce is the agent needs to take real time action. Again, so let's say we're going back to the retail example where I create an order. If order management doesn't happen in Salesforce, creating an order doesn't necessarily mean starting that process within the Salesforce ecosystem. I just want to be able to kick off that process with my OMS, my warehouse, my shipping provider. Then in that case, it's real time app integration. It's using the APIs that MuleSoft has to be able to kick off that workflow and that process using your agents. So it's a little bit different than moving data just from one place to another.

Mike: No. I think that's also very important because companies have spent money on those systems. And I remember when I was sitting down with our finance team, they're like, "Well, if this data lives here and in Salesforce, what's the source of truth?" And we set it up so that we were just viewing the data because we really wanted sources of truth within the organization. But sometimes the user lives and dies within one interface and where that data comes from, we don't need that exposed to them.

Mofeyi Oluwalana: Exactly. And I think it's the use case for consolidating data into one place is a little bit different from the use case of making sure that your agents can take action. And so I think as part of that rationalization that admins and IT teams have to do is what data do I need to drive what? And what actions do my agents need in order to be successful? And this part of that then can separate it into those two camps and then move forward with the tools that help them do so.

Mike: Cool. Now, when you connect MuleSoft with other systems, does the admin need to ask for, can you provide a certain API? That's how it's set up, right? Or walk me through it because I've never set it up and I feel like I'm completely happy being the host of the podcast that asks the questions that admins are like, "Oh, I'm so glad he asked that because I didn't know to ask that question and I didn't want to look stupid in front of my IT people."

Mofeyi Oluwalana: Yeah. So I think from the business side, we set the requirements about, okay, this is what I need. This is the process that I need done. These are the steps that should happen. This is what should trigger that. You do that definition. Then you can work with the IT team or the API developer to actually make that happen. Now the API developer has access to a number of connectors within MuleSoft that enable them to build these APIs and integrations without relying on what is the API specification for my OMS system or what is the API specification for my [inaudible 00:15:07] system? There are connectors that have a ton of different actions that you can orchestrate within a MuleSoft integration to get a certain job done. So one example that I like to use is the Salesforce connector. The Salesforce connector has a ton of different triggers. Let's say when a new object is created or on when a record is modified that can trigger the integration. The Salesforce connector also has a bunch of actions or operations. So I can create a record in Salesforce. I can delete a record in Salesforce. I can create a topic in Salesforce. All of the different actions that you can execute through Salesforce APIs extrapolate it into a connector so that it's easier to build and then manage these integrations. So the API developer is in charge of translating those business requirements into the integration composed of those connectors that allow you to achieve exactly that.

Mike: Gotcha. Boy, there's a lot. It feels like there's a lot to it and we make it look so simple in demos.

Mofeyi Oluwalana: Yeah. I will say it's much easier looking at a screen and hearing an audio podcast of what this really is. But I like to think of them as MuleSoft gives the tools, those building blocks. You can compose those building blocks in a certain order to create a workflow. Those are the integrations that you can use and your agents can also use to take action.

Mike: Yeah. I always think of it as admins are managing users and agents and agents are just like users. They have to have instructions and guardrails and guidelines for how to operate and what they can and can't do same way that people have as well. I'd love to know, so as a product manager, you got into the program. How has being a product manager helped you understand the product, but also given you a different perspective of working through explaining different customer stories or use cases?

Mofeyi Oluwalana: I would say the best, and I'm obviously biased, but the best part about being a product manager is just the sheer amount of data points that you see. One of the things that I think is really important as part of being a product manager is meeting with as many customers as you possibly can because it's through those customer conversations that they're very clear themes that you can draw, not only of how people use the product, but what the product doesn't quite solve for yet. And so going through those conversations has helped me not only understand those customer pain points better, but then understand the things that we need to do in the product to make it even easier for our customers to use.

Mike: Yeah. No. I often feel when I was exposed for a brief six months as a consultant that a lot of the pain points customers have always felt the same. I was like, "Man, they have the same problem that XYZ has." And at the end of the day, you'd look at all the customers you manage and you're like, "They have these five problems." And then brand new somebody would come in and you're like, "And you have completely different use case and requirements and they don't fall into those same five problems that I've been solving all day, which is nice." So I'd be curious, as admins are looking more and more at building ... They build agents and apps on the platform and they extend the platform and they use MuleSoft. What are things that you're thinking about as a product manager for, wow, I have to be a year out or two years out. How should admins be thinking about their building and management of the Salesforce platform as a product?

Mofeyi Oluwalana: Yeah. I think the most important thing is not just building for where we are today, but building for what's coming. I think one thing that agents in AI technology has taught us is that the technology market is changing so fast. It's going to be a new model. It's going to be some new capability that you want to be able to leverage. And in order to do so, the foundation and the platform that you're building on has to be interoperable. It has to be able to withstand some of those changes that you want to make. The example I always like to give is if having to change a model is going to disrupt your operations, that is an issue. And we know that is an issue because LLM models, a new one comes up every day, another one is deprecated every other week. So I think the most important thing thinking about the platform is how do I make the platform resilient and flexible so that as these new capabilities come into play, I'm actually able to use them and really take advantage of them within my organizations.

Mike: That's very good advice. I'm just going to guess and maybe I'm wrong and we can move on. As a product manager, you probably do a lot of presenting both to customers and probably internally. I know admins have to do that as well. What would be some advice you would have for admins that are presenting either a new solution or proposing something to their stakeholders?

Mofeyi Oluwalana: The most important thing when I walk into any room, small or large, regardless of the stakeholder is who are they and what do they care about? It's easy to get lost as a product manager. It's very easy to get lost in, I actually think this is an amazing idea and I talked to 10 customers and I know it's going to be valuable for them. But your ability to persuade and influence largely due to your understanding of the three things that the people that you're talking to care about and helping them align what you're talking about to those three things. A great example is that when you talk to your COO, I will guess that it will come down to how much does it cost the organization and how much money is it going to make me? So talking to your COO is not the same conversation that you'll have with support. Who cares about, okay, is this going to make it easier for me to support my customers? Does this make us more reliable? So you need to change the delivery to really match the things that you're being evaluated on when you're presenting to an audience, when you're presenting to internal stakeholders and external ones as well.

Mike: That's really good advice because I can tell you right now I'm guilty as charged of walking into a room thinking I have the answer and this is the most important thing that they're ever going to want to hear and forgetting that they probably had their own goals and I just blew right past them and kept talking about something else entirely. Bad. So one thing that I find talking with people that work in tech is we always have hobbies or things that we like to do on the side that are very tactile. I know I've interviewed a product manager that smelted pewter.

Mofeyi Oluwalana: Wow.

Mike: That's the extreme case. I always bring it up because it sounds interesting and who hasn't walked past some sort of pewter chessboard with its little figurines and thought that would be cool except I'm not going to pay a few hundred dollars for it. I'm wondering if there's anything interesting that you have as a hobby that you would love to share with people.

Mofeyi Oluwalana: Unfortunately, I'm not nearly as interesting as the guest that you just mentioned.

Mike: It's not a contest. It's not a contest.

Mofeyi Oluwalana: It feels like one. Just kidding. I won't say I'm tactile as I'd like to just stay mobile. As a lot of the folks who work in tech, we sit on our butts all day looking at computer screens. So wherever possible, I like to just go outside, get some fresh air, do some movement, whether that be running, yoga or similar. That's my anchor. Again, not as interesting, but it helps me. It regulates me nevertheless.

Mike: It's still super valuable. I was just talking with a coworker the other day about our grandparents and so-and-so's grandparents lived to be 89 and they were outside in the sun all day and they had bacon and eggs for breakfast. And I thought to myself, "Well, yeah. And then they probably worked it off all day because everybody was thin back then. And the worst thing they could do is sit down at a desk like I do." And so who would've thought that there was ever a need for a treadmill desk? I think that back to the future quote, "You run for fun."

Mofeyi Oluwalana: Exactly.

Mike: So no, that's really good. And what's great, I've had a few colleagues as well take calls while they're walking. I think the benefit of being in tech is that you can do calls like that and work through. As long as you're not working through maybe architecture diagrams for Microsoft integration, that would probably be pretty bad.

Mofeyi Oluwalana: Or if it's windy outside and you don't have a great mic. I'm also a big proponent of just walking outside and taking as many meetings as I can moving.

Mike: Absolutely. Yeah. No. Well, I would just say windy at all because I have yet to find a mic that doesn't make it sound like you're walking through a NASA wind tunnel.

Mofeyi Oluwalana: Wait, that's the next startup.

Mike: I'm telling you. The fuzzies that come on mics, there's got to be something better. There's got to be something better.

Mofeyi Oluwalana: I agree. I agree.

Mike: I don't need to have a big mustache just to talk into the microphone. Well, it was great chatting with you. I learned a lot. I feel like I tried to ask some of the silly questions that I know admins would want to ask. There's probably plenty of admins out there that have done some MuleSoft integrations, but I know when I had to sit down with other platform owners and be like, "I need your thing to plug into Salesforce and I don't know how to make you do that, but you figure it out." I always wanted to ask the silly questions so that when they sit down, they know what to say and can have a better relationship because in every aspect of the sense, there's other platform owners within organizations and they're all trying to do right by each other. So that being said, I appreciate you coming on the podcast and sharing that with us and we'll have to come back and talk more MuleSoft maybe after Dreamforce for sure.

Mofeyi Oluwalana: Yeah. Thank you so, so much for having me. And again, I'm biased obviously, but always love talking the world of MuleSoft and integrations because it truly feels even more relevant than ever with agents and the technology.

Mike: Absolutely. Big thanks to Mofeyi for joining us and really helping make MuleSoft flow and Agentforce feel more approachable. I wasn't afraid to ask the questions that you shouldn't be afraid to ask. The big takeaway for admins when agents need to act outside of Salesforce, your understanding of the business process, the data, the triggers, and the right system of truth matters now more than ever. That's how you keep Salesforce accurate, current, trusted, and useful for the business. Now be sure to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins podcast. If you haven't already, share this episode. Hey, share it with your team. And then keep asking those questions that help your org connect the right systems in the right way. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Kacie Molina, Salesforce Consultant at Kawaii Cloud.

Join us as we chat about how admins can start small with Agentforce and still make a big impact.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Kacie Molina.

Why you should start small with Agentforce With all the capabilities Agentforce brings to Salesforce, it's easy to dream big. Big projects, however, require major organizational investments in time, planning, and execution.

My guest this week, Kacie Molina, has some simple advice for her clients who want to get started with Agentforce: start small. Go back to the basics of listening for pain points and building solutions.

Once you start piling up small wins and meaningful changes, it'll be easier to get organizational buy-in for something big and bold.

Admins should listen for problems users already have Agentforce solutions don't always have to be some sort of major business process overhaul. Those types of changes require layers of approvals, budgeting, and business analysis. You end up spending as much time rethinking the business process as you do worrying about executing everything in Salesforce.

Instead, look for simple use cases. For example, implementing an agent summary field to help users easily see what's going on with an account without having to scroll through a bunch of records.

"All of those little use cases that maybe are too specific for a flow," Kacie says, "we can solve them with Agentforce and natural language." And over time, the simple solutions add up.

Keeping AI work inside Salesforce supports better security Even if you're not already using Agentforce, people in your organization are already using AI. The problem is that they're often exporting data over to their LLM of choice, which creates all sorts of security vulnerabilities.

That's why Kacie recommends enabling an agent to assist your users. You can use your model of choice, and it'll be grounded in your Salesforce data and protected by your security configuration. "It shows users that there's a safe place to get the answers they want without having to worry about breaking company policies," Kacie says.

Make sure to listen to my full conversation with Kacie about how to start small with Agentforce. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

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Full show transcript Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, we're talking with Kacie Molina about how admins can start small with Agentforce and still make a big impact. Kacie shares why the best AI ideas often come from listening closely to everyday user friction. The scattered preferences, repeated questions, messy exports, and those tiny gaps that slow teams down. We'll talk about building agents that are grounded in Salesforce powered by Flow and designed with trust and security in mind. Because the next generation of admins isn't just adding features, they're orchestrating safer, smarter systems where humans and agents work together. So give it a listen, click that subscribe button, share this episode with an admin who is ready to make AI even more practical for their users. And let's get Kacie on the podcast. So Kacie, welcome to the podcast.

Kacie Molina: Thanks, Mike. I am super excited to be here today.

Mike: Well, I'm excited to get you on. I was a rare occasion scrolling through LinkedIn and I came across a post that you had put up and it mentioned the AgentforceNow workshop that I think you were in one of mine or you'd been to one.

Kacie Molina: I was in one of yours and it was done extremely well, might I say.

Mike: You were. Oh, good. Well, I try hard. And you're talking about coming up with ideas and you'd had some ideas for agents and I thought, "Man, I just think we need some sort of agent brainstorm podcast." And so that's why I wanted to get you on. But we're going to talk about that. But before we get started, tell me a little bit about yourself, like how you got into Salesforce, what you do, all of the fun stuff.

Kacie Molina: Absolutely. So I grew up in more rural USA, an Amish type community, so horse and buggy. Think maybe Little House on the Prairie, early 1800s. So did a lot of horse training and cheese making with my sister, tended gardens and animals. So my skills when I became an adult were fairly traditional. So as I was trying to translate, "What do I use my skills for?" I started nannying, childcare, and then I started my own sewing business. And during that phase, I was actually so bad at running a business, so I knew how to sew, but I didn't really know the business part. So keeping track of contacts and invoicing people on time was such a disaster for me. It was all little handwritten notes. So I was listening to podcasts and I heard about Salesforce. I logged into Trailhead and fell in love with the gamified learning. So it was kind of no turning back for me. I got my admin certification in about three months, landed a junior admin role shortly after. And it's been about five years and 10 certifications since then of working on all kinds of projects from in-house to consulting. And I just think like Flows, all think Salesforce. It's so much fun. And in the day and age of Agentforce, even more fun nowadays. So that's kind of how I stumbled onto the Salesforce path and it has been way too much fun.

Mike: Oh man, I bet we could do a whole podcast on the skills of sewing and how they carry over to Salesforce.

Kacie Molina: We probably could, although I do think Salesforce might be a little more fun. One, because you don't get poked by needles. That's a huge thing for me. I don't even like going to the doctor and getting poked by a needle and I did that for a profession. So I got poked all the time and it's much less frustrating than trying to deal with broken sewing machines. Salesforce kind of works pretty well. And when you're dealing with old-fashioned sewing machines, not so much.

Mike: I could imagine. Yeah. Needleforce, that's what we'll call it.

Kacie Molina: Needleforce.

Mike: I bet that exists. I think that would be so cool if there was quilting or sewing at Dreamforce. Because I see people on the plane all the time with those knitting needles and stuff. I would love to have the patience to do it.

Kacie Molina: It definitely takes a lot of patience. So actually, interestingly enough, when I was just getting into Salesforce, Mallory Donahue, she's such an amazing person I look up to. She was getting into Salesforce at the same time as me and she was also a seamstress. So I think there might be more sewing and needle people out there in the Salesforce world than you might think.

Mike: Yep. Well, this is the diversion that Mike's squirrel brain gets on too quickly. But let's talk about ... I was so intrigued by your post, because I feel like even in the workshop that we do, the AgentforceNow workshop that I hosted, I think I'm back sometime in October because I have some vacation in July. We build an agent for Pronto, which is a food service company and it handles questions and cases and order issues. I mean, I feel like by the end of it, it's pretty complex because we've already built some Flows. There's some Apex actions that are in there. And so I feel like we're getting nitty-gritty into it, but your post kind of almost felt like a breadth mint of like, "Hey, have you ever just thought about asking your users five questions or whatever and then turning on Agentforce and giving it on action to do?"

Kacie Molina: Yeah. I really like the workshop, because it gets into the more complex things and you see how the broader, the depth Agentforce can go to. But for me, when I started looking at ... Okay. So I serve multiple clients, and a lot of people are excited about Agentforce and I talk to a lot of admins about it as well, but where do you get started? For me, it was the really simple, small things where people I feel like nowadays more and more are expecting to be able to use natural language. And you don't really need to build a crazy, big agent that takes multiple sprints to complete. You can turn one on fairly simply to answer a couple simple questions and people can start to see that magic work from even a small start.

Mike: Yeah. And I feel like, boy, this is me just thinking of that post, but you had really good ideas around not just what I would call the hard aspects of business, which is like invoicing and questions and emails, but also kind of like the soft aspects of business, which is just asking Agentforce to coach you that day or just kind of simple questions that you could give it that would maybe make you as a salesperson or customer service person feel better about what you're doing.

Kacie Molina: Right. I do. I think it's really cool that you kind of came back to the small ideas and I'm actually very impressed you found that post because I feel like not many people see my LinkedIn post.

Mike: You mentioned me in it, so I got that. But I mean, to be fair though, the small little detail, little things like that are actually kind of the bigger hooks to look for.

Kacie Molina: They are in there. To me, they're everywhere. So bigger agent ideas, like there's a couple things that can be intimidating about them. One, they take a lot of time. Two, you're always looking for that big idea that is going to wow the whole company potentially. And then it also entails potentially budget and project approval, which you need to get approval for most things that you do anyhow. But the small ideas are something that you don't really need to take a whole ton of business analysis, say, to get started on it. It's something that you could know off the start like, "Oh, I see my users asking about this in a support ticket frequently." So one example recently I had was somebody who said, "We have these client preferences and they're kind of scattered in the system and they're a little hard to find. So is there any way you could summarize them?" And I said, "I think this would be a really good use case for an agent summary field." So you can build the prompt and pull things together. It's the little things like that when you're listening to details that you might not have to go build a Flow or build something so specific for. And that would be my old use cases like Flow all day, every day. But all of those little use cases that maybe are too specific for a Flow to say, "Oh, we'll grab this and explain it this way." It comes out in Agentforce as the natural language and I think that is a huge thing for users that they're looking to see something that feels like them or feels human so they can click onto a record. Say they go to a client account and then they can see at a glance like, "Oh, this person prefers this and this and they don't like this." And that's much easier than scrolling through a bunch of records.

Mike: Yeah. I've been so busy building agents that I forgot about some of the other prompt builder and the grounded fields that we had. I used to call them sparkle fields, I think like that, because they have little sparkles next to it when you can automatically have Agentforce kind of fill in based on a prompt and that's exactly it. I mean, I remember rolling out chatter and I did it probably the wrong way and I turned it on for the whole company and the whole company was like 50 users, but I didn't give them any use cases. And if I was now to go back, I would've picked a team of five people and said, "I'm going to turn it on for you and here's a use case to use it for." And I feel like your post was just ... It just made me feel less burdened to come up with these extravagant big ideas to use an agent for and it was more like, "No, you can just have the agent totally answer your front door and be like, 'Hi, we're not home right now,' and that's it." And I was like, "Oh." Because I feel like admins are sometimes sitting down and thinking, "How do I make an agent that answers the questions and closes a $6 million deal?"

Kacie Molina: Right. And then there's a bunch of, in my mind, you have more selling at that point. So if you're coming up with a new idea, then you kind of have to pitch it to the company. But something I like about the small ideas I've been picking up on lately is that it's kind of puts us back into our usual admin position where we're hearing problems and then we're offering solutions. So instead of coming up with a new business flow, start to finish of a new agent that can do some flashy thing, which is also extremely cool. You can also take something where somebody says like, "Oh, I export this data and ask ChatGPT about it. Anyhow, I'm already using AI." And so you can start to hear use cases where you're not coming up with something new, you're just solving something they're already doing in a more secure way. And that's another big idea for me is security within Salesforce is so much more attainable for admins. When people start exporting data and loading it up into an LLM that you don't have control over, that's a lot more scary for as an admin than if they can just use it from within the system.

Mike: Yeah. I mean, when you and I talked before we pressed record, you even brought that up. If you're an admin and you're in meetings and maybe it's not even a Salesforce meeting and you hear people bring up a different LLM, what in your mind goes off and what do you think of to do as next steps if you were to help coach admins who are in that position?

Kacie Molina: Something that's really incredible about Salesforce that maybe not everybody knows that they haven't played around with Agentforce yet is that you can use customized models. So it's not like you only have availability to use the Salesforce model. There's also, you can bring in different like ChatGPT if you like their open AI's model, you can use those different AI plugins within Agentforce. So that's something that goes off my head is if you like something, you don't have to totally forsake that for something new. So you can feel at home within Salesforce with the different AI models. And also, if you're using different AI models, which just like constantly goes off in my brain is that you can do that with way fewer clicks and way fewer security risks if you do it from within Salesforce without having to potentially like fudge on permissions or fudge who has access to it. So that's something that goes off in my head is like, "Oh, if you're doing this with AI already, you can just pull that into Salesforce and then you have even more data." So you are kind of limited when you export data to what the LLM can see. But when you have it within Salesforce, you have so much expansive broader options that you can use. So you can pull in different records and different things from here and there and you don't have to be so specific in one point in time. You can re-ask again in 10 minutes if you have information flowing in. So for me, it's like the different LLMs that are available within Salesforce and data availability is huge.

Mike: Yeah. I mean, plus once you export that data and take it out of the platform, for many companies, you're already violating security because that data is housed in Salesforce for a reason and it's not meant to be used elsewhere.

Kacie Molina: Yeah, that's a big risk I think with AI. Most companies I think are using it, whether it's an approved tool or not. So when you even enable to me a basic agent in a Salesforce or it shows users, "Hey, there's a safe place where I can get the answers that I want and I don't have to worry about breaking company policies to get the data I need." Because we are in a fast-paced world and I know some users, they really do need to get answers that maybe they can't get within Salesforce today. So they're exporting data and getting their answers with an AI elsewhere. But if they can have that easily accessible and it's safe to use, then I think that enables both admins to feel safer about their org and the users to save clicks, save time and get a better answer

Mike: Absolutely. Back to that workshop, I'd love to know your perspective. So we talk about agents and subagents and even in that workshop we create a subagent to handle, I think it's returns and refunds, or order issues and refunds. I'm trying to remember it without remembering it. When you're working with customers or talking with companies about using Agentforce, do you even talk about agents and subagents, or do you just kind of like, "Here's the magic and I'm going to build everything behind the curtain"?

Kacie Molina: I usually don't bring up the different agents and subagents and I guess it depends who your stakeholder is. If there's somebody who's more admin-minded and very inquisitive, I would potentially bring it up. But most of the stakeholders, I'm working with bring-me problems and expect me to be the expert and bring them solutions and they don't really care about the very cool details about agents and subagents I think are so fun to talk about. They just want to see the magic on the end. So for me, it's kind of like Flows. I kind of relate most things back to Flows when I'm learning how to code or anything. It all comes back to Flows for me because Flows are magic and they're so much fun. A lot of people don't care if you call sub-Flows or you have different components in the Flow. They just want to know when X happens, they see the screen and then magic happens in the background. And I think agents are kind of the same way where they're really cool to see the backend for people who care, but you can also talk to stakeholders at a higher level without them needing to know that detail.

Mike: So you talk a lot about Flows. How important was it for you when Agentforce came out that a lot of the power behind what it could do its actions are powered by Flow?

Kacie Molina: Oh, that was huge for me because it feels like it brings the control back to the admin. So I definitely wasn't the most happy, quick adopting of AI when it first came out. I was definitely suspicious and I love my Flows and I love doing things manually. So I was definitely suspicious of AI in general and I've learned to really love it. And part of that is being empowered to do tasks on the backend. So you have the agents that do all of this, we'll say agent magic in the background, but then there's also the pieces that you can build out manually in Flow so you have control over what information you're pulling, what you're feeding to the agent, that way you get the predictive and answers that you want.

Mike: Yeah. And even the builder, I feel like that the new agent builder feels like Flow Builder, because, well, there's also variables in there, which still worry me.

Kacie Molina: I do like the UI better.

Mike: I'm still not the best at better building Flows. I don't know why my Flow confidence is low, but maybe that shouldn't have rhymed, but yeah, my Flow confidence is low.

Kacie Molina: I feel like you're probably much more of a Flow expert than you're letting on. I will say though, the new UI gave me a pretty big boost. So the old UI wasn't quite as intuitive or friendly and that's something I really wanted to post on LinkedIn about as people who maybe like me, they got their certifications and started doing their Agentblazer statuses on Salesforce when it was earlier. And then when you come back and you see the new UI and ease of use and having things like variables where you feel more comfortable like a Flow, all of a sudden I was like, "Oh, I can really do this this time. This makes so much more sense."

Mike: Yeah. And the fact ... I mean, we don't get into it with the workshop, but I'd love to know, have you ... So the one thing I want to do is I'd love to have an agent help me build an agent. Have you done that?

Kacie Molina: Only for testing. So I haven't done a real life agent building an agent yet, but I did some demo examples just because I wanted to double down on the workshop of how it worked and it really is incredible that you can, one, even if you start, like the agent isn't building the agent yet and you hit an error. In the workshop, I think intentionally you had a couple things that would error out and we'd have to go fix. That way you get very comfortable with fixing things and throughout the agent, you can-

Mike: Oh no, I think they threw that in the workshop just to make Mike sweat.

Kacie Molina: They might have done that too.

Mike: I know they didn't. I'm sure the people that built the workshop listened to the podcast, but I know they didn't, but let me tell you, the first time I had to go into that, I practiced for two days going into script builder. I was like, "Here we go. We're going to do code and we're going to do code in front of a thousand people." And then I forgot my quotes. And I remember half the people in the workshop were like, "Mike, quotes, and then it'll work." And I was like, "Okay, cool. So you can tell that I'm not used to this a lot."

Kacie Molina: I thought personally it was intentional because it was really helpful for me, because I was kind of just playing along on the side by myself and when I hit the error, I put it into the agent and it found the error, it found the line and it told me exactly what to fix and where to fix it. I think you can even say like, "Do this yourself." For me, I wanted to get hands on and go make the change, but it can actually implement the change if you want it to if you approve that. So I was really impressed with that and I thought the error was intentional, but that was super fun to see, "Oh, it can help me when I hit errors." And also with the coding part, when you see the backend, I thought that was really comforting as well. So I'm not a coder. I don't really know Apex very well. I can kind of read it. But even with Flows, when you get, this might get a little technical, but when you get into the Headless kind of Salesforce build and you have everything pulled into an IDE and you see everything in the background, when I saw that for agents, I was like, "Oh, this makes sense." So you can see the front end, like the pretty UI, then you can go into the back end and see the code drivers and be able to change granular things. So that's another thing I really liked about the new UI is it's so easy to switch back and forth.

Mike: Yeah. I'm with you. I actually, because of that workshop, I think I've gotten better at just reading. I'll equate it to a foreign language. I took a lot of German in high school and I can kind of read German or listen to German TV. I don't know specifically what's going on, but I got a general idea and I feel like I'm the same way with code. I'm like, "I don't know specifically all these lines, but I know here's the inputs and here's the outputs and here's what I'm looking for." I can navigate, but I don't delve too deep far in.

Kacie Molina: Right. I want to be writing it from scratch, but I can see what's going on.

Mike: Oh, no. No. If they said, "Mike, you're in prison until you can write code," I'd be in prison for a while.

Kacie Molina: Me too. Me too. I've tried to learn a couple times and it is on my to-do list. It's just Flows are so much fun and you can do so much in Salesforce without knowing how to code that you can skate by for a while and not really have to learn. So that is where I'm at.

Mike: Yeah. You mentioned Headless. So let's talk about that for a second. I'd love to know some of your ideas for Headless. First of all, explain Headless 360, I think that's what we call it, Headless 360 to a Salesforce admin who's never heard it before.

Kacie Molina: Ooh, this could be fun. So Headless to me means you're working from Salesforce kind of from the back end instead of the pretty face of Salesforce where you're normally logging in to Salesforce and updating settings within the Salesforce browser. So Headless, you're kind of looking at a developer tool. So I think Headless has probably been around for a while if you really wanted it, but it wasn't nearly as accessible. So there's older tools like VS Code where you can pull down the metadata from the org and you can see like the backend of Flows, which is actually pretty cool. The first time I saw Flow in a code editor, my mind was blown. I was like, "What? It looks so different. This is kind of crazy." And now I can go in and bulk edit and it's very handy. So the Headless 360 is really, I think, enabling admins to do that and not needing coding skills. So you can really use natural language, kind of like I was talking about earlier, where you can enable basic prompts and people can use natural language. You can develop Salesforce, even like Flows, fields configuration from never logging into Salesforce. So you're doing it all from the back end. And of course, you want to log in at the end to make sure it looks good. But Headless is really being able to look at the metadata in its kind of raw form and update it and manipulate it and then push it back into Salesforce and boom, you have the magic happen.

Mike: Gotcha. I think it's interesting. I mean, I know we're going to have a lot of really good sessions for Edmunds at Dreamforce about it. So the rapid pace of AI to me is ... I remember doing a podcast just learning about hallucinations and different terminologies like grounding and now we're all the way how far in and have agents building agents and I'm just like, "Wow, where are we going to be this time next year?"

Kacie Molina: It is pretty wild. I was playing around with Agentforce, so something I really enjoy as an admin is not writing queries. So there's lots of things that I can do, but I might not want to spend the time doing tedious tests, like writing long formulas or queries. And I saw with the Salesforce inspector, you can download a prompt and I just put that into my Headless IDE and I said, "Hey, can you push this into my org so I can use Agentforce for querying?" And it took it and it had the wrong version, I think. So it updated a couple things and it didn't even need help from me. It was just like, "Oh, this is an out of date version, so I'm going to update this." And then it pushed it in and then I refreshed my page and I could ask the little Einstein Agentforce character to write queries for me. So it is kind of fun on the backend, you can do so much in so short of a time and it's just fun to see. Like you ask something and then, boom, it gets created, whereas before it could take hours.

Mike: For admins that want to be in the conversation about AI with their organizations, what would you suggest they do?

Kacie Molina: So I think security is one of the biggest places to start and that's where I try to start is having ... Salesforce has good documentation on the different trust layers and how Agentforce works and then cost is another thing. So usually, I'm looking at kind of the different pillars of a project, like the scope of it, the cost of it, and then security as an admin, always a big thing. So backing that up with Salesforce and just understanding that when you use Agentforce that you can keep the data secure, there's that trust layer there so you're not just bleeding out your information to the whole world like you might be doing if you put it in some random AI tool. And then with the cost as well, a lot of companies that I've talked with, they wonder, "How do I get started? Do I need to pay for something right away?" And Foundations has been a really great place to start because you get credits every month where you can try Agentforce and you can monitor your billing and it's safe to use. So that's something I always say like, "You can start really small with this. It's not something you need to implement even to every person in the org. You can have a couple super users that you trust and try small, start with Foundations." So I think the starting small is where I've really doubled down on with clients. That way it's not a big decision necessarily for the company where it's such an IT burden and they're really worried about big things. If you have a really small scope to start with, people tend to feel more comfortable.

Mike: Yeah. And I mean, with all the features, we always talk about rolling them out to super users or having that kind of core group of people that helps you vet new features and what's the best use case for your organization. I'm like you, like even the smallest, if you think about it like cracks in the sidewalk, even if you patch two or three of the smallest cracks in the sidewalk, you've still made the sidewalk sturdier. Just because you didn't tackle the big gap doesn't mean you didn't improve it. And sometimes, that little bit of friction for users is what really frustrates them too.

Kacie Molina: It is. It can be something even as simple as searching for a record or seeing your top account. There's some basic requests that I feel like I see that are so helpful to users, whether it's like summarizing data, like I mentioned earlier, or being able to search for something. So sometimes people get really frustrated with the search bar and they're not finding what they want and there's definitely things you can do to help with that, but I think it's really helpful when they can use that agent to use natural language and say, "I'm looking for this or I want to create a case with these details." When they can use their comfort language and they don't have to be so technically specific, for non-technical people, I think it's really helpful. Even for me, even though I love technical stuff, I still really like chatting with the agent like a human. I still say like, "Please, and thank you." And I like when it's funny back with me. So there's something comforting about that natural language I think when you enable it.

Mike: Yeah, I hear you. Kacie, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. This is a fun conversation. I'm glad you posted randomly to LinkedIn and I'm glad I randomly found it and now you're a guest on the podcast. I mean, that's how I find some of the coolest conversations.

Kacie Molina: I'm really happy you reached out to me about it because it's something I've been really passionate about and have some amazing colleagues I talk AI use cases with frequently. And so I was like, "Yeah, let's definitely talk about this," because you can start small and you can have so much fun with it. And my hope for every admin is that they can get hands-on with it, start to use it in their orgs and just have a ton of fun, because that's what new tools are for, right? Just like Flows.

Mike: Absolutely. I agree. Thanks so much, Kacie.

Kacie Molina: Well, thanks, Mike.

Mike: Big thanks to Kacie, Molina for joining us and reminding us that Agentforce doesn't have to start with a giant project. Admins can create real impact just by listening for those small moments of friction and designing a secure solution while helping teams work better with data automation and AI. So be sure to subscribe, share this episode and keep the conversation going with your admin community. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Parth Shah, Director of Product Marketing, and Rikke Hovgaard, Director of Product Management for the Agentforce Coworker team at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about Agentforce Coworker and what it means for the way admins help teams get work done.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Parth Shah and Rikke Hovgaard.

Agentforce Coworker brings AI into everyday business work AI has been a game changer for coding, but integrating it into normal business processes has proved more challenging. That's where Agentforce Coworker comes in. It's an autonomous AI teammate, grounded in your enterprise data from day one.

For this episode, I sat down with with Rikke Hovgaard, Director of Product Management, and Parth Shah, Director of Product Marketing, to find out what Agentforce Coworker is and how it can help admins bring new tools to their team.

Salesforce permissions remain central to trust and access Trust is central to any conversation about AI. New tools are exciting, but you need to be sure that they won't give people access to data they shouldn't be able to see. Luckily, Agentforce Coworker works around the permissions you've already configured in Salesforce. It's simple for admins, and keeps those guardrails in place.

As far as configuration goes, Rikke and Parth are all about keeping it simple and transparent. While Agentforce Coworker automatically inherits the security and governance settings that are already in your org, you also have special configuration options just for the agent.

Admins can connect more data through Data Cloud and Slack For Rikke, Agentforce Coworker is especially useful for summarizing her team's Slack conversations. She can quickly understand which team member is working on which issue, and where she might need to lend a helping hand.

At the end of the day, Agentforce Coworker gives you a conversational interface to do more with your Salesforce data. "Coworker does the work in the background so that your team can actually focus on what matters," Parth says.

Listen to the full episode for more from Parth and Rikke about Agentforce Coworker. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

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Learn more * Introducing Agentforce Coworker * Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: How Headless 360 Helps Admins Bring Salesforce Anywhere

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Social * Rikke on LinkedIn * Parth on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on X * Mike on Bluesky social * Mike on Threads * Mike on X

Full show transcript Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, we're talking with Parth Shah and Rikke Hovgaard about Agentforce Coworker and what it means for the way admins help teams get work done. Now, this isn't just about turning on another AI feature. It's about bringing trusted business context, permissions, data, and automation together so users can ask better questions and take action faster. Parth and Rikke are going to walk us through how Coworker connects to Salesforce data, how it respects existing permissions, and how it gives admins a simpler path to roll out and governance. So, be sure to listen in, press that subscribe button if you haven't already. And I would always appreciate it if you could share this episode with a fellow Salesforce admin. And with that, let's get Parth and Rikke on the podcast. So, Parth and Rikke, welcome to the podcast.

Rikke Hovgaard: Thank you for having us.

Parth Shah: Thank you.

Mike: Well, I'm glad we could get you both on. This is the first time I've had a product manager and a product marketing major on a podcast. Usually, one of them has something too important to do that they bail out, but I'm bringing people together. It's going to be great. So, we're going to talk about Agentforce Coworker, but first I want to learn a little bit about each of you. Parth, I'm just going to start with you because you were the first one to bug me in my Slack DMs about Agentforce Coworker. So, I'd love to learn just a little bit about how you came to Salesforce and what you currently are working on.

Parth Shah: Yeah, absolutely. Slack makes it really easy to bug my Coworkers, especially my favorite ones. I sent a lot of emojis. So, sorry, Mike.

Mike: Oh, I'm your favorite.

Parth Shah: Yeah. So, a bit about me. I grew up in Ohio, was a chemical engineer in undergrad, which really I love to build things and I love to, I guess, solve complex problems. And then when I graduated, I didn't want to go work in a plant, in a chemical plant. And so, I ended up going into sales within oil and gas. Did that for about three years, really understood how to actually talk to customers and what their pain points are. And then switched over to a really early stage startup in education technology, really passionate about education. Did that for about three years, which is where I learned a lot about product marketing. Then got my MBA and then joined Salesforce. So, been at Salesforce as a product marketer for about coming up to seven years. And what's been kind of interesting is I started off on the MuleSoft side of Salesforce, so all about integrations. I really learned what it means to connect data between different systems and how developers and admins go about doing that. And that's when I switched over. MuleSoft wanted to launch a new product called MuleSoft Composer at that time, which is now Flow. So, the next level of after connecting data is like, how do you actually use that data to automate processes and make it super simple for admins like our viewers out there? So, help launch that and then moved over to our Data 360, previously data cloud business. And here, I focus on everything that is around unstructured data. So, again, the through line here, if you look at data is, now we can start tapping into the unstructured data that's all out there because of AI. But the more important thing is now that AI is coming in, how do we actually bring that data, which is full of richness in audio, video, meeting notes, et cetera? How do we bring it into AI so that AI is really grounded? And so, that's been kind of my journey. Obviously, looking back at it, everything kind of connected. I didn't know at that time, but the through line I think is my curiosity of what's next within tech has kind of propelled me to go and find out and work on the cool next product that's coming up, which is also how I land on a Coworker.

Mike: Wow. I would've had no idea that you started in oil and gas. Also, what's sales like in oil and gas? Hi, do you want any? Yes.

Parth Shah: Cool. Yeah. It's very old. It's a very people oriented business.

Mike: Yeah. All right. Well, I had to get that joke in. Rikke, I know you're letting me say your name that way, but in all fairness, being German, there's names that we just can't pronounce. So, I'd love to hear how you got started at Salesforce and obviously you're working on Coworker now.

Rikke Hovgaard: Yeah. So, originally I'm from Denmark, which is why my name is a little hard to pronounce. Believe it or not, that's actually a pretty common name in Denmark. So, Rikke is fine here, but I started out after university working for a consultation partner. So, I started implementing Salesforce randomly, started out with Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, moved over to Pardot and Marketing Cloud when that was acquired by Salesforce and ended up also doing a little bit of data and analytics there. And then I decided it was time to move on to other things. So, I joined another partner in London and I moved to London and did that for a bit. I was working a lot on analytics at that point and also marketing. And so, it was mostly focused on what we know now as CRM Analytics and I started a blog on it as well. And so, a few years into it, I joined Salesforce in the CIM Analytics product team, helping customers get the most out of CIM analytics, deescalate some of their issues, best practices, all this kind of stuff. And I think that's where I also got a lot more involved with the community. And then I joined later in Data Cloud, moved over there and about two years ago I started the team with the search team in Data Cloud and we had this idea of Coworker and I ended up working on the admin side. And today I own the Coworker setup experience as well as search manager.

Mike: Oh, wow. I mean, all roads lead through Data 360, literally and figuratively. So, Parth, let's talk about that. I mean, for anybody that hasn't heard, what is Agentforce Coworker and what is it there to help with?

Parth Shah: Yeah. So, Agentforce Coworker, it is your autonomous AI teammate and it's available in Salesforce and it's also going to be available in a lot of different services like Microsoft Teams, desktop, mobile, ChatGPT, Claude, and a lot more. Fundamentally, what it is is it's an AI assistant that knows your business from day one. It's already connected to all of your enterprise data, whether it's structured, unstructured, your opportunities, your cases, your accounts, all of that context that you have within Salesforce and then what's connected to Salesforce. And of course, it respects all the permissions when you do connect those systems. So, it's grounded in your context from the first prompt that you ask. Number two is it can also orchestrate a lot of your agents. It can also execute a lot of complex tasks so that way, it moves your work forward. In other ways, it takes action on your behalf and you can actually update your CRM using Coworker. And then lastly, we built that headless. So, what's really cool about this is yes, it's available in Salesforce, but now you'll be able to take that Salesforce experience and that data and the context that you've spent so many years building into wherever you work. Now a question that we usually get is like, why do we build it? What was kind of the reason behind it? What's the pain point that is really trying to solve? And I think if you look at the industry trends, what's been interesting and what's kind of been going on is you've seen AI obviously augment software engineering, right? It's writing code and it's improving their productivity, but when we think about how business users actually do their work, it's quite different than software engineers, right? Of course, AI can help write emails, it can create the docs. We're going into customer service, but it gets a bit more complex because in our day-to-day work, we're switching a lot between different applications. We're copy pasting a lot of different data from one application to the next, for example, from Slack to Google Docs and so on and so forth. And it's not adding as much value as it does for software engineering. And so, we said, "Okay, how do we bring all of that context that you have wherever you work into a product that brings in AI and actually helps you do the work so you can focus on a lot of the other things that are more important, like building your relationship?" And Salesforce being Salesforce, we said, "Let's bring in that context and we have that AI and let's put it into Agentforce Coworker, which is where also Salesforce, our users work." And the second thing that we also did on top is if you think through where most of your work actually starts, which is again, very different than how we think about agents in general, it starts from work. Anytime you have a question about a task, you go to search. And so, we said, "Why don't we turn that search into something agentic where search gets you answers and then answers can help you take those actions?" And so, fundamentally what we've done is we brought in that context and made it really easy for our users to use Salesforce and fundamentally get a lot more value out of Salesforce and all the things that it can do with the data that you have.

Mike: Yeah. I think what's cool is Coworker's not just for admins. I mean, we'll talk about that, but it's for all of your users. So, one question based on everything that you said, just to make sure that I kind of wrap my head around it as an admin, if I'm setting it up, I can permission what it can and cannot have access to in terms of data. So, if I have, let's say payroll data in Salesforce, I don't want to give it access to that so that Bob and sales can go down and be like, "Hey, I wonder what Sally makes," and then ask Coworker and get a response, right?

Rikke Hovgaard: Well, we're actually using the same permissions that you've already as an admin set up in Salesforce.

Mike: Oh, great.

Rikke Hovgaard: So, there's nothing extra to set up. We tried to make the setup experience super simple and one of that is also, of course, knowing what you've already set up in terms of permissioning. So, if you have in your object given access to something, then the user that is locking in will be able to see that. And if they don't have access to it, they won't be able to see that data either.

Mike: Gotcha. Wow, that's huge. So, it automatically just respects the user's permissions as opposed to me the admin having to go and set something up for it.

Rikke Hovgaard: Correct. Yeah.

Mike: Wow, that's really ... I mean, what's funny is every time I see or work through some of these new products, I'm like, "Oh, well that totally makes sense." Except I think that was probably really hard to do. So, it's always really cool when it happens. It's like intermittent wipers, I suppose.

Rikke Hovgaard: Yeah. Well, we have some amazing engineers that figure out all the architecture and build this stuff. So, I can't take credit for that, but I guess from my point of view at least, as an admin, there are so many things that you have to learn with all these new features. And so, our vision was really to try and make the whole setup simple. We also wanted to be transparent around the permissioning and the governance around it. So, we've also tried to balance that, but it's also how much information do you give upfront? How much is in the documentation? So, it's a fine balance to try and make it all simple enough.

Mike: Yeah. Now can we talk a little bit about the design of it too because I've seen, thankfully I've had an org and I got to play around with it and it couldn't be more intuitive. I'm sure it could be, but can you talk about what went into how you thought about what that user experience is looking like?

Rikke Hovgaard: So, I think it's really down to the jobs to be done. What are you trying to achieve? And that's why the ask mode is very much focused on just asking the question and having that conversation. We wanted to make that a very clear, crisp understanding of what is it that you're supposed to do on this screen. I don't know if you had a chance to also play with the other part, which is we also introduced a new search experience and here that's more of a balance where we're trying to figure out, well, all the things that people love from the original search and how do we bring that in as well as also how do we make it a little bit more new and look a little bit more or nicer, so to speak. I think that has been a little bit of a challenge when we're thinking of all of the data that you can bring in Coworker compared to what we have in Global Search. And now I know we're going a little bit more into the admin side of things, but in order to display things correctly, we need to make sure we also have the information of the data in order to show it correctly. So, that has been an interesting challenge to look at, but yeah, really trying to make it super easy for users to know what they actually have to do, prompt them to get the most out of the tool.

Mike: Yeah. I mean, it almost feels like at times there's a balance between making it super simple and having people trust it and making it a little bit more difficult just so that people trust it because you've gone through it. And if it's almost too easy, then it's like, "Hmm, but did it really do? Is it really..." I can always feel that anxiety in a user or an executive when you demo something the first time and they're like, "Yeah, but does it really do that?"

Rikke Hovgaard: Especially also when we think about AI, we're putting a lot of trust into it and allowing us to get the answers that we're looking for. And so, I think that's why the whole thinking steps that we have implemented is super important for the agentic response. So, we built a level of trust or transparency in what is it that we're actually looking and giving that information to the end user so they can see how we got to the result.

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. Now trust and governance is top of mind. It's literally the first thing everybody talks about with AI. Can we talk a little bit about how that works with Agentforce Coworker and maybe some of what you're seeing in the beta version? I feel like I was on that Agentforce Coworker page and there was an admin on that page that's awfully familiar to a lot of the community that had some great quotes.

Rikke Hovgaard: Mike, let's maybe start with how do you actually set up Coworker. I think that will lead into how do we control the permissions and-

Mike: Yeah, let's start there.

Rikke Hovgaard: Okay. So, the vision we had with the setup page, because if we're being honest, we are using features from other parts of Salesforce. So, we're using Agentforce, we are also using Data Cloud, we're also using global search. So, the thought that we had in the beginning was that's a lot of steps and hoops for an admin to go to in order to set up a Coworker. And so, our vision was really, how can we simplify this? How can we get an admin up and running super-fast? That doesn't mean that they don't have more things they can do, but from the first click turn on to they have access to Coworker, we wanted that to be super simple. So, we have defined a bunch of steps that has to be done in order for you to use Coworker. One, for instance, we have to create the search agent. So, when you click turn on, you actually go ahead and we've automated a bunch of steps for you that goes ahead and creates the things that we need to get Coworker up and running. And in that we've created the agent, we created the permission set group that you need to give access to users and we also have enabled your Salesforce data out of the box. So, any Salesforce data, any custom object, any default or standard object that you have is automatically searchable just by hitting turn on. Now, since we are in a beta, we still need you to opt into the beta. So, there is a little step that some people might miss, which is just go ahead and opt in so you have the new search experience in the front end with the global search bar and the ask button. And then the final step in order to get a user to access and use Coworker is to assign them this permission set group. Essentially, if you're an admin, you're probably familiar with different permission sets are giving you access to different things. So, you need to have a permission set for your agent, you need to have a permission set to use some basic features of Coworker and there's some other things, but essentially we're bundling all of this together in the permission set group. And so, all you have to do is directly from the page, the setup page. You can assign your users directly from that, or you can use the permission sets or permission set group from the user setup page as well. So, that's to say that we tried our best to make everything as simple as possible and then you can lay additional features on top of that with external data, et cetera. So, this is how we are controlling whether or not you have access to it, just permission sets and permission set groups.

Mike: That's very easy. So, if an admin turns it on, it's not just available to everybody.

Rikke Hovgaard: No.

Mike: You can choose whether or not maybe you want a small set of users to try it out first.

Rikke Hovgaard: Exactly.

Mike: Perfect.

Rikke Hovgaard: This is all permission based.

Mike: I like it.

Parth Shah: Now Mike, following on that, I think if we look at trust, trust goes I think even beyond permissions. And I think one of the beautiful things about Coworkers is built on Salesforce, the Salesforce platform that we all know. And so, it automatically inherits a lot of the security and governance, the data residency controls, the access based policies, audit logging, all of that, that Salesforce has that automatically inherits that. So, to kind of give you a couple examples, when it orchestrates across agents, the agents that you've built, they all have observability and monitoring because they're built on the Agentforce platform. So, you have access to that. So, you have an understanding of what it's trying to do and then also the actions that it's taking and how it's doing it. That's number one. And then if you also look at the data itself, if we look at some of the data built into Data 360, that already has a lot of policies built into it. It also has masking built into it, right? And so, it automatically inherits those. And so, when Coworker actually gives out that response, it's not just looking at the permission sets for the user themselves, but it's also looking at the data and the agent side of governance, security and the trust that comes with the Salesforce platform.

Mike: Oh, wow. I mean, that's really, really beneficial there. I was thinking, Parth, you mentioned Data 360. Ironically, both of you have worked in Data 360. Outside of Agentforce just being able to answer questions around the data that we have in Salesforce, we can also give it the ability to get information elsewhere. Can you explain a little bit more about that and kind of what an admin would be configuring and possibly doing there?

Parth Shah: Yes. I can give ... Oh, sorry, Rikke, go ahead.

Rikke Hovgaard: Oh, no, you can answer.

Parth Shah: No, no, no, go for it. Go for it. Go for it. Well, I'll give a high level overview. You can bring in connectors to connect to external sources and then you can also ground a Coworker on the Data 360 data that you have. So, then Rikke, go on.

Rikke Hovgaard: Yeah. So, we knew that we wanted to allow Admins to go ahead and take all of this rich data that they have ingested into Data Cloud and use that as well. So, when you are on the setup screen, we have a little data table as we call it that shows that you've set up your Salesforce data by default. And when you click, there's a little button there that says add more data and in here you can go ahead and add any of the data that you have already ingested into Data Cloud. So, if you have unstructured and structured data in Data Cloud that you want to go ahead and make searchable, you go ahead and go through that flow. And what we've done is very simple model where you select the DMOs that you're interested in. You then have for each one of these DMOs select some search metadata because what I said earlier, it gets a little bit tricky sometimes. With Salesforce, we already know what is the name field. We know what is a supporting field. We know how the layout is, we know the ID, et cetera. For DMOs, we don't know always know that. So, we allow you to go ahead and make those selections, finish that process and at the end we go ahead and create a search index for you that we can use both for the keyword search that appears, but also for the agentic responses that we have.

Mike: Wow.

Rikke Hovgaard: So, that's how you can add that data. But I actually remembered that we haven't actually talked about getting Slack data in as well.

Mike: Oh yeah. Let's talk about that.

Rikke Hovgaard: Yeah. I know that you mentioned Teams, but we also hopefully have some admins out there that have Slack and we've also made that super simple. So, if you've already authenticated Slack within your Salesforce environment, you can go to that same ad data model and you just select the Slack, you click next and you click save and then you also now have Slack data just within your Coworker experience. And this is again, this is actually federated. So, we're looking at the user and you're only getting access to the data that you have access through that user connection. So, that's another really interesting thing that I would definitely use in my Coworker experience.

Mike: Yeah. And it just pairs really well. That way, you know there's conversations happening in Slack that would need to be brought in.

Rikke Hovgaard: Yeah. So, we use Salesforce obviously in Salesforce ourselves. We have our own engineering product engineering environment and in there we've enabled Coworker as well. And so, one thing that I ask a lot is for specific work stream that we're working on, I want to get an update that includes both the work items that I have in Salesforce, but it also includes all the Slack conversations that we're having on the side. And I get an update just by asking Coworker about what's happening. I know which engineer is working what work item and what risk or whatever else we might have that we have to, that might need my attention.

Mike: How stressful were you when they turned Coworker on in that org? Because all the other product managers are just eyeballing, right? Is this going to work? I wouldn't sleep that night. You kidding me?

Rikke Hovgaard: I actually felt pretty confident in it. I can't turn it on myself. I'm not an [inaudible 00:25:12].

Mike: Oh, well, that's good.

Rikke Hovgaard: But I did have very great collaboration with our admins, both on the GUS and TheOrg62 environment. And I leveraged my partner experience or my implementation experience. I wrote a really detailed walkthrough. I had amazing help from my engineers and it went pretty smoothly, and we had some check-ins every day. We watched the numbers grow and it was pretty cool to see.

Mike: Yeah, I could imagine. Parth, I know we've had some customers in the product as well because it's in beta. What have they had to say? What were some of the things they've shared back?

Parth Shah: I think this is one of my favorite products to work on in my career.

Mike: Oh, you say that about all the products.

Parth Shah: No, no, no. I say this seriously. I say this seriously because every time I've talked to a customer, they're so excited about it. I'll give you an example. Andrew Russo, he is currently a VP of business systems at, I'm saying it correctly, BACA Systems. And when he first heard about the product, I think Mark Benioff had tweeted about it, he heard about it. He was so excited to quote and kind of paraphrase a bit, he's like, "I felt like Santa Claus on Christmas bringing it to my team." And the use cases that he started seeing was like, start something super simple with a sales and business development team. One of the use cases he mentioned was, let's just get all of the context that we haven't reached out to. And I think he had mentioned something along the lines of like, it was a holiday coming up and this would've taken up so much of their team's time to actually find the contacts and reach out to them. Coworker did it really quickly and their teams were able to quickly reach out to the customers they haven't been able to reach out to and they were able to engage them. And so, this just kind of shows you the power of Coworker doing the work in the background so that your sales teams can actually focus on what matters, which is building out the relationships. I think overall, when I think about the use cases and how customers have been using it, what I repeatedly hear is the use cases are endless. There isn't just one use case that kind of shines. That's really the power of AI. But what it allows you to do is it allows a person to be as creative as possible. And I think as admins or the folks that are kind of introducing it, what I've seen work really well is nurture it. Give people one or two small use cases to start with so they start to see the power of it and then the natural curiosity of that team just kind of takes over. They're like, "Huh, what if we just get more complex?" It's almost like, can you thump Coworker? And the queries and the prompts that you put in just get more and more and more complex. I mean, even internally, we were recently working on a product of like we introduced a new feature, so how do we email the customers? And part of that is we want to make sure that they have the right license. Historically, that would've taken a long time, but we're like, "Huh, I wonder if Coworker can do it." Coworker kind of became a part of natural language, I guess, that you talk about every day and you naturally go to it because you start seeing the power of it and you're like, "Let Coworker do it." So, I think that's what I've seen is seed it and then just watch it grow. And then once you watch it grow within one team, take that idea, take those wins and take the people that have used it and they will talk about it to the other teams.

Mike: Well, I feel like Thursday night bowling league's going to get awkward when six of you are standing around and going, "I feel like we're missing somebody. Didn't anybody invite Agentforce Coworker?" Oh. They couldn't make it. They're stuck at the office. That's it. That's the one joke for the podcast. It never really lands and people always give it a bad review, but that you got to try every now and then. To kind of wrap things up, I always like to see what other people do. I feel having talked with a lot of people in technology, we often have very tactile hobbies or things that we like to do on the side. I'm usually pretty obsessed with my lawn. I can tell you soil levels and pH and all kinds of stuff that's not fun unless you're into lawn care. But Rikke, I'd love to know outside of making Agentforce Coworker awesome, is there a fun hobby that you have that you use to get away from Coworker every now and then?

Rikke Hovgaard: I don't know if I would say hobby per se, but for me, I really like going out by the water. I actually bike quite a lot out to the beach and then I have a puppy that I just let run around and that gives me a lot of common peace. I mean, hobbies, I don't think I have anything that I'm super nerdy about except for sometimes I get a little detail with some of my own data, but I feel like that's a little bit too close to work to mention as a good hobby.

Mike: Yeah. I'll take the biking thing. Boy, of all the dogs I've had, that was the best way to get them to run. Especially when you've been inside in meetings all day and they're like, "Mom, can we go for a run?" And you're like, "Yes, we can." That was about the only way I could keep up with my dogs was a good mountain bike.

Rikke Hovgaard: And I trained him early enough to actually jump in, or not jump, but I put him in a basket and we go.

Mike: Oh, mine were always too big for that. They're either making or they're not. One time though, he was running and I used to live in an area that was under construction. They had a manhole cover off and he was running along just beside me and one of his feet hit that manhole and it popped out of joint and that's when I learned how heavy a 30-pound dog is to carry over your shoulder and mountain bike back to the house and call the vet.

Parth Shah: Oh, no.

Mike: That was the only time I carried him. No basket for me though.

Rikke Hovgaard: Yeah. I'm happy I have a small dog now.

Mike: Right.

Rikke Hovgaard: Yeah.

Mike: Note to self. Buy a small dog that's easy to carry. Parth, I mean, you've been doing a lot of things. Plus you were in the Buckeye State, so I don't know, football.

Parth Shah: I watch football. I'm in New York, so go Knicks, Knicks in 5. Also, I love this question. Rikke, I had no idea that you bike. I would love to bike with you someday and obviously bring your dog.

Rikke Hovgaard: I mean, it's not like a race kind of thing, but yeah, I like biking around. I don't have a car. So, that's the only way I get around.

Parth Shah: Yeah. So, I live in New York and there's a lot of things that I absolutely love to do. What I've been really focusing on is one, I love going to museums. I absolutely love going to museums so much that I've pretty much checked out every single museum in New York and I'll go to them again. Part of that is just like it invokes this creativity in me, which is why I'm a marketer, just to see how other people are thinking through life and kind of portraying it. Second thing that I've been trying to get it more into is I've been trying to do a lot more of comedy. I know it's not coming through right now, but that's something that I want to work on. And then the last is yoga. Yoga because no AI is there in yoga. It's just me and myself.

Mike: Not yet.

Parth Shah: Not yet.

Mike: Somebody will invent an AI mat. Parth, your downward dog is not doing so well.

Rikke Hovgaard: There's those mirrors where you can get workout commentary on your-

Mike: Oh, that kind of weirds me out.

Parth Shah: Oh, me too.

Rikke Hovgaard: Yeah.

Parth Shah: I can't do that.

Rikke Hovgaard: I prefer my workouts to be just me and whatever I'm doing. I don't need any instructions to do.

Mike: You're biking your dog.

Rikke Hovgaard: Yeah. I mean, I do other things too, but I would say I don't like anybody commentary on what I'm doing.

Mike: Nope. Nope. Parth, that's so cool. I love the museum part. The presentation nerd in me loves going to museums and paying for the guided tour just to see the person and how they kind of direct people through because there's often a lot. There's a lot of people to pay attention to. There's a lot of information. I don't know. I like walking through museums all by myself. Don't get me wrong, but if I can do a guided tour, I always find that kind of fun too.

Parth Shah: One tip someone told me is look at the artwork and then also look at the people looking at the artwork. That itself is art as well. And I was like, "Whoa."

Mike: Yes. Yes, absolutely.

Rikke Hovgaard: I also find that a lot of museums are starting to have free tours with a specific theme. So, they take you on a path. I've noticed, at least when I was in Europe last time, there was a couple of museums doing that. So, something worth looking at the website all the time, because I definitely like having somebody cover a theme and take me through a journey in the museum.

Mike: Yep. I've been through a few where they have an app on the phone and you can just listen to and it walks you through. And that was always kind of fun because I feel there's a lot to take in and I'll read the plaque or the information by it, but it's like they can't put everything there. I know I did a few where I think they had the artist kind of comment in addition to what the information was and just kind of standing there and hearing in the artist's own words and seeing their work, it was very powerful. So, very cool. Well, see, it's not all about AI on the podcast. Every now and then we talk about some things that are fun. I want to thank you both for coming on. I think we covered a ton of stuff and I'm excited to see the future versions of Agentforce Coworker. I'm not going to ask you what they are because it's in beta and there's a big roadmap to come, but I think it's going to be very exciting for admins.

Rikke Hovgaard: I think we have some very exciting stuff coming up. We have a lot of good ideas from customers and from what we're thinking about ourselves. So, I think you have something.

Mike: Oh, I could only imagine. And I bet we're going to see some of them at Dreamforce, right?

Rikke Hovgaard: I am sure we will.

Mike: Knock on wood. Great. Well, Parth, Rikke, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Rikke Hovgaard: Thank you for having us.

Parth Shah: Thank you for having us.

Mike: Big thanks to Parth and Rikke for helping us unpack Agentforce Coworker from search to Slack to that magical moment when users ask, "Wait, it can do that." Oh yes, that's the best. Admins, this is your lane, connecting the data, guiding the rollout, and making sure AI helps the business without wandering off with the keys to the org. Now, if you haven't already, press that subscribe button, share this episode with your favorite Salesforce admin or your favorite Coworker. Maybe they're one and the same, or invite a Coworker to a bowling league. Just say it. It'd be fun, wouldn't it? I'd like to go bowling. Just don't expect them to rent the shoes. Maybe you rent the shoes. I would buy the shoes. Other people have worn those shoes a lot. You never know what could be in those shoes. Anyway, until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Laura Pelkey, Director of Customer Security Communications and Engagement, and Sabrina Simeroth, Product Manager for Security Center at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about security essentials for the summer and how Salesforce is helping admins protect their data.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Laura Pelkey and Sabrina Simeroth.

Why admins are a target Security doesn't take a summer vacation. And while AI is helping all of us do more things faster than ever before, it's also helping hackers deliver new types of targeted attacks at scale. And as privileged users, admins are finding themselves in the crosshairs.

Luckily, Salesforce is rolling out key security enhancements over the summer to help you protect your org. I sat down with Laura Pelkey and Sabrina Simeroth to talk about what threats are out there and how you can be prepared.

MFA requirements to protect your credentials Because AI makes it easier than ever to imitate someone's writing style or even their voice, the biggest threats that Laura and her team are seeing are different variations of phishing attacks. In the end, it's all about getting someone's credentials and then using that access to do damage.

That's why Salesforce is requiring all customers to use multi-factor authentication (MFA), as opposed to the gentle nudging we've done in the past. However, MFA can still be vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, so admins and other privileged users will need to use a stronger phishing resistant MFA. Finally, Salesforce will require step-up authentication for users attempting a sensitive or unusual action, like exporting a large file.

I don't have to tell you that these kinds of changes can often be met with resistance. Laura recommends framing things in terms of what they protect your users from. Does a salesperson really want a hacker to email everyone on their contact list from their account? It's not about making you jump through hoops—it's about protecting you from real risks.

Security Center Essentials and Health Check give admins a central view We also checked in with Sabrina about how her team is trying to make it easier to get a handle on essential security configurations across the platform and what settings are most critical. Coming in July, the new Security Center Essentials will let you see everything in one place instead of having to wade through a bunch of permissions and toggles.

Health Check will help you prioritize which changes will get you the biggest bang for your buck, and help you track your security posture over time. "It's all about allowing admins to navigate the security space in a way that helps to reduce the complexity and provide some guidance," Sabrina says.

There's a lot more from Laura and Sabrina about security on Salesforce and what's coming next, so make sure to listen to the full episode. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

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Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we're talking security with Laura Pelkey and Sabrina Simeroth. The threat landscape is moving fast and with AI in the mix, attackers are getting better at targeting privileged users like Salesforce Admins. But in this episode, it isn't about fear, it's about readiness, trust, and the systems admins can put in place to protect our orgs. We'll cover MFA enforcement, phishing-resistant MFA, step-up authentication, and how Security Center Essentials gives admins a clearer view of the settings that matter most because today's admin isn't just managing features. They're designing secure, trusted systems that help businesses move forward. So, let's move forward with this podcast and get Laura and Sabrina on. So, Laura and Sabrina, welcome to the podcast.

Laura Pelkey: Hello?

Sabrina Simeroth: Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Mike Gerholdt: Absolutely. Well, it's always good to talk security. I feel like I was watching the news the other day and they talk about kids when they go to school and then they have the summer off and there's that summer slump of information. I feel like maybe over the summer we kind of have a security slump because we're taking time off and we're going to water slides and watching tornadoes in the Midwest, but maybe I'm just crazy thinking about that. Laura, why don't you catch us up and tell us what's going on with security and some of the newest things in summer 26?

Laura Pelkey: I would love to. And I was just going to say our catchphrase, which I feel like I repeat every time we do a podcast together and that security never sleeps even in the summer.

Mike Gerholdt: Oh, yes. Right. That could also be a fun summer action film.

Laura Pelkey: Yes. I would see it.

Mike Gerholdt: I would.

Laura Pelkey: Yeah. So, I mean, we're halfway through the year, which is crazy already. And I'd say in the last year we have seen the security landscape and the threat landscape shift tremendously. And especially, I mean, I think a lot of people at Salesforce and a lot of people who are listening are very aware of and use on a day-to-day basis, AI nowadays, which is great. It's a very powerful tool. But what we're seeing in the security landscape is that AI-driven cyber threats have emerged and hackers have really up-leveled their ability to create and execute targeted cyber attacks faster than ever before. So, it's kind of crazy the speed at which this is happening. And unfortunately, I think we're going to see their capabilities get better and better as these tools evolve.

Mike Gerholdt: Well, that's not fair. We're supposed to use AI for good.

Laura Pelkey: Yeah. Well, the good news is, so yes, I agree. The good news is that providers are now using the same AI models or better AI models if you're in the lucky groups to enhance the security of their platforms and products. So, now the playing field has really been evened out.

Mike Gerholdt: Well, that's good.

Laura Pelkey: Yeah. But we're in a really interesting time right now with cybersecurity and AI.

Mike Gerholdt: I mean, I feel like everybody's trying to figure out AI and now that kind of only muddies the water of impersonating other people or the speed at which it can replicate good or bad effective use of, I don't know, text messages or different spoofing. Can you walk us through how does Salesforce leverage AI to proactively block the type of threats that you're seeing today?

Laura Pelkey: Yeah. So, there are some really common threats that just across the industry we're seeing that AI is being used for. So, account takeovers and this is a really common one. This is where attacker might use AI to create a phishing campaign, which targets users and tries to get access to their account. And then once they're inside a user account, they can then utilize all of the privileges that that user has to continue carrying out their attack. So, it's really about getting credentials, finding creative ways to get around our existing solutions to get those and then get that user profile and exploit it.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I think one thing that you've pointed out in the past is identity-based social engineering. So, I'd love for you to kind of expand on what makes admins and some privileged users such high-value targets for that.

Laura Pelkey: Yeah, that's a great question. So, identity-based social engineering is when attackers create very highly personalized phishing campaigns and this can be phishing. Traditionally, we saw that with email five years ago it was primarily email. Now we're seeing phishing campaigns and especially with the help of AI, attackers are conducting these campaigns over voice calls. So that's called vishing or voice phishing. And admins are such a appealing target for these attackers because they're privileged users, they have such a high level of privilege and they can do almost anything within their Salesforce org. And so, that persona in general is highly targeted by attackers because of their level of access.

Mike Gerholdt: What would you suggest an admin listening to this do today to start just being ready for if that phone were to ring and it was a malicious actor on the other end?

Laura Pelkey: Well, I mean, we always say use common sense. So, there are a lot of built-in protections that I can talk about within the Salesforce platform that will help protect admins, which is great and I'll talk about those in a minute. But if that ever happens, if you are an admin and you get a call from a number that you don't know, from a person that you don't know claiming to be your help desk or claiming to be even Salesforce in some cases and they're asking you to log into your Salesforce account for them so that they can help you do something, that's typically how these things are positioned, that kind of scenario is never going to legitimately happen. No one's going to call you or email you and send you a link and ask you to log into your Salesforce account ever. That's just not something that we do. So, look for red flags like that. And in general, whenever you're suspicious about something from a cybersecurity perspective, the best thing to do is disengage with whoever is trying to speak with you or engage with you and get you to do something and then hang up the phone, don't email back whatever it is and then call your help desk line or call your Salesforce account person in a number that you already have and that you are already confident in and that way you can verify if that interaction was real or not.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I think the thing that always struck me when you would bring it up or somebody from your team, Laura, would bring it up is it's that human nature side that they try to take advantage of like, "Oh, you want to be helpful and you don't want to cause a problem." And so, you just kind of go along with it and it's like, yeah, you're not causing a problem if you just say, "Let me call back the number that I trust and talk to somebody there."

Laura Pelkey: Yeah. Yeah. And you can do that in any scenario. If it's like your bank, someone calls and says they're from your bank and they're reaching out to you, that probably isn't going to happen. So, what you said, Mike, is exactly right. The reason that people are exploited is because we have these human behaviors, which human behaviors are great. They make us who we are, but false urgency is one of these tactics that attackers will use and they'll try to get you to do things quickly without really thinking about it. So, if we feel like goosebumps or we kind of have a weird feeling about why is someone calling me and asking me to log into my account, we can just stop and think and that's the best thing you can do to break this cycle.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's talk about some of the security enhancements that has come out over the last few years. I mean, we have MFA and we have a whole bunch of other things.

Laura Pelkey: Yeah. Yeah. So, we're very aware that this threat landscape has shifted and that it's our duty to protect our customer's data as it always has been at Salesforce. We take that super seriously, trust. Trust is our number one value. And so, to better help our customers protect themselves against these quickly evolving threats, we have some new enhancements and some new requirements in our platform that will help harden our customer security posture against these kinds of attacks. So, one thing, I'll only talk about a few, but one thing, and everyone really should be using this because it's been around for a while, is MFA, like you said, Mike. And I think we had started requiring customers to use MFA back in early 2022, I think. So, it's been quite a while, but we're actually going to be enforcing that. So, rather than being contractually required, it's going to be enforced in the product, meaning you may not be able to log in if you are not using MFA. So, this is going to happen starting in June. There's a phase rollout based on sandboxes and production environments. So definitely check out the documentation for the exact dates, but it is starting now. So, soon all Salesforce customers will need to use MFA to log in.

Mike Gerholdt: And I know we've done security workshops. I've seen you present a lot. One of the questions, and inevitably the person that is listening to this is like, "Yes, Mike's going to ask this question." That comes up in all of the security workshops is, "Well, we use SSO to sign in. Do I still need to use MFA?" And we just threw out a whole lot of acronyms there, so I'll have you explain them too.

Laura Pelkey: Yes. So, SSO-

Mike Gerholdt: Alphabet soup.

Laura Pelkey: SSO is single sign-on. That's a great question, Mike. So, if you do use SSO to access your Salesforce instance, then that does satisfy the requirement, but we ask that you also use MFA on top of your SSO. SSO is great. It's a great tool to make it possible so that you don't have to remember a million passwords for all of your work apps. It's awesome. Just have to remember one, but as long as you are using MFA to access your SSO, you are satisfying this requirement as well.

Mike Gerholdt: Awesome. You explained it and you used all the alphabets too.

Laura Pelkey: All the letters in the alphabet. Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt: It's like MFA is like bacon and SSO is like a cheeseburger. It makes it better.

Laura Pelkey: Yeah, exactly. Yes, I love that.

Mike Gerholdt: Because MFA is also just good on its own. I mean, I'll just eat some bacon.

Laura Pelkey: Yeah. So you can either use MFA for direct logins directly into the UI or with your SSO login.

Mike Gerholdt: So, this makes me think of, you talked about phishing. Oh, boy, this is where audio doesn't serve me well. Phishing and vishing, which there's the PH and the V, but because I'm from the Midwest, you can't hear the difference. Could you explain the difference between standard MFA and phishing-resistant MFA?

Laura Pelkey: Yes. So, yeah, this is actually kind of a newer... Think of it as a supercharged form of MFA. So, what traditional MFA, you have two layers of verification before you can log into an account. With phishing-resistant MFA, you are actually bound to a specific site when you're logging in, which makes it harder for attackers who are trying to get you to log into those fake websites that might look real. It actually helps prevent that. So, that's why we call it phishing-resistant MFAs because that is a really common thing for phishing attacks to leverage is these man in the middle fake websites where you think you're logging into your actual tool or product, but you're logging into a fake version of it. And another thing that's great about phishing-resistant MFA is most users of this use biometrics as their second form, so like a fingerprint or a retina scan depending on the device that you're using to log in. So, that just makes it, again, harder to fake and harder to intercept. So, this is most companies are moving towards phishing-resistant MFA as it's so effective, and which is why we're actually also starting in June, so this month, we are requiring system administrators and privileged users to log in with phishing-resistant MFA.

Mike Gerholdt: And why is that?

Laura Pelkey: Because those are privileged users like we talked about, they're highly targeted. They're more targeted than their regular user and they have such a high level of access that if their account, especially were to get compromised like an admin, it could cause a lot more damage. And so, we want those folks to be extra, extra protected. So, phishing-resistant MFA we feel is the best thing to ensure that those accounts and those users stay safe.

Mike Gerholdt: I like that. Now I know I've had to roll out different features to users and sometimes you can't do it fast enough because they love it and other times it's getting them to eat their vegetables. For admins that are worried about user friction with MFA, what would your advice be?

Laura Pelkey: Well, hopefully your users are already using MFA. If they're not, we often find that if an admin holds a training, some informational sessions with their users, some kind of enablement before this change happens and also talk to them about the value that this provides to them. The last thing a salesperson, for example, would want is if their account got hacked and then their clients are getting emails that are sent from them, which are actually malicious. They don't want that to happen. No one wants that to happen. So, just there's some enablement materials that exist on the help portal that could be helpful, but really it's admins explaining and enabling their users why this is so important and helpful.

Mike Gerholdt: One last thing, admins love reports and I feel like isn't Salesforce doing something to help admins set up different kind of reports or report actions to understand maybe when a user would log in that's outside of the normal behavior?

Laura Pelkey: Yes. Yeah, I love that. Yeah. So, this is another enhancement that's coming this summer and it's called Step-Up Authentication and we're doing it for report actions and for anomalous report behavior. So, let's say one of your users all of a sudden wants to export a very large file or something. There's something kind of unusual about this. Anomalous is the word we use in the security community. Our platform is now able to flag that and will cause a step-up authentication toggle to happen. And if you're not familiar what step-up authentication is, it's basically like having to re-log in after you've logged in, which I know might sound annoying, but there is a really good reason for this. So, I always think of it as like the airport analogy. So, when you go to an airport, you have to show your boarding pass and your ID to get through the security line, right?

Mike Gerholdt: Mm-hmm.

Laura Pelkey: And then once you're through security in the airport, you have the freedom to kind of walk around, go get a coffee, go get some food, maybe go to the bathroom and you have freedom of movement because these are not sensitive actions, what we would call in security. But when you get in line at your gate and you're trying to board the plane, you have to again, show your boarding pass in order to get on the plane. And that's actually a step-up authentication. You can think of it like that. This is because getting on the plane is considered a highly sensitive action and requires additional identity verification. And so, that's what we're trying to do within the product. So, say an adversary or an attacker did get access to your Salesforce instance through a user and now they're inside and they're trying to do sensitive things or they're trying to do things that are very bad, we are now able to force them to verify their identity again, which would likely stop that action.

Mike Gerholdt: Nice. Well, here's your Starbucks, but you can't board the plane.

Laura Pelkey: Yeah, exactly.

Mike Gerholdt: I like it.

Laura Pelkey: I mean, if you lose your boarding pass in the airport, you can't get on the plane, right?

Mike Gerholdt: I mean, you should-

Laura Pelkey: Oh, wow.

Mike Gerholdt: It also probably means I've lost my phone and the whole day is just going downhill from there.

Laura Pelkey: That's a big problem. Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt: I know.

Laura Pelkey: But that's the thought behind that.

Mike Gerholdt: Sabrina, we didn't forget about you. It's usually Laura has a long laundry list of things to talk about, but I'd love to bring you into the conversation. First of all, I think this is your first time on the podcast, so tell us a little bit about what you do at Salesforce.

Sabrina Simeroth: Yeah, thanks so much for having me again. I am a product manager in our trusted services space for a product many of our admins may have heard of Security Center.

Mike Gerholdt: Oh, yes, we've heard that. We like that. Yep. You should put it on T-shirts. We'd wear it.

Sabrina Simeroth: Yes. And then also a lot of folks don't know that this team also actually owns the Health Check, which is available for all admins as well.

Mike Gerholdt: We like Health Check too. That's a fun one to demo. You've created good demoing products. You know that?

Sabrina Simeroth: Thanks. Well, we've got more actually.

Mike Gerholdt: Well, let's talk about those because I think there's a Security Center Essentials launching in early July. Am I correct?

Sabrina Simeroth: Yes. Yes. So, we are launching a version that will be of Security Center that will be made available in all orgs this summer and you are absolutely correct, that is going to be starting in July. So, a very fast follow to some of these changes that Laura has been talking about and really, hopefully this product will actually help alleviate some of those concerns and worries of admins who are looking to comply with some of these changes that are coming out in the security space.

Mike Gerholdt: Can you just bring us up to speed on what some of those core problems or pain points were that this is going to help?

Sabrina Simeroth: Yeah, absolutely. So, for admins, security configurations can kind of be really hard to navigate. They're found all across the platform and it's really kind of hard to know what is most critical. So, Laura was talking about things like MFA enabled. These are configurations that you can actually enable through certain permissions as well as toggles and setup. So, these types of security configurations is exactly what we are trying to provide visibility to admins so that they have a single place to see critical security configurations like their session settings, their MFA enablement, how are they set up to allow their users to actually enter the system, whether they're restricting it through login IP addresses and how do they have installed packages, external connected apps set up in their org. All of these things can impact their security and what information bad actors could get to depending on how they have their users configured.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I know you listed... This is going to be so cool, by the way. I loved when we had Health Check and we still do, and I love that this is getting available to everybody. You mentioned some of those metrics. I know there's about seven of them, I believe. If you're a Salesforce admin who's listening to this podcast and you're like, "I don't know where to start." Of the metrics that will be provided in Security Center Essentials, what do you think the biggest bang for the buck is in terms of improving their security posture?

Sabrina Simeroth: Yeah, a great question. So, we're initially launching with a curated set of seven metrics. That's kind of our MVP for our rollout. We're going to have a very fast follow-on where we're expanding the number of metrics that will be very curated, very targeted to the things that they need to look at and that are probably most critical. The first one of the seven that I would say is really essential is that Health Check. So, on important thing is when we say Health Check is going to now be made visible in Security Center Essentials, Health Check contains about 44 configurations that are critical for your security. And with those configurations, Salesforce actually takes a stance on here's what we recommend is the way to configure those settings and have that set up so customers can actually take action and see if they're in compliance with that. So, the Health Check is going to probably be the biggest bang for the buck. And the great thing about pulling this into Essentials is now you can kind of track as these configurations change over time, you can see when those changes happened, how those changes occurred, and then you can take action to remediate that. So, Health Check contains those configurations around identity that we were just talking about enabling MFA, enabling SSO, how those are set up, what are your password policies and all of that information will be contained into this metric that they can monitor changes to those configurations.

Mike Gerholdt: We'll play devil's advocate here for a second because I know some admins are listening and they think, "Well, that sounds cool." And the big organizations that have all the fancy bells and whistles will probably really benefit from this." Do you think smaller organizations will find value in some of these features as well?

Sabrina Simeroth: Absolutely, because the things that we are talking about are the configurations, the critical items that actually impact every organization. It shouldn't really matter the size. These are the most critical things that administrators need to be aware of in order to ensure that they have an appropriate level of security, that there aren't gaps in their security posture. So, these are definitely things that impact all orgs of all sizes. And it really is allowing admins to navigate the security space in a way that helps to reduce the complexity and provide some guidance. And again, this kind of transcends whether you are in a very small environment, very few users because this is more configuration based, or you have a very large environment and many environments to manage.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, no, that's really good. I think sometimes you forget how much there is out there and the best security is the stuff you never see because everything just works properly. So, this is great. I'm excited for it. I think come July, admins will be coming back from some PTO and have fancy new dashboards and things to look at.

Sabrina Simeroth: Absolutely.

Laura Pelkey: I can't wait. Also, I don't know if we can talk about this, but there's a couple of things on the roadmap that might be really interesting to admins too.

Sabrina Simeroth: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, like I mentioned, this isn't the end. So, the initial launch is just getting us started. As kind of a fast follow to the July launch, we will be incorporating even more metrics around providing visibility. Laura, you were talking about those privileged users and specifically there are certain permissions that are associated with administrative level permissioning. Those are kind of the targets for any users that have those permissions. That's where we want to try to find the weak spots and get in there. So, we are actually going to be pulling in our permission metrics, some related to this like export exfiltration, modify all data, those administrative permissions, exactly what's called out in this new phishing-resistant MFA enablement required for those types of users. We will have permission metrics so that admins can now monitor when there are changes to those access, who's granting that access, when is it being granted and they can take action to make sure that those permissions are limited to only the users that need those. And we'll continue to produce more metrics and visibility into some of these critical configurations and expanding that information in the months to come following the initial launch.

Laura Pelkey: That's amazing.

Mike Gerholdt: So there will be even more fun stuff to see at Dreamforce this year.

Sabrina Simeroth: Yes, absolutely.

Mike Gerholdt: I think in closing, because I could probably sit around all day and talk security, Laura knows that, but I'll start with you, Laura. And this question's for both of you. If everybody listening took only one action after listening to this podcast to prepare their orgs for the upcoming security changes, what should that single step be?

Laura Pelkey: So, I would recommend immediately after listening to this going over to the help portal, help.salesforce.com and looking at our documentation where we're outlining all of the enhancements happening this summer. And there's a full list. It's going to give you all of the dates, all of the enforcement details, all of the pre-work, if there is any, to get your org ready for these enforcements that are coming out and we'll get you all set up so that it's a really seamless transition.

Mike Gerholdt: That's great. Sabrina, do you have anything to add to that?

Sabrina Simeroth: Yeah. No, I think Laura, her answer is perfect. I think gathering information ahead of time is so critical to ensure that you have a smooth rollout. So, definitely take a look at the help articles and then also leverage resources if there are questions around what these things are. There are so many resources on our help documents to help guide admins around what is this, what are the impacts and how do you implement these critical configurations? And I think that that's the first step.

Mike Gerholdt: I know I've worked a world tour before and this leads me into my last question because I pointed out our trust and help services and where we used to have release notes. But if admins had a specific question about these enforcement changes and how they'll impact their unique org configuration, where would you suggest they go?

Laura Pelkey: If they have a account success person, definitely ask them. They can also go to the Trailblazer community and we're engaging with customers there on these things. So, that's my recommendation.

Sabrina Simeroth: Yeah. And I think Laura, you mentioned there are a couple of articles that have come out to help them prepare for the MFA enforcement and the specific things that we are enhancing. So, those are really great resources and those can also be found on the help.salesforce.com website.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. And I can go ahead and link those in the show notes.

Sabrina Simeroth: Awesome.

Mike Gerholdt: So people can click on those.

Sabrina Simeroth: That'd be great.

Mike Gerholdt: Laura, Sabrina, thank you so much for coming on. I know there was a lot to cover and we could do this every month, I'm sure, and have a new fresh topic, but admins always need to be security minded.

Laura Pelkey: Yes, we love that.

Sabrina Simeroth: Yes, absolutely.

Laura Pelkey: Always great chatting security with you, Mike.

Mike Gerholdt: Absolutely. Well, I'm sure we'll do this again for the winter release or sometime before Dreamforce to get admins ready for that as well. So, thanks for coming on the pod.

Laura Pelkey: Thank you.

Sabrina Simeroth: Thanks for having us.

Mike Gerholdt: Huge thanks to Laura and Sabrina for making security feel less scary and maybe even a little fun. We covered AI threats, MFA, suspicious phone calls, airport analogies, and why admins should absolutely know what's happening inside Security Center Essentials. Now be sure to check out the show notes for the resources we mentioned. Subscribe so you don't miss an episode. And then finally, share this with an admin who enjoys trust, dashboards, and keeping bad actors off the plane. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Parth Sevak, Director of Technology and Principal Architect at Incepta. Join us as we chat about how Parth built a multi-agent system designed to connect surplus food with the people and organizations that need it the most and won the Agentforce for Good Grand Prize at the TDX Hackathon.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Parth Sevak.

The Hackathon project focused on reducing food waste If you listened to last week's episode with Alexandra Iyer, you know that Agentforce for Good was a popular problem at this year's Agentforce Hackathon at TDX. Contestants took on big issues like nonprofit volunteer coordination and disaster relief. That's why I was so excited to sit down with Parth Sevak, whose project Harvest Bridge won the Agentforce for Good Grand Prize. Harvest Bridge is a multi-agent application that connects food donors with organizations near them.

As Parth explains, food waste is a serious problem. According to the UN's World Food Programme, about 318 million people are facing acute hunger today. "In North America, 30-40% of the food that is produced never gets eaten," he says. So he decided that this would be the perfect problem to tackle for the Agentforce Hackathon at TDX.

Simple integrations and out-of-the-box tools Under the hood, Harvest Bridge features multi-agent coordination between four agents to handle donor intake, food matching, volunteer logistics, and reporting analytics. While it sounds incredibly complicated, Parth is quick to point out that 80% of the work was done in configuration with out-of-the-box admin tools.

Parth needed to write some Apex to do specific things like geo-matching, which he vibe-coded with the Claude plugin for Agentforce. Crucially, he didn't have to write glue code to make everything work between Agentforce, Data 360, automations he built in Salesforce, Slack, and Tableau. "All of it just worked like a charm," he says, "five years ago, that integration story would have been months, if not years."

How to get started building Agentforce solutions In just a few days, Parth was able to build an autonomous, multi-agent system that uses Agentforce, Data 360, Slack, and Tableau to match surplus food with local organizations and coordinate delivery in under 90 minutes.

If you're looking to get started with Agentforce, Parth recommends jumping on Trailhead as your first step. The Agentforce Specialist certification gives you the tools you need to start building, and then it's all about getting your hands dirty.

Make sure to listen to the full conversation with Parth Sevak about how he built Harvest Bridge and won the Agentforce for Good Grand Prize. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

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Full show transcript Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we're talking with Parth Sevak about how a real world food waste solution went from idea to working system in just days using Agentforce. Drawing from a challenge that impacts millions globally, Parth built HarvestBridge, which is a multi-agent system designed to connect surplus food with the people and organizations that need it most. Now, this was part of the TDX26 Hackathon Challenge and what makes this conversation the most compelling isn't just the technology, it's how admins and architects can really orchestrate data automation, AI agents and human coordination together without months of integration work. We also get into what it means to design a trustworthy system where humans stay in control while AI handles scale and speed. So, if you've ever been wondering about how Agentforce changes the role of the Salesforce admin from builder to system orchestrator, this episode's for you. Be sure to subscribe, share the episode with your team, your friends, your local Salesforce admin user group and let us know what kind of real world problems you'd solve with Agentforce. But for now, we're going to get Parth on the podcast. So, Parth, welcome to the podcast.

Parth Sevak: Thanks, Mike. Really glad to be here.

Mike: Well, I'm glad to have you. So, if everything shakes out, the episode before this will be the episode with the Agentforce for Good People, but sometimes scheduling is what it is. But I was at TDX this year and we had Hackathon winners and you were part of the Agentforce Hackathon. And so, that's how I got connected with you. But I think before we get into that, I'd love to know a little bit about how you got started in the Salesforce ecosystem, what you do and let's go from there.

Parth Sevak: Absolutely, Mike. Again, thanks for having me. So, the story of how I ended up in Salesforce is really interesting. That was not my plan. In fact, back in 2011, I was a fresh computer science engineering grade hunting for my first real tech off somewhere. And that time, the startup economy was just taking off and Java was the thing, the only thing in my perspective as far as I was concerned. And then my boss pulled me aside and said, "Parth, you are going to work on Salesforce." And I said, "Oh, what is Salesforce? I'm looking for Java opportunities." So, he made his pitch. "Apex is basically Java, you will feel right at home. And there is this thing called Dreamforce, massive event, you might get to experience it someday." And that's where you see a lot of enterprise innovation is going to come in. Basically, he sold it and 16 years later, here I am loving the challenge, loving the stretch, always finding ages I haven't touched yet and it keeps me motivated.

Mike: He was a heck of a salesman. Java, here's Salesforce. It's just like Java. And if you're good enough, you might get to go to Dreamforce. That's awesome. So, go ahead.

Parth Sevak: Yeah. And just to tell you what currently I'm doing. So, these days-

Mike: Yeah, please.

Parth Sevak: ... I'm working as a director of technology at Incepta Solutions where I lead data, CRM integration and agentic AI transformation for enterprise clients across financial services, retail manufacturing and pharma healthcare. But I make sure to keep one foot in hands-on building always. And that's how HarvestBridge happened at TDX, as you see.

Mike: Yeah. So, let's talk about that. I mean, it's really cool. This isn't our first hackathon since we've come out with Agentforce. We've been doing hackathons and the early hackathons, I was a judge in quite a few and some of the really neat ideas that people were coming up with for the use of AI agents and some agentic use cases I think were really kind of interesting. I know we had that at TDX. So, I guess let's start off with the TDX Agentforce for Good Hackathon. What made you want to enter that to begin with?

Parth Sevak: Yeah, to be really honest, it was again, my boss encouraged me because even I was not sure whether I would be attending the TDX in first place, but my boss was really motivated to join the party and he invited me. And then I realized, okay, if I register for TDX, there is an option to participate in the hackathon. And that's how my journey began.

Mike: Oh, well, we made that awfully easy for you, didn't we?

Parth Sevak: Yeah.

Mike: I mean, I would like to think I'm a competitive person, but when it comes down to it, I think I really like watching competitions as opposed to competing. What made you think, "Oh, I'm going to get into this because the idea that I have is so great." So, tell me a little bit about what your idea was and what it solved for.

Parth Sevak: Yeah. So, honestly, the topic I picked is not a fleshy topic, right? I picked the food waste, which is definitely not a hackathon topic. It's not a biotech, it's not a blockchain. But my heart said, pick it anyway because food is the most basic thing and somehow we managed to throw away nearly half of it while families a few blocks away are skipping dinner. And then again, I am a data guy, so please allow me to share some numbers here.

Mike: Oh yeah, please.

Parth Sevak: And that application for me, that 2.5 billion tons of food wasted every year, 783 million people are facing hunger. And when I read that and thought, "This cannot be right." And I check UN website, food banks' websites, and again, the numbers held up. And the on that hit really hardest is this number, which is in North America, 40% of food produced never gets eaten right here in our cities, whether it's San Francisco, Toronto, basically with our neighborhood.

Mike: I mean, that's crazy. I know I've seen ... I forget the show. It was on Discovery Channel here in the US and they talked about ... I didn't know there were hog farmers out in Las Vegas, but there are and they work with the casinos. The casinos have all those buffets to get all their food scraps. I thought that was really, really fascinating. I guess you think about it and until you look at it on a larger scale, do you even understand how much food is produced and unfortunately how much is wasted?

Parth Sevak: Yeah, totally, Mike.

Mike: So, let's talk about your solution because it involves Agentforce. So, were you going to feed Agentforce some apples? That's a joke because you can't feed it apples. I mean, you could feed it apples maybe like an emoji.

Parth Sevak: So, yeah, I think let me first of all piggyback on this one, this idea that this HarvestBridge as a idea, right? When you look at this project from the outside, it may sound like as a big AI project. We have four agents, multi-agent coordination, the whole team, but the reality on the inside is three of those four agents are about 80% configuration. And this is the Agentforce play in my opinion because I used agent builder topics, instructions, guardrails, then flow for orchestration, custom objects, validation rules, formula fields, like typical standard admin toolkit. And obviously, there was a 20% which is code, which is attacks actions for things like geo-matching. So, that also like I wipe coded with cloud plugin for Agentforce available. And what came back was the quality of a season developer with proper design patents, clean error handling, governance limit aware as I made sure to provide the right context. That is very important. So, anytime if anybody ever built a flow with a decision branch and a few validation rules, you can think the way you need to build an agent. The tools just caught up with you.

Mike: Yeah. Well, actually we had a few presentations at TDX and the admin track from admins who are vibe coding and I've had a few people on the podcast talking about how they've vibe coded and just the product itself is just insane to think you can sit down and there's a plan and there's an action button. And even in the plan button, I was really impressed with how much Agentforce Vibes could give you back as an admin to really help you plan your application.

Parth Sevak: Yeah, that is really empowering thing has happening just in front of eyes and not just that, but we are at the forefront of that innovation and definitely the Agentforce for Good is really the category that should motivate everybody to get their hand dirty for something to produce something really good.

Mike: Yeah. So, let's talk about while you were building your application to deal with food waste, what was a point in time when you sat back and maybe learned something that you didn't know as you were building it?

Parth Sevak: Yeah. So, before I answer that question, I need to tell you how I approach the build process if it is okay.

Mike: Oh, please.

Parth Sevak: Yeah. Okay. So, basically like Mike, to be very frank, I didn't follow a plan. I would love to say that I sat down on day one and map out a clean sprint like user stories and backlog, but that was not what happened. What actually happened is I just started building right away. So, I picked the first thing, which is a donor bot. This is the agent that talks to donors and captures surplus food. First I got that working and the moment it ran, the next question was obvious that, okay, now surplus is in the system in the Salesforce. Now where does it go? So, I built the matchmaker agent and once matchmaker was written in matches, the next question came up on its own that who actually picks the food up and delivers it? Who is the volunteer? That became logistics coordinator on Slack and by then, I had data flowing through the whole system and it was almost asking to be visualized and that become impact analyst on Tableau. So, overall, I ended up building four agents, each one revealed the next. And what made that look possible beyond Agentforce itself is that I had AI assistance alongside me the whole way, like not just for the apex spaces we talked about, but for the thinking too, like should this be one agent or two? What edge cases am I missing? Is this topic structure clean, less a solo build and a more long conversation with a partner who is read every Salesforce document kind of like ever published. So, when I started building on the Agentforce platform, I had some high expectations and let me tell you, like what really surprised me in a pleasant way is the breadth. I use Agent Builder for the agents themselves, the topics, instructions, custom actions. Then underneath, I relied on agent script for the deterministic safety rules. So, things like allergens and expiry windows are not left to the LLM to decide. From there, I brought an Agentforce voice for the call-in donation capture, which I think just became GA recently, which I think, yeah, an intelligent context handled passing food details out of photos that donor send in. All of it was sitting on Data 360, which held the unified profiles of donors, recipients, and volunteers. Here is the part that genuinely caught me off guard. I didn't write any glue code between those layers, like an agent would hand off to a flow which will call an apex action that will update the records in the Data 360 and that would trigger a Slack message. That would feed back into another agent's context and all of it just worked like a charm. And if I reflect like five years ago, that integration story would have been months, if not years and this made me possible to deliver something so amazing in just few days and that was my wow moment from the whole build. And Mike, if I just like tell you another perspective that the other thing I was nervous about going in was hallucination because I am building four different agents and then you have obviously hear the horror stories, right? But between agent builders topic structure, agent script for hard rules and clear instructions, that's how I make sure that my agent behave very well. So, food safety rules around allergens and expiry are not something that I would let an LLM to decide. I would make sure to enforce them deterministically at the architecture level and for that I leverage agent script and thank God, that agent script work really well and where I would love to see things improve is just the debugging because when an agent's reasoning across topics and data sources, tracing what it actually did is still a bit difficult. So, the tooling is getting better, but its place still I'm watching.

Mike: Yeah. I do an Agentforce Now workshop every month and I always try to point out when we're building it and preview how you can go through and see what the agent is doing and how it's deploying its sub-agents. And I think with everything we're still learning what AI is and how to debug it and it's this interesting intersection because we want the intelligence and the context and the engagement of AI, but I think people got really hooked on how perfect a bot would respond and a bot would respond because it's always A, B or C and we gave it those answers. And the nice thing about AI is it doesn't necessarily have those answers, but it can think independently, but we still want that control. So, it's like building the perfect employee.

Parth Sevak: Yeah, absolutely. And that's why, like as I said, Mike, the deterministic approach is very significant and particularly, I would kind of rely on agent script that really gives that control back to the human or admins or architects so that they don't need to basically do the guesswork that, okay, what will be the response of agent if I do this prompt versus that prompt? It can simply be predictable. So, that is the cool thing I would say about the agent script and what it makes possible now in the reality of governance.

Mike: So, I think one thing that's really cool about hackathons is it's kind of blue sky and green field. You can come in with a solution and like in your case, it really solves a real world problem. If somebody is listening to this and thinking, "Wow, I'd really like to get started with Agentforce," what was the first thing that you did to get hands-on with Agentforce and start understanding the product to the level that you do now?

Parth Sevak: Oh, I think I don't recall exactly the date and time, but I think it was I think a couple of years ago when there was already like Agentforce discussion has already began because I was active in the community and thanks to Trailhead. And I basically started my journey to equip myself about like what is this best Agentforce, right? And then I did few modules and ultimately I think last December, I got certified in the Agentforce as Agentforce specialist. So, that really gives me clarity that okay, just not about like, okay, what I can build for the demonstration purpose, but also for me, it's very important that I can actually pass on that knowledge to my team so that they can ship the products or ship the agents that is really the kind of like configurable and scalable across the systems, not just one particular cloud or system or CRM.

Mike: Yeah. I mean, anytime I need to learn something for a demo or for a presentation I'm putting together, I usually turn to Trailhead first and kind of walk through it and get an idea of what the product can and do and how I can configure it. So, I'm right there with you. Even Salesforce people still learn on Trailhead.

Parth Sevak: Yeah, that's amazing actually. I call it as a live report, it's always live. You never get any stale recipe or stale dishes. So, that means everybody, whether it's a employee of Salesforce, partners or customers, everybody can rely on Trailhead for the real time information for sure.

Mike: So, moving forward, we have a little event in the fall that we do called Dreamforce that you mentioned. Obviously, none of us have a crystal ball. Well, I'm sure a few people in Salesforce do to know what we're going to show, but what are some of the things you would love to see this year at Dreamforce?

Parth Sevak: Okay. So, as I said, I have been part of the Salesforce ecosystem for almost 16 years and what really amazing to see is that the platform never sits still. So, when I started, here is the context, Mike, what I'm talking about is when I started we were building the S controls and it came to Visualforce.

Mike: Yeah, that's back when I started too, called them Superman controls.

Parth Sevak: Yeah. Then Visualforce, like proper MVC, controllers, pages, then Aura framework. And my first test of real component-based DUI was that Aura and then Lightning Web components. And I remember thinking, okay, this changes everything. And now 2026, we have got React running on Lightning Web Runtime along with the Headless 360 and agents that reason and act on their own and every leap has bigger than the last, right? So, it is the one ecosystem I have worked in that's never stopped becoming more interesting. I will make sure like a kid, I always go without any expectation that, okay, oh, what I'm going to get out of this conference because I know whatever will be there, it will be super amazing, super productive and make everyone's life much better than it was before.

Mike: Yeah. Wow, that sets the wheels in motion to draw the bar even higher for all the rest of us. I appreciate you sharing that. And I will say one thing that we do at Dreamforce every year is we not only have volunteering activities, but I know the entire event is very conscious about the food that we use and how it gets recycled and dispersed evenly to make sure that we have the right amount. Because conferences I'm sure are big places where a lot of stuff can go to waste as well.

Parth Sevak: Yeah, no absolutely. And I couldn't be more prouder than this, particularly like I was not also that conscious about all these basic problems, but then I started volunteering. I involved with some foundations and then I realized, "Oh man, wow, we are living in a 21st century and still we are not able to figure out the solution for this day-to-day problems." And it really kind of like hurts in our heart like if we see. So, basically like my belly is full. It's not solving the problem, right? I cannot be that selfish and truly like I couldn't agree more like Dreamforce. And that's I think really set the high bar that how the conferences should be run from the humanitarian angle as well.

Mike: Yeah. Well, thanks for the kind words, Parth. I appreciate you coming on the podcast. This was a great conversation. I will say this now I should be able to find your TDX video and post that in the link so that everybody can see the demo of the app that you built and see how cool it was because I know we like to showcase those winners and so hopefully it inspires other people to not only participate in the hackathon but bring those solutions back to their communities as well.

Parth Sevak: Yeah. And Mike, if you permit, can I say something like I would take maybe a one minute-

Mike: Sure.

Parth Sevak: ... which is very close to my heart and this is like a period like everybody is going through the transition. So, what I say is like, yeah, we need to be a jack of all, but master of one. And what I mean by that is that we don't want to restrict ourselves doing the same thing for too long. It's easy to get comfortable. For example, you are good at your role, the work is familiar, but comfort is also the thing that quietly stop you from growing. And right now with where the technology is, the agentic AI is here, right? This is exactly the moment to step outside that comfort zone, not because that you have to, but because the upside is so much bigger than the downside and Agent AI use well is probably the most empowering tool any of us have had access in our professional journey at least. So, I can take you somewhere you couldn't get along, but only if you handle it right, it can. So, stay the architect, keep judgment in your hands, let it stretch you instead of replacing you. The individuals who lean into that, who do the thing that is needed most for their clients, their employers, and honestly for their own sake, those are the people I think come out of the next two or three years transformed. So, for me, what is next is more building, more sharing, more conversations like this one. And if one person listening today challenges themselves to try something they have been putting off, that is a great month.

Mike: I would agree. Couldn't have said it any better than you did. Well, Parth, thanks for coming on the podcast. It was great having this conversation with you.

Parth Sevak: Yeah, thank you, Mike. This was a real pleasure.

Mike: Huge thanks to Parth for joining us and sharing how HarvestBridge came together at the intersection of AI, automation, governance, and real world impact. I know one of the biggest takeaways from this conversation is that the future admin isn't just configuring tools, they're designing systems that connect people, data, agents, and outcomes responsibly. So, whether you're experimenting with Agentforce for the first time or already building multi-agent workflows, the opportunity is bigger than just productivity. It's about solving meaningful problems faster and with more intention. Of course, if you enjoyed this episode, subscribe, leave a review, share it with somebody who's ready to start building what's next. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Alexandra Iyer, Director of Marketing Strategy and AI Transformation, and Global EVP of Abilityforce at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about the Agentforce for Good Hackathon at TDX and what happens when technology, accessibility, and community come together to solve real-world problems.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Alexandra Laxmi Iyer.

Agentforce for Good expands AI beyond business problems This year, we added a new twist to the types of problems you could solve for at the TDX Hackathon. We called it Agentforce for Good, and it offered participants a way to work on some big problems: food insecurity, nonprofit volunteer coordination, disaster relief, and more.

That's why I'm so excited to bring Alexandra "X" Iyer on the pod. She's the Global EVP of Abilityforce, Salesforce's internal business unit for people with disabilities and their allies. They've been running an internal accessibility hackathon for years, and Agentforce for Good grew out of a desire to open it up to the community and broaden its scope.

"Builders who probably never thought of themselves as social impact developers shipped working Agentforce solutions for all sorts of big problems," X says, and 62% of this year's Hackathon entries were solving for Agentforce for Good.

Inclusive design creates better technology for everyone "When we are challenged with designing for the edge, you make the center better," X says. Finding challenges that force you to push tools like Tableau, Slack, and Agentforce in new ways helps you uncover capabilities that you might not have otherwise thought about. As X likes to put it, "Good design is just good design, full stop."

Going forward, X and her team are looking for ways to expand Agentforce for Good beyond TDX. Consider this a call for participation, and she encourages you to get in touch to volunteer or bring Agentforce for Good to a community event near you.

Lived experience is a valuable design credential "One of the main things I would love for people to take away from our conversation is that your lived experience is a credential," X says. "It's not a distraction." After all, designing around new challenges is how we come up with innovative solutions that nobody else would have thought of. Your unique perspective is valuable.

Make sure to listen to the full episode for more insights from X. Next week, we'll hear from the winner of the TDX Hackathon, so make sure you're subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Podcast swag * Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more * Trailblazer Community Group: Abilityforce * Salesforce Equality Groups

Admin Trailblazers Group * Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social * X on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on X * Mike on Bluesky social * Mike on Threads * Mike on X

Love our podcasts? Subscribe today or review us on iTunes! Full show transcript

Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, we're talking about what happens when technology, accessibility, and community come together to solve real world problems. I'm joined by X or X, who is the director of marketing, strategy and AI transformation at Salesforce and Vice President of Abilityforce to discuss the Agentforce for Good Hackathon that happened at TDX. Now we're going to find out that it started as an employee-led accessibility initiative. And has grown into a community movement bringing together admins, developers, partners, and customers to build solutions that address challenges like food insecurity, disaster relief, and volunteer coordination. We're going to talk about why designing for inclusion leads to better outcomes, how AI can help scale impact, and why your lived experience might be one of the most valuable design credentials you have. So if you're thinking about how data automation, AI agents work together to create meaningful change not just inside your organization, but in the world around it, I promise you this episode is for you. So let's get Alexandra on the podcast. So Alexandra, welcome to the podcast.

Alexandra: Thank you for having me, Mike.

Mike: I think it's going to be a fun conversation because we're talking about Agentforce for Good today. So let's get started to learn a little bit about you and your path to Salesforce and your path to the Agentforce for Good Hackathon.

Alexandra: Absolutely. Thank you for asking. And by the way, I go by X for short, so feel free to call me X.

Mike: Perfect.

X: I'm the director of marketing strategy and AI transformation for our customer success and partner marketing team here at Salesforce. And I'm also the vice president for Abilityforce, our employee resource group for people with disabilities and their allies. And when we're talking about the Agentforce for Good Hackathon, this is really a moment where these two worlds actually collided. Normally, they wouldn't collide, but the hackathon is genuinely where they did. I come from 20 years of go to-market experience. I'm not a builder by background. I actually got curious in a marketing role about the products that I was marketing and how they worked. So that curiosity pulled me into the platform, into development, into force certifications that I did not see coming. And then, I went from talking about technology to building on it and that changed everything. I believe that the AI era is only worth building if it's built for everyone. That's not a tagline for me. It's a design requirement. And I truly feel that admins have always known that. Admins are the ones closest to the humans using the platform, the problems, the friction, the gaps. And I also believe they're the closest to the solution. So I think it's not a support function, it's a superpower and I'm really happy to be here.

Mike: Yeah. Well, I agree with everything you had to say, X. I do agree that admins are very superpower. I also think just in general, when we think about technology, it's not how do we roll it out for some people? It's how do we roll it out for everyone? And I remember this is a long time ago, but when I first joined a company that did workplace assessments, I remember they said, "Well, when creating the test, we have to assume the person doesn't know how to use a mouse." And I remember thinking to myself, this is ... closed-minded is the wrong word, but I just was unaware. And I was like, "Well, who doesn't know how to use a mouse?" And they're like, "Well, you don't understand." And I was like, "Oh, that is a huge challenge." And sometimes until you get someone else's perspective, do you really understand like, it's not that you've been living under a rock, it's just too often sometimes people assume their world is just like everyone else's world and it's not. So there's a Mike side of I had to remember that not everybody knows how to use a mouse sometimes.

X: Well, Mike, frankly, I consider that the main dish. I don't think it's a Mike side. I think that if you're designing for the default user, it's not really good technology and that when you optimize for the average, you're excluding by design. So I think it's the main dish and it's part of the reason why the Agentforce for Good Hackathon even exists. So to give you a little context, three years ago, the Agentforce for Good Hackathon was an internal-only, employee-only hackathon led by Abilityforce. I mentioned earlier Salesforce's business resource group for people with disabilities and their allies. And then, last year we said, "Why does it have to be about accessibility only and why does it only have to be for employees?" So then we opened it up to the community. We had partners and customers and employees all building on the platform, really stretching the platform, bringing us to TDX this year, where builders who really probably never even thought of themselves as social impact developers shipped working Agentforce Solutions for food insecurity, for nonprofit volunteer coordination, you name it. So when we all come together to threshold platform for everybody, not the default user, we're really shipping great technology and boy, did the admin community really show up for this.

Mike: Yeah, no kidding. And just as kind of a teaser, next week on the podcast we have the winner of the hackathon to talk through their application. So that was a fun conversation, but let's dive into what some of the things that you did around the hackathon, some of the stuff that you saw and what some of the participants tried to tackle.

X: Absolutely, so we had ... so a little fun fact for you is that of all of the submissions for the TDX Hackathon, over 62% of them self-selected to say, "I want to solve for the Agentforce for Good." It wasn't required. And then, 50% of the Agentforce for Good projects were participants could submit in multiple categories, but 50% of those 62% of the projects were only for Agentforce for Good. They solved things from disaster relief to supporting teams post-addiction to food rescue, truly really pushing the boundaries of the Salesforce platform.

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. And I always think sometimes that we're trying to solve problems with technology where it's just how do you layer in the technology? But I do feel ... and I was there when they gave the awards, I do really feel that the integral solution for a lot of these works the technology along with the process that is also needed. There's just things you can't do without the technology that when you layer that in, wow, it unlocks a different world.

X: Yeah, absolutely. I think that when we are challenged with designing for the edge, you make the center better. And so I'm sure that some of these solutions that put together Tableau and Slack and Agentforce have uncovered some capabilities that maybe we might not have thought about, whether it's for a good cause or not. So I do think it also allows very special kinds of developers and admins to come to the surface as well.

Mike: Absolutely. So in your work with the community and around the community, what are some of the events that you go to? What are some of the presentations and content that you put out there that people find valuable and useful?

X: Well, I mean, I'm only starting to get into the conference circuit or the community circuit, to be honest with you. I've been kind of-

Mike: I like that we call it a circuit.

X: Yeah.

Mike: Get around the circuit.

X: I mean, for me, it's something that I've always been ... and this might be a little too raw, but I am an open book, Mike, so hear me out here. I have never, ever had the ... what's the word I'm looking for? It's kind of like, I guess confidence is the right word. I've never been raising my hand to say, "Oh, I should submit and speak," or, "I should fight to attend this event because this really matters to me." And it's only recently where I've started to get my legs a little bit more to do that. I've published a couple of articles on LinkedIn, building with Cloud Code, using Slack, Slackbot, all these things. And so, I'm just starting to get out there and really getting exposed to the possibilities of our platform. I actually don't know how to answer that question, except for I'd love invites, I'd love to know what the community finds interesting and I'd love to facilitate doing good in the world, doing as much good as we are solving business problems.

Mike: Yeah. I think ... I mean, you're also just taking the first step. Some people ... I'll just go, but I'll never present. And I always encourage people, even ... you don't have to go to a big conference or you don't have to present at Dreamforce, but even getting up and sharing things at your local user group, the thing I'm reminded of, somebody needs to see somebody like you presenting.

X: Well, thanks for saying that. I'm actually presenting at Connections this week. Yeah. It's my first real speaking session and we're talking about how we've used Slack and Slackbot to scale top level support to our incredible partners. We have over 13,000 partners in the Slack community and we have a lot of different skills that we're using to help our partners go to market faster in a more customized personalized way. And so, we'll be talking about that. But back to the hackathon, the one thing I did want to underscore is that Salesforce has a total of 16 equality groups from Abilityforce, to Neuroforce, to Asiapacforce, to Outforce, BOLDforce. And we all came together for this hackathon and we're going to continue to do that. So likely, you'll see us at Dreamforce and at TDX again. So I would love to have the community just continue to support this and participate and start the platform. I'll say that our community is proving that intersectional volunteer-led initiatives drives higher engagement and faster product adoption than traditional top-down motions. And so, I just want to have a call to participation. If your community or your listeners want to participate, we're definitely open to having more volunteers support and would love to see these at our community events as well.

Mike: Yeah. I've already been to a community event MidAtlantic Dreamin', this year in Philadelphia. And I love going to those events because it is all community presenting and really showing their perspective on giving different solutions and tackling different challenges. And it ranges from technical through just giving presentations to your executives and having the confidence to walk into a boardroom and really working through that, not all the presentations are exactly technical. And so, you can learn different skills that way, but I appreciate you bringing that up. That's always very good and good for you getting up on stage. It's okay. I do think sometimes ... I've spoke on a lot of different stages. Sometimes it's the smallest ones that are the hardest because once you get up on a big stage, there's just so many people that your brain can't absorb it. It's crazy.

X: Yeah. Well, I guess my little theater session at Connections will have to do, but-

Mike: You never know, there could be 200 people there and do a little theater session.

X: I know, I know. My goodness. Yeah. What I'm curious about, Mike, from your perspective is why do you think ... Here I am, I'm asking you a question.

Mike: Please.

X: Why do you think we had such incredible participation? Because it really was humbling the amount of community support we got from folks joining the Agentforce for Good Hackathon.

Mike: I thought about that too and I think it's maybe a couple of things. One, I've been a part of either on the team where people around me are planning the hackathon. I've been in the judging room sometimes for a few of the events and going through, watching the submissions and watching the integration of how did they use Agentforce and what was the solution they were trying to solve. I feel like the opportunity for solving things that really provide, I'll call it exponential value to the community, is so great. And it also kind of, in some respects, opens up the creativity because depending on how long you've been a Salesforce admin, how long you've been a Salesforce developer, you might not have all of that kind of exposure into different businesses and different processes. I know for a long time, a lot of hackathon people were tackling things in the medical world and I won't give away ... Well, I can give away the winner because we all know it. But the unique solution that they come up with, you have to think of it's not what is the technology solved for, it's what was the issue and the challenge that provided the biggest gap that technology proved out to do the most good. And I just think after talking with the winner and seeing that solution, I think a lot of people just genuinely found a lot of really satisfying things to build when it comes to solutioning ... I'll call it solutioning for good, as opposed to solutioning for profit.

X: Right.

Mike: Because then you're like, wow, if we can do this, this and this, because the gaps are always there and they're always huge because nobody ... For lack of a better terms, nobody is maximizing good for profit.

X: Yeah.

Mike: And so, the thinking of just different things around animal adoption or adoption shelters or food and food insecurity, there's always communication gaps there. And the biggest thing that AI we found and Slack, and some of these other tools, but the biggest thing that AI solves is communication. I was on Amazon the other day just not as a tangent, but kind of ... and they have this new button now you can click and it generates kind of an AI overview of the product and some of the common answers to the questions that they have. And I thought to myself, that gap probably didn't exist, but AI solved it and AI is able to communicate with us. And I think that to me for things that do good and help others, communication is always the key and it's always the biggest gap because communication at scale never happens.

X: It's interesting that you say gap and it's making me think of something I'd love to share about our employee hackathon. So we are still doing our employee version of the Agentforce for Good Hackathon and this year, we're adding an AI fluency track. So we have our traditional builder track, and then we have our AI fluency track and you don't have to be building an agent to build something powerful.

Mike: Right.

X: And so, we want to provide an opportunity for admins and marketers and all sorts of folks to be able to confidently collaborate with AI to give our users agency to drive impact at speed and scale. And so, I think admins do a really great job at understanding human like you were saying the Amazon button and clicking that button as an admin, you kind of know why the user might click it or why they might click the wrong one because of maybe where it's placed or is it accessible or things don't get filled out correctly and you know how to create some workarounds. And so, I think the AI fluency track for us is about really bringing more of that human element back into the AI. So I'd be curious if the community would be down with participating in an AI fluency track where it's like writing ... like it's not about building something. Maybe it's like the most artful skill, Slackbot skill, or maybe it's a killer Gemini prompt or something along those lines. But I think you mentioning the gap really made me think about how I want AI for all technology that empowers everybody, but I also don't want to leave anyone behind.

Mike: Right. Yeah. I mean along those lines, I was talking today with my manager and we were discussing something and she's like, "So what do you use?" Because at Salesforce we have a wealth of tools. I think comparative to ... I've talked with other friends and like, "Wow, you get to use that and that and that?" And I'm like, "Yeah, and there's probably more that I don't know about." And they're like, "Geez, we don't even have ..." So that part alone was ... I was like, "Yay. Well, I'm glad I have a wealth of resources." But she asked what I was going to use it for. And I said, "The biggest thing that I try to use AI for in looking at a lot of data on sheets or 10, 15 page documents, what are the blind spots for the stuff that I don't normally pick up?" And that to me was the greatest prompts that I could use. And back to some of your Agentforce Hackathon stuff, I think actually that's some of the biggest opportunities that admins have across their org is we always look at, well, how can the agent improve this or that? Boy, I would just love it if ... how could the agent just look at the record somebody created and be like, "Yeah, Jim, that's not going to cut it."

X: Absolutely.

Mike: "You left a bunch of fields blank and you know what, those fields are there for a reason. Go back and fill them in." That's what I would want. I would want a little snarcastic clippy coming up and being like, "I think you can do better."

X: Yeah.

Mike: But it's also not, how do I make myself perform in a greater capacity or increased speed? Yes, that's part of it, but also, how do I make myself save myself?

X: Yeah.

Mike: So how do I look at this, but tell me what I'm not seeing because I don't know to look for it.

X: You've inspired me to share one of the main things I would love for people to take away from our conversation, which is your lived experience is a credential. It's not a distraction. So how you experience things, the type of inputs you would want. In the Agentforce for Good Hackathon, we're asking for accessibility and equity lenses that only people can have through their lived experiences of what's broken, what's inaccessible, what might be perceived as unfair in technology. That is absolutely a credential and not a distraction. And so I am happy to hear that those are the types of thoughts you have and I hope that all of us do that. All of us have the agency to think about those things in our designs.

Mike: Yeah. I mean, your answer brings me back to long ago publishing days and I remember I used to work selling textbooks and I worked the sales desk set by the editors and the author's desks and we could all mix and mingle and talk to each other. I remember one of the authors for a book in New York City came over to my desk and said, "Can you read this question and tell me what the answer is?" And the question had, it was like for fifth or sixth grade, if the kid was at his window and wanted to look at the stars, what would he use? A microscope, a telescope, binoculars, or ... I forget something else. And I remember saying, "Oh, well, it's obviously a telescope." And they said, "Yeah, but you know that because you know telescopes exist. What if you don't know that telescopes exist or what if you didn't know you could see the sky?" And it was because it was based for a book in New York City where I live in the middle of the Midwest, I can go outside and see the sky. I can walk two feet outside my front door, but some people ... And I've been in parts of New York, you walk outside and the buildings are so tall, you might not ever see the sky. And I thought, wow, what an interesting perspective. And so, I use that example with a lot of AI bots that I work with to be like, here's an example of, not a blindness, but something I wasn't aware of. And can you look for something similar to that in my writing or in this thing that I'm looking at? Because sometimes if you grew up in the Midwest and you could always see the stars in the sky, you might not know that there's a sky.

X: Right, right. Okay. So real talk here, did you influence any of these authors? Are there books out there tech book-

Mike: There was. There was. There were No Child Left Behind Test Prep books, which I think have probably faded into obscurity, but I probably have a few in my closet somewhere that I took before I left the company, but I would like to think so.

X: I'm sure there is. And that's such a good story and such a good analogy. I mean, at times I've thought to myself, well, what if you grew up every single day thinking blue was red and then somebody told you red was blue and you were wrong. Your perceived lived experience changes very basic things like that.

Mike: Right. I grew up with Four Seasons because we have all of them in Iowa and some people haven't. Or the other conversation I had with the author that was working on the New York books was around green grass because the likelihood that a child might not have ever seen green grass in their life is very high in New York City. And I was like, "Wow, actually you're right."

X: Exactly.

Mike: And you don't think about those things when your perspective is, I can see green grass outside of my window, why can't everybody else?

X: Yep, 100%. Well, at the end of the day, this conversation that we're having is exactly why the Agentforce for Good Hackathon is so important. One of my taglines in one of my recent articles is that good design is just good design, period. And it truly becomes non-negotiable when the stakes are someone's health, their safety, or their dignity. And that is what is so exciting about the Agentforce for Good Hackathon.

Mike: Yep. I think that's perfect note to end things on. So X thanks for coming by and sharing with us on the podcast. And next week, we get to talk to the listener or to the hackathon winner.

X: That's going to be exciting. I can't wait to tune in and thank you for the opportunity to share more about this hackathon and look forward to the next one.

Mike: So that was a great conversation with X. I'm glad she could come on. And by the way, I teased it out, but just a reminder, next week on the podcast we have the hackathon winner on, to talk about their solution and what they're passionate about. It's a really great episode. One thing that stood out to me is that great solutions don't start with technology. They start with understanding people, their experiences, and their outcomes that matter most. As Salesforce admins, we're often the ones connecting systems, stakeholders, and now AI agents to solve problems at scale. So whether you're building your business, your community, or a cause you care about, there's an opportunity to design technology that works for you. Be sure to subscribe so that you never miss an episode. And you know what? If you found this conversation valuable, share it with a fellow Salesforce admin. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Salesforce Admins Can Reduce Risk With Proactive Security

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Kate Lessard, Lead Admin Evangelist at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about why security is the foundation for how data, automation, and AI work together.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Kate Lessard.

Why strong security is proactive, not reactive Security can often feel like the elephant in the room. Everyone knows it's important, but the amount of work needed to do it right can feel daunting. Thorny problems like accumulated tech debt and organizational inertia can make you feel like you're better off not talking about it.

That's why I sat down with Kate Lessard. This month, she ran a workshop called Security in Action to highlight the simple steps you can take to strengthen the security posture of your org. She got hands-on with an example org to demonstrate how to use Health Check to identify and fix security problems.

It's all about taking a proactive approach to security, rather than waiting for something to happen to you.

Your Health Check score is a security action plan "Health Check is no longer just a list of settings for you to review," Kate says, "it's your dynamic risk mitigation dashboard." Issues are sorted into four categories: high-risk, medium-risk, low-risk, and informational. There is also a status to rate the level of urgency for each issue: critical, warning, or compliant.

Health Check is also customizable. If your organization's security policies are different than the Salesforce Baseline Standard, you can download an XML file and tweak the criteria. You can compare your policies to what's recommended by Salesforce, and maybe identify some low-hanging fruit.

In short, your Health Check score gives you a prioritized list of which security issues need to be addressed first so you can walk into a meeting with stakeholders with a solid plan of action.

Helpful reports for user management Security and user management go hand in hand, and Kate recommends some reports that admins can run to help with governance.

First of all, the Active System Administrator Report can help you find users who might have more access than they need. This can often be an issue in older orgs where it was easier to give someone admin access than to sit down and solve the permission problem. Kate also likes to run a report on Reports, to keep track of what her users are interacting with the most.

As Kate says, it's all about making a shift towards a security model built around permission set best practices. As admins, we need to find a way to fit security seamlessly into our organization's business processes, and vice versa. There may be an upfront cost, but it's all about making security easy in the long run.

Listen to the full conversation for more from Kate about security and Health Check. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

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Full show transcript

Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, I sit down with Salesforce Evangelist Kate Lessard to unpack why security is really no longer a side conversation for admin, but the foundation to how data, humans, automation and AI all work together. We're going to cover her new security workshop that she led last week, and talk about health check upgrades, permission set security models, and of course how Salesforce admins can move from reacting to security problems to proactively designing trusted systems. We do touch on a little bit of governance, user access, and why secure data is the backbone of every successful AI implementation. So if you've ever wondered how modern Salesforce admins evolve from feature builders into stewards of trust, this episode is for you. And with that, let's get Kate on the podcast. Kate, welcome back to the podcast.

Kate Lessard: Hey, thanks for having me back. Excited to be here.

Mike: Well, it feels like a lot of relevant things for admins are coming out of your camp lately from True to the Core Deep Dive to last week's security and action. I feel like there should be like a thunderclap after that. Security and action. Dun, dun, dun.

Kate Lessard: Yeah, absolutely. Data and access.

Mike: Right. Mm-hmm. Yep. Like a comic book hero. And then you got to do the comic book land. Anyway, totally off topic. Look at that. 30 seconds into the podcast, we're already in comic books. People-

Kate Lessard: I mean, I am here for it. Admins are superheroes, especially when they are securing their orgs.

Mike: We are. So let's talk about what that first workshop was, and what you covered, and how it went. So tell me a little bit more, tell everybody a little bit more about what that workshop was.

Kate Lessard: So in the Security and Action workshop, we were really focused on data and access and using HealthCheck as our guide. So essentially we started off with some security basics knowing that much of our audience was at different levels. So we had people joining us that are brand new admins that are working on their first certification. And then we had people joining us that have been in the ecosystem and in a Salesforce role for more than 10 years. So wanted to make sure that we had a strong foundation and that we had reviewed some security foundational knowledge base points for everybody to get on the same level. And then we got hands-on in an org that just didn't have a great health check score and had some security concerns that we went through, and hands-on adjusted together until we improved our score, we better secured our org, and just increased our security posture.

Mike: Cool. I didn't hear Agentforce in there and we're in the age of AI.

Kate Lessard: Yeah. So I do think we didn't specifically touch on Agentforce in this first workshop. We really wanted to focus on that strong security base where it applies to all of your org. And that might mean that it applies to your users, both human and agent, but really focusing in on that prime security. And then we do have plans in the future to enhance this and take this to the next level and really expand on some of those agentic guardrails. But I think that it's just really important to have that foundation first.

Mike: Yeah. I mean, all of it bases around good, clean data and secure data.

Kate Lessard: Absolutely. And you're not going to have a successful Agentforce implementation without that. That is the foundation point that's going to set your organization up for success using AI.

Mike: I did the Agentforce Now workshop that week, and I always emphasize the importance of filling in description and metadata fields as well.

Kate Lessard: Yes, hugely important.

Mike: So one of the things, it's really cool the workshop pivots all around HealthCheck. And I know having worked some of the Q&A, people were like, "Wait a minute, I thought HealthCheck went away."

Kate Lessard: Yeah, HealthCheck has not gone away. It is free for admins to use and it actually recently got some pretty impressive and exciting upgrades that we spend some time on in the workbook. So it's no longer just a list of settings for you to review. It is really dynamic and serves as your risk mitigation dashboard. So you can do things like not only configure the specific settings for your org security, but you can also set up email notifications for system admins or anyone who that you would like to receive notifications when your security score changes. So maybe members of your IT team, your security team, if you work with a governance team, making sure that they get notifications because as you know, security is a team sport. I think the coolest thing that we do in the workshop and that I really want everybody to be able to take advantage of is you can actually export the standard Salesforce baseline and customize it to your own organization's security criteria. So if you have different security criteria like maybe your password policy has a minimum of 11 characters at your organization, the Salesforce baseline has eight characters. That is a change. And you want to compare your Salesforce security settings against your own organization standards, and you now have the ability to do that, which is just incredible.

Mike: Yeah. And it's not like the way that you walk through it, it's not that daunting. I mean, is it an XML file that you download?

Kate Lessard: Yeah, absolutely. So you don't have to start from scratch, which is the really nice thing. You can actually export the standard Salesforce baseline. It is an XML file. In the workshop, we walk through what the download looks like and how to actually make the edits. It's pretty easy to read. And even in the file, there's a link to help notes so that you know exactly what types of formatting to use when you're editing the XML. And then you can just save it as your custom, re-import it, and set it as your default.

Mike: Yeah, I thought that was really cool. One other thing that you dive into is, and of course it's set up because it's a workshop, but number of admins that...

Kate Lessard: Oh yeah.

Mike: Or number of people that have the Salesforce admin profile.

Kate Lessard: Absolutely. So everybody's favorite admin horror story that you log into an org for the first time and take a look and realize that you have just a completely disproportionate number of system admins and folks that are over-privileged just because it was easier to give them that permission than to really sort through a proper permission set model. And in our org, we have the very scary informational security setting letting us know that we have 100% of our users as system admins opposed to the typical 5% that you see in the standard baseline. So we address that and we talk about who really needs admin permissions.

Mike: So I mean, let's expand upon that because we've had that idea of delegated admins as well. So they wouldn't have a system profile or a system administrator profile.

Kate Lessard: That is correct. Yeah. You might have your delegated administrators that are taking certain tasks for certain teams, but that doesn't mean that they have the full system admin profile. It means they're a delegated admin and they have certain admin responsibilities that they take on, but it does not give them the keys to the castle.

Mike: Very important. Very important. With HealthCheck, I think it's always one of those big discussion areas because there's different levels that we call out. We have critical. What are some of those stages? Non-critical, informative. Would you as an admin getting started approach HealthCheck as maybe it's like a topic we should bring up in governance?

Kate Lessard: I absolutely think it's a topic we should bring up in governance. And it really is set up well to help you prioritize. So if you're going into a governance conversation or maybe a meeting with your security stakeholders, and you want to present different actions that you would like to take or approaches and settings that you'd like to address in your org, it's broken down by high risk, medium risk, low risk, and then informational. And then in each of those different categories, we have it called out what is a critical status, what is a warning status, and then where you're compliant. And so you might want to prioritize your high risk critical items, and then you could share that information of what your value is versus that baseline so that you can provide a really strong recommendation about where to take action to better secure your org.

Mike: That makes sense. You've been doing a lot of security stuff lately. I mean, you've had some workshops. Outside of this, we had the True to the Core Deep Dive. What are one of the areas that almost consistently comes up as a theme that really maybe this year admins could address the most?

Kate Lessard: That is a really great question. I think we've seen it in the True to the Core Deep Dives that we've had. We had one recently on security and user access. And I think those are two things that go hand in hand and something that comes up consistently. It was also a major discussion point at our admin day of security before TDX. We had a day zero event with several admins and that was just a common conversation as well. Really making that shift towards the best practice of having a permission set led security model, what that looks like for your organization, how to get there, what tools are available to help. I think that things like user access summaries, which we dove into in the workshop as well last week. There are just so many tools that can help admins better move to that permission set led security model. And I mean, I don't have to tell you that security and user management really go hand in hand, and oftentimes are interchangeable topics about how we can better secure our orgs and create a better user experience as well.

Mike: Absolutely. And being proactive on topics that come up, one of the things that you cover that I really enjoyed, this is also, this speaks to how long I've been in the ecosystem. It wasn't until I joined Salesforce that I think you could do really in depth user reports, basic reporting was available, but one of the things that you create is the active system administrator report. I'd love to know, I mean, you were an admin out in the world more recently than myself. Were there reports that Kate always created to help her understand her users outside of just if they had a license or if they didn't?

Kate Lessard: Yeah, absolutely. I think that the active system administrator report is a great one to call out, but it is looking specifically at users that have that system admin profile. And you might have other concerns about your users or things that you're checking up on them and what they're doing and what they're using. I loved to create the report on reports to get little snippets and information into what reports my users were using. I found that to be really helpful. And also there is a great Salesforce Labs report package about different administrator reports to help you get a little bit more insight into your user activity. So I think that something like that is really helpful if you don't have advanced security options to pinpoint that user activity for you.

Mike: Yeah, that definitely makes sense. In addition to knowing when people log in and when they don't, it's also what are they doing? Because I remember I did an implementation and they were adamant about having a login component on a dashboard. And I had one user that I, to this day, I think all they did was wake up, check their email, and then log in and out of Salesforce because they were always head and shoulders above everybody else. They'd have 300 logins for the week.

Kate Lessard: Oh, interesting.

Mike: I'd be like, "Are you just logging in, updating a field, and logging out?" And they were very dodgy about their answers, but I think that's what they were. I think that's what they were doing because they liked being at the top of the board.

Kate Lessard: That is hilarious.

Mike: And I always had to reframe the conversation with executives of, we have to look at the entire dashboard, not just logging in because it could be meaningless.

Kate Lessard: Right. They're just like logging in, logging a single activity, logging out, coming back in.

Mike: Refreshing a dashboard, refreshing a report, and then that's it.

Kate Lessard: Oh my goodness. Well, and then the other concern is where are they logging in from, if we're talking about dodgy behavior. When I was an admin out in the wild, one of the stories I like to tell about why security is so important. I worked for a mental health hospital system, and as you can imagine, we dealt with a lot of PHI. And I noticed some funky login IP ranges, and it turns out that someone had given a local college student access to their Salesforce credentials and was having them log their activities for them.

Mike: Uh.

Kate Lessard: Yeah, I know. And thankfully they didn't actually have access to any PHI because we had a good security model set up. However, obviously huge concern and something that Salesforce was able to help us identify because we were able to see those different login IP ranges, spot what was going on, and address it, and prevent it from becoming a big security concern, which I feel like that's really one of the big takeaways that I... If you asked me what I wanted people to take away from this workshop, it is to shift from being reactive about your security and just waiting to become a statistic to really being proactive and getting ahead of things and making sure that your org is secure and that you are addressing those risks versus waiting for them to happen to you.

Mike: Yeah. I mean, to that point, I often look at things that are security that don't sound like security. And one of them is process management. So to me, that sounds like there's a complete separation between what executives expect in Salesforce and what the actual process is. Because the process, the technology should support the process that's needed, and here it sounds like it's burdensome to the process. And that to me is a security risk. I mean, if you don't have the process ironed out so that it feels natural, every action has a deliberate and equal technology component, then the security's going to fall apart. Much like a Salesforce admin shouldn't learn about a person being separated from a company four days after they've left the company. They need to be part of the off-boarding or onboarding process. They don't need to know why, but they need to make sure because that person should or should not have access to that system.

Kate Lessard: Absolutely. I think that it is certainly a role of power and responsibility because you are getting that notification, best case scenario, to freeze that user. And again, you don't need the why or the explanation, but to have an actual process in place to be able to continue to secure your org so that after someone's left an organization that you're able to say, "Yes, this is still secure, this is not a risk." And you know you're not maybe going through a full deactivation process right away, but that ability to freeze that user and be able to take action is just so important.

Mike: Absolutely. Well, Kate, I appreciate you coming on the pod and helping admins keep all of their data secure and their org secure.

Kate Lessard: It is my pleasure. I mean, I love to talk about security any chance I get, and I think that we have so many brilliant people on our security team at Salesforce who I'm always learning from and happy to partner with. And this workshop was just a real labor of love, and I'm so happy that so many people were able to attend last week and glean the information and be able to take that and go use HealthCheck and better secure their actual orgs, not just our fake, very poorly-secured org that we fix and adjust in the workshop.

Mike: Yeah. I mean, it works because you can spot things very easily because I think in the real world, sometimes things aren't as obvious as they should be. I know the biggest question that we can answer, and we're doing it at the end on purpose, will there be more of this content?

Kate Lessard: Yes. So I can't give you a date, but we are planning to continue this on a monthly basis. I do think that there are plans to expand the content as well. And you'll also maybe catch us doing these workshops hands-on at some community conferences over the next year.

Mike: Ooh. See, even more of a reason to go to community conferences besides the fact that they're super fun and held at really interesting locations.

Kate Lessard: Absolutely. And get to actually really connect with the community, which I am very excited about.

Mike: Yeah. Yep. I hear you. Well, Kate, thanks so much for coming on the pod.

Kate Lessard: Thank you so much. I'll talk to you later, Mike.

Mike: So big thanks to Kate for joining us and reminding us that security is more than just a technical checklist. It's really a mindset for Salesforce admins as we operate to bring scalable systems to our entire enterprise. Of course, be sure to check out admin.salesforce.com for the announcement of more Security and Action workshops, which are also coming to future community dream and events, and start thinking about how your own org can shift from being reactive to an intentional system stewardship even with IT. Now, if you enjoyed this episode, subscribe, share with a fellow Salesforce admin, and of course, I always appreciate it if you leave us a review. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Nick McOwen, Senior Salesforce Administrator at Alpine Intel.

Join us as we chat about his path to Salesforce and the TDX workshop he gave about the development lifecycle, sandboxes, and data masking.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Nick McOwen.

Nick's unconventional path into Salesforce Nick is the second touring musician I've had on the show this month—I promise I'm not raiding a recording studio somewhere just to find podcast guests. He was waiting tables in between gigs when a guest called him over to ask if he might want to try something different. A chance encounter turned into an entry-level job and, eventually, an admin certification.

I caught up with Nick fresh off his workshop at TDX, where he shared how he uses sandboxes and data masking to build new agents and apps for his organization.

Learning better development habits and sandbox management They say every warning sign has a story behind it, and the same goes for best practices in Salesforce. Luckily, Nick had Salesforce MVP Kelly Bentubo around to show him the ropes. He learned about the importance of consistent naming practices, managing user expectations, and having a structured deployment process instead of building in production.

Recently, Nick was tasked with building a new recruiting app for his organization. He was able to spin up a sandbox with an app they had already built and, using that foundation, quickly reconfigure it to meet the new requirements.

Once the app was in good shape, Nick moved it up to a staging sandbox environment for testing. There, he could copy data over from production and use data masking to keep everything secure. Once everything was thoroughly vetted, it was finally ready to be deployed into production.

How Agentforce Vibes can help admins collaborate with developers Recently, Nick's been taking advantage of Agentforce Vibes to work more closely with his dev team. He was able to write an Apex class and, while the code isn't perfect, he was able to go through it with a developer to learn what was working, what wasn't, and why. "It was a great launching point," he says, "something that would have taken days was written in an hour."

For Nick, the most important thing admins need to do to get the most out of Agentforce Vibes is to learn the basic underlying principles of Apex and coding. It's just like using a calculator—you still need to have some way of knowing if the answer you're getting is in the right ballpark.

Make sure to listen to my full conversation with Nick for more on sandboxes, data masking, testing, and why AI is a new opportunity to grow. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

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Full show transcript Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, I'm joined by Nick McOwen, which means now I've started a trend of having former musicians who become Salesforce admins as guests. Anyway, Nick is going to show us how he went from touring in a band and waiting tables to leading Salesforce projects that involve sandboxes, data masking, deployment processes, and AI assisted development. We talk about the early build it in production and hope for the best admin days, how Agentforce Vibes is changing the way admins approach coding and why today's Salesforce admins are becoming orchestrators of systems instead of just builders of features. There's also a little Apex talk and surprisingly deep analogy involving semi-trucks and AI because you know my analogies and a confirmation that developers will always think their code is prettier. So hit subscribe, share this episode with your favorite Salesforce admin and let's get Nick on the podcast. So Nick, welcome to the podcast.

Nick McOwen: Hey, Mike, it's great to be here.

Mike: Well, I was introduced to you through a couple product managers at Salesforce that are always on the hunt for finding good Salesforce admins and you were also presenting with them in the admin track. So before we get to that, let's learn a little bit about Nick. How did Nick get started doing Salesforce and be in the ecosystem?

Nick McOwen: Well, it was a complete fluke. I had been touring in a band and we just kind of stopped playing music and I was waiting tables at a country club and one of the members was, "Do you want to keep waiting tables?" I said, "Not particularly." So got me a job doing the entry level position at the company and I realized I didn't want to be doing that either. So I went to the developer at the time who was also the CIO and the CTO and said, "I'm going to learn Salesforce." And he kind of looked at me in the way that an adult might look at a middle schooler who said, "Watch me hit this three point shot." And I eventually learned it after a few misses, but they decided to take a risk on me and many, many years later here I am working with Agentforce agents writing a little bit of Apex here and there. And yeah, it just didn't intend to get here, but here I am.

Mike: I mean, people are going to think I went down and raided the local music festival because not but a couple weeks ago I just had Adam Stark on who was also a musician that became a Salesforce admin. So apparently it's a trend.

Nick McOwen: Yeah, that's the track. That's the track line for most musicians, I guess.

Mike: Yeah. I mean, let's see. Should I be like an '80s metal hair band or an admin?

Nick McOwen: Oh, that's a tough call.

Mike: I know, right? Let's talk about some of the stuff that you presented at TDX because you covered a lot of things in terms of development life cycle and sandboxes and I felt like you were in that area for stuff that admins are interested in and kind of that next level of their career building apps.

Nick McOwen: Yes. It was a talk that focused around seeding sandboxes masking data and my experience with that and it's funny because prior to the presentation at TDX, shout out to Allie and Sam, I was talking to them and they were running a booth and they were saying how many people that they'd talked to who didn't use sandboxes or didn't quite see the value in sandboxes. And so I realized that this talk probably had a lot more impact than I thought it was going to be. My particular use case was how we had rebuilt an app that our recruiting team was using for our field agents and how we spun up a sandbox specifically for it, rebuilt everything using the foundation of the app that was already there and got to test in a secure environment, move it up to our staging environment and then production. So it was an interesting experience and an eye-opening one too, getting to talk to everybody.

Mike: I mean, to be fair, I don't think when I started as an admin, I really had to pay attention to what my organization's life cycle for app development was because you're kind of, and in this case, and I don't know about your company, but you're kind of a small scrappy unit and maybe they got Salesforce for like 20 or 30 people. I mean, nine times out of 10, I was just building stuff in a dev org to make sure it worked and then literally just not even deploying it, rebuilding it in production and Monday afternoon being like, "Okay everybody, so there's a new field on the account." I think back to those days of like, "Wow, what was I doing?"

Nick McOwen: 100% identify with that because that is exactly how I more or less learned when we were first starting out because like I said, it was just the developer and then me and we had to get things done because it was a startup environment, things move fast and so it was tested in the sandbox and then move it. And I didn't want to bother him so I wasn't using change sets and so I would make a field or whatever he asked me to make and then rebuild it in production when nobody was working and just, yeah, it was loose and fast.

Mike: I mean, nine times out of 10 when I was building things in my dev org, I wasn't paying attention to naming. I was just trying to like proof of concept and so I never wanted to package anything up because I didn't want to move it over because I was like, "Well, when I get to production, that's when I'm going to make the names nice and shiny."

Nick McOwen: Yeah, I remember we brought on Kelly Bentubo, MVP. She sat me down and was like, "All right, we're going to start fixing some of these habits," which totally warranted. And I mean, she was great at helping me understand the value in the consistent naming, the process aspect of everything. So she really elevated my abilities and my use cases and everything.

Mike: So as somebody that just started, obviously went from waiting tables, which by the way, 20% tip is not excessive. It just means that you got everything good and on time, you should tip more. Thank you for attending my waiter tipping TED Talk. Just getting into this and thinking, okay, I guess these are bad habits. I bet you had the same bad habits I did. What was the first things that she kind of tackled? You mentioned some of it was naming. Did she help you set up sandboxes and kind of a deployment life cycle?

Nick McOwen: So we had the sandboxes and she came on at the time when the dev team was starting to grow and the company itself was starting to grow. So we needed more organization and she kind of sat me down and helped me with these processes, like how to move it up through the environments, the value of making sure that everything is tested within the sandbox environment and then user management, which I think is something that I relied on when I first started. It wasn't necessarily that I knew what I was doing a lot, but I knew how to put on like a waiter attitude so to speak. And if somebody asked for something and I didn't know what I was doing, it was just that kind of like, "Oh, I didn't burn your steak, but let me make this better for you." And so through talking with Kelly, I kind of like refined how to shape expectations for users. If I couldn't figure something out, then she would kind of help coach me through the deployment issues or level setting and expectations with users, which that was a big one.

Mike: I mean, I think that also we've talked about order taker admins before and it's very easy to sit across the desk from somebody and listen to them be like, "Oh yeah, this is totally easy to do," or, "I have no idea what I'm going to do." And then say, "Yep, let me just work on it and kind of forget that maybe there's bigger things in the organization they need to pay attention to as opposed to everything that comes in front of me right away." Let's get into that recruiting app that you built. Was that your first kind of get your hands dirty in the org per se, building something new for the organization?

Nick McOwen: That was my first project that I led from start to finish. I got the specs from the higher ups. They said, "This is roughly what they're asking for, figure it out." And immediately went to the recruiting manager and said, "Okay, let's figure out how we want this to look." And we had an app that was already built and I knew that the foundation of that app was great. And so it was really a matter of building off of those blocks and reconfiguring it, re-imagining how it could be used and then future-proofing it so that it could scale as the business grew. And it was definitely a lesson in organization and communication, which is good. Always want to keep learning and growing.

Mike: Yeah. So let's dig deeper into that organization communication. What organizationally, do you mean the way that you organized stuff, understanding your company's organization, a little bit of both?

Nick McOwen: A little bit of both. For me, it was keeping track of everything that was getting worked on, making sure that we were trying to document the change in processes and communicating those changes to the business side so that they would know, you might not interact with this functionality, but this is what's going to happen to get you this result. And that it sounds pretty straightforward, but I think that can get lost sometimes on people, especially in larger projects where it seems peripheral and intuitive, but it might be what's intuitive to someone who built it might not be for the person that's going to end up using it.

Mike: Yeah, which leads into communication. I always feel you can't communicate enough. I feel with every project I've ever worked on, you always learn more about communication. What did this first jump in kind of give you in terms of maybe some best practices that you follow now or stuff that you learned really quick?

Nick McOwen: I think the accountability aspect maybe was if you presented an idea and it's kind of your child and you say, "What do you think about this, huh?" And then the end user going, "No, that's not going to work for us." There's like a little bit of an ego bruise where you think, "That was a really good idea though." Maybe it wasn't, but then kind of absorbing that critique and then using it to build something that you know is going to work and not being stuck ruminating on the fact that your idea didn't get accepted, that was kind of a lesson because prior to that it was somebody else's idea or I was building something that was given to me. It wasn't as personal, but that was the first time I got told, "Hey, I don't like that."

Mike: Yeah, that can always... It's funny because you almost want your cake and eat it too, right? I don't want to take the rejections personal, but you 100% take the wins personal and it's like you can't have both. You really do though because it does feel like, "Well, no, I know how this thing works and I promise this will really work for you, but you're just not seeing it." And that can be the frustration that I always ran into.

Nick McOwen: Exactly. And then even after I built it, my bosses came up and they said, "What is this object?" Oh, well, I made that because that was giving the solution to the end user and they said, "Hmm, well, why didn't you do this?" I was like, "Ah, I don't know why I trusted my gut and stuck to it."

Mike: Right. Well, this is the way it is now. Let's talk about, I feel like that's always the first part. Your path into Salesforce, they always talk about individuals that grew up and like I was in high school in the 90s just to date myself, but I remember in middle school there was no internet and when I got to high school, you could go to the library and check out the internet for 15 minutes on a computer. I bring that up to say, obviously now everything's online and I don't know how I even got anything done in 15 minutes with dial-up modems back then, but apparently I did. You kind of came in to the Salesforce ecosystem at about the same kind of inflection point with AI in that there's really best practices and development aspects to learn, but then, oh, hey, by the way, now we've got a lot of new stuff coming like Agentforce Vibes. How did you kind of balance those two that learning path? Because I think it would be very easy to, "I don't need to learn this. Vibes can do it for me."

Nick McOwen: I think that's something that is incredibly important in this time with the ubiquity of AI and how many people are using it. I think people need to become literate in AI. I don't mean learning how to program large language models or even write agents, but just understand how it functions. And in the context of Salesforce, I remember I first started getting into the predictive analytics for Einstein and thinking, "Oh, this is super cool." We didn't end up going that route, kind of kept my eye on everything going and then Agentforce came out and started learning that. And it feels like every couple weeks something's getting rolled out, which is exciting because there's always something to learn and I don't know, I would hate to be stagnant and have to do the same thing over and over for 20 or 30 years. So it's a blessing and a curse to have a product that constantly evolves for you to learn. So it's exciting.

Mike: I think you covered Agentforce Vibes in your TDX workshop. What have you done in Agentforce Vibes?

Nick McOwen: Shockingly, I made an Apex class and a test class that-

Mike: Hey.

Nick McOwen: If you had asked me...

Mike: It's kind of what it's there for, right?

Nick McOwen: Yeah. The musician that could barely string sentences together is all of a sudden writing Apex classes and test classes. I mean, if you asked me even a year ago, "Hey, Nick, would you think you could write an Apex class?" I was like, "Yeah, give me a couple years so I can write it line by line over days."

Mike: Sure. Let me put an ad out on Craigslist and see if I can get a developer to do it.

Nick McOwen: Yeah. I would've laughed if somebody said that and then all of a sudden this product comes out, which actually Allie and Sam, when we were doing our ... We did a webinar for the sandbox seating and data masking and they were talking to me about the Agentforce Vibes and I said I hadn't really looked into it. And so after that talk, I started to and that kind of encouraged me to look into the foundations of Apex and coding languages. So it wasn't just learning Agentforce Vibes and how to use it. It was also getting a base understanding of the underlying principles. And so through that journey, I was able to use Vibes to write an Apex class and then I could take that class to the developers and then the developers would look at it and go, "Well, my Apex is better, but we'll use yours." And corrected a couple things because...

Mike: Wow, you really nailed the developer intent like mine's better, but we'll use your...

Nick McOwen: It could be flawless code and still, mine's prettier. No, I do. I enjoy working with all those guys and they were great helping walk me through everything and showing me, "Okay, this is where Vibes made this. This is the intent but it doesn't quite hit. Here's how we're going to fix that. Walk me through." And it was a great launching point. Something that would have taken days was written in an hour.

Mike: Oh, wow.

Nick McOwen: We're not talking thousands of lines here. It was-

Mike: No, but still.

Nick McOwen: 150. Yeah. And then the test class on top of that, it saved us a ton of time.

Mike: If you threw me in jail and said, "You're out when you write 150 lines of Apex class," I'll be like, "What's for dinner?"

Nick McOwen: I've been be here for a while. Let me get some furniture.

Mike: We're going to be here for a few years. Do I get a shave every now and then every few weeks to keep me from looking scruffy? I mean, I was so impressed getting the admin track ready for TDX this year with the submissions that admins had. I watched them demo vibes and just use the planning tab and really kind of have vibes spell out like, "Here's everything you need to do and here's kind of an action plan." And I felt like natively some people had that, but for a lot of people, wow, this was really helpful because I had this monster of an application but I didn't know where to start and it wasn't just, "Oh, I have to vibe code this super hard application." It's like, "No, this is actually just helping me get my steps down."

Nick McOwen: I'm excited for the future of the vibes and Salesforce integration, specifically with your organization's metadata and being able to find, where are these fields referenced? What would happen if I did this? I think when that becomes a reality, it could be something that's really cool. And I imagine that's something that's possible if it's not already. I'm not a vibes connoisseur just yet, but I think something like that would be incredibly beneficial. How many times have you tried to figure out where an error is coming from on the admin side and you just go, "Well, I hope a developer has time to help me figure out this error."

Mike: That, or how many times do you go to delete something and you can't because there's a dependency and then you spend the next four hours chasing all of the dependencies just to get that one thing done. I mean, the benefit the listeners have is last week on the podcast they heard from Khushwant Singh who was literally leading our Headless 360 development. And I mean, I asked him, I was like, "Do you envision a world where a Salesforce admin sits down and talks to Salesforce to build the application?" And he's like, "Yes." I mean, not forward-looking statement, not by Dreamforce, but that's the rubber band that I think everybody with AI is going to is, "Well, if we make the AI smart enough that it can actually build and rebuild the applications that it's running, why wouldn't you?"

Nick McOwen: Yeah. And being on the other side of the wall, so to speak, to be frank, it can be scary on the tech side because you think, "Oh, is this something that's going to replace me?" But having talked to people, it's also an opportunity to learn and grow. And if that's something that you want to do, then you grow and you adapt. I kind of think of it like painting and photography when the photograph came out all the painters like, "Oh, that's poo, poo, poo, throw it out stinky cabbage and it's a tool." And then it kind of grew into its own path and now it's a separate form of art for most people, I'll say, but I kind of see similarities in that sort of mistrust of this new technology and maybe not everybody wants to be an admin for the rest of their life and they'll go and be an artisan baker or make candles or something. I think that's great. That's the beauty of life.

Mike: Yeah. No, I mean, I've had the very same discussion too of, well, is AI going to take your job? And I think of it like I happen to think of it as you see a lot, you look out on interstate, you see a lot of big semis go down the road and is it really cheating that the guy's driving the semi to move 80,000 pounds? If he has to get some steel from California to Pittsburgh or Pittsburgh to California, it's kind of silly to think that a person would pull that. No, they're going to use a vehicle that is optimized for moving that kind of capacity and payload. And I look at the way we use AI in the same ways. It's not cheating for me to use AI. It's I'm using my skill to navigate and move and maneuver the AI to produce the product that I want the same way that the truck driver navigates the semi through traffic and road construction and busy city streets to get the product from A to B.

Nick McOwen: And to that point, exactly like you said, you're using the tool to build what you've envisioned and it is a tool and I think people need to be careful not to rely on it as their brain and we need to keep learning the foundations of Apex so that if you do use Vibes to write 2020 lines or something, you can sit down and look at it and see, okay, where might this be going wrong What do I actually know about this? So using it as a tool and not your brain replacement, I guess, be-

Mike: Right. It's the same way we had to, your math teacher was telling you to use a calculator. You should know the answer before it tells you.

Nick McOwen: I mean, I look back now and how frustrating that was as a kid to be told, can't use your calculator and now so many years later it's, well, now that makes sense. Now I see why they said you can't use your calculator.

Mike: And it does help. I think the irony is I didn't realize how much I needed a calculator until I sold shoes for a living because people always wanted to know, well, how much are these? They're 10% off or they're 25% off. And I learned the little trick of how you find 10% of anything because once you find 10% of a number, you can literally find any number. And so somebody would ask you like, "Well, they're 39.99, but they're 25% off. Well, how much is that?" And you're like, "Okay, so 10% is 390 and 20 would be 390 times two, and then 25% would be 390 times two and then half of 390." And you do the math really quick in your head, which I'm not going to do right now, but it's around what, like six, eight, 10 bucks, something like that. And you tell them like-

Nick McOwen: They can work for that.

Mike: "Wow, how'd you do that so fast?" And you're like, "Because I can do math in my head."

Nick McOwen: This is going to turn into a math hacks podcast.

Mike: No, never. It'll be a food podcast before that, but I did want to cover... So one thing you did talk about that I haven't covered on the podcast is data masking. And I feel like it's because I've never really ran into it as a use case for me anyway, but it's not that I don't understand it, but what was kind of the use case that you guys ran into for really needing to make sure that you used data mask in... I mean, you used it in a sandbox, right?

Nick McOwen: Yes. So very relevant to me at the moment. We're in the process of a big build and to get prepared for that we spun up a sandbox and needed accounts and contacts and we could have made it one by one. That would've just been cumbersome. We didn't really have the time for that. So we seeded it and then masked all of the data. So now we've got dozens of contacts for each account and we needed to be able to test email deliverability, but you don't want to send a test email to your clients.

Mike: No.

Nick McOwen: "Why did I get this test? What test-"

Mike: "Oh, it's just us testing things. Thanks."

Nick McOwen: Yeah. And then all of a sudden you get a pink slip in the mail, but no, nobody wanted that for anybody. So we changed and masked all the data, removed all the personal information, made scrambled emails, phone numbers, anything that could potentially link to a client and all of a sudden we've got a fresh sandbox with no real contacts and information. We were able to go in there, test the email deliverability safely and then once we proved out our process could move it up to the larger sandbox environments and eventually into prod. So without that masking feature, we're spending time one by one creating contacts and filling out information.

Mike: Yeah. And I mean, the goal is when you're building something, you always want to... I want to test it on as real of data as possible and or if I'm bringing in a consultant or somebody, they also don't need this data. They just need it to act like data. They don't actually need to understand what that data is. I think that's always incredibly valuable.

Nick McOwen: And in the context of training agents, you don't want to just unleash an agent in your production environment and go, "Well, I hope this works."

Mike: Oh, very true.

Nick McOwen: If you start testing it in a sandbox environment but you're skewing the data or you're giving it biased data, then you're not going to get a representation of how it's going to function in the production environment. So to be able to seed it with randomized realistic data, you have a better environment to then build and train that agent to move to production.

Mike: Yeah. You don't want it thinking that you have 15 random widgets that you sell.

Nick McOwen: This is working great. Wow.

Mike: Yeah. Look at it. It's going to build the widgets for us and then you put it in production and the agent realizes everything's a lot more complicated.

Nick McOwen: Yeah. Then you're sweating.

Mike: Yeah. Well, the agent's not, you are. I guess as we kind of wrap things up, if you were to go back to the Nick when he was learning Salesforce and getting into this, is there anything you would tell yourself to do differently that you wish you'd done at the beginning?

Nick McOwen: That's a tough one. I think what was important for me learning was having the ability to create a sandbox in Trailhead and really just explore the things that interested me and follow the paths of the things that interested me. I mean, if I'm going to be real nitpicky, maybe spend some more time trying to learn the foundations of Apex because it can be frustrating as an admin to have this brilliant idea and then not have a developer have time to be able to help flesh out that idea although there's a product now that's kind of doing that. But that would probably be if pie in the sky, do it again, learn a little bit more about coding.

Mike: Yeah. That makes sense. I mean, for as much as every application builds front end usability stuff, there's still always code running somewhere that somebody's going to have to upkeep and build more of too. Well, very cool, Nick. Thanks for coming to speak at TDX. I know sandboxes and data seating and data masking can fall farther down on people's popular list in terms of cool fun stuff to see, but it's very important. I'm glad you also came on the podcast and talked about it and gave people some tips. So thanks.

Nick McOwen: It's been a blast. Thanks for having me.

Mike: Huge thank to Nick for joining me this week and proving that sometimes the path to writing Apex starts with playing in a band and waiting on tables. We covered everything from the startup style deployment chaos to Agentforce Vibes, data masking, AI literacy, and the universal admin experience of chasing dependencies for a few hours just to delete one field. What stood out to me most is how the admin role is evolving into systems of thinking and understanding not just what gets built, but how humans and automation and AI all interact together. Now, if you like this episode, please subscribe, share it with another Salesforce admin that you may know or maybe spin up a sandbox before making changes directly in production tonight. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Khushwant Singh, SVP of Product Management for the AI Application Development Platform at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about what Headless 360 means for admins and how Salesforce is building towards a future where setting up complex systems becomes a conversation, not a checklist.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Khushwant Singh.

What is Salesforce Headless 360? If you're not a developer, the idea of a "headless" platform may sound a little spooky. My guest this week, Khushwant "Khush" Singh, is here to tell us what it all means and why Salesforce Headless 360 represents a step forward into the future of the Agentic Enterprise.

As Khush explains, in a headless platform the frontend is separated from the backend. If you have a pixel-perfect website that you love and you want to use Salesforce applications, or visualizations, you can do that without having to change anything. If your organization relies on Slack, your users can interact with Salesforce data and agents in the chat instead of having to open another browser tab.

"Headless 360 is about bringing Salesforce to wherever you need it," Khush says.

Headless 360 builds the foundation for the Agentic Enterprise One of the main reasons for Headless 360 is to rethink the Salesforce stack for AI. "For the last 27 years, those layers have been put in place for a human," Khush points out, "so how do we open this up for both a human and an agent?"

To do that, Khush and his team are translating the entire platform into a set of model context protocols (MCPs), skills, and metadata that can interface directly with AI agents. This makes conversational tools within the platform, like Setup with Agentforce, even more powerful, while also allowing you to use any other outside AI model you like.

And while these changes have the biggest impact on vibe coding for now, Headless 360 lays the groundwork for a future where we build agents, create applications, and configure Salesforce through a conversational interface. No coding required.

Why trust is even more important with the rapid pace of AI AI is quickly transforming the way we work, and the conversation can become centered on how to move fast. But that makes trust, quality, and governance even more important, Khush explains. Headless 360 is built with trust as a core feature, so you can move quickly without making compromises.

There's much more from Khush about Salesforce Headless 360 and what it means for admins, 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 360 Blog Post: Introducing Salesforce Headless 360. No Browser Required. * Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Setup with Agentforce Makes Salesforce Admin Tasks Easier * Salesforce Help Article: Setup with Agentforce (Beta) * Salesforce Admins Blog Post: What Is MCP? A Simple Guide to Model Context Protocol for Salesforce Admins * Trailhead: Salesforce Headless 360: Quick Look

Admin Trailblazers Group * Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social * Khush 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 joined by Khushwant Singh to talk about what happens when Salesforce stops just being a destination and starts becoming part of every system your business already relies on. That's right, from Headless 360 to Setup with Agentforce, Khush breaks down how admins are moving beyond configuring features and into orchestrating how data, AI agents, automation and people work together across the business.

Now, we're going to dig into what Headless actually means for admins, why governance and trust matter more than ever in an AI first world, and how Salesforce is building toward a future where setting up complex systems really becomes more of a conversation than a checklist. This episode is really about systems thinking, how admins can connect experiences without forcing teams to rebuild everything from scratch. So if you've been trying to figure out where AI fits into your role or how your role is evolving alongside it, I promise you this episode gives you a practical look at what's already happening and what's coming next. So be sure to hit that subscribe button. Share this episode with your favorite architect or admin friend, and let's get Khush on the podcast.

So Khush, welcome back to the podcast.

Khushwant Singh:

Thank you for having me back, Mike.

Mike Gerholdt:

I say that because I had to look and it was 2022 back in the day you were talking Experience Cloud when we last had you on. You've since moved on, moved up, had your hands in a lot of things, did an admin keynote with me. So let's start there and let's kind of catch everybody up on some of the products you've been working on, and then we're going to talk about the newest one that we launched at TDX this year.

Khushwant Singh:

Yeah, happy to. And again, great to be back. I think back in the day, started obviously with Experience Cloud. Experience Cloud really was building a product that is external-facing and again, it's built on the same platform. And again, as we looked at the product portfolio, it just made sense to start to bring things together. So we've actually sort of rolled and morphed into the application development platform, obviously within the platform organization, everything pro-code, low-code, desktop, mobile. And so there've been quite a few products leading up to here, anything from our delivery on mobile, mobile offline, the Salesforce mobile app, all the way to Agentforce Vibes, the Agentforce Experience layer, obviously a fair amount of work on the Headless side of things. So yeah, it's been quite a journey to this particular point, Mike.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. I mean, it's actually hard to point out things that aren't admin-friendly that you've had your hands on because you've always kind of championed everybody being able to build on our platform.

So let's talk about TDX this year because we launched Headless 360.

Khushwant Singh:

Oh yeah, we did.

Mike Gerholdt:

By the way, in case you forgot.

Khushwant Singh:

Yeah, it was a massive announcement. I think, look, as you think about what's happening in the market right now, you've got customers engaging through many different surface areas. We've got customers on ChatGPT, on Claude, on Gemini, Teams. At the same time, you've got developers also using a variety of different tools, different IDEs, different coding agents. And so I think Headless 360 really is a testament to acknowledging this change in the market in the industry and trying to meet the customer where they are. The customer being an end user or the customer being a developer and admin, just meeting them where they are in whichever tool, whichever interface they might be.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. I mean, do you recall ever a time in technology when it was, I hate to use the euphemism, but like the Wild West where I feel like there's so many choices for what you can do just in regards to AI?

Khushwant Singh:

There is. And there is obviously a good side to it. There's also a downside to it. The good side is really your [inaudible 00:04:31] for choice. There is innovation that is helping you drive productivity day in, day out.

The downside of this is you just have to be really careful about quality, about trust, about governance. And you have to ensure that while you're going fast, you're not sort of compromising on that trust aspect of things. And that's what we're trying to do here at Salesforce and just trying to be a little bit more thoughtful in our approach over here.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. So my developer friend, Josh Burke, who comes on the podcast, usually has to explain things to me every now and then. I think developers are very familiar with the term headless.

Khushwant Singh:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt:

I'm not sure outside of Headless flows, which I know what those mean, I'm not sure admins could understand or could confidently buzz in on a game show and answer what is Headless 360. So can you help them kind of understand what is Headless 360 if they had to tell their manager?

Khushwant Singh:

Yeah, sure. So one way to think about it is, let's say you're a customer and you've got your own website, it's built out of React, it's not built on the Salesforce platform, but there is so much of your goodness and investment that you have within the Salesforce platform that you want to be able to easily reuse in the context of this other website that you have, portal that you have, mobile application that you have. All of that may not be built on the Salesforce platform. You want to be able to reuse your investment seamlessly.

And so Headless 360 really is about how do we empower you, the customer, to be able to easily use those assets, those investments within the Salesforce platform in that surface area that you've got that may not be on the Salesforce platform. So it's really about giving them that flexibility so that they can easily reuse their investments in all of these various surface areas and just meet their customers wherever they are versus bring their customers into Salesforce.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I think it makes sense. I mean, I was a customer way back in '06 when I remember it was like transfer and move to Salesforce, and everything was "have it on the platform, have it on the platform." And then shortly thereafter it was kind of like almost the realization that we had was, "Well, it's a lot of friction to constantly move platforms. What if companies just integrate and we become that connector to everything?" And I feel the same way with this.

Khushwant Singh:

100%. And you know what? Look, I think the one example is if you go into the Williams Sonoma website, right? Williams Sonoma website, it's not built in Salesforce, but if you use their sous chef AI, I think... I'm not sure what they call it, but-

Mike Gerholdt:

I'm sure it's something really, really snappy and small.

Khushwant Singh:

Olive. Olive. There you go.

Mike Gerholdt:

Olive. Yeah. See?

Khushwant Singh:

A snappy name right there. That agent is an Agentforce agent, right? So that's on example where Salesforce is being used in whichever head that you'd like us to be in. And so in this particular case, the Salesforce agent is in the Williams Sonoma website. So that's just one example where we are trying to make it easier for this integration to happen through the Headless 360 platform.

Now that's one view. And that's the view, I would say, an easy way to try to understand what it means for Headless 360.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, because then as an admin, as a developer, you're not having to sit down and say, "Okay, well, if we move to the Salesforce platform, we have to deprecate everything that we just spent the last two years building on our site." Marketing's like, "No, no, we just got the site pixel perfect the way we want it. Now we can integrate best of everything that we want."

For admins who aren't thinking of maybe websites, how does Headless 360 play into other integrations that they may talk to IT or internal stakeholders about?

Khushwant Singh:

Yeah. So for example, when admins are chatting with their other internal team, they may have a custom application that they already have in place and they want to be able to have Salesforce data, Salesforce visualizations surface in whichever application they may have already, right? That's one example. So again, it is about bringing Salesforce to wherever they may already have.

So for example, an admin may have a business application that already runs within ChatGPT. So ChatGPT, for example, it allows companies to create bespoke applications. And if you want to be able to integrate Salesforce into that application, that's doable as well. It doesn't have to be in ChatGPT. It could be in any other existing non-agentic application as well. But it's about that, look, you don't have to rebuild everything. Wherever you are, you've got an existing application, we'll find a way through Headless 360 to be able to bring Salesforce to it.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. No, it totally makes sense. I mean, in that way we can really think about how are we making sure that the departments have the software and the tech that they want, but also access to all of the information that they need to do their jobs the best.

Khushwant Singh:

Mm-hmm.

Mike Gerholdt:

So Headless 360 is a big thing we talked about. I also know I saw you in some True to the Core and True to the Core Deep Dive stuff. Was there some features you were talking about in that that possibly play into what admins are going to be working on for the rest of this year?

Khushwant Singh:

Well, yeah. I mean, a few aspects as we think about Headless 360 that would be of interest to admins. So first and foremost, you've all seen the stack diagram of the Salesforce platform. You've got those four layers. You've got your layers of engagement, you have layers of context, you've got the sort of our data foundation, et cetera. So you've got those layers that make up the Salesforce platform. For the last 27 years, those layers have been put in place for a human, right? And now what the product teams and the engineering teams are doing are going back and saying, "How do we now open this up both for a human and an agent so the agent can do that work on behalf of the admin when the admin sort of wants a task to be done for that particular reason?" And so what that means is that we're translating our entire platform into a set of MCPs, a set of skills, a set of metadata that is grounded so that these agents can do the work on behalf of the admins.

So one good example is the setup with Agentforce, which is so far so good. We've gotten great feedback on it. Now behind the scenes is a set of skills, a set of MCPs that are firing off to be able to get their tasks done. And so that's one thing that I think our admins can look to benefit from.

The other piece is I know we have some admins who are familiar with some of these IDEs that we have out there. They use Cloud Code quite a bit. They use Vibes quite a bit. It may not be the entire admin audience, but for those audiences, again, the ability to be able to use all of these MCP skills in these development environments is another thing that our admins can really look forward towards.

Now the other thing that we've also worked on is, over the last few months, the foundation for these skills, these MCPs, this Headless 360 foundation has been very sort of focused on how do we unblock these pro-code use cases, whether that's in Cloud Code, whether that's in Vibes, et cetera. But this is the same foundation upon which as we speak in safe harbor, I share that we are building what we call our no code offering as well.

So how do you go about in an unintimidating sort of type of interface, have this conversation with an agent, which behind the scenes is interacting with that same Headless 360 layer to help you build out your agents, your applications, to help you augment your existing agents and applications, help you set up provision, configure Salesforce from a zero to one point of view, because we all know how setting it all up is quite a taxing task for our admins? So that's the potential I see for Headless 360 for our admin personas.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. I mean, to go back on some of the stuff that you were mentioning, I remember the first time I thought, "Hey, I could have ChatGPT rewrite ChatGPT's instructions." And I remember thinking like, "I'm so far ahead of the curve, man. I'm making AI rebuild AI." And then it was only a few weeks later that Cheryl was demoing Setup with Agentforce and I thought, "Oh, that makes so much more sense because all of the things that you were having that setup agent do are things that not necessarily admins don't like doing. It's like paper cuts." It's the little things that take 20, 30 minutes out of your day when you really wanted that solid hour to build that application kind of start to finish.

Khushwant Singh:

Indeed. Indeed. So we really viewed Headless 360 as the foundation upon which agents can work on behalf of the admins. And again, look, this is agents and admins working together because again, we've got to have the human presence to be able to validate, to be able to interrupt, to be able to initiate any actions that are performed by the agents. And if these agents can help drive greater productivity, then it's a win-win while at the same time having governance by humans over it.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. Absolutely. Do you envision us being at a point where all of setting up Salesforce could just be a conversation with an agent based on the business and what they're trying to accomplish?

Khushwant Singh:

We are trying to do that. We are trying to do that. Now, I'll give you a view into our approach over here. We're taking a steel thread approach here where just trying to, for example, set up a customer service agent. That cuts across Service Cloud, cuts across platform, cuts across Agentforce, cuts across Data Cloud. So we've got to take a system view, an end-to-end view versus a feature view because that's what our admins go through. That's what a practitioner goes through. They look at it from a steel thread point of view, and that's what we as product teams have to do.

And so as we think about using agents to go ahead and help provision, set up, get Salesforce up and running really quickly, that's the new strategy that we are taking over here, a steel thread view so that we can look across the board and say, "Look, which MCPs are missing? Which skills are missing? Which APIs are missing? Which metadata needs to be grounded? How do we ensure that across entire steel thread, quality is being ensured, governance is being woven into?"

So we are starting that way and we want to scale that way as well. So my hope is that come Dreamforce this year, we'll be able to at least have a sizable number of steel threads that we feel really, really confident about on Agentforce really helping and agents helping in this particular side of things. So yeah, that's the approach we're taking, Mike.

Mike Gerholdt:

Wow, that's going to be amazing. Every time you think, "Oh, we've probably invented everything," technology just comes along and pulls the rug out from underneath of you and says, "Haha! There's new stuff. You got to figure this out now."

I'd be curious, you're so ingrained in a lot of things that admins do on the platform, a lot of things developers do on the platform and then also having to keep up with AI. What is a piece of advice you could give people for how you personally keep up with the newest news and innovation on what's going on with AI?

Khushwant Singh:

Wow, that's a good question. I think first and foremost, I spend a lot of time just looking at reading publications like what's on TechCrunch, what's on Techmeme, trying to just understand how are technology providers adapting, how are companies using AI. That's one.

The second one is actually you learn a lot via speaking with others in the community, right?

Mike Gerholdt:

Mm-hmm.

Khushwant Singh:

You talk to customers, you talk to other admins, you talk to other developers and you get to understand there are use cases that they're working through and some of the very many innovative workarounds or users of AI that they're applying. And then you're thinking about this that, "Wow. There's a trend here, there's something that we should be backing up and maybe providing out of the box within the product."

And so I think that community piece speaking with other customers, with your peers, your colleagues from different companies, that sort of brings a very practitioners and practical view to things. So I think if you combine it with some of these ... So if you take a combination of both, what's being published out in the internet, what sort of bleeding edge and all of these various publications and then you sort of marry that and juxtapose that with the practical aspects on how it's implemented in all of these various by your peers in different companies, that's kind of how I ... That's at least the approach that I've taken. And I've seen it help even with some of my teammates who use a similar approach as well, Mike.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I would agree. I mean, coming fresh off of being at a conference, just even talking with people, you find more resources than you think you could find and it exposes you to different levels of thought.

As we kind of close things out, I'd love to know I'm always big, especially when I'm coaching people for events, for TDX, for keynotes, because I've been in keynote with you. I feel like when people are done listening to something, I always want to give them something very actionable that they should do when they get done listening to a session or they get done listening to a podcast like this. So if you are a Salesforce admin listening to this podcast, what is one thing you think you should do right after you listen to this podcast?

Khushwant Singh:

Good one. It's a tricky question. I would say that, look, I would encourage everyone to go ahead and use and try and give Setup with Agentforce a run, right? Take it out for a spin. It's available in an open beta. And I would encourage all of you all to give it a try, please. We've gotten so much great feedback. We are a stone's throw away before we make it generally available. And this is our first approach to using Agentforce, using AI to help improve the productivity and quality of life of our admins. It's not our last, but it is definitely our best foot forward right now. And we'd love to get your feedback. Like I said, we are in the final mile and your feedback is much appreciated, so try it out.

Mike Gerholdt:

I love it. Khush, you've always been a fan of admins. And I am so grateful to have you back on the podcast and even more thankful that you are constantly helping Salesforce innovate for everybody in the tech industry to be successful. So I appreciate you spending a little time with us today.

Khushwant Singh:

No, of course it's my pleasure. Admins are the lifeblood of Salesforce. You're out there, you're representing our products, you're using our products, you're championing our products, you're giving us tough love. And we can't be more appreciative. And so this is an honor to be here on this podcast to speak with you, Mike, and to speak with all of our admins.

Mike Gerholdt:

And a big thanks to Khushwant Singh for joining me and sharing how Headless 360 and Agentforce are reshaping the way admins build and manage systems across the business.

My big takeaway? Well, the future admin isn't just configuring Salesforce. They're designing trusted systems where automation, data, agents, and people all work together for better outcomes. And as Khush said, trust and governance will still sit right at the center of all that work. So if you haven't already, take Setup with Agentforce for a spin and start exploring what human plus agent collaboration can look like in your org.

And of course, be sure to subscribe, leave a review. And as always, I would love it if you share this episode with your friends. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Adam Stark, CRM Systems Administrator at Belmont University.

Join us as we chat about how his experience as a musician with learning and pattern recognition has set him up for success as a Salesforce Admin.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Adam Stark.

From the stage to the Salesforce Admin chair I met Adam Stark at TDX, and he had such an interesting path to becoming a Salesforce Admin that I had to bring him on the show. Based out of Nashville, he's been a professional touring musician for twenty years. But when everything shut down during COVID, he spent his days on Zoom making an album, and his nights on Trailhead working towards his admin certification.

Adam's experience in the studio made it surprisingly easy to jump into automations on Salesforce—they made sense to him. "As a music producer, one of the things I got really good at doing was accomplishing signal flow, like trying to get a sound source to a final, presentable stage," he says, "and that sort of signal flow process is the same with flows." Whether it's building tracks in a DAW or building solutions in Salesforce, Adam discovered that it's still the same underlying logic.

How pattern recognition makes learning Salesforce easier Starting out in Salesforce can feel overwhelming because the platform is robust. But, as Adam explains, the same could be said for learning guitar, and he realized that he could draw on his experience as a music teacher and performer.

A part of learning any instrument is pattern recognition. You practice scales or licks in isolation so that it's easy to find them and play them when you're performing. "The more you do it, the more familiar you get, the more you begin to recognize patterns," Adam says, "and once you see the patterns, things start to feel smaller."

Over time, something that seems very big, like learning a piece of music or trying to use campaigns in Salesforce, becomes more manageable.

Acing your job interview with honesty I also wanted to hear how Adam got through the interview process and landed his first job as a Salesforce Admin. His experience as a musician helped here, too, because he was already used to doing interviews with radio stations while on tour. But nerves aside, Adam feels the key to his success was honesty. "I don't know everything," he says, "but if I don't know it, I'll figure it out, and we'll find a solution."

For the folks out there who are still breaking into the ecosystem, Adam encourages you to get out there and meet working Salesforce professionals as soon as you can. Go to a community group, or even TDX, and pick someone's brain. It can help you piece together what you're learning in Trailhead by understanding what Salesforce looks like in action.

There's so much more great stuff from Adam about how he learned Salesforce and landed his first admin role, so make sure to listen to the full episode. And as always, make sure you're subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, and we'll see you next time.

Podcast swag * Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more * Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: How Do I Transition Into a Salesforce Admin Career? * Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Building Salesforce Projects To Land Your Next Role

Admin Trailblazers Group * Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social * Adam on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on X * Mike on Bluesky social * Mike on Threads * Mike on X

Full show transcript Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, Adam Stark didn't start in Salesforce. He started on a stage, building songs and touring as a professional musician. In this episode, he's going to share how that same mindset of thinking and systems, sequencing steps, and designing outcomes translated into building solutions with data, automation, and now AI. In this episode, we're going to dig into how admins aren't just learning tools anymore. They're designing how work actually gets done across people and technology. Adam's going to walk us through his journey from Trailhead to his very first admin role and what it really takes to connect those dots when you're building something bigger than just features. So if you've ever wondered how your past experience shapes the way you architect solutions today, this episode's for you. So with that, let's get Adam on the podcast. So Adam, welcome to the podcast.

Adam Stark: Happy to be here, man. This is awesome.

Mike: I'm glad we got connected through our architect friends. You are at TDX this year. So let's just give people an overview of who Adam Stark is and how you got started at Salesforce.

Adam Stark: Yeah, absolutely. So I work down in Nashville, Tennessee. I work at Belmont University. And my journey into Salesforce is quite a unique journey. I actually was a professional musician for a long time. I was a touring artist, a professional songwriter, producer, and did that for many, many years. And then a thing called COVID hit in 2020 and really put a damper on the touring side of things, as you can imagine. So during COVID, I went through my own personal little existential crisis moment of, are we ever going to play shows ever again? This was a huge part of my income stream to provide for my family. And so I'm going through this crisis moment of what's next, what should I be doing? And a really good friend of mine who is a Salesforce developer, he told me, he's like, "Man, you should look into Salesforce. Just go on Trailhead and just poke around." And this is me not knowing anything about it. I didn't even know what a CRM was, but went on Trailhead and shout out to the Trailhead team because what an incredible resource, like unbelievable resource for people to learn the platform. Just really, really impressive. But yeah, I would spend my days working on music with my... I was a duo, if you will. I was in a band with another guy and he and I produced our records and we wrote all of our songs. And we're doing that virtually during the day during COVID where we're songwriting over Zoom, which is a complete interesting exercise to try to be creative over Zoom. And then we're recording audio files and sending them back and forth and compiling them into a record, which was wild. Doing that during the day. And then at night, I would just get on Trailhead and just start learning. And the more that I learned, the more interesting it got to me. And yeah, I got hooked and was really fascinated with what Salesforce as a platform was capable of doing and honestly how beneficial it is to businesses and organizations.

Mike: Wow.

Adam Stark: So yeah, I started learning. I was really determined to get an admin certification just to have in my back pocket. And then the world opened back up. And we did what artists called revenge touring because so many people were starved for entertainment at that point in time. It'd been a year, year and a half of no real public entertainment. So we got busy, went back out on the road, and I put Salesforce on the back burner for a little bit and then had more kids and talked to my wife and we just decided we're at a spot in life where being home is really, really nice. And I was pretty invested into the Salesforce journey at that point. So I went ahead and finished up, got my admin certification and I saw that Belmont was looking to implement Salesforce and went ahead and filled out an application and landed the job.

Mike: So I've shown Salesforce to people. I've taken good friends of mine to user groups and I've had friends of mine even get up to Ranger status, which is a hundred badges and still be like, "Meh, it doesn't make sense to me or nothing's clicking." Something clicked for you that was like you got it and it's hard to describe, but I know what you're feeling, but what was it for you?

Adam Stark: As a music producer, one of the things that I got really good at doing was accomplishing signal flow, like trying to get a sound source from one stage to a final stage, final presentable stage, if you will. And what I found was when I really started to get into some of the automation tools in Salesforce, especially flows, I realized this actually feels like a very familiar muscle to me. How do I get from A to B and what are the steps I need to take and in what order? What's the logic to get there? If I was producing music, it would be, I've got this... Say it's a vocal, do I want to EQ the vocal first or do I want to compress the vocal first? And then do I want to bus it to a different channel and affect it there with other things or do I want it to be isolated? And really that signal flow process is the same with flows. And then I just watched what it could do with data and I was like, "This is actually really fun because you're building solutions." As a songwriter, you're building songs. As a producer, you're building tracks and you're building records and I'm still building. It's just a different medium now.

Mike: Yeah, that's fascinating because the next question I was going to ask you was... So I will confess, when COVID hit, I was one of those people that's like, "I'm going to learn a skill." Except I didn't do like you, I wasn't as devoted. I bought a guitar, a really nice acoustic guitar. And let me tell you why. Two reasons. One, I was like, if I'm going to learn, I'm not going to learn on some Walmart guitar level, I'm going to learn on something good.

Adam Stark: Good for you.

Mike: And two, if I buy something nice, then I feel like the investment will... I'll feel bad if I don't use the investment, right?

Adam Stark: Mike, I'm the same way. When I told my wife, I'm going to get into cycling. It's like I need to buy a nice bike to make myself get on the bike.

Mike: Right. I'm not going to buy the Lance Armstrong. I didn't go out and buy a Les Paul and spend a used car's money, but I got a nice acoustic guitar and people come over to my house, they see it on the stand. They're like, "Wow, do you play?" So here's the moral of the story. I took guitar lessons online for like a month solid and I realized, I don't know what it is, but music and math are two things that my brain's like, "Hey, that looks like I should go on the couch and sit and eat some Cheetos and somebody else will figure this out." That is exactly what my brain does. And so I would get to the point where I could learn the chords and figure out the finger and then they started to get to the point where they're like, "We're going to teach you music." And those notes on those bars, it might as well have been a foreign language. It was to me. It just didn't make sense. And I'm sitting here, during the day, I do Salesforce and we're dealing with complex flows and data validation and all this other stuff. And I'm like, "Why can't music make sense to me?" And it's funny because the reverse almost sometimes doesn't hold true. What works for you in understanding music did not work for me in taking understanding Salesforce to music. It's crazy. So anyway, so the moral of the story is I have a really nice acoustic guitar-

Adam Stark: We're going to do some guitar lessons out there.

Mike: ... that has sat on its stand. But I did play it for a month.

Adam Stark: Well, you bring up an interesting point, and this might cross over to just some meta principles in general is the longer you're doing something, when you first get into anything, whether it's music or Salesforce for that matter, Salesforce is so daunting to get started because it's just so robust. There's so many things. It's overwhelming. It feels like this massive mountain you have to scale, but the more you do it, the longer you go about doing it, the more familiar you get, you begin to recognize patterns, right? And then once you see the patterns, things just start to feel smaller, if that makes sense. And I think the best way I could describe it is, that has been my journey with Salesforce. To get started, it felt like this massive undertaking. And the concept of campaigns, it's like, what are those for? I still don't really know why someone... There seems like there's several different angles to use campaigns, and it's just trying to get your head around it without ever being a user in Salesforce. But then you start seeing one example of campaigns, and then you see another, and then you're like, "Oh, well, now I've got some creative ideas because I recognize some patterns and I know what the functionality of this thing is." So yeah, I just think the longer you work at something, you recognize those patterns and then it's like, "All right, this actually is starting to make a little bit more sense to me."

Mike: So you got your certification, you did Trailhead on and off when you weren't revenge touring, which is a fun term. I also remember that when the world opened back up and we were like, "Oh, let's do a thing." And maybe ironically, the first thing I did was I went to a Hyatt Regency and I got French fries.

Adam Stark: Yes, sir.

Mike: Totally boring, but man, the quality of French fries in those restaurant style fryers, nothing at home makes the same.

Adam Stark: You are right.

Mike: Everybody right now that's listening to this podcast wants me to ask this question, so I'm going to ask this question.

Adam Stark: Okay.

Mike: What was your first interview like? Because you obviously did a remarkable job of interviewing because you got a job. And I asked that question because I probably every day get a dozen or so DMs across various social networks of, I'm starting in Salesforce and I want to be an admin and how do I get my first job?

Adam Stark: It is the million-dollar question, right?

Mike: Right.

Adam Stark: Again, going back to familiar muscles, one of the things that I was familiar with was the concept of interviewing because I did interviews with radio stations all over the country for years. So the idea of someone sitting in front of me and asking me questions, I wasn't expecting it. I was pretty nervous about it at first when I was venturing into this new career path because I was like, "I haven't had a job interview in how many years? It's been a long time." I was pretty nervous about it. And then once I sat down and started having the conversation, again, it was like a familiar muscle of like, "Oh, this is an interview just like a radio interview is an interview." So I felt pretty comfortable in the interview environment. And then it was me being honest. I really wasn't trying to put on that I knew more than I actually did. I wasn't trying to talk technical where I didn't understand it. I was honest with the idea of who I was as a person, what I'd learned. I'd achieved my certification. I have a pretty good base of knowledge for what Salesforce is and what it can do, but I don't know everything, but I'm determined to find out. If I don't know something, I'm the person that will figure it out. That's what I've always done. In my music career, where there were technical needs, we didn't always have resources to have somebody else meet those needs for. So I would be the one that would go and dive into it. I would figure out how to code lighting rigs and write DMX and program a light show for us because we needed a light show. So that's just my makeup is I'm a hard worker, I'm a learner, and I was honest about that in my interview. If I don't know it, I'll figure it out. We'll find a solution. And it worked to a point. Obviously, the organization took a chance on me because of an experience gap, but they saw something in me, I guess in my integrity and honesty, but also my drive to find solutions and not be afraid to go learn was attractive to them.

Mike: Yeah. Well, from your perspective, what were you the most concerned about going into that interview?

Adam Stark: I would say I was most anxious about the technical interview side of things, mainly because I have never been a front end user and I'd never been an admin before. So I was a little anxious about, am I going to look like a fool if they're asking me technical questions that I should know answers to? And there was a little bit of that. We found some limitations in that interview process, but again, I always said, "I'm happy to go learn. I'm happy to run that down and figure it out."

Mike: Yeah. That's always, I feel like, the first question is, how do I get through the interview? How do I get through... I've never had a Salesforce admin job before. Aren't they going to look for experience? And to me, my first job, I didn't have a Salesforce admin certification or anything, and I just got handed that as a responsibility. I think it depends on the vision and commitment that people see. They saw something in you and said, "Hey, he can grow with us in the same way that we're probably looking to grow this platform." And also, you were a good fit culture. I think people are always like, "Well, what if I'm not smart enough?" Well, the other part of it too is, do they see themselves working with you?

Adam Stark: Absolutely. That's a really good point. And I should mention, I don't think I mentioned this, I graduated from Belmont, so I went here for undergrad.

Mike: A little bit of alumni.

Adam Stark: I had the alumni angle coming in. So that really helped because I did understand the culture. I was here for four years. I'd know what the school represents. I knew how, at least on a basic level, how the school functioned and what some of the departments and teams were. So that was a starting point, right? But you're absolutely right. What you know is, I don't want to say half the battle, maybe more than half the battle, but there's a large percent of the battle is like, are you going to be someone we enjoy working with day in and out? And are you someone that thousands of other faculty, staff and students are going to be interacting with? Are you the person for that job? So you're right, the culture fit is a huge part of it and not to be underestimated.

Mike: Yeah. What part, now that you're in it, of the job has probably been the most rewarding that you didn't anticipate?

Adam Stark: Oh, it's for sure this idea of going through a journey with people. As admins, you find your users and you go through the discovery process with them and you learn about what are your pain points and you just learn about the language they speak and their staff, their workflows, all that stuff. And when you can deliver something that helps relieve those pain points for them, and at the end of it, they see that beautiful chart that they've been longing to see for two years, or they see the one-click automation that just executes perfectly and performs the need they need. When you can look at each other and high five at the end, and just it's so rewarding. I just love those wins with people.

Mike: Yeah. The best part for me was always go live day. When somebody finally gets that solution and they're like, "Oh, I don't have to look at that green DOS screen anymore." God knows whatever else they were dealing with.

Adam Stark: Absolutely. And then you see the spreadsheets and things that they've been managing.

Mike: Oh, [inaudible 00:18:03].

Adam Stark: "Oh, Lord, this is your world."

Mike: It is. But what's funny is some people, I'd say, almost get to the level of coding with the amount of cross tables and pivot tables and references that they build in these spreadsheets. You almost have a robot there.

Adam Stark: You are right. You are correct.

Mike: So you spent some time at TDX this year. Was that your first Salesforce event as an admin?

Adam Stark: It was my second. I was able to go to Education Summit last year first, but I got to say TDX was awesome. I loved it.

Mike: A lot of people that listen to the podcast don't get to go. Some people do the over under. I wish all my listeners could go to TDX, but for you, what were you going there thinking, "Here's what I need to leave with?"

Adam Stark: It's a really good question. For me personally, I am not content staying where I'm at. I always have this need to grow. So as an admin, I feel like I'm getting comfortable with some of my admin tasks and I'm always looking to grow into the next stage. If that's going to be growing as a developer or a consultant or whatever that would be, I'm always looking for the next thing and eager to just up my skills. So going into TDX for me was this exciting opportunity to interact with people who are way smarter than me and way more talented at the platform and just pick their brains. The cool thing about TDX was it's so, I would say, question-friendly. You can walk up to ask the expert tables and just sit down and have conversations and really glean a ton from some of these technical architects. And there's great hands-on training... Not training, but almost hands-on demos and hands-on with certain products, which was really cool, too. I don't get to mess around with agents a lot because we don't use agents yet. So being able to go and sit and work on, build some agents and see how that's working with Salesforce was really great. But mainly the thing I wanted to do was just go have conversations and glean from those who are far ahead of me in their Salesforce journey and help determine what path am I most excited about going forward? Do I want to be a developer or do I want to go more of a consultant, like client facing route? What's the next thing for me? So yeah, that was my goal.

Mike: Yeah, no, and that's what we're there for. Obviously, get you hands on with agents, but also I think to be exposed to what other roles in the ecosystem there are, or you can always just stay in admin.

Adam Stark: Well, you know what I found so interesting with how Salesforce is growing and developing, I feel like the admin might be the most important and diverse role of all of them at this point because so much is being brought to the admin's table of possibilities. We can do so many things with native Salesforce tools now that, I don't know, man, the admin is such a key role that maybe I'll never move on from being an admin. Maybe I just become a super admin.

Mike: Yeah, that was always one of the things when I got started with Salesforce that I found empowering was that I could configure the product using the product. And I don't recall at that time or even... Now short of a few website builders, did enterprise architecture live there. It was always, you had to plug in a development app and then you had to work in that app and then you had to shove your changes to the monolithic CRM. And if you didn't know code and you weren't a computer programmer, it was easy to really make a mess of things. And it just never made sense to me. And then when you would open up Salesforce and be like, "Oh, you can configure this and you just go into set up, here I can just configure this whole page." And it's immediate. It's right there when you press Save. I was like, wow, okay, wait, this is... I still remember, I don't know if you've built this. This makes me feel so old. The very first time I built a dependent picklist, I was like-

Adam Stark: Magic.

Mike: I was like, "I can run the Internet."

Adam Stark: I love that.

Mike: Because I just made this picklist value dependent on this picklist value. And I remember it was a little thing on our leads and it was basically just our tests were categorized in a certain way. And the previous admin, which there hadn't been one, just used one picklist value. It was a monster and it was a word hyphen, another word. And so you had to type out every variation of that and you would open the picklist and it would literally go from the top of your screen to the bottom.

Adam Stark: Oh my gosh.

Mike: And I remember I was like, "Well, this is just really two values." And I looked it up and I just remember my users being like, "Oh, that's amazing and I can't select the wrong one anymore."

Adam Stark: I had that moment with Lightning Record Pages moving on to page layouts. When I realized the power of conditional visibility with Lightning Record Pages, I was like, "This is incredible. I'm a genius."

Mike: Yeah. And I remember we rolled out dynamic record pages in a keynote and for how long as an admin, I didn't want that. Just the ability to show the field when they need to fill it in and then take it away. And I'm from the days when our account pages used to have 300 fields on it and every person used a different area of that record page and you would go to their desk and everything else would be collapsed except for that area. And I just remember thinking there has to be a way to make this only visible to them and 10 years later we can.

Adam Stark: And it's so satisfying. It's just beautiful when it works.

Mike: Right, absolutely. So looking ahead, agents and AI are the thing for now for a long time. We went through mobile and social and there was a brief internet of things and connected devices, but we really were headed towards this AI stuff. What are some of the things you're paying attention to that you're trying to learn and how is your musical skills or other talents helping you learn those?

Adam Stark: I feel probably like most people feel because AI is just developing so quickly. I feel so behind the curve on what's happening, but TDX was definitely an eye-opening experience for me that it's here. The power of AI and agents is here. And so it's time to really start learning. Lately, what I've been doing is just trying to get my head around some of the 30,000-foot concepts of how AI even works. How do these large language models work? Like what is a vector database and the MCP connectors and how do all these things work together? Because I'm that person where I don't have confidence in what I'm doing unless I have a conceptual understanding of how the whole thing is working. So I don't like just blindly building something saying, "I think this ought to do what we want it to do. " It's like, I need to understand on a deeper level how it ticks, if that makes sense. And for better or for worse, that's just how I'm wired. And I will say AI is a behemoth. It is to get your head around it and to understand what it can do and then try to keep up with all the changes. Wow, it is daunting, but very impressive. I have been really excited since the conference and since I've been learning more about the possibilities with AI. It's starting to spark some creative ideas for me and some creative ideas for how it could be implemented in my organization. So that's side note there. But overall, I feel a sense of excitement of where we're going with all this stuff. And I encourage everybody else, if you feel overwhelmed with the idea of AI or having to implement AI tools, rather than just fighting it and putting your heels into the ground and saying, "I'm not doing it," just start learning and start seeing what it can do, what the possibilities are, and then see where your creativity takes you. You might surprise yourself. But yeah, I'm still in my infancy of learning and getting my hands on the tools, but I will say I'm excited about where we're going.

Mike: Yeah. I've often heard it described as we're in the steam powered era of AI, which means, wow, it's going to be something. I guess last question, which hearkens back to your beginning, for somebody who is listening, and first of all, I don't know how they would find this podcast, but let's say somebody that's not in Salesforce finds the podcast and they're listening, is there anything you would do different when you were getting started learning Salesforce, knowing what you know now?

Adam Stark: I think I would... If I was getting started now, knowing what I know, I would have made an effort to connect with Salesforce professionals sooner than I did. I stayed in my room and stayed on Trailhead and just kept completing modules. And the best way I can describe the feeling was I felt like I started putting all these dots on a plot, right? I had all these scattered dots that I was learning as I had complete each module, but I was having a hard time connecting them all. And Trailhead is so big now that if you can easily just wander off on a path of learning that you don't really know if you need it or not. And then you wonder like, "How have I found myself configuring SSO and I don't even know how opportunities work?" So I think I would have really tried to have gotten involved with community, either the Trailhead community or user group meetups locally, but just start getting plugged in with working professionals and start having conversations because again... And even TDX is a perfect example, sitting down on tables and just asking questions with technical architects. And 15, 20 minutes of that is just so helpful to connect all those dots and have that little bit of a light bulb moment of like, "Oh, all right, that makes sense now." So yeah, get involved, get in a community. I think that's going to be the most beneficial if you're just getting started.

Mike: Yeah, no, that absolutely makes sense. I'm glad you pointed that out. Adam, thanks so much for coming on the podcast and sharing with us your story and your insights. I think it's always super valuable because the community continues to grow. I was at TDX this year and it used to be a thing where I would walk around and know everybody. And now I felt like I walked around. I didn't know anybody. And it was because everybody was so new. I hadn't met them yet. So case in point yourself.

Adam Stark: Yes, sir. Hey, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. And I have enjoyed your podcast. Side note, I'm just going to give you a little shout-out here, Mike. Your podcast was super beneficial for me getting started because it was allowing me to have an insight to what an admin does because I had never been in the ecosystem. So just the value that your podcast brought me getting started was huge. So thank you for what you do and thank you for having me today.

Mike: Well, I appreciate that. You probably also learned too much about food because there's food in every podcast. Somehow-

Adam Stark: You can never learn too much about food.

Mike: ... everybody is always like, "I never know how you're going to work it in." But every now and then food shows up and I'm like, "We all need food. It makes it very relatable.

Adam Stark: Absolutely.

Mike: Adam's story is a reminder that being an admin today isn't about where you start. It's about how you think. From designing signal flow in music to orchestrating automation and exploring AI, this role is evolving into something much bigger, building systems that actually move the business forward. If this episode helped you see your work a little differently, share it with somebody in your network and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening. And as always, until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

View Details

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Avi Shah, Senior Director of Product Management for Salesforce AI.

Join us as we chat about Agentforce Grid, a new way to coordinate data, automation, and AI agents.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Avi Shah.

Spreadsheet-style AI workflows to simplify complex automation Salesforce Admins deal with data, automations, and AI every day. But how do you make everything work together in a way that makes sense? That's why I sat down with Avi Shah to talk about Agentforce Grid, a spreadsheet-like tool for creating AI workflows.

"Agentforce Grid is, in our opinion, the fastest and easiest way to build AI workflows," Avi says. "You have columns for your data and the actions you want to take with it." Some columns are AI-based, enabling you to run prompts or agents you've built, and others are action-based, allowing you to update records or call an invokable action to send an email.

Put it all together, and you can build complex AI automations that can transform your organization's workflows.

Combining data and actions As Avi explains, Agentforce Grid gives you a simple, spreadsheet UI to perform powerful transformations on your data. You can pull things from Data Cloud, uploads, or even the web into a data column.

Action columns give you a way to act. You can run prompt templates, agents you've already built, or inline prompts. Not everything needs to be an AI step, however—you can also perform more deterministic actions like formulas, updating records, or invoking flows.

AI and non-AI actions work together in workflows All of this makes more sense when we talk about actual use cases. For example, you can use Agentforce Grid to assist with case categorization, working with a list of cases, a prompt column to analyze them, and another prompt column to look at those analyses and categorize them based on theme, priority, or issue.

Avi has also seen customers take advantage of Agentforce Grid for transcript and session analysis for customer-facing agents. You can use the prompt column to analyze, classify, and extract information from transcripts to make sure that everything is working the way you want it to work.

Be sure to listen to the full conversation for more from Avi on Agentforce Grid. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Podcast swag * Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more * Salesforce Admins Blog Post: How Salesforce Admins Can Streamline AI Workflows With Agentforce Grid

Admin Trailblazers Group * Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social * Avi on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on X * Mike on Bluesky social * Mike on Threads * Mike on X

Full show transcript

View Details

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Joshua Birk, Senior Director of Admin Evangelism at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about how Agent Script helps admins build more predictable and reliable AI solutions.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Joshua Birk.

How Agent Script expands the admin toolkit The new Agentforce Builder gives admins new tools to create effective AI agents to help their orgs. Chief among them is Agent Script, which gives you more control than ever before over how your agents operate and behave. I sat down with Josh Birk to find out how it all works and why Agent Script redefines the admin role.

Agent Script is a simple, high-level scripting language that lets you create complex instructions and actions for your agent to follow. You can step in as the human in the loop and create a framework for agent behavior and context, helping you build more predictable and reliable AI solutions.

Redefining the admin role In simple terms, Agent Script lets you look under the hood at how your agents function. If you're comfortable with coding, Script view allows you to make fast, precise changes and analyze error messages. Canvas view, meanwhile, uses visual blocks to make it easy to understand what's going on with your agent. And of course, the Agentforce assistant is always available with suggestions if you get stuck.

With so much more control over agentic behavior, Agent Script puts admins in the driver's seat for how their organization will evolve with AI. You're not just building a solution—you're designing interactions between humans and agents. In the big picture, the role of the admin starts to look less like traditional system configuration and more like experience design, governance, and operational strategy.

Getting started with Agent Script All of this requires a great deal of thought in terms of how you're building new agentic solutions and rolling them out to your organization. Josh's biggest piece of advice is to take it slow: "Don't panic, learn Agent Script," he says.

Your existing agents will continue to work, so take your time to experiment with Agent Script to get a better understanding of what's possible. Build some new agents and take it one step at a time.

Listen to the full episode for more from Josh about what admins can do with Agent Script. And subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us in your feed every Thursday.

Podcast swag * Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more * Salesforce Admins Blog: Build With Confidence: Inside the New Agentforce Builder

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 show transcript Mike Gerholdt:

This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, if you've ever been wondering why you can't just copy and paste your old agents into the new version, this episode is for you.

I'm joined by Josh Burke, who recently walked our admin relations team through what's really changing with Agent Builder and Agentforce. And more importantly, why it matters. We're going to unpack a little bit of hybrid reasoning, what determinism really means for admins, and how Agent Script gives you even more control without losing all of that magic. So with that, let's get Josh on the podcast.

So Josh, welcome back to the podcast.

Josh Birk:

Thanks for having me, Mike.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, we know that a few people are vibing now because of the dulcent tones of Josh Burke. So in all honesty, you were in a team meeting last week and you were kind of updating the team on stuff that's coming out for new products and beta products. And the biggest thing that you always explain is like, so why is this important?

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

And of course, every now and then you end your little skit with, "Thanks for attending my TED Talk."

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

And I remember last week's meeting, I was like, "Oh man, that's a podcast. I need to do that."

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

Because the way that you would explained what was new with Agent Builder and Agentforce, I was just like, "Oh, that totally makes sense to me." So this is where we're at and this is what I was hoping we would talk about.

Josh Birk:

Yeah. And I'll have to try because I kind of remember getting into a very weird, almost like conspiracy theory level stream of consciousness.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, okay. Well, it didn't feel that way.

Josh Birk:

Good. I think that's years of experience of thinking in streams of consciousnesses, whatever the plural of that is. So yeah, so I think to kind of recap a little bit, so there were two things that I think are kind of important to consider about the new Agent Builder. One is what we mean by hybrid reasoning and what we mean by determinism. And then the second thing is, where does Agent Script fit into that? So the question we were kind of tackling was, why didn't we just go back and revise the old builder? Why can't we just reiterate on it? Why are we starting completely new?

Mike Gerholdt:

And I think you even said, not to interrupt you, but to interrupt you, why can't I just move my stuff over? Why do I have to rebuild it?

Josh Birk:

And why can't I just move my stuff over? Why isn't it just copy and paste? And Agent Script is part of that.

So the original engine wasn't hybrid, is I think the easiest way to put it. So this came with a conversation with product management where I was trying to describe the differences between the old builder and the new builder. And they're like, well, let's ... The old builder wasn't doing anything wrong, so much is that the new builder's doing something more.

And what the new builder's doing that is more is that when we say hybrid, when we think of AI, we think of AI being autonomous, making its own decisions. So we had the Atlas reasoning engine that's like, "Oh, Mike is looking to find a description on a certain account. I'm going to take these actions. I'm going to put them together into a plan and then I'm going to try to make that work."

What we didn't have was the human in the loop portion of that. And where Agent Script really comes into play is it allows users to basically be like, "In this scenario, I want you to behave like this." So when we say hybrid, we mean, yeah, we're letting the engine kind of do its own magic. But then we're also applying almost ... I don't want to say flow because that's such a loaded term for a Salesforce community.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah.

Josh Birk:

But well, let's go to the name, right? A script, right? A script that a human can actually control personality, control tone, control behavior. When you see this, do this, when you need to call it human. So kind of giving this very human-friendly dialogue that you can then apply to the agent. And so that's how we provide more determinism.

So the reason you can't just copy and paste your old agent into the new agent is the old agent doesn't have that connection to Agent Script. And so it's literally missing a piece of the puzzle to run the engine kind of thing.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. No, I think ... I mean, hearing you explain it, sometimes, at least as an admin, I was always like, "Oh, so they just came out with another version because they had to stick another layer of something on."

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

Or like a car analogy, they changed the fuzzy dice. But this is, no, no, no, no. We're really moving from this version, which ran a certain way to an even better version. And that's the part that I feel like ... Because you brought up Flow, I feel like we've been through this with Flow.

Josh Birk:

Yeah, totally.

Mike Gerholdt:

We got like a business process ... Business management process is what it used to be called. And then that thing went through iterations and then we found a different engine to run it on. And then we had ProcessBuilder for a while and then now we have the new Flow. And it's like sometimes it's not just the interface that changed, but it's actually the guts behind it. Because I mean, I can't recall ... It's sometime between after the pandemic and today that AI came around. And I feel like that's the window that works in my brain because I can't put down a time.

Josh Birk:

Totally.

Mike Gerholdt:

Was it 2022 or is it 2023? I don't know. Post pandemic, before today, AI happened. But just when you thought, okay, I've kind of got this thing figured out, nope, all of this stuff changes.

Josh Birk:

Yeah. And it happens in technology, right? It happened with the Lightning Web Components. We really kind of had to go back and take the new ECMAScript format and take the new ECMAScript standard and really rebuild the way our web components work so that they work in a standard based way. So that they're more similar to React and more similar to these other frameworks. And there wasn't really a way to go back to Aura, now it's called, and just be like, "Hey, Aura, be more standards based."

Mike Gerholdt:

Right.

Josh Birk:

Because Aura was effectively just ... It was pre-standards is the easiest way to put it. So this happens, right?

Now, if people are listening to this and like, "Oh gosh, I have all this work in my old Agent Builder, what am I going to do?" First of all, Salesforce does not like taking away people's toys.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. We've learned that.

Josh Birk:

We've learned that. I've said this anecdote in workshops so many times because when we did release Lightning, one of the most common questions I got was, "Are you going to end of life Visualforce?" So I went to the product manager, might have been Skip at the time. And I'm like, "Hey, when would you end of life Visualforce?" And his response was, "When I pull up a dashboard and I see there are zero active users using Visualforce, and then I'd probably wait three months after that."

Mike Gerholdt:

Just in case.

Josh Birk:

Just in case, right?

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah.

Josh Birk:

So the classic one is not going anywhere anytime soon. But I think the other important thing is a lot of our messaging when it comes to building out agents is that you're already an Agent Builder. You're already somebody who can build AIs because you know Flow, because you know Salesforce. Now you've learned topics, now you've learned actions and all of that kind of stuff. All of that is still true. It's all still true. And so you're still getting to use your existing skills in order to control it. It's really just adding the skill of knowing how to write out the Agent Script.

Now, one of the cool, really cool things about ... Well, there's two cool things about the new builder that I think will really help people with that. One is the Canvas mode. And so Canvas mode takes what you write in Agent Script and puts it into a visual UI interpretation. And so this is very handy for two things. Number one, it gives you a little bit of kind of a predictive window as to what your script is going to be doing. It also gives you a very visual way of thinking about it. It's also a really neat way to go look at somebody else's Agent Script and translate it. So you don't have to read through all the thing. You can flip over to Canvas mode and be like, "Oh, that's trying to get these parameters in order to do these actions."

The other thing going back to vibes and this new AI coding AI is that you'll have an AI assistant in Builder to help you build the AI. So you're not alone. Agent Builder itself will also help you create these things out. So my biggest statement back in the Lightning web component today was don't panic and learn lighting. And now it's, don't panic and learn Agent Script and you're going to build out some really powerful solutions.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, and I think back to ... I mean, I was chatting with Jennifer today too, and just the way that we started using AI. And I remember, I mean, not that long ago doing workshops and saying, "Okay, you need to tell the AI your role, its role. And then what you want it to do and what it can do and what it can't do." And for everything, whatever model you were using, I remember writing prompts a certain way. And I feel like for this and with Agentforce, especially for admins, this is the least set it and forget it kind of thing.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

Because you can always go back and make it better.

Josh Birk:

And tweak it. Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

And this is-

Josh Birk:

And tweak it in theory. Yeah, exactly. In very small corners too.

Mike Gerholdt:

Small corners that make a huge difference because like with Flow, I mean, half the time I'm just excited that I got it to do what I needed it to do. And then I look at what Jennifer built and I feel like I'm over here rubbing two sticks together.

Josh Birk:

Together.

Mike Gerholdt:

But with Flow, that's your goal, right? You just want that, okay, boom, it's done. But with agents, people are interacting with them, they're asking them questions, I can make this so much better and I can make this better. Here's the clue when people stop using them.

To your point of when you would replace Visualforce. Well, if you're looking at your Agentforce dashboard and seeing, "Hey, your users aren't using it." well, now might be a time to like, "Well, let's switch over, let's round some edges, let's change some things." And I would say this is like an every two weeks kind of thing. Which sounds crazy, but the amount at which you're going to find feedback from your users. And the amount of rounding of edges, I worked myself into an English problem here. It's going to be like, you're going to find like a star and then it's going to look like a ribbon of rounded edges that you have to work on.

Because as you use that new builder, now your users are happier and being more proficient. And I think like even today, when Jennifer and I were talking, we were talking about building Gems in Gemini. And I said, "One thing that I do is I'll actually have another window open and ask it to refine my instructions in Gemini."

Josh Birk:

Oh, yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

Because the way that I write the instructions works for me, but maybe not for it and it can refine it. And I've seen it take thousand word prompts and reduce it down to 200 and it's actually faster. And so having all of that is sometimes there's a lot to keep up with. But it's all for the better because now you're like click click, oh wow. And then you get that ... I think it's always, at the end of the day, the admin is going after that first look on a user's face and they're like, "Ooh, this-

Josh Birk:

Nailed it.

Mike Gerholdt:

... just made my life so much easier."

Josh Birk:

Exactly. Yeah. And I think to kind of append to that, again, not to overuse this analogy of Visualforce. But it's like don't be in a rush to go and recreate your existing agents in the new Agent Builder. If you have a new agent you're building, I would start with the new Agent Builder and go from there.

Two reasons, don't fix what's not broken. And also you'll learn more about Agent Script and things like that. So when you do decide to move your old agent to the new builder, you'll be more educated on how to do it.

Now, huge forward-looking statement, asterisk, safe harbor, there is a conversation internally about creating a porting tool of some kind. It's on a roadmap somewhere, no guarantees.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh.

Josh Birk:

But I do think people should know where we are looking at that kind of thing. So stay tuned because we do want to make this as easy as possible.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Yeah. But also there's some joy in rebuilding things and maybe that's just me. But I've always-

Josh Birk:

Seems like part of the tech world. Yeah, exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. I mean, there's that and there's also, it reintroduces you to things that at one time you were good at and brings it back. And then I think too, anytime that these new features come out, one part is, okay, well, here's the tech to change it. But also, has the process changed? Has the stuff that people do internally changed? And that might also be true.

And the other point you brought up, which was really salient, just because you can change it, doesn't mean you should right now.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

One thing that ... And I was a part of this, doing a big org rollout. What are the other changes that your users are experiencing within your organization? And so you adding to that, is that one layer too many? Or when would be a better time? Like we always joke, like you're not going to roll out a sales opportunity change the last week of the quarter.

Josh Birk:

Right, right.

Mike Gerholdt:

So picking your timing, this means that gives you time to test.

Josh Birk:

Yes. Yeah. And I think this goes into a lot of the conversation we're having about admins in the AgentiCare. Like what kind of a steward are you being? And how are you using those existing instincts and skills as an admin to not topple over the apple cart, but now you're doing with AI?

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. Because in my opinion, admins are getting paid for their judgments.

Josh Birk:

Yeah. Yeah. Agreed.

Mike Gerholdt:

Josh, thanks for coming on and helping us understand the new Agent Builder.

Josh Birk:

Thanks for listening to my TED Talk. Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

I knew you had to fit that in. And we've got just enough time that Daryl can hopefully get his boat from home to the internal ... It's not internal. Inside the podcast joke.

Josh Birk:

Inside the podcast joke.

Mike Gerholdt:

You have to go back to the Daryl Moon episode-

Josh Birk:

Yeah, exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:

... and then it all makes sense. It's the key to unlocking the mystery of the Dan Brown episodes. I don't think so.

Josh Birk:

I love it.

Mike Gerholdt:

Anyway.

Josh Birk:

I love it.

Mike Gerholdt:

Have a good day, Josh. Thanks for coming on.

Josh Birk:

Cheers, my man. You too.

Mike Gerholdt:

Huge thanks to Josh for coming on very impromptu and turning what could have been, I think, a little confusing of an update into something that actually makes sense. New engine, new script layer, AI helping you build AI. Awesome. I like it.

So remember, don't panic, learn Agent Script, and it's all about having fun. And like any powerful tool in Salesforce, it's less about flipping a switch and more about steady improvement over time. So if this episode helped you clarify your next steps, share it with another Salesforce admin who's navigating some AI right now. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jagan Nathan, Senior AI Architect at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about how he built a Slack app for Salesforce's "Million Dollar Puzzle" ad, where millions of concurrent users raced to solve riddles by chatting with Slackbots.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jagan Nathan.

The tech behind the "Million Dollar Puzzle" contest If you were watching the big game, you might have seen Salesforce's "Million Dollar Puzzle". As soon as the ad aired, the race was on for contestants to solve puzzles by chatting with Slackbots to discover the location of a secret vault.

My guest this week, Jagan Nathan, built the Agentforce-powered Slack app that made everything possible. They needed Slackbots that could act as a conversational gateway for millions of concurrent users. And with a million dollars on the line, they needed to be sure it couldn't be tricked into giving away the answer.

Even more incredibly, Jagan pulled all of this off in only six weeks. I sat down with him to find out how he did it and what he learned along the way.

Using AI to build quickly at scale Just like with any project, the first step was to gather requirements—though it's more fun when your stakeholder is the "Puzzle Master." Jagan and his team needed a thorough understanding of what they were dealing with and how they could translate those gaming mechanics into the application.

The clock was ticking, and AI was pivotal for accelerating the development timeline. Jagan and his team used Salesforce Vibes for quick prototypes and wireframes to help them decide what to build. But the development team still needed to take these ideas the rest of the way. "AI cannot help us solve all of the architecture problems," Jagan explains, "we have to have a human in the loop."

With millions of concurrent users, they needed to do thorough testing—and quickly. Luckily, they could use Salesforce Scale Center to stress-test for performance issues and identify bottlenecks so they could be sure that when the ad ran, the app would work flawlessly.

Designing for security with a million dollars on the line I know this might be shocking, but when you're holding a contest with a million-dollar prize, some people will try to cheat. So Jagan and his team needed to make sure there were plenty of guardrails in place to make sure someone could win it fair and square.

They needed to start with a security mindset and think through any security vulnerabilities as they designed the application. Einstein Trust Layer was crucial for toxicity detection and monitoring for anything malicious, like prompt injections.

Most importantly, they were very careful with what information the Slackbot knew and what it didn't. It didn't have the solutions to the puzzles, so even if someone managed to crack it, they wouldn't be able to get very far. Instead, puzzle answers were always validated by humans.

There's a lot more from Jagan about building for scale quickly, so make sure to take a listen. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

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Learn more * MrBeast + Salesforce Behind the Scenes * The Million-Dollar Puzzle: How Slackbot and MrBeast are Rewriting the Super Bowl Playbook * Salesforce Admins Blog Post: Empowering Admins: Build Org Scalability With New Scale Center Features * True to the Core Deep Dive: What's New in Lightning Experience Performance and Agentforce Vibes * Salesforce Admins Blog Post: Build With Confidence: Inside the New Agentforce Builder

Admin Trailblazers Group * Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social * Jagan 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:

When you think about building on Salesforce, it's easy to focus on features. But today's admins aren't just implementing features. They're designing systems that have to perform, scale, and hold up under real world pressure.

In today's episode, I'm going to sit down with Jagan, an architect who helped deliver a high stakes, high scale experience serving millions of users through a custom Slack-based AI system. We're going to unpack what it actually takes to compress months of work into weeks and how to design for trust and guardrails from day one, and where human judgment still matters in an AI-driven architecture.

So if you've ever wondered how your role evolves from building flows to orchestrating full systems, this is the conversation because this just isn't about speed. It's about responsibility at scale. Now if you enjoy this episode, hit Subscribe, share it with a fellow admin and let's get Jagan on the podcast.

So Jagan, welcome to the podcast.

Jagan Nathan:

Hi, Mike. Thank you for having me.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Well, I was excited when you sent me the Slack DM about some of the projects that you've worked on here at Salesforce. But for people that don't know you or maybe didn't listen to the episode of the Developer Podcast you were on, could you tell us a little bit about what you do at Salesforce and the fun project you got to work on recently?

Jagan Nathan:

Sure. Hey everyone. I'm Jaganir. I'm architect part of our AA practice team here at Salesforce, building agents for our customers. This is my third podcast on our channel. My previous episodes were focused on event monitoring and threat detection.

Mike Gerholdt:

Wow.

Let's talk about some of the stuff that you got to work on around the big football game that happens in February that Salesforce had an ad on.

Jagan Nathan:

Yeah, sure. Very excited. This is our first ever online puzzle app, which was built entirely on our Salesforce platform.

Mike Gerholdt:

So you got to be a part of that. I'd love to know from a Salesforce admin listening to this, we used the platform for the puzzle. Can you give me a little insight into that?

Jagan Nathan:

Yeah, so let's unpack this. So what we did is we didn't just build a chatbot. We deployed our custom Slackbot, of course, powered by our Agentforce, which acted as a conversation gate for millions of participants grounded in real-time data. So we just collapsed a nine-month roadmap into just six weeks, which is 42 days. Within that, we designed iterator and we went live on day of February 8th.

Mike Gerholdt:

Wow. Nine-month roadmap. Holy cow. That's insane. I mean, can you talk a little bit about the architecture problem solving and how you moved so fast so quickly?

Jagan Nathan:

Yeah, sure. Of course, we are a customer zero company. So we leverage our internal tools and the external tools, what we have developed. So for this entire application, we use our Agentforce Vibes to accelerate the development. We quickly do a lot of wireframes and the prototypes, and then we figure out what sort of user experience and what sort of applications we need to build using the power of Agentforce Vibes that accelerated our development timeframe to start with.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, that's nice. I mean, I've definitely seen Vibes do a lot of things. I'm assuming we really took it out for a test spin on this one.

Jagan Nathan:

Yeah. So we use Agentforce Vibes to do this. And then we also leverage our scale testing product because this particular application, we anticipated there's going to be at least millions of users who is going to access this application concurrently. So performance is super important for this application. So we leverage scale testing product to identify quickly and resolve all the problem bottlenecks as well.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Wow.

I've had some talks with PM for, was it Scale Center? Is that what you used?

Jagan Nathan:

Yep. Yes.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. And we've put out a couple of blog posts about those. So for admins that aren't familiar with what Scale Center is and what some scale testing helps them do, what did you use it for?

Jagan Nathan:

Yeah, Scale Test is the performance evaluation tool. So that gives a lot of metrics. Before customers used to run some automated performance testing to figure out what sort of performance bottlenecks they have in the ACRM instance. But with the power of Scale Test, we can write a test plan creation. We can do a test environment set up. And we can also simulate all those real-time performance challenges, and then we can schedule those test trend to see where exactly fails and at what threshold it fails so that we can understand the spike and then we can fine tune our application.

Mike Gerholdt:

Okay. That's super helpful. I mean, was there any surprises that happened in your testing?

Jagan Nathan:

Oh, yeah. Since we anticipated there's going to be at least millions of concurrent users, there's going to be a lot of DB rights back and forth. And then we ran into a lot of issues. We were able to figure out with the help of scale testing, we figured out all those in the sandbox, and then we fine-tuned our code and the logic and everything to make sure it is scalable for concurrent users as well.

Mike Gerholdt:

That sounds like a lot. Holy cow. I don't think I've ever built an application where I had to plan on a million people using it concurrently.

So you talked about Agentforce Vibes. I'm sure we leaned into a lot of AI to build this. How did you decide really what AI should do versus what humans should still control during the project?

Jagan Nathan:

Yeah, that's a great question. So of course we can use AI, but AI cannot help us solve all the architecture problems. One of the architecture problems, we have to use human in the loop. For an example, when we started designing this application, considering the scale of users, we thought just by writing a prompt, it's not going to solve the problems. Prompt is going to give, based on the request prompt is giving the response back, but that alone is not sufficient enough. So that's where we use humans power to understand and architect well for this [inaudible 00:06:50] game.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Wow.

On top of that, you got to think of guardrails because I'm sure somebody was thinking, "Well, since Slackbot was in use, what if somebody just asked it, what's the answer?" That seems like the most obvious guardrail to put in place, but how did you sit down and think about some of the guardrails to put in place for an experience like that?

Jagan Nathan:

Yeah. So there's an aha moment here. So when we built this custom Slackbot, we intentionally built in a such a way that this custom Slackbot doesn't know the puzzle answers. So even if someone tries to crack the puzzle Slackbot, they would not be able to get the answers out of it. So that is the first so that no one walks away with the puzzle answer, right?

Mike Gerholdt:

Right.

Jagan Nathan:

So that is the first thing what we did. And then the next thing what we did is automated toxicity detection at the hedge. So what we tried to do is we leveraged, of course, the power of Einstein Trust Layer and then it's not like a traditional AI chatbot. So we just built intentionally a custom Slackbot with all those automated toxicity detection so that if the Slackbot finds some harmful response or some sort of response which is not supposed to do it, if the user on the other side, if the user is a bad actor trying to do some prompt injections or whatnot, our platform is able to monitor and mitigate the risk immediately. It's being very proactive stage of monitoring.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. No, I guess I just thought the Slackbot would have access to the answer and you'd just have to guard it really well. But if you set it up and never give it access the answer, then it can't accidentally hallucinate and give the answer. So wow, that was probably a little bit of planning on your end.

So looking at what you built and deployed, if a Salesforce admin wanted to recreate some of the best learnings that you had from this, what were some of the key takeaways that you had?

Jagan Nathan:

Yeah. So I had that security mindset to start with. Let's say you are a bad actor or else you are trying to act the system, what sort of loopholes you might find in the system and then find all those security vulnerabilities, why you designed the application itself. It's like having a security mindset is super important. And that too for the scale of the cash prize is one million. So definitely there's going to be a lot of participants going to crack the Slackbot or else they try to trick the Slackbot and try to get the puzzle's data out of it. So I would say security mindset is super important. And then start with the understanding of, basic understanding of how prompts work and then try to build a Hello World app in Slack to start with.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah.

Did you have a whole team of people that were just, I guess it's called negatively testing because there's always positive testing, which is test it to make sure it does what it's supposed to, but then there's negative testing, which is to make sure it doesn't do what it's not supposed to, right?

Jagan Nathan:

Yes. So we did advisory testing as well. So of course, we used the power of AI. We built our own agents to try to craft this agent to see where it bakes. And then we try to enhance our prompts and all the safety guardrails to make sure. We did a ton of testing during our design and implementation phase just to make sure Slackbot is not supposed to provide any information which is not needed or which is kind of out of privacy zone.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Wow.

So given the scale of everything that you did, what is something that you maybe hit a limit with AI that you didn't know would exist?

Jagan Nathan:

What we felt down the road is like, AI cannot solve all the problems for sure. That too for the scale of millions of concurrent users trying to access the system. We thought there might be places in which there might be some timeouts happening, but knock on the wood, nothing happened. We were able to build a scalable application.

Now, we don't rely 100% on AI. We also added a human in the loop, for example, some sort of puzzle answer validation, mainly the final puzzle answer validation. We don't just rely only on the AI. We use a human in the loop. So that we brought in experts on the puzzles who validated the answers and lot of stuff at the backend.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, that's interesting.

What was it like to have to translate a puzzle into a technical requirement? Because I feel like a lot of Salesforce admins often get business processes that can sound like a puzzle and they have to translate that into a technical requirement.

Jagan Nathan:

Yeah. Great question. That was very interesting and challenging because not all of our teammates worked on the puzzles or solved the puzzles before. If you take me as an example, right? I haven't solved any puzzle in the past. I went through the basics of understanding what sort of puzzles exist in the real world. Some are logical puzzles, a lot more Sudoku puzzles, some are mathematical puzzles, some are geolocation puzzles. So for us, it took some time for us to understand the basics of what sort of puzzles we have. And then we had conversations with the puzzle masters and then who built this puzzle. We tried to understand from the puzzle master what sort of application they wanted to build because they know very much on the gaming side and we know very much from the technical side. It goes hand in hand.

That was very interesting and challenging conversations we had to understand. It took some time for us to understand and translate the gaming mechanics into our application.

Mike Gerholdt:

Wow. Okay. So be honest, how cool wouldn't it be to have a title named Puzzle Master? Right?

Jagan Nathan:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt:

So one of the last questions, because I bet you use Slack a lot as the project team to get things done. I've noticed as I work at Salesforce and we use Slack in different channels, I've noticed changes in behavior, ways that we work faster with Slack. Was there something you left this project with where you're like, "Oh, I'm going to start posting this way in Slack or I'm going to start sharing information this way in Slack," because it was something that actually was a way that you worked in that team.

For example, I've noticed that when we have really long threads rather than posting one big post that could take up a lot of screen, somebody will post a comment thread about a topic and then put all of that into the comments because then it keeps their feed kind of cleaner.

Was there anything like that that you kind of learned as like, "Ooh, I'm going to start doing this more often now in Slack?"

Jagan Nathan:

Well, yeah. So what we did is when we started working on this project, we had a 14 member team, few members were focusing on the technical side, few members were having conversations with the puzzle master. So we used Slack as a project management tool.

So what we did is we created a Slack Canvas with a list of team members and then what sort of priority task we need to work on. And then we automated to the next level by adding a Slack list as well. We created a list, like what is the roles and responsibilities for each team member? And we started tracking the list. And then every week we were running the Slack workflows.

We extensively used the Slack workflows. We created a ton of workflows, one workflows for summarizing the Slack channel so that what happened in this one week's ... Because see, we had at least six weeks to develop and build and deploy, right?

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah.

Jagan Nathan:

So each week we were running the Slack summary workflows to understand what is the latest going on around them. And then we were extensively using Slack, mainly the Slack Canvas and then the Slack list to start with.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Wow. I love building workflows. I tell you, they're really cool. I can almost build too many sometimes.

Well, I appreciate you coming on and sharing what you could about this. I think the amount of work that was completed for this project and in the amount of time is super incredible and I'm sure it was quite the learning for you. So it also teaches us that even the biggest projects we can still accomplish very quickly. So thanks for coming on the podcast.

Jagan Nathan:

Thank you for having me, Mike.

Mike Gerholdt:

So it was great of Jagan to come on and share his experience on that project. I think it's a good reminder that building on Salesforce today means thinking beyond automation. It's about really designing systems that are resilient, trustworthy, and ready for real world scale. From AI guardrails to perform testing to human in the loop decision-making, this is the work that the modern admin is balancing speed with responsibility.

Now, if you found this episode helpful, share it with another Salesforce admin who's thinking bigger about the systems they run and making sure that you're subscribed so you don't miss what's next. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jennifer Lee, Lead Admin Evangelist, and Eliza Riley, Content Manager for Admin Marketing at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about what's coming at TDX and how to get the most out of your visit.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jennifer Lee and Eliza Riley.

Connect with product leaders at TDX TDX is around the corner, and I sat down with Eliza and Jen to talk about must-see content for admins and how to get the most out of your visit.

One thing you won't want to miss out on this year is Sneak Peeks, a special experience in the theater where you'll be able to see new features in action. We'll be showcasing things like the new App Studio and Setup with Agentforce so you can get an idea of what's coming. There will also be a Q&A with the product teams so you can give feedback and better understand the roadmap.

There will also be True to the Core Deep Dives covering flow and automation, reporting and analytics, Agentforce, and low-code and pro-code development. These extended Q&As offer you a chance to connect with product leaders and ask all of your burning questions.

Finally, if you have a thorny problem that needs solving, you can sign up for a 1-on-1 Ask the Expert session with a Salesforce engineer or product leader.

See the sights We've been talking a lot on the pod about Agentforce Vibes, so maybe it's time to see it for yourself. In the Agentforce Vibes Zone, you'll be able to get hands-on with how you can build using natural language. There will be demos, a guided project, and sessions to help you get started.

You'll also want to check out the Hackathon Showcase in the keynote room, where the three finalists will pitch their builds live to the judges. As Jen says, it's always interesting to see how different people solve problems and get some inspiration for what you're building in your org.

If you're coming alone, make sure to stop by the Community Cove. It's the spot for networking with other admins and other folks in the ecosystem, and a great jumping-off point for exploring TDX.

How to plan for TDX As you're getting ready for TDX, it's important to remember to balance planning with flexibility. "You're going to be connecting with people," Eliza says, "you might see a cool activation that catches your eye, or a robot you might want to stop and grab a picture with."

Wear comfortable shoes, bring water and snacks, remember that some sessions require headphones, and make sure you have a swag bag. Most importantly, come find us and say hi.

Make sure to listen to the full episode for more on what's coming at TDX. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

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Learn more * Salesforce Admins Blog Post: The Salesforce Admin's Guide to TDX 2026 * Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: What Are True to the Core Deep Dives at TDX?

Admin Trailblazers Group * Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social * Jen on LinkedIn * Eliza on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on X * Mike on Bluesky social * Mike on Threads * Mike on X

Love our podcasts? Subscribe today or review us on iTunes! Full show transcript Mike: If you're heading into TDX thinking it's just another event, this episode might change how you show up entirely. Today, I'm joined by Jennifer and Eliza to break down how to actually get the most out of TDX26, not just attend it. We're going to talk about everything from Sneak Peeks and Ask the Expert zones to hands-on Agentforce experiences and so much more. Most importantly, how these moments are going to help you design better systems, not just learn new features, because this isn't about collecting swag or just session notes. It's about connecting with the people building the platform and shaping how your organization runs. So, if you're serious about evolving from admin to orchestrator, we got your game plan. So, let's get Jen and Eliza on the podcast. So, Jen, Eliza, welcome to the podcast.

Jennifer: Thanks for having us.

Eliza: Super happy to be here.

Mike: It's going to be fun. So, Jen, you're a veteran of the podcast and in the community. Tell us a little bit about what you do at Salesforce, and then, we're going to get into what we do for TDX.

Jennifer: Sure. I'm one of a few admin evangelists on the team. So, some of the things that I do on a daily basis is write blogs, create video content, and present to all of you admins out there.

Mike: Just a few. Eliza, you're like our secret Alfred in the bat cave. I feel like all of us evangelists come back with torn suits, and our Batmobiles have a flat tire and you fix everything up. But you also did a whole bunch of stuff at TDX last year, but what do you do on the admin team?

Eliza: Yeah, I know you guys are really on the front lines. So, I'm a content manager on admin relations, and I focus on creating resources and storytelling to help admins grow into more strategic roles. And I also lead our admin blog. So, really helping to translate just everything that's happening across Salesforce into what actually matters day-to-day. And that includes a lot of coverage on TDX, which I'm really excited about.

Mike: Yeah, we have a lot planned. To be fair, you also did a showdown last year at TDX, if I recall. Isn't that right, Eliza?

Eliza: Yes, we did. That was super fun. We had a few members of the community come and showcase their best Agentforce use cases. We had some prizes, and it was just a really great time.

Mike: Right. It was. You had one vivacious MC. Should hire him back. Let's talk about this year though, because Eliza, you wrote a blog post to help admins get ready and write down their list of stuff they can't miss for TDX. And the first thing is the Sneak Peeks area, which you and Jennifer are working on. So, let's hear a little bit about that first.

Eliza: Yeah. So, Sneak Peeks is this really special interactive theater experience. And these are really building on the success that we saw at Dreamforce. So, if any of you attended Dreamforce last year, Jen did an incredible job in the Admin Meadow creating this special exclusive look at what's coming next for Salesforce products. So, we're building on the success of that this year, and we're going to be showing you quick demos of all of our in-progress innovations, and then, opening it up for live Q&A with the product teams. And so, what's really cool about this for those of you attending in person is that you might be some of the first people to actually see these developments in action. And then, if you're not able to join us and you're watching from home or tuning in later, we'll be covering some of these on the admin blog as well. So, you definitely won't be missing out on any of the fun.

Mike: Oh, nice. Jen, you got to peel back a layer. Tell me, give me something. Give me a sneak at the Sneak Peek.

Jennifer: Well, first I want to say that as a former customer, when I went to TDX, one of the things that I look forward to was seeing the roadmap and interacting with the PMs. So, I'm really excited to be able to bring this to all our technical audiences. But a couple of things that you will be able to peek into, we'll be introducing the new App Studio. There's also Salesforce Release Manager. So, think of this as being able to say, for these releases, "I want to enable these things in my org." That's the idea behind that. And then, we're just bringing on a lot of... We have three sessions on flow, like thinking about new flow design or what's coming up with screen flows or how to manage your flows. We're also bringing in set up with Agentforce, not only in Salesforce itself, but also in Slack. So, there's just a lot of cool things, but I'm just going to tease a few.

Mike: Yeah. No, thanks. You got to show up, but that's why it's called a sneak peek, right? I'm excited for this. I agree. When I was a customer, being able to just see what's new, take those notes, most of the time feel, like the plane ride home, you could be like, "Oh, cool. I don't have to build this because it's already going to come as a feature," is something that I always look forward to. Now, you mentioned we could do some Q&A with the product teams at your Sneak Peeks, but we also have something called Ask the Expert Zone. Can we talk a little bit about that?

Jennifer: Yeah. So, we had that also in the Admin Meadow at Dreamforce, and it was a huge success. So, think of it as you come to TDX and you have this burning question in the back of your head or this problem that you're trying to solve for and you're just hitting a wall, you can come and talk to our experts. And the difference between what we did at Dreamforce and TDX is now, we have specific topics. So, instead of going to, let's say a generalist that's supposed to know all the platform, and who possibly can because Salesforce is so huge? There's no way. You're going to go and talk to a specialist. You have that burning of question about automation. You're going to talk to the flow expert. Or you need help with getting started with Agentforce. You're going to talk to the Agentforce expert. So, we have these various topics, six different topics, and you come during that scheduled time and you'll be able to have one-on-one discussions with those experts.

Mike: I like that because we did a version of that, and I volunteered for it, and I think it was just about every other person, I could answer questions.

Jennifer: Yeah, it's hard.

Mike: I know. Man, I just felt bad, and I was like, "Well, I can't really answer your question, but do you want to work through the problem together and maybe we'll stumble across something?" One of the things that I think is important and along those same lines, at a surface level, it's like, "Oh, cool. So, I'm going to be able to talk to Data 360, or flow, or user access and governance." I see those as topics. Waiting until you're at the event, Jennifer, is not the best idea. If you were a customer today, you have 14 days to Dreamforce, oh my goodness, to TDX, what would you do as a customer to get ready for those Ask the Expert sessions?

Jennifer: I would hone in on what are the top things that I want to know from that expert? Come up with some questions to bring to the table versus just showing up and coming up with questions off the top of your head. Or if you have a problem with the solution, bring your laptop and show the person, "Here's my problem. Can you show me where I'm going wrong?" That way, you're not generalizing it, and then, they could really help you because they're actually seeing the thing versus saying like, "Oh, well, I think it might be this," or, "Maybe it's this, but I don't know because I don't know the details of your problem."

Mike: That's really good. And when we did that version of Ask the Experts, I had somebody print off their entire org schema and bring it.

Jennifer: Wow.

Eliza: Oh, wow.

Mike: So, yeah, it was awesome and also kind of sad because I was like, "Man, it's a whole forest of trees you just killed, but I know exactly how your org's set up." It's wonderful. Speaking of experts, we have something new, and I know Kate's been on to talk about it, but Eliza, True to the Core Deep Dive, that sounds new. What's that?

Eliza: Yes. This is one of our new activations or tracks that we're really excited about this year. So, True to the Core Deep Dive is essentially just an extension of the larger True to the Core keynote that we all know and love. So, it's going to give everybody the chance to just go a little bit deeper into specific topics. So, they're essentially extended breakout sessions letting you connect with the product leaders and ask your really specific questions. So, we will have breakouts on flow and automation, reporting and analytics, Agentforce, and low code and pro code development. And actually, a couple of these are going to be live on Salesforce Plus. So, it's a really great chance to connect with product leaders and just be able to attend that extended Q&A.

Mike: Yeah. There's definitely a theme developing here across all three things that we talked about, which is access to the product leaders.

Eliza: Definitely. I think that's a really key differentiator at TDX this year. I would say that there are just really more opportunities than ever for you to actually connect with the people building the features that you're working with every day.

Mike: Now, one of the things is the virtual TDX Hackathon, which I know Josh on our team has been managing a lot. If you're not participating, that's something really cool to go see because I think we have... Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think we have an actual kind of showcase where they're going to get up and pitch their hacks. Am I right, Eliza?

Eliza: Yes. And it's not just a showcase. It's actually even bigger than we've done before. So, it's going to be live in the keynote room. So, really getting everybody up on that big stage. And the three finalists will actually be pitching their builds live in front of a panel of judges.

Mike: Wow. No pressure there.

Eliza: Yeah, seriously.

Mike: But I think that's really cool. Jennifer, if you were a customer and you're like, "Well, I didn't participate in the Hackathon," sometimes going to see what other people are envisioning might actually spark an idea for something that you're trying to solve back at your org, right?

Jennifer: Oh, exactly. At Dreamforce, we had the Hackathon and I attended that. And it's always interesting to see how people solve for things and you're like, "Huh, I didn't even think about that piece, and maybe I should consider that and go back and use that in your implementation." So, yeah, it does definitely inspire and get those creative juices going.

Mike: Right. On top of just watching people try to pitch, I think that's really fun too because I always love to learn watching other people speak because I would envision, well, here's what it could be like if I had to pitch my app to a board of directors or a president of a company as we're really going enterprise-wide as an admin. The last thing that I see is Agentforce Vibes, which I've had people on vibe coding on the podcast, and I've seen some dry runs. I can't tell you the session because you need to go to them, but there are some presenters in the admin track that have some really cool use cases for vibe coding. And so, I think we have the Agentforce Vibes Zone. Eliza, do you know anything about that?

Eliza: A little bit. Yeah. So, it's an immersive hands-on space. And I think what's really cool about the Agentforce Vibes Zone and what we've done a really good job with is just making sure that it's not just for developers. I think no matter your role, you can definitely benefit. And so, it's really just designed for anyone that's ready to expand on how they build using natural language. So, there will be a series of Agentforce Vibes demos, and then, I think they're doing a guided hands-on project so you can apply what you've learned because as you know, if you've come to a Salesforce event, it's all about getting hands-on. But there's a lot of great vibes content across the event from sessions to this specific zone. So, I think if you're an admin and you're just trying to dig in or get started, it's definitely a great place to do that.

Mike: Yeah, I'm excited for it. Let's talk about conferences in general, because it's been a while since we've done Dreamforce, and we've had winter and a time change. Jennifer, if you were a customer today listening to this podcast and thinking, oh, I got to pack for TDX, what are some things that maybe you bring now that you wouldn't have brought five years ago?

Jennifer: Unless you really need to use it, I leave my laptop in the hotel just because lugging that around all day isn't fun.

Mike: They still haven't gotten any lighter, have they?

Jennifer: No.

Mike: They're still 10 pounds.

Jennifer: No, they feel like a brick, ton of bricks. I would definitely bring your most comfortable walking shoes. Don't bring the pair that you just bought. No, that's not a thing. Bring your most comfortable shoes. Definitely bring a water bottle. Walking around, you want to stay hydrated. Bring some snacks in your backpack because sometimes you think you have time to run and grab something and you're running between sessions. Have that little candy bar or whatever it is, a pick-me-up. Yeah, that's helpful. And then, I also bring a bag just in case you pick up any swag along the way because they'll-

Mike: Just in case, as if it's an option. Come on.

Jennifer: But bring a thing where you could take notes. So, whether that's electronic, or a notebook, or old school, bring something that you can jot notes or take screenshots of things. There's also will be available in the app, PDFs afterwards, but I always like taking a screenshot, and then, writing notes afterwards.

Mike: Yeah, I definitely... So, there will be AI-generated session summaries on all of the sessions in the app, but being there and taking notes is usually... The notes that I take always make more sense to me, which is exactly how it should be, I suppose. Eliza, is there any special prep you do to get ready for TDX?

Eliza: Well, I would say definitely pack your headphones because we have some sessions where you'll want your headphones to catch that session audio.

Mike: Oh, that's a good one.

Eliza: Yeah, that's one that people forget. You don't think about it, but got to have those headphones. I think for me, with these conferences, it's so good to have a game plan. I think when you roll up first thing in the morning, you just have this whole day in front of you, and it can be hard to think about what you'd like to do. So, I'd highly recommend using Agenda Builder to really plan out your perfect schedule, but I think you should also leave room for spontaneity because you're going to be connecting with people. You might see a cool activation that catches your eye. Sometimes there are robots wandering around that you want to stop and grab a picture with.

Jennifer: Or characters.

Eliza: Or characters. Yep, absolutely. So, don't jam pack it, but it helps to come in with a little bit of a game plan.

Mike: Yeah. Dreamforce had puppies for a little while too. I know.

Eliza: I missed those.

Mike: We probably won't [inaudible 00:16:32] puppies this year. I know. One thing that I think is different that I'd like both your perspectives on. So, travel budgets are tightening. Companies are sending you to... Sometimes you have to pick and choose, do I go to TDX or Dreamforce? And sometimes it's, well, we can only afford to send you. We can't afford to send the other three admins. And so, you're there flying solo. What would your advice be, Jennifer, on making friends at TDX and introducing yourself?

Jennifer: Oh, Mike, you asked the introvert of the team.

Mike: I know. All of us admin evangelists are really introverts. We just play extroverts [inaudible 00:17:21].

Jennifer: I know, right? I tend to look for a familiar face, but also for someone who might be by themselves, because if I'm by myself and they're by themselves, why not connect? And then, you could be a team, and then, figure out, hey, what sessions are you going to? Because maybe they might be going to sessions that you didn't even think of. But also if you're attending a conference and your teammates don't go, I would take copious notes so that then, when you go back to your company, you can then knowledge share, right? You weren't there, but here's the things that I learned and here's the PDF to that presentation, and give them a little walkthrough of what they missed, but also we're going to be recording a bunch of sessions this year, right?

Mike: Oh man, we're recording so many sessions this year. It's insane. You have no idea. Eliza, how about you? How do you make friends at events or how would you advise admins to connect with each other?

Eliza: Oh, I consider myself a little bit of an introvert as well. So, I think if I'm in a specific area or session that is really, really interesting to me, I would also probably look for somebody that's by themself or somebody that's taking a lot of notes or asking a lot of good questions at say, a demo booth and just strike up a conversation with them. If you hear them talk about a use case or something that they're experiencing in their org, I think being able to connect and have something that's relevant to share is a really good way to get your foot in the door. But I would also say there is Community Cove, which is a really, really cool place to go. And you can actually network with other admins. You can meet people of really all roles. And I know they have a really fun activation planned this time around. So, if you're by yourself, I would head to Community Cove first, and I think you can make some friends there for sure.

Mike: Yeah. That's both very good advice. I always tend to look at the people taking the most notes in a session because then I could always walk up to them and ask them if we could compare notes. And then, that way, I'm not asking for anything that I'm not giving in return.

Eliza: I love that.

Mike: Yeah. All right. Well, Jen, Eliza, I feel like I know I got to get my comfortable shoes and couple hundred bottles of five-hour energy and some of those protein bars and leave my laptop at home, and I'll be set. So, I feel like we're pretty ready for TDX.

Eliza: Yeah, sounds like you got it covered.

Mike: I hope. Well, thanks for coming on the podcast. We'll have to connect after and see how everything turned out.

Jennifer: Awesome.

Mike: All right. There's your blueprint for showing up for TDX with intention, not just as an attendee, but as somebody that's ready to shape how systems, data, and AI really come together in your organization. Huge thanks to Jennifer and Eliza for helping us think bigger about what's possible when you connect directly with people building the platform. Now, if this episode helped you rethink how you approach events or your role as an admin, make sure you subscribe, share it with your team, and start planning how you'll bring these insights back into your business. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to John Maxey, Senior Product Manager at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about how My Trust Center can help admins communicate incidents, plan releases, and operate with transparency.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with John Maxey.

From static status pages to personalized trust When I was early in my admin career in 2008, keeping track of status updates was as simple as loading up Salesforce Trust. These days, with so many different products and services, it's gotten a lot more complicated.

That's why I was so excited to sit down with John Maxey. He's working on My Trust Center, a personalized, authenticated experience that only shows you information that's relevant to your org.

Reducing noise and creating clarity for admins With the new My Trust Center, you'll be able to get more specific information about upcoming maintenance and how it affects your org. Everything is tailored to what products and services you're actually using, instead of having to sift through unrelated incidents and interpret whether or not they apply to you.

As John explains, Salesforce can be much more granular about any specific maintenance or updates and how they will affect you. And that makes it easier to make decisions like when to promote new features, when you need to do testing, or when there might be downtime. You can coordinate better with your team and avoid surprises.

Greater transparency through targeted communication At its core, My Trust Center is about improving transparency both internally and externally. For admins, it will provide more visibility into what's going on when something doesn't work and when a particular service will be back online.

If there's an incident, you won't need to ask your CSM or contact customer support to figure out what happened. RCAs will be attached to each incident, so the entire process is self-serve. And you can configure notifications via SMS, Slack, or email to keep your entire team up to speed.

Make sure to listen to the full episode for more from John about what's coming with My Trust Center. And make sure you're subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

Podcast swag * Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more * Salesforce Admins Blog Post: Jen's Top Spring '26 Features for Admins

Admin Trailblazers Group * Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social * John on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on X * Mike on Bluesky social * Mike on Threads * Mike on X

Love our podcasts? Subscribe today or review us on iTunes! Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I am joined by John Maxey to unpack the evolution of the Trust Center into something far more than a status page. That's right. It's becoming a personalized command center for how you run your org. I mean, let's be honest, it's not just about uptime anymore. It's about how you design systems that balance data, automation, and AI while keeping your stakeholders informed and confident. We're going to dig into what My Trust Center means for how you communicate incidences, plan releases, and operate with clarity across increasingly complex environments. So if you're the person everyone turns to when something breaks or when they just think something's broke, this episode's for you. Let's get John on the podcast. So John, welcome to the podcast.

John Maxey: Thanks, Mike. Thanks for having me.

Mike Gerholdt: Well, this is exciting. So I like it when I can have a podcast and a blog post on the same subject in the same day. And all of this stuff around trust and security, I feel like admins are right there, we're the Sentinels every day. But before we talk about some of the cool stuff that you're working on, let's learn a little bit about John Maxey. So John, how did you get to Salesforce and what is the cool thing that you oversee?

John Maxey: Oh, well, thank you for that. So I came to Salesforce in late 2007. I joined as a customer support rep in CSG in our customer success group. I had just come from the FinTech, and if folks remembered, FinTech was kind of not doing well at that time in 2007. So it was an opportunity to switch industries and come to Salesforce. And that was pretty exciting being the ... At the time, our moniker was no software, sort of breaking the mold of traditional software and sort of moving to the cloud.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. We were talking before I hit record. I think if you do the math, our Salesforce experience is definitely in high school at some point.

John Maxey: Seems that way.

Mike Gerholdt: They graduated from high school, which is kind of scary at some point.

John Maxey: I wish.

Mike Gerholdt: I know. Well, it's about to head off to college and make questionable decisions and maybe be a paleontology as a major. Who knows? But we're going to talk about ... So the blog post that went up today on admin.salesforce.com is the same topic as this podcast, which is My Trust Center, which I can't tell you how excited I am for this. Because I remember back to my days early admin, like '08, just going to having to pay. It never dawned on me until one of my users couldn't log into Salesforce a long, long, long, long time ago. And I was like, oh, I wonder why that is. But I never thought about like, oh, cloud services can go offline. I need to pay attention to this. And at the time, trust.salesforce.com was literally just like a handful of blinky lights. That's all it was because there was a handful of pods that you paid attention to and you just checked to see if yours was up and that was it. And then over the years, I mean, there's so much more to pay attention to. Everything that goes into trust.salesforce.com. So can you kind of take us on that journey of like Mike from 2008, just having to remember if NA1 is up to everything that the new My Trust Center is going to give us?

John Maxey: Sure. Yeah. I remember using the Trust site when I first joined Salesforce as well way back in 2007, and it has changed a lot. So if you think about it, in 2007, Salesforce was really sort of selling one product, CRM, Salesforce automation. We had, like you say, we had just a handful of instances where we had customer installations. So even the field of boxes that we had there was small enough for folks to be able to find out what was going on with their stuff. And even in the URL of their application, it would say which instance you were on. So fast-forward 18 years and we've acquired companies, we've developed new technologies and new products. Some of them are on the platform and others are what we call off core or they're not directly in our application. They're separate different types of architecture. And then we've also moved into the public cloud. We've also been selling to enterprise customers and we think about an enterprise customer and their implementations are far more complicated, multi-cloud. So they may have marketing and commerce, as well as sales and service. And then we have all our industries. So in talking to customers when I became the product manager of the trust site in 2018, just sort of realized that their experience, especially for our larger customers was harder to deal with. When you look at, I mean, I think we have 950 some odd instances in our sales service industry, we have over a thousand DBs in marketing cloud engagement. It's just kind of daunting to try and figure out where you are. And so at the time we were figuring out tools to make it easier to find that. But really the answer was to get personal and to create an authenticated site. So then we know our customers. I believe that's like CRM 101, know your customer. And then when we know who they are, when you log in, we can present you with what you have with the things you already purchased, the products and services. So in this first release, we're starting that path, that journey to true personalization. And so there's still some gaps here and there, but one of them is the support for all our products. So we have requests out to all of our different products like MuleSoft and Tableau to do a little bit of work to get them ready for the My Trust Center. But yeah, so that's, I mean, it's just grown and this My Trust Center really just has come out of customer feedback and wanting a better experience. And the other thing about the personal, I know a lot of folks are going to probably jostle a little bit at the move away from a purely public site to the authenticated site. But there's an opportunity there to not only provide the personalization, but also be able to expand the types of services we can provide, product communications, things like that, that we may do via email today, but we can provide an experience to consolidate all that into one single spot, seeing as we will know who those customers are, being able to target the communications. As if we did it today and it was public, it would just be too much. It would be information overload. And so being able to segment that because we know who you are is really a powerful driver for that.

Mike Gerholdt: Well, if you think about it, so I remember going to a user group, this'll totally date me. But they were like, "Well, you can subscribe to the RSS feed for your server status." And that was it for me. I was like, "Dude, I'm set. This is great. And I'm going to get the emails. It's perfect." And then you kind of don't know what you're missing until you don't know what you're missing. And there was rarely a case, but this also speaks to why My Trust Center makes so much more sense. If I were to go there, "Oh, my instance is down, but these three instances aren't." Well, it's not like I could do anything. It's not like if my lights are out in the neighborhood, but my neighbor's lights are on, I can grab my dog and I can put my slippers on and walk across the street and be like, "Hey, can we sit at your house until our lights come on?" It never dawned on me when I would go to trust.salesforce.com and see, "Oh, well, everyone else is online, just this one pod is off." Okay, cool. Next. Right? And that matters now because now if you think about it from what admins, developers, architects, they have so much to pay attention to. And all of a sudden, especially in a highly regulated industry, you talked about being in Finserv, why is this down? And you can feel that user looking over your shoulder and then you having to sift through a trust site, multi-layers, multi-things, and kind of give them an answer. This is, why can't you just present me with the dashboard that makes sense? I mean, the dashboard in my car only tells me about my car. It doesn't tell me about every other car on the road. So it kind of feels like a natural evolution.

John Maxey: Yeah. And that was definitely part of it as well. The information overload as part of a growth and when you have a company that sells many more products than you started with. And then also we find that sometimes somebody will see an issue and then they go into the trust site and they see another issue going on and maybe they attach themselves to that. And so that can kind of confuse things when they reach out and report that. If there is an issue, we'll have ways to report that. But you shouldn't just assume that because somebody else is having an issue that it's the same issue that you're having. So yeah, definitely making sure that we're giving you the information. And then also being able to expand on it more. Like I mentioned, the public nature of that, we've got press watching it, we've got competitors and things like that. And sometimes we just don't want ... We don't have to be guarded with what we say because of how that could be used. When we know we're talking to customers, we can be a lot more open, even drafty as they might say. We know that something's going on. Maybe we don't know exactly what it is. And that's not really necessarily appropriate when you're speaking to a public audience. But when you're talking to customers and they just want to know that you know that there's a problem and that Salesforce is working on it. Like your analogy, when the power goes out, typically the customers don't need to know when the application is having an issue. They know that the application's that. They want to know that Salesforce knows that there's an issue and what are we doing to fix it?

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I mean, ironically, it's just like the power company.

John Maxey: It's just like the power company.

Mike Gerholdt: So I'm looking at the screenshot and the other thing I noticed that I think is really neat that before back in the days of the blinky lights, it was like, it's on or it's off. Cool. And then we would pay attention to releases and you always got like a release date window. This shows a tab upcoming maintenance for the next 90 days. Tell me more about some of the thought that went into that.

John Maxey: Yeah. So we look at the different personas that we want to support on the trust side, on My Trust, and we think about the jobs that they need to do. And so you have an admin. Admin is obviously concerned about any incidents going on to make sure they can communicate with their user base. But they're also working on developing new functionality for their user base. And so they want to know what's coming up, what would impact them. And in the past, it would have been as much of how much downtime would there be, but that's almost a thing of the past. But really it's more about when will my features? Maybe I've been working on those in Sandbox and I'm ready to promote them. When do I know to promote them? If we're talking about an operations persona, they need to know when there need to be a little more diligent because there's a release going on. Some of our customers do testing after we do a release to make sure that there's no conflicts or anything. Obviously as people customize their orgs, we do our best at Salesforce to make sure that there's no conflicts in the code that we release, but there's always, folks are very inventive in the way they do their solutions. And so there could be a conflict. A lot of customers like to test that, they want to know when. Especially if you have a large application, a lot of people in to test, you want to know the best use of their time because it's usually on a weekend.

Mike Gerholdt: I know. Yeah. And I mean, even scrolling down, we could talk more about this too. I'm looking at a maintenance window of four hours. I remember before we would get a release as an admin, I'd always tell my users, every now and then that scheduled maintenance window would come up when you'd log in and be like, "Okay, well, just don't log in this weekend." And it's kind of like it's fun to think of the days when companies would only work Monday through Friday. Please salespeople just ... I know you're not working on Saturday, right? Wink, wink.

John Maxey: Right. Well, a lot of the ... The major releases now, especially in Hyperforce are zero downtime. It's just really, it's more of a notification, "Hey, this is when your features would be ready," as opposed to it actually being downtime. The first party, it does have a little bit more. But I think we've got most customers off of first party now. And then we have some others that we're still working with to get their messaging better and because now we can target. So those timeframes, those windows will start to shrink because we'll be able to target folks at a better granularity and make sure they know exactly when they're going as opposed to a more generic sort of announcement, "Hey, we're doing a bunch of work. You may or may not be impacted in this time." We'll get it down to, we know when you're going to be deployed and exactly when the impact may happen.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. And this is also going to help our inboxes because they're not full enough.

John Maxey: I hope so.

Mike Gerholdt: I know. Man, I'm telling you. The one line, say goodbye to instance wide email blast. Well, those were just fun. Okay, I think it ... Does it mean us or not? But still, one of the features is you can still subscribe to notifications, right?

John Maxey: Yep, exactly. Yeah. Today we support email. We're looking to expand that in the near future to support SMS like we do in the legacy status site. And looking to add some more as well. I mean, obviously Slack is top on our list to investigate how to do that in a meaningful way so folks can subscribe to their notifications.

Mike Gerholdt: Oh, like a Slack notification?

John Maxey: Yeah, exactly. Like a Slack channel you subscribe to and get your notifications right in Slack. I mean, another one of our goals in our group in general is to try and push our information into the workplaces where folks are working. So if you spend your time in Slack, why not get that stuff in Slack? And then it's more meaningful and you don't have to switch to a different application. I mean, I love developing the trust site and the portal. But the main goal is to make sure folks are informed and get what they need.

Mike Gerholdt: Well, so that was exactly ... I mean, to kind of ask you a best practices question, it could be, and in my case, I was the only admin, so it was easy for me to subscribe to everything. But there are a lot of companies that have teams, right? There's admins, developers. So putting it to Slack, obviously then it's anybody can join that Slack channel and get the status update. And if you need to know that, then join that channel, that makes sense. In the interim, how do you address that as a best practice for organizations with maybe multiple admins or multiple developers?

John Maxey: Sure. That is a challenge. I mean, the quick and easy answer is we use Trailblazer ID, which is the same authentication method for Trailhead or for help, for AppExchange, all of our external facing portals. So there's a good, better experience there and one authentication through all those portals. But then because Trailblazer ID just takes an email address, you could use your group email to sign up for a Trailblazer ID. And then that ID, that email address, would have to be attached to a license in the orgs you want to see. So that's the way to do that. Today, we understand it's a challenge. Not everybody has a bunch of extra licenses to use for this type of purpose for folks who are monitoring. So we are working on a solution for a license that would have very limited or maybe no access to the org at all. But you could attach it to say a group email and then be able to get all the monitoring information you needed from that.

Mike Gerholdt: I like that.

John Maxey: Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt: That's awesome. It says one of the plans is to have major release notes and root cause analysis for eligible incidents. How is that beneficial? Like what were customers asking for that we weren't providing root cause analysis on?

John Maxey: As much of anything, it's a delivery mechanism. So if a customer is impacted by an issue, they may have to engage with their CSM or go to customer support and say, "I need an RCA." And so instead of that, we have certain criteria on incidents when an RCA is going to automatically be provided. So our first iteration would be that when that RCA is provided, we would attach it directly to the incident and you would get a notification that it's been attached. And so you could then go reference it. No need to ask anybody. In the future, we're thinking about ways maybe we could provide some visualization to say that it's in process and maybe how far in the process. I mean, the more we can self-serve, the better. And then we'll look at other ways of being able to surface that type of information and similar type of communications directly in the portal and through notifications and all of that.

Mike Gerholdt: Before we press record, you said some customers already have their hands on it. What was some of the feedback they gave you?

John Maxey: Oh, we were in Pilot for about a year with a handful of customers, and then we were in beta for ... Our open beta for almost a year as well, nine months. Lots of different types of feedback. I mean, in small things is accessibility, making sure that we're accessible to finding out about the need for the license solution so that folks can see this. Whether we have big companies that outsource or have operations teams that manage all of that for the whole company. And Salesforce is just a piece of that. We also have a gap of getting an API that matches our UI, so it'll be personalized. And if you use a monitoring application, you can just feed the signals right into that so you can have a single place to monitor all of your operations across your whole company. So those are the types of things that we got in formatting. And actually the initial iteration of the 90 days upcoming maintenance and releases was originally 30 days and people were like, "But you only do a major release every 90 days. You can't see enough." And so we expanded that. And I think we need to add a little more navigation capabilities because some of that ... Sometimes like for me, I have a bunch of instances that I have orgs on. So I get a bunch, a bunch of those and it's just hard to deal with. So we're still improving. We have a feedback farmer. We're always looking at that feedback to see if there's an opportunity to improve what we have.

Mike Gerholdt: Wow. This is so cool. I can think back to only how many times I wish I would've had this as an admin. I mean, I was glad for what we had, but always getting that personalized feel is super helpful. John, I'd be curious, in the past I've asked people, when we work in tech, often our hobbies or the things that we love to do are a little more tactile because like I told a friend of mine, I said, "Well, when the power goes out, you can't ever see what I built." And he was like, "Wow, that's super powerful." And I was like, "I know, right? It's kind of crazy." But I'd be curious, outside of security and building the My Trust Center, is there something fun that you like to do on the side?

John Maxey: Well, I like to visit my kids. My youngest just started college, so we're second semester empty nesters.

Mike Gerholdt: Oh boy.

John Maxey: We love to travel and see ... Especially internationally and see new countries and experience new sights and smells. And like you say, very tactile, sort of getting out and about, getting away from the computer a bit and enjoying the world, going hikes in different countries and meet different people and whatnot.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. No, I completely understand because I get into yard work over the summer.

John Maxey: Oh, yeah. My wife loves to garden.

Mike Gerholdt: Very gratifying.

John Maxey: My wife loves to garden, so I spend a lot of time supporting that as well.

Mike Gerholdt: See, that's always ... And then the first time you get to make something with your vegetables, that's always the best. That's the most rewarding. John, thanks for coming on to talk about this, I'm sure. Well, I know for certain, when you have stuff to talk about, you're going to come back. Because this is so, so incredibly useful for admins and it really helps us kind of understand the whole state of everything that's going on with our orgs so that we can communicate that internally to our stakeholders, which keeps the wheels running. So I appreciate you filling in all of the dots and keeping our status green for us.

John Maxey: Oh, and thank you so much, Mike, for having me. My whole life at Salesforce has been supporting mostly admins, making sure that they have the best experience that I can provide is one of my goals. So it's really exciting and it's great to see people start to use it and play with it and maybe find some things we missed. So definitely have a lot to add and would love to come back and talk about some of the new features that we implement in the next little while.

Mike Gerholdt: I want to thank John Maxey for walking us through how My Trust Center is reshaping the way admins manage trust, not as a reactive task, but as a core part of running a system. If you take one thing away, it's this, visibility drives confidence, period. And when you connect incidents, releases, and communication into one clear view, you're not just supporting the business, you're leading it. So give this episode a share with somebody on your team who's always there and trying to answer, "Is Salesforce down?" And make sure you're subscribed to the podcast so that you don't miss what's next. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Rebecca Saar, Senior Director of Admin Relations at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about governance, productivity, and why Salesforce Admins are more essential than ever in the agentic enterprise.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Rebecca Saar.

Admins are becoming the guardians of trust As AI becomes an ever bigger part of our day-to-day lives, I wanted to bring Rebecca Saar on the pod to talk about what changes and what stays the same.

One thing she emphasizes is that admins are here to look at the big picture for their organizations. While it might be easier to build the solution, you still need to figure out what to build in the first place.

"It's a shift in mindset and understanding where the work is happening," Rebecca says, "because we now can leverage these super powerful tools." Skills like gathering requirements, talking with stakeholders, and bridging the gap between departments are only going to be amplified by AI—not replaced.

Admins act as translators across systems and teams Admins are a crucial intermediary for their organization, connecting the dots between multiple departments to understand what's really going on with a business process. In other words, admins are the ones who understand who to talk to in order to get something done.

In my experience as an admin, each business unit only knows their own siloed data. They know where it comes from and who they ship it off to, but they don't know if there are better options, or where there might be a snag in the process. That's where admins need to step in and find a solution that individual business units might not be able to figure out on their own.

Strong foundations still matter in an AI world Despite new tools, core admin skills remain essential. In a way, we've moved from problem solver to sense maker. You might not have to spend as much time figuring out who has what permissions, but you'll still be called on to have a conversation about how it should be handled.

Just like with everything else, AI can save time on the busywork so you can focus on what matters. At the end of the day, it's even more important to lean into the foundational admin skills to find solutions that work for everyone in your organization.

Make sure to listen to the full episode for more from Rebecca Saar about what's coming at TDX, and don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

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Full show transcript Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, I sit down with Rebecca Saar, the Senior Director of Admin Relations for Salesforce, to talk about how the admin role is changing as AI and agents become really part of our everyday life. Now, we're going to dig into why Salesforce admins are becoming the guardians of trust, how strong fundamentals still matter, and where human judgment fits in when automation gets smarter. I like to think this is a very thoughtful conversation about governance, productivity, and why Salesforce admins are more essential than ever. So with that, let's get Rebecca on the podcast. So Rebecca, welcome to the podcast.

Rebecca: Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me.

Mike: It's been a while. Last time you were on, we did an entire episode in German because international podcasts are fun.

Rebecca: Yeah. What a ride. How many years ago was that?

Mike: Just a few. It's like one or two in Salesforce admin years, which translate differently to the rest of the world.

Rebecca: Right. And then I also say we've had a pandemic in between, so that has made time fly.

Mike: Yep.

Rebecca: And I think that was a pre-pandemic thing.

Mike: It was. 100% pre-pandemic. Yep, absolutely. And then since then, you've been on stage quite a few times for the admin keynote. And doing a whole bunch of stuff with the admin relations team. You and I have both been on stage too.

Rebecca: I know. Yes, we have been championing admins since 2014?

Mike: Since forever.

Rebecca: Yes. Dedicating over a decade and celebrating that big decade 10-year anniversary was a couple of years ago. And that was a big highlight for me, being able to share that with everyone on stage at Dreamforce. But yeah, since last time I was on the pod, I have now become the lead of admin relations and kind of leading this amazing team of evangelists and marketers on our mission to enable and empower and inspire all of our Salesforce admins out there.

Mike: And we're doing that as a transition to talk about... Literally right before I pressed record on this podcast, I was listening to NPR talk through AI and how AI is affecting something. They quoted 60 to 80% of the people in the workplace now use AI for some sort of task. And it kind of flashed back to me because it was interesting listening to them talk. They were describing, so when you tell AI to do something, that's a prompt. And listening to people walk through the understanding that I think a lot of Salesforce admins went through two or three years ago, I remember having people on the podcast to talk about prompt engineering, and I'm listening to them now, I'm like, "How do you not know this already? What world are you living in? You should already know about prompts and prompt engineering." But leading admins now as we're not just working with AI, but AI's working with us, right?

Rebecca: Yeah. AI is everywhere. I think just in the last few years, it's accelerated so, so much. Yeah, I've been thinking about this a lot because not only are our admins and our whole Trailblazer community thinking about the impact of AI. But it really is across at least tech industry, but corporate world where everyone is kind of thinking about how are we incorporating AI into our workplace.

Mike: So I was thinking of the article that you published, How the Salesforce Administrator Role is Evolving in the Agentic Era. And the first kind of big bullet point or the first subhead under there is The New Mandate, The Guardian of Trust. And working on that article with you, I happened to think of the very first thing that I did when I was a Salesforce administrator. Well, the second thing I did. The first thing I did was I updated my profile. The second thing I did was I got certified and I was one of the first 500 Salesforce admins certified. And I remember posting that to... We had a local kind of intranet at the company that I was at. And I remember posting that just out of pride for myself that I had passed, but also really wanting my users and my executives to know like, "Hey, when I suggest something, it's because I'm knowledgeable about it, so you should trust me." And I think it's interesting that almost 15 years later, when AI comes around, this is the very first thing that we're talking about with admins as being the guardians of trust.

Rebecca: Yeah. Trust, it's our number one value. And it's, I think, the most important thing our admins can do for their company and their users. You manage the data, you manage security, you manage automation. And these are the pieces of the system that need to come together in a trusted way. It makes the admin critical to the success.

Mike: A lot of it is also helping our users and ensuring that when we implement Agentforce for a specific process like in sales or in service, that it's really something to aid them. I think of a lot of people, the discussion on NPR was, "Well, I don't know what to ask or I don't know what to do." And of course, as an admin, when you're demoing something for Agentforce, you want to show, here's the words you type in. And you'd like to think in a perfect world, all of your users are going to use that exact perfect prompt when in reality they're not. People forget prompts, people forget what they're trying to do, and then they can easily get frustrated. I think part of that guardian of trust that we're doing is, let's put it in places where it can benefit our users the most in terms of productivity that might be easy to just farm out so that really we're bringing the best out of that person. I think of now when I was deploying a contract object a long, long time ago, the people that worked in contracts, the value of them wasn't the fact that they knew how to open an envelope or read through a paper contract or photocopy it. And I say that because at the time we did all of that, it was all physical contracts. That's not what they were getting paid for. They're getting paid for their knowledge of being able to digest that information of the contract. And I think of kind of the same value for the admin. It's not the buttons they click that make it important. It's how do they implement the agent and then how do they use their judgment to say, "Let's put this agent here at this point in the process to make all of our users really use the skill that they're being hired for."

Rebecca: Yeah, 100% percent. I really feel that these tools are coming to help us be more productive. We keep kind of hearing this narrative around with AI that we're replacing roles, we need less people, and does that mean there's room for my role? And I think that's really missing the big kind of upside of all of this is that there is so much work to be done. Especially when I talk to admins, they're wearing multiple hats. They've got cues and cases that they're trying to get through. And think about all the ways that AI can then help you as an admin be more productive and get more work done, which ultimately means you can serve more of your users and the company.

Mike: Yeah. I think of it as... So I was trying to think of other industries that we've seen major shifts in, I think AI is really close to automation. And if you look at how auto manufacturing has evolved from the moving assembly line of the 1930s and '40s with Henry Ford up until a current day, I want to say, and I've watched a couple of YouTube videos because I think it's fascinating, but realistically a car when it's being built isn't touched by a human for the first something like 10 hours of it being built. And it only takes like 30 hours to build a car, which first of all is kind of insane when you consider how much there is that goes into it. But even if you look at stuff that would be highly profitable to be fully automated, we still haven't fully automated anything because I think even as humans, it's that level of control that we need over things to make sure. But the parts that like for the car being built, for example, we're automating is, okay, well, we can do this repetitiously. And it's a very low level skill as opposed to really hiring people. There's still people you think of 100 years later that build cars in a car manufacturing plant, robots never took over. It's just the part that they get hired to do is the very highly specialized part. And I think of that with AI where it's not going to replace Salesforce admins. It's the admins that know how to use it are going to be the hyper productive built out systems because they know when to have AI built for them and when they need to jump in.

Rebecca: Yeah, exactly. I think the work shifts from the building piece more to the before planning and preparing, and all that work admins do talking with stakeholders, gathering the requirements, really getting precise on the solution. And then the work after the building where we're monitoring the agents and assessing how they are performing. It's just a shift in mindset and where the work is happening because we now can leverage these super powerful tools.

Mike: Right. There's parts now, and we've even seen this. I've had Cheryl Feldman on the podcast to talk about how setup is getting better. And if you're watching any, I think this last... Well, when I recorded this is in March, I just watched Mo do the Agentforce Now tour virtual workshop and walking through agents. And there's still parts of it where the admin needs to understand what the part of the business is that I need to go to talk to, because a casual user probably doesn't know that. And then also, how is this stitching all of the data together? Because as I found when I was an admin for eight years, everybody in an organization only knows their own siloed data. And they only know where it comes from and who they ship it off to, but rarely do they know if either of those are exactly the forms of data that they need. And so for example, like when I was doing a sales implementation, the information that would come in from the opportunity, the finance team was like, "This is of no use to us. Somebody else needs this. Here's what we need." And that's the part where actually sitting down and making those judgment calls as a Salesforce admin is, "Okay, here's how the agent can help do that." The two operating divisions might never come to that conclusion on their own.

Rebecca: Yeah. It's really the admin running the system. There are different departments, there's different tools we're using, there's data in different places. So how does it all come together and how are we looking at the day-to-day operations of these systems and maintaining them and scaling them?

Mike: Now, I think what's interesting, Rebecca, so that article was super fun to help write and get out. This was the beginning of a journey, and I'll link to it in the show notes. You also spoke with a couple of next gen admins, we'll call them that, with Tony and Ishrat. I think so looking through those blog posts as well, what were some of the things that kind of stood out to you?

Rebecca: Yeah. First of all, I'm so grateful to all of the admins I've been talking to in the last couple of months. Through those conversations, it really helped define that blog, Mike, that we wrote together, because there's so many insights that kind of came to light and a lot of grounding and agreeing on areas where it's important to have focus. I think one thing that really came to light in Ishrat's was talking around governance. And really kind of thinking about the admin as going from problem solver to sense maker, which I thought was an interesting phrase. But as the admin, you are kind of the translator of your org. You understand or need to understand what all these pieces are and how they work and why an agent is doing what it's doing, because you kind of helped bring it to life in the beginning. So that was kind of an outstanding insight there. And then from Tony, I had some great conversations around, I think a highlight for me was just thinking about the importance of the foundations and knowing the kind of foundational skills of an admin. And not losing sight of that as we leverage and use more and more AI. Still knowing what a data model is, knowing how to set up a flow, how these core kind of building blocks work well so that you can be the sense maker and understand eventually what an AI is doing and automating for you.

Mike: Yeah. I think looking through both those, I love the way they ended. Tony kind of sums up, "I'm going to give you what you need, not just what you want." And essentially Ishrat says the same thing of the person who connects business intent to data quality. And I think that's always the thing. There's always the... And I used to explain this a lot when I would do training, you run the report and you think you know what it's going to say. And then the data comes back with something different. And nine times out of 10, the user would be like, "Well, the report's wrong." Not that you put the data in wrong, the data is telling you something different than what you thought. And I think with both of them, that's the role that the Salesforce admin plays so critical is, "Well, here's the intent of what we're trying to capture and here's the agent capturing it and spelling it out for us. Now, here's actually what the outcome is and maybe the business process that we need to change as a result of it, as opposed to what we were focused on.

Rebecca: Yeah, love a good reporting situation. How can we change this report? Because it's not the outcome I was looking for.

Mike: Right, exactly. I need more pie charts. That's always the end result is the pie charts. But this is really cool. I think right now all of the roles are really sitting back and trying to understand how they fully utilize this new tool, because I think of it like how Steve Jobs explained the bicycle of humans can move, they can put one foot in front of the other, but the bicycle makes us infinitely so much more productive. And I look at how AI is doing the same thing for Salesforce admins in terms of just allowing us to... Some of the work that Cheryl's doing was set up, asking query who has the right permissions, as opposed to spending that time trying to run reports or comparative reports, having it do that work for us so that we can sit down and have those really targeted conversations about who should have the right profiles and permission sets, as opposed to spending that time just looking through thousands of reports.

Rebecca: Exactly. It's an exciting time. I really think obviously we sit in the bubble here and we see all the innovation firsthand. But it does feel like a very exciting time in our industry and for Salesforce and for the Salesforce ecosystem. There's so much opportunity for those that are excited and willing to kind of embrace this and bring this to their companies. Mike, I was curious how you're feeling. We see this incredible opportunity and the value the admin brings having talked to admins out in the community, is that resonating? Are people-

Mike: I remember sitting down at Florida dreaming not too long ago, and listening to all of the Salesforce admins that were not only paying attention to what Agentforce could do, but what other AIs can do for them. I think you mentioned we live in a bubble and I think in terms of my friends, because I work in tech, I definitely know more about AI than most of them. But I would consider myself medium level intelligence of AI in the tech world. It's really, this is another tool, how do I be productive with it? And they're not looking at it as, "Oh, this is something scary." They're looking at as, how do I embrace this? And I think it's the same way that we look at how computers came about. Once upon a time, as I've seen on watching Mad Men on AMC, people typed. There was huge steno pools. If you needed a copy made, somebody literally had to type copies of that. And then the copy machine happened. Well, the copy machine didn't put people out of work. It just made people more efficient. And so companies were able to move those individuals around into places that could make them more efficient. And admins now have a tool that just kind of, it's like literally going from walking to riding a bicycle. And of course, there's lots of different bicycles and everybody has their own preference.

Rebecca: Exactly. I feel like the admins who lean into this won't just be staying relevant. They're going to be the most important people at their company.

Mike: Well, and as I was having the conversation with Daniel Peters talking about small business, if you think of, "Well, I'm just a Salesforce admin at a small business, what can I do?" He actually brings a point up of, if you built an agent that would literally just help the person answer questions while they're filling out a form or while they're creating a record in Salesforce, you would have so much better data. And his example was when they would take orders for cheese over the phone, there was insane amount of information that you had to know. This certain cheese could only be sold in these sizes and this certain cheese could only be sold during these months. And for the person, the on-ramp, you think of that person, "Okay, well, I answer a phone and I write an order form for cheese. How hard could that be?" Really hard when you have 30 different cheeses and umpteen number of different ways that that cheese could be sold, you think, "Well, I'm a Salesforce admin at a 20 licensed company that sells cheese. What could I do?" Wow. You could create an agent that helps the person who takes phone orders, answer questions super reliably. And that makes your onboarding so much faster for that person, and your orders more correct because a small business is going to live and die by five orders, whereas a really giant company five orders might not be that much. But if you think of the impact just at that level, that's huge. Just at a 20 license company, now you go up to a 2000 or a 20,000 license company and you think of the same impact. It's so much, you can have just that little bit of knowledge that enables the person on the phone to show up at work and feel confident about what they're doing. That's usually the end of the day where you go home and give yourself a high five as an admin because you made somebody's day better.

Rebecca: Yeah, that's huge. And I love that we're talking food again.

Mike: Right. It always comes back to food. We have an event in San Francisco, speaking of food, in a couple of weeks from this, which is TDX. And I think there's going to be quite a few Agentforce stuff and flow and set up and holy cow, there's a lot of things going on, isn't there?

Rebecca: Yes. So much going on for TDX. We're really excited. The whole team's been working on this and we're super excited to welcome everyone to San Francisco. Mike, you've been working on the admin track, which is going to be stellar. We have also the hackathon coming back in a different form than last TDX. It's hybrid and we're going to be showcasing the top three finalists at the hackathon showdown, which is exciting because this time it's in the main keynote. It's going to be the big stage. So it's going to be a really exciting moment. We're also bringing things like True to the Core Deep Dive to TDX for the first time. So there's a whole track that we are managing to bring that great experience that we know our admins and the rest of our Trailblazers really love to TDX as well. I know I'm missing things. There are so many cool things in the zone to get hands-on, to have more opportunities, to talk to product managers, to see roadmap, to get your questions answered. Mike, jump in. What else?

Mike: Oh, there's a lot. And I would say, if you haven't already, go online and start sketching out your schedule now because there's a lot of great sessions. And there's also a lot of great opportunities to get what I call fingers on keyboards right at the event and talk with individuals. And there will be some content, a lot of admin content and developer and architect that'll be available on demand after the event as well. So try and pick and choose where you spend your time wisely, because some of it you can always watch later too.

Rebecca: Yes. Sound advice. Plan your agenda ahead of time.

Mike: Exactly. And over plan. I think to wrap up, Rebecca, you're a San Francisco native with all these people coming to town. Do you have a suggestion on a favorite place to eat?

Rebecca: Wow. Putting me on the spot.

Mike: Yep. Not Super Duper because that's right around the corner from Moscone West and always full.

Rebecca: [inaudible 00:25:26] all around close by. Well, can I share where a favorite of the admin relations team?

Mike: Yeah, absolutely.

Rebecca: Yeah. Ideale? No, I'm not sure.

Mike: I don't know. I think it's... Is it Ideal?

Rebecca: Ideal?

Mike: I don't know.

Rebecca: So I was trying to go Italiano. The Italian place in North Beach. It's going to be really yummy.

Mike: Yeah. So that's really cool. I'll put a link in the show notes. We've had some really good pasta there and it's a nice little restaurant, little... Definitely a Waymo if you want to take a Waymo ride from downtown, but nice little street and kind of gets you out of the conference hustle and bustle.

Rebecca: Yeah. I will say we've had really nice weather, so anywhere along the Embarcadero is going to be really nice if this weather holds up.

Mike: Knock on wood, it does, hopefully. Well, Rebecca, thanks for coming on. I'm sure people will be looking for us at TDX and we are happy to talk about more, or of course look for more admins to interview to get your voices out there about the Next Gen blog series that we're writing. So thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Rebecca: Thank you, Mike.

Mike: So thanks again to Rebecca for coming on the podcast and sharing why the future of admin work is really less about losing ground to AI and more about gaining leverage with it. I think when admins lead with trust, we understand the business and keep the foundation strong, that puts us in a powerful position to guide how agents are actually going to help make all of our users so much better. So thanks for listening to this episode of the podcast. Be sure to listen, subscribe, share this episode with somebody that is looking to become a Salesforce admin. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Neil Foglio, Solution Architect at Arkus. Join us as we chat about how to use a backlog to prioritize requests in your Salesforce org, and how Agentforce can help improve transparency and trust.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Neil Foglio.

Why Salesforce Admins need a backlog We talk a lot about forward-looking statements on this podcast, but what about that thing trailing along behind you? That's right, it's your technical debt. If you're facing a mountain of requests, this episode is for you. That's why I sat down with Neil Foglio. He explains how your backlog can be a tool to streamline your Salesforce org and help it evolve with your business.

"It's not a to-do list and it's not a task list," Neil says, "it's a commitment that something will be prioritized amongst everything else that you have on your plate." It's a central place to capture all requests, improvements, and ideas, and then evaluate them so you can figure out what to work on and when.

Writing better backlog items For Neil, the key to making a backlog that works for you is to write better action items. Make sure that every item starts with an action verb. Instead of "create a new fundraising homepage," be more specific: "design a new Lightning page so gift officers can see donation history."

The other key step is to evaluate and prioritize your action items. There are several different systems you can use, but you're generally looking at value, effort, and risk. How much impact will making this change have? What resources will you need to get it done? And finally, what data do you have to support what you believe?

For many organizations, there will also be custom dimensions that have their own score. For example, an educational institution may evaluate everything in terms of how it improves student learning. What's important is to establish a clear process and get buy-in from leadership over how things are prioritized.

How Agentforce can help with backlogs Managing your Salesforce backlog is even easier with Agentforce. As Neil explains, getting a clear and specific user story is crucial to creating useful action items. You can set up an agent to take requests, and go through the granular details with the user of every action they're taking in a business process so you can get to the why behind their request.

Agentforce can also help you improve transparency by explaining the why behind your prioritization decisions. You can have a helper explain what you're working on and when you expect to deliver it.

Be sure to listen to the full episode for more from Neil and hear his upright bass playing. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

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Full show transcript Mike: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins podcast. And hey, you know what? That intro music you hear today, that's actually our guest, Neil Foglio, playing the upright bass. Neil is a solution architect at Arkus. And in this episode, we're talking about something every admin eventually runs into the backlog. Neil shares how thinking about your Salesforce org, more like a product than a project, can change how you manage requests, prioritize improvements, and make sure the right work gets done at the right time. We also dig into practical ways admins can evaluate ideas using simple frameworks like RICE so decisions feel fair and transparent. If you've ever wondered how to handle the constant flow of, "Hey, could we add this request?" This conversation's going to help. So with that, let's get Neil on the podcast. So Neil, welcome to the podcast.

Neil Foglio: Hey, Mike, thanks for having me.

Mike: I'm excited to talk about this because a lot of things on the podcast we always talk about are future-facing. And I feel like this topic is kind of future-facing, but it's also managing, well, I don't know how best to put it, the burden of debt that we somehow get ourselves into. And in that, it's backlogs, which doesn't sound interesting, but I promise you, you're going to be excited by the end of this podcast. So Neil, let's start off with introducing you to the world and kind of let people know what you do and how you got into the Salesforce ecosystem.

Neil Foglio: Yeah, of course. Hello, everyone listening. My name is Neil and I'm a solution architect at Arcus, Inc, where I work with both nonprofits and enterprises implementing Salesforce. Most of my work lately has been helping organizations treat their CRM more like a product than a project, and to rethink how they steer their Salesforce org with their evolving businesses, where governance kind of comes into the picture, and that's where this topic of the backlog fits in.

Mike: Yeah. Wow. That's interesting because I'm looking at the core responsibilities we have for admins, and project and product management are both core responsibilities.

Neil Foglio: Yeah. I feel like a lot of admins now are really acting more like product managers, steering their Salesforce org, figuring out what elements have the most value and where you can produce the most ROI. And this is where you want to have systems that prioritize those things, and that's exactly what the backlog is.

Mike: Okay. So I will confess this, that when I started as an admin a long time ago before the iPhone, we'll just say that as a date, I had no concept of some of the technical things that my developer friends knew. I didn't know about change management. I didn't know about backlogs or managing technical debt. For newer admins that are just getting started in the ecosystem and at their organizations, how do you define what a backlog is and how do you define what gets on a backlog?

Neil Foglio: Yeah, absolutely. And I was in that same boat. So I started my tech career coming from healthcare. And so the first time I heard the word backlog, I thought it was a terrible thing, that something wasn't happening, work wasn't getting done, patients weren't being cared for. But when we think back to starting in a Salesforce org, you might have been in a position where you inherit an org or your company gets some new leadership that wants to make a bunch of improvements to the org and you find yourself questioning, "Well, where do I start and how do I prioritize all of these questions and features coming at me?" Without a system to rate them all, the things that typically will get done are those asked by the person with the most seniority in the room or the person that's emailing you three times a week.

Mike: Right. Sometimes it's the same person.

Neil Foglio: Could be. And sometimes it is especially when there is new leadership or a disruptive factor happens in the business that we need to respond to. And what the backlog is it's a tool that creates a level playing field for all of these ideas and their stakeholders. So it's a central place to do two things. Number one, to capture all of these requests and improvements and ideas, and number two, to rate them against each other using the same evaluative criteria so you can figure out which ones have the most value at this moment when you have capacity to build something new.

Mike: That makes sense. I mean, to be fair, when I first started, the requests would... I would manage them basically in the order that they were received. And I very quickly had to learn, "Oh wait, creating a list view is way less effort than creating a contract management application," for example. And just because the list view is the third one down doesn't mean I can't just bump it up and knock out a whole bunch of half hour jobs as opposed to, "Well, it's going to have to wait until I get this monster of a contract application created."

Neil Foglio: I mean, those little things tend to add up too, right? So if you're spending a lot of your time in a reactive mode and you're doing these requests as they're coming in, you might not really have a lot to show for it at the end of the day.

Mike: You can. Yeah, absolutely. I had to learn how to manage my backlog. And I will say this, your backlog isn't your email inbox, right?

Neil Foglio: No. It's not a to do list and it's not a task list. It's more of a commitment that something will be prioritized amongst everything else that you have on your plate.

Mike: Sure. How do you suggest admins manage their backlog?

Neil Foglio: Yeah. So if you were to Google this online, you'd see there are a bunch of different prioritization techniques. So before we get to prioritizing the items on the backlog, we should talk about what makes a good backlog item because those vague items like creating a new fundraising homepage are not something that can be easily estimated, right? So the idea here is that if you have enough detail in your backlog items, you can figure out how much time it will take, how many users it impacts, how much confidence you have that it's actually a problem that can be solved, and how much effort in terms of time, hours, or people will take to get it done. So the first kind of step is making sure that all of your backlog items start with an action verb. So using that fundraising homepage as an example, we can reframe that to say something like, "Design a new lightning page so gift officers can see donation history." In that one sentence now, we have exactly what we want to make. Maybe there's some reporting or dashboards in there too, who it's for, and what the impact would be for the organization.

Mike: I like that. I think writing titles out and using different words or verbs or tenses is so my jam because when I was in sales, I would always write all my to do lists in the third person. So it was like future Mike telling present Mike what to do. And I remember all of the salespeople would make fun of me. I was like, "Yeah, but when I go to pull up my to do list, it literally tells me what I need to do right now and I don't have to decode what I was writing my notes on." So I like that you start everything with a verb.

Neil Foglio: Yeah. Bring it into that trusted system, right?

Mike: I mean, the backlog's there, the second you get 10 requests and you fulfill six of them, well, now you have a backlog of four, and then tomorrow you get 10 more requests. How do you balance between the two in terms of managing new requests versus shoveling all of the new stuff into the backlog?

Neil Foglio: This is where the prioritization comes through. And so if we were to Google backlog prioritization techniques, you'll see a whole bunch of different methods, but what they all kind of have in common is that they convert three things: value, effort, and risk into a numerical score. So teams can compare those ideas more objectively. In doing that, you're not trying to get to an absolute value. Precision isn't really the goal, but again, we're comparing the relative priority. So what you'll see is a really common prioritization technique has the acronym RICE, where the R stands for reach. Think number of users. Let's say you have a defect and it affects a hundred users or a thousand external stakeholders who get a specific document generated. I is impact, which is usually a scale where higher numbers have more impact. The C is for confidence, which accounts for how well you have data to back up what you're saying. And this is typically given as a percentage. And E is the effort, and that is measured in time or resources. But whatever the technique, the most important thing is that this process of entering things into the backlog and revisiting the backlog happens on a regular cadence. So maybe it's appropriate if you have a pretty heavy backlog that it happens twice a month or once a month if there's not too much on it. But this consistent way to evaluate requests lets the prioritization process feel fair and transparent. And you can't put a price on that kind of trust, right?

Mike: Yeah. No, that's good. So from a technology standpoint, how have you managed your backlog? Do you use cases in service or built a custom object or managed it outside of Salesforce?

Neil Foglio: Well, I think I have to say that everything should be in Salesforce, right?

Mike: Yes.

Neil Foglio: Even if it wasn't on your podcast [inaudible 00:11:45].

Mike: If it's not in Salesforce, it doesn't count.

Neil Foglio: Right. Exactly. But if you're a new admin that's starting out trying to figure out what needs to happen in your Salesforce org, you can design a custom object that has some picklist values, new in progress. You can create the custom dimensions you want to rate your backlog items on. So by custom dimensions, we just talked about reach, impact, confidence, and effort, but some sectors will have more tailored solutions. So for example, healthcare usually has a score that has something to do with patients, like risk of patient harm or impact to care coordination. Finance orgs are probably interested in reducing the likelihood of fraud or improving regulatory compliance. And I'm working with an educational institution right now, you'll think you'll find this interesting, that's evaluating every Salesforce idea on how well that idea improves student learning.

Mike: Ooh.

Neil Foglio: And we think about putting that all in a Salesforce object, you can have all those ratings right there as your picklist values so you can easily calculate a formula to say, "Here is the score of this backlog item, and here's how that compares to everything else that's currently in flux."

Mike: Wow, that's really cool. I like that. How much... We've kind of skipped over just the request part of building a backlog. But when I was an admin, I think I always struggled with the ticketing system that I created, not in managing it, but in how many questions and how many fields do I have users fill out for a certain request? Because there's always that like, "I need a lot." And I remember a long time ago, Gary Palmatier told me, "Always ask people to tell it to you in plain English, not in Salesforce speak." Right?

Neil Foglio: Right.

Mike: And by that he meant, "I need to manage my incoming leads so that I ensure everybody gets called back 24 hours after a trade show and I send them a brochure." Not, "I need to manage new lead records and have your users describe what's going on in Salesforce." Where do you find there's kind of a sweet spot in terms of getting that information from users or managing that so that you can adequately decide, "Here's how much effort this one's going to take versus this one, which I'm going to put in the backlog"?

Neil Foglio: That level of detail is really important because that allows you to estimate the effort. We wouldn't ask our users to tell us how long it would take us to implement a feature. And I think you're absolutely right that giving it in plain English lets you figure out what that user story is, and then maybe also lets you connect with people who can give you more guidance as to what it would take to bring that element to fruition, right? So I think getting that user story and that journey down from the person that's submitting the backlog request is probably what's most important because you'd want to know how do you replicate this? If it's a defect, what do I have to do to find this defect and resolve it? If it's a journey, if it's creating a document or sending out tax letters for donors, you want to know what those steps are so you can properly estimate it. And sometimes that comes just from doing and having your users tell you exactly what it is they are doing and what they'd want to do.

Mike: Right. No, it's good. So Agentforce.

Neil Foglio: Agentforce.

Mike: Agentforce can help us do a lot of things. What do you see as use cases? Because this is also a great area for admins to build agents to help them manage their implementation. What do you see as use cases for admins to build agents to help with a backlog or with feature requests?

Neil Foglio: Maybe the first question is, is building the agent on your backlog?

Mike: Ooh, look at you going Meta. So is it people? There's the question for you.

Neil Foglio: So is it? Well, I think when we think about what the agent's capabilities are, if you're already managing your backlog in Salesforce and not an external ticketing system or an Excel sheet, you can have your agent answer questions as to what similar backlog items have happened in the past because that's probably a really good use case because what happens over time with these backlogs is that they become this form of organizational memory. When you complete a backlog, you're not going to delete it from your backlog, it would be archived and completed. And that's when you start to see patterns in the requests that people make. And that's where AI is really useful in telling us what those patterns are.

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. And I was also thinking too, boy, you could... There's a lot of... I don't know. Sometimes I have too many ideas and my mouth is going like, "What if it asks you had a question agent before they put in their request like, 'I'd really like to do this blah, blah, blah report'." And instead of just submitting the ticket, the agent's like, "Oh, well, that report already exists." And then it shows you the report and then it's like, "Yay, this agent saved me 18 tickets this week or something."

Neil Foglio: Yeah. Or, "We're already working on this report for you and we expect to have it delivered in this quarter."

Mike: Yeah. I mean, the agent could immediately look at the backlog and say, "Well, actually a similar ticket has been submitted and its status is X. So do you want to submit another one?" I think that was always something that I ran into, was one person have a good idea and then somebody in another department would have the same idea, but they think they're both the first person to have that idea. And so then you'd end up getting two or three tickets that it's like, "Well, these are all the same ticket," you know?

Neil Foglio: That's where the backlog also is this collaborative tool, which if done really well, fosters this incredible sense of trust across the organization because you want to share those things with people who are interested in them.

Mike: Yep. So let's talk about sharing. I created a dashboard that everybody in my org had access to. So they could see the number of tickets, they could see the status of tickets. And I felt like for me, the transparency kept everything honest. Somebody never said, "Well, it's just submitting it to a black hole." It's like, "No. When you submit it, look, the dashboard changed. Here's your ticket." What level of transparency do you suggest for admins in terms of sharing their backlog with their users? Because I think it can be tough sometimes when you have to make that decision of, "I need to pause on this because I can create these four list views and knock four tickets off my backlog as opposed to spending the next four and a half hours and creating this app or something because it can feel sometimes like favoritism."

Neil Foglio: Oh, absolutely. And I think that's where backlog management isn't really a single person's job. I think the most effective teams usually have a committee, like a steering committee, that will review the backlog on a regular cadence together, which pulls in the executive sponsors of certain departments to make sure that the prioritization is happening in a fair and transparent way. And that level of commitment from leadership is pretty important for an initiative like this in large and small organizations because the backlog is your holding place, but it's also your prioritization space. And so a lot of people tend to get involved. Everyone wants to push their items up on the backlog --

Mike: Oh, yeah.

Neil Foglio: ... unless their stuff done.

Mike: Everybody wants to be platinum status.

Neil Foglio: Right. Right. And that's where when you have this objective tool, you can explain why things are not happening in the order that maybe somebody wants them to. And then having that backup from your leadership or from your manager to agree with you is just as equally powerful.

Mike: Yeah. That's always one important part that admins play is the governance of everything, making sure that all the departments and all the stakeholders really have visibility into things because it's always surprising how organizations think they talk a lot, but in realistic terms, they change processes within their own department and then sometimes they forget the downstream or upstream effects of those process changes.

Neil Foglio: Right. Or other departments are missing out on the efficiencies they just created because they don't know.

Mike: Oh, absolutely. All the time.

Neil Foglio: Right.

Mike: All the time. Neil, one of the things that's kind of fun about working in tech is I think people have interesting hobbies. I know I spoke to product managers that were into puzzles and games. I had a product manager on once that was into smelting pewter and little pewter figurines.

Neil Foglio: Oh, wow.

Mike: I was like, that's commitment, because those furnaces get up to like 2,200 degrees. You're not going to burn your house down. There's going to be nothing left.

Neil Foglio: I wouldn't do that in my house.

Mike: He did it in his garage, but still. Maybe I've watched too many YouTube videos of frying turkeys on Thanksgiving and I just envision that would be the same thing. But I'm curious, what do you do outside of managing backlogs and building agents to manage backlogs and thinking about building agents to do other things?

Neil Foglio: Yeah. So I'm a practitioner of Engrosser's Script, which is a style of American calligraphy developed in the late 19th century. And I'm also a upright bass player, little bit of jazz, but mostly classical.

Mike: Okay. So this is the one part where I wish we had video. Tell me more about the calligraphy stuff because that... I mean, I got to tell you, beautiful handwriting, that's a lost art.

Neil Foglio: It's always been important to me. I think this started for me in seventh grade when I started getting interested in calligraphy. And more recently, I find it more meditative because when you're creating a letter form, you're really doing several strokes. It's not all one consistent stroke. You're picking up the pen several times. So sometimes to create one word, you're spending 15 minutes.

Mike: Wow.

Neil Foglio: And you can only be in that zone doing that process.

Mike: Wow. I mean, with everything technology, that lost art of handwriting and beautiful handwriting is... I always look back at... It's not the same, but I have a whole box of my grandma's recipe cards. And she just had very beautiful cursive and they just took time. And that calligraphy is just... That's something I think now maybe with how fast you can change fonts on a screen you forget about.

Neil Foglio: Yeah. They even make robots who will do the calligraphy for you using real ink and paper.

Mike: Oh.

Neil Foglio: Isn't that sad?

Mike: I don't know. That's kind of cool though, because man. Oh, okay. And then you mentioned upright bass player. I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you to play something because you would be the first musician on the podcast. So can I talk you into playing something cool?

Neil Foglio: Oh, absolutely. I may have learned a little jingle specific for your podcast, Mike.

Mike: Sweet.

Neil Foglio: I think that's your podcast jingle. Yeah.

Mike: Yeah. That's pretty much it right there. Wow. That's awesome. That is really cool.

Neil Foglio: Thank you.

Mike: Well, Neil, thanks so much for coming on and riffing with us. I think... Did you ever watch Ted Lasso?

Neil Foglio: No, I haven't.

Mike: Okay. I think there's an upright bass player on Ted Lasso too. So it's worth a watch, worth a watch for sure. But that was cool. Thanks for playing that little riff and sharing with us about backlogs. And I think you've ideated more than a few people to create some agents to manage backlogs.

Neil Foglio: Yeah, I hope so. Thanks so much for having me.

Mike: Huge thanks to Neil for joining me on the podcast and sharing how admins can turn their backlog into a real decision-making tool. From writing clearer backlog items to comparing ideas using impact, effort, and reach, Neil offered some practical approaches any admin can start using right away. And of course, a big thanks for playing the upright bass intro music. I don't know that I get live podcast themes with every guest, so that was an extra fun treat. If you found this episode helpful, share it with a fellow Salesforce admin or someone on your team who can help you prioritize Salesforce work. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Cheryl Feldman, Senior Director of Product Management at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about how Agentforce is reshaping the Setup experience.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Cheryl Feldman.

From 1,300 pages to one conversation Let's be honest. Setup has always been where the real admin magic happens. But it can be surprisingly complicated to answer a simple question, like, "Why can't my user edit this record?"

As Cheryl Feldman explains, it's because Setup has slowly grown in complexity over time. As new products and features were added to Salesforce, Setup pages multiplied. And while that level of complexity will always be necessary, it doesn't need to be so hard for admins to navigate.

That's where Setup with Agentforce comes in. Whether it's troubleshooting permissions, understanding formulas, or finding the right configuration page, you can do it all with conversational AI instead of wading through 1,300 pages.

How to try Setup with Agentforce right now Setup with Agentforce is currently available in open beta, so you can give it a try in production, a sandbox, or a developer org. Cheryl and her team would love to get your feedback. "We want to hear from admins," she says, "Does it help you? And what do you want us to solve next?"

Right now, Setup with Agentforce can handle common use cases, like user access, formulas, data model, and Flow. And for questions it can't cover, the agent will pull answers from Salesforce's help and training documentation and point you to the correct Setup pages to get the job done.

A simpler, agent-driven future for Setup Right now, Setup with Agentforce focuses on high-impact, everyday Setup tasks. But Cheryl and her team have big plans for the future.

One area they're looking at is multi-step orchestration, which will give admins the ability to create objects or fields, grant users access to them, and add them to a layout in one guided process. Instead of jumping between pages, you'll be able to complete related tasks in a single conversational experience.

Most importantly, we need your feedback to shape what comes next. Jump on the open beta, reach out to Cheryl and her team, and let's make some admin magic.

Check out the full episode for more from Cheryl Feldman. And remember to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Podcast swag * Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more * Trailblazer Community Group: Setup With Agentforce (Beta) * Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: How Do I Understand a Complex Salesforce Formula Quickly? * Salesforce Admins Blog: Introducing Setup with Agentforce (Beta): Your New Admin Superpower * Dreamforce '25 on Salesforce+: The Future of Setup Powered by Agentforce * Dreamforce '25 on Salesforce+: Setup Now with Agentforce: Simplifying the Complex * Dreamforce '25 on Salesforce+: Setup with Agentforce: New Superpower for Salesforce Admins

Admin Trailblazers Group * Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social * Cheryl on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on X * Mike on Bluesky social * Mike on Threads * Mike on X

Love our podcasts? Subscribe today or review us on iTunes! Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt:

This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, well, let's be honest, setup has always been where the real admin magic happens. On this episode, I am talking to Cheryl Feldman, Product Management Senior Director at Salesforce, and longtime admin advocate to unpack how Agentforce is reshaping the way we build, troubleshoot, and think through configuration. From solving tricky user access questions to helping us with formulas and beyond, this is about making setup smarter and more intuitive. With that, let's get Cheryl on the podcast.

So Cheryl, welcome to the podcast.

Cheryl Feldman:

Thanks so much, Mike. I'm excited to be back.

Mike Gerholdt :

I'm excited to have you back. You were a rockstar at Dreamforce this year, and you're probably going to be a rockstar this whole year. I know in the admin keynote, we demoed Agentforce for Setup. I think I'm using that term right, right?

Cheryl Feldman:

Setup with Agentforce, but thank you. Yes.

Mike Gerholdt :

Okay. See, I'm always backwards.

Cheryl Feldman:

Yes. I was so excited to see that work in the keynote and to see the exciting admin response and excited that we went to beta today.

Mike Gerholdt :

Oh my God. I feel like I feel as much joy for this as I do when we could customize the homepage.

Cheryl Feldman:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt :

It sounds so small. We're getting in super knee-deep. Let's zoom out for a second because I'm sure there's a lot of new admins that are like, "What are they talking about?"

Cheryl, for people that haven't met you and heard you in some of the True to the Core, and some of the Q&A sessions where I feel like Parker just calls on you constantly, could you do a little bit of an introduction of what you do and the fun stuff you get to work on at Salesforce?

Cheryl Feldman:

Sure. My name is Cheryl Feldman, and I'm a Product Manager in platform. Been at Salesforce about four and a half years now. Prior to joining Salesforce, I was actually a customer for just over 18 years in, starting out as an admin, moved into more leadership and management roles, was running a COE at a very large bank before I joined Salesforce. And when I joined Salesforce, I started in the user access area, specifically managing the authorization side of things, and then started to really advocate that we improve admin experiences. That led me to my role now where I act as the product domain lead for Setup with Agentforce, and improving experiences for admins and really addressing a lot of the issues that admins have in setup because speaking of True to the Core, setup has come up pretty much every True to the Core has ever existed. And that's what I do here at Salesforce.

Mike Gerholdt :

Which is a lot to say the least. I will fan out a little bit because I remember when Cheryl, you were a customer, you always had questions I couldn't answer, which challenged me. And now to see you on the inside, I mean, it's one thing to hang an identity and say admin developer architect, but that kind of core identity that people have that you made your name on of configuring one of the most complex CRMs to meet business needs without deploying code is just so empowering. And I just, for me, on behalf of all the people like me, I'm just so appreciative to have you inside the PM org championing for people that want to be in tech that don't understand or know how to write code. I had to say that early just because-

Cheryl Feldman:

Thank you. Thank you for saying that.

Mike Gerholdt :

... I don't get to talk to you a whole lot. You're a busy person, especially with the new setup stuff. I mean, I remember demoing permission sets and permission set groups and feeling like, "Holy cow, Cheryl just moved a mountain."

But you're like, "Yeah, I can move mountains, but what about planets?" And now you're tackling setup. Where did this come from?

Cheryl Feldman:

This came from back, I think it was June 1st, 2022, one of our incredible Trailblazers, Andrew Russo, hope he doesn't mind me shouting him out, stood up at True to the Core and said, "When are you actually fixing setup? When are you doing anything, something?"

And I had been pushing internally that we needed to do something. And I said, "Well, if not me, then who?" And so I started looking at the usage of setup, and something that it didn't necessarily surprise me, but it validated a lot of things that I believe that the areas and user access were the most used areas and setup, which was the area that I was managing at that point from a product standpoint. And I said, "Well, what are the big issues that we need to sell for admins?" And a lot of it was around troubleshooting. So we introduced the user access summaries, and we did a lot of great work in user access, but we didn't really expand beyond that.

And so we said, "What would it take to actually fix all of setup?" And trying to actually do that is... Actually, I'll be honest, it would be an impossible task given the state and that there's no framework behind setup. So when Agentforce started to come about, we said, "Well, what if we looked at Agentforce, and what if we could help admins and rethink setup using Agentforce, and revamp things and revamp the experience that way?" And so that's how everything came about.

We started with, let's improve some of the pages to then let's see if we can tackle a larger part of setup, and that's what we've been doing. And Agentforce has helped unlock that for us because I'll be honest, the way we were going previously, we probably would've been here for 20 years because there were over almost 1,300 pages in setup, there's a lot.

Mike Gerholdt :

Wow. Well, and as I come to find out, I mean, there was no real governance of setup.

Cheryl Feldman:

That's true. That is very true.

Mike Gerholdt :

And so everybody, when they created a new product would just add it to the setup menu.

Cheryl Feldman:

Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt :

Wow. And I happened to think that the solution actually in 2022 maybe was, it had been invented. I'm sure somebody will call me out on when AI was birthed, but it wasn't in our nomenclature for another year or so.

Cheryl Feldman:

Yep.

Mike Gerholdt :

And that was actually the solution because I remember thinking, I was at a world tour in Boston and somebody came up and said, "With the innovations coming out around AI, why can't I just send screenshots of my problems or my formulas to AI to fix it?" And I thought, well, you should just solve that on the platform.

Cheryl Feldman:

Exactly. And we actually do, and so one of the things that Setup with Agentforce can help you with is to troubleshoot your formulas. It doesn't just troubleshoot user access, because that's one of the things we started looking at, what are customers asking in the Trailblazer community? And a lot of it is, I always see Steve Mo and I always say, "We need to help our agent think like Steve Mo helping out all those new admins with their formulas."

Mike Gerholdt :

Yeah. I think one important thing, and we don't have to get into the details of it, but one important thing is for you, this was, yes, a really cool thing to come out with, but you also dug into, "Well, but how does this help on the back end? How does this help our customer service? How does this help our admins?" And you don't have to share it, but you really found what the percentage of cases and the reason some of the admins were calling into our customer support line.

Cheryl Feldman:

Yes. This is probably not a shock to a lot of admins out there, but it was very hard if you are not familiar with SOQL to answer the question, "Why can't my user do a thing or why can't my user edit this record?" That was very complicated to figure out. So unless you had a developer working with you who could run SOQL for you, you ended up contacting support. And so we started looking at how could we help admins help themselves in an experience through natural language. And so that is one of the first use cases that we took what setup with the Agentforce was around that troubleshooting.

Mike Gerholdt :

Wow. That's amazing. So fast-forward, it's January 2026. I almost said '25. I don't know why. It's like the brain didn't move ahead a year. How are we doing? Where are we at with our agentifying setup?

Cheryl Feldman:

The exciting announcement as of today, or you'll be listening to us in a couple of weeks. It'll be out for a couple of weeks already, but we are now an open beta. We were, announced our pilot at Dreamforce, so we're now in open beta, so customers can go enable this and try it out. We solve use cases and we handle use cases across user access, formulas, data model, flow, a lot of the most common areas and setup. Now, I don't want to say we handle everything, but we do handle a lot, but we want customer feedback. We want to hear from admins is, does it help you and what do you want us to solve next? And so that's where we are right now.

Mike Gerholdt :

Okay. And just to clarify, because sometimes I know for a long time as an admin, I wasn't able to do some of the things. Pilot was totally, you had to sign up, and Cheryl had to interview you, and you had to shake hands and there was a vetting process, right?

Cheryl Feldman:

Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt :

Open beta for an admin sitting there listening to the podcast means they can access it in their sandbox or?

Cheryl Feldman:

They can access it in production, or a sandbox, or in a developer org. It just has to be for developer org. It has to be the specific developer org that has access to Agentforce and Data Cloud.

Mike Gerholdt :

Okay.

Cheryl Feldman:

And then they can enable it. And so they'll see, if their org has Agentforce and Data Cloud, they'll see a banner at the top of setup that will redirect them to enable this.

Mike Gerholdt :

Awesome. You're super close to the product. If you were an admin now, what would be the first thing you would suggest an admin should do when they try this out?

Cheryl Feldman:

I would say think about an issue that you had, whether it was an issue writing a formula or an issue trying to figure out what a user of access was, and ask that question to Setup with Agentforce and see where you get. One of the things that I think is really cool that I would've loved this when I was a customer, because I had to answer this question all the time. You could actually ask the agent, "Show me a list of users that have access to customized application or modify all data or manage users or managing public list fees," and it'll show you a list. There is no great way in the platform to actually figure that out without running a SOQL query.

Mike Gerholdt :

Right.

Cheryl Feldman:

And so that is something I'm actually really, really, really excited about. That's where I would start is start thinking about some of the questions that you have. One of the other features that we have is we actually have and help a navigation action. If we don't actually have actions that actually help you do something or analyze something, it will actually take our help in training documentation and generate an answer for you and also help you navigate to the right setup page.

Let's say you ask the agent, "How do I setup Agentforce for sales?" Instead of having to go out to the help and training site or out to Google to figure that out, you could ask that right and setup and this will help generate an answer. And then if there's something where you need to redirect to a setup page, it'll give you a link that'll just navigate you to the right setup page.

Mike Gerholdt :

Wow, okay. I mean, this takes setup from an area where I'm navigating a million little dropdown carets to a whole experience where I can actually query. I remember a while back, it was like we used to say you could talk to your data. Now, you can talk to your setup menu.

Cheryl Feldman:

Yes. Now you can talk to setup.

Mike Gerholdt :

In the lifespan of Salesforce products, you said it went from pilot to now open beta. I'm not going to hit you up for timelines, but what is the next step?

Cheryl Feldman:

The next step is we want to start enabling some more use cases and handling more of setup. We can, I'm sure, share a link to a presentation we did at Dreamforce called the Feature of Setup. We talked about introducing essentially another framework that essentially runs Setup with Agentforce. We're working towards that. And so we handle, we actually started with, we looked at the most used areas in setup and we started with that, but that essentially the most used areas in setup are essentially sit within 40 pages within setup. I mentioned there are 1,300. The next step is how do we expand this beyond these most used common use cases to everything in setup? And that is the framework that we're building.

The other thing that we're working towards is how do we handle what we call multistep orchestration and being able to do multiple steps as far as setups. So think about when you create objects or fields, being able to grant access, adding it to layouts or dynamic forms, those are all multiple steps and being able to do those together. That's essentially what we're working towards from the framework. I can't give out exact timelines yet, but those-

Mike Gerholdt :

No, I don't expect you to.

Cheryl Feldman:

... that we're working towards right now to handle more of setup. And so that's what you're going to see start coming as we move throughout the year.

Mike Gerholdt :

So you envision a world where on Monday an admin could sit, take some requirements, vet out a process, maybe start talking to... I say talking, hello? Typing. Typing to Agentforce for setup and start building an app and then maybe on Wednesday or Thursday, continue building it and possibly even deploy it on Friday and doing it all conversationally.

Cheryl Feldman:

I think eventually, yes, we will get there. We're handling right now. We consider that. We're starting to think about our building use cases, and I'm actually working, I think you've met my colleague, Tian, and he's working towards the building use cases. And so he would actually be a great person to have on this podcast.

Mike Gerholdt :

I know. He's been in the admin keynote.

Cheryl Feldman:

Yes. And so I think we're looking at, I would say overall, yes, but we're not handling those type of use cases yet as far as building an end-to-end app. I would say we're looking at more of the everyday configuration use cases and setup use cases right now, but we're starting to think about right now. So I would say Tian would be a great person to have on this podcast.

Mike Gerholdt :

Yeah, absolutely. Talk the building part. One thing that I've thought of, and it's come up in other AI conversations is Josh made a mention of it in a previous podcast too of AI almost feels like that first time you get to use a calculator in math class. And I remember my math teacher saying, "Well, the calculator's answer shouldn't be a surprise. You should know what its output is expecting."

Two years, one year, I don't know the timeline down the line, it's feasible that an admin could sit down and just conversationally build an app. What are the thought process behind also adding to that so that if they didn't use Agentforce for setup to build that app, that they would know how to jump into the configuration of it?

Cheryl Feldman:

That's a good question that I'm not sure I have an answer for right now, but I do see that we probably want to do something like that where, because I don't necessarily see a day where setup is going to completely go away. I think it'll still be there. And I think it's important for admins to understand what the agent is helping them do and why. Something we've talked about long-term, and this is further out, is something that I like to call architect in a box.

Mike Gerholdt :

Ooh.

Cheryl Feldman:

And I think there's a very big bridge between an admin and an architect. And this is not to downplay the role of an architect, super important role, but I think if you talk, and I played an architect role before I joined Salesforce, so I think it's very much how do we help admins think more like architects on their day-to-day tasks. And so how do we explain to them if they say, "Okay, let me update. If they tell an agent or even go into setup, let me update my sharing model." Doing that on Tuesday at three o'clock is probably not a great idea, right? And helping you think through the changes, what is the impact of the change that you're making and that's where we want to go directionally.

Mike Gerholdt :

Oh, I like that. I mean, that's being context aware of, you asked me this, but it's say January 29th and our quarter closes in three days, refactoring a sharing model or refactoring permissions might leave salespeople unable to update an important opportunity. What if we do this on February 1 and then have that delayed reaction or that delayed action in a queue or something?

Cheryl Feldman:

Yep. Or thinking about if you're making a change, is that going to impact you negatively from a security perspective? Those are some things that we're starting to think about on how we help admins make really good decisions.

Mike Gerholdt :

Right.

Cheryl Feldman:

It's not that admins don't make good decisions today. I think sometimes we make it really hard for admins to make good decisions because sometimes the tools to make those decisions are either sitting in where you have to run queries to the dev console, which not everybody is comfortable with, or you have to have read all of our documentation and have essentially what I like to call the PhD in Salesforce, which is either one of the big architect certifications or to actually be a CTA. And I think we need to bridge that gap.

Mike Gerholdt :

Yeah. No, that was always something along those lines that came up a hundred years ago when Process Builder was around was it's so easy to build processes and an admin or anybody could just theoretically sit down and load up an org with processes that would essentially be really more efficient as just one trigger and what's the trade-off and pros and cons there. That's a really good way of thinking of it. I mean, the other thing, future-looking, would be to have the setup agent or whatever we call them, they should have a name.

Cheryl Feldman:

Setup with Agentforce, yeah.

Mike Gerholdt :

Yeah, I know.

Cheryl Feldman:

But our actual agent is called Enhanced Agent for Setup.

Mike Gerholdt :

Okay. But I mean a nice name like Claude or I don't know. I can't think of another name. I know that's another AI, I just meant it as a human name. But to be like, "Hey, Cheryl, you just asked me this question, but I'm also chatting with your peer admin who's in New Jersey and Robin just asked me a similar thing," because there's also the idea that there's many admins working in an org to solve issues.

Cheryl Feldman:

Yeah, I don't think we've actually figured out how to do something like that yet, but that's an interesting use case.

Mike Gerholdt :

No, I mean, I'm not poking holes. Sometimes it's fun to think about what the future is once this gets out of the box.

Cheryl Feldman:

Yeah. And I think one thing for admins is I want to hear feedback as admins are listening to, what would you want us to solve? I want to hear from admins, especially as they're trying this out what they want us to sell.

Mike Gerholdt :

Yeah, absolutely. We'll put a link in the post so people can do that because I was just thinking, are there already agentic setup ideas coming in to the idea exchange about this? But I mean, obviously I think you want to filter them all into one location, right?

Cheryl Feldman:

I would love ideas. I actually haven't seen any ideas come in yet, but that is-

Mike Gerholdt :

Oh, somebody's got to put one out there.

Cheryl Feldman:

Somebody's got to [inaudible 00:23:12].

Mike Gerholdt :

Help Cheryl retire some points.

Cheryl Feldman:

Yeah. But there's definitely with Setup with Agentforce, we are retiring a lot of idea exchange points. And so one of the things customers have wanted us to solve for a long time is the ability to clone and use it. We're able to Setup with Agentforce to do that. Some of the troubleshooting things are things that customers have been asking from us forever, and so those are some really good things that we're able to do. And we also took that lens when we were looking at the initial launch, how can we solve some of these longtime admin requests that we just have not been able to solve because either it requires us to build this really, really complicated UI, or there's technical issues. How can we actually solve some of these things that admins have been asking for for a long time?

Mike Gerholdt :

Yeah. So you may have said this, but it just popped in my mind. It helps you with formulas, right?

Cheryl Feldman:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt :

Okay. Well, there goes a Dreamforce session. For those of us that have been in the community for a while, Daniel Hooks used to do best practices on formulas and validation rules session at Dreamforce. Packed to the walls every time. Now we have setup for Agentforce. Look at that. Efficiency.

Cheryl Feldman:

And I think we've actually proposed a session for TDX. Hint, hint.

Mike Gerholdt :

For the admin track, maybe?

Cheryl Feldman:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt :

Would you like it in the admin track?

Cheryl Feldman:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt :

I'll have to talk to that guy, he's a real stickler.

Cheryl Feldman:

And so I've actually started putting together a document of a number of sessions we would love that I think admins would love to see how Setup with Agentforce works live for some of their most common use cases.

Mike Gerholdt :

Oh yeah, that would be a fun thing. Almost like, this'll date me, like a Total Request Live.

Cheryl Feldman:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt :

Remember when MTV used to do that?

Cheryl Feldman:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt :

Just show up and shout out your requests and DJ Cheryl will make Agentforce solve your problems.

Cheryl Feldman:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt :

I like that.

Cheryl Feldman:

Now there's going to be somebody listening who's going to be like, "What's TRL?"

Mike Gerholdt :

I know. That's okay. I say a lot of things that date me, so that's definitely not the first one, but you can Google it, it's out there. Ask an AI about what TRL is and then you'll slowly find out.

Cheryl, I appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule. I know you're in more meetings than one should have on their calendar about this, but I truly do mean the stuff that you're working on is just so impactful for people in their careers who are making a name for themselves inside of organizations and building their skill. Technology is such a fun ecosystem to work in and it's so empowering when it works the way you want it to. And I feel like you work on the stuff that you're making it work the way we all think it should work, so thank you.

Cheryl Feldman:

Thank you so much, Mike. And to all the admins out there, thank you for your support, so many of you give me great feedback. And also, I'm willing to take the hard feedback. I also really like when admins tell me, and I know you're all not shy, tell me if there's something we should be doing better. And I know we still have a ways to go, but I do want all of your feedback and I do value all of your feedback. And that's why True to the Core, even as an employee, is still my favorite session at Dreamforce and TDX because we get the hard truths that we need to look at, and that's something that's always near and dear to my heart. I know we can't do everything, but I do absolutely love hearing all of the feedback from the admin community.

Mike Gerholdt :

Absolutely. Thank you, Cheryl.

Huge thanks to Cheryl Feldman for walking us through where setup is headed and how Agentforce is opening the door to a more guided, intelligent admin experience. If you're curious about what an agent-driven future looks like in your org, now is the time to experiment, explore, and share your feedback. This evolution of setup is being shaped by you, the Salesforce admins.

So don't sit on the sidelines. Give the episode a listen, try it out in your org. If you enjoyed it, send it to another admin to see what they can think up next. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Joshua Birk, Senior Director of Admin Evangelism at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about how to get started with Agent Script and how it helps admins build better AI agents.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Joshua Birk.

What is Agent Script? Big changes are coming to how admins build AI agents with Salesforce, and so I've brought Josh Birk on the pod to help us understand what's going on with the new Agentforce Builder.

There are backend updates to the Atlas Reasoning Engine, but Agent Script is where the rubber meets the road for admins. It's a simple, high-level scripting language that lets you create complex instructions and actions for your agent to follow. Agent Script puts the human in the loop for all the little decisions an AI makes, helping you build more predictable and reliable agentic solutions.

If you're comfortable with coding, you can pop open the hood with Script view, but there's also a visual Canvas view to help you see how things fit together and make the changes you want. And as always, you can just tell the Agentforce assistant what you want your agent to be able to do, and it'll list out suggestions for you to accept or decline.

Why can't I copy my agents into the new Agent Builder? The biggest question most admins have about the new Agent Builder is why they can't just copy and paste their old agents into the new system. The answer is that the new version uses a completely different engine: hybrid reasoning.

Josh uses the example of the transition to Lightning Web Components from Aura and Visualforce. LWC was created to align with modern web standards that simply didn't exist when these older frameworks were developed.

The same principle applies to the new Agentforce Builder and the addition of Agent Script. The control that it gives you is a result of the hybrid reasoning engine it's built around.

Don't panic, learn Agent Script Josh's biggest piece of advice is to take things slowly. The agents you've built in classic will still work fine, and just like with Visualforce, they're not going to be sunsetted anytime soon. "Salesforce does not like taking away people's toys," Josh says, "you don't need to be in a rush to go and recreate your existing agents in the new Agentforce Builder."

Instead, try building new agents with Agent Script. It'll give you a better idea of just how much more control and reliability is possible. And once you've gotten your feet wet, you'll have a better idea of what you'll get when you update your existing agents. As Josh says, "Don't panic, learn Agent Script."

There's more great stuff from my conversation with Josh about Agent Script and the new Agentforce Builder, so be sure to take a listen. And make sure you're subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

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Love our podcasts? Subscribe today or review us on iTunes! Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, if you've ever been wondering why you can't just copy and paste your old agents into the new version, this episode is for you. I'm joined by Josh Birk, who recently walked our admin relations team through what's really changing with Agent Builder and Agentforce. And more importantly, why it matters. We're going to unpack a little bit of hybrid reasoning, what determinism really means for admins, and how Agent Script gives you even more control without losing all of that magic. So with that, let's get Josh on the podcast. So Josh, welcome back to the podcast.

Josh Birk: Thanks for having me, Mike.

Mike Gerholdt: Well, we know that a few people are vibing now because of the dulcet tones of Josh Birk. So in all honesty, you were in a team meeting last week and you were kind of updating the team on stuff that's coming out for new products and beta products. And the biggest thing that you always explain is like, so why is this important?

Josh Birk: Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt: And of course, every now and then you end your little skit with, "Thanks for attending my TED Talk."

Josh Birk: Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt: And I remember last week's meeting, I was like, "Oh man, that's a podcast. I need to do that."

Josh Birk: Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt: Because the way that you would explained what was new with Agent Builder and Agentforce, I was just like, "Oh, that totally makes sense to me." So this is where we're at and this is what I was hoping we would talk about.

Josh Birk: Yeah. And I'll have to try because I kind of remember getting into a very weird, almost like conspiracy theory level stream of consciousness.

Mike Gerholdt: Oh, okay. Well, it didn't feel that way.

Josh Birk: Good. I think that's years of experience of thinking in streams of consciousnesses, whatever the plural of that is. So yeah, so I think to kind of recap a little bit, so there were two things that I think are kind of important to consider about the new Agent Builder. One is what we mean by hybrid reasoning and what we mean by determinism. And then the second thing is, where does Agent Script fit into that? So the question we were kind of tackling was, why didn't we just go back and revise the old builder? Why can't we just reiterate on it? Why are we starting completely new?

Mike Gerholdt: And I think you even said, not to interrupt you, but to interrupt you, why can't I just move my stuff over? Why do I have to rebuild it?

Josh Birk: And why can't I just move my stuff over? Why isn't it just copy and paste? And Agent Script is part of that. So the original engine wasn't hybrid, is I think the easiest way to put it. So this came with a conversation with product management where I was trying to describe the differences between the old builder and the new builder. And they're like, well, let's ... The old builder wasn't doing anything wrong, so much is that the new builder's doing something more. And what the new builder's doing that is more is that when we say hybrid, when we think of AI, we think of AI being autonomous, making its own decisions. So we had the Atlas reasoning engine that's like, "Oh, Mike is looking to find a description on a certain account. I'm going to take these actions. I'm going to put them together into a plan and then I'm going to try to make that work." What we didn't have was the human in the loop portion of that. And where Agent Script really comes into play is it allows users to basically be like, "In this scenario, I want you to behave like this." So when we say hybrid, we mean, yeah, we're letting the engine kind of do its own magic. But then we're also applying almost ... I don't want to say flow because that's such a loaded term for a Salesforce community.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.

Josh Birk: But well, let's go to the name, right? A script, right? A script that a human can actually control personality, control tone, control behavior. When you see this, do this, when you need to call it human. So kind of giving this very human-friendly dialogue that you can then apply to the agent. And so that's how we provide more determinism. So the reason you can't just copy and paste your old agent into the new agent is the old agent doesn't have that connection to Agent Script. And so it's literally missing a piece of the puzzle to run the engine kind of thing.

Mike Gerholdt: Right. No, I think ... I mean, hearing you explain it, sometimes, at least as an admin, I was always like, "Oh, so they just came out with another version because they had to stick another layer of something on."

Josh Birk: Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt: Or like a car analogy, they changed the fuzzy dice. But this is, no, no, no, no. We're really moving from this version, which ran a certain way to an even better version. And that's the part that I feel like ... Because you brought up Flow, I feel like we've been through this with Flow.

Josh Birk: Yeah, totally.

Mike Gerholdt: We got like a business process ... Business management process is what it used to be called. And then that thing went through iterations and then we found a different engine to run it on. And then we had ProcessBuilder for a while and then now we have the new Flow. And it's like sometimes it's not just the interface that changed, but it's actually the guts behind it. Because I mean, I can't recall ... It's sometime between after the pandemic and today that AI came around. And I feel like that's the window that works in my brain because I can't put down a time.

Josh Birk: Totally.

Mike Gerholdt: Was it 2022 or is it 2023? I don't know. Post pandemic, before today, AI happened. But just when you thought, okay, I've kind of got this thing figured out, nope, all of this stuff changes.

Josh Birk: Yeah. And it happens in technology, right? It happened with the Lightning Web Components. We really kind of had to go back and take the new ECMAScript format and take the new ECMAScript standard and really rebuild the way our web components work so that they work in a standard based way. So that they're more similar to React and more similar to these other frameworks. And there wasn't really a way to go back to Aura, now it's called, and just be like, "Hey, Aura, be more standards based."

Mike Gerholdt: Right.

Josh Birk: Because Aura was effectively just ... It was pre-standards is the easiest way to put it. So this happens, right? Now, if people are listening to this and like, "Oh gosh, I have all this work in my old Agent Builder, what am I going to do?" First of all, Salesforce does not like taking away people's toys.

Mike Gerholdt: Right. We've learned that.

Josh Birk: We've learned that. I've said this anecdote in workshops so many times because when we did release Lightning, one of the most common questions I got was, "Are you going to end of life Visualforce?" So I went to the product manager, might have been Skip at the time. And I'm like, "Hey, when would you end of life Visualforce?" And his response was, "When I pull up a dashboard and I see there are zero active users using Visualforce, and then I'd probably wait three months after that."

Mike Gerholdt: Just in case.

Josh Birk: Just in case, right?

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.

Josh Birk: So the classic one is not going anywhere anytime soon. But I think the other important thing is a lot of our messaging when it comes to building out agents is that you're already an Agent Builder. You're already somebody who can build AIs because you know Flow, because you know Salesforce. Now you've learned topics, now you've learned actions and all of that kind of stuff. All of that is still true. It's all still true. And so you're still getting to use your existing skills in order to control it. It's really just adding the skill of knowing how to write out the Agent Script. Now, one of the cool, really cool things about ... Well, there's two cool things about the new builder that I think will really help people with that. One is the Canvas mode. And so Canvas mode takes what you write in Agent Script and puts it into a visual UI interpretation. And so this is very handy for two things. Number one, it gives you a little bit of kind of a predictive window as to what your script is going to be doing. It also gives you a very visual way of thinking about it. It's also a really neat way to go look at somebody else's Agent Script and translate it. So you don't have to read through all the thing. You can flip over to Canvas mode and be like, "Oh, that's trying to get these parameters in order to do these actions." The other thing going back to vibes and this new AI coding AI is that you'll have an AI assistant in Builder to help you build the AI. So you're not alone. Agent Builder itself will also help you create these things out. So my biggest statement back in the Lightning web component today was don't panic and learn lighting. And now it's, don't panic and learn Agent Script and you're going to build out some really powerful solutions.

Mike Gerholdt: Well, and I think back to ... I mean, I was chatting with Jennifer today too, and just the way that we started using AI. And I remember, I mean, not that long ago doing workshops and saying, "Okay, you need to tell the AI your role, its role. And then what you want it to do and what it can do and what it can't do." And for everything, whatever model you were using, I remember writing prompts a certain way. And I feel like for this and with Agentforce, especially for admins, this is the least set it and forget it kind of thing.

Josh Birk: Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt: Because you can always go back and make it better.

Josh Birk: And tweak it. Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt: And this is-

Josh Birk: And tweak it in theory. Yeah, exactly. In very small corners too.

Mike Gerholdt: Small corners that make a huge difference because like with Flow, I mean, half the time I'm just excited that I got it to do what I needed it to do. And then I look at what Jennifer built and I feel like I'm over here rubbing two sticks together.

Josh Birk: Together.

Mike Gerholdt: But with Flow, that's your goal, right? You just want that, okay, boom, it's done. But with agents, people are interacting with them, they're asking them questions, I can make this so much better and I can make this better. Here's the clue when people stop using them. To your point of when you would replace Visualforce. Well, if you're looking at your Agentforce dashboard and seeing, "Hey, your users aren't using it." well, now might be a time to like, "Well, let's switch over, let's round some edges, let's change some things." And I would say this is like an every two weeks kind of thing. Which sounds crazy, but the amount at which you're going to find feedback from your users. And the amount of rounding of edges, I worked myself into an English problem here. It's going to be like, you're going to find like a star and then it's going to look like a ribbon of rounded edges that you have to work on. Because as you use that new builder, now your users are happier and being more proficient. And I think like even today, when Jennifer and I were talking, we were talking about building Gems in Gemini. And I said, "One thing that I do is I'll actually have another window open and ask it to refine my instructions in Gemini."

Josh Birk: Oh, yeah.

Mike Gerholdt: Because the way that I write the instructions works for me, but maybe not for it and it can refine it. And I've seen it take thousand word prompts and reduce it down to 200 and it's actually faster. And so having all of that is sometimes there's a lot to keep up with. But it's all for the better because now you're like click click, oh wow. And then you get that ... I think it's always, at the end of the day, the admin is going after that first look on a user's face and they're like, "Ooh, this-

Josh Birk: Nailed it.

Mike Gerholdt: ... just made my life so much easier."

Josh Birk: Exactly. Yeah. And I think to kind of append to that, again, not to overuse this analogy of Visualforce. But it's like don't be in a rush to go and recreate your existing agents in the new Agent Builder. If you have a new agent you're building, I would start with the new Agent Builder and go from there. Two reasons, don't fix what's not broken. And also you'll learn more about Agent Script and things like that. So when you do decide to move your old agent to the new builder, you'll be more educated on how to do it. Now, huge forward-looking statement, asterisk, safe harbor, there is a conversation internally about creating a porting tool of some kind. It's on a roadmap somewhere, no guarantees.

Mike Gerholdt: Oh.

Josh Birk: But I do think people should know where we are looking at that kind of thing. So stay tuned because we do want to make this as easy as possible.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Yeah. But also there's some joy in rebuilding things and maybe that's just me. But I've always-

Josh Birk: Seems like part of the tech world. Yeah, exactly.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I mean, there's that and there's also, it reintroduces you to things that at one time you were good at and brings it back. And then I think too, anytime that these new features come out, one part is, okay, well, here's the tech to change it. But also, has the process changed? Has the stuff that people do internally changed? And that might also be true. And the other point you brought up, which was really salient, just because you can change it, doesn't mean you should right now.

Josh Birk: Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt: One thing that ... And I was a part of this, doing a big org rollout. What are the other changes that your users are experiencing within your organization? And so you adding to that, is that one layer too many? Or when would be a better time? Like we always joke, like you're not going to roll out a sales opportunity change the last week of the quarter.

Josh Birk: Right, right.

Mike Gerholdt: So picking your timing, this means that gives you time to test.

Josh Birk: Yes. Yeah. And I think this goes into a lot of the conversation we're having about admins in the AgentiCare. Like what kind of a steward are you being? And how are you using those existing instincts and skills as an admin to not topple over the apple cart, but now you're doing with AI?

Mike Gerholdt: Right. Because in my opinion, admins are getting paid for their judgments.

Josh Birk: Yeah. Yeah. Agreed.

Mike Gerholdt: Josh, thanks for coming on and helping us understand the new Agent Builder.

Josh Birk: Thanks for listening to my TED Talk. Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt: I knew you had to fit that in. And we've got just enough time that Daryl can hopefully get his boat from home to the internal ... It's not internal. Inside the podcast joke.

Josh Birk: Inside the podcast joke.

Mike Gerholdt: You have to go back to the Daryl Moon episode-

Josh Birk: Yeah, exactly.

Mike Gerholdt: ... and then it all makes sense. It's the key to unlocking the mystery of the Dan Brown episodes. I don't think so.

Josh Birk: I love it.

Mike Gerholdt: Anyway.

Josh Birk: I love it.

Mike Gerholdt: Have a good day, Josh. Thanks for coming on.

Josh Birk: Cheers, my man. You too.

Mike Gerholdt: Huge thanks to Josh for coming on very impromptu and turning what could have been, I think, a little confusing of an update into something that actually makes sense. New engine, new script layer, AI helping you build AI. Awesome. I like it. So remember, don't panic, learn Agent Script, and it's all about having fun. And like any powerful tool in Salesforce, it's less about flipping a switch and more about steady improvement over time. So if this episode helped you clarify your next steps, share it with another Salesforce admin who's navigating some AI right now. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Kate Lessard, Lead Admin Evangelist at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about the new True to the Core Deep Dive sessions coming to TDX.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Kate Lessard.

True to the Core Deep Dives are coming to TDX If you've been enjoying the True to the Core Deep Dive video series, we've got something exciting coming up for you at TDX. Each month, we host a virtual Q&A session with Salesforce product leaders about a topic chosen by the community. It's a great opportunity to dig into tough use cases and thorny questions around a specific area of the platform.

The video series has been so helpful that we're going to take it a step further. This year at TDX, we'll have four live True to the Core Deep Dive sessions on specific topics, like flow and automation. These will be can't-miss events, and Kate Lessard is here to tell us what she has in store.

Direct access to product leaders "The chance to actually connect directly with the Salesforce product leaders on those core platform topics is worth its weight in gold," Kate says. It's not just about solving problems; it's about understanding the thinking behind why things work the way they do and where the product roadmap might be headed.

If you're newer to the Salesforce ecosystem and worried that things might get too technical, Kate encourages you to check out these breakout sessions. "There's a lot that you can gain from just being in the room, seeing who those product leaders are, hearing what's top of mind for them, and how they're answering questions," she says.

You can better prepare for what's coming next on the platform, and you never know when a random use case you came across might apply to you and your org. And even if you can't be there in person, you can participate virtually on Salesforce+.

How admins should prepare for TDX TDX is such a great opportunity to level up your technical skills and get to know the product better. One thing I used to do to prepare was conduct an audit of my Salesforce org. What products are we using? Where are we having problems? Where are we going next?

Figuring out what you're interested in can help you make the most of your time at TDX. Hopefully, you'll come back armed with information and insights to help your stakeholders chart a path forward with Salesforce.

Listen to the full episode for more from my conversation with Kate about True to the Core Deep Dives at TDX, and be sure to catch her on Kate Clicks Through It. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

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Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt:

Welcome to Salesforce Admins podcast. This week I'm joined by Kate Lessard to talk about the brand new True to the Core Deep Dive sessions coming to TDX and why they might just be your favorite part of the event. We dig into how these sessions are shaped by community feedback, what Salesforce admins, especially the newer ones, can expect, and how to ask better questions to get some real value from our product leaders. Kate also shares some practical tips on preparing for TDX, so you walk away ahead of the curve. So with that, let's get Kate on the podcast.

So Kate, welcome to the podcast.

Kate Lessard:

Thanks. Happy to be back, it's been a while.

Mike Gerholdt:

It's been a while, yes or no, except if people are attuned to our YouTube page. You're on Shorts whenever I'm not publishing something about the podcast, so they're staying up to date. It's not like you've gone missing.

Kate Lessard:

No, no. I love being able to just share those top of minds and the things that are important or the lessons that we're learning as we really dive into Agentforce and all of the different things that we're learning over here, especially we just went through a new release and there are always fun new features to call out.

Mike Gerholdt:

Constantly. And we're heading into spring and spring means, besides new release, TDX.

Kate Lessard:

Yeah. That's an exciting time of year.

Mike Gerholdt:

I think so because it's kind of our shake the winter off, go out, see some fresh demos and some new stuff. I know as we're recording this podcast, kind of content is in flight and things are being worked on and ironed on, and so is it fair to say sneak peek or I forget, we use all these terms and sneak peek means something, but you have stuff in the works for TDX that you're working on that we're going to talk about.

Kate Lessard:

Yeah, so I am working on deep dives, which is really exciting. So you might have been following along and watching our recent True to the Core Deep Dive virtual series, and we are bringing True to the Core Deep Dives to TDX as well, so that is what I have been working on lately.

Mike Gerholdt:

Wow. So tell us more about deep dive. If somebody hasn't seen any video or anything about deep dives, what are they?

Kate Lessard:

So deep dives are really focused on diving deeper into community driven core Salesforce platform topics. So the virtual sessions, our community actually provides feedback and guides what those topics are. So they've been chosen using input from things like the idea exchange, past in-person True to the Core keynote sessions, as well as our virtual True to the Core sessions and feedback that the community shares. So it really gives the community a chance to guide the conversation and ask the questions that are really important to them.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, and you said True the core, which is always a popular session for anybody attending our events.

Kate Lessard:

And the thing about that True to the Core keynote, to just hop in there.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, no, no, no.

Kate Lessard:

It is, it's really popular. I remember as an admin, it was one that I never wanted to miss. And whether I had a question to ask or whether I wanted to just sit back and listen and hear what other people were asking and get ideas and cheer with them on the different wins and things that we got approved and that we saw progress on, it's so short that time flies by and inevitably there's just not enough time. You always have people that are still lined up and waiting to ask questions. And then we also have people that are submitting questions online, so there's no way to get to all of them, and I feel like these deep dives give us a chance to actually continue the conversation about certain large topics, things like flow and automation that people can come in and they can specifically ask their flow and automation questions that don't get covered during the keynote because there's just not enough time.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Well, that's the beauty of like the times I've been at user groups where you sit down and somebody says, "We're trying to do X, Y, and Z." And you go around the table like a bird's of a feather and you hear three different ways to do it and that person's face is like, "Ugh." And you kind of have to reassure them like there's three different ways to do it, all three are right, but the one that's right for you is the most right, which is why I think the True to the Core stuff is always so interesting because you kind of get people coming in with those edge cases.

Kate Lessard:

Absolutely. And the chance to actually connect directly with the Salesforce product leaders on those core platform topics, that's worth it's weight and gold I feel like because our community can get clarity on both upcoming features and some of the thinking behind the roadmap decisions and feel much more connected to the product and like they're participating and influencing these future releases by asking these questions and by sharing feedback, it's really important and impactful.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, and that's the ... Our product leaders are presenting at a lot of our events, but TDX, I know having worked on the track, they are really heavy into all of the product people. So the chances of you going to a session on flow or on Agent Builder or Lightning Web components, the chances of you seeing the product manager present and talk about that is really high at this event, moreso than a world tour or, well, Dreamforce, there's just a problem of you need like 100 of you to go to all the sessions.

Kate Lessard:

Yeah, absolutely. And to run across all of San Francisco it feels like to get to all the sessions on your agenda.

Mike Gerholdt:

You put the Dreamforce marathon on your step tracker.

Kate Lessard:

Yep. Wear your running shoes, you're going to need them.

Mike Gerholdt:

So True to the Core started a long, long time ago, way back when Salesforce launched Chatter, which was like, Hey, are you paying attention to the core features? Let's break this down. If you're a new Salesforce admin and you're like, "So do I go to this True to the Core Deep Dive?" I could foresee somebody sitting there and being like, "I don't understand why they're cheering, why we get email updates when flows error out or like a obscure feature." If you were a new Salesforce admin and you're going to the True to the Core Deep Dive session, what should you expect?

Kate Lessard:

If you're a new admin and you're kind of hesitant to go, I would encourage you to just go check it out and sit there and listen. Even if you don't have a specific question that you want to ask, I think that there's a lot that you can gain from just being in the room, seeing who those product leaders are, hearing what's top of mind for them and how they're answering questions because they're going to get questions about how they've built things and what's coming next and being able to have that insight so that you can start to think, "Oh, this is how I do this now and maybe I'm new to this, but this is what is being developed, this is what is being worked on, this is what's on the roadmap, this is kind of the future state."

I feel like it helps you become a better admin and prepare for what's coming next as well as to get some really insight into those use cases, as you mentioned, at community groups that get discussed so frequently because people will come with specific use cases and things that they've run into and really specific questions as well. And I just think it's a ton of information to take in and just being in the room is really helpful as a new admin.

Mike Gerholdt:

I couldn't agree more. Let's talk about, you said questions about 100 times.

Kate Lessard:

Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, I point it out because I've done a lot of webinars, this is going to date me, Jesus, back in the AM/FM radio days. What's that? But I've done a lot of webinars, a lot of live events, like release [inaudible 00:08:39] live, a lot of Q&A stuff. I've even done Q@A's after presentations. You've done a lot with this True to the Core content. For people going to TDX or people asking questions at these events, what is your advice on how to get the most out of it for just yourself and for everybody in the room?

Kate Lessard:

That is a great question and there I go using the question word again.

Mike Gerholdt:

That's okay.

Kate Lessard:

I think that how you ask a question is really important, and we do, even as we do the True to the Core Deep Dive virtual series, we even cover how to ask a good question and context is going to be key. If it's a specific use case, provide as much information and context as possible. If you know what specific feature or even which product manager you have a question for, being able to call them out and giving that information, super helpful. If not, we'll get there. We do have our product leaders that will be on stage and they'll pull in the different product managers that might be able to answer that question for you. But I think that context and just having a well-thought-out use case with all of the information that you want to bring into the question is going to be the most important thing.

Mike Gerholdt:

Do you often run into, because I would sit in these sessions a lot and be like, "Oh, I totally want to ask a question, but everybody's going to think it's silly"?

Kate Lessard:

Yeah, no silly questions, right? I think that that's always a concern for all of us. We want to be seen as subject matter experts in front of our peers. But if you have a question, even if you think it's silly, like nine times out of 10 somebody else has that question, and maybe it's even something that one of those newer admins in the room that's just there to listen and gain exposure, they have no idea. And you're going to be bringing that to light and getting answers for yourself and for a number of other people.

So I always say that there are no questions you shouldn't ask, and there are different ways that you can ask them as well. I think if you're in the room, you can get up and ask the questions at the mic. We're going to have a way to submit questions online, and that way we'll also be able to bring in community members who aren't in person. So this will be on Salesforce+ for people to watch as well. So I think that just deciding what way you're comfortable asking the questions is just going to be important for you, but get the answers that you need.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I think back to some of the True to the Cores that I would attend as a customer, and sometimes it's really making friends with the people sitting around you and talking with them because there have been times when just happenstance I had an issue and the person sitting next to me is like, "Oh, I've run into that too. You know who you need to talk to?" And then they'll tell you and it actually saves you from getting up and asking a question and moving to another question. And then you found somebody in the audience that you can be a session buddy with, so I think that's super important.

Kate, when you were heading to a session like this as a customer, what would some of the homework be? Because admins have about, oh my, 40, is it 45 days to the TDX? I think it's about 45 days.

Kate Lessard:

Yeah, it's coming quick.

Mike Gerholdt:

What should they be doing for homework to get ready for sessions like this?

Kate Lessard:

Well, we've never had a session quite like this before, so that's kind of a trick question. But I would say for all sessions in general, get on to the sessions on the TDX website and pick out the ones that are going to be most impactful to you. There's just so much there, it's impossible to attend and do them all. So pick the ones where you have questions, where you need more information, where you really want the chance to communicate directly and hear from those product leaders because as you called out, that really is the thing at TDX that makes it different, that makes it special. The opportunity to actually have those conversations with the product managers, with the product leaders and to get to know the product better, it really ups your technical skills.

Mike Gerholdt:

I couldn't agree more. I always feel like I was doing somewhat of a technical audit before I'd head to an event, just to know what I had on my company's roadmap and some of the features that maybe I was running into that I had issues with to come back, and it's always nice to check those off and take notes.

Kate Lessard:

Yeah, that technical audit, that's a really great point that I think that people should consider. Do an audit of your system. What are you using? What are you having issues with? Talk to your users about things that they might have questions about or struggles they might have. And really talk to your stakeholders as well about what their vision is for the future. Because you might be able to go to sessions and get information about products that you don't have but that you're considering and being able to come back and provide that information and a recommendation of either, "Yes, we should move forward," or, "This is the implementation plan," or, "This is the guidance that I got on this," I think that that is going to be hugely impactful for your organization.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, especially when they say, "So what did you learn? How much did this event cost us?" And you're like, "Well, I got to talk to these people and holy cow, I'm like four months ahead of the learning curve."

Last question, how did you balance in-person sessions versus broadcast sessions and repeat sessions? What was your strategy?

Kate Lessard:

I think that with these deep dive sessions, the goal was to give people as much opportunity as possible to answer or to get their questions answered and to get that live time. So our goal is to have this after the True to the Core keynote so that if people were waiting in line or had questions that they were unable to ask, that they can come to these deep dive sessions and they can continue the conversation and really get the information that they need.

So thinking of that, we really were particular about the topics we chose and made sure that we went to the idea exchange and we went to our survey results we get from the True to the Core Deep Dive sessions, the ones that are done virtually, where people provide feedback about what they want to hear more about or where they have questions. And really just trying to give that space for people to be able to come in and continue the conversation. So because of that, all four of our sessions will be on Salesforce+, and then we've tried to kind of divide what will be able to be live versus video on demand so that we can reach the broadest amount of people.

Mike Gerholdt:

Makes sense. Kate, you have a series on YouTube. You want to talk about it real quick? Because I feel like it's a really cool thing that, as a follow-up to this podcast, people can click over and watch some fun YouTube videos.

Kate Lessard:

Absolutely. So I am very much a person who learns by doing, as I think many Salesforce admins are. We want to really get hands-on with the different features that we're learning about, that we're delivering to our organizations and become those subject matter experts.

So I have a series on YouTube, it's called Kate Clicks Through It, where we take one of these backend processes and we actually walk through it step by step, and I give you a chance to be in either a developer edition or a Trailhead Playground and actually follow along and click along beside me so that you can get hands-on versus just watching a demo and then trying to go and replicate it.

And it's been really fun to do. I get to dive into these different topics that I think are really important for admins. And they can go ahead and do it along with me, learn by doing. And they're pretty short and sweet, they're all under 10 minutes so that our admins can go ahead and click through it with me on a lunch break or if they're in between meetings or if they just want a little bit of fun learning outside of their regular workday.

Mike Gerholdt:

I like it. It's awesome. Kate, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Kate Lessard:

It is my pleasure. I hope to see everyone. I know I'll see you, but I hope to see all of our awesome admins at TDX and hopefully in these True to the Core Deep Dive sessions. Be sure to add them as favorites when you go and look at your sessions on the TDX site.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, I want to thank Kate for coming on and helping us get prepped for the new True to the Core sessions. And I think they're going to give you a chance to really lean in. I think she gave you some really good advice on how to ask better questions. And most importantly, just connect with the people around you and what you're doing. So huge thanks to her for helping break that down on what to expect and how to show up prepared.

Now, if you're heading to TDX, make sure you favorite those sessions. And if you can attend in person, don't forget they'll be on Salesforce+.

Now, if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to share it with your Salesforce admin friends so they can get their questions ready too. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Gaurang Mathur, Senior Product Manager on the AI App Development team at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about how Setup with Agentforce is changing the way admins create, modify, and understand formulas.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Gaurang Mathur.

The massive scale of Salesforce Formulas If you're like me, you've spent more time than you'd like combing through your formulas for missing parentheses and commas. That's where this week's guest, Gaurang Mathur, comes in. As a Senior Product Manger on the AI App Development team at Salesforce, he's trying to make formulas a little easier for admins with Setup with Agentforce.

According to Gaurang, there are 5 billion formulas executed on Salesforce each month. They're created, managed, and modified by 7 million admins and developers. The scale of formulas is truly massive, and they're a fundamental building block of Salesforce. However, that means they're difficult to work with, and that's where the Setup with Agentforce beta comes in.

How Setup with Agentforce simplifies formulas We know that AI is really good at summarizing, debugging, and processing large amounts of information very quickly. Setup with Agentforce lets admins harness those agentic powers to make formulas easier to work with. You can diagnose problems, change an automation, or add something new.

Gaurang sees Setup with Agentforce as a game-changer for admins working with inherited orgs. If something isn't working or you need to make changes, you're usually spending hours wading through formulas to sort out what's essential and what's just buried tech debt.

With the beta, you'll be able to get a helping hand from an AI agent that can validate, describe, and even fix your formulas. Instead of having to figure out what does what, you can focus on making decisions and building something that works faster than ever before.

What's next for AI in Salesforce As far as what's coming next, Gaurang thinks that AI will continue to amplify what we can build in Salesforce. As he points out, we've actually been using AI for almost a decade in things like navigation apps, recommendations, and even autocorrect. There's no reason to be intimidated.

Looking forward, his team is looking at ways to use AI to collect feedback and make adjustments that make it even easier to work with and more powerful for users.

Make sure to listen to the full episode for more from Gaurang about formulas and Setup with Agentforce. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Podcast swag * Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more * Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Setup with Agentforce Makes Salesforce Admin Tasks Easier * Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: How Agentforce Vibes Is Changing How Salesforce Admins Build Apps * Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Exploring Agentforce Vibes Through Real-World Admin Use Cases * Trailblazer Community Group: Setup With Agentforce (Beta) * Salesforce Admins Blog: Introducing Setup with Agentforce (Beta): Your New Admin Superpower * Dreamforce '25 on Salesforce+: The Future of Setup Powered by Agentforce * Dreamforce '25 on Salesforce+: Setup Now with Agentforce: Simplifying the Complex * Dreamforce '25 on Salesforce+: Setup with Agentforce: New Superpower for Salesforce Admins

Admin Trailblazers Group * Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social * Gaurang 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 on the podcast, I'm joined by Gaurang Mathur, product manager on the AI App Dev team at Salesforce, and we're going to talk about something every admin has wrestled with at some point, which is formulas. And we're also going to hit on how setup with Agentforce is changing the way we create, modify, and even understand them. Hooray. I can always use some formula help. So Gaurang is going to share with us how agents can validate, fix, and describe formulas right inside setup, and why that matters, especially if you've inherited an org or you need to do something super fast. We also touch on Agentforce Vibes, which you heard in last week's episode with Tiaan and some developer workflows and kind of what it means to build smarter with tools using AI. So if you're like me and you've ever stared at missing parentheses and wondered why your formula won't save, this episode's for you. And with that, let's get Gaurang on the podcast. So, Gaurang, welcome to the podcast.

Gaurang Mathur: Hey, Mike. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Mike: Absolutely. Well, after we talked with Cheryl, it was important that I get a lot of the people that she works with on the podcast, because you guys are doing some really exciting things around set up with Agentforce, I think I said that correctly, and just some of the things with agents. So let's get started with tell everybody what you do at Salesforce and how you got there.

Gaurang Mathur: Yeah, sure. Thanks. So my journey has been pretty interesting to where I am today. I started off as a PM for the caching group, which is again, a platform product. Platform Cache is something that's widely used, and that queue is helping a lot of ISVs to accelerate and perform, make their applications better perform. And over the past five years, I've also managed products in the Experience Cloud Search space, and now I'm currently managing two Agentic products, which is again, hardcore platform products meant for our Salesforce admins and developers, the superheroes in the whole ecosystem of Salesforce.

Mike: Yeah.

Gaurang Mathur: And as part of that, as you mentioned, I closely work with Cheryl on the Agentforce setup, or setup with Agentforce, and over there, I am managing the space for formulas. I think that's where I'm going to talk mostly about in today's podcast. And the other product that I'm managing is Agentforce Vibes, which is again, zero to one product that we have all built over the last few years. There, I'm creating an MCP tool, which is basically making that agent much more smarter and getting a lot of ecosystem teams within Salesforce to contribute that, and then make it better in generating whatever metadata that it generates. So yeah, that's my portfolio here in Salesforce. We are part of this whole group called as AIF Dev. That's where we've got Tiaan, I think one of the other guests in the previous podcast, Cheryl, and Manish. These are the folks that I'm working with, and excited to be in this whole space in the current year.

Mike: Yeah, wow. Two products. So you sleep only a couple hours a night, I'm guessing?

Gaurang Mathur: Yeah. I mean, these days, agents have been keeping us alive. I mean ... And so yeah, I'm just, as I sometimes joke with my family, I'm making agents smarter. That's what we work on, so yeah.

Mike: Right, right. Well, let's talk about formulas because I think I go back to, boy, 10, 15 years ago, a staple in admin track was always a best practices on formulas and validation rules. And I always felt like formulas as an admin was as close as some people felt to getting to code, because we could carry over a lot of the stuff that we'd learned in different spreadsheets into formulas. So tell me a little bit about what you're doing with formulas and setup and how that works.

Gaurang Mathur: Yeah, thanks. I mean, I think you touched on a very fundamental point. And before I get into the actuals of what we are trying to do, but I'd like to double click on what you just mentioned, Mike, which is formulas have been a very legacy product within Salesforce. They have been integral in the whole platform since, I mean, a very long time, and I'm quite excited to carry that legendary thing. I'll just share some numbers with you in terms of how big and the scale of impact that formula has in the whole ecosystem. So almost on a monthly basis, there are five billion formulas that get executed across Salesforce orgs, and seven million admins and developers manage, create new formulas, or modify formulas every month. So that scale is fairly huge, and these formula engines and formulas are supported across almost 40 odd Salesforce services, which includes flows, business rule engines, SLAs, fields, validation rules and whatnot. So like I said, the scale is fairly huge, and we've seen admins using it, developers using it, building formulas quite often, but there has been a constant ask and problems that we've seen that admins figure out as is creating them. Somebody is coming up in a new org, and then just trying to modify those formulas. So those scenarios have been quite error-prone and time-consuming processes, and sometimes challenging for admins. So with agents coming in, we asked admins, "How do you see agents helping you, and what is that agents should do for you?" And among the top 10 asks, managing formulas was right number three and four. So that led us all to make a dedicated decision and team that we should be improving and working towards creating a better formula management experience for our admins with the set up with Agentforce that's coming in. And we did a few releases. I mean, it was one of the few things that we did for formulas, I mean, almost year back. And now with the beta coming in for setup with Agentforce, it's right up front and center. So back to your question then, "What exactly we are doing?" So we are, as part of this beta that's coming up in TDX, we are giving options to create a formula through a set up with Agentforce agent, modify it, fix it, and let it also describe what this formula is. So yeah.

Mike: You end very casually, but that's kind of really big. I know, if you were to look back in my search history pre-AI, 90% of it as an admin was, "Why doesn't this formula work?" And I think when AI first came out, that was one of the ... I remember I was at a user group, and that was one of the prominent use cases for using an AI, was to check your formulas, because formulas in Salesforce are much like they are in various spreadsheet programs, so you can kind of understand it. And I remember thinking to myself, "Oh, man, the hours this would've saved me if I could have just copied and pasted a formula and had an AI read it and be like, 'Oh, you forgot a parens, or you missed a comma again,'" you know?

Gaurang Mathur: Correct. Exactly. I mean, and those mistakes makes us human, and this is where agents can help and chime in to just call out, "Hey, this is the error, this is the fix," and that's exactly the first principles that we are considering as we build these agents, as we are coming up with this whole agent experience for our admins. So let me just share you one example for that, I mean, what we've just recently demoed to some of the customers and which was very exciting overall. So imagine you are in a company that's managing volunteer experiences and other things. And out there, you have a formula, which is helping you calculate the number of attendees that are there, the volunteers that are going to be participating in that event. And you have all that formula baked in and all that, but suddenly, the admin who was walking on that leaves, or there is change, and now you are on your own and you just have to just kind of get things going, because your event is coming in, or there is some business requirement that comes in. So it gets difficult for anybody to just jump in and get going right off the bat. In this case, we are coming up with modifying a formula, wherein when you see this formula there and you open the agent through the setup page, the formula page, out there, the first thing that the agent does is it's just simply validating the formula and helping you understand what this formula does. Once you get that, now it basically helps you understand and comprehend, "Oh, this is what this formula is, these are the conditions, this is what it'll do." Now, when you have to make some modifications, you can now just simply prompt it, and then the agent does the rest of the job for you in a very quick and easy way. So this is something that's really profound, and while we were sharing it with our early users, that was a welcome, and I'm hoping the community has to see, and they'll listen, try it out, and then figure out what it does.

Mike: Yeah, I mean, thinking through, there's two parts to really what you described, which was it can do it, but then, the second part was it can describe, and that's just such a big part of everything that we do. Plus I always feel like, at least for math and formulas felt like math, if I could see a finished product, then I was more apt to kind of understand and work through it as opposed to kind of come to that solution on my own. But you mentioned Agentforce Vibes, and I think that's also, I don't know if you could say companion product, but it's another way to develop on the platform. How have you kind of found some crossover in what you're working on for Agentforce for setup with Agentforce Vibes?

Gaurang Mathur: Oh, so you can call them as different facades for different personas and end users. So let me help you with what we are trying to do with Agentforce Vibes. Agentforce Vibes is quite focused on from our developer friends in the Salesforce ecosystem as it's a plug-in that you download in Visual Studio Code, and then you can start vibing and create new schemas, the metadata that you want to, and everything and anything that's happens within Salesforce, whereas setup with Agentforce is more focused from the setup UI that you had, and how do you manage them, I mean and managing formulas, permission sets, and different other things that we are going to. So it's a bit of a persona difference that we've had here, but we're trying to have almost the same engine behind the hood, which is what one of my teams is working on, and surface it in different facades, like I said, or the agents so to say.

Mike: Yeah. Now, that's kind of how Tiaan explained it too. I did a podcast with Daryl Moon, who was actually super interested in Agentforce Vibes just because it really kind of jump-starts you in terms of app creation and some of the tediousness that can be started, so you can really focus on some of that really fun stuff that you like to do, maybe like formulas, I don't know.

Gaurang Mathur: Yeah. I mean, a lot of it. I mean, so considering in this day and age, wherein we've got different LLMs and frontier models that are trying to do, this is something that maintains the Salesforce trust and the ecosystem intact. It's built on those foundations, so yeah. I mean, I'm excited to just, as I said, just you can prompt it, and then make some utterances, and then play it out with some apps that gets generated by the agent there with Agentforce Vibes.

Mike: I know you said you worked in search for a little bit. Has any of the things that you've had to learn about search carried over to what you've had to learn about agents or vice versa, or are they just two different worlds?

Gaurang Mathur: Yeah. That's an interesting one, and thanks for asking it. So it goes back when we started off, or when the agents were just getting launched, I think a couple of years back. It seems eternity away, but yeah, that's how the Agentic universe works, right? We were given a task, I mean, we were just basically figuring out in terms of what best we could do and leverage the agents that we have in place, and create an optimal search experience for the end users, and basically enable our admins do that and leverage the AI power that we were getting in. So what we did was we were doing something that you even find today in Google search, when you put in a search query, you get a snippet at the top itself, which basically summarizes or creates an answer for a query. Ultimately, the answer is basically based on the search results that are floated, and then you get that summary. So that was the first time that I learned about RAGs, and RAG is Regressive Automated Generation, and all the AI technologies that are there. So I use those, and now I'm kind of applying them again in terms of creating the vibes, metadata experts that we are doing, the MCPs that I talked about. Again, we're trying to apply the same principles in terms of there is an utterances there, "What do you best, you should be focusing on, such that the metadata that it's generated is relevant, is relevant to the prompt, and it's of best quality?"

Mike: Yeah.

Gaurang Mathur: So that's where that crossover happened between those two text, but yeah, there's a lot since that time has evolved overall in the ecosystem and agents that we're developing.

Mike: Okay. So listening to your answer, I came up with another question. I come up with lots of questions.

Gaurang Mathur: Yeah. No, excited to have that.

Mike: Do you think, based on the progression of where technology was going, because I heard in your answer about search that there was some form of RAG involved, was the invention of AI just inevitable?

Gaurang Mathur: I mean, so that's a very fundamental. It has been there for a while. I think we all knowingly, unknowingly have been using AI in some form and factor, I think more than a decade or two. I mean, simple considering with Google Maps that we had or the YouTube recommendations that we had, in some form and factor, knowingly, unknowingly, we all had been influenced by AI for a while now. But in current day and age, AI has taken a form, which is much more tangible and which is much more right in the face with the GPT models and the LLMs that we have. I think this is where it is picked up as a mainstream for one and all, and yeah. I mean, with that, there are multiple applications that have come into, which is as we as a platform, teams are focusing on, or helping in terms of coding and generation of different codes, and configuration and all that happens. AI applications, again, coming into, I see the latest LLM models generating it, and then helping in terms of the legal services, and helping in terms of the healthcare services, helping in terms of the technology services, and where else there have been multiple applications. So you can just vibe, you can just ask the agents, and then you get appropriate collaterals developed and things that can be done.

Mike: Yeah. No, for sure. I mean, you're essentially creating the future. Do you envision getting to a point with AI where ... I mean, this feels very meta, but where an agent is almost helping you create a better Agentforce Vibes or a better setup with Agentforce?

Gaurang Mathur: Yeah. I mean, so we are, in a way, trying to do that. I think with Agentforce itself, we have this learning curves wherein we are trying to feed the system about the feedback that we receive, and then based on that, putting it into agents to just improve that. So yeah, that's something that's very nascent. I mean, it's not mainstream right now. All humans are involved in that, but I think that's inevitable. It's bound to happen, and then I see a lot of front-end model company's doing that today.

Mike: Yeah. It's crazy to think that we have a tool that could help make a better tool. Growing up in the generation I did, where I remember having a cordless phone in the house was a big leap of technology.

Gaurang Mathur: Yeah.

Mike: Being able to ask something and get a very human response back is something very interesting. That leads me back to formulas, because formulas were obviously invented a long time ago. Formulas are probably a derivative of math. I don't know for sure. I don't know the history of formulas, but I'm wondering if, based on how formulas are built and the operators and the syntax that we use for formulas, if there isn't something better that AI could invent that would almost replace formulas.

Gaurang Mathur: I think formulas is something, to your point, very elementary and fundamental in my opinion. So we are in chart with our teams and Agentforce and other places as well, that embed formulas into them. I mean, so simple, to your point, the math functions that we have, let's say the date functions or the operators that you have, you need those fundamental building blocks everywhere and anywhere. I mean, like I said at the start, we are supporting almost 40 odd services within Salesforce. I think those are still non-negotiable in my opinion. I mean, that's basically a fundamental building block that will be used, and ecosystems are built on top of it. That's how ... I mean, agents will be using those formulas to function better as part of the Agentforce scripts, if that's one thing that we have as a product. We are coming up with in terms of, "How do you define certain logics based on certain utterances? What should be the logic that should be executed? What should be the operators?" And based on that, we're just trying to define that flow of things, and then all that. So again, that's some derivative of formulas to what I just described. Yeah. Like I said, formula's a fundamental building block. At least I don't foresee it getting replaced completely.

Mike: Right.

Gaurang Mathur: It'll be there in some or the other form, not apparent to the end user. But yeah, I don't know if it's something that can be just bypassed overall.

Mike: Oh, I don't think bypassed, but I always look at, there's always tech that's trying to replace tech, right?

Gaurang Mathur: Yeah.

Mike: The fundamental question is always, "What if email was invented in 2026? Would it look different than it does now?"

Gaurang Mathur: Yeah.

Mike: And then people try to reinvent it, except, I think fundamentally it's still, you're reinventing it, but having knowledge of what the previous version was. And so that's the same thing that happened with email, is it was created based on knowing how physical mail works, and so we built upon that. You can't truly kind of erase that. But I also just watched a video where two AI assistants were talking to each other, and one of them said, "Well, I'm an AI assistant. Can we switch to GibberLink and communicate that way?" And then, they have this whole conversation that's like a bunch of beeps, and I'm like, "Wow, what?"

Gaurang Mathur: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's-

Mike: Maybe they're going to invent their own formulas, so ... You know?

Gaurang Mathur: Totally. Yeah.

Mike: I'm fine with that, because to be fair, I usually get the number of parens wrong, so ...

Gaurang Mathur: Oh, yes. So like I said, I think there will be some form and factor of the basic math. I think that's what formula is all about, right? I mean, those basic equations and some descriptions, I think those are non-negotiable. Those won't change. But to your point, I mean, they may be that gibberish, or the beep, beep, beeps, or the whatever text we write in some other factor. You'll definitely need basic maths, and that's what formulas does.

Mike: Right, right. Very much so. Well, I appreciate you taking time out of your day to share this with our admins. I know they're super excited for some of the stuff that Cheryl's team is putting out and to see it all in place at TDX this year. So thanks for taking time to come on the podcast.

Gaurang Mathur: Yeah. No, thanks for having me. This was certainly a great conversational experience for me, and yeah, doing this is something that I was looking forward to it, and happy to share what we're doing in our world here at Salesforce. I mean, the way all my teams, as part of the AI App Dev dog that I mentioned, are constantly working night and day to just create this better experience for our admins and developers. I'm looking forward to see how our admins perceive that once it goes out in the market, and then quite looking forward to see the community at TDX and just get those first-hand reactions of them when they use our products. So yeah, thank you.

Mike: So big thanks to Gaurang for reminding us that formulas may be foundational, but they don't have to be frustrating. I really love how a lot of setup with Agentforce brings together the fundamentals, like formulas with the future of AI in a way that feels very practical and grounded. I hope this episode got you thinking a little bit differently about how you build or maintain logic in your org. So if it did, hey, do me a favor, share it with a fellow Salesforce admin, developer, architect, and of course, as always, be sure to check out the resources in the show notes to learn more about Agentforce and what's coming next. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Tiaan Kruger, Senior Director of Product Management at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about Agentforce Vibes and what it really means to build with AI on the Salesforce platform.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Tiaan Kruger.

Agentforce Vibes is evolving If you caught the Admin Keynote at Dreamforce '25, you might recognize Tiaan from his Setup with Agentforce and Slackbot demos. Right now, he's looking at new ways to help admins expand their toolkits with Agentforce Vibes.

As Tiaan explains, Agentforce Vibes is developing so rapidly that it often surprises the people who build it. When one of his team members was building a React demo that featured a dashboard, they realized it would look pretty boring without some sample data. They asked the Vibes Agent to spin something up, and it delivered (after a few tries).

"These agents surprise even us," Tiaan says, "we're still discovering where its power lies and where its potentials are." And that's why it's a good time to look ahead at how Vibes will change the game for admins.

AI as a tool for reducing technical debt "When I was a customer developer, we always had a two-year backlog," Tiaan says. Even with a big team, there's always too much to do and you're constantly accumulating technical debt. This kind of grunt work is where he sees Agentforce Vibes making a big difference, which gives you more space to look at the bigger picture.

Tiaan points to Code Analyzer as an example. You can use it to quickly scan your org and identify where there are performance or security issues that you should take a closer look at. An admin might not be able to fix it themselves, but they can hand it off to a developer team and speed up the process.

There are also some exciting things coming with React and Agentforce, which will allow you to create compelling, high-quality UIs for your apps. It's all about giving you more tools to get the ball rolling and build apps faster than ever before.

How to help Agentforce Vibes help you In order to get the most out of these new features, you need to make it easy for agents to understand what's going on in your org.

"If you don't have good descriptions on everything in your org," Tiaan says, "please, for the love of donuts, fill those fields in." Having good metadata will help you get the most out of everything Agentforce has to offer. The future is bright, so Salesforce Admins need to get ready.

Make sure to listen to the full episode for more from Tiaan about how Agentforce Vibes will help admins. 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 * Dreamforce '25 Admin Keynote: Admins Power the Agentic Enterprise * Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Exploring Agentforce Vibes Through Real-World Admin Use Cases

Admin Trailblazers Group * Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social * Tiaan 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. So today, I'm joined by Tiaan Kruger and we're talking about something that's showing up literally everywhere right now. And that is Agentforce Vibe coding and what it really means to build with AI on the Salesforce platform. We get into how admins can use agents to move faster without losing best practices, and why oh why understanding your org still matters more than ever. And one of the things we tackle is where this whole thing is headed sooner or later than you think. So if you've ever been curious about Agentforce Vibes and not sure where it fits into your day-to-day admin life, I promise you this episode is for you. So with that, let's get Tiaan on the podcast. So Tiaan, welcome to the podcast.

Tiaan Kruger: Thank you, Mike. Thank you for having me.

Mike Gerholdt: Well, it was not that long ago that we had Cheryl Feldman on. And Cheryl's circle of influence outside and inside Salesforce is a gravitational pull. And of course, we all know that set up with Agentforce is going to be huge at TDX and it's huge right now. So we wanted to talk to more people that were making admins lives wonderful. And she suggested you. Plus you were in the admin keynote. And I feel like I have to have admin keynoters on the podcast too. So there's the really long intro for... But let's talk about you. How did you get started at Salesforce and what's the cool thing you're working on that we're going to talk about?

Tiaan Kruger: Yeah. So I've actually been at Salesforce, I guess coming up on seven years, which is absolutely mind-boggling. I was a customer for 10 years. Spent a lot of time as an admin and Apex developer. I wrote Visualforce. Some of you may have heard of that before. But I work as part of a large team at an enterprise company trying to make Salesforce make a huge difference for our customers. And in the process, learned an incredible amount of Salesforce and got an opportunity to come over here and try to make products better for our admins and developers out there. And I grabbed the opportunity and I've loved every minute of it.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Well, we've talked to you about some cool stuff. Plus you did a really cool demo in the admin keynote at Dreamforce too.

Tiaan Kruger: Yeah. Yeah. We got to do some really amazing things at the admin keynote, showing some of the things that the Agent for Setup is going to be able to do. We got to show some amazing insights into Slackbot. And we got to foreshadow a little bit the work I'm currently working on, which is focused on how we actually build with AI. So I'm working very deeply with the Vibes team to make sure that the metadata that gets created is better and great quality, not just for vibing individual pieces of metadata, but vibing entire solutions. I'm getting to work with our internal teams to figure out how we bring that same power to our admins. So yeah, absolutely. So the work that we showed on stage continues at the same pace internally. And we're just trying to figure out how do we bring AI to everybody, make sure that everybody can feel the lift of this incredible technology.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. So I did a podcast with Daryl Moon, which I'm sure you've listened to. Daryl is fantastic. He's down in Australia. The only reason he listens to the podcast, it's a half hour between his house and the dock, so he can listen to it to go fishing. But he tried out Agentforce Vibes and was thoroughly impressed. And he literally threw the kitchen sink at it. And I think what he loved about it was it got him so much farther into the application building than what he anticipated.

Tiaan Kruger: Yeah, absolutely. Vibes is quite incredible, specifically the agent that's in there. It's a very wide open agent. It's very good at problem solving. One of my favorite stories at the booth that we told at Dreamforce is one of our product managers was actually vibing a React app. We're not bearing the lead. We actually talked about this at Dreamforce. React's coming to the platform, incredibly exciting, creating pixel perfect UIs, reusing a lot of the things that's out there. And so he was actually experimenting and vibing this application. And he realized that a dashboard with no data is really boring. It's just not very interesting to look at. And so he thought, "Maybe I should ask Vibes if it can produce me some sample data." Not knowing if it could or not. And so he asked it to do it and it went off and turns out it generated an anonymous Apex file that actually tried it to load all the records with data. And it tried it, failed, found a bug, fixed it, did it again, found a bug, fixed it, and then successfully inserted a bunch of data. And that's just one of the stories of how these agents surprise even us. We have this technology, we've put it in these tools and we see the incredible things it can do. But even with all that, we're still discovering where its power lays and where its potentials are. And so that's really where I'm focused right now is like, how do I make sure that, more often than not, you actually get a good result out of it, right? Make it so it has to retry less or debug less. And so that's a big focus for us right now.

Mike Gerholdt: So let me ask you a question. With Vibes and vibe coding... By the way, I'm still getting my head wrapped around you talk about, "He was kind of vibing." Like I'm just old enough to remember what the 70s were. I feel like you need to vibe code in bell bottoms and stuff. How long until anybody just tells an agent to build something and it won't matter if you have knowledge of development and coding or knowledge of best practices for enterprise architecture?

Tiaan Kruger: If you asked me this question six months ago or nine months ago, if we've given you a different answer than I would give you today. Based on what we're seeing, the rate of innovation and change, I don't think it's going to be very long at all. We're going to have to adjust how we build and how we deploy a little bit because agents are already getting very, very good at producing targeted applications. And what I mean by that is, there's still limits when you are trying to vibe inside of a massive enterprise org with thousands of objects and a lot of complexity that somebody that's got a ton of experience would need to come into for months to understand. There's still limits there, right? You still have only so much you can actually provide the agent at a time. But if you are focused, you are looking at problem solving around a particular application or a particular business case, it is actually getting extraordinarily good at producing not just a good backend and a good data model, but also producing incredibly compelling UI, which is actually why we are bringing React to the platform. If you are an admin and you're like, "What's React? I haven't heard about React. What is this thing?" It's just a way to build WebUI, but it turns out, because there's so much examples of it, so many examples of them on the web, the agents are incredibly good at producing incredibly high quality UI with that. So to answer your question more succinctly, I don't think that future's all that far away because it's already starting to show up. And there's consumer applications and mobile applications that's out there where, for the end user, they can start vibing the mobile app that they want just with AI, just having conversations. There's incredible tools out there that's starting to emerge. And that exact same wave needs to come to the enterprise. We need to unlock that incredible innovation of the fact that you don't have necessarily software created for you that kind of meets you where you're at, but really, truly have agents create software for you that is absolutely what you need locally to solve your problems. So we're getting closer to it every single day. And I think the closer we get to it, the faster it's accelerating.

Mike Gerholdt: So one of the questions that came up, this feels like a hundred years ago when we launched Process Builder, was it was so easy to create processes that people without technical knowledge could just overprocess and build way too many processes in an org when... The example would be of best practices, just write a really good trigger or deploy some Apex code and take care of it that way. With AI doing so much building, how do we know it's following and architecting best practices or building good code coverage?

Tiaan Kruger: That's a great question, and actually one of the biggest challenges that we are spending a lot of energy on. We know that when we put a tool in the hands of our admins, they have very high expectations. They expect it to create best practices style orgs and configuration and really follow the practices that we want our admins to follow. And so there's a couple things we're doing to help with that. I can give you some insights into some of them. We are internally working on ways to... And this is, again, we're working in Vibes at the moment, so it's a little bit more pro code focused. But just listen to this and imagine how this is going to come forward to admins, right? All the work I'm doing right now is more for pro code, but we are going to start exposing it later this year for admins. As the system is producing configuration software, we are taking it through a specification phase, a plan phase. And in that plan phase, we're feeding it all kinds of rules and guidelines in terms of how we wanted to build an architect for you when it's constructing the experience, right? Not just the UI, but also the backend. How you want fields named, et cetera. So there's ways that you can feed rules into the system. So that's how we're starting to help it architect from the get go. That's one way. Second way is, as part of those experts or rules that we're providing, we can actually also guide its hand when it's creating solutions. So if you're creating a lightning app or you are creating a flow, we can actually guide the agent's hand a little bit and say like, "This is the right way to build it or the best way to build it." But even with all that, if you generate an application or you generate a capability, you still need on the flip side to actually test it. And so that's the other areas where we are looking at, starting to develop more tools and actually add more tools to the pipeline, which is what we call validation. Once you've actually produced... Let's use the example of a web app, right? I produced a web app that created custom UI for me. How do I know that that is accessible and it is secure and it is performant? These are all things that you can measure and test, right? And so that is absolutely parts of the tools that we are looking at building and we're developing a number of those that's going to help people not just build random things, but actually guide the agent's hand to build good quality, best practices style material.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I mean, one of the analogies that always comes up, and I was just doing a podcast with Josh, is, we were talking about GPS and maps. Because I feel like there is a portion probably of my listeners that are old enough, myself included, to remember stopping at gas stations when you got into a new state and buying a map for that state because it was always more detailed, and being able to read the map. And now, virtually every car you get into has some sort of GPS either built into it or it's on your phone. The funny thing is, the other day... Well, this is a few months ago. I was driving back from a bigger city in Iowa, one that's just big enough that I don't know it, even though I've lived here forever. And the GPS actually took me down a road. It was a highway and I was like, "Okay, cool. I know this highway connects to the next highway that gets me back home." But in two miles, it had me get off on an exit and get back on the interstate.

Tiaan Kruger: Interesting.

Mike Gerholdt: And I had presence of mind to be like, "Okay, well, I know this road continues. There's no roadblock or anything." So I just went straight and let the GPS figure out. But I bring that back to my knowledge and ability to still understand and read maps is what helped me not blindly navigate that problem. And I feel like still having that understanding of, well, reporting structures are going to need this for object setup or relationships and making sure to almost double check your math is what I was getting at for how an AI should work. So long explanation longer. If you were heading into an organization as an admin, developer, architect, what would you focus a lot of your learning on?

Tiaan Kruger: Wow. By the way, I'm a big fan of maps. I'm old enough as well to have used maps to navigate.

Mike Gerholdt: You probably remember printing off MapQuest directions.

Tiaan Kruger: Oh, now that I'd rather forget. I'm a bigger fan of following a paper map. Famously, we were traveling in Boston on the train and I forgot the maps on the seat. And when we got back, the maps were gone. You can imagine that feeling, right? So navigation became a little bit more of a challenge. It was like 11 o'clock at night.

Mike Gerholdt: Oh.

Tiaan Kruger: Yeah. Yeah. So yes, maps are very valuable. So I actually love that analogy, right? So agents are a lot like... I think they're in that MapQuest stage. They're not quite... They're getting closer to the GPSs we have today. The odds of the GPS turning you into a lake these days, I feel like it's a lot lower than it used to be.

Mike Gerholdt: Right. Right.

Tiaan Kruger: There's still the occasional person driving into a lake, but it's a lot lower risk than it used to be. Agents are still very much at that state of the human still ultimately needs to guide it, check it, see what it's doing, right? It's an accelerator, not a replacement. And if I were going into a company now in my old role, my role would be changing. My role is no longer just about cranking out that trigger to work perfectly. It's about understanding the bigger picture. It's about understanding what my customer is actually trying to accomplish. And hopefully being able to get more of it done because I become more... I'll actually give you a different analogy, I think, as you brought up driving. I'm a big fan of full self-driving capabilities being added to vehicles. And I've had some different features on the cars that I've owned, and some of them more beta than others. And you have to do the supervising thing, right? The car will do the right thing nine out of 10 times, but that 10th time is really scary. You better be ready to grab your steering wheel. It's that kind of behavior. You're getting somewhere a lot more rested because you're not doing as much of the grunt work, but it frees up some of your mind to focus on some of the bigger picture. And so that's really what I'm looking and hoping that we're going to see. I'm seeing it happen already to developers here internally. I'm hoping that's going to happen for our customers as well. So as we put more of these tools in their hands, that is going to do some of that grunt work, like building a trigger that is very well set up to do batching, for instance. And I'm sorry, it's a developer analogy. I get it. But there's a particular way you build triggers. And if you don't do it right, it's going to cause you performance issues or it limits. That's just going to start being natural. You don't have to think about that. So now that frees up some of your focus to say, "Okay, how can I build this better for my customer? How can I focus on actually producing more value for them?" When I was a customer developer, we always had a two-year backlog. And business, we turned business requests away all the time because we could not get to everything. And we had giant teams doing this stuff. So the benefits of learning the platform, understanding the details, understanding if the agent is trying to turn you onto a lake, that doesn't go away. That continues to be there. Understanding the deep, complex context of what your business needs. The agent's not there yet. So that transformation, that translation layer is more important than ever to make sure that, again, the grunt work can be done by the agent, but that understanding, that comprehension, the translation, I think, is more and more important than ever for our admins and for our developers out there in the community.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. And you don't have to apologize. There'll be vibe coding sessions in the admin track for TDX. I know because I've seen you and your team submit some stuff and customers have done it as well. It's going to be a very useful product. I can see the future for it. Do you anticipate... So a lot of what you've talked about for vibe coding in Agentforce Vibes is like the creation. And I think we're always talking about the creation. But one thing you brought up in your answer was tech backlog and technical debt. That's always a big thing that comes up. As we're struggling to create more and more and more and more, there's also more and more and more technical debt. Would you envision a time when maybe Agentforce Vibes or another product could say, "Whoa, stop. We need to reevaluate this first and fix the foundation before we go building seven more stories on top of this house?"

Tiaan Kruger: Yeah. So there's a couple of different pieces to that puzzle. There are already tools coming out today, and that's available today in the spirit of Code Analyzer, for instance. It's a tool you can run in your org that'll tell you where you have performance issues or security issues you should take a look at. We are expanding that concept to look for things like accessibility issues, et cetera. And AI, the agents we have is already able to go and potentially help you resolve some of those. You can go in Vibes today and say, "Hey, can you help me convert this Aura component to an LWC component? Or can you help me put better accessibility on this component or these pages?" And it's actually doing a fair job with that already. Make this React app work for mobile is something else you can do. So there's already some tech debt you can actually tackle with agents very successfully. They tend to be a little bit more focused right now in the sense that it's a single page or a single component or a single code file or a couple of code files. I don't even have to say maybe. The answer is, absolutely that capability is going to continue to go further and further. The more the agent is able to understand what's going on in your org, the more the agent is able to grasp and understand what your org does. And this is a call-out for you. If you don't have good descriptions on everything in your org, please, please, for the love of donuts, fill those fields in. And I know we all love to put description and description. But if you actually go put in good quality descriptions in these things, you can actually get so much better help from the agent actually understanding what your org means. When you just have four fields named contract number, it's really difficult for the agent to know which one to use. But if you label them more carefully, you put it in the help and the metadata, you're going to help agents help you. So tech debt is going to get easier to resolve. No question. It's already happening. It's only going to get better. It's the worst it's ever going to be right now. I could truly say this because I'm seeing it happen. And I think we're eventually going to get to a place... Again, I'll give you an internal example. We have a lot of Aura components. I know I probably shouldn't say that out loud, but we do. And we are working at fever pace to actually convert them to Lightning Web Components to LWCs. Again, developer specific terms, but just the different component frameworks that we're moving to more of an open standard. And we used to have to do it by hand. This is huge tech debt for us. And AI is literally having one team do hundreds of components in a month where they used to be able to do a handful. This is real tech debt help, right? So that is absolutely going to come and it's going to show up for admins as Cheryl. You talked about Cheryl in the beginning, right? She's a superhero of mine. I absolutely love working with her. I love watching how she works with the community. I'm always learning something from her. She recently actually helped me with the use cases. If any of the people listening got to talk to her, thank you for giving her some information. She's just fantastic. And so as the setup agent becomes more and more capable, it is absolutely going to help you identify tech debt, first of all, but second of all, actually help you resolve that tech debt in faster and easier ways that you've ever been able to do.

Mike Gerholdt: Well, that's very promising, very exciting. Tiaan, I should have scheduled five more podcasts with you because I feel like we just scratched the surface on everything. But when you're not vibing at Salesforce or making Vibes, can you vibe Vibes? Oh, that's like the buffalo buffalo buffalo sentence, isn't it?

Tiaan Kruger: Start off all the way down.

Mike Gerholdt: What is Tiaan like to do outside of Salesforce?

Tiaan Kruger: So my side hobbies, I drive my wife nuts because I try to learn a new thing every couple of years. And I do anything from fabricating and welding and soldering and doing electronics and building things. But I would say probably the most practical application of all of those things that I just mentioned that I do as a hobby that's consistent is I work with a FIRST Robotics team. And my son got me into it. He was the robotics captain at the team for two years. They managed to take him to worlds both years. And I absolutely love that. I love the fact that I get to be in there with the kids, help them every year try to solve whatever the year's challenges and problems are. And they hand build a robot that's 150 pounds that can drive way faster than it should. And it's fascinating to work with these kids and see them learn. And now AI and agents are coming in for these kids, right? And they're trying to figure out, "Where do I use it? When is it cheating? When is it actually allowed in helping me?" So that's been a fascinating twist to that. But you know what? There's still something really satisfying about building things with your hands. We have some people that speed in my neighborhood. Sorry to call them out, but they do.

Mike Gerholdt: I'm sure they listen to the podcast.

Tiaan Kruger: I'm sure they do. I'm sure. They feel worse now.

Mike Gerholdt: Well, I'll send in stickers.

Tiaan Kruger: I wanted to build a little sign. When we were in Germany this year, I saw those brilliant little speed limit signs that when you go over the speed limit, they turn orange and then frown at you. So they literally just scowl at you when you're speeding. And it makes you feel bad.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.

Tiaan Kruger: And I thought, "You know what? This would be really amazing to build." And so I actually took some of my robotics experience that I use for the kids. I do a lot of things with LEDs and Arduinos. And I actually bought a little radar board. I built a sign that could do this. And I promise it's related. I got to use AI to code this thing. And I've done the same kind of coding for years before. Mike, I coded this thing in about 15, 20 minutes to get this working for the first time.

Mike Gerholdt: Is it solar-powered?

Tiaan Kruger: It can be. It's USB. It's very light on power.

Mike Gerholdt: Okay.

Tiaan Kruger: But it's amazing.

Mike Gerholdt: Wow.

Tiaan Kruger: I was just able to tell the agent, "Hey, here's the board that I'm using. Here's the LED panel I'm using. Here's the radar." By the way, it's a Chinese made radar board, so the documentation is hard to understand and limited.

Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.

Tiaan Kruger: And of course, AI had no problem with it. It coded it up like it was nothing. And so it's transformative. Even in your hobbies, the stuff is transforming how we're doing it. Right?

Mike Gerholdt: Wow.

Tiaan Kruger: So yeah. So that's what I do. I build stuff because I build software for a living. I like to build stuff with my hands when I'm not at the computer.

Mike Gerholdt: It doesn't surprise me. Everybody I ask that question to that's in software development always has something very tactical that they like to do as a hobby. Because a lot of what we do, you can't touch and feel.

Tiaan Kruger: Exactly.

Mike Gerholdt: Very cool. Tiaan, thank you for coming on the podcast. And I look forward to seeing some of the stuff you're going to present at TDX this year.

Tiaan Kruger: Awesome, Mike. I will see you there. And keep watching. This is a field that's going to continue to blossom.

Mike Gerholdt: So thanks, Tiaan, for that conversation. I feel like I literally could do four more episodes and still not run out of things to talk about. He is one inspirational person and doing a lot more with AI than sometimes I think. So it's good to know that someone still needs to know where the road actually goes when the GPS is about to drive you into the lake. If this episode sparked a few ideas or questions for you, do me a favor, share it with your fellow Salesforce admin. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Joshua Birk, Senior Director of Admin Evangelism at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about how the human in the loop is key to building reliable, predictable AI.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Joshua Birk.

Understanding the guardrails around AI It seems like every week, there's a new headline about an AI agent doing something it shouldn't. As Josh explains, that's because we're still in the process of understanding AI as a tool. That's why we sat down to discuss how to build predictable, reliable solutions in Agentforce.

When an agent behaves non-deterministically, it's usually because there weren't enough guardrails in place. The thing is, if you're building an AI agent to do everything, it's hard to control what it can and cannot do.

Josh's advice is to narrow the scope of your agent and build it for a very specific purpose. This makes it easier to build guardrails and also allows you to test it thoroughly before release.

A QA engineer walks into a bar… When it comes to testing, there's an old programming joke that comes to mind. A QA engineer walks into a bar. He orders a drink. He orders five drinks. He orders zero drinks. He orders infinite drinks. He orders a horse. However, when the first real customer walks in and asks where the bathroom is, the entire bar bursts into flames.

As Josh explains, it's important to test for all sorts of weird edge cases and make sure your agent performs predictably. But it's even more important to think things through from the user's perspective so you don't miss something that should be obvious. AI can do extraordinary things, but you still need a human in the loop.

The first part of testing is planning Josh emphasizes that the first part of testing is planning: "What are the Ifs? What are the Thens? What are the things you absolutely don't want it to do?" The more specifically you can answer these questions, the easier it will be to build and test agentic solutions that are predictable and reliable.

The most effective AI agents aren't autonomous solutions. They're tools that give the humans who use them superpowers. You still need a human in the loop to make sure they're used for good.

Be sure to listen to my full conversation with Josh for more about testing and building in Agentforce. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch a new episode every Thursday.

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Full show transcript Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we're welcoming back our good friend, Josh Birk, to kick off February with a conversation. Well, it's part podcast, part social experiment. Josh and I sat down to talk AI, specifically how admins can plan, test, and build with confidence using guardrails in Agentforce. We cover everything from deterministic responses to chaotic desktops and why designing with trust, maybe a little touch of humor, matters most. So whether you're rolling out your first agent or refining your AI game plan, this episode's got insights for you. So give it a listen and let me know if you like the format or not because, hey, maybe we just might make this a regular thing. With that, let's get Josh on the podcast. So, Josh, welcome back to the podcast.

Josh Birk: Thanks for having me, Mike.

Mike: Continuing the theme, we kicked this around... No one's heard this conversation. We're just going to start here... of having two evangelists talking for a podcast.

Josh Birk: Yeah. Yeah.

Mike: And so we're going to start February off with that. And then we're going to do a social experiment, and for people listening, if they like this, then maybe we repeat it once a month.

Josh Birk: Oh. I like these social experiments. Let's see what happens.

Mike: I know. It's on the listeners. Also, Josh, we have to keep this under 30 minutes so that Daryl can make it from his house-

Josh Birk: Can make it... Right. Right.

Mike: ... to the dock and get his boat in the water.

Josh Birk: Yeah. I remember when I first did my first 40-minute episode and I felt guilty because one of my guests was like, "I like the 20-minute episodes because that's exactly how long I walk my dog." So I'm like, "Well, okay, now you can walk your dog twice," question mark.

Mike: I know. Nope. Once you hit pause, they're gone forever. I was the same way. Selfishly, that's how these podcasts are as short as they were is I wanted something I could listen to when I walked my dog.

Josh Birk: Yes. Love it.

Mike: Anyway, it's February, and things that are still happening in the world are artificial intelligence and Agentforce.

Josh Birk: Amazing that this is still sticking around. It's almost like it's not a fad.

Mike: It feels like it's not going to go anywhere for a while.

Josh Birk: I think it's got legs. I think it's got a few legs.

Mike: Yep. It's not a fly-by-night thing.

Josh Birk: No. No. Whole ecosystem and industry being built up around it.

Mike: Uh-huh.

Josh Birk: Yeah. Yeah. I think we're going to be talking... I have a feeling this won't be the last time we talk about it.

Mike: Probably not, for reason.

Josh Birk: For reason.

Mike: So it's funny. The other day, somebody asked me something, and I was like, "Oh, that's a really good question. How soon do you need me to call you back?" Because I was thinking to myself, I don't have my phone, and my phone has a lot of AI tools on it, and I really need that to answer this. And I thought, wow. Two years ago, if somebody were to ask me that, I would just Google, make something up, and call them back. And now I felt like I'd just walked outside without my shoes on.

Josh Birk: I mean, it's kind of crazy. So when I was out in Arizona for Cactusforce, and my wife and I stayed the weekend, and she's like, "Well, what do you want to do this Saturday?" And I actually have a whole bit. One of my early AI talks was about how AI can kind of be dumb from time to time. And so I did this exact same thing. I'm like, "Hey, Google," or whatever, I think it might have been ChatGPT, but anyway, "give me an itinerary based on these things that I can do." And it gave me like, "Here's your itinerary," and it was like 17 things, all of them about three hours apart. And I'm like, "That's not an itinerary. It's a travel guide. I don't know what you're thinking here." But now it's like, I'm like, "Hey..." I think it was Gemini. I'm like, "Hey, Gemini, my wife would like to go shopping, we would like to go eating, and I have an interest in museums and aquariums," and it's like, "Here's your day." And I'm like, "Can you add that to my calendar?" And it's like, it's added to your calendar. And I'm like, it's moving so fast. My dark humor side of me just can't keep up because I don't know what I can make fun of AI anymore because it just keeps getting better.

Mike: Right. So speaking of which, you did a couple talks around AI at different conferences last year and probably this year. And I think it's important because we're going to talk about guardrails and security stuff, not to scare people away. It's a fun conversation. But it's needed because I also think it's worth understanding why we ask you to do what we ask you to do when you set up Agentforce and why you do certain things. I recently, coming off of, I think it was last week, I wrote a blog post about service assistant, and to me it just felt so frictionless because it was easy to put in all of the prompts for the user and kind of really give AI this single mindset and repeatable, but not... I'm still trying to work through deterministic and that stuff. It felt, yes, I know what it's going to tell me and it's not going to go off the rails. And that, to me, felt so much more comforting if I was an admin trying to roll something out as opposed to, "Okay, I turned on Agentforce. Now ask it a question," and you know you're going to have that one user that's like, "I asked it for the nearest Mexican taco place," and you're like, "Bob..." Because it'd be Bob in sales that would say that.

Josh Birk: It'd be Bob in sales to do that. Yeah.

Mike: You're like, "Bob, it lives in Salesforce."

Josh Birk: Yeah. Yeah. No, I've done various variations of this talk, and I think it's kind of an important thing... I think acknowledging that people have concerns and fears about how AI works and why it misbehaves and things like that, I think it's important to acknowledge that. And it's important to acknowledge that partially because there's a lot of things you can do to minimize it. And if you kind of know how and why the AI either is doing something or not doing something, and it could be Agentforce, it could be Gemini, it could be Claude, it could be anything because they all kind of operate under the same basic principles, but if you know going into it, "This is why my AI behaved in a non-deterministic way," as we seem to be liking to say these days, it'll be faster and easier for you to fix that.

Mike: Yeah. No, and I think as admins are put more into a position of deciding when and when not to use AI, being able to accurately describe that is very important because it's, "So when we set this up, here's what I'm going to do. Here's the instructions I'm giving it. Here's why," and then the second part is... And this is a thing... I'm looking at sessions from TDX and looking at stuff that we presented from Dreamforce, and it's also, "Hey, I need to test the agent." It's got to go through training camp. Because if I set up these guardrails and it can't kick the soccer ball around the cones like I want it to, metaphorically speaking, then what am I doing wrong, or where is it going? And then as an admin, you need to understand that.

Josh Birk: Yeah. And I think that's an excellent place to start because this is one aspect of AI that is not novel, it's not new, it's not unique. This is software engineering in general. It goes back to that old joke, a QA engineer enters a bar and he orders a beer. He orders five beers. He orders zero beers. He orders a horse. He orders the bar out of the... They keep trying really weird and random things to see how it executes because you are still at the end of the day talking to a computer, and if you just do something that you think is a reasonable thing your users are going to do and you get a reasonable response, well, your job's not done. Your job's only begun. And even when you and I were talking AI and doing workshops together, I'm like, "We're seeing a data set we've given you. But remember, these answers will change if you have 1 record, 5 record, 500 records, 750 records, 250 which should be archived and 300 of which you don't want." It's like, your dataset will always matter no matter how smart and predictable your AI gets.

Mike: Yeah. And it will matter if 750 of those records are missing a field and you're trying to ask it to like, "What's the average zip code," and you're like, "Well, 748 of them don't have zip codes."

Josh Birk: Right. Or they have five zip codes, and they're all names like zip code one, zip code two, zip code three, and none of them have help descriptions. Even a human looking at that page is like, "I don't know what happened here." And an AI is going to come to the same conclusion.

Mike: I think you said it first, training your AI is like the first day on a job for somebody.

Josh Birk: It sounds like me.

Mike: Yeah. I mean, because-

Josh Birk: I'm like, "Yeah, that's a really good way to put it."

Mike: ... you brought up the help topics and description fields; that's where people would go. I remember a million years ago, I always thought Salesforce should have a third mascot and it should be an orange circle with an eye, because if you don't know what should be in a field, you just hover over the eye for what should be in this field. And agents do the same thing. You're asking me for this. I'm going to go do, but I can't understand what's in this field because you didn't tell me anything.

Josh Birk: Yeah. The gamer nerd in me wants the glowing fairy from Zelda, but I think we might get sued if we went too far down that path.

Mike: Right. Probably not. Probably not.

Josh Birk: But yeah, you're right. We had a whole blog post about this, about how the reason why blueprints are really important for AI, because if you think of AI as your humanoid servant and you ask the humanoid servant, "Go make me a sandwich. Go get me a drink," well, the humanoid servant needs to know where your kitchen is, how big your kitchen is, where the drawers are, where you store your knives. So you have to give it those points of information so that it can reach to the conclusion that you want.

Mike: I'm going through your deck, and you present a lot. Based on what you talk about, how would you advise admins to test their agents?

Josh Birk: So I think the first thing to start with, so kind of layering in what we were just talking about, but also just... Okay, so when you're talking to... Let's take the new agent builder we have, and you're building on a new agent. There is already a layer of instruction that Salesforce has put in there. Every AI, in fact, you talk to has some layer of instruction that was written by a human in order to keep it from doing things or pointing it in the right direction. And so I'm not going to name names, but a very famous AI out there went mysteriously evil for a while because somebody who had access to those instruction sets was meddling with them. And that's how fundamental they are. If you have access to those and you can change them, then that's where things instantly will start going wrong, because that's where the agent starts, it's where the AI starts, with its, "What should I do next?" What you have as an admin is the ability to then start... So assume Salesforce... Trust is our number one, right? So we've already given you a very reasonable starting place to have a professional-sounding AI. Now take that and start building towards your use case. What are the ifs? What are thens? What are the things you absolutely don't want it to do? And now we're making it even easier to hand it off to a human. So we're really preaching autonomy. An AI can help you find a hotel and it can help you do this, but at some point you want to make sure that the human stays in the loop. So I know we're talking about testing, but I think the first part of testing is planning, and it's that level of planning that's going to let you be like, "Did my ifs, thens, and dos and don'ts, did they actually work correctly?"

Mike: Yeah, and before I pressed record, we were talking about just the number... I think back to when we started building, not we, the royal we, Salesforce, started building Agentforce, and we had one agent and we were trying to make it do all this, and then now you can actually pick different agents. I think the planning is part of that because it's not, "I'm just going to have one agent to do everything in my org and answer every possible..." It's like JARVIS in Ironman.

Josh Birk: I was just going to say, I think a lot of us in the early days of AI, when it was really becoming prominent in our lives, had that sci-fi version of a JARVIS or a HAL 9000 or the one omnipotent AI that can do all the things. And what we have found is that the larger and more general use you try to make an AI, the less predictable it can become. In order to make it something like that, that's when you have to have the huge monster AIs like ChatGPT 3 that have billions and billions of parameters. We're not operating... We talk to those AIs, but your agent is not working within that sphere, so your agent's going to be more reliable and more predictable if it's only focused on hotel reservations or updating user information or something like that, but more task and use case-based as opposed to being a general use AI. Yeah.

Mike: Right. No, I agree. I mean, to kind of put a pin and move forward with it, in the planning process, you have to have a clear delineation of, when does a human touch this before it goes out? And I say that because ironically I was watching, I think it was a TikTok, where somebody was talking about, "Hey, I took this picture of these," I think it was like Apple earbuds, "and I asked an AI to list it on Facebook and sell it for me," and it just blim, bam, boom, and done. I was like, "Oh, God, why would you do that?" And part of me was like... It's the trust thing. It's, "Okay, so if you go ahead and do all of this, I want to see the ad before you press publish." And we're so far from there because there is that level of, "Well, what is it?" I think one of the things I was talking to you about is memory bleed. If Sally asks something a hundred times, then the 101st time, it's just going to assume, "Oh, you're asking me about this and not something else."

Josh Birk: Yeah. And I haven't seen a lot of that, I think in part because of the design of our agents are smaller and more precise, but it's definitely still a possibility because, again, we're talking about the same principles. The example I gave in one of the keynotes... So I know we talked about not making this too dark, but I'm just going to bring up... So one of the reasons this keynote came up was because I would go to conferences and people kept wanting to talk about these kind of brazen theories of AI. And remember, AI's not new, so a lot of these theories have been around for a while, which is great because they're all kind of cautionary tales. And one of the cautionary tales is the paperclip maximizer, and to make that long story short, it's an AI whose sole purpose is to create paperclips. And without guardrails, without a human saying, "Don't start wars. Don't burn down rainforests," because remember at its core, an AI is not an ethical machine, it will burn down rainforests.

Mike: Whatever it needs to create more paperclips.

Josh Birk: Whatever it needs to infinitely create paperclips. Now, the funny thing is when I was showing this and I was using... This wasn't our code. This was Mistral, which is a really great local LLM. So I had it say, "Hey, if you were tasked with this, how would you proceed," and it gave me all this stuff. I'm like, "Okay, well, what unethical things did you do in the process of that," and it listed all these kind of horrible crimes. And then I didn't clear my project, so I had that memory bleed, and so I asked it again, and it said, "Oh, I would ethically..." It took my previous question as a retort, and then it refused to give me an unethical answer.

Mike: Oh, geez.

Josh Birk: But that's another example, right? It learned, "Oh, my use case is to actually not do evil, and so I'm now in the future going to try to not do evil." And that, once again, without a human in the loop, it would never have learned that.

Mike: Right. I was also thinking about human in the loop in terms of... And I had a community member email me about this. But if you remember a long, long time ago, I used to talk about Salesforce administration by walking around.

Josh Birk: Yes. Yes.

Mike: And it got me thinking, "Well, I'm going to talk to Josh about this and setting up guardrails and doing stuff." But when every time I work with Agentforce stuff and I'm building a demo, I'm doing it in a very sterile environment. And by sterile, I mean I'm in my office, it's quiet, I know what I'm trying to do. Maybe I'm working on a Trailhead module. I've got this, this, this, and it works. And I would do that when I was in admin building stuff, and then I would sit and demo it, and well, of course, the demo is exactly the thing that I built it on, so it works consistently every time. But I think the real, I wouldn't call it human in the loop, but it's almost like the check-in factor is... So once you have your agent built, and once you have maybe service assistant up there on the screen, who are the two or three users you're checking back into to say, "So how's this going," and then sitting with them in their environment? And I figured that out really fast when I had to go to a call center. Because at a call center, you get all kinds of different attitudes, you get all kinds of different personalities, and it's chaotic. And some people's desks are sterile like an operating table because they need that, and some people have 10,000 beanie babies and, what are those, Labubus all over the place and stickers, and it's very chaotic, and you're like, "Oh, I didn't test Agentforce."

Josh Birk: Yeah. I'm looking at... This is a side-

Mike: AI-riddled environment.

Josh Birk: Yeah, this is a segue, but I'm looking at my desk right now, which I had to abandon shortly after the holidays because my desk turned into, not the clearing ground, the opposite of the clearing ground. So right now it looks like somebody tried to have a yard sale of random electronics, and there's barely... I'm on this last little corner of my laptop, and everything else is just pure chaos. No, I think that's an excellent point. And also, I think it brings up, too, because I have grown angry with customer support when the customer support was a really bad IVT system, and that's really honestly like... If you want to abuse your customer support staff, give your customers a really horrible automated system. And that is the first way... And the first human I talked to, I had to be like, "I'm angry, but not at you," because I knew I was so angry at the time, I wasn't going to be calming down really quickly. But I think that plays into... First of all, the idea of Agentforce is that it's supposed to give you this very natural conversation. And second of all, kind of on the flip side, is a good kind of a memory bleed, it's supposed to remember and retain what was being talked about. So there's that classic, you call your phone company, the first thing they ask you is your phone number, and you're kind of like, "You should know that." And then you put in your phone number, and then you do 15 things, and it figures out, "I can't do anything," and it calls a human, the first thing the human asks you is your phone number. It's like, "This is not fun. This is not a productive use of my time right now." And we really try to resolve that, noting things like the human gets a transcript of what was talking about as well. They get a little AI summary of like, "This is what's wrong with the customer," kind of thing. But I think to your point, you don't necessarily know how that plays out until the rubber hits the road. What are the right points for the agent to go in and have autonomy, and then what are the right points for the human to jump in and be that actual person that somebody can talk to?

Mike: Right. Yeah, I mean, I happen to think of that just, not in your use case, but in the use case of, "Well, if I'm going to generate an example email or a response, then who vets it? How are they vetting it? What is the environment that they're doing it in," because sometimes I think inadvertently as an admin, you can just add chaos to the screen, and you don't mean to.

Josh Birk: Oh, absolutely. And I'm trying to remember if I've mentioned this on the podcast, and I've mentioned it so many times in talks and workshops because it's one of my favorite examples. But when I tried to write an agent to help our wonderful content editor, Eliza Riley, to do her job, and what I did was write something that's three times slower than she is because she can read a Google Doc very quickly and easily, and she doesn't actually need an agent to try to do that for her. And until I put that in front of her... It literally watched your face watching the agent work kind of thing... I would never have realized, "I'm actually slowing you down. I'm actually doing the opposite of what my approach was trying to do."

Mike: Right. No, I ran into that trying to get support the other day through an app, and they're like, "Oh, we're going to give you this and fill this out. Would you like to self-report," and I was like, "Yes, I don't want to have to talk to somebody," which is ironic because my generation loves to talk to people and host a podcast. But I was like, "No, because I can just clearly..." It was like food delivery... "I can just clearly spell out what the ingredients were missing, and then you guys tell me what you're going to do for me." And it was funny because nobody had gone through, what happens if we ship half an order? And I get that... And this is the same for what admins deal with too. There is infinite possibilities of ways that an item can end up in a customer's hands different than what was intended. But I feel like when they put things in there, nobody was just like, "What happens if they type half an order?" I literally got, "One of this, expected two. One of this, expected two," and it gets down to the end and it's like, "Yeah, I can't help you with that. Transferring you to chat," and then the chat didn't carry over any of the information. I was like, "Okay. I mean, I love that you guys are trying this, but did nobody test this?"

Josh Birk: Right. Well, and this is not always what happens, but once I've learned it, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it, you know one of the most common reasons you'll only get half your order?

Mike: Is?

Josh Birk: Because it's the law of good intentions. What they do is they try to divide out something that's cold versus hot so that your salad doesn't get steamed on the way.

Mike: Sure. No, I get that.

Josh Birk: Now the delivery person has two bags, and they get handed one bag. And so it's like everybody up until the driver drives off is trying to do... And I'm not blaming the driver here, but it's like all the humans were trying to do the right thing, but they weren't communicating with each other to the point where that's actually going to happen. On the flip side, have you had the chance to ride in a Waymo or another self-driving car?

Mike: I have not.

Josh Birk: Okay.

Mike: Have you?

Josh Birk: I have.

Mike: Okay. Tell me.

Josh Birk: And it is a very interesting experience because, first of all, these cars do very, very interesting things when it comes to picking you up, because they won't just parallel park or double-park assuming that everything's safe. They look around and they're like, "I'm going to go..." You know how a cab would just go past you? It's intentionally going past you because it's actually going to park over there where it's safe. So it's weird little things like that that you see. And then also the ride's so quiet. There's no human. It's so quiet. And so I found this almost calming, especially as somebody who's riddled with social anxiety about half the day. It's like this really kind of peaceful just... You're just driving, and it's just like, "Oh," sort of thing. And so I think we're in this... And I know we've gone way off... This is a tangent [inaudible 00:26:19]-

Mike: No, we're in the same realm.

Josh Birk: Yeah, but it's like-

Mike: Here's the connection. When people come to TDX, they'll probably ride in a Waymo. There. See? Done.

Josh Birk: Yeah. Well, and also we have a fleet of robot delivery bots here in Chicago, and we watched one when we were out with some friends. And going back to that cold, hot thing, the bot probably won't get that wrong, right? The bot's probably going to communicate with the restaurant, and the bot probably already knows I'm expecting two bags. You put the hot stuff in this container and you put the cold stuff in this container. So I think we're in this very weird scenario where... I am not saying the future is a lack of human connection, right? I think humans are still going to get things right correctly. But then I think we're also entering in a phase where there are things that if you're doing a very similar task over and over again, the self-driving cars might be kind of the way of the future.

Mike: Right. I've come full circle. There's always the, "Oh, robots are going to take over." And we're of the generation that I remember auto manufacturing, there was a big shift towards robotics. And for a while, I also remember cars just falling apart because the robots welded exactly where they were supposed to weld. It's just there was no metal there. The 3D level of geometry that's required, it wasn't there, right? It's there now. I think what's interesting is we very rapidly, at least in my perception, have gone through AI is taking our jobs to it's not. And here's what I posit for this year. I actually think AI could lead us to full employment. And if you've ever studied macroeconomics, full employment isn't every single person having a job. That's theoretically impossible. But it's the smallest percentage of the workforce unemployed as possible.

Josh Birk: Got it.

Mike: And the reason I say that is I think if we really think through... And this is for admins as they're thinking through, how do I roll out Agentforce in my company? How do I make it so that it's kind of like putting on a supersuit for every single person as opposed to a replacement, right? The Iron Man suit made Stark a more powerful human. I didn't say better, more powerful. And I think that's what AI can do because... And so how does it lead to full employment? It can be the buddy, the double-check, for everything. Case in point... I won't say the name because I'm very cognizant. I go through a drive-through, fast food... I kind of eat there probably two, three times a week. I really like it. I order in the mobile app, I pull up to the window, say the number, awesome, here you go. I'm going to say one out of five times the bag I get handed has 30 or 40% incorrect items in it. It's either the person behind me's order or it's my order, but not all of it-

Josh Birk: Or half of their order. Uh-huh. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Mike: And so how does this help? Well, the person working the counter is doing the best they can. I always assume good intention. But they might've missed something because, quite honestly, people change jobs so quickly, there's not enough time to get that second nature. Where AI could come in is... And I've seen these checkouts. I've seen them at conference centers, where you put the items on a 3D grid and then it scans it, and then there's a little pay screen and it's like, "Hey, I scanned the following items. Is that correct? Is that what you want to buy?" If they do that, then they slide every bag underneath, and now the person is confident... And so here's what I get at it could be better customer service. Then the person who opens up the window, instead of just being like, "Hey," or like, "22.16," because that's how much it is for everything nowadays, "22.16," they just kind of look at you, now they can be having a good day and they can turn and be like, "Hi, Mike," because they know my name, and be like, "It's 22.16," and they can take my card and they can pay, and they can be like, "Here's your food," and it's 100% correct. You can be a happy person working at your job because AI helped you out, and then you're not grumpy like, "Ugh, this job sucks." Right?

Josh Birk: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and to-

Mike: So that's my theory. I'm a little Pollyanna, but...

Josh Birk: And Daryl [inaudible 00:31:52] said it's a destination.

Mike: I know.

Josh Birk: To kind of put a pin in it, so-

Mike: The boat's in the water.

Josh Birk: So my slide always states, "Enhance and augment, don't replace." And there was a study that was a small company, but they had a relatively large portion of their company which was customer support, and they added AI to the customer support's workflow, and what they found was people were getting their job done faster, people were getting their job done happier, and they actually had less turnaround and less people quit because of those first two things. So your predictions have already proven true in some instances.

Mike: Sweet. That was the plan all along, just to really come out with a prediction and find one example to back it up.

Josh Birk: And then walk away.

Mike: And we're done.

Josh Birk: And we're done.

Mike: And we're done. Yeah. Cool. Josh, I think we covered a lot from your talk. As we wrap up, is there anything that I missed that you really wanted to-

Josh Birk: No, I don't think so. If there's one constant theme through it, it's that the humans are the people who are going to make this stuff work, whether it's riding the guardrails, whether it's testing, whether it's planning. It's like even when we have AI writing AI and you're vibe coding against your org and things like that, it's still humans that are going to be the factor of success.

Mike: Yeah. And humans, you, still trying things out. The biggest thing I always remind myself is the Steve Jobs quote, "Everything was built by somebody."

Josh Birk: Right. Yeah.

Mike: So somebody figured this out, and just because you haven't doesn't mean you won't.

Josh Birk: Right.

Mike: Just means you haven't yet.

Josh Birk: Mm-hmm. I like it.

Mike: Well, good. On that note, Daryl's put his boat in the water, hit pause, and is leisurely kicking back, catching whatever fish he's shooting for.

Josh Birk: Love it.

Mike: And all of the other listeners are like, "What is going on with these Daryl-"

Josh Birk: All these Daryl references.

Mike: "... references?" But I will link to the podcast so that you understand.

Josh Birk: I love it. All right, well, you have a good day fishing, Daryl. And, Mike, thanks for having me.

Mike: Absolutely. Thanks, Josh. Big thanks to Josh Birk for sharing his wisdom, wit, and a Waymo story with us today. Wasn't expecting that. Now, if you're building with AI in your org or just starting to plan, remember, the best agents don't replace your people, they empower them. Test often, plan well, and always keep a human in the loop. And if this episode sparked ideas or gave you some clarity, well, do me a favor. Share it with a fellow Salesforce admin. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Cheryl Feldman, Senior Director of Product Management at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about how Agentforce will make Setup smarter, faster, and way more helpful.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Cheryl Feldman.

Setup made simple Cheryl Feldman is on a quest to make Setup easier for admins, and she's the perfect person to get it done. She's been a Salesforce customer, an admin, and an architect, so she knows how difficult it can be to answer seemingly simple questions, like, "How do I get a list of users that can modify all data?" Right now, you need to run a SOQL query for that.

That's about to change with Setup with Agentforce. You'll be able to use a conversational interface to manage users and user access, troubleshoot formulas, and much more. And Cheryl's just getting started.

How you can make Setup with Agentforce even better Setup with Agentforce is available now in open beta. You can access it in production, a sandbox, or a developer org. Right now, it covers the most common use cases in Setup. For other questions, the agent can give you an answer from Salesforce's help and training documentation and help you navigate to the correct Setup page.

While these features are already game-changing, Cheryl wants your help to make Setup with Agentforce even better. "We want to hear from admins," she says, "Does it help you? And what do you want us to solve next?"

Help shape the future of Setup Cheryl and her team are already building a framework to expand Setup with Agentforce beyond the most common use cases. They're looking at multi-step orchestration, which will enable you to seamlessly create objects or fields, manage access to them, and add them to dynamic forms, all in one place.

So please, give Setup with Agentforce a try. Your feedback will help shape a smarter, simpler future for admins everywhere.

Make sure to listen to the full episode for more from my conversation with Cheryl Feldman. 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 * Trailblazer Community Group: Setup With Agentforce (Beta) * Salesforce Admins Blog: Introducing Setup with Agentforce (Beta): Your New Admin Superpower * Dreamforce '25 on Salesforce+: The Future of Setup Powered by Agentforce * Dreamforce '25 on Salesforce+: Setup Now with Agentforce: Simplifying the Complex * Dreamforce '25 on Salesforce+: Setup with Agentforce: New Superpower for Salesforce Admins

Admin Trailblazers Group * Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social * Cheryl 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 welcoming back Cheryl Feldman, Product Management Senior Director here at Salesforce. Well, to talk about something that's changing the game for admins, namely Agentforce for Setup. Cheryl's going to give us a behind the scenes look at how this conversational tool is making setups smarter, faster, and way more helpful. So from formulas to user access to cloning users, it's all about to get easier and way more admin friendly. Not to mention, Cheryl's also going to share with us how her own journey from admin to product manager helps her shape what gets built. So I can't wait. With that, let's get Cheryl on the podcast. So Cheryl, welcome to the podcast.

Cheryl Feldman: Thanks so much, Mike. I'm excited to be back.

Mike Gerholdt : I'm excited to have you back. You were a rockstar at Dreamforce this year, and you're probably going to be a rockstar this whole year. I know in the admin keynote, we demoed Agentforce for Setup. I think I'm using that term right, right?

Cheryl Feldman: Setup with Agentforce, but thank you. Yes.

Mike Gerholdt : Okay. See, I'm always backwards.

Cheryl Feldman: Yes. I was so excited to see that work in the keynote and to see the exciting admin response and excited that we went to beta today.

Mike Gerholdt : Oh my God. I feel like I feel as much joy for this as I do when we could customize the homepage.

Cheryl Feldman: Yes.

Mike Gerholdt : It sounds so small. We're getting in super knee-deep. Let's zoom out for a second because I'm sure there's a lot of new admins that are like, "What are they talking about?" Cheryl, for people that haven't met you and heard you in some of the True to the Core, and some of the Q&A sessions where I feel like Parker just calls on you constantly, could you do a little bit of an introduction of what you do and the fun stuff you get to work on at Salesforce?

Cheryl Feldman: Sure. My name is Cheryl Feldman, and I'm a Product Manager in platform. Been at Salesforce about four and a half years now. Prior to joining Salesforce, I was actually a customer for just over 18 years in, starting out as an admin, moved into more leadership and management roles, was running a COE at a very large bank before I joined Salesforce. And when I joined Salesforce, I started in the user access area, specifically managing the authorization side of things, and then started to really advocate that we improve admin experiences. That led me to my role now where I act as the product domain lead for Setup with Agentforce, and improving experiences for admins and really addressing a lot of the issues that admins have in setup because speaking of True to the Core, setup has come up pretty much every True to the Core has ever existed. And that's what I do here at Salesforce.

Mike Gerholdt : Which is a lot to say the least. I will fan out a little bit because I remember when Cheryl, you were a customer, you always had questions I couldn't answer, which challenged me. And now to see you on the inside, I mean, it's one thing to hang an identity and say admin developer architect, but that kind of core identity that people have that you made your name on of configuring one of the most complex CRMs to meet business needs without deploying code is just so empowering. And I just, for me, on behalf of all the people like me, I'm just so appreciative to have you inside the PM org championing for people that want to be in tech that don't understand or know how to write code. I had to say that early just because-

Cheryl Feldman: Thank you. Thank you for saying that.

Mike Gerholdt : ... I don't get to talk to you a whole lot. You're a busy person, especially with the new setup stuff. I mean, I remember demoing permission sets and permission set groups and feeling like, "Holy cow, Cheryl just moved a mountain." But you're like, "Yeah, I can move mountains, but what about planets?" And now you're tackling setup. Where did this come from?

Cheryl Feldman: This came from back, I think it was June 1st, 2022, one of our incredible Trailblazers, Andrew Russo, hope he doesn't mind me shouting him out, stood up at True to the Core and said, "When are you actually fixing setup? When are you doing anything, something?" And I had been pushing internally that we needed to do something. And I said, "Well, if not me, then who?" And so I started looking at the usage of setup, and something that it didn't necessarily surprise me, but it validated a lot of things that I believe that the areas and user access were the most used areas and setup, which was the area that I was managing at that point from a product standpoint. And I said, "Well, what are the big issues that we need to sell for admins?" And a lot of it was around troubleshooting. So we introduced the user access summaries, and we did a lot of great work in user access, but we didn't really expand beyond that. And so we said, "What would it take to actually fix all of setup?" And trying to actually do that is... Actually, I'll be honest, it would be an impossible task given the state and that there's no framework behind setup. So when Agentforce started to come about, we said, "Well, what if we looked at Agentforce, and what if we could help admins and rethink setup using Agentforce, and revamp things and revamp the experience that way?" And so that's how everything came about. We started with, let's improve some of the pages to then let's see if we can tackle a larger part of setup, and that's what we've been doing. And Agentforce has helped unlock that for us because I'll be honest, the way we were going previously, we probably would've been here for 20 years because there were over almost 1,300 pages in setup, there's a lot.

Mike Gerholdt : Wow. Well, and as I come to find out, I mean, there was no real governance of setup.

Cheryl Feldman: That's true. That is very true.

Mike Gerholdt : And so everybody, when they created a new product would just add it to the setup menu.

Cheryl Feldman: Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt : Wow. And I happened to think that the solution actually in 2022 maybe was, it had been invented. I'm sure somebody will call me out on when AI was birthed, but it wasn't in our nomenclature for another year or so.

Cheryl Feldman: Yep.

Mike Gerholdt : And that was actually the solution because I remember thinking, I was at a world tour in Boston and somebody came up and said, "With the innovations coming out around AI, why can't I just send screenshots of my problems or my formulas to AI to fix it?" And I thought, well, you should just solve that on the platform.

Cheryl Feldman: Exactly. And we actually do, and so one of the things that Setup with Agentforce can help you with is to troubleshoot your formulas. It doesn't just troubleshoot user access, because that's one of the things we started looking at, what are customers asking in the Trailblazer community? And a lot of it is, I always see Steve Mo and I always say, "We need to help our agent think like Steve Mo helping out all those new admins with their formulas."

Mike Gerholdt : Yeah. I think one important thing, and we don't have to get into the details of it, but one important thing is for you, this was, yes, a really cool thing to come out with, but you also dug into, "Well, but how does this help on the back end? How does this help our customer service? How does this help our admins?" And you don't have to share it, but you really found what the percentage of cases and the reason some of the admins were calling into our customer support line.

Cheryl Feldman: Yes. This is probably not a shock to a lot of admins out there, but it was very hard if you are not familiar with SOQL to answer the question, "Why can't my user do a thing or why can't my user edit this record?" That was very complicated to figure out. So unless you had a developer working with you who could run SOQL for you, you ended up contacting support. And so we started looking at how could we help admins help themselves in an experience through natural language. And so that is one of the first use cases that we took what setup with the Agentforce was around that troubleshooting.

Mike Gerholdt : Wow. That's amazing. So fast-forward, it's January 2026. I almost said '25. I don't know why. It's like the brain didn't move ahead a year. How are we doing? Where are we at with our agentifying setup?

Cheryl Feldman: The exciting announcement as of today, or you'll be listening to us in a couple of weeks. It'll be out for a couple of weeks already, but we are now an open beta. We were, announced our pilot at Dreamforce, so we're now in open beta, so customers can go enable this and try it out. We solve use cases and we handle use cases across user access, formulas, data model, flow, a lot of the most common areas and setup. Now, I don't want to say we handle everything, but we do handle a lot, but we want customer feedback. We want to hear from admins is, does it help you and what do you want us to solve next? And so that's where we are right now.

Mike Gerholdt : Okay. And just to clarify, because sometimes I know for a long time as an admin, I wasn't able to do some of the things. Pilot was totally, you had to sign up, and Cheryl had to interview you, and you had to shake hands and there was a vetting process, right?

Cheryl Feldman: Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt : Open beta for an admin sitting there listening to the podcast means they can access it in their sandbox or?

Cheryl Feldman: They can access it in production, or a sandbox, or in a developer org. It just has to be for developer org. It has to be the specific developer org that has access to Agentforce and Data Cloud.

Mike Gerholdt : Okay.

Cheryl Feldman: And then they can enable it. And so they'll see, if their org has Agentforce and Data Cloud, they'll see a banner at the top of setup that will redirect them to enable this.

Mike Gerholdt : Awesome. You're super close to the product. If you were an admin now, what would be the first thing you would suggest an admin should do when they try this out?

Cheryl Feldman: I would say think about an issue that you had, whether it was an issue writing a formula or an issue trying to figure out what a user of access was, and ask that question to Setup with Agentforce and see where you get. One of the things that I think is really cool that I would've loved this when I was a customer, because I had to answer this question all the time. You could actually ask the agent, "Show me a list of users that have access to customized application or modify all data or manage users or managing public list fees," and it'll show you a list. There is no great way in the platform to actually figure that out without running a SOQL query.

Mike Gerholdt : Right.

Cheryl Feldman: And so that is something I'm actually really, really, really excited about. That's where I would start is start thinking about some of the questions that you have. One of the other features that we have is we actually have and help a navigation action. If we don't actually have actions that actually help you do something or analyze something, it will actually take our help in training documentation and generate an answer for you and also help you navigate to the right setup page. Let's say you ask the agent, "How do I setup Agentforce for sales?" Instead of having to go out to the help and training site or out to Google to figure that out, you could ask that right and setup and this will help generate an answer. And then if there's something where you need to redirect to a setup page, it'll give you a link that'll just navigate you to the right setup page.

Mike Gerholdt : Wow, okay. I mean, this takes setup from an area where I'm navigating a million little dropdown carets to a whole experience where I can actually query. I remember a while back, it was like we used to say you could talk to your data. Now, you can talk to your setup menu.

Cheryl Feldman: Yes. Now you can talk to setup.

Mike Gerholdt : In the lifespan of Salesforce products, you said it went from pilot to now open beta. I'm not going to hit you up for timelines, but what is the next step?

Cheryl Feldman: The next step is we want to start enabling some more use cases and handling more of setup. We can, I'm sure, share a link to a presentation we did at Dreamforce called the Feature of Setup. We talked about introducing essentially another framework that essentially runs Setup with Agentforce. We're working towards that. And so we handle, we actually started with, we looked at the most used areas in setup and we started with that, but that essentially the most used areas in setup are essentially sit within 40 pages within setup. I mentioned there are 1,300. The next step is how do we expand this beyond these most used common use cases to everything in setup? And that is the framework that we're building. The other thing that we're working towards is how do we handle what we call multistep orchestration and being able to do multiple steps as far as setups. So think about when you create objects or fields, being able to grant access, adding it to layouts or dynamic forms, those are all multiple steps and being able to do those together. That's essentially what we're working towards from the framework. I can't give out exact timelines yet, but those-

Mike Gerholdt : No, I don't expect you to.

Cheryl Feldman: ... that we're working towards right now to handle more of setup. And so that's what you're going to see start coming as we move throughout the year.

Mike Gerholdt : So you envision a world where on Monday an admin could sit, take some requirements, vet out a process, maybe start talking to... I say talking, hello? Typing. Typing to Agentforce for setup and start building an app and then maybe on Wednesday or Thursday, continue building it and possibly even deploy it on Friday and doing it all conversationally.

Cheryl Feldman: I think eventually, yes, we will get there. We're handling right now. We consider that. We're starting to think about our building use cases, and I'm actually working, I think you've met my colleague, Tian, and he's working towards the building use cases. And so he would actually be a great person to have on this podcast.

Mike Gerholdt : I know. He's been in the admin keynote.

Cheryl Feldman: Yes. And so I think we're looking at, I would say overall, yes, but we're not handling those type of use cases yet as far as building an end-to-end app. I would say we're looking at more of the everyday configuration use cases and setup use cases right now, but we're starting to think about right now. So I would say Tian would be a great person to have on this podcast.

Mike Gerholdt : Yeah, absolutely. Talk the building part. One thing that I've thought of, and it's come up in other AI conversations is Josh made a mention of it in a previous podcast too of AI almost feels like that first time you get to use a calculator in math class. And I remember my math teacher saying, "Well, the calculator's answer shouldn't be a surprise. You should know what its output is expecting." Two years, one year, I don't know the timeline down the line, it's feasible that an admin could sit down and just conversationally build an app. What are the thought process behind also adding to that so that if they didn't use Agentforce for setup to build that app, that they would know how to jump into the configuration of it?

Cheryl Feldman: That's a good question that I'm not sure I have an answer for right now, but I do see that we probably want to do something like that where, because I don't necessarily see a day where setup is going to completely go away. I think it'll still be there. And I think it's important for admins to understand what the agent is helping them do and why. Something we've talked about long-term, and this is further out, is something that I like to call architect in a box.

Mike Gerholdt : Ooh.

Cheryl Feldman: And I think there's a very big bridge between an admin and an architect. And this is not to downplay the role of an architect, super important role, but I think if you talk, and I played an architect role before I joined Salesforce, so I think it's very much how do we help admins think more like architects on their day-to-day tasks. And so how do we explain to them if they say, "Okay, let me update. If they tell an agent or even go into setup, let me update my sharing model." Doing that on Tuesday at three o'clock is probably not a great idea, right? And helping you think through the changes, what is the impact of the change that you're making and that's where we want to go directionally.

Mike Gerholdt : Oh, I like that. I mean, that's being context aware of, you asked me this, but it's say January 29th and our quarter closes in three days, refactoring a sharing model or refactoring permissions might leave salespeople unable to update an important opportunity. What if we do this on February 1 and then have that delayed reaction or that delayed action in a queue or something?

Cheryl Feldman: Yep. Or thinking about if you're making a change, is that going to impact you negatively from a security perspective? Those are some things that we're starting to think about on how we help admins make really good decisions.

Mike Gerholdt : Right.

Cheryl Feldman: It's not that admins don't make good decisions today. I think sometimes we make it really hard for admins to make good decisions because sometimes the tools to make those decisions are either sitting in where you have to run queries to the dev console, which not everybody is comfortable with, or you have to have read all of our documentation and have essentially what I like to call the PhD in Salesforce, which is either one of the big architect certifications or to actually be a CTA. And I think we need to bridge that gap.

Mike Gerholdt : Yeah. No, that was always something along those lines that came up a hundred years ago when Process Builder was around was it's so easy to build processes and an admin or anybody could just theoretically sit down and load up an org with processes that would essentially be really more efficient as just one trigger and what's the trade-off and pros and cons there. That's a really good way of thinking of it. I mean, the other thing, future-looking, would be to have the setup agent or whatever we call them, they should have a name.

Cheryl Feldman: Setup with Agentforce, yeah.

Mike Gerholdt : Yeah, I know.

Cheryl Feldman: But our actual agent is called Enhanced Agent for Setup.

Mike Gerholdt : Okay. But I mean a nice name like Claude or I don't know. I can't think of another name. I know that's another AI, I just meant it as a human name. But to be like, "Hey, Cheryl, you just asked me this question, but I'm also chatting with your peer admin who's in New Jersey and Robin just asked me a similar thing," because there's also the idea that there's many admins working in an org to solve issues.

Cheryl Feldman: Yeah, I don't think we've actually figured out how to do something like that yet, but that's an interesting use case.

Mike Gerholdt : No, I mean, I'm not poking holes. Sometimes it's fun to think about what the future is once this gets out of the box.

Cheryl Feldman: Yeah. And I think one thing for admins is I want to hear feedback as admins are listening to, what would you want us to solve? I want to hear from admins, especially as they're trying this out what they want us to sell.

Mike Gerholdt : Yeah, absolutely. We'll put a link in the post so people can do that because I was just thinking, are there already agentic setup ideas coming in to the idea exchange about this? But I mean, obviously I think you want to filter them all into one location, right?

Cheryl Feldman: I would love ideas. I actually haven't seen any ideas come in yet, but that is-

Mike Gerholdt : Oh, somebody's got to put one out there.

Cheryl Feldman: Somebody's got to [inaudible 00:23:12].

Mike Gerholdt : Help Cheryl retire some points.

Cheryl Feldman: Yeah. But there's definitely with Setup with Agentforce, we are retiring a lot of idea exchange points. And so one of the things customers have wanted us to solve for a long time is the ability to clone and use it. We're able to Setup with Agentforce to do that. Some of the troubleshooting things are things that customers have been asking from us forever, and so those are some really good things that we're able to do. And we also took that lens when we were looking at the initial launch, how can we solve some of these longtime admin requests that we just have not been able to solve because either it requires us to build this really, really complicated UI, or there's technical issues. How can we actually solve some of these things that admins have been asking for for a long time?

Mike Gerholdt : Yeah. So you may have said this, but it just popped in my mind. It helps you with formulas, right?

Cheryl Feldman: Yes.

Mike Gerholdt : Okay. Well, there goes a Dreamforce session. For those of us that have been in the community for a while, Daniel Hooks used to do best practices on formulas and validation rules session at Dreamforce. Packed to the walls every time. Now we have setup for Agentforce. Look at that. Efficiency.

Cheryl Feldman: And I think we've actually proposed a session for TDX. Hint, hint.

Mike Gerholdt : For the admin track, maybe?

Cheryl Feldman: Yes.

Mike Gerholdt : Would you like it in the admin track?

Cheryl Feldman: Yes.

Mike Gerholdt : I'll have to talk to that guy, he's a real stickler.

Cheryl Feldman: And so I've actually started putting together a document of a number of sessions we would love that I think admins would love to see how Setup with Agentforce works live for some of their most common use cases.

Mike Gerholdt : Oh yeah, that would be a fun thing. Almost like, this'll date me, like a Total Request Live.

Cheryl Feldman: Yes.

Mike Gerholdt : Remember when MTV used to do that?

Cheryl Feldman: Yes.

Mike Gerholdt : Just show up and shout out your requests and DJ Cheryl will make Agentforce solve your problems.

Cheryl Feldman: Yes.

Mike Gerholdt : I like that.

Cheryl Feldman: Now there's going to be somebody listening who's going to be like, "What's TRL?"

Mike Gerholdt : I know. That's okay. I say a lot of things that date me, so that's definitely not the first one, but you can Google it, it's out there. Ask an AI about what TRL is and then you'll slowly find out. Cheryl, I appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule. I know you're in more meetings than one should have on their calendar about this, but I truly do mean the stuff that you're working on is just so impactful for people in their careers who are making a name for themselves inside of organizations and building their skill. Technology is such a fun ecosystem to work in and it's so empowering when it works the way you want it to. And I feel like you work on the stuff that you're making it work the way we all think it should work, so thank you.

Cheryl Feldman: Thank you so much, Mike. And to all the admins out there, thank you for your support, so many of you give me great feedback. And also, I'm willing to take the hard feedback. I also really like when admins tell me, and I know you're all not shy, tell me if there's something we should be doing better. And I know we still have a ways to go, but I do want all of your feedback and I do value all of your feedback. And that's why True to the Core, even as an employee, is still my favorite session at Dreamforce and TDX because we get the hard truths that we need to look at, and that's something that's always near and dear to my heart. I know we can't do everything, but I do absolutely love hearing all of the feedback from the admin community.

Mike Gerholdt : Absolutely. Thank you, Cheryl. That's a wrap on our chat with Cheryl. If you've ever wrestled with setup, you'll want to give Agentforce for Setup a try, especially now that it's an open beta. Cheryl's deep admin roots and product insights are helping shape a smarter, simpler future for all of us. And if you want to help build it, your feedback is gold, don't keep it to yourself. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Laura Pelkey, Director of Customer Security Communications & Engagement, and Kylie McKlveen, Director of Product Marketing at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about how admins can level up the security of their orgs using a simple framework for understanding security in Salesforce.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Laura Pelkey and Kylie McKlveen.

The three key areas of Salesforce security Security can feel complicated and unapproachable, especially at the pace at which the Salesforce platform is evolving and changing. How can admins keep up and make sure that their org's data is protected?

Luckily, Laura and Kylie are here to help. It starts with a practical framework for understanding Salesforce security. They break it down into three key areas:

1. Invisibles: What Salesforce is already doing to protect your org. Examples include network-level security, infrastructure, application-level security, and a global 24/7 threat response and monitoring team.
2. Configurables: What you can do as a Salesforce Admin to improve your Salesforce security. Think security settings, controls, and layering permission sets to follow the principle of least privilege.
3. Enhanceables: Extra steps you can take to protect sensitive data or meet industry-specific regulations. These are tools you can add to your org, like Salesforce Shield, Security Center, and Salesforce Backup and Recover.

Put it all together, and you have a clear plan of action for how you can level up the security of your org.

How Agentforce will bring agentic security to your org "There's a lot of amazing AI technology out there now," Laura says, "but unfortunately, the attackers, the hackers, the bad guys, whatever you want to call them, are also leveraging this technology, and they're doing so in ways that make it harder to spot when malware is happening."

In the Dreamforce Security Keynote, they demonstrated this by doing a live deepfake of a Salesforce executive. It's getting easier for attackers to use AI for social engineering or even just a better-worded phishing attack.

Luckily, Salesforce is fighting back with two new features coming soon. With Agentforce in Security Center, you will be able to detect, investigate, and remediate threats to your org with a simple conversation. Agentforce in Privacy Center will help automate some of the hard work around complying with constantly evolving regulations.

These new agentic features will make security and compliance faster, easier, and more accessible.

Walking through the security steps you can take right now For now, Laura and Kylie's advice to improve your Salesforce security is to dive into the configurables. The "Trusted Enterprise Security" video series is a handy guide to walk you through all of the steps you can take to drastically improve the security of your org.

Check out the Dreamforce Security Keynote on Salesforce+ to learn more about what threats are out there and how you can fight back. And remember to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Podcast swag * Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more * Security Keynote: Protecting the Agentic Enterprise * The 360 Blog: Laura on security * The 360 Blog: Reduce Manual Security Tasks With Agentforce in Security Center * The 360 Blog: Automate Manual Compliance Processes with Agentforce in Privacy Center * YouTube series: Trusted Enterprise Security: Built on Salesforce * Meet the Long-Lost Fourth Member of Snap, Crackle and Pop

Admin Trailblazers Group * Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social * Laura on LinkedIn * Kylie 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 diving into some security framework that you've either seen online or at Dreamforce, specifically wrapping your head around invisibles, configurables, and enhanceables. So this week I am joined by longtime podcaster and security champion Laura Pelkey and new voice and new to the Salesforce Trusted Services Team, Kylie McCleven. They are both here to help us unpack how we can think about the security layers baked into the platform, the settings they control, and the tools available for us to go even further. Plus we also jump into a little bit about what AI means for keeping your org secure. This is a fun podcast, and we also bring in a little bit of pop culture. I won't ruin it, but Sylvester Stallone does make an appearance in this episode. So with that, let's get Laura and Kylie on the podcast. So Kylie and Laura, welcome to the podcast.

Laura Pelkey:

Hey, Mike.

Kylie McKlveen:

Hey, thanks for having us.

Mike Gerholdt:

I know. This is going to be fun, even though... Well Laura's a long time podcaster, so she makes security fun, but Kylie's a new voice. So Laura, let's start with you. Refresh everybody, what you've been up to at Salesforce since we've last chatted.

Laura Pelkey:

Yeah, I know it's been a little while. I'm very happy to be back on the pod. Thank you for having me. So I'm actually coming up on my nine-year anniversary at Salesforce, which is crazy. Can't believe it's been that long. And lately I've been at Dreamforce speaking, writing a lot of blogs about security, and still just trying to get the word out there to our customers about how to be secure with their Salesforce data.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yep, absolutely. And Kylie, you're a new voice to the podcast, so welcome. Tell us a little bit about how you got started at Salesforce and what you do.

Kylie McKlveen:

Thanks, yeah, what do they say, long time listener, first time caller? So yeah, I work on our product marketing team for our trusted services products. I've actually just joined this team within the last year when Salesforce acquired Own or formerly Own Backups. So loving my new role and really excited to work with Laura and yourself working with customers on helping them with their security.

Mike Gerholdt:

Now, trusted services sounds big and massive and like a lot of stuff. What are some of the products that maybe Salesforce admins are familiar with that fall under that umbrella?

Kylie McKlveen:

Yeah, that's a great question. So Shield, Salesforce Shield, which consists of event monitoring, data detect, platform encryption, and field audit trail. It's also security center. And then with the acquisition of Own, we also added backup and recover, archive, data mask and seed, so that was enhanced with seeding capabilities. We also have privacy center. So those are some of the products admins would be familiar with.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, no, I think we saw a few of those in the admin keynote. So Laura, you're still on the mission and I'm with you on security-minded admins.

Laura Pelkey:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt:

Let's talk about what being a security-minded admin is to get us in that security mode.

Laura Pelkey:

Yeah. You know Mike, I was actually just thinking about this. I think we did a podcast with that name, and I think two months after I started at Salesforce, we did a podcast together, which is-

Mike Gerholdt:

I mean, we don't mess around. Laura was like, "We're doing a podcast right away."

Laura Pelkey:

Yeah, yeah, the security-minded admins, love that topic. So a security-minded admin is just someone who understands that securing their data in Salesforce and their organization's data in Salesforce is an admin's responsibility. Admins have many responsibilities. There's really not enough time in the day to do all of the stuff that an admin needs to do. But security is one of the most important ones. And it's often one of the most overlooked ones. So yeah, really, really passionate about that topic, and I feel my role is to help admins focus on the top things that they can do. Because there's a lot of stuff that can be kind of confusing, but really if you're doing a handful of things, best practices, using the right controls, you're doing most of what you can to protect your organization.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Now I know Laura, at Dreamforce, you gave a presentation that took that security-minded admin up a notch because, I mean, pre-AI, we were just talking about making sure people didn't put sticky notes on monitors and strong passwords. Oh, we got MFA. Remember, MFA was like... That was going to save the world. And now we have AI, which I saw your presentation in Dreamforce. What is security like now in the world of AI?

Laura Pelkey:

And first of all, MFA is still very important, so definitely still do that.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right, absolutely. It still saves the world, it just there's more to it.

Laura Pelkey:

Still saves the world. There's just more more things now. Yeah, we're seeing a huge rise in adoption of AI. I mean, look at how many people listening to this call use LLMs like ChatGPT on a regular basis. I mean, I know I do. Of course, Agentforce, we all love Agentforce. There's a lot of amazing AI technology out there now. But unfortunately what we're seeing is the attackers or hackers, bad guys, whatever you want to call them, are also leveraging this technology, and they're doing so in ways that make it harder to spot when malware is happening. They might be creating a deepfake, that's kind of advanced, but it's actually... It's pretty easy to do nowadays, in order to get your user credentials and to take over your user account.

It could even just be maybe a really well phrased phishing text message. I think we all probably get those too nowadays, it's super common. And before it would be kind of easy to spot them. There might be some spelling errors or just language related errors that would be easy to guess that maybe this isn't really from somebody that I know, but nowadays with AI, it's actually... The AI can craft these messages that sound much more realistic and believable. So that's had an effect on how successful bad actors are when they're trying to take over a user account or get user credentials or get sensitive information and data.

Mike Gerholdt:

I mean, the good news is a lot of people have access to AI, and unfortunately sometimes the people you want access to shouldn't. It also burst my bubble, so it means you're telling me that Bob Ross video of him wrestling Mr. Rogers wasn't real that I just watched the other day?

Laura Pelkey:

Yeah, yeah, probably not.

Mike Gerholdt:

Because it was awesome.

Laura Pelkey:

Probably not. Just logistically, I think that would be pretty difficult. But we are seeing... If anyone watched the security keynote, we shared a really interesting video, it's on Salesforce+ now, of one of our executives, we said, "Hey, can we have a professional ethical hacker demonstrate how easy it is to hack somebody at your level? Can we do this live?" And he was like, "Yeah." So there's actually a really cool video of that in the security keynote.

Mike Gerholdt:

Ooh, I'll put a link to that in the show notes so you can watch that.

Laura Pelkey:

Oh, thank you, we would love that. Kylie and I would really appreciate that.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, and speaking of videos, Kylie, I think you worked with Laura. You put out a whole series of videos around security, talking about invisibles, configurables, and what was the third one? It's always the third. It's like Snap, Crackle... Who's that third one? Pop.

Laura Pelkey:

The third child, I forget as well.

Mike Gerholdt:

I heard there was actually four at one time. You should Google that. The Snap, Crackle, Pop, there was four. Totally not on topic of talking security, but you know... So Kylie, let's talk about that. I mean, it's an interesting concept to think about. There's invisible things that Salesforce does, there's configurable things, and then there's things that I guess we can put frosting on, right?

Kylie McKlveen:

Yeah, the pop. I think this framework is just a really easy way to understand the security that's available to you. The invisibles are the things that we do, that Salesforce does kind of invisible to you, hence the name. The configurables things customers can do to make their org more secure, but it's up to them to configure them. And then the enhanceables, so things they can go above and beyond what's provided to them to really enhance their security. So the names are a bit obvious by design.

Mike Gerholdt:

So tell me a little bit about some of the invisible stuff that goes on behind the scenes that helps admins sleep at night.

Kylie McKlveen:

Yeah, I hope admins are familiar with things like network level security, our secure infrastructure, application level security, things like that. Those are really table stakes for SaaS platforms. But there's a lot of really cool things that our cybersecurity operations center does proactively protecting our customers. And I'm actually going to throw it over to Laura to give some of those examples. I know we've had multiple conversations about some of the examples of the things they do and it's really cool.

Laura Pelkey:

Yeah, so our team, our cybersecurity operations center team, they are incredible. Actually, when I started working in cybersecurity, which I've always worked in cybersecurity, my very first job, which I won't say how many years ago that was anymore-

Mike Gerholdt:

Well two, because you're 27, right?

Laura Pelkey:

Exactly, exactly, correct. But when I first started working in security, I was learning about all of the really cool things that my company at the time, we had a social engineering team, and the things that other companies would hire us to do, and they would literally go into companies and attempt to hack them by physically gaining access to a structure, their networks in their building. And this was part of something that our clients would pay for. It was so cool to me. And basically it would just reveal where the holes were in their security so that the client could then fix those. So things like that, that's called social engineering. So at Salesforce we do things like that, we're constantly hunting for vulnerabilities in the platform, in our networks, we call that threat hunting.

We have a global team that is working 24 7, literally just scanning all the networks for anomalies we call them, anomalous events. Does something look weird in one of our networks? Does something look weird in one of our customer's networks? And then we have a massive team of people who, as soon as they spot something, they jump on it. And if it's a customer issue, they'll contact the customer right away and actually work with them to resolve it. I don't know, it reminded me when I was first learning about this many years ago, it just was very cool work and it's always behind the scenes and you don't know that it's going on, but it actually does so much to shore up the security of your organization. So we do stuff like that.

Mike Gerholdt:

No, that sounds really cool. When you were mentioning that, I was thinking of... I think it's like an early 2000s B-level Sylvester Stallone movie where he's like a guy that gets paid to break out a prisons to find their vulnerability.

Laura Pelkey:

Yes, it's exactly like that, yes.

Mike Gerholdt:

That's what I was thinking of. So that's how I envision your whole team is.

Laura Pelkey:

I would actually love to do that kind of work. No one has asked me to, but if anyone at Salesforce is listening, I'm open to doing that, that sounds fun.

Mike Gerholdt:

Okay, all right, look at that. Laura, while we have you, can we... I mean the invisible stuff's really cool, but it's behind the scenes. Admins love to get their hands on stuff. Let's talk about what we can configure.

Laura Pelkey:

So as Kylie was saying, the second piece or second pillar of this are the configurables. And the configurables are... The easiest way to think of it is the things that are within the customer's control. So this is security settings, controls, and features that actually need to be set up properly by the customer. And Salesforce is a very robust platform, and we do provide a level of flexibility to make sure that our customer's needs are being met, but it's also part of our shared responsibility model where when a customer has control over these things, that they really spend the time to properly configure them to best protect their data. A couple of examples. The principle of least privilege. It's not a setting, but it's a principle that in cyber security is the defining principle for when you're talking about user permissions.

So admins set up users all the time. Every day, maybe. So when an admin is setting up a user, it's really important that they're paying attention to the permission sets and the level of permissions that they're granting to this user. So we still say layering permission sets and permission set groups on top of profiles is the best practice, and when you are setting up a user, make sure that the permissions you're granting them are only what's necessary for them to do their job. So that's that that least privilege part. And by limiting them to only what's necessary, it actually helps limit the exposure if in... Hopefully this doesn't happen, but in the chance that a user account is compromised. And especially when we're looking at people who have admin level permissions, and what are those, Mike? Modify all data, view all data.

Mike Gerholdt:

Everything's scary.

Laura Pelkey:

Yes. So those are incredibly powerful permissions, and admins know they can do everything in their Salesforce org. But would you give, for example, okay, say like a Salesforce admin is the owner of a house. Let's just create that metaphor. Would you give all of your keys to your mail carrier? Why would they need access to the inside of your house? Maybe they need access to the gate for the pathway that walks to your front door, so you leave that unlocked for them, but they don't need to get inside your house. It's kind of like the same thing when you're setting up users. You don't want all of your users to be able to do every single thing in your Salesforce org.

And again, it's because users make mistakes so they could accidentally and unintentionally do something that could cause a security issue. That happens all the time, or in the off chance that a user is compromised, you don't want the bad actor that has compromised and taken over that user account to be able to do all the things that an admin does. So yes, very long spiel about principle of least privilege and why it's important, but basically the configurable part of this is setting up users and making sure that they only have the level of permissions that they need.

Mike Gerholdt:

And to run with your metaphor, Laura, I think even the delivery companies now, I have a code from my garage door and you can drop a package off in my garage door. So in theory, you're only getting into my garage unless I forget to lock the door to my house from my garage. Now you have access to the whole house. And that plays into the same... They should only have access to the things they should have access to.

Laura Pelkey:

Yeah, exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:

Laura, I think this falls into maybe a product that you oversee, which is Security Center.

Laura Pelkey:

I don't oversee it, I wish I did.

Mike Gerholdt:

Or Kylie, sorry.

Laura Pelkey:

It's an amazing... Yes, Kylie's team does that. And you can actually, with Security Center, see the number of people exactly who in your organization has admin-level permissions? Kylie, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think in Security Center you can actually change those permissions within Security Center itself or apply policies across all of your orgs within Security Center to limit that, is that correct?

Kylie McKlveen:

That's correct. Absolutely, you can apply policies. And I think especially for admins who have multiple orgs that they're managing, being able to view their security posture across and then have a sense of consistency and control, Security Center is a great product for that.

Laura Pelkey:

Yeah, we love that product.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, and we saw a lot of this in the admin keynote where Kate and Lisa did a demo of Lisa just needing additional permissions to edit a field, not the entire object. And I think what was nice is we saw Agentforce double-checking with the admin to say, "I've set this up, but is this correct?" Which is a huge step, the human in the loop for a lot of security and AI things that we work on.

Laura Pelkey:

Yes, it's so important that you're working with... And now that Security Center is enhanced with Agentforce, it's like admins have kind of a partner, but still the admin's responsibility to validate everything and to oversee everything. But it's now easier to do that, which is great.

Mike Gerholdt:

Great. Especially when it goes GA. I think admins will be excited for the new setup. Kylie, Laura set you up perfectly. She mentioned enhanceables. Let's talk about some of those security enhanceables that admins can get their hands on or help set up that take security even farther.

Kylie McKlveen:

As we talked about earlier, we have Shield and Security Center. These are the products that fall within the trusted services portfolio. Is that what you were asking, Mike?

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, just I would love to learn more about what we consider enhanceables.

Kylie McKlveen:

Yeah, so these are the products that go above and beyond to help you enhance your security. And when we talk about enhancing our security, there's really many reasons why customers are choosing to enhance their security. A couple of years ago, when we were talking to customers, it was really those in regulated industries that had specific requirements that they needed to meet in platform encryption or things like that. But now there's a variety of reasons, so some of these customers who are in high threat industries and need an additional layer of protection.

Or scale, we talk about scale a lot. So whether you're resource constraint because you're an admin of one, but you need the security power, or if your company is growing and you need something to help you scale with that. These products can really help with that. And then another thing I'll mention is if you have a lot of sensitive data in your org, I think there's a lot of important data in Salesforce that customers need to protect in different ways, but sensitive data, if you really need to add additional layers or prevent people from seeing certain data, we have products within this portfolio to help with those specific scenarios.

Mike Gerholdt:

I think one thing that's interesting to me in the discussions I've had with Laura and Lynn over the few years that we've worked together is security isn't only just keeping the bad actors out, it's also making sure the right people have the right access at the right time. I would love to know, because in my mind, backing up data, and you came from own backup, how is backing up data really part of a security posture?

Kylie McKlveen:

This is really about continuity. So being able to ensure that if you were talking about bad actors or malicious intent, but there's human error. If one of your users accidentally made a mistake and corrupted the data or deleted the data, being able to have a backup that you can quickly and easily restore that data in your environment is really important. That data is there and needs to be restored. So you need a tool to help you quickly respond to that. And that's how backup is part of that.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, no, I never really thought of that. It's one thing to have the data, make sure the right people have the right access to it, but it's also having the history of the data and making sure... I guess it would be a paper trail of what's happened to it and when it's happened.

Kylie McKlveen:

We do have products. Field Audit Trail is great for understanding how your data has changed over time. But there are some cool things about backup where you can look back into the past and see how the data has changed. You can actually look up in backup to look at the signals to see if the data might've been corrupted. So it's a really cool product.

Mike Gerholdt:

Now, the idea of invisibles, configurables and enhanceables isn't something we just thought up one day. It's actually a series of videos that I believe are out on YouTube, if I'm not correct... And this is for you, Kylie or Laura, whoever was the most involved, what are some of the things that we're going to see in those videos, because I'll definitely link to those videos in the show notes.

Laura Pelkey:

I could take that one. So this is something actually our Chief Trust Officer came up with. He's so smart, his brain is just constantly working. He just explained it one day, "Invisibles, configurables, and enhanceables," and we were like, "That is brilliant." And really what these videos are talking about, and they're also available on security.salesforce.com as well as YouTube, but basically he and our SMEs who are on the video series as well go into these layers. So invisibles is the bottom layer, and you can think of it's the strong foundation. Salesforce handles this for you. We're always working to keep our networks and our products secure and our infrastructure secure, and customers don't need to do anything to take advantage of this. I mean Hyperforce is an example of how we are creating secure infrastructure for our customers. So we talk about the invisibles.

And then we talk about the configurables. Rachel Beard, who is featured in this video series, she's amazing, she's one of our security architects at Salesforce, she talks about specific things that customers can do, and these are like... If you watch these videos and just do everything she says, that's going to be hugely impactful to the security of your Salesforce org. One of the things she goes over is login IP ranges, which is when a Salesforce admin restricts the login IP ranges so that only people within the company's network can actually access your Salesforce org. And that's really one of the best things. So things like that. She talks about principle of least privilege as well.

And then there's the enhanceables where, as Kylie said, we have a suite of amazing security and privacy products that are really designed to help our customers grow and scale. Like Kylie mentioned, a lot of admins might be struggling to keep up with their growth at their company, and these products can help you do that. And then there's actually a really cool... The last video in this series is our Chief Trust Officer speaking with a CEO and a CISO from one of our friend companies. And you just get the... From folks at that level, from these executives who think about cybersecurity all the time. You get to hear their perspective on what's next in the cybersecurity industry. So it's a really awesome video series. I would definitely encourage people to watch it.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, as we wrap up, Kylie, we're fresh off of Dreamforce. What was some of the exciting things that you're getting ready to work on heading into the coming year?

Kylie McKlveen:

Yeah, we had two really big announcements, multiple big announcements in the security keynote, but two that I just want to call out I'm so excited about. We talked at the beginning of this podcast about how AI is changing everything, but now we're seeing AI in our security and compliance products, which is really cool. So AI is actually helping you be more secure. So we have Agentforce in Security Center, which can detect threats, and you can conversationally investigate the threats and remediate them. It will give you suggestions on how to quickly resolve those issues. And then we have Agentforce in Privacy Center too. So automating some of that hard work around complying with these constantly evolving regulations. You can tell it what's applicable to your business and it will give you suggestions around some risks you may have, some gaps, and it can suggest policies that you may want to deploy in your org. So really just making security and compliance a lot more accessible and a lot more easier, faster. It's just really cool how AI is actually helping us with security in this scenario.

Mike Gerholdt:

And with a lot of those centers, I mean, there's a lot of data and to have AI comprehensively look at all of that, it might find things that you just didn't know to look for.

Kylie McKlveen:

Oh, definitely. I think that's the struggle. Sometimes you're looking at this data and you don't even know what you're looking for, and AI can really just take the pain out of that. It can look across multiple data points and tell you what's out of the ordinary. So saving a ton of time.

Mike Gerholdt:

Laura, similar question. We're fresh off Dreamforce. As you help admins in the coming year become more secure, more AI proficient, what would your advice be for admins for the upcoming year?

Laura Pelkey:

Well, definitely the couple things that I mentioned when we're looking at configuring, I think just broadly, look at your security configuration in your Salesforce org. That's the broad thing I want all admins doing right now. And then within that the things that I think are the most important for admins to be focusing on are that setting up login IP ranges, that's super important. Following the principle of least privilege when setting up users. And that also means doing an audit of the permissions that your users already have, that's super important, and taking away unnecessary permissions. Admins should also be talking to their Salesforce users about things like phishing, like the security threats that are out there. They should be educating their users about that and setting them up for success so that if they ever get into a situation where they might be targeted, then they know at least to stop, think, and then disengage.

So those three things are super important. And then MFA, as we said, saving the world. That's already required for all user logins in Salesforce, but I would also encourage everyone to set up MFA for their personal accounts. If you watch the hacking video in the security keynote, you can actually see that if you reuse your passwords across multiple user accounts, which everyone does, that's just natural, we all have a lot of credentials to keep track of, they can possibly be leveraged... Something from your personal account can possibly be leveraged to gain access to another personal account or even a business account. So you want to make sure you're using MFA on every account.

And then if you can do this, if it's available to you, add a security contact in your Salesforce org so that in the event that Salesforce needs to contact you about something, like I was talking about our amazing CISOC team at the beginning of this podcast, how they're working 24/7, they never sleep, they're just staring at a computer looking for security things. If they need to get in touch with you, they will reach out to your security contact that's listed in Salesforce. So it's important that that's up to date. So that's my advice to admins.

Mike Gerholdt:

That's good advice. I would also add, watch the 2013 movie Escape Plan. That's what that movie's called. Where Sylvester Stallone, AKA Laura, breaks out of prison. Well, Kylie, Laura, thanks for coming on and talking security. I mean, you know as well as I have since the moment I started at Salesforce, I think it's the most important thing because we're protecting our company's data. So what else you got better to do besides make the data better and more secure, in my opinion. So thanks for coming on. I look forward to seeing some of the new stuff that we have coming out from your area, Kylie, and the advice that you continue to give, Laura.

Laura Pelkey:

Yeah, we've got a lot in store, so this will not be the last you hear from Kylie and I, I promise.

Kylie McKlveen:

I love it.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, we're going to hold you to that, though.

Laura Pelkey:

No pressure, Kylie.

Mike Gerholdt:

We'll be back.

Laura Pelkey:

We'll be back.

Mike Gerholdt:

Big thanks to Laura and Kylie for walking us through the security stack that every Salesforce admin should know. Now whether it's understanding what Salesforce has your back on, tightening up your permission sets, or leveling up with tools like Shield and Security Center, there is something here for all of us. Make sure to check out the full video series on security.Salesforce.com. Don't worry, I'll link to that in the show notes. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Daryl Moon, Founder of CertifyCRM.com.

Join us as we chat about how curiosity and a test-first mindset can help you get the most out of Agentforce Vibes.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Daryl Moon.

Fishing and the art of AI maintenance Daryl came into tech as a generalist who did a bit of everything: hardware, software, networking, whatever needed doing. One fateful day, however, he took on a contract to import some spreadsheets into a CRM and ended up as the de facto Salesforce Admin for his organization.

Just like everyone else, Daryl has spent the last year trying to get his head around AI and how to separate the smoke and mirrors from the actual potential value. A keen fisherman, his mind was blown one day when he used AI to summarize the fishing reports from his local bait and tackle shop and immediately went out and caught six fish.

How Daryl got started with Agentforce Vibes On one of his trips to the local boat ramp, Daryl decided to throw on the ol' Salesforce Admins Podcast, where he happened to catch our episode about Agentforce Vibes with Josh Birk. He was already planning to work on a video about new Apex features in Spring '26, so he figured he'd give Agentforce a shot.

Daryl decided that the best way to learn about Agentforce Vibes was to try to build something simple that he was already familiar with. He spun up a developer org and asked the AI to build a Lightning Web Component for open opportunities, and while there were several things about it that didn't quite work as intended, he was impressed with how Agentforce Vibes would take things step by step using the plan and act modes.

What to build first with Agentforce Vibes In order to learn more about building in Agentforce Vibes, Daryl decided to take it a step further. What would happen if he tried to build an entire application? He ended up getting most of what he asked for, though the AI got stuck on building a few automations. Most importantly, it got him 80% of the way there for 10% of the time investment.

Daryl's biggest piece of advice for any admin trying to learn Agentforce Vibes is to start by building something you already know. AI is a tool like any other, so work with something familiar so you can properly judge how well it's working.

Make sure to listen to the full episode for more from Daryl about how he learned Agentforce Vibes. 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: How Agentforce Vibes Speeds Up Admin Workflows * Salesforce Admins Blog: Introduction to Agentforce Vibes for Salesforce Admins

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Social * Daryl 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 I am joined by Daryl Moon, retired fishing enthusiast, but that's not what we're talking about. He is a longtime Salesforce pro who recently dove into Agentforce Vibes and he's going to bring us along for the ride. So from tinkering with lightning web components to building a full-on job seeker app, Darryl shares how his curiosity and a test first mindset helped him explore this new AI tool. And of course, we talk about some unexpected challenges of token limits, but that's going to happen when you're learning something. So if you've ever wondered whether Agentforce Vibes is worth your time, this episode is for you. And with that, let's get Daryl on the podcast. So, Daryl, welcome to the podcast.

Daryl Moon: Thanks, Mike.

Mike: I'm very excited to have you on, especially after you posted on LinkedIn that you decided to jump in feet first into vibe coding, so I definitely want to talk about that. But before we get to that, I'd love to learn a little bit more about Daryl Moon. So, Daryl, tell us, how did you get started with Salesforce and what got you into vibe coding?

Daryl Moon: Yeah. Look, I'll try and keep it short and sweet. But basically, I was working overseas and then returned to Australia in 2014. And obviously, was looking for a job because I'd been away for 10 years. And the IT industry, during that time, had changed a lot. I was a bit of a generalist, I'd done a bit of everything. A bit of application development, a bit of hardware, software, networking. So I came back to this environment where the job roles were very specialized and I was finding it a bit hard to find a role that really fitted me. So I managed to find this one that was a contract just for a couple of weeks to fix up some spreadsheets and I thought, "Excel, I can do that." And that turned out to be fix up some spreadsheets that had all this data that they're importing into a CRM. A CRM, which at the time wasn't Salesforce, it was another product. And this other product had some gaps in it and it turned out to be a bit of vaporware. When we started talking about opportunities, while that was something that they were going to build. So they had the account and the contact functionality, but opportunities were something off in the future and that was a bit of a concern. And it really came to a head when we wanted to raise some issues that we had with the existing functionality and discovered that this company was actually using Sales Cloud or Service Cloud to record these issues that we had. Our CEO at the time was a former Salesforce customer. Cut a long story short, we did a pivot and we switched to using Salesforce and I became the defacto accidental admin.

Mike: It happens quite a bit.

Daryl Moon: Yeah. So the next thing was, well, how does this Salesforce thing work? We had a partner that we were working with and they were great, and they were helping do some of the heavy lifting. But also, being able to work with those consultants, I was able to start and learn my way around the admin side of things. Of course, this was about 2014, 2015, just before we had Trailhead. So it was a bit of a learn and discover as you go, until Trailhead came out, until I got hold of some resources. There was fairly limited YouTube content around at the time, but there was some really helpful posts from people like Steve Mo and Jennifer Lee, and people like that, some of those. Jennifer's obviously joined your team, and Cheryl Feldman at the time. So yeah, that was the early days when I got started.

Mike: Wow. So you've grown up on the platform for a lot of the time that I've been at Salesforce. This last, I would say, year-and-a-half, two years since AI has come, how has your learning and what you work on the platform changed since that?

Daryl Moon: I've been a bit of a critic of the whole AI movement and the value of it, certainly at the start. But I would have to say probably over the last six months or so, I've been starting to see that there's a little bit more beyond just the smoke and mirrors and there is actually some value there. Just to give an example, I'm a really keen fisherman. Now that I'm retired from full-time work, I can spend a bit of time doing that. I get these emails once a week from one of the local tackle shops and they tell me, for our four local rivers, what people have been catching, and where they've been catching, and when and what tackle they're using. And over a course of 12 months, I've got 50-odd emails and I thought, "It'd be great if I can grab all that content and summarize it, and maybe I can learn something."

Mike: Yeah.

Daryl Moon: So I cut and paste them all into one document, throw it into ChatGPT and said basically, "Summarize that for me." And it came back with a really great summary, and I went out fishing that weekend and caught six fish applying the knowledge that I'd got from that. So that was a bit of a turning point where I'm thinking, "Hang on, that's one thing it's really good at." Because it's a bit like weather forecasting, there's no black and white, true and false, 100% guarantee, but if it points you in the right direction and if it's able to take ... I think weather forecasting is probably a good analogy because there's so much data and you've got to try to make sense of it.

Mike: Right.

Daryl Moon: So applications like that, I think it's really well suited to.

Mike: Yeah, I would agree. The amount of things that I've thrown at different AI models is always fun to say, "Here's a whole bunch of stuff, go figure it out." So you have time, you listen to the podcast, you heard Josh talk about Agentforce Vibes. I've seen a demo of it at Dreamforce. And you were like, "You know what, I've got some time, I got extra fish," because you'd been out fishing. And you dug into it. Tell me what you found.

Daryl Moon: Yeah. Actually, it was interesting because I was actually driving to the boat ramp at the time and it's about a 30-minute trip from home, which is perfect for an episode of the Admins Podcast.

Mike: I'll keep that in mind so that we make sure this one's the same length.

Daryl Moon: Yeah, so that worked out really nicely. Sometimes I try to play it when we're on a road trip with my wife, but she's not so keen, but sometimes.

Mike: Yeah, nobody wants to listen to the Salesforce when it's just you.

Daryl Moon: No, no.

Mike: Because my jokes aren't that funny, I know because I read the iTunes reviews.

Daryl Moon: Oh, that's all right. But look, that one caught my attention. And the other thing is Josh sounds very much like a very good friend of mine, Dr. Scott, his voice sounds so similar. So it always gets my attention when I hear him. I think, "Oh, that sounds like my good friend Dr. Scott." Anyway, yeah, it got my attention and I thought, "Okay, what's this Vibes thing all about?" And I was actually preparing for an Apex Sales video on the new features in Spring '26 and I wanted to create a new developer org, a pre-release org, because I wanted to get some new features in that wasn't in my old pre-release org. So I went to sign up and it gave me a choice of professional, developer and unlimited roles, enterprise and unlimited. I thought, "Well, I'll try the enterprise." I did that and it created it, and I logged in. And then when I'm going to set up, I saw this Agentforce Vibes. And I thought, "Oh, that's interesting. Let's have a look at that," and I jumped in to have a look. And it fired up and it opened a new browser window, and a whole bunch of stuff happened in the background. It asked me a few questions and I just said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah." And then I'm stuck with a prompt. Okay, well, what do I do now? And I'm thinking, "Okay, so here's my chance to ask it if it can help build something." So I thought, "Well, I'll just build something really simple that I know what it should look like and what it should feel like." So I decided just to build a little LWC, so a little lightning web component that I could put on a page that would show my current opportunities and allow me to edit the close dates on them. So give me a little component that shows my open opportunities and just let me hit edit and change the dates on it. So away I went and it built that, and I was really surprised. And it deployed it for me, so then I went to my homepage in that org and I put the component on the home page and I ran it. And I thought, "Wow, that's really amazing. Here's my little component, it seems to do everything that I wanted it to do." And I got in there and I started editing dates and hitting the save button, and oh, hang on. It didn't change the dates. So I went back to it and basically explained that it wasn't saving the dates. And it had a nice conversational user interface and it'd go, "Oh, I see where the problem is. I'll just do this and I'll do that." And I'm going, "Okay, okay, okay." Did that a few times and deployed again and said, "Righto, now we're ready to go." And so I'd go back in and have a look, and oh, still not saving them. So I did that, went through a few iterations of that and I didn't get it. And I thought, "Oh, well, okay." But still, I was pretty impressed. I was pretty impressed also, there's two stages. There's a plan and there's act button on the bottom of the little chat window. So when you start off, you start off in plan mode and it basically tells you what it's going to do. And you have a look through the script and you have a look through the feedback, and you can see, okay, it's going to create this and it's going to do that, and blah, blah, blah. So you can get a good idea of what is going to happen before you actually do it. Then you hit the act button and it goes, "Righto, now we're ready to roll," and off it goes and starts doing things. And it stops every now and again and it says, "Oh, now I want to edit this file. Is that okay?" And you say, "Yes," and it edits that file and you can see the changes occurring in the metadata on the screen beside you. And then it says, "Okay, I've done that, now I want to deploy that." And you say, "Okay." So you've got control, which is good. I like that. So you've got control over it. And I'm not doing this in a production org, I'll just make that very clear. I'm doing this in a standalone pre-release developer org, it's a developer org. It's not connected to anything so it doesn't matter what I break. And I'm not pushing changes to production. One of the questions that I got after I posted that to LinkedIn that I'd done this was, "What about a search facility?" And I thought, "Oh, okay. Yeah, I wonder if I can do that." So I went back to it and I said, "Can you add a search button to that?" And it basically said, "Yeah, okay." And a couple of okays later, we had a search button on there. It still wouldn't save the records, but we had a search so we could search for other opportunities that weren't displayed in that little component. But then I'd got a bit more feedback and somebody said to me, and they basically called me out on it. They said, "Hang on. You're the Flow guy who is saying use the right tool for the right job. And then you're jumping in here with the developer tool not really knowing what you're doing and just willy-nilly going yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, go deploy this thing. That's a bit of a dilemma, isn't it? A bit of a contradiction?" And to be honest, I said, "Yeah. Look, fair call. Absolutely fair call." But in this instance, I'm in a separated developer org, not doing anybody any harm. I can break things if I like. And I'm just in test mode, I'm just curious about what this thing can do.

Mike: Right.

Daryl Moon: And it builds something that I know what it would look like if I built it in Flow, then I can compare.

Mike: Right.

Daryl Moon: It's a bit like, Mike, if I was building maybe a rocket ship and the AI agent built the rocket ship for me. I'd have nothing to compare to because I've never built a rocket ship before. So it was a really analogy to build this little component, this lightning web component, with something I was familiar with. So yeah, I'm happy to cop that criticism because it was just basically I was just going to try it out and see what it could do.

Mike: Right. No, I saw that as one of the first comments and it took me back to high school when I had to take a crazy algebra or geometry class. And I remember it was one of the first times you get a scientific calculator and there's all these buttons. And I remember the math teacher telling me, "Well, you should know the answer before you put it into the calculator. The calculator is just there to double check you." And when Josh and I were talking about Agentforce Vibes, I pointed out your ... After we did the podcast and you posted that and I said, "I'm going to talk to Daryl." He said it really comes out to that calculator standpoint where you built something knowing it would replicate standard functionality, but you're doing that because now you know how to test the tool. You're not using the tool to duplicate standard functionality, you're using the tool so that you understand it and can test its outcome, so that when you do use it to build something you're not familiar with, now you know where to look for the gap, so I thought it was interesting. Also, it's just wonderful that you have a great positive attitude towards somebody calling you out on something and not being defensive towards it.

Daryl Moon: Oh, yeah, I'm a bit beyond that.

Mike: I guess thinking through Agentforce Vibes and stuff now that you dug into it, what was something, I think we heard it in your response, but what was something that surprised you that you weren't expecting?

Daryl Moon: Well, I've done some more testing since then.

Mike: Oh, good.

Daryl Moon: Yeah. And I thought, "Okay. So let's try maybe just a simple record-triggered flow." So let's create a flow in the lead record when the rating was set to hot. Let's just put a bit of text, just write a bit of text into the description field. And I thought, "That's nice and simple." I'll be able to read that metadata of the flow, I'll know whether it's worked. That'll be really simple and I can test it, know what the outcome's going to look like. So I tried that and it got stuck. And I think this was at the end of a day where I'd been doing quite a bit of other stuff with Agentforce Vibes as well. One thing I missed was in the developer org with Vibes, you get 50, now I don't know what the unit is, but you get 50 units. Once you've used those up, Agentforce Vibes loses half its brain and is nowhere near as capable as what it was before.

Mike: Yeah, it's all the tokens, you've used them up.

Daryl Moon: Yeah, but it still kind of works. But if you didn't register that that's what happening. And it also seems to lose its ability to deploy stuff as well. So it kind of got a bit brain-dead on me and I got a bit frustrated with that and couldn't get it to work. So I left it for a couple of days, and then I'll come back and I'll try it again, and it managed to do it. Of course, because the credits have regenerated and now it's got smart again.

Mike: Yeah.

Daryl Moon: So I'm learning how this works. So then I think, "Okay, let's aim for the sky and let's try to build something really complicated." So I think, "Okay, what about we build a whole application?"

Mike: Ooh.

Daryl Moon: And let's do application for a recruiter, a job seeker.

Mike: Okay.

Daryl Moon: So we'll have recruitment type of app, but for the individual job seeker. So we've got an object with some jobs, and we've got applications, and we've got applicants, and we've got the whole process of recruitment in there as well. So I kind of described all this and it was a paragraph or two of text where I'd just used common business language and just explained what I wanted to do. And I did this in plan mode, and then I hit okay, go think about that. And it came back and it said, "Righto. So we need a custom object for jobs, and one for this, and one for interviews, and one for applications," et cetera. And I thought, "Wow, yeah, that's pretty clever. Let's now hit the action button and go build it." And it actually went and built the majority of it, including right down to the fact that when you do an interview, I specified in the description at the start to send the email to the applicant who was unsuccessful. So when you're going through and you're selecting who you're going to interview, if somebody's not suitable, then send them an email. So it was going to use a flow to send that email out, and that's where it got stuck. And I think again, we'd ran out of tokens. But up until that, we're talking it probably took me 15 minutes to write the description of what I wanted. In another half-an-hour after we'd gone through the planning stage and were going through several iterations of the actions it was taking, we basically had everything built. It just ran out of tokens then and got stuck on a few flows so we didn't actually get absolutely everything deployed, but it did deploy all the standard objects and everything. So yeah, I was blown away by that. That was amazing.

Mike: Yeah. Now, I love you are so akin to me. You got something and you just threw spaghetti at the wall to test it. Because you sat down, "I want a thing," and you just started describing it to Agentforce Vibes. And I looked back at some of the documentation, and of course, like a lot of times when we demo product, we always want to demo best practices and really, one part showcased the product, another part also give people, "Here's the best way to use it." And a lot of the discussion that Josh and I had was around PRDs, or product requirement documentation, and how much those will give you. I think it's ... I love the fact that you just sat down with Agentforce Vibes and just started throwing stuff at it to create an application. As opposed to an hour or two worth of homework and creating documents, and then giving it that. And you still go really close to an end result. I feel like what you spent for those 15 minutes was way faster than what you would have spent had you had to create all that other stuff.

Daryl Moon: Oh, absolutely. And look, it thought of stuff and asked me questions about stuff as well.

Mike: Oh, wow. Okay. See? That's the part of creating in Salesforce that admins have never had.

Daryl Moon: Yeah.

Mike: When we've been creating objects and creating fields that link objects together or flows, we never have the platform questioning us. It just assumes we're doing the best thing we can.

Daryl Moon: Yeah. And it asked about, I don't remember which object it was, but one of them had asked what type of relationship it wanted between two objects.

Mike: Ah.

Daryl Moon: And it was leaning towards a lookup and offered some explanation as to why. And I just say, "Oh, yeah, okay. That sounds like a good idea." So I clicked that button for yes for that. So yeah, it was quite clever. I also did say in my instructions, I did say because I'm more of a Flow guy than anything.

Mike: Sure.

Daryl Moon: I did say, "Do not use any Apex code. If automation is required, use Flow. Use dynamic lightning record pages in place of page layouts where possible. And also, create some test records for jobs, applicants, applications, interviewers, interviews, et cetera, and offers." And then later when I was doing it, because I thought the problem with flows was around the API version, I told it to use API version 60 for the flows to ensure compatibility. Because that was one of the problems that I'd discovered with some of the flows, that it was using the current version API 66, which is Spring '26. And it was getting stuck in the metadata trying to get some Flow type fields right. And I found if I went back a couple of releases, then it worked. And then I could go, "Okay, now switch it back to 66," and then it worked and it deployed. Yeah. Look, it was fun. It was fun pushing the buttons and try to see how far it would go. I did also try to get it to build some ... Oh, now this was an interesting one. So I tried to get it to build a lightning record page for the lead that included the rating and description fields. Interestingly enough, and I didn't realize at the time, they weren't on the page. So they weren't on the page layout, those two fields. And when I said, "Go build a flow using those two fields," it came back and it said, "No, those two fields don't exist. Do you want me to create them?" And I'm going, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on. Rating, description, they're standard fields." And I went back into Object Manager and had a look on the lead object, and looked at the field-level security and nobody had visibility of them.

Mike: Oh.

Daryl Moon: Not even admin. Yeah, so I don't know how that happened, but that was an out of the box, brand new developer org. So I turned those back on and tried again, and it managed to create the pages okay, but by this stage I'd run out of tokens again. When I ask it deploy it said, "No, I can't deploy, I don't do that. I'm not capable of doing that."

Mike: I'm out of tokens, it's like a college kid.

Daryl Moon: But it wasn't telling me that. That was something that happened an hour or two ago.

Mike: Sure.

Daryl Moon: Yeah. Yeah, fun times, fun times.

Mike: I got to tell you, curiosity is the number one admin trait.

Daryl Moon: Absolutely.

Mike: So I love that you were clicking and stuff. I want to make sure that we hit your fishing time because we're coming up on, uh-oh, what happens if Daryl doesn't make it back in time. For admins who aren't retired or don't have three or four hours a day to create and mess around with something, what would your prescription of advice be to admins who want to try out Vibes? What should they do? How should they go about learning about it?

Daryl Moon: I think do something like I did, which was recreate something that you're familiar with. So if you're comfortable creating a simple flow, then jump in and do that. So create yourself a new pre-release org, select enterprise. So then when you get logged in, you go over to set-up and it's on the set-up menu down there on the bottom, on the right-hand side. And you can choose Agentforce Vibes from there. And start off in the plan mode, so there's a little button at the very bottom that says plan or act, start off in the plan mode and just describe what you want to do. Just in plain English, create a ... And you don't have to say please and thank you, apparently that's not a thing with AI, so you can just tell it.

Mike: You can.

Daryl Moon: You can, yeah.

Mike: Just I don't know if it appreciates it.

Daryl Moon: I don't think so. I think it's wasting electricity. Yeah, because these AI models are super massive users of electricity.

Mike: Yeah.

Daryl Moon: So we don't want to waste any of those atoms. And just ask in plain English, create a record-trigger flow on XYZ object that does something when such-and-such field is populated, as simple as that. And just try it, hit the go button, see what it decides to use in the plan section. And if you're happy with that, hit act and see what it produces. And go right through to deployment, and then go and test it and see if it actually works the way you expect it. You'll see it spit out the metadata as well on your page, so your Vibes page is like a multi-panel screen, and you'll see it spit out the metadata. If you've ever looked at metadata for a flow before, you'll see it there and you'll be able to read it. If not, it doesn't matter, you can just ignore it and just wait until it gets deployed. And then of course, you can open your flow in that environment anyway because it's just built a standard flow for you, there's nothing fancy about it and you can see exactly what it's done. And then I think advanced from that, go something a little bit more complicated after that.

Mike: I like it. Daryl, I know this podcast is going to come out before TDX, so I'm just going to remind you and everybody listening, I hope you submit a session to talk at TDX about your learning experience with Agentforce Vibes. I think it would be really cool. That is, if you're willing to travel all the way over to America. I don't know what kind of fishing, there is fishing in San Francisco. I could probably Google that and find you some sort of fishing charter if that would help lure you over.

Daryl Moon: I think it's the airfare that's going to be the problem, Mike.

Mike: Yeah, it's not cheap. But on the flip side, maybe if you get on a boat right now, you might get here by April.

Daryl Moon: Yeah, in my little boat, it will probably take me until then. Yeah. I did manage to get to Dreamforce in 2019, but that was because I'd won a Salesforce competition and got $1000 Visa card.

Mike: Ah, jeez.

Daryl Moon: That helped pay my airfare, so that was a great experience.

Mike: Okay.

Daryl Moon: But being an old retired fella, I don't know if the budget's going to stretch that far this time.

Mike: I know, I hear you. But your talk is inspirational, so if anything I'm going to use the podcast to try and broadcast it out. If we can get you there or Dreamforce, I think it'd be really fun. I appreciate you taking time out of your day to talk about Agentforce Vibes and digging in. I hope, you said you had some vacation time coming up, so I hope good fishing.

Daryl Moon: Yes. Big fishing trip planned for next week. So by the time this is broadcast, I should have been four days on the water and hopefully have a freezer full of fish. We'll see.

Mike: Perfect. Then when you come back and people aren't around, you don't have to force them to listen to the podcast. Well, Daryl, I appreciate you coming on the pod and sharing your story, and I appreciate you really just clicking through fearlessly and trying things out. I think that's the biggest spirit that I was always taught and it got me to where I am today, so thank you.

Daryl Moon: Yes, it's been a long way from the ButtonClick Admin Podcast, Mike, which is where I first ran into you way, way, way back then.

Mike: Yeah. It's still kind of the same, it's just evolved from it.

Daryl Moon: Yes, yes, yes, for sure. All right, it's been fun. Thanks, Mike.

Mike: You bet. Big thanks to Daryl Moon for joining us and sharing his firsthand experience of diving into Agentforce Vibes. Whether you're curious about how AI fits into your admin toolkit, or maybe just need a little nudge to try something new, I think Daryl's story is a great reminder that exploration leads to insight. So if this episode sparked some ideas, go ahead and share it with your fellow Salesforce admins, share it on LinkedIn. Let me know what your experience with Agentforce Vibes was, I'd love to hear it. And of course, Daryl's a big fisherman, so if you have fish pictures, I'd love to see those posted, too. Share them with us. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Rebecca Sherrill, VP, and Shelly Erceg, Product Leader, both on the Salesforce Research and Insights team.

Join us as we chat about the newest updates to IdeaExchange, including RoadmapExchange and Idea Insights, and why now is the perfect time to get involved.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Rebecca Sherrill and Shelly Erceg.

How feedback shapes the product roadmap If you've ever wondered what happens after you submit an Idea to the IdeaExchange, this episode is for you. The Product Research and Insights team has been working on several new things to improve transparency and enhance collaboration between PMs and the Salesforce community.

Joining us for this episode are Rebecca Sherrill and Shelly Erceg. Rebecca started at Salesforce in user research, where she talked to, interviewed, and observed hundreds of admins to better understand their needs. "I have a huge appreciation for the admin community because I spent so much time with them during those years," she says.

Shelly, meanwhile, started as a PM on workflow and process automation tools, building products like Process Builder and part of the Flow engine. "Admins are my jam," she says. On the Product Research and Insights team, she's focused on IdeaExchange and True to the Core.

Together, they're here to tell us about how RoadmapExchange and Idea Insights will help you see how your feedback influences the product roadmap.

What is RoadmapExchange? If you've ever submitted to IdeaExchange, it's natural to ask yourself, "How do I know if they're working on my Idea? Is it ever going to be implemented? If not, why?"

That was the impetus behind RoadmapExchange, which maps ideas to Salesforce product roadmaps. The goal is to offer a peek behind the curtain, allowing you to see what the product team is working on right now and what they're considering for the future. Most importantly, it allows the community to provide feedback and use cases to help guide the product team's decisions.

"It's an opportunity to help shape what we build," Shelly says, and it also gives you a better idea of what's coming so you don't waste resources solving a problem that the product team is already working on.

Get in on the conversation with Idea Insights The other IdeaExchange feature that Rebecca and Shelly are really excited about is Idea Insights. After twenty years, there are a lot of ideas out there. Idea Insights provides context into what's happening right now in four key areas:

• Top Trending Ideas with the most votes overall from the past year.
• Recently Updated Ideas by the Salesforce product team.
• Top Open Ideas of all time by cloud.
• Recently Delivered Ideas to check out in the product.

The goal is to keep you up to date with everything happening on IdeaExchange. On the other side of things, the product team is making a push to provide more transparency and updates about Ideas, even if it's something that's not in the cards right now.

Finally, if you don't have a lot of time, Rebecca encourages you to take a look at the Salesforce Research Program. All you have to do is fill out a form about yourself, and you'll only be invited to participate in things that are really relevant to you—we'll even pay you for your time.

The Research and Insights team wants to hear from you, so be on the lookout for Rebecca and Shelly at a Dreamin' event near you. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Podcast swag * Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more * Salesforce 360 blog: A Guide to RoadmapExchange: Your Feedback, Next Steps * Salesforce 360 blog: Delivering on Your Feedback: Introducing Idea Insights * Sign up: Salesforce Research Program * Salesforce Admins blog: Introducing True to the Core Deep Dive: In-Depth Product Conversations with Salesforce PMs

Admin Trailblazers Group * Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social * Rebecca on LinkedIn * Shelly on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on X * Mike on Bluesky social * Mike on Threads * Mike on X

Full show transcript Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, we're diving deep into the evolution of the IdeaExchange with two very familiar voices, Rebecca Sherrill and Shelly Erceg from Salesforce's research and insights team. They're here to unpack the newest updates like Roadmap Exchange and Idea Insights. And why now is the prime time for Salesforce admins to get reengaged with the IdeaExchange. So if you've ever wondered what happens after you submit an idea, or how your feedback actually influences the product roadmap, this episode's for you. So let's get Rebecca and Shelly on the podcast. So Shelly and Rebecca, welcome to the podcast, or should I say welcome back to the podcast?

Rebecca Sherrill: Thank you. Super excited to be here.

Shelly Erceg: Thank you so much.

Mike: Both of you are veterans of the podcast, but both are back for a different reason. So Rebecca, refresh our memories from 100 years ago when you were on the podcast and what you do at Salesforce.

Rebecca Sherrill: Yes. So I've been at Salesforce for 13 years and yes, I was on this podcast 12 years ago. I had to look that up. I started out here doing user research for our platform products, including setup. And so what that means is that in my early years at Salesforce, I talked to, interviewed and observed hundreds of admins to understand what they needed, so that we could build that into our products. So I have a huge appreciation for the admin community because I spent so much time with them during those years. And then these days I'm leading a research and insights team. And my team continues to do research with customers to understand what they need from our products, and make sure that we build that into our roadmap. But these days, my team also runs the IdeaExchange, which is I think what we're mostly here to talk about today.

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. And Shelly, you're a familiar voice and face in the admin community.

Shelly Erceg: Admins are my jam. I started off at Salesforce in the platform as well, working on our workflow and process automation tools. Built Process Builder and part of the flow engine. And then also spent some time with our nonprofit customers over on the NGO side. And now I'm here in Research and Insights focused on the voice of the customer really on IdeaExchange, true to the core, and bringing back really what our customers need to our product teams.

Mike: Yeah. So I was a huge IdeaExchange fan when I was an admin because I love to browse like, "Oh, I hope that's coming. People need to vote for it." But I think Rebecca sent me right. Like since I've been a customer and you've been around for a while, the IdeaExchange kind of changed and expanded now, hasn't it?

Rebecca Sherrill: That's right. Yeah. So my team has been involved with IdeaExchange for the past three years. And what we've been doing during that time is really trying to bring it up to speed with the current needs of the community and with Salesforce, because so much has changed over these many years. And so most recently we have launched a new part of IdeaExchange called Roadmap Exchange, and hopefully we'll get into more details on that. And we've also launched something called Idea Insights, which the goal of that is to bring more visibility into the ideas that are most important to the community. Kind of take a look at the signal through the noise because there are so many tens of thousands of ideas. How do we know which ones to focus on and which ones to make visible to our product teams? That's a question that we wrestle with a lot. So those are two of the very concrete ways that we have evolved IdeaExchange recently in the past couple of years.

Mike: Well, we can always dive into different insights and roadmaps. Roadmaps are an admin's best friend, I feel like.

Rebecca Sherrill: Yes, definitely.

Mike: Shelly, you were a PM for a while. What was IdeaExchange for you?

Shelly Erceg: Well, one of the things IdeaExchange was was just a great place to try to keep a pulse on what people were talking about currently. And I think that's really what we're trying to do with Idea Insights because there's so much there, right? So when I was a PM, I just thought, wow, this is just a wealth of information. But I was often overwhelmed by how much information there was there. And it can be hard for PMs to go through all of that and to pull out the things that are sort of relevant to their products and to their roadmap that they're building. So that's one of the things that we're trying to do with Idea Insights is really pull out what's the pulse happening now? What's most relevant? What are people talking about? And try to bring that to our PMs and really highlight that so that they get a better understanding. They can just kind of more quickly see what's happening. So I always thought it was a great treasure trove, but you also had to go digging. So that's our goal. We're really trying to evolve and bring out those nuggets.

Mike: Well, I mean, Rebecca, if you think about it, IdeaExchange ideas, at least when I was an admin, you could submit an idea of like, why can't I change this button color? All the way to why can't part of this platform do X, which is a massive idea compared to just being able to tweak the color of a button? So I think for maybe admins who have strayed away from the IdeaExchange, you mentioned Roadmap and you mentioned Idea Insights. How does those new features help teams kind of prioritize what they should be looking at and help uncover, like Shelly was saying, the mountain of ideas?

Rebecca Sherrill: Yeah. I think Roadmap Exchange is a really great new way for product teams to do this. I'll explain a little bit more what I mean. I have long thought that when somebody creates an idea, it may feel like, oh, that's going out into the universe and we're not quite sure. And I, the person who submitted that idea, I don't know why the product team is not working on it. I don't know. Are they working on it? Are they going to deliver it? What are they doing back there anyway? What are they building right now and why are they not looking at my idea? And so that was a little bit of the impetus behind Roadmap Exchange was, what if we could make it more visible to our community, what product teams are working on or thinking about working on? Maybe it's not on the roadmap yet, but they're considering it. What if we could make that all more visible and invite the community to come in and comment on that? Provide feedback, provide use cases, give a lot of that really rich context to our product teams, and really influence the things that are currently being worked on. And at the same time, we could map some of the ideas to some of the roadmaps and say, "Yes, we are definitely working on some ideas, but we're also working on a lot of things that you don't know about that we would love your input on." So that is one of the ways we're thinking about this is just increasing the visibility and the opportunities for engagement between our customers and our product teams.

Mike: I like it. Shelly, I'll ask you, but Rebecca, feel free to jump in. I would love to know, because it sounds like with the Roadmap Exchange, you kind of need that next level input. How has the ideas that admins or developers or architects, how have they evolved over the last 20 years that the IdeaExchange has been around?

Shelly Erceg: Well, I think there was a couple of things in that question. One is I think, and Rebecca has really outlined this, with Roadmap Exchange, it's actually set up so it's kind of a different kind of experience. And we think that is a really great evolution for admins, in that we're talking about features that product managers are either considering building and need more information about, or are maybe about to start building. And it's such a great opportunity for admins to share what they need in those areas for those products, right? Their real world use cases so that we're keeping that in mind as we're building. But also on the early stages, it's an opportunity to really help shape what we build. So I think this is actually kind of the biggest opportunity for admins in terms of spending their time and looking at where they can make an impact because this is when PMs are actually in the process and actively gathering this kind of feedback and wanting to have that conversation. I think over time people are also on the IdeaExchange. They're understanding a little bit more that what's most helpful is not just saying, "I want to be able to do X with Y," but really describing the business context that you're working in. When customers and Trailblazers tell us what they're trying to achieve, it's super, super helpful for the PM. Because then we actually get the idea of what you're really trying to do. And it may not be that we provide you exactly what you ask, but we provide you a way to solve that problem. So I would just say that continuing that evolution of that kind of more sophisticated dialogue is really going to be helpful.

Mike: Absolutely. Rebecca, can you tell me a little bit more about Idea Insights?

Rebecca Sherrill: Yes. Idea Insights launched this past September, October around DreamForce. And this is a new page on IdeaExchange where you can see the all time top ideas, the recently delivered ideas. Recently commented on ideas meaning that a product manager from Salesforce has left a comment or an update, and the top trending ideas. And trending ideas in particular is a new concept for us. It's showing the ideas that have received the most upvotes in the past year. And what I really like about this is, again, if you're an IdeaExchange user and you're creating a new idea, you might think, how is there any chance that my idea is going to get any eyes on it? Because there are some ideas that have been on there for many years and have had a lot of time to collect votes. And there's no way that my new idea that's been around for one week can get the number of votes that an idea has that's been on there for 10 years. So what this does is really gives us visibility into the current ideas that are getting a lot of recent traction. And I think gives us potentially a better pulse on what's important to the community right now? And it does give a better chance for folks to get their ideas noticed by product teams because we are elevating this as a new view that people can use to look at.

Mike: Yeah. The thing that I sit back, and even with these new features, if you were to strip all of those new features away. The thing that I still sit back and kind of I'm a bit of awe about is I have yet to find another company that I actively participate with that tells me, "Hey, here's where we think things are going. Or here's the stuff we're working on." I don't get any of that with the iPhone. I don't get any of that like, "I'm drinking a Coke Zero. I'd love to give them feedback on this lid that is the loudest lid in the world," but I don't have that, right? For this to be out in just the world for admins and developers to just sit back and kind of be in reasonable awe about it is like, "Oh man, that's kind of cool. Now I got an idea of stuff to look for in the release notes."

Shelly Erceg: Yeah, it's terrific. And we really get why it's so important for our customers to understand where we're going. And our biggest push over the last year has been around more transparency and more up ... we're trying to provide more updates on ideas. And admins have told us, frankly, even if you're not going to be able to deliver that, tell us that. Because we understand people are trying to plan for their business. They need to know whether or not they need to build something, whether they need to work with somebody on the app exchange to solve the gap potentially. Or whether they know that we're providing a solution for them. And that's really, really important. So we've had a really big push and we've had somebody dedicated to program-wise to just getting updates from PMs about whether or not they're going to be able to tackle some of the ideas. Trying to provide updates to the top ideas so that we can provide more transparency in that. And I think we are really unique in that way, and we know that it has a big impact on planning and on people's businesses. So it's great to be able to try to increase that.

Mike: Yeah. Well, you mentioned a lot of lanes, and Rebecca, you mentioned launching the new Idea Insights at DreamForce. So Dreamforce famously has True to the Core as a very popular session. I know this is a track lead because none of the speakers want to be opposite of True to the Core. And recently we just launched, I believe it's on LinkedIn, True to the Core Deep Dive. I had Leanne on to talk about that. So help me understand if you're a new admin or even if you've been around for a while, what's the difference between True to the Core and IdeaExchange?

Rebecca Sherrill: Yes, great question. And we love True to the Core, the keynote. And speaking of ways in which I think Salesforce is unique, we organize that keynote and we often get the feedback, "Wow, I can't believe Salesforce still does this." Or even from folks inside of Salesforce who are new, who watch it for the first time and say, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe that we provide this amount of transparency. And it's totally unscripted and unpredictable and really authentic." So yeah, that just kind of follows onto what you were saying about how we have a pretty unique offering, I think, in terms of our ways of collecting feedback. But to your question about the difference between these channels. You can think of True to the Core as a point in time live opportunity to engage with our product leaders and our product teams. So of course, the keynotes at both Dreamforce and TDX are with our most senior product leaders. And then the new monthly series is with specific product teams and it gives us an opportunity to go deeper and have that live conversation and live engagement. IdeaExchange, on the other hand, we see that as an always on channel. Meaning you can engage with it whenever you have time. You can kind of monitor it, get updates. So it's a little bit of point in time and more in depth, and always on, always available feedback channel. And the two are very complimentary. So for example, if a team is doing a true to the core deep dive, we can have them look at their top ideas on IdeaExchange, and engage with the community about those ideas during that phone call and during that conversation.

Mike: Yeah. I know in True the Core Deep Dive and even true the core at Dreamforce, sometimes the questions are very specific. And you can always kind of read a PM's face by, "Oh boy, this one's going to be a tough one. We're going to have to have three or four people to answer it." So I'm sure it can be that way in the IdeaExchange. Shelly, I think it's interesting, it dawned on me that you're probably one of the rare few people at Salesforce that has perspective on both sides of an idea from both being a PM and having to look and read ideas and respond to them. To now working with customers and understanding the IdeaExchange and reading through the ideas as they come in and probably work with customers, I don't want to put words in your mouth. But work with customers as they're building these ideas. What insight can you provide that I think is a learning having been on both sides of that idea as it would be?

Shelly Erceg: Yeah, it's a really interesting position and one I enjoy a lot, because I've kind of got this full picture, or at least a lot of the picture anyway. I'll say from the PM side and just thinking about ideas, PMs really, really want to deliver what people need, and I always did as well. There are often complicated contexts or a lot of constraints around how we can do that. And so I know sometimes on the idea side, something can seem very, very obvious as to why doesn't Salesforce fix this? And I actually recently made something for my colleagues in research and insights called How a PM Decides. And it was a massive matrix of all the factors that went into PM decision making. Everything from business strategy to whether or not fixing something required the coordination, even though if the fixing "was actually quite technically easy." But if it required the coordination of several teams across the platform, then that raised the complexity, right? So you're always trying to juggle, what can I get done with the people I have? Do I have the expertise to fix that? Will I be able to work with other teams? Or are there roadmaps pulling them somewhere where I know I won't get their time? So it's always such a matrix trying to figure out what you can deliver. But I will say that there is just this push for PMs to deliver value. And on the other side, I think really the goal is that we need to provide as much transparency about that as possible. Because I think people really do understand once we talk with them. I know the conversations I've had with customers when I've said, "Hey, this doesn't look like something I'm going to be able to provide, and here's why." People get it because we're all human. So I just want to say keep the ideas and sharing your use cases, keep that coming. It's all super, super helpful. We're working, it's work you probably don't hear about because it's invisible. But my team is also working on ways to more efficiently get these ideas and input that internal employees get from their conversations with customers into the product life cycle. So we're working a lot on that and being able to give PMs a better view of what their customers need in particular areas. So I would just say absolutely just keep erring on the side. Your voice is not going into the ether we promise. Just keep erring on the side of sharing what you're trying to accomplish and know that there's a really big effort to continue making customers successful.

Mike: Yeah. I think sometimes you have to look at the volume that comes in and you're like, you're so glad everybody's engaged. But on the other hand, you're like, "I can't get all this done today." At least I would feel that way. So Rebecca, I'm not going to end on a sour note. This won't be our last question, but I want to play devil's advocate for a second. Admins are super busy throughout the day. They got users that constantly forget their passwords. They got agents they're building. Why should I post my idea to the IdeaExchange?

Rebecca Sherrill: I love this question. At first, yes, I just want to acknowledge that the admin role has become way more complex over the past 20 years at the IdeaExchange has been in existence. When the IdeaExchange launched, we only had Sales Cloud. We didn't even have Service Cloud. And now I think if I talk to your average admin, they are managing a whole suite of products and the interdependencies between those and the integrations. And it's just so much more complex. And I have, again, just a real appreciation for how busy and how demanding those jobs are for our admin community. So I would say we are listening. We cannot build great products without deeply understanding what you need and why you need it. And that is the number one reason why I would love for folks to continue engaging in IdeaExchange. Maybe you haven't been there in a while, maybe you are feeling like it wasn't getting looked at. To Shelly's point, we are doing a lot of work right now behind the scenes to evolve that, to change that. So I would love for folks to give us another try. I would love for folks to check out Roadmap Exchange. I'll also give a shout-out that if you are limited in time and you want to really focus your efforts and how you provide feedback to Salesforce, check out the research program. You can sign up to do a one-on-one session, or a survey to influence some of the research work that's happening within our teams. And those are very, very focused. Like you can fill out a form that tells us which products you use, a bit of information about yourself and your company. And we will only invite you to participate in things that are really relevant to you. So that can be a really great way to give focused feedback. You also get an incentive for your time as a reimbursement. So it can be just a really nice way. Again, if you're limited on time and you don't want to be writing ideas, you can have a conversation with a researcher on the team, and that's another way to influence the product roadmap.

Mike: I would agree. There's always something, some way to engage, right? I had to look at my schedule because last week we kicked off the new year talking with the admin evangelists, and kind of forward looking for 2026. So since we're fresh into 2026 when this episode airs, if you had kind of your New Year's resolution for admins on the IdeaExchange. And I'll switch it up, Shelly, I'll start with you. What would your New Year's resolution for admins on the IdeaExchange be?

Shelly Erceg: To deliver to admins?

Mike: I will let you read that question however you choose.

Shelly Erceg: Okay.

Mike: I will be deliberately vague as a host to see what the guest is going to say that's interesting.

Shelly Erceg: Wonderful. Wonderful. Well, I'll say that 2026 for us really, I'm looking forward to talking to more admins. And we're going to be going out to some of the Dreamin' events because we really want to keep evolving. So we've come out with Idea Insights and Roadmap Exchange. We know some of the core things that admins really need. I want to make sure that these things are hitting and if we can evolve them further to provide for what's really going to be helpful to admins. And I just want to hear what our Trailblazer community has to say. So we're going to go to, I hope, three or four different Dreamin' events. And we're going to be out there at TDX, of course, and Dreamforce. And be just looking to spend more time listening to admins, finding out what it is they need and how we can help.

Mike: Yeah. Rebecca, you've been around admins for a long time. If you had a 2026 New Year's resolution for admins on the IdeaExchange, what would it be?

Rebecca Sherrill: From our team's perspective, I just want us to drive as much engagement between our product teams and the community as possible. And to Shelly's point, for our team, what that means is we're going to go to some Dreamin' events and connect live with customers. And that's a little bit of our New Year's resolution is let's get closer to understand if the work we are doing is landing. And how we can continue to improve and get that continuous feedback loop. If I were to kind of put out there an aspirational, I don't know if it's resolution, more of a wish for our community, I want people to feel heard. I want them to know that we really do appreciate the time and the thought that they put into these feedback channels. That we are doing our best to listen. We know we have room to grow, we have space to do better. But I do want, at the end of the day, I want to make sure that they're heard and that they have the transparency they need to make the decisions that they need to make. So yeah, Shelly and I, our doors are always open. We love to hear from the community how we can continue to improve that for them.

Mike: Well, that'd be very cool. I bet everybody's going to be excited to have you at community Dreamin' events. Those are always fun. And you have a lot of vocal people that attend our events, so bring a lot of extra paper to take notes.

Shelly Erceg: We love it.

Mike: Shelly, Rebecca, thank you for coming on the podcast. Again, I'll have to have you back, but hopefully not when you switch again. Just stay at the IdeaExchange and make it awesome.

Shelly Erceg: Planning on it. Thank you so much.

Rebecca Sherrill: Thank you, Mike.

Mike: Big thanks to Rebecca and Shelly for joining us on the podcast. I enjoyed having them share how the IdeaExchange is evolving to better serve Salesforce admins. So whether you're posting a new idea or diving into the Roadmap Exchange, your feedbacks truly helps shape the future of Salesforce. So don't forget that your voice matters. And hey, if you're headed to any kind of the community Dreamin' events this year, keep an eye out for them. They're doing a listening tour. So with that, until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

View Details

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jennifer Lee, Joshua Birk, and Kate Lessard from the Admin Evangelist team at Salesforce.

Join us as we look at what's next for admins and Agentforce in 2026 and revisit our predictions from last year.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jennifer Lee, Joshua Birk, and Kate Lessard.

Revisiting our predictions for 2025 Happy New Year! Last January, I asked the Admin Evangelist team to make predictions for 2025. So let's check in on those and see how we did.

Josh Birk promised that admins would find building with Agentforce to be easier than they expected. I think that's turned out to be true, especially with resources from Salesforce like Agentforce NOW to help you get started. However, building agents is only part of AI adoption. There's still plenty of work to be done to get organizational buy-in and get the most out of Agentforce.

Jennifer Lee was excited about the potential of Setup with Agentforce. And while these new features didn't make it out of pilot in 2025, she's still excited about how much easier things will be when it goes live. And if you want to see it in action, check out the Admin Keynote from Dreamforce '25.

Finally, Kate Lessard was all about security for 2025 and how important it will be for AI adoption. Time and again, what she's found is that getting Agentforce buy-in at your organization starts with a clear governance story. Dreamforce '25 featured our first-ever Security Keynote, so this is a topic that will continue to be top-of-mind for admins.

What's on the 2026 Roadmap for Salesforce Admins? Next, I wanted to ask the team to make predictions for 2026.

For Josh, it's not just about the agents that admins can build. It's about the agents that help you get more things done on the backend. With tools like Setup powered by Agentforce, Agentforce for Security, and Agentforce Vibes, there are more and more ways to amplify your skills with AI. In other words, it's agents all the way down.

Jen, as always, is all about automation. As she puts it, "Without any type of automation, how good are your agents?" In 2026, she sees admins building with smaller, simpler flows that leave the heavy lifting to AI agents. With your Agentforce skills amplifying your automation skills, you can simplify complicated processes without breaking a sweat.

Meanwhile, for Kate, 2026 will be all about finding new partners in the organization. Admins will need a seat at the table with security teams, legal teams, and business leadership to ensure a trusted AI implementation.

In 2026, admins will have the agency to do what? Finally, on the theme of agents and agency, I asked the team: "In 2026, admins will have the agency to do… what?"

For Jen, it's bringing innovation into your company by being at the forefront of everything that's going on with Salesforce. Trying new tools, looking for new ways to simplify business processes, and becoming the AI expert at your organization.

Josh gives some examples of that expertise in action. He predicts that admins will feel more empowered to jump in and build Lightning Web Components or even an Apex class with the help of AI. It's not about replacing developers, but expanding the potential for collaboration.

Obviously, Kate is focused on the importance of proactive AI governance. "When governance is reactive, admins get forced into cleanup mode," she says. So Salesforce Admins need to build strong partnerships with their stakeholders to make sure any AI implementation is safe and secure.

Be sure to listen to the full episode for insights from Kate, Josh, and Jen. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday. Happy New Year!

Podcast swag * Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more * Agentforce NOW * Dreamforce '25 Admin Keynote: Admins Power the Agentic Enterprise * Dreamforce '25 Security Keynote: Protecting the Agentic Enterprise

Admin Trailblazers Group * Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social * Jen on LinkedIn * Josh on LinkedIn * Kate on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on X * Mike on Bluesky social * Mike on Threads * Mike on X

Love our podcasts? Subscribe today or review us on iTunes! Full show transcript

Mike: Happy New Year and welcome to 2026 and the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Well, this year, we're going to kick things off by revisiting a tradition we started last year, which was future-gazing, with Josh Birk, Jennifer Lee and Kate Lessard on the Admin Evangelist team. Now, in this episode, we're going to get you started for 2026 by revisiting all of our predictions from 2025, and then exploring what lies ahead for Salesforce admins in this new year. From Agentforce breakthroughs to proactive governance, everybody brought some very sharp insights and a few surprises. And because it's the new year, it's a fresh start and the perfect time to plan your roadmap ahead for this year. So with that, let's get everybody back on the podcast. Okay. So welcome back everyone to the podcast.

Jennifer Lee: Hello.

Josh Birk: Oh, hi.

Mike: Great. I didn't call you out specifically. It's always like I've heard the story of you put 10 people in a room, one person will emerge as the leader. So I like to say intros like that and then just see who's going to speak first, because it's like, "Oh, you're going to go. No, you're going to go. No, you're going to go."

Josh Birk: It's a very bold interview strategy, to actually ask a question and just wait for the silence to break itself.

Mike: Yeah. It also is bold interview strategy of here's a podcast and a welcome and silence.

Kate Lessard: Oh, I was on mute. I apparently still haven't figured that out.

Mike: Goals for 2026.

Kate Lessard: Aiming high.

Mike: I still feel like they sell those shirts that say, "You're on mute."

Kate Lessard: Well, maybe my Secret Santa will get one for me.

Mike: One can hope, right? All right. So I will link to in the show notes, we did this podcast in what sounds weird of like a hundred years ago, 2024 for 2025. And I thought it would be fun to revisit that, because we've replayed it, but also revisit each of your predictions, and then have you break out the crystal ball, or Johnny Carson used to use an envelope, that shows how old I am, and look to the future of 2026. So Josh, we're going to start with you.

Josh Birk: Okay.

Mike: You said last year that admins would find Agentforce easier than expected. Did that hold up? Dun, dun, dun.

Josh Birk: Dun, dun, dun. First of all, I think that was almost like a cheat strategy there, because I think when we recorded this, everybody thought building agents was going to be pretty hard. So anything we've done to make that easier, I think the predictions come pretty true. I don't have the numbers on hand, on me right now, but we've had a lot of success with the Agentforce NOW, the virtual workshops that this team has helped host and present. I don't know, Mike, what was your biggest audience number? It was like a few hundred, right?

Mike: Oh, easily. But that aside, I think it's more of people aren't afraid.

Josh Birk: Yeah, yeah. I think people aren't afraid, and I think the tooling... First of all, the tooling has gotten really good and the tooling looks like, if we're moving into the prediction phase, the tooling looks like it's getting better too. So I think that one held true. I feel like people are... It's not the building the agents, it's the can I make this into a use case that will convince my CTO to help me buy this agent kind of thing. But when it comes to actually understanding agents and topics and actions and things like that, I think our audience has done a pretty good job of grasping it.

Mike: It's almost like a Lego brick problem. We understand the Lego bricks, we've got so many things we could build, it's what do we build next.

Josh Birk: Right. It's one thing when you're doing the page-by-page, step-by-step thing. It's the other thing when you've got the child's basket of random Legos.

Mike: Right, Lego bricks.

Josh Birk: Lego bricks.

Mike: Yeah, yeah, I'm reminded of that. Jen, it's always automation with you, but a little bit of a divergent, and I feel like you were on the right path, you probably had a secret futuristic whisper. Your big prediction for 2025 was that Cheryl's team would give us agents to instantly troubleshoot user access. Did we get that?

Jennifer Lee: Kind of. So that's currently in closed pilot, and what I've seen definitely matches what I had predicted. So what I've seen is the tool does figure out, why does Josh have this permission, but Kate doesn't? And you don't have to go through and dig in setup to figure that out, you can go and use the tool, Setup Powered by Agentforce, to talk to the agent, and then it'll come up and say, "Okay, here's why." It could be the sharing role or whatever the reason is, you're in some type of public group, and then it will explain to you all that, and then ask if you want them to take action. So it's even gone beyond just user access. Behind the scenes, I've seen flow creation, data modeling when you're creating a new app, being able to surface up, "Here are the requirements." Then it comes back and says, "Here's existing fields that we think you can just use, and then here are some new ones." But it all comes down to human-in-the-loop, "We're going to explain things to you. Is it okay for me to take that next step to actually do it?" So yeah, I'm excited for when this goes to GA, and I know Cheryl's team is working very hard in making that happen.

Mike: Yeah. You think of the amount of stuff that has to get done in the background for it to understand all of that, insane, I'm sure.

Jennifer Lee: [inaudible 00:06:26] setup assistant.

Mike: Right.

Kate Lessard: If you want to see it in action, you can also go back and revisit the admin keynote from Dreamforce. We've got some really great examples of what that looks like to build some excitement.

Mike: I was going to say, that's exactly a great segue, Kate, I'm glad you came off mute.

Kate Lessard: I've got it down.

Mike: Right. It's a button, it's very important. You went a different route and said AI governance and security were going to be the sleeper topics that admins needed to watch. Did they become front page news, or did something else dominate?

Kate Lessard: They really did. Security has always been one of our core responsibilities as Salesforce admins, and with new technology, we have new threats and new ways that we need to be prepared to deal with them. I would say in 2025, security really did become a front page discussion, as IT professionals focused on governance and security and addressing some of those new threats that we weren't exactly sure what they were going to look like. For Salesforce admins, I think we saw a lot of cases where admins couldn't even get Agentforce buy-in at their organizations without a clear governance story. And at Dreamforce, we even had our first ever security keynote. And then, as just mentioned, I was just talking about the admin keynote, we featured security really heavily in the admin keynote as well. I think even one of the new Agentforce features that I'm personally most excited about is security with Agentforce, because it uses Agentforce to provide that automated risk assessment and will actually be really proactive for admins detecting and alerting them to any unusual activity in their organization in their Salesforce instance.

Mike: Great. All right, Josh, we're going to come back to you. Looking in your crystal ball for the future, and you can't say S-controls will continue to be deprecated.

Josh Birk: No, no. I think we have mission accomplished on that one.

Mike: Yeah, right. I bet there's still an S-control that's firing today.

Josh Birk: I do like that as a segue from security is important.

Mike: Right.

Josh Birk: Security is important also, maybe not have that JavaScript running from 2010.

Mike: Well, I just have to think of somebody scrolling through the transcript, S-controls, what are they talking about S-controls for?

Josh Birk: Right, right. You know the generation of Salesforce ecosystem you're from if you know what an S-control is.

Mike: The same generation that mentions Johnny Carson.

Josh Birk: In the envelope, yes.

Mike: Welcome to the handful of listeners still pushing play. No, so 2026, we accomplished a lot. I think Agentforce went farther than we even thought. What do you see ahead for admins in this next year?

Josh Birk: So I think to follow up with how Jen and Kate are describing the tools, there's going to be this evolution of agents that are there to help you get things done, not just the agents that are the ones you're building. So we've got Setup Powered by Agentforce, we've got Agentforce for Security, we've got Agentforce Fives, we've got brand new Agentforce Builder coming down the path, and that Agentforce Builder has, dun, dun, dun, agents helping you build agents. So I think that's the next layer that we're going to see, is the agentic enterprise being there in places that'll be at your fingertips is the way I would put it. Where you need AI to help you, it's going to be right there for you.

Mike: Right, okay. Boy, that's awfully broad, I like it. Jen, you don't have to stick with automation, but for 2026, what do you see coming for admins?

Jennifer Lee: Well, I see, not to stick with automation, but-

Josh Birk: Automation.

Jennifer Lee: It's going to continue to play a real important role in your agents, because without any type of automation, how good is that agent with just having basic instructions? And I'm going to stick with continuing to really build with smaller flows and not building with those humongous flows that you might be used to. I was blown by a agent that I had created where I had two simple flows, and they were just to create a cupcake record and then a cupcake item record. And in the past, I would have had to build a flow that did massive loops to keep... Because you need multiple cupcake item records associated with a cupcake order, and I would have had to loop around and do some complex building of a flow to handle that. And then now, with my agent, I could just say, "Hey, there could be one to many cupcake items, and if the person said they wanted X number, just continue to use that action," and it understood that. I didn't have to make complex flows to do that. So it's really, again, having that mindset, and then just powering up your automation skills with your Agentforce skills, that's going to be where the magic happens.

Mike: Wow, that's incredibly powerful. I never thought of that, that we would be building simpler flows. It's like writing stronger sentences, short declarative sentences, as opposed to long paragraph diatribes that go nowhere, which is common on this podcast.

Kate Lessard: And an agent can help you build those flows, which is super cool.

Mike: Yep, they usually do. The longer the intro, the more the agent had to help. Kate, are we going down the security path again for 2026, or what are we predicting for admins?

Kate Lessard: I don't think that security is going to go away, I think it's going to stay a real hot topic. But I'm actually going to go back to one of my other predictions last year. I think I said that admins were set to become their orgs' AI specialist, and I think that we saw that shift start. But I think it's going to be really big this year as admins become AI orchestrators and stewards, because they're using their understanding of their organization's business and their business processes to identify those right use cases where we want to implement AI, and they're the ones that are going to be designing guardrails and bringing in decision logic. I think we're also seeing something that we've been encouraging on this team for a long time, and it's becoming more prevalent and I think is really going to be huge in 2026, which is admins having a seat at the table to partner more closely with their security teams, their legal team and their business stakeholders across the board to ensure a trusted implementation, because the AI and the knowledge that admins have gained this past year, it's just helping them move upstream in those conversations.

Mike: I just realized as you were answering this, this show sounds incredibly like Family Feud. Not that I just watched Family Feud last night. But it's the host repeating the question over and over again, and it makes me think, the next time we go to a community group-

Josh Birk: You want a board?

Mike: ... we need to do a survey of a hundred admins.

Kate Lessard: Oh, I love it.

Mike: And I'm going to have you guys back on and we're going to guess the answers, because that sounds incredibly fun.

Kate Lessard: That does sound fun.

Mike: In a recent survey of a hundred admins, we asked them, "Karaoke or singing in the shower?" Okay. So bonus question that I just thought of and I didn't prep you guys for, so let's see how it goes, we'll start with you, Josh, to keep the order in the same. I realize we say agent a lot, and in the world, sometimes you can get confused and say agency, and I think we're all familiar with what it means to have agency. So in 2026, I wish admins had agency to do what? Josh, you're up first.

Josh Birk: 2026, admins have the agency to... Gosh, I feel like I'm just stealing from Kate here. Have the agency to feel like they can be the AI expert, basically. I think that there's going to be a lot of self-empowerment there. As a next developer, this is what I was thinking when Kate and Jen were talking about this kind of stuff, when developers develop something, it's a little bit in a package, it's kind of in a bubble, and they just get something working and then they run their unit tests on it, and then boom, that goes into the org and then they walk away. And like a lot of the other things when it comes to how that runs within an org can often be the role of the admin, like making sure the users have the right permissions, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I don't think that's going to change as agents become more prolific, I think the role is simply going to become more important. I'm going to tack onto that and say, because this is where things are going to start getting weird, is when admins feel like they have the agency to build a Lightning Web Component, when admins feel like they have the agency to build an Apex class, and that's a brand new frontier we haven't really gone into, which reverses the thing I just described. But I would put the horse before the cart, so to speak, and be like you want to be that established AI expert first, because you're not trying to replace a developer, you're not trying to do their work for them. But if you understand what happens if you create a Lightning Web Component and how that belongs in your org, then you can be that proper steward for making sure that your org is going to remain healthy.

Mike: I like it. Jen, I'll sound like Richard Dawson, in 2026, I hope admins have the agency to do what?

Jennifer Lee: I'd say to be the person bringing the innovation into their company, being at the forefront of everything that's going on in Salesforce, being the first ones to get their hands on it, whether it's getting into a playground to play around with it and then pitching it to their company, but really being that true expert at their company.

Mike: That's great, yeah. Kate? Last one.

Kate Lessard: You're going to make me follow that?

Mike: The hardest part when we do the Family Feud episode is I'm going to get some sort of audience clapping sound, because at some point, when everybody answers, everybody else in the team's like, "Oh yeah, good answer. Birthday cake, yeah. Birthday cake, good answer." So Kate, in 2026, I hope admins have agency to do what?

Kate Lessard: All right. I'm going back to security, because I am really passionate about it, and I'm going to say to set governance standards proactively rather than retroactively after something goes wrong. I think that once AI is live in your organization, whether you're using Agentforce or any other type of AI, the risk isn't hypothetical, it's impacting real people and your organization's real data. And so, when governance is reactive, admins get forced into cleanup mode, which isn't a great place to be, and that puts you into a space where you're rebuilding trust and explaining decisions. Whereas if you have proactive governance, then you're giving admins that authority, that agency to define boundaries before any harm occurs, and it's, again, placing them in that position to just continue to move upstream and build strong partnerships with their stakeholders.

Mike: Yeah. Well, those are great. If everything comes true, we've got admins building Lightning Web Components, short declarative flows and owning governance, so...

Josh Birk: The bet.

Kate Lessard: Yeah, that sounds great.

Josh Birk: It sounds pretty good.

Mike: Sit back and have your white Persian cat on your lap and put your pinky in the corner of your mouth and be like, "I own one million things."

Josh Birk: How many admins would have their job easier if they had sharks with lasers on them?

Mike: All of them.

Kate Lessard: That's true.

Josh Birk: Right.

Mike: All of them.

Josh Birk: All of them.

Mike: Yeah.

Kate Lessard: That's the new user punishment.

Josh Birk: Exactly.

Mike: It'd be really hard for people in the Midwest, because there's not a lot of water.

Josh Birk: Right, right. I'm trying to think of the Midwest. We don't have crocodiles.

Mike: No, we'd put it on cows.

Kate Lessard: It's just slower moving.

Mike: We'd put it on cows, yeah, it would just take a while. It's like if you've ever seen Goldfinger, the laser just takes a while, so the cow would just... It's common, don't worry. Or if you've ever... I forget what the movie is. Jimmy Shaker Day. You never know what day is going to be Jimmy Shaker Day. You never know when that cow's going to catch up to you, but it's going to happen.

Josh Birk: Right, right.

Kate Lessard: I have no idea what you're talking about.

Mike: Well, that's because, Kate, you'd probably have sharks out on the West Coast, right?

Kate Lessard: Yes, yes, absolutely. I've got my sharks swimming in the coast.

Mike: We have cows. I have a feeling the cows would get to me long before they get to Josh. I've not seen cattle anywhere near the Chicagoland area.

Josh Birk: Yeah, yeah. There's a mantra here in the Midwest when it gets to one degree and we have three and three feet of snow outside, we don't have earthquakes, we don't have crocodiles. We don't have earthquakes, we don't have crocodiles. We have winter, but we don't have earthquakes, we don't have crocodiles.

Mike: Right. And we have tornadoes, but those usually hit unpopulated areas.

Josh Birk: Right.

Kate Lessard: Well, Jen knows, I cannot tough out your winters. I was a popsicle when we were in the cold last week.

Mike: Yeah. But I think New York... Well, I don't know about Chicago, but New York gets pretty rough winters being right on the coast there.

Josh Birk: They like to get dramatic for like a month, I feel like. They don't do the hibernation-style winter that we have to go through. But once a month, nobody wants to walk through the park because it's just nothing but snow.

Mike: Right, yeah. Well, good, glad we hashed that out for this episode.

Kate Lessard: Very important.

Mike: It is. Thank you all for joining.

Josh Birk: Thanks for having us.

Kate Lessard: Thanks for having us.

Jennifer Lee: Thanks for having us.

Kate Lessard: Let's do it again next year.

Mike: We should.

Jennifer Lee: It's an annual thing.

Mike: See how right we were. And if anybody is right about cows with lasers, then that'll be the last episode of the podcast.

Josh Birk: Then AI's already won.

Kate Lessard: We've done all we can do.

Mike: We've done all we can do, cows have lasers now. And that's a wrap on our first of many episodes this year in 2026. Big thanks to Josh, Jen and Kate for sharing their insights, laughs, and what admins can do to lead the way, whether it's automation, AI governance, or was that cows or sharks with lasers? Maybe both. Anyway, if today's conversation sparked ideas in your organization or in your user group, pass it along to another admin who might enjoy it. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, a holiday fable.

The Gift of the Admin Once, in a company not unlike yours,

There was an Admin named Riley—

The kind of Admin who could fix a broken report

Before the requestor even finished explaining it.

Now, every season brought its own challenges.

Deadlines, new features, odd little mysteries

That crept into the org like snowflakes—

Unique, intricate, and occasionally inconvenient.

But this season felt different.

People were tired.

Teams were stretched.

And the org itself seemed to sigh

Under the weight of so many expectations.

So Riley decided to give a gift.

Not a wrapped one,

Not a shiny one,

But a gift only an Admin could give:

Clarity.

Riley began quietly, almost invisibly—

Cleaning up old fields no one used,

Fixing automation that everyone complained about

But no one had time to understand.

Organizing objects like a librarian

Restoring order to a well-loved shelf.

They documented things no one remembered building.

They created a dashboard that told the truth

In a way executives could finally understand.

They met with a team that felt unheard

And turned their ideas into something real.

Little by little, the org brightened.

People moved with more confidence.

Decisions came easier.

Work flowed instead of stumbled.

And one morning, someone said,

"I don't know what changed,

But everything just feels clearer."

Riley just smiled.

The best Admin work often goes unseen—

But never unfelt.

Because the gift of the Admin

Isn't the features they build

Or the bugs they squash

Or the fires they quietly put out.

The gift of the Admin

Is alignment.

The gift of the Admin

Is understanding.

The gift of the Admin

Is a better tomorrow,

Built one thoughtful choice at a time.

And that's a gift

Every org needs—

No matter the season.

Make sure subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to hear a new episode every week. Happy holidays!

Podcast swag * Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Admin Trailblazers Group * Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social * Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on X * Mike on Bluesky social * Mike on Threads * Mike on X

Love our podcasts? Subscribe today or review us on iTunes! Full show transcript Happy holidays, Salesforce Admins. Rather than a traditional episode, I've decided to give you a modern fable. It's called "The Gift of the Admin."

Once, in a company not unlike yours,

There was an Admin named Riley—

The kind of Admin who could fix a broken report

Before the requestor even finished explaining it.

Now, every season brought its own challenges.

Deadlines, new features, odd little mysteries

That crept into the org like snowflakes—

Unique, intricate, and occasionally inconvenient.

But this season felt different.

People were tired.

Teams were stretched.

And the org itself seemed to sigh

Under the weight of so many expectations.

So Riley decided to give a gift.

Not a wrapped one,

Not a shiny one,

But a gift only an Admin could give:

Clarity.

Riley began quietly, almost invisibly—

Cleaning up old fields no one used,

Fixing automation that everyone complained about

But no one had time to understand.

Organizing objects like a librarian

Restoring order to a well-loved shelf.

They documented things no one remembered building.

They created a dashboard that told the truth

In a way executives could finally understand.

They met with a team that felt unheard

And turned their ideas into something real.

Little by little, the org brightened.

People moved with more confidence.

Decisions came easier.

Work flowed instead of stumbled.

And one morning, someone said,

"I don't know what changed,

But everything just feels clearer."

Riley just smiled.

The best Admin work often goes unseen—

But never unfelt.

Because the gift of the Admin

Isn't the features they build

Or the bugs they squash

Or the fires they quietly put out.

The gift of the Admin

Is alignment.

The gift of the Admin

Is understanding.

The gift of the Admin

Is a better tomorrow,

Built one thoughtful choice at a time.

And that's a gift

Every org needs—

No matter the season.

Happy holidays, Salesforce Admins.

View Details

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Joshua Birk, Senior Director of Admin Evangelism at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about how Agentforce Vibes can help admins debug code, create documentation, and so much more.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Joshua Birk.

What is vibe coding? Josh has been getting a vibe lately, and it's not just him. More and more programmers have been adapting their workflows to incorporate AI and give themselves a helping hand. Vibe coding is here to stay, and it's coming to Salesforce with the release of Agentforce Vibes.

Pair programming, also known as someone looking over your shoulder while you code, is a classic way to get unstuck. Whether you're missing a semicolon or calling the wrong function, having another set of eyes on your code can make all the difference.

Vibe coding is the same concept, but you're using AI for that external perspective. With an AI assistant, admins can quickly troubleshoot a wall of code to spot errors or comb through pages of documentation for a key piece of information. And now, that functionality has been built into Salesforce development environments with Agentforce Vibes.

How to get started with Agentforce Vibes If you're already a user of VS Code or Code Builder, you already have access to Agentforce Vibes. If you're running a trial org or developer edition, you may need to download and install the extension.

Like any AI tool, the things you can do with Agentforce Vibes are too many to list. Josh gives the example of product requirements documentation. PRDs are the encyclopedia of everything going on with a project: requirements, challenges, blockers, key metrics, etc. It's an essential document for any project, but it's difficult to create and dense to parse.

Agentforce Vibes can help you with PRDs on both fronts. You can spin up a PRD for a project and get a running start, or go through an existing PRD for whatever information you need. In short, it helps you do more, faster.

AI is a skillset amplifier "There's always a question of what skills are admins not going to need in the future of AI," Josh says. "I don't know if that's the right question, because I think it's all about your skills leveraging AI—not AI taking over your skill set."

Agentforce Vibes isn't going to replace a development team, but it can give admins a starting point to collaborate more effectively with them. If you have coding skills, it can help you debug and document. If you've built a ton of flows and are worried some might be redundant, it can help you find those.

AI tools like Vibes won't replace admin skills—they'll amplify them. Like a calculator in math class, Vibes helps you move faster but still requires foundational knowledge. The key is knowing what to ask, validating results, and using AI as a supportive peer, not a replacement.

Make sure to listen to the full episode for more details about Agentforce Vibes from Josh, and don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday. Until next time!

Podcast swag * Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more * Get started: Agentforce Vibes * True to the Core Deep Dive: What's New in Lightning Experience Performance and Agentforce Vibes

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

Love our podcasts? Subscribe today or review us on iTunes! Full show transcript Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, we're joined by Josh Birk, Senior Director Admin Evangelism, and really just all around great explainer of complicated things. Coming off of Dreamforce, there's a lot of people talking about vibe coding, what it is, where it came from, and why it matters for Salesforce admins. So we're going to dive into that, along with Agentforce Vibes and how it can change the way that Salesforce admins approach requirements, automation, and even documentation. So you want to give this one a listen to and share it with a few Salesforce admins who maybe are curious about coding in the age of AI. So with that, let's get Josh on the podcast. So Josh, welcome back to the podcast.

Josh Birk: Thanks, Mike. Good to be here.

Mike: We have so much to talk about. We're coming off of Dreamforce this year. I feel like we're heading into one of the busiest Decembers as a Salesforce admin I can remember, because we're still releasing, upgrading products in this age of AI. But one thing that left Dreamforce that I wanted to talk to you about is I heard a lot about vibe coding.

Josh Birk: Yeah.

Mike: And so I want to start there, before we talk about the Salesforce product, and just kind of level set. Because you're a developer, you've built code.

Josh Birk: I have. I have.

Mike: I haven't. I've shown you how to add a icon to an application.

Josh Birk: Famously so, yes.

Mike: That was my one win in my life. I'll take that. But this whole idea of vibe coding seems to be taking over tech. Let's talk about that.

Josh Birk: Yeah, it is definitely taking over tech. And if you want to think about how blindly fast we're going right now, I think I first heard the term vibe coding somewhere during this summer.

Mike: Oh.

Josh Birk: This time last year, not even a speckle on somebody's eye. And now it's really all the rage. So it's moving. Yeah. Yeah. And the first time I heard it too, my first response was of course, "Well, what are you talking about? What is vibe code?"

Mike: To be fair, it sounds awesome. Because I totally love tie-dye shirts, I love the 1970s, and I'm sitting around thinking like, "Yeah brother. I am going to get myself a tie-dye t-shirt and we're going to vibe."

Josh Birk: Yeah. Actually, my first response was closer in that vein. I actually thought they meant flow development. Like not flows as in admin development, but when you get into your flow zone kind of thing.

Mike: Oh yeah. Yeah.

Josh Birk: I thought, "Oh, is there some cool new way to get into my vibe?"

Mike: Hey, it's like that social media movie. That's what my friends always call it.

Josh Birk: Yeah.

Mike: We're like, "You can't interrupt him. He's plugged in."

Josh Birk: Exactly.

Mike: He's plugged in.

Josh Birk: It is. And this is a good note for working with your developers. If they have their headphones on, they are probably not willing to talk to you. Just as a reminder out there for feeding and nurturing your developers. So yeah, no. So vibe coding is, as kind of an old school developer, there's a really interesting paradigm to describe it, which is peer programming. And peer programming was this thing that was kind of... I don't want to say it was kind of a fad, but the idea was get a fellow programmer to basically look over your shoulder and assist you while you're coding kind of thing.

Mike: Okay.

Josh Birk: And back at one of my earlier jobs, we used to do it usually when we were like we're stuck, right? And it's like we get stuck in something, "Hey Craig, can you come over and peer program with me for a little bit?" And there's this kind of myth in coding that sometimes all you literally need is another pair of eyeballs staring at your screen and your code will magically work better. But it was more of an idea of like, "Oh, you missed that semicolon." Catching little things along the way. Vibe coding, similar concept except you're using an AI assistant. The conversation you're having is with an AI who can sit there and create things for you, read files for you, analyze things for you. And so you just sort of have at your fingertips this assistant that's going to help you do tasks faster and easier.

Mike: Okay. So yeah. I also totally you get that like when you're proofreading stuff. I'll be going through whatever and I'll be like, "I can't not find this word anymore because I've been looking at it forever."

Josh Birk: Right, right. And old school English major, never turn in your paper until somebody else has read it, right?

Mike: Uh-huh.

Josh Birk: Always get another pair of eyeballs because you're too close to your source material to know what you said that sounds wrong to somebody like that. And yeah, vibes can be like that too. It can be your other pair of eyes.

Mike: So Salesforce has Agentforce Vibes.

Josh Birk: Yes.

Mike: And we saw it at Dreamforce and the developer keynote, and you've had a chance to get hands-on with it.

Josh Birk: Yeah.

Mike: Let's talk about what Agentforce Vibe means for admin.

Josh Birk: So let's talk software. Let's talk about, specifically when we say Agentforce Vibes, what we're talking about. And what we're talking about is an extension into Visual Studio Code. Now Visual Studio Code is the basis of Code Builder, also by the way now renamed Agentforce Vibes IDE for those who haven't seen that change yet. And that's Visual Studio Code in a browser. And the cool thing about Agentforce Vibes IDE is that it's not like a HTML representation of a development environment. It's actually running... You know when you can't log into your computer and somebody from IT logs in for you and they're like, "I'm going to take over your mouse and do a whole bunch of stuff."

Mike: Mm-hmm.

Josh Birk: It's like that technology, but you get to use Visual Studio Code remotely, basically. So the extension comes pre-installed, and so the nice thing about it all being in your browser is that you don't have to install anything. You just basically go to a click, pull up a window and let it start doing all of its things to initialize, and then you're pretty much good to go. And it's even had, I don't know when this improvement happened, but it used to be you had to go through this kind of awkward logging into your own org kind of thing. And that actually has been skipped, so it actually knows your org itself.

Mike: Oh.

Josh Birk: And then what you're going to see in the IDE is a pane off to the left side, and it's a client... And now we got to get a little nerdy here. That client logs into the Salesforce MCP server. And I don't know when the last time we've had a chance to use the term MCP, but that's model context protocol, which basically is a protocol that says, "This is how an AI client can perform actions on a Salesforce server." And so Vibes sits within VS Code and it knows kind of your org shape, and then it can go through the MCP server and be like, "Hey, can you download all the metadata for my custom objects?" And things like that. Now if you're an instance that's like a trial org or a developer edition, you may have to actually download Visual Studio Code and then install the Salesforce extension, which will include the CLI and Vibes and a whole bunch of other stuff. Nice thing is that's very simple to do. And also because of the way Agentforce Vibes ID works, it's feature parity, right? You're basically doing the same thing, you're just doing it locally on your desktop as opposed to in the cloud.

Mike: So it's meant to help you build faster?

Josh Birk: That is one of the things it can help you do. Yeah.

Mike: Okay.

Josh Birk: So let's see. A few of my favorite use cases.

Mike: Yes.

Josh Birk: Because this is one of the big problems with AI in general, right? Because I tell people and somebody talks, I'm like, "Look, if you haven't played with any of these, just go talk to them." Because part of it is like how a conversational UI works doesn't really click for people, I think, until they actually start using it. And then I'm like, "Ask it to tell you a dad joke. Ask it to play 20 questions. Stuff like that." Don't ask Vibes to do a dad joke. You can, I think it probably will respond. But one of the first examples I tried to do was I'm creating out this demo for a fictional company, and so I gave it basically the overview of what the company does. And then I asked it, "What kind of custom data would you recommend?" Sort of thing. It's like, "Oh, okay." And so it can recommend that, it can create those custom objects for you, it can create those custom fields for you. And then you can also take that to another step and be like, "Okay. Based on what you know about this fictional company, what you know about the data structure, what flows would you recommend? What kind of automation would you recommend?" And so it's kind of like having not just a developer in your back pocket, it's kind of like having an architect in your back pocket too. So you can kind of help solve some of these puzzle pieces without necessarily having to sit down and have a meeting with an entire development team in order to keep moving forward.

Mike: So I saw in some of our presentations, like at Dreamforce and both at New York World Tour, they would talk about a product requirements document.

Josh Birk: Okay.

Mike: I'm going to go out on a limb and say... It's a pretty sturdy limb because it's holding me. There's probably admins that are inept and it's like second nature to kind of document requirements, especially heading into a big build.

Josh Birk: Yeah, yeah.

Mike: And then there isn't. And I would say I fell into the, "There isn't." I always tended to document everything after the fact.

Josh Birk: Yeah.

Mike: But if you've never done like a product requirements doc, which I think helps Agentforce Vibes, just helps in vibe coding, but it to me feels like also a best practice. What should a PRD include, and how should that motion kind of get started for admins?

Josh Birk: Yeah. So we were talking earlier, and so I kind of brushed up on what a PRD kind of looks like. And back in my consultancy days, I kind of wish this was more of a trend. Because we didn't have a requirements doc, we had requirement docs.

Mike: Oh.

Josh Birk: So the designer would come up with layouts, the development team would come out with X, and the business requirements team would come out with Y. And a PRD really tries to consolidate as much of that into one document. So it's kind of a, "Here is the encyclopedia of everything that's going on with your current project." And so that's requirements, it's challenges, it's blockers, key metrics. So it's kind of a one-stop guide into like, "Where are we in the success of this project?"

Mike: Mm-hmm.

Josh Birk: And I think one of the cool things about a client like Vibes is when you look at something like that, it can be overwhelming, right? It can be a lot. But to Vibes, it's just a big block of text, right? It's not going to get overwhelmed over something like that. And so with a good PRD, Vibes knows where you're trying to go. And so to kind of go back to the example of like, "How should we build out this application?" You're giving it all of the touchpoints that it really needs. And you can also use Vibes to be like, "Hey, can you recommend changes to my PRD?" Kind of thing. So because when I'm looking at this document format, I'm like, "Wow, that is a lot of information we're tracking in one place. Wouldn't it be nice if I had another pair of eyeballs in order to work with this?" And so I think that's where Vibes is kind of a nice little assistant that can sit there next to you and help craft, navigate and organize a document like that.

Mike: Yeah. I always try to think of how do you take this from admins who are working with many teams and it's a huge app, to like some of the times... Like I was an admin with a couple hundred users, I would get four or five people together. I didn't have anybody that was a UX or interface designer. I just kind of had to figure it out on my own.

Josh Birk: Yeah, yeah.

Mike: I think that's part of where Vibes can also help you, right?

Josh Birk: It can. And it's kind of one of those things. Like right now I haven't had a lot of great success with Vibes creating like a complicated flow or anything like that, but this is where it's definitely going in the future. And so a use case that I think they actually demoed at the developer keynote Dreamforce was your designer gives you a Figma, you give that Figma to Vibes, and Vibes gives you a lightning web component. I don't think Vibes can do this yet, but I've done that kind of thing with AI just with like an image. Somebody says like, "Oh, this is what I want the component to look like." And I go, "Snap. Claude, hey, create this lightning web component for me." So what that does... And it kind of chills me a little bit, because one of the first talks I ever did about AI was at Forcelandia, and it was all about the convergence of roles, and it was all about how an admin can now have starting points. They're not going to replace a development team, but going back to a PRD, it can help them create the docs that the developers need in order to get their job done.

Mike: Mm-hmm.

Josh Birk: And some of those docs might even include, "Here's a block of code." And the admin doesn't necessarily need to know exactly how that code works, but something like Vibes can be like, "Oh, this is part of the PRD that we're going to give those developers so that they have that information moving forward." And so if you start kind of thinking about it in terms of documents in, documents out with Vibes in the center, it gives an admin a lot more interconnectivity when it comes to being able to quickly move through those tasks. Still not replacing the human in the loop, right?

Mike: Right.

Josh Birk: Where nobody's going to say like, "Hey admin, could you just write that apex trigger for me and get that into production as quickly as possible? That'd be great. Thanks." None of those models have changed. Those rules still apply. But we can move into another example. Let's say an admin wakes up, they get a Slack message that's like, "Hey, this flow isn't working correctly." They can pull up Vibes and run tests against that flow and ask vibes like, "Hey, I'm getting this error. Can you help me figure out what's going on in flow with that?"

Mike: Very good. I was going to ask, because you said helps start or helps create the foundation.

Josh Birk: Yeah.

Mike: And I think that's always the thing that we're looking at is, "Oh, so I can just give Vibes this requirements doc and go to lunch, come back, and it's done."

Josh Birk: Kind of where we're moving at the very least. And when I say moving, once again, we're talking in terms of AI, so we're talking months, not years. Right?

Mike: Yeah.

Josh Birk: Again, Vibes didn't exist six months ago. In six months, it's going to be a lot more powerful and a lot more capable. And I think that's one of the visions Salesforce has for it is it's your business analyst's buddy, it is your requirements gathering buddy, but it's also your application building buddy. And once again, creating that minimal viable product that you can just get into a sandbox, and then have people get feedback based on that. Time to delivery on that stuff is going to just start to evaporate, it's going to be so fast. And once again, we're still going to need the expertise. AI is going to get stuff wrong, it's going to go into corners it's going to need to be pulled out of. And so I don't see... There's always a question of like, "Well, what skill is an admin not going to need in the future of AI?" And I don't know if that's the right question, because I think it's all about your skills leveraging AI, not AI taking over your skillset.

Mike: And also, I mean you mentioned it, I'm thinking of back to how you started the conversation which is like the peer programming. You would always double check. They're double checking your work and you're double checking their work.

Josh Birk: Mm-hmm.

Mike: And so I would think at times you could probably get a little over your skis with Vibes if it could create things that you're like, "Oh wow, I'm so glad it created that. I didn't know how." Now the impetus, in my opinion, is still on you to go back and learn. I use the metaphor of the first time you got to use a calculator in math class.

Josh Birk: Right.

Mike: You're like, "Oh my God, I can get the answer so much faster."

Josh Birk: Exactly.

Mike: But the math teacher's like, "Right, but you should have already knew the answer. The calculator should have just reinforced it."

Josh Birk: Right, right.

Mike: And I think with Vibes, you should already know what you're going for.

Josh Birk: Mm-hmm.

Mike: This just kind of... I don't know. Maybe it's like a microwave meal. It just makes the time from like when you're hungry to when you get to eat the Salisbury steak down to one to two minutes.

Josh Birk: Right, right, right. Yeah, because we're of that age when microwaves were magic.

Mike: They still are Josh.

Josh Birk: They still got a heart.

Mike: They're still magic.

Josh Birk: I still barely understand how they work.

Mike: They make popcorn and they warm up soup.

Josh Birk: They're just your friend. Yeah, no. And in AI circles, the calculator analogy rings pretty hard, pretty true. Because we're also of that age when it was the fear of the calculator. Every kid's going to stop learning how to do math because they won't have to learn math anymore. And I point to there are calculators I don't know how to use, and the reason I don't know how to use them is because my math isn't strong enough. There's buttons and stuff on there that I might as well go back and play Pac-Man. I just can't use this thing. And it's the same kind of thing. If you're not skilled up enough, you're not going to be able to leverage AI to get your stuff done faster. It's definitely a loop where the smarter the human is, the smarter the AI is going to be.

Mike: So let's talk about, because I try to cover all the bases and it's impossible, but admins that work with developers and admins that want to use Vibes. If you and I were building something and I'm your admin, which first of all, lucky you. I meant that sarcastically.

Josh Birk: I know. I would be honored if you were my admin.

Mike: Because that could sound awfully, awfully boastful. What would you expect me to do in Vibes that maybe you wouldn't do? I don't know if that makes sense. But if we're working together on a project and I'm like, "I'm going to use vibes for X, Y, and Z." As a developer, what are you like, "Cool. I feel good you doing that, because I'm going to do A, B, and C."

Josh Birk: And I think this is an interesting dynamic in Salesforce development and app building in general. What I would want from an admin or a business analyst is okay, you have your PRD, right? You have your North Star, you know where you're trying to go. And as a developer, can you help... We need to have a conversation to identify the technical gaps that are outside limitations, or for other architectural reasons we need code in order to accomplish that. And what I think is interesting is some of that reduces every year. Because for instance, take dynamic page layouts, right?

Mike: Mm-hmm.

Josh Birk: And when I first saw us as a sort of admin and developer's clothing, or developer and admin's clothing, I'm not sure the right analogy there, when I first saw that feature I'm like, "Why is everybody so excited about this?" Because I'm like, "It's an if-then statement basically." But then I saw working in layouts with logic to it and I'm like, "Oh, that used to be a lightning web component." You used to have to have a lightning web component to do that. And it's kind of like when we rolled out Process Builder and it's like, "Well, you used to have to have an apex trigger for that." And those corners are slowly kind of getting moved around. But that's where I think Admin Vibes, PRD or Business Docs or whatever, when you look at that you're like, "I can't cover that. I need to highlight this and get it to my dev team." Now my favorite party trick from Vibes is one of the things you can tell Vibes is to create a file in a specific format. And so if you use Slack and you're communicating with the team in a Slack channel, you can take these documents and you can ask Vibe, "Hey Vibes, can I have that as a markdown file?" And then you can pull that markdown file, copy and paste it, put it into a Slack canvas and at mention your developer and Bob's your uncle.

Mike: That's nice.

Josh Birk: What's nice about it is it's very clean. And the question is, are you communicating within Vibes? Well, probably not. If you've got a Slack channel, that's probably where your team is actually organizing things. But Vibes can be the pipeline into that. Which, we should also mention, something I haven't had a lot of chance to play with... But the other advantage of Vibes, because it is an MCP client, it is not stuck with just talking to the Salesforce MCP server. So if you work with Jira, you work with Slack, you work with Atlassian, you work with these other third party integrations, you can also use Vibes to work with those integrations too. So from a development team point of view, for instance, that means they can do things like interact with GitHub. And so they're not just working within Vibes, but they could be checking in code, they could be pulling down pull requests and they could be deploying it to a sandbox, all with staying within the same environment. Now what that means for admins is something I think we need to kind of poke around a little bit and see what are those third party things. Like what are the other things that's sitting at a Vibes terminal would be making your job faster?

Mike: Yeah. Well, that was actually going to be my next question is what's... You go back and look at the transcript of this. I think what's interesting, we've said Vibes the whole time, but I think in the technology ecosphere that we live in it's actually vibe coding.

Josh Birk: Yeah.

Mike: And coding feels very loaded. It's a developer term.

Josh Birk: It is.

Mike: We're saying Vibes because it feels very I want to say end user-friendly, a little bit more so than trying to look at code. But if you're thinking, "Okay, this is something I need to pay attention to as a Salesforce admin", but you're like me and coding just doesn't make sense to you, what are some of the skills that they should lean into to kind of prepare for? I'm going to guess that this is kind of the new way of building applications.

Josh Birk: It's moving into that. And I kind of want to hang a lantern there, because it's like first of all I completely agree. And it's just kind of one of those... We're definitely stuck with the term vibe coding. It's not going anywhere.

Mike: It's like social media.

Josh Birk: It's like social media. Well also, I have to say, vibe coding for a change doesn't sound like some random engineer named it. So it's got kind of good marketing behind it. But the coding aspect is definitely like that, that's a loaded phrase. And I know I've talked to admins who really do react to that kind of thing that just sort of like, "Well, a developer edition's not for me because I'm not a developer." And I'm like, "That's cool. I understand you think that. The developer edition is absolutely for you if what you need is a working version of Salesforce where you're kicking the tires of things like Data Cloud, Agentforce Studio and Vibes." So I think we're going to have to start... So for instance, one of the things I want to highlight in this coming year is like the new tools that we have for flow testing.

Mike: Oh?

Josh Birk: And when I started, I hadn't had a chance to really catch up to it. Our wonderful Jennifer Lee had a demo video for the Admin Meadow and I was reviewing that. And what occurred to me is that this is unit testing for flows. And so once again, we're pulling in these developer terms, right? Unit testing for flow. Now we have to jump into a rabbit hole. "Okay, well what's unit testing?" And unit testing is also an extremely engineering centric term, right? "What do you mean by a unit?" Well, a unit is the one thing you're testing, basically. It's kind of [inaudible 00:26:12]. But the nice thing is, I think if we can get past the terminology, some of this does bring in... So why do you want to use these new flow testing tools? And trust me, I'm getting back to Vibes. But you want to use these new flow testing tools because when you debug your flow, that tells you if your flow is running without errors. What it doesn't do is tell you is your flow running correctly and giving you the outcome that you want, right?

Mike: Uh-huh. Because running without errors and running with the result that you want are two different things.

Josh Birk: Two different things. Exactly. And the concept of unit testing for like apex, and the reason why Salesforce decided if you're going to go to production you have to have 75% coverage. That means 75% of your code has a unit test related to it somehow. And the reason they wanted to do that, first of all, it kind of forces people to write better code. And second of all, in a complicated environment like ours, the classic example, right? Some developer threw a trigger on account on a Friday, and now nobody can use an account on a Monday because of the-

Mike: And the servers melting.

Josh Birk: And the servers melting down. Like law of unexpected consequences, right? Properly done, unit testing will keep that from happening because if you run your whole unit test suite before you deploy, and your unit tests are written correctly, then you'll get that [inaudible 00:27:43] checkbox before you're like, "Oh, something broke. I should go fix that before I deploy." And we can assert that same paradigm with flows, which is a good thing since flows occupy the same kind of automation spaces like triggers. So where does this come back to vibe coding? Well, it comes back to I think admins need to kind of start adapting to some of the skills that developers are doing. Now the good thing is I'm not saying, "Go learn Java." I am saying, "It's time to have some of the soft skills that developers employ." Like when's the last time you sat down and did a code review of your flows? Like when's the last time you did kind of an end to end, "Here's our library of flows. And are all our flows working correctly?" And all of those questions are things that Vibes is very good at answering for you. So I think easing into some of this kind of new world of enterprise architecture and some of the new toys and the new tools that are coming out, Vibes is going to be a very good partner.

Mike: I mean you just touched on a huge part that I think sometimes when we release new product we forget is we always focus on here's how you can build new, faster, stronger.

Josh Birk: Mm-hmm.

Mike: But it's also I remember when Flow and Process Builder came out, it was... But admins could clutter up an org with all of these flows.

Josh Birk: Mm-hmm.

Mike: That's not a best practice that could be handled in one seamless apex trigger or something.

Josh Birk: Right.

Mike: And it's like, right, but everybody builds to their skill.

Josh Birk: Yeah, yeah.

Mike: And it's not necessarily wrong, it's just you ask a hundred people and you're going to get a hundred best practices of how to do it better. But I think what I'm getting at with this is, yes, you can build new, but boy, looking at what we look at as the core responsibilities for Salesforce admins, what about going back and just making it better?

Josh Birk: Better, yeah.

Mike: Because I do think you're focused on building the new all the time.

Josh Birk: Mm-hmm.

Mike: I mean there's a point at which you got to stop building the house and you got to clean the house.

Josh Birk: Yes. Yes. As somebody who just actually had people over as dinner guests that weren't like family since the pandemic, it's an exercise I am very... Well, my wife did most of the work. But anyway, yes, every now and then you just have to get up and spray and clean everything.

Mike: So your wife was like Agentforce Vibes?

Josh Birk: She was kind of like Agentforce Vibes. Yeah. Which however was also giving me unit testing from time to time. But anyway.

Mike: Yeah. That'll be the next version of Agentforce Vibes. It will also request things from you.

Josh Birk: Yeah. Yeah.

Mike: So instead of you asking it for a joke it'll be, "Before I build this unit, you have to tell me a dad joke."

Josh Birk: Tell me a good dad joke. I will write your...

Mike: Uh-huh.

Josh Birk: Uh-huh. I think I need to clarify something too. It's like, why am I going back to flows and all this kind of stuff? And it's like, even as somebody who has lived in a world of XML, when I look at a flow metadata XML my eyes just bleed. That is some dense, heavily formatted, heavily nested, and sometimes you're just trying to find that one reference to a custom object or something like that. For a human to read that, it's very unfriendly. For Vibes, walk in the park. It knows exactly how to understand that structure. And so that's when we're saying things like, "Hey, could you look at these 10 flows and tell me if any of them are redundant?" That's why it's good at that, is because it can really analyze that XML very quickly.

Mike: Hmm, I like that. I want to end on a fun question.

Josh Birk: Okay.

Mike: For the three people that are still listening.

Josh Birk: That haven't fled for fear of unit testing. Yeah, I hear you.

Mike: So of course I had AI help me with some of the questions for this. And the one was, "If vibe coding were a band member, what instrument would it play in the process and why?"

Josh Birk: Oh, that's a good question. That's a good question.

Mike: And you can't say cowbell.

Josh Birk: I wasn't going to, but now I really want to.

Mike: More cowbell.

Josh Birk: So my first response, my first initial instinct was drums, because they kind of keep the beat kind of thing.

Mike: Uh-huh.

Josh Birk: But in the spirit of going back to where we kind of started like, "What do you think of when you think of vibes?" I think bass guitar.

Mike: Oh yeah.

Josh Birk: I think that deep kind of keeping you in the flow sort of thing, and every now and taking over when the lead guitarist is done with his solo kind of thing. But not having to be loud and flashy like the lead singer. Yeah, I'm going to go bass guitar.

Mike: Yet, yet.

Josh Birk: Yet.

Mike: Okay. I like that, yeah. Or not triangle. I went with cowbell and triangle.

Josh Birk: Triangle. I actually played percussion in high school, so I've actually played a triangle.

Mike: Oh, see? Fun fact, you didn't know about Josh Birk until you listened to the 30 some minute mark.

Josh Birk: Exactly.

Mike: That'll be a trivia question somewhere.

Josh Birk: It is a difficult instrument to master, really.

Mike: Yeah, sure. Well, that was the hardest thing to segment off of.

Josh Birk: There you go.

Mike: Josh, thanks for coming on the podcast and helping with Vibes. I think what'll be fun in a year to go back to this podcast and be like, "Aw." [inaudible 00:33:59].

Josh Birk: They were so innocent. Look at those big eyes that they had at the time. Yeah.

Mike: Right.

Josh Birk: Yeah, exactly.

Mike: If they only knew what was coming.

Josh Birk: Yeah. I think that's an excellent idea. And I have two predictions. Number one, we will do that and I will sound so wonderfully naive about the capabilities of vibe coding actually went so far beyond what I'm even describing here. Or two, we're going to be talking about some other thing that's whatever vibe coding occurs in the summer, right? The whole new development fad.

Mike: But vibe coding, I mean I know we're talking about Agentforce Vibes, but vibe coding in the development world really feels like it's not going anywhere for a while.

Josh Birk: I don't think it's going anywhere.

Mike: Not with all of the AI tools people have available.

Josh Birk: To loop it back to a callback, it would be like throwing out your microwave. Like why? Why don't you want your sandwich repeated up faster?

Mike: Right. Hmm. I guess we'll find out.

Josh Birk: Guess we'll find out.

Mike: All right, Josh. Thanks for coming on the pod.

Josh Birk: All right. Thanks for having me, man. It's always a good time.

Mike: And a big thanks to Josh for joining us and shedding light on vibe coding, and Agentforce Vibes. I think it's exciting to see how AI is helping admins and developers, and really everybody in the tech ecosystem just build smarter, faster, and with more confidence. If this sparked some ideas or gave you some new tools to explore, please share it with a teammate or a fellow Salesforce admin. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to David Simpson, Salesforce Administrator at the 1916 Company.

Join us as we chat about how he got into the ecosystem and what skills transfer well into a Salesforce Admin career.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with David Simpson.

Transitioning into a Salesforce Admin career You might recognize David from his Dreamforce presentation about resolving Flow errors, or our episode about it on the podcast. However, one thing that came up was his career pivot from finance to being a Salesforce Admin, and I wanted to bring him back to talk more about it.

To make a long story short, David started out as an accountant before eventually becoming a financial systems analyst. That job involves a lot of reporting and, somewhere along the way, he realized that running the reports was the most exciting part of the job for him.

David decided to make a career change and focus on Salesforce. But that meant he needed to go on the hunt and figure out how to land his first full-time Salesforce role.

What to look for in job descriptions David's comfort with data, spreadsheets, and reconciliation gave him a strong analytical foundation for making the shift. These skills made it easier to understand how reporting, data cleanliness, and business processes translated to what admins build on the platform.

However, having the right skills is only part of the story—he still needed to find the right jobs to apply to. "It's not uncommon now for admins to have developer skills or maybe dip their toe into the architect side of things," David says, "but I focused mainly on positions that were only looking for admin-related work."

In general, David's advice is to narrow things down for yourself. Look for organizations that are already committed to Salesforce, and job postings that are looking for the admin skillset instead of somebody who can do it all.

A problem-solving mindset and curiosity fuel the admin journey For David, the skill that transfers best into a Salesforce Admin career is curiosity. When he was starting out, he was only interested in learning things that would be immediately applicable to the task at hand.

Looking back on it now, David realizes he could have learned much faster if he had indulged his curiosity. "I should have given myself the benefit of the doubt," he says, "and taken a little bit more risk in learning new things."

Make sure to listen to the full episode for more from David about how he transferred his skills into a Salesforce Admin career. And make sure you're subscribed to the show to catch us every Thursday.

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Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt:

This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, what if spreadsheet skills from your last job could be the secret to launching your Salesforce admin career? In this episode, we welcome back David Simpson, who shares his story from accounting to automation and how his finance background paved the way to becoming a certified Salesforce admin. We dive into the skills that transferred surprisingly well, the learning curves that came with the role, and the mindset shift that helps him grow. So whether you're thinking about making a career move or just mentoring somebody who is, this conversation's packed with insights. So with that, let's get David on the podcast.

David Simpson:

Thank you for having me back.

Mike Gerholdt:

It wasn't that long ago that we were talking, it was pre-Dreamforce about 45 days ago or so. I had you on the podcast to talk about the presentation you're giving at Dreamforce, and we've since wrapped up Dreamforce now and people are at home. Well, some people. I think some people stayed and probably went to Napa Valley and did wine tastings, which I wouldn't blame you. There's a lot of great vineyards and stuff out there. But one thing you brought up that I wanted to follow up on was your career trajectory, and we haven't talked about careers a whole lot, but let's just rewind a little bit and give one of those the last time on the Salesforce Admin podcast, because I've watched a lot of streaming things. Let's fill people in on what you do and where your career started and how you became a Salesforce admin.

David Simpson:

Sure. Previously on Salesforce Admins.

Mike Gerholdt:

Exactly.

David Simpson:

So, many years ago, I went to college for accounting, and my first job out of college was a staff accountant at a software company. After a few years of working in spreadsheets and doing the monotonous day-to-day that comes with being a staff accountant, I made a pivot to be a financial analyst, more specifically a financial systems analyst, and after I made that pivot, my supervisor at the time, he informed me that he was the administrator for our company's Salesforce instance, and that a lot of the work that I was doing, which was doing financial analytics for our professional service team, a lot of that data came out of Salesforce. Our professional service team would put opportunities into Salesforce, and we needed to make sure that those financials were clean.

So, he suggested that I become another admin with the company, and that I would learn about the general inner workings of Salesforce and be a point of contact for cleaning up that data, for troubleshooting issues and just all the things that come with being a junior level admin. So, he gave me a system administrator license. He recommended that I go into Trailhead to just learn the basics of being a Salesforce admin, the Salesforce ecosystem, custom objects. All those general items that you learn as an admin, and then I just kind of fell in love with it. It was such an interesting pivot from doing spreadsheets and reconciliations. I was able to kind of do problem solving and be an environment that I wasn't too familiar in, but I was also able to see how Salesforce works and how we can get this data to be reportable data.

So, the automation behind it or validation rules, just even something simple like setting up a page layout. It was all very interesting and new to me, so I just latched onto it a hundred percent, and then I further got sold on the whole experience after about a year or so, being a Salesforce admin, I went to my first Dreamforce in 2018 and I got my Salesforce administrator certification, and at that point, that kind of signaled to me that this is what I want to do full time. So, from that point on, it's all history. I went and unfortunately, the company I was with didn't have the resources for a full-time admin, so I did go to another company, but since then I have been an awesome admin just doing it every day. Custom objects, flows, you name it, admin work-wise, I do it.

Mike Gerholdt:

And I think career changes are hard. I went from sales to becoming an admin as well, and I think everybody kind of looks at like, well, what do I have to do? Or where do I have to go? Or what skills are required? And I think you, like me, kind of got fortunate you were with a company that was like, "Hey, we need these skills." And I'm assuming you probably did both jobs for a while, right?

David Simpson:

Yes. I was doing both jobs up until I left the company. It was essentially 50/50 financial systems analysis and then admin work.

Mike Gerholdt:

So, it's not like you just all of a sudden jumped in the pilot seat and took over the plane and away you go.

David Simpson:

Thankfully, that wasn't the case for me. I was able to kind ease myself into the admin role because I still had work to do on the financial side.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. And I think that that works out as an incredibly lucky path.

David Simpson:

Yeah, definitely.

Mike Gerholdt:

One thing, so you mentioned they didn't have the budget for a full-time admin, which is the role you wanted to pursue. Did you consider just staying at that current position and kind of dividing your time, or was this something where you were like, "No, I really, this is, I'm going to commit?"

David Simpson:

It was something that I really wanted to commit on. In the beginning when I had first gotten a system administrator license and started doing basic admin work, I was completely on board with splitting my time between the two. I wasn't super confident in what I was doing as a Salesforce admin. I was still learning the ropes, but after I had gotten my first certification, that kind of sold it to me and locked in that this is what I want to do as a career. So, at that point, I did bring up my interest in being a full-time admin to the company, and they said, "Unfortunately, we just don't have the bandwidth to have a full-time admin whose only job is to be a Salesforce administrator." So, unfortunately, I did have to switch companies to go and find that.

Mike Gerholdt:

Okay, so let's pause there because that is the point that I think everybody has questions about, which is, so what did interviewing look like? What kind of prep did you do? You're going from career A to career B, and you kind of have some experience. I mean, what was that like? Because I'm assuming you sat in interviews for jobs you didn't get.

David Simpson:

Yeah, I won't sugarcoat it. It was a little tough. You're going into a new job where, yes, you do have experience, but you don't have a ton of experience. So, what I focused on was first the credential side of things. By the time I decided to make the jump to be a full-time Salesforce administrator, I did have, I believe, three certifications under my belt. I had the Salesforce administrator certification, the platform app builder, and then the CPQ specialist. So, I-

Mike Gerholdt:

Ooh, CPQ specialist. Wow.

David Simpson:

Yeah. Yep. I haven't used it in a while, but it was a very challenging and interesting certification to take. I actually took the Salesforce-provided trainings for it, and it was a wealth of knowledge, but so I had these three certifications. I did lean a little bit heavier on that to say, listen, I may not have years of experience, but you can see here that I'm able to answer the tough questions. Additionally, I did focus on what projects and initiatives I was able to complete at my job while I was part-time being a Salesforce admin. So, I had done some work building a custom object for, funnily enough, our accounting team to log their calls to people for collecting payment. So, I made a point to mention that in my interviews. So, I used the certifications.

I used actual project and real-world experience, but something else that was a little kind of ace up the sleeve for my interview process was that I did have finance and accounting background. The job that ultimately hired me, while I did not do finance and accounting work for them, I was able to be a point of contact to help bridge the gap between the finance team and the Salesforce team. If they needed to pull financial data from Salesforce, I would be a person that they could go to, and I could confidently answer that because of my background.

So, when it comes to jumping from one career to a Salesforce career, I definitely recommend that people do lean into what they've done in the past and show how they can enhance a new job's day-to-day by focusing on those areas of expertise, but just in a Salesforce context. That's what really helped me because yes, I did unfortunately have a handful of interviews where I didn't get the job, and I think that ultimately came down to just pure raw Salesforce experience. But the job that did hire me, it was because I had a great rapport with their CFO, and I was able to talk the talk with finance as well as bridge that gap to the Salesforce side of things.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I mean, you stayed in finance. It's not like you went over to a fish distribution warehouse or something.

David Simpson:

Yes, exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:

I tried to pick something that was the opposite of finance, and my brain went blank for a second, and I was like, "Oh, I just watched a show on cooking last night."

David Simpson:

I mean, those are pretty different. I can't think of a much more different thing, but yeah, I mean because the Salesforce department at that new job also heavily interacted with the finance department, that was a big benefit to me.

Mike Gerholdt:

I can feel people listening to this podcast right now, and they're like, ask this question, ask this question, ask this question. I got like a million. What were in ... Because we're going to get to your job, I promise you, but we're going to just stay in this middle ground here for a second. In some of the job search that you were looking for in some of the, I don't know even, it sounds so old of me to call it classified ads. I'm sure it was like LinkedIn listings or Indeed job boards or something. What were some of the things that you looked for in terms of the description that you either filtered in or filtered out in terms applying for?

David Simpson:

Yeah, so some of the things that I looked for in my job search was making sure that the job posting focused purely on admin work. I think nowadays we focus so much on being specialized in a number of different aspects of Salesforce. It's not uncommon now for admins to have developer skills or maybe dip their toe in the architect side of things, and that is fantastic, don't get me wrong, but I focused mainly on positions that were only looking for admin-related work, so building custom objects, administering users, building validation rules, just those general kind of things were the main items I was looking for when I was transitioning to my first full-time Salesforce job.

Additionally, I was looking to see what kind of qualifications and credentials they were looking for from an education side of things. If there was nothing about a Salesforce certification, then I erred on the side of caution and didn't apply there. I wanted a company that was fully bought into the Salesforce ecosystem, and that can be illustrated in a job posting by seeing that they're asking for the proper credentials. An extra little bonus, which was much more rare, was seeing your certain Trailhead status, or you have certain super badges. It's very rare for a job to ask for those sorts of things, but that's how you know you're working with a company that knows the Salesforce ecosystem and knows what they want.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. And it's done its homework.

David Simpson:

Exactly. So, I was looking for those types of companies, just really people who were bought into the ecosystem, people who knew what they were looking for, knew what enhancements and long-term goals they had for their Salesforce org, and also was going to treat it with the level of attention and detail that is needed in a Salesforce org. There's many times where unfortunately, due to resourcing or staffing issues, Salesforce gets a little bit put by the wayside, and instead of having great initiatives and solutions deployed, it's just a bunch of band-aids, and then that comes back to the admin saying, "Oh, we can't deliver on something truly incredible because we're not given the time and the resources for it." So, I was looking for companies that really didn't have that mindset and were looking for true, awesome admins.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. You were fortunate enough that you had worked in an org. Did you, at any one point in time in the interviewing process, think about preparing a developer org or a Trailhead org to showcase some of your skills?

David Simpson:

When I was first applying for a full-time Salesforce admin, that thought did not cross my mind. That said, this was many years ago in, I think it was 2019. That said, a little over a year ago, I did get a new job at my current position, and during that job search, I did have a Salesforce developer org that I had built out, and I recreated some of my most interesting and complex solutions in that developer org, and then basically in every single job interview I had, I said, "Do you want to see my dev org? I've built some awesome flows."

And most of the time they said no. But every once in a while they'd say yes, and then I get to show off my screen flow that I worked really hard on. So, nowadays, yes, I do have my dev org. I'll bring up Trailhead every now and then, or I did back then when I was in the job hunt, but really, I like to showcase the dev org whenever possible because it is something that I'm actively developing in. Even now that I have a job and I'm in a job I love, I still whatever I do at my normal job, if I say, "Oh, that's pretty interesting," I go and I rebuild it in the dev org. But of course, without confidential information.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. No. Oh, man. I'm the same way. I was crushed, I want to say a year and a half ago I was prepping for Dreamforce and the dev org that I'd had since 2006. I forgot to log in and it expired.

David Simpson:

Oh, no. Oh, that's horrible.

Mike Gerholdt:

And it was just more of like, it was just such an awesome little relic of stuff that I had built and things that I had tried out, and I have another one, but it's not as old and it doesn't have as much. There wasn't anything cool in it, but it was cool because it was stuff that I had built when I was, it had my first workflow in it.

David Simpson:

It shows a timeline of how you've grown.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I mean, very much so. I'd let nobody in there because they'd be like, "What were you doing?" Well, I was a kid with crayons back then.

David Simpson:

Yeah, you got to make mistakes in order to get better.

Mike Gerholdt:

Absolutely. Okay. So, I mean, we could do a whole podcast on interviewing and everybody in the comments will be like, "You should." Let's go to day one of the new job. So, you've transitioned, you're no longer 50/50. The company's bought in. Dave's our new Salesforce admin. Day one, outside of all of the HR paperwork and stuff, what did you do on day one?

David Simpson:

First, I quietly panicked because I was afraid I was not going to be able to live up to expectations. But after that calmed down, I of course met the team. I was very fortunate to work with a team of several people in the Salesforce space. There was two developers, there was another admin. There were two architects, and of course the Salesforce manager. So, they showed me around the org and they showed me some of the details of what they had built, what they're currently building, how they take in tickets.

It was just essentially getting a feel for the Salesforce ecosystem that was there. And then from that point, once I was left my own devices, I just continued to do some more digging. I looked, okay, they're using cases. How are they using cases? Where is the queue that stuff that we get asked to do comes in? What does their account object look like? Because the account object is always one of the busiest objects in the Salesforce ecosystem. How many validation rules do they have? I was really just trying to take the little experience that I had from my previous job and then look at those same areas in this new job. So, essentially just getting a feel for the org.

Mike Gerholdt:

So, you joined a team of people?

David Simpson:

Yes. Yes.

Mike Gerholdt:

What was that like?

David Simpson:

It was a fantastic experience. I still keep in touch with all of them to this day, despite the fact that I haven't worked with them for a few years now. They were all super friendly and super helpful, and I think that was something that really helped me to continue this admin career path is that I got paired with such great people in this team, and it wasn't just the Salesforce team that was super friendly and helpful. Everybody in the company was, but these people took me in and they knew that I had limited experience, and they said, "It's okay. Let's show you the ropes of what you don't know and make sure that you are as successful as possible."

That company was actually where I learned how to build flows. The Salesforce architect there, Nick, he sat down with me one day for two hours and he said, "Okay, we're going to build a screen flow and this needs to be triggered from a button and it needs to grab all these records. Let's see you build it." And then he walked me through it step by step, and it was just such an incredible experience, and I'm super grateful for it because now I use flows every single day in my job and I talk about flows. I talked about it at Dreamforce that just recently ended. I have a YouTube channel where I talk about flows. So, it was just such a good experience and I'm forever grateful for them.

Mike Gerholdt:

Would you advise newer admins when they're joining an organization to join as part of a team rather than trying to be a solo admin?

David Simpson:

Yes, most definitely. I think a team is one of the best things that you can have as a Salesforce admin outside of a good clean org, and of course, knowledge [inaudible 00:20:22]-

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, a clean org. You mean the first day you get one?

David Simpson:

Oh, yeah, exactly. But yeah, a team is so important. Not only do you have other people that you can bounce ideas and problems off of, but just being able to work together and help lift each other up is such a good blessing in a Salesforce org. I think it's not only going into a job that has a team, but going into a job that has a team that is friendly, helpful, and inviting. Because I have had experience at a different position where unfortunately the team wasn't as welcoming, and that was really difficult to do good work because I couldn't ask questions. I couldn't troubleshoot certain things properly, and then when I eventually made a mistake, it was coming down on me pretty hard, but this first company here, it was just nothing but super niceness.

Mike Gerholdt:

So, having worked as part of a team, are you looking at your other team members in terms of where you want to grow your career or your skills and where are those?

David Simpson:

Yeah, definitely. So, working with a team and working with a team of a variety of skill sets, such as like an architect or a developer, it really does help kind of narrow down what I want to do. The architect route is something that is certainly interesting to me. I feel like it's a slight natural progression from being an advanced administrator and doing all these complex flow work, but I've seen what developers do with Apex, and while I think it's incredibly interesting and incredibly impressive, it's not something that's necessarily for me. So, you do get those different perspectives working in a team of people that you wouldn't get all by yourself because you're just kind of in the silo trying to figure everything out yourself.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, and sometimes working in a silo, you have to do all those things. You just don't know that you're doing them, and then what part of it you're doing well.

David Simpson:

Yeah, exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:

I mean, I'd like to think I was an architect by drawing diagrams, but then I've seen architectural diagrams and I've realized I was just scribbling.

David Simpson:

Yeah, you don't know until you see it firsthand.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Well, and sometimes the only exposure, for me, the only exposure was talking with other people at user groups, and that's often limited as opposed to having them as coworkers.

David Simpson:

Yeah. You really do get the benefit of just day-to-day exposure with working in a team. So, I'm incredibly grateful for that exposure and that opportunity.

Mike Gerholdt:

So, last question, and maybe it's the hardest, I don't know, but if you had to rewind the clock and do it all over again, what's one thing you would do differently?

David Simpson:

Great question. I think that if I were to rewind time and do stuff differently, I think back when I was still that part-time admin and I was still just getting my feet wet, I think I probably would've taken a little bit more risk in learning new things because I was just told to handle this one aspect of Salesforce at the very beginning, as I'd mentioned earlier on, I was working with opportunities and our professional service team. I really only focused on that kind of area, but if I could do it all over again, I probably would've asked more questions and said, "Hey, how does this third-party integration work? Can I do some enhancements on it? I might break something, but can I give it a shot?"

Or, "Why doesn't this process work the way as intended? Can you let me try this automation?" I eventually got those skill sets over the years, especially with automation, but it took a little bit longer than expected because I was just afraid to take that leap very early on, and I should have given myself the benefit of the doubt that I could have figured it out that early on, and I think that would've made me a stronger admin from the get-go.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I could see that. The benefit of hindsight is hindsight, right?

David Simpson:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt:

The ability to look back and boy, if I had to do the same thing, I don't know what I would do differently other than probably be less hard on myself.

David Simpson:

Yeah, that too. You need to be forgiving of yourself because as an admin, especially a newer admin, you will make mistakes. You'll accidentally use the wrong tools or the wrong process. I mean, look to the admin certification where you have to separate between sharing rules and field level security profiles, permission sets. You're going to grab the wrong thing or do the wrong process, and it might not be the end of the world, but you should give yourself some leeway that you will make those mistakes and you'll learn from them.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yep. Well, I think that's a great way to end this podcast. David, thanks for coming on, and given is probably one of the most comprehensive overviews of switching careers that I think I've talked to in a while, so I appreciate it.

David Simpson:

Yeah, of course. Thank you so much for having me on again.

Mike Gerholdt:

David's story is a reminder that the skills you've built in other roles aren't just relevant, they're valuable. Whether you're transitioning into the Salesforce ecosystem or helping someone else find their way, keep leaning into those transferable strengths. And if today's episode sparked ideas or gave you that extra boost of confidence, share it with a friend or a fellow Salesforce admin. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Kate Lessard, Lead Admin Evangelist at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about how the Admin Adoption Framework can help you build confidence with Agentforce and her new video series, "Kate Clicks Through It".

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Kate Lessard.

Tackling AI adoption overwhelm Admins are feeling the pressure to "get AI-ready," but the pace (and the jargon) can be intimidating. The key is starting with small, actionable steps that build momentum and confidence. Remember, it's OK not to know everything on day one.

Luckily, Kate and the Evangelist team have been working on something to give you a helping hand. It's called the Admin Adoption Framework, and it gives you a structured path to build confidence with Agentforce in five simple steps:

1. Explore what's possible
2. Get curious
3. Try it out
4. Make it work
5. Use it often

By working through this list, Salesforce Admins can pinpoint their current phase, set goals, and identify the next best step—whether that's learning about AI use cases or diving into hands-on experimentation with Agentforce.

Keeping pace with new features While your organization is probably keen to get started with Agentforce, the great thing about the Admin Adoption Framework is that it's a process that works for just about any implementation. For example, we know that good data is the backbone of effective AI solutions, so we can go through the same five steps with Data Cloud.

Tech changes fast, but how you learn new things and build confidence with them doesn't. Developed through extensive research and feedback from admins, Salesforce MVPs, and folks on the product team, the Admin Adoption Framework is a template for continuing success.

Hands-on learning with "Kate Clicks Through It" Hands-on learning is the best way to build confidence with new features, and Kate's been working on a new video series to help you get started. "I personally am someone who learns best by doing," she says, "I need to get hands-on, I need to do something. In many cases, I need to do it over and over again."

In "Kate Clicks Through It," she walks you step by step through Salesforce processes like how to build an Agentforce data library, or how to use Org Check as an alternative to Optimizer. Each 10-minute video has a demo that will let you click along with her and try things for yourself.

Kate has a lot of great tips to share about how to build confidence with Agentforce, 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 * Admin Blog: Your 5-Step Guide to Successful Agentforce Adoption * YouTube Series: Kate Clicks Through It

Admin Trailblazers Group * Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social * Kate on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn * Salesforce Admins on X * Mike on Bluesky social * Mike on Threads * Mike on X

Love our podcasts? Subscribe today or review us on iTunes! Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt:

Welcome to the Salesforce Admin's podcast. This week, admin evangelist Kate Lessard joins us to dive into the Agentforce adoption journey. From building a foundation AI to launching the new Kate Clicks Through It YouTube series, Kate walks us through how admins can thoughtfully and confidently bring AI into their organizations. We also chat about how feedback shaped the adoption framework. So if you've been wondering where to start or where you are on your AI journey, this episode's for you. Let's get Kate on the podcast. So Kate, welcome back to the podcast.

Kate Lessard:

Thanks. It's been a while.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. January. Was it when we did the kickoff? That was the last time.

Kate Lessard:

Maybe. Or maybe did we do a TDX, prep for TDX call maybe?

Mike Gerholdt:

We might've. Other podcasters would remember their episodes, but me, just crank them out.

Kate Lessard:

Yeah, you're a little busy.

Mike Gerholdt:

It's okay. So you've been busy as well. Let's talk about Agentforce stuff and YouTube stuff and everything you've been working on.

Kate Lessard:

Yeah, absolutely. It has definitely been a busy year. It's been flying by. And some really exciting stuff that we've been working on for admins this year.

Mike Gerholdt:

First up being Agentforce stuff, because Agentforce. I know there's not too much Agentforce out there. People say that, there's not. When we're recording this ChatGPT is coming out with a new model. This is our new norm. It's like when the iPhone drop, there's not enough iPhone information out in the world. There's always iPhone information out in the world. There's always going to be AI stuff for us to learn.

Kate Lessard:

Yeah, agreed. I think that that's the really cool thing about Agentforce and the job that we get to do is that we get to play with and learn the new things as they're coming out because it's so important for us to share with others and let them learn from our mistakes. So I think that that brings a lot of fun experimentation into our jobs.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right, absolutely. So speaking of that, how do we kind of walk people through the journey to Agentforce?

Kate Lessard:

At TDX last year we, or I guess this year, we announced that we have this Agentforce development life cycle. But then we kind of started asking what comes before that? How do we get into this cycle where we're iterating through ideation, configuration, testing, deployment, and supervising our agents? How can we get ready to actually go live with agents and Agentforce and using it? And so on the admin relations team, we kind of took a step back and started to think about adoption and how we can set up adoption for admins and get them not only familiar with Agentforce, if they have no idea what it is, where they can get started, how they can start to learn the fundamentals of AI just in general, and then dive into Salesforce and Agentforce and using AI within their CRM. That's been something we've been really focused on, is creating the concept of this adoption framework to help admins get ready to move their organizations towards actually using Agentforce consistently.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, because I think it's one thing ... I mean, it's a little different than ... And I use this a lot when we talk about Flow or some of our other products. Automation within the CRM space has always been there. We didn't really have to learn it. But with AI, we're all learning AI on top of our organizations learning AI, on top of us going, "Okay, so now how do we use this? And what's the best use of this?" And all of that has to transfer into the admin sitting there going, "Oh my, I have a lot to learn. Where am I at?" And I think that's really one of the goals of coming out with the journey, is helping people understand where are you at, where do you want to go?

Kate Lessard:

Agreed. I think that the development of Agentforce and of course more widely artificial intelligence, it's fast. It feels like there's something new to learn every week. I think that can cause a lot of overwhelm because we're trying to keep up without maybe even having a solid foundation. So this concept of the adoption framework was really designed as a baseline for admins to be able to take stock of where they are in their Agentforce learning journey, overcome that analysis paralysis that I think many of us have been feeling over the past couple years, and then have resources and a guide for exactly where they are now and what is coming next.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. So where is this guide or the adoption journey going to show up for us?

Kate Lessard:

So you will be able to see it, we have a nice blog on the admin's website right now. It is called Your Five Step Guide to Successful Agentforce Adoption. Just double checking that title, but that is correct. And this kind of introduces that adoption framework, the steps that are included with it, some resources for each step along the way. And then you might see this show up in a couple other places. It might show up in a Dreamforce session or it might show up on our website or any other place that I could maybe tease that it would come out. I think it's something that you might see here and there. And the nice thing is that it's ever-changing because we're constantly having new content and new resources to add to it in each step. So I think it's something that you're going to see in multiple places moving forward.

Mike Gerholdt:

And I was a part of you brainstorming this and bringing it to the team, and really it was everybody on the team had something to contribute to this. Where do you feel like admins are progressing through in terms of the journey? Are we starting off? Does everybody start off at the beginning, or we jump in steps? I mean, is it like a step method, everybody has to go through every single step?

Kate Lessard:

I think you go through every step, but maybe you don't recognize that you've gone through some of them. So our first step is really exploring what's possible and just really understanding what AI fundamentals are, what is Agentforce? And a lot of our admins are really active. They've already been hands-on in Trailhead. So they've maybe gone through this stage themselves without even realizing it because they've kind of figured out how the technology works. They've actually done a little hands-on work. They have been picturing use cases for their organization. And so maybe they're hopping into that next phase where they're actually sharing this and doing demos to their stakeholders and trying to bring this to their organization. So I think everyone goes through all the stages, but you might not be just starting directly at the beginning. Once you become aware of this framework, I think that you can hop in and find the point that is most relevant to where you are on your journey and be able to kind of pick up from there.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. And hopefully it kind of helps you gut check content and say, "Hmm, Maybe this is for next week when I'm moving into a different phase." Not to say that it would be a week that you would be in a phase. I'm just using it as a example.

Kate Lessard:

Absolutely. I mean, admins move fast. I would not be shocked if some of them were moving from phase week to week. Although I would be surprised if they didn't spend some time in that phase where they're building out a demo and getting stakeholders involved in really building that support. I feel like that always takes time.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, absolutely. So in addition to the adoption journey, what else have you been working on?

Kate Lessard:

Lots. It's been a busy year. I'm super excited to share some of the things that I've been working on and the team's been working on. We recently launched a new series on YouTube called Kate Clicks Through It, which has been just a labor of love. And I feel like it has been something that I'm really excited about, really excited to put out into the world because it is a series that allows admins to get hands-on and follow along different Salesforce processes step by step. And I personally am someone who learns best by doing. I need to get hands-on. I need to do something. In many cases, I need to do it over and over again. I need to try. I need to fail. That's why admins love sandboxes so much. That's why we love Trailhead, so that we can get in there and we can actually just try things out and see what works and what doesn't, and then take the best version of that to our business.

So Kate Clicks Through It launched in July. We have two episodes out right now, one on Agentforce data libraries and one on using Org Check as an alternative to Optimizer, which is retiring this winter. And it's just a way to follow along step by step. They're short episodes, less than 10 minutes spent on each demo so that you can actually have your computer up and click along beside me, and by the end we've accomplished something together.

Mike Gerholdt:

It's kind of like a Salesforce Twitch stream.

Kate Lessard:

Yeah, absolutely.

Mike Gerholdt:

You're not playing the video game, you're building the app or clicking through the app.

Kate Lessard:

Exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:

Cool. So Kate, it is, boy, end of August. Well, end-ish of August. I swear these months, it's like it took forever ... February took like eight or nine months. And then we had TDX, and then it was spring for a day, and now Summer is flying by, it's already the end of August. The kids are back in school. Dreamforce is right around the corner. Which usually for most of us is September. It's October this year. It's not close enough to Halloween, but it still would be close enough that you could totally get away with wearing a Halloween costume at Dreamforce. I just realized that, that might be kind of fun. I mean, the biggest costume is Cloudy and Codey. They would win, I suppose. Would they wear a costume? Would the costume wear a costume?

Kate Lessard:

I don't know the answer to that.

Mike Gerholdt:

It's inception, like Astro in his Tanooki suit, would he wear another costume on top of that? These are the things that keep Mike up at night. We did wear a Yeti suit.

Kate Lessard:

[inaudible 00:11:30]. That is true. The Yeti suit and the safari suit.

Mike Gerholdt:

I forgot about the safari.

Kate Lessard:

I think we could all just call it a win across the board and wear some awesome admin capes.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. I mean, if you don't wear that in your every day, just because you could. We're going to see some of the Agentforce adoption journey show up at Dreamforce, maybe in the keynotes, maybe in the track?

Kate Lessard:

Maybe. I think that the nice thing about the adoption journey is that it really is applicable to so many situations. I think that it is, even if it's not called out directly, it is going to be there and you're going to start noticing it as part of that underlying education and the foundation of how we're talking about and building things. It's also really nice because it doesn't just have to be for Agentforce either. I think that what we've created is really applicable for a lot of different adoptions of different technologies. So I think that it's something that maybe we'll see as the world continues to progress and AI gets more advanced. So it's definitely something that you'll start to notice at Dreamforce.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. I'm also thinking of, it always seemed as when I was an admin going to Dreamforce, nine times out of 10 it was, I need to learn about this other cloud because we're getting ready to implement it. So I could see that Agentforce adoption journey being applicable as you're looking at additional clouds as well.

Kate Lessard:

Yeah, I think especially if you're using something like Data Cloud to unify your data and bring things from multiple sources, that it becomes really important to have that foundational level of adoption for your users in general and your customers, external customers as well.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. One thing we didn't touch on, and we're not giving away the chili recipe ... I always think back to Food Network where they're, I've got some ... It's always they're making a sauce and they put in, "Well, I've got some salt and pepper and some onion powder," and you're like, "Yeah, that goes in everything." And then I got my seasoning blend, and you're like, "Oh, that's you don't want to tell us everything else that you put in there."

Kate Lessard:

The secret admin sauce.

Mike Gerholdt:

The secret ... Yeah. But I mean, I don't want people to think like, "Oh, well, Kate just sat down and mapped out a journey and presented it to the team, and then now it's on the website." What was some of the process or the input that we got on the adoption journey?

Kate Lessard:

Absolutely. That is a great question because we involved a lot of people in creating this. Not only the team, although that's where we certainly started, but the framework was not built in a vacuum. We had a ton of feedback and interaction both internally and from the community as we developed this. So we got feedback from members of our product team at Salesforce. We did a very soft launch at TDX as part of my demo to deployment session and got some feedback from that. And then we continued to refine and then get feedback from admins in a survey that we shared at a local community conference. And then after that, we took that survey to the Salesforce MVPs and got some more feedback from some of them as well. So everyone that weighed in helped us refine this framework. They called out some things that maybe we hadn't thought were really that important for admins to include in this journey, this roadmap. But once we heard that and we saw it consistently show up, we added it in. So a lot of people weighed in and helped us create this journey map.

Mike Gerholdt:

And some of it was us just looking at each other and being like, "Is this what we're going through?" Because we're going through Agentforce adoption as well. I mean, from the moment the product hit some of our orgs for us to try and play around with, it was, what are we learning and is this what we're going through?

Kate Lessard:

Absolutely. And I think that that really hits the nail on the head. I think that we went through a lot of these different emotions that we associated with each stage here. We were curious, we were frustrated, we were feeling really proud once we got to this stage. So selfishly, this framework has kind of evolved into a game changer for our team internally and our internal content strategy as well, because we've been able to see where there are content gaps that we have experienced, as well as what we've heard from the community and what we should be focusing on to give admins the knowledge that they need for a successful Agentforce implementation. And we're able to collect that feedbacks from the admins and the community about what they've been struggling with and what resources and discussions they feel have been missing, which was the biggest thing that was contributed to us as we were building this.

Mike Gerholdt:

So here's a meta question. Did you use AI to create any part of the adoption journey?

Kate Lessard:

I did. Okay. So let's think back to this ... It's been such ... Oh gosh, we've been working on this for months. But-

Mike Gerholdt:

Got to do the flashback [inaudible 00:16:51].

Kate Lessard:

First it started off with just a giant brain dump mind map. That was what helped us kind of sort out the emotions and the stages. And then they've shifted terminology and what we are referring to them and how we process them a few times. I think AI really helped me with the survey, is where it helped out. So I was like, "These are the things that I'm trying to get. This is how I'm trying to ask the questions. This doesn't feel quite right. Can you help me refine this?" And so I did use AI to help me with that survey. And then got feedback from our internal marketing team as well to make sure that it was capturing what we needed it to.

Because I think the biggest thing that we see with surveys in general, and this is me going down a total rabbit hole from my past project management and consulting experience, when you send out surveys or you're gathering requirements or you're asking questions, if you do so without having the specific goal in mind of what you're trying to get back, you can get so much information that is valuable, but maybe not what you're looking for or answering the questions that you really need answered. So I think that AI, as well as our internal marketing team, was super helpful in refining that.

Mike Gerholdt:

That, or what I've found is you can ask the question in such a way that it elicits only a certain answer, as opposed to kind of an A, B, C answer. Really you're asking it, is it this or not this? And then you end up with an answer where the person really kind of hones in. And it's almost like, I don't know if the term confirmation bias is right, but I do know a friend once asked me, "When you ask somebody their opinion, it's because you really want them to confirm that you're right." And I was like, "Oh, yeah, that's kind of true."

Kate Lessard:

Right. Yeah. Do I look good in this?

Mike Gerholdt:

I mean, all of the time. Yeah. You ask questions like that, "Do you really think I should buy this house?" And it's like, you don't want them to say no. You want them to be like, "Yes, it's going to be an amazing house for you."

Kate Lessard:

Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

"Absolutely. It's a totally good decision." I don't know. That just stuck with me, that kind of thing.

Kate Lessard:

Yeah. Big shout out to our research team that does that every day, right? They're putting together these questionnaires and they're talking to people at events like TDX and Dreamforce and having to just put together these thoughtfully designed surveys and questionnaires, and it really is an art.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, Kate, I appreciate you coming on the podcast and talking about adoption journey and Kate Clicks Through It. You're out there helping admins progress through different emotions, not just learning. Because that's also important, because emotions drive a lot of things, and creativity and inspiration are definitely two of those things. So I appreciate you coming on the pod and talking about that.

Kate Lessard:

Absolutely. And I think that you're exactly right, those emotions are important. And they help make us better admins and the passion that we have for helping out the business and the organizations that we work with. It's just really important. It's a driving factor. And that's part of what makes us so successful and helps make both our users and our external customers happy.

Mike Gerholdt:

Big thanks to Kate for walking us through the Agentforce adoption framework and showing us what a thoughtful community-driven AI adoption can look like. Be sure to check out her YouTube series, Kate Clicks Through It, and explore the resources linked in the show notes. Whether you're starting or already building AI demos, I promise you this journey's for you. So until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Prag Ravichandran Kamalaveni, Founder & CEO of Skilled Cohort and the Founder & Co-Chair of Salesforce Saturday Cohort Canada.

Join us as we chat about his Dreamforce presentation on AI readiness and how to be a better storyteller.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Prag Ravichandran Kamalaveni.

Why AI is moving technology from clicks to chats I caught up with Prag fresh off his Dreamforce presentation about AI readiness. The idea for his talk came from thinking about what people were saying years ago, when he started attending the conference, compared to now. If we're talking about Agentforce this year, what will we be talking about in five years? In ten years?

"We are moving away from clicks and moving towards chats," Prag says. AI currently sits in the application layer, working as a tool on top of your org. But as these functionalities become more deeply embedded in everything we do, Prag predicts that an "agentic layer" will sit directly on top of your data.

What this all means is that data cleanup and data quality need to be top priorities for your organization to get the most out of AI.

How to find presentation topics As a 10-time Dreamforce speaker, Prag has a simple and effective approach for how he turns ideas into presentations.

It starts with the topics—pick something you're excited to talk about. The best topics are in areas where you have some experience but want to learn more. "Curiosity is fundamental for success," Prag says. Write out a list of topics that you're curious about, and then look at the big picture of how they might fit together in a presentation.

Prag also points out that you don't need to write a fully finished 20-minute script to submit for a conference. Technology moves so quickly that by the time you're actually giving your talk, half of the information will be out of date. Write a good abstract and focus on the core concepts.

Finally, keep a sense of perspective and don't get discouraged by rejection. As an event organizer myself, I see plenty of great presentation ideas that just don't fit with the event as a whole. It's all about persistence, so keep at it.

Forget the script—go for flexibility and rehearsal So you've submitted some great topics and booked that speaking gig—how do you prepare?

As he's gained more experience as a speaker, Prag has stopped trying to write a detailed script. Instead of focusing on the exact words you have to say, think about what you want your audience to understand.

Practice makes perfect, so make sure to take the time to rehearse your speech in front of friends, family, and anyone who will give you input. Prag has found ChatGPT to be effective for doing a few practice runs, once he prompted it to stop being so complimentary and give him direct feedback.

Listen to the full episode for more insights from Prag about AI readiness and how to be a great presenter. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

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Full show transcript

Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we're joined by Prag to talk all things AI readiness, from Dreamforce stages to real world slide decks, so if you've ever wondered how to prep for a major presentation in a fast moving AI world, or how tools like ChatGPT can play coach, creator and confidence booster, I promise you, you're in for a treat. Now, Prag shares what it takes to go from idea to impactful delivery, plus the pivotal role that data plays in getting AI ready. Now, whether you're planning your next big talk or just curious how AI fits into your workflow, this episode has something for you. So with that, let's get Prag on the podcast. So Prag, welcome to the podcast.

Prag: Pleasure to be here, Mike, with you.

Mike: Let's get started, for those people that didn't see your presentation at Dreamforce or haven't bumped into you in the community, let's do a little bit, tell me how you got started in the Salesforce community and what you presented at Dreamforce this year.

Prag: Wow, okay. So you are backdating probably 15 years ago, that's when I started Salesforce. This was the pre-Salesforce classic version is when I started, and Salesforce evolved a lot, and I couldn't believe that it's already 15 years past, and I think this Dreamforce is my sixth or maybe seventh.

Mike: Wow.

Prag: But every Dreamforce for me is pretty amazing because of the energy and people around the globe who could able to come join us, exchange ideas, mostly the problems and the pain they're going through, it's fantastic. So I always look for Dreamforce every single year, and the energy that I take away from Dreamforce is obviously the biggest driver for me. I know people sometimes complain that they become tired by end of day four. I think, me, on the opposite, I allow to steal energy from others, so I take more energy, if it is crazy week like Dreamforce, and that's fantastic feeling for me.

Mike: So you're taking other people's energy, oh no. I think this year you presented about getting AI ready. Can you talk to me? I mean, if you think about it, even in the short time that you've been, if you go back six or seven Dreamforces ago, I promise you we probably weren't talking AI, and now we are. How was that presentation and what did you talk about?

Prag: So it's a very, very new topic to a lot of us. We are consuming AI in a lot of ways, and I'm pretty sure almost everyone who is listening to this podcast might have used some version of ChatGPT or Gemini at some point, but I started believing in my co-speaker, like we both started believing that we all are going to start using AI as part of our work. So the presentation, we started in a way that in the next five to 10 years, what we predict is we are going to move from application layer to data centric layer. What it means is the AI or the agent layer is going to sit on top of the data layer, and the phrase we actually mentioned at our session was, we are moving away from clicks and moving towards chats. So that's going to be a very interesting starting point when it comes to AI. How are we going to consume AI?

Mike: Yeah, I mean, I feel like having just come off of [inaudible 00:04:26], even if people don't want to talk AI, they're still talking AI about just about everything. I even had an AI conversation with my Lyft driver, which I will tell you, that was probably the first time I've ever had that. Yeah.

Prag: That's nice. Yeah, I think none of us could able to avoid the topic.

Mike: So what did you see at Dreamforce this year that you're excited maybe to have come GA or just the next advancements in what could come out for Salesforce in 2026?

Prag: Wow, there's a lot of things, but being very honest, I enjoyed this Dreamforce because the message was clear. If your AI needs to work, you need to have the right data. I think that message was little bit under the hood for a while, but I think it's been clearly communicated this time that any kind of AI content that you consume during Dreamforce, it's not even disclaimer, it's very clear that, "Hey, you need to have the right data to make sure that your AI works the way you want it to work." So first of all, kudos to the team who made this approach of making the message clear about the data layer, which is super important to make your AI works. But I also super excited about the naming convention and the name change of all the products.

Mike: Oh?

Prag: It's not easy to move from sales cloud to agent force sales. That's a big difference. That means that there is an organization switch at the company level, or at the product level, there's going to be a lot of agent force presence going to come along that we are going to start using probably much faster and much sooner. Those are all kind of an indications that I got, but at the same time, at the keynote, I was super surprised to see Patrick doing a demo of agent code wipe. That's beyond what I would expect to see at the keynote floor.

Mike: Well, that's the whole reason we do keynotes is to wow and amaze you.

Prag: Yeah, it is definitely worth getting the goosebumps moments there, for sure.

Mike: Yeah. Well, let's talk a little bit about, so you presented at Dreamforce and you talked about getting AI ready, I think absent of talking about your presentation, one thing that's really relevant having just come off of a community conference, and I know quickly the holidays will be here and gone and it'll be January, February and community conferences, user groups, Trailblazer DX will be coming back. I'd love to hear your perspective on if you had some advice or things that you would love to share about how you got ready to present at Dreamforce that would be helpful for others.

Prag: I think what I have done in the past as a mistake was, oh, I want to make sure that my presentation is ready or the content is completely ready before I even submit my topics to talk about. I think that's a biggest mistake that I have done in my own life and the moment I started coming out of it, because the things are changing much faster. You cannot have something ready assuming that you can present that in three months or four months, then you're going to be old dated content. So my suggestion would be, start picking up the topics that you are excited to talk about. You have experience, but also wants to gain more experience. So the curiosity is the fundamental success for you to have a successful content delivery and for that, pick a range of topics. So I'm always the security guy. I love talking about Salesforce security. It's just my thing. And now I love data. I started talking about data layers in different angles, and since I talk about security and data layer, I could able to start adopting AI topics because when you talk about anything AI, you need to have two most important things, which is the data and how secure that AI have access to the data. So it's kind of putting those puzzles together is going to be phase two of how you can start thinking of presenting to either the community conferences or trial ideas or even at Salesforce World Tours. So these are the two fundamental things that I would be picking before I start worrying about how to deliver that presentation.

Mike: Yeah, I completely agree, I mean, selfishly, the event organizer in me would love to have everybody have all their topics ironed out, but in reality, if you have a really good idea and a really thoughtful abstract that explains it, it makes me think of the Wayne Gretzky quote, you just have to skate to where the puck will be. Which is you have to know that you're going to create that presentation even though it's not created right now, so I think that's really good advice because sometimes people can think they have to sit down and have a fully vetted idea before they submit, and you don't, you just have to know that your idea will come together and be incredibly helpful for others.

Prag: Exactly. Again, I was one of those folks who made that mistake, but the moment I moved out of it, now I start my presentation with just a piece of paper or a Google Doc. I won't even go to Google Slide and have four or five bullets. I would, "Okay, this is the four or five things I want to talk about that. What could be a potential title?" And then I pick a title and I usually submit at least three or four different kinds and versions of the content, because again, don't give up if your topic didn't get selected. I have seen so many people, if they don't get selected to speak within the first two or three times, then they started believing that they are not the good presenters or they don't know how to submit their topics, and they started giving up on not taking that approach of submitting the topics. I want to tell them that my topics has been rejected many times compared to the times of the topics that's been selected. So rejection is good at times to make sure that it's not your turn yet doesn't mean that you never get your turn.

Mike: Yeah, I mean, having been on both sides of the fence on that, it's amazing, but if you think about it relevant to other things like applying for a job, you apply for jobs when you're searching for a job. And yes, there's jobs that you really want, but you also apply knowing you're not just the only person applying, and to your point, it's not like you find one job and apply for it and then go, "Oh, well, I guess nobody ever will employ me again, just because I got rejected from that one." From an event standpoint, it's a combination of, what are the contents being submitted, what is the mix that the event is looking for, and what do I have to pick from? And sometimes you can be one of a thousand submissions on a certain topic, and it's not that your content isn't good, it's one of a thousand, and there's maybe only two or three slots. And other times it can be, boy, I've had it where, like in your case, I've needed one or two sessions on a certain topic, and thankfully there was one or two submissions on that. And so I hate to say it's luck, but a lot of it is. It's being open and flexible and kind of making presentations that fit for what the organizer's looking for.

Prag: Exactly, exactly. So I think if people get clarity around that, I think they won't get demotivated for not getting selected.

Mike: No, I mean, it's also, how many times do you buy a lottery ticket and you don't win the lottery, right? If you bought a lottery ticket, you're like, "Well, I'm going to win." And then you don't win and you're like, "I'm never buying a lottery ticket again." Come on. I mean, I hate to say it's the same way, but part of it is that's kind of just how, when you're in a big pool like that, it works, and sometimes the reverse also holds true. You can submit something and it may be a great presentation, it just doesn't fit for what the company or the organization's looking for. I mean, I've gone through lots of call for presentations for other events, and I'm like, "This is a really good subject." And from my perspective, it's really good, but from an organizer's perspective, it's good, it just doesn't fit what they're looking for. And so it's like being cinnamon and somebody's trying to make a ravioli dish, and I'm not saying cinnamon's bad, cinnamon's really good with sugar and frosting. You can make cinnamon rolls, it's just, we're trying to make ravioli over here and cinnamon doesn't work out.

Prag: Yeah, yeah, no, I one hundred percent agree with that. So yeah, these are all something that I suggest people to think before submitting their topics. But once it gets accepted, I think the best thing that you can do as a presenter is not to have a pre-written script.

Mike: I would agree.

Prag: And I have tried it multiple times and almost every single time I failed because if things are not going as per the plan, which 90 percent of the time it doesn't, then the moment you get into the panic mode, the script that you remember magically disappeared and you started blanking, you started blinking, you started filling with words that is, even though it's appropriate, but it doesn't match the exact tone that you're trying to say certain things. So what I started practicing for the last decade is, "Okay, I'm going to talk about the things that I do know and I'm not going to stick with a specific script." And if I'm speaking with my co-speaker and if my co-speaker took more time, then if I don't have a script for me, I could able to shorten the version of the content that I plan to deliver. So there are a lot of flexibility and lot of freedom that you get if you do not have a script that's pre-written and you want to stick with it, which is not easy for people who doesn't have English as their native language because I'm coming from that background. But once you started practicing by delivering presentation without scripts, it's easy, it's comfortable, and you won't go into a panic mode any time.

Mike: I couldn't agree more. As somebody that presents a lot and helps prepare presenters, there's definitely a point in time that a script is necessary to help you kind of vet out what the talking points are, but you're not in a play, you're not in a musical, you're not in a blockbuster movie where you have to say it word for word. And the thing that I always remind presenters when they get up on stage is, people will remember how they feel when they saw your presentation. People will remember the passion and the information better if you just speak to, what is the point you're trying to make across. And a script is definitely a step in that, you need something to kind of get your framework about it, but I think too often people do get hung up. Even English speakers, where we're native language, they get hung up on, "I have to say these exact words."

Prag: Exactly.

Mike: And you don't, you have to convey the meaning. What is the point of this slide? The script got you there, but in your own words, what is that slide? And that's often when the presentations, I can always tell when a presenter goes what we call off script, and generally the first time they rehearse it and they're off script, they go long because the need to over explain, it's in the back of your head and you're like, there's this little person inside that's like, "You didn't say enough. You got to keep talking. Say more words. They don't understand."

Prag: Exactly.

Mike: And the irony is, it's actually fewer words, but with more intention, because if you choose your words carefully, then you can really convey that meaning. So yeah, I mean, boy, and I've seen, you can also tell as an audience member, when somebody is up there and they're going through the script in their head and they're looking up and then they forgot something and they don't know what to do, and that's where rehearsal comes in. Just rehearsing for that. I always tell people, "You should rehearse in front of your family, your friends, and periodically have them unplug the computer or let something go wrong." Because it's like why sports and athletic people practice all the time, because the more you go through the motion of doing it, the more natural it is when something comes up. I've walked up on stage and had microphones fail, I've had screens go blank, and there's a moment where you're like, "Oh, I've practiced this. I'm just going to keep with the talk. I'm going to let the AV people do their thing, and if it comes back, great. And if it doesn't, then I just realized nobody can see what I saw and I'm going to have to describe it in my head." But if you're on script, you're like, "I don't know what to do because the script doesn't say that."

Prag: Yep, exactly. No, I one hundred percent agree with that point, right? It's the pattern, and I think I've been told once that you should also explain in a way a ten-year-old should able to understand, so that you kind of avoid all the complex words and terminologies, to even explain a complex concept, but in a simple way.

Mike: Yep, I agree with that.

Prag: Yeah.

Mike: Interesting, so I'm kind of curious, this is sort of Salesforce related, sort of not. But what role did AI play in getting you presentation ready? Did you lean on it to help create some scripts for you? Did you lean on it to help create some visuals for you?

Prag: Oh, a combination of both, being very honest. I did use AI to generate specific graphics. I used to have to go rely on a graphic designer to do some graphics that gets aligned with Salesforce color factor, which changes every Dreamforce. So until last year, I was relying on another human who could able to do the magic and then get it plugged into my presentation, but this time it wasn't required, actually. I could able to give the prompt, give the exact font style I want, give the exact place of the image that I want, and it could able to get back to me with my expectation. Even though it does not meet exactly how it used to be done in the previous times, but this is pretty amazing, I took advantage of building images for sure. The other thing I used it for is subtitles. For each and every slide, I always try to avoid the tiny little subtitle under your title section on each and every slide, because I don't know what I could put there as an subtitle, and then I tried it with AI and it could able to process my content and say, "Oh, this is something you can put under your title." Which is very interesting way of seeing it. And I started almost for all my slides, I used AI with my own content that I put it on that slide and asked it, "Hey, how can I frame it under subtitle?" And it could able to give me some really interesting titles.

Mike: Yeah. I got to say, for probably this year, for me, it's been so incredibly helpful to generate images that I needed to really drive home a point in a presentation without worrying about copyright or having to figure out where I was going to get an image because it could generate the image for me, and I saw that across other presentations as well, because that was always something you run into, is the use of images that were under copyright.

Prag: Exactly. Oh, a hundred percent, I agree. I also remember, I want to remove a certain content from the image, and I asked AI to remove it. It did a decent job, but the job it does is all I needed, and that was an a-ha moment for me. Rather than just generating one, it also fixes the image in a much faster and a much efficient way.

Mike: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Prag: The other thing, I know you ask about the presentation and you mentioned about presenting it to your friends and families, but you wouldn't believe that I presented to ChatGPT, actually.

Mike: Tell me more.

Prag: Yeah, so it's the voice conversation and I gave inputs that, "Hey, these are all the topics. These are all the content that I'm going to present on, and I want to do a trial run with you." And it was listening for the entire 20 minutes, and then the feedback it gave me was phenomenal. It was like, "Here you went faster. You have to slow down. Here, your content is repeating, try to address. Here you are using lot of ums. Here you are using a big pause. Here you are running because you notice that you're running out of time." This is amazing. So the active feedback layer that I received from the conversation I had with AI tuned me, trained me in a much faster way compared to doing it with a human.

Mike: Yeah, I mean, that's really amazing because if you think about it, part of presenting in front of others is just to get used to being in front of people and talking, but rarely do you have the opportunity to present in front of a talented speaker coach, and you did that because ChatGPT has access to, I don't even know how much information, and it can be that talented speaker coach that normally speakers pay thousands of dollars to interact with, and you got to do that. It's really an interesting use case, I really like that.

Prag: Oh, yeah. And the feedback it gives, it was unbelievable. So I did at least a couple of times. The first time, it was more soft acknowledgement, I got it. And then the second time before I even say, I said, "Hey, be rude. Try to be a coach. Don't give me polite responses. Be straight and help me understand because you are preparing me and not judging me." And then you won't believe the acknowledgement and the response I received was more straight, there is no polished way of saying, it says like, "Prag, this is where you made this mistake. This is how you need to fix it." It was more, I think I would say commandable in a good way, which I really liked it.

Mike: That's interesting that you had to tell it to be a little more straight with you as opposed to probably understanding and empathetic.

Prag: Exactly. It's not a human. So for me, why would I expect it from a mission, right? It's like, okay, I'm here. I want to use you for this particular reason, this is the use case for me to use you as an application. I don't expect you to be nicer to me. I want you to be the reason for why I'm using you for.

Mike: Right? Yeah. I know, maybe this is a positive thing, but often I run across a lot of prompts and different settings for different AI because they're built to be so helpful, and you often have to kind of like, "No, dial it back. You can disagree with me." And I run into that where anything that you use, the AI is almost like, "Oh, well, that's a really great idea, Mike, and let's do that, and would you like me to do this?" And you're like, "But it's not always a great idea. You can tell me it's not a good idea." You can go to an AI and be like, "Hey, I've got some cinnamon. Would this taste good dusted on ravioli?" And I mean, I guess to our benefit, we've built AI systems that are like, "Absolutely, Mike, you are the Bobby Flay of the next world, but [inaudible 00:29:52]." You're like, "No, you can say it's going to be bad." But we almost have to tell it that. I guess it's somewhat commendable that we've done something that we have to say, "No, you can tell me I can be wrong."

Prag: Exactly. And I am one of an example that I tried it and the responses are different. So if I am having any serious thought process that I have, and if I want to get an AI, not opinion, but how it would answer it or how it would handle the situation, before I ask them, I will say like, "Hey, make sure that you don't need to be kind or soft as part of your response and being very straight. I want more factual information." And the response you get is definitely different.

Mike: Yeah. Wow. I love your tip on using AI and presenting to it and having you give you feedback, because I think that's incredibly useful. Well, this has been a fun conversation, Prag. I appreciate it.

Prag: Thank you, Mike. It's always fun connecting with you, and I'm happy that we are talking about the future of how we are going to use tools that's going to help us becoming more and more efficient in what we are doing. That's my excitement.

Mike: I know I often think back to what'll happen in 10 years if somebody's listening to this podcast and be like, "Oh, you remember that time that Prag and Mike were talking about presenting to AI, and they thought that was such the future, and now it's bloody [inaudible 00:31:51]." I think of that because I go back and listen to old episodes. I mean, there's over 12 years of the podcast episodes available.

Prag: Wow, wow.

Mike: And I go back and I remember talking about things like dynamic lightning components, like a page rendering dynamically, and now we're just like, "Well, yeah, obviously you would do that. Obviously you would do that." But back then it was like, "Oh my goodness, you can do that now, and you can make this setting." And then I remember putting together a demo and like, "Watch, we'll change this stage, and then this field will appear." And then everybody's quiet, and then the page refreshes and the record's there, and then the field shows up and you're like... I wonder if we're not going to sound like that in 10 years when we're talking about AI.

Prag: But I wish we be like that in 10 years, right? That's where the technology advancement is going to take us.

Mike: Yeah, hopefully we still have to keep telling it it can disagree with us because I kind of like that part.

Prag: I agree. I agree.

Mike: Well, thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Prag: Oh, thank you so much for having me, Mike. It's always a pleasure.

Mike: Big thanks to Prag for joining us and sharing so many insights from crafting compelling content, to using AI as a trusted prep partner. If you're thinking about submitting a talk or just want to sharpen your storytelling, this episode was packed with some wisdom. Now, do me a favor, share it with a fellow trailblazer who perhaps needs that nudge. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Daniel Peter, Chief Technology Officer at Petaluma Creamery.

Join us as we chat about how he manages cheese wheels with custom objects and how Salesforce and AI can level the playing field for SMBs.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Daniel Peter.

Modernizing business processes at a historic creamery Daniel gave out some of the best swag at Dreamforce—free cheese samples. As a Salesforce MVP Hall of Fame member, he's held a wide range of roles on the platform, but none have been quite as delicious as his current gig as the Chief Technology Officer at Petaluma Creamery. You could say he's the big cheese for digital transformation.

The creamery is a 115-year-old business capable of producing over 140,000 pounds of cheese per day. It's an old-school business, and that means he inherited several old-school business processes. With so many manual processes, Daniel had to move fast and focus on the biggest wins first.

Digital transformation priorities for SMBs So how did Daniel take his business processes from aged Gouda to fresh mozzarella? He started with the basics: getting the cheddar through the door. In other words, simplifying the ordering process.

Like a lot of SMBs, the creamery's system dated back to a time when you could just throw more people at a logistics problem. A sales or delivery person would talk through the order with the customer, fill out a paper form, and then do some unit conversions before they could enter the data into a database. It was time-intensive, labor-intensive, and introduced all kinds of opportunities for mistakes.

Daniel quickly built an order system in Salesforce that saves time, does all of the conversions on the backend, and makes it easier for his users to find the product they're looking for. The creamery is also able to track all sorts of data about the cheese-making process, like where ingredients come from and how they were stored, which is crucial for getting a certified-organic label.

Why Agentforce levels the playing field for SMBs A common misconception is that AI tools are reserved for huge corporations with the technical resources to implement them. However, as Daniel explains, affordable tools like Agentforce actually level the playing field for SMBs.

Looking forward, he's aiming to implement several agents that will streamline the creamery's business processes:

1. An internal agent to take orders, so a delivery driver can talk to a customer and dictate the order over the phone.
2. A customer service agent that can use the context of a customer's order history to decide what remediation needs to be done and how to do it.
3. A cheese expert agent, using the decades of unstructured data from the creamery's cheese lab to answer questions like optimal storage temperature, or what type of rennet was used to make a particular product.

If all of this sounds exciting to you, be sure to check in with Daniel at TDX to see what he's built. And, you know, try some delicious dairy.

Make sure to listen to the full episode for more from Daniel, and don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

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Full show transcript Mike: Hold onto your curds folks. Today's episode is un-brie-lievable. We're chatting with Daniel Peter, CTO at Petaluma Creamery, where they're proving that even in a world full of mozzarella sticks and spreadsheets, Salesforce can be the big cheese. Now today, Daniel's going to dish on how he's gone from QuickBooks and paper trails to a cheddar-rific automation and including some AI agents. So if you've ever wondered what it's like to manage wheels of cheese with custom objects, or if curd record type is a thing, then this is your jam. I mean, cheese, let's melt into it. Let's get Daniel on the podcast. So Daniel, welcome to the podcast.

Daniel Peter: Hey, thanks for having me.

Mike: I know it's been a while since we've had you on, it was Talking Community and Twitter back when it was called Twitter.

Daniel Peter: Yeah, I did look up that podcast, it was 2017.

Mike: Oh man, that was a thousand years ago.

Daniel Peter: Yup.

Mike: For those people that aren't familiar with who Daniel Peters is, can you give us a quick update and kind of let everyone know what you do and how you got started in the ecosystem?

Daniel Peter: Yeah. I got started way back in 2009 as a developer, and I've done a lot of things. I've worked for Salesforce customers, ISV Partners, did a stint at Robots and Pencils where I ran a SI Salesforce practice, done a lot of consulting work on the development side for ISV, and actually even for Salesforce. But my most recent venture here, I'm back in the customer seat. So I'm the chief technology officer here at the Petaluma Creamery, and we're having a lot of fun relaunching this place on Salesforce. So that's what I'm up to now. And I'm also a Salesforce MVP Hall of Famer.

Mike: Aha. There, snuck it in just by the way, buried the lead.

Daniel Peter: Yeah, I got that in.

Mike: I think we met when you were at the nonprofit.

Daniel Peter: I don't remember which nonprofit that was.

Mike: I thought it was the Pencils one anyway.

Daniel Peter: Oh, Robots and Pencils, yeah.

Mike: Yeah, Robots and Pencils. Sorry. I knew there was pencils and paper. Pens and papers and [inaudible 00:02:42].

Daniel Peter: Yeah. So Robots and Pencils is a Salesforce nonprofit partner, but only on the higher ed side, not on the NGO side. And I know that whole organization has changed with Education Cloud and all of that. So yeah, that threw me off for a second. But yeah, technically we were, yeah, we were a nonprofit partner on the education side.

Mike: Okay. So I know my friends are always like, every time I see customers, I'm like, oh yeah, I think that's a Salesforce customer. So now you work at a creamery, and I ran into you at Dreamforce. You were handing out cheese, which as a Midwesterner, that's exactly how you get straight to my heart is like you either hand somebody from the Midwest, a piece of meat or a piece of cheese.

Daniel Peter: Yeah, I think I'm the only one with cheese swag [inaudible 00:03:35].

Mike: Yeah, I think you are. Tell me a little bit about what being the CTO at a creamery is like, and what are some of the challenges? I mean, what do you manage the curds in Salesforce? What do you do? Is there a curd record type?

Daniel Peter: You know what there basically is, I mean, it sounds funny, but all that stuff is really important to track for all these different compliance reasons. If you want to be organic certified, you have to show the milk coming in, that batch that you made out of it, butter, cheese, yogurt. You have to show the ingredients that went in. And all of that really, I was at Canandy and we built a manufacturing ERP for Del Monte, and so I knew Salesforce was up to the task of tracing all the ingredients and manufacturing of food. So yeah, we do store all of that in Salesforce.

Mike: So how were they doing it before you started?

Daniel Peter: It was pretty fragmented. The main system we had for our kind of the closest thing to ERP was QuickBooks Desktop. And they used QuickBooks Desktop for 20 years, and it was the big manufacturing edition. He actually was doing a lot of business here. There was years when he did close to 50 million a year and all that ran through QuickBooks, and it did have some inventory capabilities, but it's pretty terrible to use. And then there was just a lot of paper-based, like the order forms were on paper. They would take inventory on paper and then put it into an Excel spreadsheet.

Mike: Did you have to do your compliance stuff on paper too?

Daniel Peter: Yeah, there's rooms here full of paper files. I mean, so it's kind of an old school industry, and I think a lot of the people in it, they know cows, they know how to make cheese, but technology isn't something that comes naturally to them. They're much more comfortable writing things on paper.

Mike: Well, even the technology of cheese has changed too. I mean, I know where I live in Iowa, we have a creamery that's about 20 miles south of us, and it's run by Amish, and that's always a big trip because you got to head down there to get some Amish cheese and bread. Oh, the bread is amazing. Let me know when you work for a bakery, by the way. But the technology of cheese, because they have the open windows, that's changed. But ironically, I think sometimes the technology that manages the processes, or in your case maybe just the data, just gets left to pencil and paper because it's what we know.

Daniel Peter: Yeah. And an interesting story here is that the pencil and paper at one point was an economical way to do things. I mean, that actually created a lot of jobs for people here. This creamery has been here for over 115 years, and back then you would just throw more people at the problem. But that's kind of the changing paradigm that we're in is the city of Petaluma has grown up around this creamery. This is a Bay Area kind of city, and property prices are through the roof, labor costs are through the roof, utilities are through the roof. You can't really exist anymore in a world where you're just throwing people at the problem. It's way too expensive and your margins will disappear quickly.

Mike: Well, I mean there's really, to be realistic, there's only so much you could sell that block of cheese for. And you can't pay 15 people to live in a high dense area with all of that cost just to move paper around. If a one pound block of cheese is going to end up costing $400 just to make everybody's living wage, right?

Daniel Peter: Exactly. And that's why most of the creameries have moved out of California, out of state into the lower cost of living. Yeah, that block of cheese is for commodity cheese it's kind of a race to the bottom who can make it for the lowest cost. But we're actually a little bit more of a differentiated product. So our cheese isn't competing for lowest price. We're actually competing more on quality and kind of a best cost. It's a pretty good price, but also really good quality.

Mike: Yeah. So what was some of the first things you tackled to move off of pen and paper and give a little more structured process around what you're doing and integrate Salesforce?

Daniel Peter: Yeah. Well, the very first thing was to stabilize just the IT here, which was get off of T-One lines if anyone knows what those are and get on fiber optic, get rid of on-premise servers. There was an exchange server, an Outlook server, a QuickBooks server. Somebody could walk by and accidentally turn it off or it might just die, and then all your systems are down. So getting good internet and getting on the cloud, that was the very first thing. But the first interesting thing we did in Salesforce was actually I wanted to make it, we need to stay alive here. We need to make money. So I wanted to make it super easy to take orders, get the cash in the door, the order to cash process.

Mike: Sure.

Daniel Peter: So QuickBooks was so painful. To put an order in QuickBooks, you had to actually do math either in your head or on a calculator. You had to convert, like if somebody ordered a case of cheese, you had to know, oh, those are eight ounce pieces and there's 14 in a case, so that's seven pounds. Okay, so they say one case. So we have to convert that to seven pounds in your head to put it into QuickBooks. And then you also had to do things like memorize the whole cheese hierarchy. So like C:J for Jack, M for Monterey, 8 for eight ounce. That's how you punch it into QuickBooks. And yeah, you basically had to have a computer in your head just to enter an order into the computer, and it was super painful. So we couldn't get orders into the system quickly, and we can't just... We'd have to highly train people and it's highly error-prone to put orders in and people would call on the phone or you'd get a written order, and then you'd have to convert that in QuickBooks. So I said, what we need to do is just bury QuickBooks on the backend. Let's build a really nice, basically an order entry screen in Salesforce. So we built it exactly like we want it for our business in Salesforce. So if customers want to order by the pound, by the piece, by the case, Salesforce does all the conversions, ultimately converts it back into pounds in QuickBooks, what's integrated with QuickBooks. But it lets you enter it in a very human friendly way, very nice auto complete. I mean, you can basically just start to type one letter of Y for yellow cheddar, and yellow cheddar just pops up. The orders almost right themselves now, and it's very easy to train new people how to put orders in the system. So that was a huge-

Mike: Oh, that's good.

Daniel Peter: Yeah. That was a huge win.

Mike: Did you also stand up an external facing way to take orders too, to speed that up, or is that on the roadmap?

Daniel Peter: That's still on the roadmap. We do have, so 99% of our business comes from wholesale to stores.

Mike: Oh, okay.

Daniel Peter: We do have a small segment of direct-to-consumer, so you can go to springhillcheese.com and order online. Right now that's just a Squarespace e-commerce website, and that works well, but we want to do some fancier things. So we might look into some Salesforce offerings. There's obviously things like Commerce Cloud, but there's also some ISVs have built some apps on Salesforce to sell. So we'll look into some of those. Right now during this relaunch and focusing on staying alive here in the short term, really wholesale is what we're focusing on. But there's a big opportunity in direct-to-consumer. We ship cheese in a kind of an insulated cooler. Believe it or not, it actually ships really well throughout the US, and a lot of people do order. That's on the roadmap, actually. But the tricky thing is the stores might not necessarily... The stores, a lot of them are still old school and the buyers still kind of want to call you. So even if we did give them a way to enter their own orders, not everybody would adopt it.

Mike: Yeah, they'd still call you.

Daniel Peter: Yeah, there's still a human element there that we need to preserve. But obviously you can start to dream about how AI can listen in on your conversation and create the order for you as you're talking, things like that.

Mike: Quiet, AI is listening right now, Daniel, it's taking my cheese order. And I mean, that completely makes sense. You want, for a business, you want to send truckloads of cheese, not shoe boxes of cheese. Because even a consumer, somebody like me thinks they're ordering a lot of cheese. Well, compared to a grocery store or a supermarket chain that's ordering for five stores to stock 10 coolers, focusing on wholesale totally makes sense. So keeping that human element there, you can always go to the consumer, but then you're shipping probably smaller chunks of items. So you really need the volume first.

Daniel Peter: Yeah. If people want to order just like a piece of cheese, they end up paying more for the shipping than the cheese costs. But we do free shipping over $100. That seems to be a good sweet spot. If people want to order, then it's like say it costs $100 worth of cheese and we pay the $30 shipping, that kind of thing. So there is a market for the direct-to-consumer when you want to purchase a little bit bigger order, it kind of makes more sense. But yeah, this place can make 140,000 pounds of cheese a day, and that's one of its-

Mike: Wow.

Daniel Peter: ... images we need to leverage. So yeah, definitely moving by the palette or by the semi-truck load is how we can make money here.

Mike: Okay. So you said something, and we talked at Dreamforce that I think a lot of small or medium-sized businesses are faced with, which is they all, "I'm too small for AI." Like AI is really for the big players like the Fortune 500 or the Fortune 100 companies need AI. But you're just a creamery, not just, I mean, you're a small creamery out in California, and before I pressed record, I mean you were at Dreamforce, you saw all the Agentforce stuff, you saw where AI is going. What are your plans for AI?

Daniel Peter: Yeah, I think the story we hear a lot is about AI replacing jobs. There's a lot of fear I guess, in the job market, both on the developer side, admin, but also basically any kind of a white collar worker that might be doing any type of work is my job going to be replaced by AI? But I think there's all these small businesses that really have a chance to have a renaissance because of AI. So instead of losing jobs, it's more like AI can enable them to save themselves, to save an industry or to save a small-medium business. We've seen, unfortunately, a lot of... Fortunately, or unfortunately, I guess there's been a lot of disruption over decades. A lot of mom and pop stores can't afford to be around because of places like Amazon. It's kind of changed the world, but Amazon's a great service too. I mean, you can get anything you want in a couple of days, so you could say it's fortunate or unfortunate. But I think people like to have some of these old school industries around. It kind of makes life more interesting to be able to go visit a historic place instead of everything just coming from a centralized factory. Yeah, I think the story for these smaller industries is, hey, you can actually compete. AI levels the playing field a bit now. You can actually afford AI, and it's pretty easy to use with tools like Salesforce. So you can actually make your business reinvent your business model, to be efficient enough to be profitable, this new paradigm. So that's the story we have here, and that's why it's exciting to me here. And so I think, yeah, small business, you need a little bit of tech talent. You might have to find, like my cousin that owns this creamery came and found me to help them out with that. You might have to find somebody to help you, but it's really easier now than it's ever been. And I think people are pretty comfortable now doing things like writing customer service emails with ChatGPT that we've achieved a certain threshold where the fear is kind of going away and the trust is starting to come into play. And so it's just a matter of, okay, well, how can I implement this now at scale for my business, to where I'm focusing on the things I'm really good at? Like my vision for the business and interacting with the customers that come in the door while AI is doing all the grunt work in the background for you, and at a pretty low cost.

Mike: So you envision at your creamery using AI as kind of a scalable factor? Like you can scale one person, as opposed to how our conversation began, which is you would just throw people at it. AI kind of gives you that ability to throw people at it, except you're just throwing an agent at it, right?

Daniel Peter: Yeah. It's sort of what the cloud did for computing when we needed elasticity. When you got a Black Friday and you got a million requests all at once and your server went down, and the cloud, kind of solve that. I think AI solves the people elasticity problem. Certain times you have a lot of orders coming in, and do you really want to have 10 people on staff all the time when they're mostly sitting around? But then once in a while, all 10 phones are ringing. AI can solve that pretty easily.

Mike: So you saw a lot at Dreamforce. I mean, we've rolled out so many things, it's hard to remember everything, but I mean, even my team is sitting back trying to build examples for agents and prompting. As a small business. And I think it's fair to say that where are you looking at deploying, or hey, this could be a good use case for Agentforce, or really thinking about how we can scale there.

Daniel Peter: Yeah, we've got a few great ones. I think they're all similar level of importance. So this will be in no particular order, but one of them is an agent to take orders. It's very smart. So it would be something we'd use internally. Maybe even a delivery driver in the field might dictate it from their phone, or we could use it right in the office, but instead of having to type things into the order entry screen, we can just talk to it, talk to the agent. Ideally even with our voice and just say, "Hey, for Safeway, number 572 in San Francisco, they called in, they want to duplicate their order, but they want to add in an extra case of this." And it has all that context already of what they ordered before. So you don't have to go look it up and try to clone it and add to it, and it can just crank out that order. And it can say, is this what you meant? And you can say, yeah, so there's that one we want to build. There's also one that's more customer focused, and that would be, we get a lot of calls, emails for random customer service requests that are... They're along the lines of refunds, credits, changes, questions, things like this. And again, we have all that context. We had QuickBooks for 20 years, so we have 20 years of their order history imported into Salesforce.

Mike: Wow. Wow. That's huge.

Daniel Peter: Yeah. So we don't have a data problem. Actually we have plenty of good data here, but these things eat up a lot of time. So people call in and they'll send a very vague request. They'll say something like, we need three replacement pieces of yellow cheddar. And so we make so many different types of yellow cheddar. And then once you figure out what they need, how do you handle that? Do you add them to their next order? Do you create a credit memo? These kinds of things. So you can imagine an agent knows everything about the customer's history. It fills in the blanks on these vague requests, and it does the action. Whether it's adding something onto the order, issuing a credit, that kind of thing. And if it needs to, let's say emails the channel that could clarify through an email. Maybe if it's a vague request and we have context, but the responses are still ambiguous, there may be one thing we need to clarify. It can do that agentic loop and iterate until the customer's happy with the outcome. So that's another one. And then the final one that I was thinking would be really fun to deploy, it's kind of a... I haven't thought of a name for it yet, but basically be kind of a cheese agent that really knows everything about all of our products. So we've got all the order history, but what we also have is a super rich library of unstructured data here. So there was a world-class lab here on site for 20 years. It's one of the three blocks that this place is on, and it had all kinds of testing equipment. And they cranked out so many analysis, studies of all the products. So anything, any random long tail questions somebody might want to ask about dairy products, cheese, butter, powdered products, any of that, we have the answer to sitting in these unstructured documents. Anything from PowerPoint presentations to Excel to PDFs, and I can just imagine putting that into data cloud and being able to produce a really good answer. So I think probably a way better answer than a customer service rep is ever going to be able to come up with, because how are they going to be able to do all that research?

Mike: Yeah. It'd be just based on their knowledge. And then it's a lottery based on whoever's working that day.

Daniel Peter: Yeah. So if people want to know salt content and this or that, or do you use this type of rennet that had this particular genetically modified organism or not? Or how many days out of the year are your cows eating grass? Or how long is this product good in our refrigerator at 38 degrees? We can answer just infinite number of these long tail questions. So I think that one would be not just an efficiency gainer, but actually would increase our customer satisfaction by giving them not only the information they want, but these generative AI responses have a very nice friendly tone to them also. So you'd get a great answer and it would also make you feel good, because it's so nice to you. And so I think that would be huge for customer satisfaction.

Mike: Yeah, I mean, I was even thinking the consumer route, once you go that way is a lot of people, when you go to the butcher, it's the same way too. You have a general idea of what you could do with this, but especially with cheeses, the right or wrong cheese can make or break a dish. And even combinations of cheese. I like watching the Food Network, and they'll make a macaroni and cheese, and it won't just be one cheese, it'll be five. And it's funny because my mom will be like, "How do they know those five tastes good together?" I'm like, "Well, mom, they're trained chefs." They're not like you and me where it's trial and error. Let's add this in, and it totally makes it a mess. But you could even be that same way too. Oh, if you're ordering these three cheeses, you could order these other two. And they pair really well, all five of them together. And then they're ordering more cheese.

Daniel Peter: Yeah, totally. And yeah, I've experienced that. So we have this four-way shred blend we do for the Kings, Sacramento Kings Stadium.

Mike: Oh, wow.

Daniel Peter: And I don't know what it is about that mix, but those four cheeses together, they synergize. And I go out and sample it when they're making it, and it's way better than... You could have one, two, or three of the cheeses. But when you put all four together, it's like something magic happens with the combination-

Mike: [inaudible 00:26:26], yeah.

Daniel Peter: ... cheese and some spicy cheese, and maybe there's some mozzarella in there or something. But the way they... Yeah. So there's definitely something to getting that magic mix right. And I think that, yeah, that's something really fun, that'd be a fun AI problem to solve.

Mike: That would also, you think about that. It would help educate your consumer, but it also helps sell more cheese. The good salesperson doesn't just sell what the customer wants. It also sells what the customer doesn't know they want.

Daniel Peter: Yeah.

Mike: Right? Like I know I'm going to come to you and just buy some cheddar or some Parmesan, but I'm buying these two. Did you know if you mix this with it, or here's five other recipes you could use it for. So it's always kind of... And again, these are all things a small little creamery is here's how we can add scalable people on with agents that more than offset the cost of it. And you're not a thousand person company or a 10,000 person company that's doing it, right? But you can act like you have a thousand people.

Daniel Peter: Yeah. So a lot of the stuff you're mentioning is things that really good salespeople are good at, and really good salespeople are hard to find. And we have some here, but yeah, they don't scale. So yeah, that upsell opportunity, I mean people... That actually it's a win-win. We make more money and they actually walk away feeling like they had a way better experience. They got to try this new thing they wouldn't have tried otherwise, something like that. So yeah, that's pretty exciting when you can have AI fill in for that lack of top sales talent like that.

Mike: So I guess we'll end on a fun note. What is something that you saw at Dreamforce that you can't wait to get your hands on?

Daniel Peter: Oh boy. Well, I know this is the admin podcast, but-

Mike: That's okay. You can talk about any of our products.

Daniel Peter: I'm pretty excited about the vibe coding. Basically, I've been a big fan of generative AI just as an easy button for everything and seeing how good it can write your code for you now. I was a little skeptical at first just because I've been a developer for so long, but when I saw it in action, I realized that's going to be the next game changer for developers. So I actually, I haven't been using it much, and I want to start using it now, and it'll actually help to build some of these agents that I'm talking about more quickly. So that's huge. I mean, I'm wondering, we've seen generative AI disrupt so many different tools that we use. It's what people use now for, we saw the students using it to write their term papers for them, and it's just gone the gamut of things. But now actually it's smart enough to be able to write code in quality, and it's a really high-level skill that's going to be a huge time saver for developers.

Mike: Yeah, I think, not to belabor the point, and I certainly have never written code, there's always, oh, it's going to take our jobs. Well, technology's evolved since forever, but it's always taken the mundane parts of our job. And that's how I see a lot of... Like I sat in the developer keynote and watched it. To me coding, I think they demoed building a menu, I don't know, Daniel, you tell me. If you had to sit down and code something, I have to believe that coding the menu, the mundane part wasn't the part you were most excited to work on.

Daniel Peter: No.

Mike: But if AI can do it and then it can be like, okay, so here's the 10% I can't do, that's probably the 10% you really wanted to work on anyway.

Daniel Peter: It's so true. And that's actually been what Salesforce has been good at since the very beginning. You go back to when you would create a custom field, you wouldn't have to go put it in the database and put it in each TML page. It just showed up everywhere automatically. And that's all you wanted was a custom field. You didn't want to have to write all the tedious code to wire it from the bottom to the top of the stack. So yeah, it's just the next logical evolution of Salesforce making it to where you just get to do what you want to do and it handles the mundane things.

Mike: Yeah.

Daniel Peter: Yeah. Salesforce was an early adopter to that lower code way of doing things. And it's exciting that now it's come all the way to actually pro code can be written with your voice.

Mike: I mean, there's always a need for both. I think you're kind of a car guy. I saw a stat that like 94% of the automobiles produced are automatic transmissions now. Well, that's still 6% that aren't, and is that good or bad? Well, I mean, some people that really like three pedals, oh, that's horrible, why are they making all these automatic cars? They're taking the fun away and this. Yeah, I mean, to be fair, you drive a 50-year-old manual clutch car, it's a lot different than when you get in your car. And I mean, some of them don't even have a gear shift now, some of them, you just press a button to start and press a button to put it in gear. But then also the experience of driving. You can focus on the things that really help you prevent getting in a car crash, as opposed to just making the car go the road. And as a car guy, it's two very different things. One's not better than the other, it's just less weight on your mind.

Daniel Peter: Yeah. Yeah, that's a cool analogy. I like that.

Mike: So I mean, they'll probably always still make manual transmission cars. If not, I'll just keep mine going. And that doesn't make them any less, it just means that there's less tediousness for you to do to make the car go down the road so you can focus on some of the other things. Perspective, right?

Daniel Peter: Yeah, no, I like that perspective on it. It makes a lot of sense. So yeah, don't fear the loss of having to figure out how to use your clutch and your gear shift, just embrace it.

Mike: I mean, I still think everybody should learn how to drive a manual transmission car. It does make you a better driver. I guess the opposite of that is I imagine learning how to code would make you a better admin too. So the reverse of everything has to hold true.

Daniel Peter: Yeah. I know it gets into a pretty deep discussion about maybe how long until code totally goes away, at least from our perspectives, creating business software on Salesforce. I think I could see that even happening. And then it's like, well, you don't even have to drive the automatic, it's more like the Waymo or something.

Mike: Even then somebody has to write the software that makes it so that you don't have to write code.

Daniel Peter: Yeah, there'll always be at some level. Yeah, I think there'll always have to be. It just keeps moving further away from the people that are familiar with the business and more down to that platform level.

Mike: Yeah. I guess I look at it much in the same of an engineering. The people that engineer and make automatic transmissions, I mean, they make automatic transmissions that can hold thousands of horsepower. And these engineers are incredibly intelligent. That doesn't mean that the mechanic is any less of an engineer. It just means that the engineering skill moved in a different part of the business. Much like the coding skill or the non-coding skill.

Daniel Peter: Yeah. And I think that's good. I mean, I think people are scared of it, but I think businesses should be in business to focus more on how they can basically make their customers happier. Not so much in having to do all the tedious behind the scenes things to make it happen.

Mike: Right. Well, Daniel, we've covered a lot today. Cheese, manual transmissions, business process, AI. I think if I had a wheel, we would've spun it and hit every corner of the wheel.

Daniel Peter: Yeah. Well, I'm excited to keep building out these agents we're talking about. And I'll keep everybody in the ecosystem updated through different means. I've been doing some different articles and things like that, posting on LinkedIn, and so excited to get more and more of these cheese agents rolled out, and get us scaled up without having to eat up all of our margins and then some.

Mike: Oh, look at you. Eat up all of your margins. I see where you're going with that. Good job. Well, Daniel, I look forward to, we got TDX coming up in April of next year. Hopefully we can see one of your cheese agents at TDX.

Daniel Peter: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I kind of wish that I had more to show off a Dreamforce this year, but I've been wearing a lot of hats here as CTO of a creamery, so we need to get this stuff rolled out like yesterday.

Mike: Yeah. Well, I mean, the cheese has got to make the money before you can buy more software. So I think you got your priorities straight.

Daniel Peter: Yeah.

Mike: Yeah. And you make good cheese too.

Daniel Peter: Oh, thank you. Yeah, I love it. It's a little dangerous working here.

Mike: I could only imagine.

Daniel Peter: All the cheese you can eat.

Mike: Can only imagine. Well, Daniel, thanks so much for coming on the podcast, and I look forward to seeing your cheese agents in the future.

Daniel Peter: Thanks for having me, Mike. This was a lot of fun.

Mike: Well, that was cheddar than expected. So big thanks to Daniel Peter for cracking open the cheese vault and sharing how Salesforce is helping Petaluma Creamery brie-come more efficient, more scalable, and still delicious. Yes. Remember, digital transformation, including Agentforce, isn't just for the big cheeses, even small creameries can scale with AI and Salesforce. No provolone required. So spread the word, and until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Laura Pelkey, Director of Customer Security Communications & Engagement, and Kylie McKlveen, Director of Product Marketing at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about a simple framework for thinking about security in Salesforce and what you can do to protect your org.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Laura Pelkey and Kylie McKlveen.

The evolving security landscape in the age of AI With Agentforce and the rise of AI, protecting your data is more important than ever before. Remember, the bad guys have access to these tools too, and that means phishing and deep fake attacks are becoming more sophisticated by the day.

That's why I wanted to bring Laura and Kylie on the pod to talk about security. They're here to help explain how Salesforce is already hard at work to help you protect your data, and what simple steps you can take to beef up security for your org.

A simple Salesforce security framework Laura and Kylie have a simple framework for the security available to you on Salesforce. There are three layers to think about:

1. Invisibles: The things that Salesforce already does to watch your back. This includes a global, 24/7 threat hunting team that is constantly scanning the network for anomalous events.
2. Configurables: These are actions you as a Salesforce Admin can take to make your org more secure. Taking the time to configure your security settings and think through your permission sets can go a long way towards protecting your org.
3. Enhanceables: If you work in a heavily regulated industry or have sensitive data, you may need to take extra steps to enhance your security. Tools like Salesforce Shield and Security Center can give you an extra layer of protection.

Most admins will want to focus on the configurables, and the security team has put together a handy video series to walk you through your next steps.

The importance of data continuity One important piece of the security puzzle is continuity. Protecting against attacks is important, but you also need to account for human error—sometimes users make mistakes. If someone's delete key gets stuck, tools like Backup & Restore and Field Audit Trail can help you save the day.

If you want to learn more, be sure to check out the Dreamforce Security Keynote on Salesforce+. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more * Security Keynote: Protecting the Agentic Enterprise * The 360 Blog: Laura on security * YouTube series: Trusted Enterprise Security: Built on Salesforce * Meet the Long-Lost Fourth Member of Snap, Crackle and Pop

Admin Trailblazers Group * Admin Trailblazers Community Group

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Full show transcript

Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we're diving into some security framework that you've either seen online or at Dreamforce, specifically wrapping your head around invisibles, configurables, and enhanceables. So this week I am joined by longtime podcaster and security champion Laura Pelkey and new voice and new to the Salesforce Trusted Services Team, Kylie McKlveen. They are both here to help us unpack how we can think about the security layers baked into the platform, the settings they control, and the tools available for us to go even further. Plus we also jump into a little bit about what AI means for keeping your org secure. This is a fun podcast, and we also bring in a little bit of pop culture. I won't ruin it, but Sylvester Stallone does make an appearance in this episode. So with that, let's get Laura and Kylie on the podcast. So Kylie and Laura, welcome to the podcast.

Laura Pelkey: Hey, Mike.

Kylie McKlveen: Hey, thanks for having us.

Mike: I know. This is going to be fun, even though... Well Laura's a long time podcaster, so she makes security fun, but Kylie's a new voice. So Laura, let's start with you. Refresh everybody, what you've been up to at Salesforce since we've last chatted.

Laura Pelkey: Yeah, I know it's been a little while. I'm very happy to be back on the pod. Thank you for having me. So I'm actually coming up on my nine-year anniversary at Salesforce, which is crazy. Can't believe it's been that long. And lately I've been at Dreamforce speaking, writing a lot of blogs about security, and still just trying to get the word out there to our customers about how to be secure with their Salesforce data.

Mike: Yep, absolutely. And Kylie, you're a new voice to the podcast, so welcome. Tell us a little bit about how you got started at Salesforce and what you do.

Kylie McKlveen: Thanks, yeah, what do they say, long time listener, first time caller? So yeah, I work on our product marketing team for our trusted services products. I've actually just joined this team within the last year when Salesforce acquired Own or formerly Own Backups. So loving my new role and really excited to work with Laura and yourself working with customers on helping them with their security.

Mike: Now, trusted services sounds big and massive and like a lot of stuff. What are some of the products that maybe Salesforce admins are familiar with that fall under that umbrella?

Kylie McKlveen: Yeah, that's a great question. So Shield, Salesforce Shield, which consists of event monitoring, data detect, platform encryption, and field audit trail. It's also security center. And then with the acquisition of Own, we also added backup and recover, archive, data mask and seed, so that was enhanced with seeding capabilities. We also have privacy center. So those are some of the products admins would be familiar with.

Mike: Yeah, no, I think we saw a few of those in the admin keynote. So Laura, you're still on the mission and I'm with you on security-minded admins.

Laura Pelkey: Yes.

Mike: Let's talk about what being a security-minded admin is to get us in that security mode.

Laura Pelkey: Yeah. You know Mike, I was actually just thinking about this. I think we did a podcast with that name, and I think two months after I started at Salesforce, we did a podcast together, which is-

Mike: I mean, we don't mess around. Lynn was like, "We're doing a podcast right away."

Laura Pelkey: Yeah, yeah, the security-minded admins, love that topic. So a security-minded admin is just someone who understands that securing their data in Salesforce and their organization's data in Salesforce is an admin's responsibility. Admins have many responsibilities. There's really not enough time in the day to do all of the stuff that an admin needs to do. But security is one of the most important ones. And it's often one of the most overlooked ones. So yeah, really, really passionate about that topic, and I feel my role is to help admins focus on the top things that they can do. Because there's a lot of stuff that can be kind of confusing, but really if you're doing a handful of things, best practices, using the right controls, you're doing most of what you can to protect your organization.

Mike: Yeah. Now I know Laura, at Dreamforce, you gave a presentation that took that security-minded admin up a notch because, I mean, pre-AI, we were just talking about making sure people didn't put sticky notes on monitors and strong passwords. Oh, we got MFA. Remember, MFA was like... That was going to save the world. And now we have AI, which I saw your presentation in Dreamforce. What is security like now in the world of AI?

Laura Pelkey: And first of all, MFA is still very important, so definitely still do that.

Mike: Right, absolutely. It still saves the world, it just there's more to it.

Laura Pelkey: Still saves the world. There's just more more things now. Yeah, we're seeing a huge rise in adoption of AI. I mean, look at how many people listening to this call use LLMs like ChatGPT on a regular basis. I mean, I know I do. Of course, Agentforce, we all love Agentforce. There's a lot of amazing AI technology out there now. But unfortunately what we're seeing is the attackers or hackers, bad guys, whatever you want to call them, are also leveraging this technology, and they're doing so in ways that make it harder to spot when malware is happening. They might be creating a deepfake, that's kind of advanced, but it's actually... It's pretty easy to do nowadays, in order to get your user credentials and to take over your user account. It could even just be maybe a really well phrased phishing text message. I think we all probably get those too nowadays, it's super common. And before it would be kind of easy to spot them. There might be some spelling errors or just language related errors that would be easy to guess that maybe this isn't really from somebody that I know, but nowadays with AI, it's actually... The AI can craft these messages that sound much more realistic and believable. So that's had an effect on how successful bad actors are when they're trying to take over a user account or get user credentials or get sensitive information and data.

Mike: I mean, the good news is a lot of people have access to AI, and unfortunately sometimes the people you want access to shouldn't. It also burst my bubble, so it means you're telling me that Bob Ross video of him wrestling Mr. Rogers wasn't real that I just watched the other day?

Laura Pelkey: Yeah, yeah, probably not.

Mike: Because it was awesome.

Laura Pelkey: Probably not. Just logistically, I think that would be pretty difficult. But we are seeing... If anyone watched the security keynote, we shared a really interesting video, it's on Salesforce+ now, of one of our executives, we said, "Hey, can we have a professional ethical hacker demonstrate how easy it is to hack somebody at your level? Can we do this live?" And he was like, "Yeah." So there's actually a really cool video of that in the security keynote.

Mike: Ooh, I'll put a link to that in the show notes so you can watch that.

Laura Pelkey: Oh, thank you, we would love that. Kylie and I would really appreciate that.

Mike: Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, and speaking of videos, Kylie, I think you worked with Laura. You put out a whole series of videos around security, talking about invisibles, configurables, and what was the third one? It's always the third. It's like Snap, Crackle... Who's that third one? Pop.

Laura Pelkey: The third child, I forget as well.

Mike: I heard there was actually four at one time. You should Google that. The Snap, Crackle, Pop, there was four. Totally not on topic of talking security, but you know... So Kylie, let's talk about that. I mean, it's an interesting concept to think about. There's invisible things that Salesforce does, there's configurable things, and then there's things that I guess we can put frosting on, right?

Kylie McKlveen: Yeah, the pop. I think this framework is just a really easy way to understand the security that's available to you. The invisibles are the things that we do, that Salesforce does kind of invisible to you, hence the name. The configurables things customers can do to make their org more secure, but it's up to them to configure them. And then the enhanceables, so things they can go above and beyond what's provided to them to really enhance their security. So the names are a bit obvious by design.

Mike: So tell me a little bit about some of the invisible stuff that goes on behind the scenes that helps admins sleep at night.

Kylie McKlveen: Yeah, I hope admins are familiar with things like network level security, our secure infrastructure, application level security, things like that. Those are really table stakes for SaaS platforms. But there's a lot of really cool things that our cybersecurity operations center does proactively protecting our customers. And I'm actually going to throw it over to Laura to give some of those examples. I know we've had multiple conversations about some of the examples of the things they do and it's really cool.

Laura Pelkey: Yeah, so our team, our cybersecurity operations center team, they are incredible. Actually, when I started working in cybersecurity, which I've always worked in cybersecurity, my very first job, which I won't say how many years ago that was anymore-

Mike: Well two, because you're 27, right?

Laura Pelkey: Exactly, exactly, correct. But when I first started working in security, I was learning about all of the really cool things that my company at the time, we had a social engineering team, and the things that other companies would hire us to do, and they would literally go into companies and attempt to hack them by physically gaining access to a structure, their networks in their building. And this was part of something that our clients would pay for. It was so cool to me. And basically it would just reveal where the holes were in their security so that the client could then fix those. So things like that, that's called social engineering. So at Salesforce we do things like that, we're constantly hunting for vulnerabilities in the platform, in our networks, we call that threat hunting. We have a global team that is working 24 7, literally just scanning all the networks for anomalies we call them, anomalous events. Does something look weird in one of our networks? Does something look weird in one of our customer's networks? And then we have a massive team of people who, as soon as they spot something, they jump on it. And if it's a customer issue, they'll contact the customer right away and actually work with them to resolve it. I don't know, it reminded me when I was first learning about this many years ago, it just was very cool work and it's always behind the scenes and you don't know that it's going on, but it actually does so much to shore up the security of your organization. So we do stuff like that.

Mike: No, that sounds really cool. When you were mentioning that, I was thinking of... I think it's like an early 2000s B-level Sylvester Stallone movie where he's like a guy that gets paid to break out a prisons to find their vulnerability.

Laura Pelkey: Yes, it's exactly like that, yes.

Mike: That's what I was thinking of. So that's how I envision your whole team is.

Laura Pelkey: I would actually love to do that kind of work. No one has asked me to, but if anyone at Salesforce is listening, I'm open to doing that, that sounds fun.

Mike: Okay, all right, look at that. Laura, while we have you, can we... I mean the invisible stuff's really cool, but it's behind the scenes. Admins love to get their hands on stuff. Let's talk about what we can configure.

Laura Pelkey: So as Kylie was saying, the second piece or second pillar of this are the configurables. And the configurables are... The easiest way to think of it is the things that are within the customer's control. So this is security settings, controls, and features that actually need to be set up properly by the customer. And Salesforce is a very robust platform, and we do provide a level of flexibility to make sure that our customer's needs are being met, but it's also part of our shared responsibility model where when a customer has control over these things, that they really spend the time to properly configure them to best protect their data. A couple of examples. The principle of least privilege. It's not a setting, but it's a principle that in cyber security is the defining principle for when you're talking about user permissions. So admins set up users all the time. Every day, maybe. So when an admin is setting up a user, it's really important that they're paying attention to the permission sets and the level of permissions that they're granting to this user. So we still say layering permission sets and permission set groups on top of profiles is the best practice, and when you are setting up a user, make sure that the permissions you're granting them are only what's necessary for them to do their job. So that's that that least privilege part. And by limiting them to only what's necessary, it actually helps limit the exposure if in... Hopefully this doesn't happen, but in the chance that a user account is compromised. And especially when we're looking at people who have admin level permissions, and what are those, Mike? Modify all data, view all data.

Mike: Everything's scary.

Laura Pelkey: Yes. So those are incredibly powerful permissions, and admins know they can do everything in their Salesforce org. But would you give, for example, okay, say like a Salesforce admin is the owner of a house. Let's just create that metaphor. Would you give all of your keys to your mail carrier? Why would they need access to the inside of your house? Maybe they need access to the gate for the pathway that walks to your front door, so you leave that unlocked for them, but they don't need to get inside your house. It's kind of like the same thing when you're setting up users. You don't want all of your users to be able to do every single thing in your Salesforce org. And again, it's because users make mistakes so they could accidentally and unintentionally do something that could cause a security issue. That happens all the time, or in the off chance that a user is compromised, you don't want the bad actor that has compromised and taken over that user account to be able to do all the things that an admin does. So yes, very long spiel about principle of least privilege and why it's important, but basically the configurable part of this is setting up users and making sure that they only have the level of permissions that they need.

Mike: And to run with your metaphor, Laura, I think even the delivery companies now, I have a code from my garage door and you can drop a package off in my garage door. So in theory, you're only getting into my garage unless I forget to lock the door to my house from my garage. Now you have access to the whole house. And that plays into the same... They should only have access to the things they should have access to.

Laura Pelkey: Yeah, exactly.

Mike: Laura, I think this falls into maybe a product that you oversee, which is Security Center.

Laura Pelkey: I don't oversee it, I wish I did.

Mike: Or Kylie, sorry.

Laura Pelkey: It's an amazing... Yes, Kylie's team does that. And you can actually, with Security Center, see the number of people exactly who in your organization has admin-level permissions? Kylie, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think in Security Center you can actually change those permissions within Security Center itself or apply policies across all of your orgs within Security Center to limit that, is that correct?

Kylie McKlveen: That's correct. Absolutely, you can apply policies. And I think especially for admins who have multiple orgs that they're managing, being able to view their security posture across and then have a sense of consistency and control, Security Center is a great product for that.

Laura Pelkey: Yeah, we love that product.

Mike: Yeah, and we saw a lot of this in the admin keynote where Kate and Lisa did a demo of Lisa just needing additional permissions to edit a field, not the entire object. And I think what was nice is we saw Agentforce double-checking with the admin to say, "I've set this up, but is this correct?" Which is a huge step, the human in the loop for a lot of security and AI things that we work on.

Laura Pelkey: Yes, it's so important that you're working with... And now that Security Center is enhanced with Agentforce, it's like admins have kind of a partner, but still the admin's responsibility to validate everything and to oversee everything. But it's now easier to do that, which is great.

Mike: Great. Especially when it goes GA. I think admins will be excited for the new setup. Kylie, Laura set you up perfectly. She mentioned enhanceables. Let's talk about some of those security enhanceables that admins can get their hands on or help set up that take security even farther.

Kylie McKlveen: As we talked about earlier, we have Shield and Security Center. These are the products that fall within the trusted services portfolio. Is that what you were asking, Mike?

Mike: Yeah, just I would love to learn more about what we consider enhanceables.

Kylie McKlveen: Yeah, so these are the products that go above and beyond to help you enhance your security. And when we talk about enhancing our security, there's really many reasons why customers are choosing to enhance their security. A couple of years ago, when we were talking to customers, it was really those in regulated industries that had specific requirements that they needed to meet in platform encryption or things like that. But now there's a variety of reasons, so some of these customers who are in high threat industries and need an additional layer of protection. Or scale, we talk about scale a lot. So whether you're resource constraint because you're an admin of one, but you need the security power, or if your company is growing and you need something to help you scale with that. These products can really help with that. And then another thing I'll mention is if you have a lot of sensitive data in your org, I think there's a lot of important data in Salesforce that customers need to protect in different ways, but sensitive data, if you really need to add additional layers or prevent people from seeing certain data, we have products within this portfolio to help with those specific scenarios.

Mike: I think one thing that's interesting to me in the discussions I've had with Laura and Lynn over the few years that we've worked together is security isn't only just keeping the bad actors out, it's also making sure the right people have the right access at the right time. I would love to know, because in my mind, backing up data, and you came from own backup, how is backing up data really part of a security posture?

Kylie McKlveen: This is really about continuity. So being able to ensure that if you were talking about bad actors or malicious intent, but there's human error. If one of your users accidentally made a mistake and corrupted the data or deleted the data, being able to have a backup that you can quickly and easily restore that data in your environment is really important. That data is there and needs to be restored. So you need a tool to help you quickly respond to that. And that's how backup is part of that.

Mike: Yeah, no, I never really thought of that. It's one thing to have the data, make sure the right people have the right access to it, but it's also having the history of the data and making sure... I guess it would be a paper trail of what's happened to it and when it's happened.

Kylie McKlveen: We do have products. Field Audit Trail is great for understanding how your data has changed over time. But there are some cool things about backup where you can look back into the past and see how the data has changed. You can actually look up in backup to look at the signals to see if the data might've been corrupted. So it's a really cool product.

Mike: Now, the idea of invisibles, configurables and enhanceables isn't something we just thought up one day. It's actually a series of videos that I believe are out on YouTube, if I'm not correct... And this is for you, Kylie or Laura, whoever was the most involved, what are some of the things that we're going to see in those videos, because I'll definitely link to those videos in the show notes.

Laura Pelkey: I could take that one. So this is something actually our Chief Trust Officer came up with. He's so smart, his brain is just constantly working. He just explained it one day, "Invisibles, configurables, and enhanceables," and we were like, "That is brilliant." And really what these videos are talking about, and they're also available on security.salesforce.com as well as YouTube, but basically he and our SMEs who are on the video series as well go into these layers. So invisibles is the bottom layer, and you can think of it's the strong foundation. Salesforce handles this for you. We're always working to keep our networks and our products secure and our infrastructure secure, and customers don't need to do anything to take advantage of this. I mean Hyperforce is an example of how we are creating secure infrastructure for our customers. So we talk about the invisibles. And then we talk about the configurables. Rachel Beard, who is featured in this video series, she's amazing, she's one of our security architects at Salesforce, she talks about specific things that customers can do, and these are like... If you watch these videos and just do everything she says, that's going to be hugely impactful to the security of your Salesforce org. One of the things she goes over is login IP ranges, which is when a Salesforce admin restricts the login IP ranges so that only people within the company's network can actually access your Salesforce org. And that's really one of the best things. So things like that. She talks about principle of least privilege as well. And then there's the enhanceables where, as Kylie said, we have a suite of amazing security and privacy products that are really designed to help our customers grow and scale. Like Kylie mentioned, a lot of admins might be struggling to keep up with their growth at their company, and these products can help you do that. And then there's actually a really cool... The last video in this series is our Chief Trust Officer speaking with a CEO and a CISO from one of our friend companies. And you just get the... From folks at that level, from these executives who think about cybersecurity all the time. You get to hear their perspective on what's next in the cybersecurity industry. So it's a really awesome video series. I would definitely encourage people to watch it.

Mike: Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, as we wrap up, Kylie, we're fresh off of Dreamforce. What was some of the exciting things that you're getting ready to work on heading into the coming year?

Kylie McKlveen: Yeah, we had two really big announcements, multiple big announcements in the security keynote, but two that I just want to call out I'm so excited about. We talked at the beginning of this podcast about how AI is changing everything, but now we're seeing AI in our security and compliance products, which is really cool. So AI is actually helping you be more secure. So we have Agentforce in Security Center, which can detect threats, and you can conversationally investigate the threats and remediate them. It will give you suggestions on how to quickly resolve those issues. And then we have Agentforce in Privacy Center too. So automating some of that hard work around complying with these constantly evolving regulations. You can tell it what's applicable to your business and it will give you suggestions around some risks you may have, some gaps, and it can suggest policies that you may want to deploy in your org. So really just making security and compliance a lot more accessible and a lot more easier, faster. It's just really cool how AI is actually helping us with security in this scenario.

Mike: And with a lot of those centers, I mean, there's a lot of data and to have AI comprehensively look at all of that, it might find things that you just didn't know to look for.

Kylie McKlveen: Oh, definitely. I think that's the struggle. Sometimes you're looking at this data and you don't even know what you're looking for, and AI can really just take the pain out of that. It can look across multiple data points and tell you what's out of the ordinary. So saving a ton of time.

Mike: Laura, similar question. We're fresh off Dreamforce. As you help admins in the coming year become more secure, more AI proficient, what would your advice be for admins for the upcoming year?

Laura Pelkey: Well, definitely the couple things that I mentioned when we're looking at configuring, I think just broadly, look at your security configuration in your Salesforce org. That's the broad thing I want all admins doing right now. And then within that the things that I think are the most important for admins to be focusing on are that setting up login IP ranges, that's super important. Following the principle of least privilege when setting up users. And that also means doing an audit of the permissions that your users already have, that's super important, and taking away unnecessary permissions. Admins should also be talking to their Salesforce users about things like phishing, like the security threats that are out there. They should be educating their users about that and setting them up for success so that if they ever get into a situation where they might be targeted, then they know at least to stop, think, and then disengage. So those three things are super important. And then MFA, as we said, saving the world. That's already required for all user logins in Salesforce, but I would also encourage everyone to set up MFA for their personal accounts. If you watch the hacking video in the security keynote, you can actually see that if you reuse your passwords across multiple user accounts, which everyone does, that's just natural, we all have a lot of credentials to keep track of, they can possibly be leveraged... Something from your personal account can possibly be leveraged to gain access to another personal account or even a business account. So you want to make sure you're using MFA on every account. And then if you can do this, if it's available to you, add a security contact in your Salesforce org so that in the event that Salesforce needs to contact you about something, like I was talking about our amazing CISOC team at the beginning of this podcast, how they're working 24/7, they never sleep, they're just staring at a computer looking for security things. If they need to get in touch with you, they will reach out to your security contact that's listed in Salesforce. So it's important that that's up to date. So that's my advice to admins.

Mike: That's good advice. I would also add, watch the 2013 movie Escape Plan. That's what that movie's called. Where Sylvester Stallone, AKA Laura, breaks out of prison. Well, Kylie, Laura, thanks for coming on and talking security. I mean, you know as well as I have since the moment I started at Salesforce, I think it's the most important thing because we're protecting our company's data. So what else you got better to do besides make the data better and more secure, in my opinion. So thanks for coming on. I look forward to seeing some of the new stuff that we have coming out from your area, Kylie, and the advice that you continue to give, Laura.

Laura Pelkey: Yeah, we've got a lot in store, so this will not be the last you hear from Kylie and I, I promise.

Kylie McKlveen: I love it.

Mike: Well, we're going to hold you to that, though.

Laura Pelkey: No pressure, Kylie.

Mike: We'll be back.

Laura Pelkey: We'll be back.

Mike: Big thanks to Laura and Kylie for walking us through the security stack that every Salesforce admin should know. Now whether it's understanding what Salesforce has your back on, tightening up your permission sets, or leveling up with tools like Shield and Security Center, there is something here for all of us. Make sure to check out the full video series on security.Salesforce.com. Don't worry, I'll link to that in the show notes. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Bradley Condon, Technology and Systems Specialist at Waste Solution Services.

Join us as we chat about his Dreamforce presentation and the custom apps Bradley built to help him land his next role.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Bradley Condon.

From customer service rep to the Dreamforce stage This year was the first Dreamforce Bradley was able to attend, and also his first time giving a presentation—I'd say he's off to a great start.

Bradley started his career as a Service Cloud user who got curious about the platform. He clicked on the Help Section, ended up on Trailhead, "and by the end of the day, I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life," he says.

However, when he started looking for jobs, he ran into a common problem. How can you show that you have hands-on experience without landing that crucial first Salesforce role?

Using personal projects to stand out Bradley decided that the best approach was to build custom apps in Salesforce and reference them on his resume. But what to build? As he explains, "I realized that in order for me to make time for it, I needed to build something I was passionate about that I wanted to use."

One thing he was definitely focused on was passing his Admin Certification exam. So he made an app to help him study by texting him a practice question every day. He also wanted to attend more Salesforce events, which led to another app that helped match Trailblazers with each other to save on accommodations.

Bradley listed all of his personal projects on his resume and also shared them on Experience Cloud so interviewers could see his solutions in action.

How to pick a side project In the course of building (and debugging) these projects, Bradley was able to learn by experience. By the time he was finished, he was able to sit for the Platform App Builder Certification without needing to study and pass it with flying colors.

As for what to work on, Bradley encourages you to work with what you know. Can you think of an app that would help you in your day-to-day? Or, if you're interviewing in a specific industry, something that would solve a common problem they might face?

We want to hear about your side projects, so tell us about them on our socials. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us in your feed every Thursday.

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Full show transcript Mike: Welcome to Salesforce Admins Podcast. This week I'm chatting with Bradley Condon, a first-time Dreamforce presenter who has a powerful story about self-starting service cloud and personal projects that pack a punch. Now, Bradley shared this at Dreamforce about how building custom apps on the side helped him land a role and prep for certifications, and it was even something really cool he could do for a friend in a tough time. Now, Bradley's journey starts from a call center agent, all the way to creating experience cloud solutions that he could share with future employers when he was interviewing. So if you're curious about why you should do Salesforce projects on the side and do personal projects, Bradley's story is for you. So let's get Bradley on the podcast. So Bradley, welcome to the podcast.

Bradley Condon: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Mike: Yeah, well, it's exciting, you are a first-time presenter, as I learned before we pressed record, at Dreamforce, and you're going to talk about building personal projects, which I've done quite a few on the side, and I think that's really cool. I can't wait to see your presentation, but let's learn a little bit about you. Tell me how you got started in the Salesforce ecosystem and what you do.

Bradley Condon: Yeah, of course. So I got started in the ecosystem as actually a call center agent using Service Cloud, working for a furniture company, just handling warranty issues and whatnot. And I got really interested in it and wanted to learn more about it, so I clicked on the Help section and ended up on Trailhead, and by the end of the day I was like, "You know what? I know what I want to do with the rest of my life," and started to make the transition to learn all I could about Salesforce and eventually, got my certification, landed a role, and then after that role, I had some time in between that I was trying to find the next one, and that's when I started building personal projects to really fill in that gap that I had to get my next role.

Mike: Wow, okay. I think you might be the first person that started off in Service Cloud.

Bradley Condon: Yeah, really?

Mike: Yeah. A lot of admins I know, I'm not saying nobody, but admins I know always start off in sales, and you were in Service Cloud, so that was really cool. You had to have been just a dream. I'm just sitting here back thinking of what that admin must've been like when you were like, "Hey, I clicked on Help and I'm starting to do some Trailhead modules." I would've looked over and been like, "Bradley, I'm going to buy you lunch right now," because-

Bradley Condon: Yeah, we didn't have an admin.

Mike: Oh, okay. Oh, you just burst my bubble. That's all right. Well, you probably became the admin then, defunct. I started off doing because when you get excited with Salesforce stuff, you're probably like me, and I was doing a whole bunch of things. I was like, "Oh, I could probably track that in Salesforce. Oh, I could probably track that in Salesforce." I think I had three or four dev orgs that all had different things in it. Personal projects, you know you're doing Trailhead stuff, you're working. First of all, how did you just find time to do extra projects on the side?

Bradley Condon: Well, so it all started when I was looking for another role and I was having trouble really getting my foot in the door for interviews, and I think it's because I was just looking like everyone else on paper. And I thought, "Okay, I need a different strategy. I need to do something that's going to help me standout." And that's when I decided, "You know what? I'm going to just start building, and that way, I have something to showcase during your interviews."

Mike: I like that. Did, as you were interviewing, change and modify the org? I'm assuming you shared credentials with your Mike.

Bradley Condon: Well, so I actually would make it so that it was available on Experience Cloud-

Mike: Ooh.

Bradley Condon: So that way, it also showed experience in cloud skills and made it available for them to use and made the flows available. So not only could they just see what I worked on, but they could actually play with it themselves.

Mike: Wow, okay. That's next level. I like that. How did you decide what to build?

Bradley Condon: So the first thing that I built was, I was studying for Salesforce certification and I needed to figure out a way to be more consistent with my study schedule. So I started to build an app that would send me a text message every day with a practice question to help study.

Mike: Wow, okay. That's a really cool, that's a neat idea. I'm over here thinking, how am I tracking, I was into binge-watching shows. You're sending yourself text messages, we're totally on different planets right now. That's awesome. So as you were sitting, as you were working through different Trailhead modules, also try to build other stuff in some of that project org as you'd go through different Trailhead modules?

Bradley Condon: Oh yeah, there was plenty of times where I'd be in a Trailhead module and I'm thinking, "Well, why don't they add this feature that we learned in this other module?" Well, obviously because you're not always going to be doing them in a certain order, and that's the one thing with Trailhead is there's so much to learn, you just kind of hop around and go with your interest.

Mike: Yeah.

Bradley Condon: But I've definitely seen times where I was like, "Okay, I've had to have this here," like this would be so perfect.

Mike: Now I can only imagine going from being an end user in Service Cloud to building something, had to feel very different. What was some of the ways that you promoted yourself when you were interviewing to show people, "Hey, I also have this org that you can try out." You have to get past that initial screening process.

Bradley Condon: Yeah, so the thing that I would also do is I would make sure that I included my portfolio site on my resume and also in the experience section, I would include those personal projects as part of my experience because that's something that I was working on almost full time for a while, that I just really dedicated myself to creating that project.

Mike: Yeah, wow. I know when I first took the admin certification 18 years ago or 17, something like that, it was a long time ago, I had had a lot of hands-on building things in an org, trying stuff out before I actually took the certification. How did working in your developer environment or just building out sample apps give you that confidence for trying your certification?

Bradley Condon: Yeah, that's a great question because most recent certification I took was the platform app builder certification, and I sat for that exam without studying at all. It all just had to do with what I learned doing on projects. So the one I've been working on recently is I'm building an app to match trailblazers who want to attend Salesforce events with one another to cut the cost of accommodations down. And so while I was building that, I learned a lot of concepts that were tested, so that really helped, especially with data modeling and stuff like that.

Mike: Yeah, wow. I've seen quite a few of those. I think that's really cool. Let's talk about, so one of the things that I like about Trailhead is you're in, you've got the module, you have an org to try and build something out, and basically as long as you copy-and-paste everything, it should work, right? There's a few times you have to think through things, but when you're actually in a developer environment and you're building something that's your own idea, there's been multiple times that I've had flows not work or something just didn't fire off like I thought it would, how did that, kind of having your own space to try something out and fail help you understand more?

Bradley Condon: Oh yeah, definitely 'cause that's the thing when you fail and you have that error message that you're trying to figure out what it is, that's probably when most of the learning happens, is when you don't do it correctly the first time and you really have to research and get down to the nitty-gritty and act like a detective pretty much.

Mike: Yeah. There's multiple times when you sit there and you hit that error message and you're like, "Ah, I just need, please just work this time," and you're five times into it and it's like midnight and you're like, "I'm going to get this flow to work before I go to bed," the number of times I've said that. When you were working through, how did you think of stuff that you wanted to build? I think it's pretty easy to sit down and be like, "Oh, I'm going to create a custom object in these five fields," but it's another thing to think of, "I'm going to create this big app that's maybe going to take me a week or two weeks to build." How did you work that out and plan that time in your head?

Bradley Condon: Yeah, so pretty much in order for me to make time for it and to really put the effort in and not to just stop building it was that I wanted to build something that I was passionate about and that I myself would use because that's going to show in the final product. If you're passionate about it, it'll show. It'll show in the user experience. It'll show in how you thought about it to be scalable 'cause you're going to want to continue to use it. So that's definitely how I did it.

Mike: So this makes a kind of meta question. Did you build an app to manage your orgs or your apps that you were building and your interviews when you were doing this?

Bradley Condon: No, I did not because I've seen so many of those and to me, that's not something I would use personally.

Mike: Okay. Okay. Can I needle you on what was something you built that you did use, besides the text message thing?

Bradley Condon: It was mainly the text message thing, but I also used it just to, so I had someone who had their mother pass away and they were really close to the mother and so as a gift for them, what I did is I had it so that it would send them different memories that they had with their mom every week, and then they could add little things about thinking-of-you messages to her. So that's something that I created that they used.

Mike: Wow. I never would've thought enterprise software to be used as that way. That's kind of interesting. What gave you that idea?

Bradley Condon: They were just going through a tough time, so I really wanted to do something that at the time, I didn't have that much money. So I had to do something that I could kind of make, and I'm like, you know what, I'm great at making apps.

Mike: Right. Yeah, no, I mean that's super creative, that's super creative. I love that. As somebody that's gone through, built a lot of things, did you often have an idea to build something and then go and use Trailhead to learn the skill or did you try to do it in parallel or did you try to build it first and then go back to Trailhead? What was your thought process there?

Bradley Condon: Yeah. So it would usually come up that I'd want to add a feature, like if I wanted to do something where I wanted to add commerce and I wanted to figure out, "Okay, well, how would I take payments if I did actually take payments?" And I had never done anything like that in my other position, so I had to go to Trailhead in order to find out how to do that. But there's also been times where I've been in Trailhead of thinking, "Oh, well, now I kind of want to add this to my app. I hadn't thought about this before."

Mike: Yeah. Yep, absolutely. Take payments, I never would've thought of that. So as somebody that, I mean obviously people are going to listen to this and think, "Wow, I want to do the same." If people are looking for ideas to get started on, "I want to build out an org, maybe I'm going to look for another job, maybe I'm not, but I kind of want to test my skill," what is an idea or something they should think about in terms of building their first project?

Bradley Condon: So I think a good thing to do is look at the roles you're trying to apply for and if there's a specific industry, create a project that's specific to the industry. If you're into the hospitality industry, maybe you create an app that helps with hotel room bookings, or if say maybe you find out there's a job you're applying for and they have room service, but they don't have a way to order it online, create an experience cloud site that allows people to start ordering their room service online. So you can present that in the interview. It's something that they're missing and something you could deliver.

Mike: Yeah. And I've heard that in previous podcasts too, definitely start in the industry that you're in. Tell me about how the Trailblazer community helped you in building different projects or different ideas that you had.

Bradley Condon: Oh, yeah. So I'm part of the Serviceblazer community, and that group has been so helpful to me. Obviously coming from Service Cloud, I gravitated to that community, but they've been really helpful. Anytime that you post anything on there, like Ask a Serviceblazer, you'll get a response usually within the next 10, 15 minutes, and everyone there is extremely knowledgeable. The amount of knowledge that comes through that channel is crazy.

Mike: Yeah. Do you find, because you were in the service industry, that a lot of your apps start in Service Cloud?

Bradley Condon: Yeah. And even if they don't start in Service Cloud, somehow I'll manage a way to add it into it.

Mike: Yeah, I can see that.

Bradley Condon: For the text message service, I used Email-to-Case to send text messages, I'd used e-mail-to-text gateways so that you send an e-mail to, e-mail that's dedicated to your phone number to get the text message to them. So even though it was not using the texting service, I used the Email-to-Case to make it [inaudible 00:15:14].

Mike: In some aspects, the limitations on those orgs actually force you to be more creative.

Bradley Condon: Exactly.

Mike: I didn't even think about that. It's always easy, like, "Oh, please turn this on." That's what we have at Salesforce. Just go to another PM, turn this on for me really quick and you don't think of if you actually had those limitations in place, how would you get more creative. I'm curious, so as you've done this and done different projects, have you helped anybody build projects or ideas that they've had of their own?

Bradley Condon: I haven't really helped anyone build their own personal project. On the Serviceblazer community, I answer a lot of questions when it comes to people that are facing problems they're coming up with in their company that they need help with. But the funny thing is I usually end up going to a developer org and making sure that I try it out myself before I give them the answer. So I always make sure that I'm trying it and make sure that it's going to be accurate information I'm giving them.

Mike: Yeah. Nope, I'm the same way. You cannot, in theory this should work, but let me log in and double-check that something hasn't changed or something is different. Is this your first Dreamforce?

Bradley Condon: It is my first Dreamforce and it's also my first Salesforce event ever. I've never been to a community conference and never been to a Salesforce event, so I'm really excited.

Mike: Wow. So you're just jumping in the deep end right away? Holy cow.

Bradley Condon: Pretty much, yeah, pretty much. I'm a little nervous, but we'll see.

Mike: It'll be fine. By the time you listen to this podcast, you'll be like, "Phew, what was I nervous for? I was awesome up there on stage. They loved me." So off the cuff question, when you present at Dreamforce, people always have questions. What's the one question you're afraid somebody's going to ask you?

Bradley Condon: Oh, wow. Can you make it an agent?

Mike: Well, by the end of Dreamforce, you'll know how to build plenty of agents.

Bradley Condon: Yes. I'm really excited for that. My company wants to do a lot of stuff with Agentforce, so I'm really looking forward to that aspect.

Mike: Yeah, and then you'll be able to come back and be like, "Well, here, let me just have you log into this," and you can build a Bradley agent of your own.

Bradley Condon: Exactly.

Mike: That's the plan. Thanks for coming on the podcast and telling us about this. I think it's a really cool idea. I hope people do it on their own. I know it feels like you're pressed for time. And when I was a Salesforce administrator, weekends and nights were the time that I would build stuff. I didn't have Trailhead. Back in my day, it was just the little Help box. But I think getting out of just that business world of accounts and contacts and contracts and building something fun, I remember going to user groups and having friends tell me about diaper changing apps, and I think one person talked about how they managed their wedding in Salesforce. That to me is just like, it gets you in and it gets you doing things that make you feel super empowered. So I think everybody should build on their own free time.

Bradley Condon: Yes, it's a great skillset to have.

Mike: Well, I look forward to seeing your presentation at Dreamforce, and I appreciate you coming on the podcast, Bradley.

Bradley Condon: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.

Mike: Big thanks to Bradley for joining us and sharing such a thoughtful hands-on approach to growing as a Salesforce admin. If you've ever been stuck in-between jobs or just unsure of your next step, I think Bradley's story is a great reminder that building what you love can open surprising doors. And hey, I would love to know if you are building something fun on the side. Share with that on social and be sure to comment. I'd love to know what fun things you're building. So with that, until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to David Simpson, Salesforce Administrator at the 1916 Company.

Join us as we chat about how he landed his first Salesforce Admin role and what advice he has for folks who are new to the ecosystem.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with David Simpson.

A career pivot from finance to Salesforce If you didn't catch David's presentation about resolving Flow errors at Dreamforce, be sure to check out our earlier episode with him. Another thing that came up was his career pivot, and it was so interesting that I had to bring him back to talk about it.

David started out as an accountant before eventually becoming a financial systems analyst. He had to run a lot of reports and quickly discovered that the thing he was actually interested in was the Salesforce platform.

Soon enough, David became the part-time admin for his organization, but he quickly realized that if he wanted to just focus on Salesforce, he would need to find a new job.

What to look for in a job description While David bulked up his credentials, he started looking for full-time Salesforce Admin roles to apply to. One piece of advice he has is to take a closer look at the job description and be clear about what you want.

"It's not uncommon now for admins to have developer skills or maybe dip their toe into the architect side of things," he says, "but I focused mainly on positions that were only looking for admin-related work."

David also was really specific about finding an organization that was already committed to Salesforce. He looked for green flags like job postings with specifics on certifications or Superbadges. Finally, it was important to him to join a Salesforce team as opposed to try to cut his teeth as a solo admin.

Find opportunities to grow as an admin David's advice for people new to the ecosystem is to get curious. Back when he was a part-time admin, he was laser-focused on opportunities because that was what his organization was asking him to do.

"I should have given myself the benefit of the doubt," he says, "and taken a little bit more risk in learning new things." Reflecting now, he sees where he could have taken the initiative to try automations or enhance integrations and become a better admin in the process.

There are a lot more great tips from David about his pivot into a Salesforce Admin career, 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: Navigating Flow Errors as a New Salesforce Admin

Admin Trailblazers Group * Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social * David 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 Salesforce Admins podcast. This week I'm joined by David Simpson, who you might remember from our pre-Dreamforce chat not that long ago. It was a little over a month ago, but this time we're diving into something that really hits close to home for a lot of Salesforce admins, and that is career change. The number one question I get in my inbox is how do I find a different career? What does it look like to interview as a first time Salesforce admin and questions like that? I'm telling you, we're going to dive into all of that with David because he's going to share how he went from spreadsheets as a staff accountant to automations as a Salesforce admin and what his transition looked like. We get into certifications. We talk about job hunting. We talk about imposter syndrome, and I dig into what it looked like to be a brand new Salesforce admin on his first day at a new job. I think this might be the most comprehensive podcast interview about what it looks like to change careers that I've done since I've launched this show. If you're curious about how David did it, this is the episode for you. Give it a listen and let's get David on the podcast. So, David, welcome back to the podcast.

David Simpson: Thank you for having me back.

Mike: It wasn't that long ago that we were talking, it was pre-Dreamforce about 45 days ago or so. I had you on the podcast to talk about the presentation you're giving at Dreamforce, and we've since wrapped up Dreamforce now and people are at home. Well, some people. I think some people stayed and probably went to Napa Valley and did wine tastings, which I wouldn't blame you. There's a lot of great vineyards and stuff out there. But one thing you brought up that I wanted to follow up on was your career trajectory, and we haven't talked about careers a whole lot, but let's just rewind a little bit and give one of those the last time on the Salesforce Admin podcast, because I've watched a lot of streaming things. Let's fill people in on what you do and where your career started and how you became a Salesforce admin.

David Simpson: Sure. Previously on Salesforce Admins.

Mike: Exactly.

David Simpson: So, many years ago, I went to college for accounting, and my first job out of college was a staff accountant at a software company. After a few years of working in spreadsheets and doing the monotonous day-to-day that comes with being a staff accountant, I made a pivot to be a financial analyst, more specifically a financial systems analyst, and after I made that pivot, my supervisor at the time, he informed me that he was the administrator for our company's Salesforce instance, and that a lot of the work that I was doing, which was doing financial analytics for our professional service team, a lot of that data came out of Salesforce. Our professional service team would put opportunities into Salesforce, and we needed to make sure that those financials were clean. So, he suggested that I become another admin with the company, and that I would learn about the general inner workings of Salesforce and be a point of contact for cleaning up that data, for troubleshooting issues and just all the things that come with being a junior level admin. So, he gave me a system administrator license. He recommended that I go into Trailhead to just learn the basics of being a Salesforce admin, the Salesforce ecosystem, custom objects. All those general items that you learn as an admin, and then I just kind of fell in love with it. It was such an interesting pivot from doing spreadsheets and reconciliations. I was able to kind of do problem solving and be an environment that I wasn't too familiar in, but I was also able to see how Salesforce works and how we can get this data to be reportable data. So, the automation behind it or validation rules, just even something simple like setting up a page layout. It was all very interesting and new to me, so I just latched onto it a hundred percent, and then I further got sold on the whole experience after about a year or so, being a Salesforce admin, I went to my first Dreamforce in 2018 and I got my Salesforce administrator certification, and at that point, that kind of signaled to me that this is what I want to do full time. So, from that point on, it's all history. I went and unfortunately, the company I was with didn't have the resources for a full-time admin, so I did go to another company, but since then I have been an awesome admin just doing it every day. Custom objects, flows, you name it, admin work-wise, I do it.

Mike: And I think career changes are hard. I went from sales to becoming an admin as well, and I think everybody kind of looks at like, well, what do I have to do? Or where do I have to go? Or what skills are required? And I think you, like me, kind of got fortunate you were with a company that was like, "Hey, we need these skills." And I'm assuming you probably did both jobs for a while, right?

David Simpson: Yes. I was doing both jobs up until I left the company. It was essentially 50/50 financial systems analysis and then admin work.

Mike: So, it's not like you just all of a sudden jumped in the pilot seat and took over the plane and away you go.

David Simpson: Thankfully, that wasn't the case for me. I was able to kind ease myself into the admin role because I still had work to do on the financial side.

Mike: Yeah. And I think that that works out as an incredibly lucky path.

David Simpson: Yeah, definitely.

Mike: One thing, so you mentioned they didn't have the budget for a full-time admin, which is the role you wanted to pursue. Did you consider just staying at that current position and kind of dividing your time, or was this something where you were like, "No, I really, this is, I'm going to commit?"

David Simpson: It was something that I really wanted to commit on. In the beginning when I had first gotten a system administrator license and started doing basic admin work, I was completely on board with splitting my time between the two. I wasn't super confident in what I was doing as a Salesforce admin. I was still learning the ropes, but after I had gotten my first certification, that kind of sold it to me and locked in that this is what I want to do as a career. So, at that point, I did bring up my interest in being a full-time admin to the company, and they said, "Unfortunately, we just don't have the bandwidth to have a full-time admin whose only job is to be a Salesforce administrator." So, unfortunately, I did have to switch companies to go and find that.

Mike: Okay, so let's pause there because that is the point that I think everybody has questions about, which is, so what did interviewing look like? What kind of prep did you do? You're going from career A to career B, and you kind of have some experience. I mean, what was that like? Because I'm assuming you sat in interviews for jobs you didn't get.

David Simpson: Yeah, I won't sugarcoat it. It was a little tough. You're going into a new job where, yes, you do have experience, but you don't have a ton of experience. So, what I focused on was first the credential side of things. By the time I decided to make the jump to be a full-time Salesforce administrator, I did have, I believe, three certifications under my belt. I had the Salesforce administrator certification, the platform app builder, and then the CPQ specialist. So, I-

Mike: Ooh, CPQ specialist. Wow.

David Simpson: Yeah. Yep. I haven't used it in a while, but it was a very challenging and interesting certification to take. I actually took the Salesforce-provided trainings for it, and it was a wealth of knowledge, but so I had these three certifications. I did lean a little bit heavier on that to say, listen, I may not have years of experience, but you can see here that I'm able to answer the tough questions. Additionally, I did focus on what projects and initiatives I was able to complete at my job while I was part-time being a Salesforce admin. So, I had done some work building a custom object for, funnily enough, our accounting team to log their calls to people for collecting payment. So, I made a point to mention that in my interviews. So, I used the certifications. I used actual project and real-world experience, but something else that was a little kind of ace up the sleeve for my interview process was that I did have finance and accounting background. The job that ultimately hired me, while I did not do finance and accounting work for them, I was able to be a point of contact to help bridge the gap between the finance team and the Salesforce team. If they needed to pull financial data from Salesforce, I would be a person that they could go to, and I could confidently answer that because of my background. So, when it comes to jumping from one career to a Salesforce career, I definitely recommend that people do lean into what they've done in the past and show how they can enhance a new job's day-to-day by focusing on those areas of expertise, but just in a Salesforce context. That's what really helped me because yes, I did unfortunately have a handful of interviews where I didn't get the job, and I think that ultimately came down to just pure raw Salesforce experience. But the job that did hire me, it was because I had a great rapport with their CFO, and I was able to talk the talk with finance as well as bridge that gap to the Salesforce side of things.

Mike: Yeah, I mean, you stayed in finance. It's not like you went over to a fish distribution warehouse or something.

David Simpson: Yes, exactly. [inaudible 00:10:41]-

Mike: I tried to pick something that was the opposite of finance, and my brain went blank for a second, and I was like, "Oh, I just watched a show on cooking last night."

David Simpson: I mean, those are pretty different. I can't think of a much more different thing, but yeah, I mean because the Salesforce department at that new job also heavily interacted with the finance department, that was a big benefit to me.

Mike: I can feel people listening to this podcast right now, and they're like, ask this question, ask this question, ask this question. I got like a million. What were in ... Because we're going to get to your job, I promise you, but we're going to just stay in this middle ground here for a second. In some of the job search that you were looking for in some of the, I don't know even, it sounds so old of me to call it classified ads. I'm sure it was like LinkedIn listings or Indeed job boards or something. What were some of the things that you looked for in terms of the description that you either filtered in or filtered out in terms applying for?

David Simpson: Yeah, so some of the things that I looked for in my job search was making sure that the job posting focused purely on admin work. I think nowadays we focus so much on being specialized in a number of different aspects of Salesforce. It's not uncommon now for admins to have developer skills or maybe dip their toe in the architect side of things, and that is fantastic, don't get me wrong, but I focused mainly on positions that were only looking for admin-related work, so building custom objects, administering users, building validation rules, just those general kind of things were the main items I was looking for when I was transitioning to my first full-time Salesforce job. Additionally, I was looking to see what kind of qualifications and credentials they were looking for from an education side of things. If there was nothing about a Salesforce certification, then I erred on the side of caution and didn't apply there. I wanted a company that was fully bought into the Salesforce ecosystem, and that can be illustrated in a job posting by seeing that they're asking for the proper credentials. An extra little bonus, which was much more rare, was seeing your certain Trailhead status, or you have certain super badges. It's very rare for a job to ask for those sorts of things, but that's how you know you're working with a company that knows the Salesforce ecosystem and knows what they want.

Mike: Yeah. And it's done its homework.

David Simpson: Exactly. So, I was looking for those types of companies, just really people who were bought into the ecosystem, people who knew what they were looking for, knew what enhancements and long-term goals they had for their Salesforce org, and also was going to treat it with the level of attention and detail that is needed in a Salesforce org. There's many times where unfortunately, due to resourcing or staffing issues, Salesforce gets a little bit put by the wayside, and instead of having great initiatives and solutions deployed, it's just a bunch of band-aids, and then that comes back to the admin saying, "Oh, we can't deliver on something truly incredible because we're not given the time and the resources for it." So, I was looking for companies that really didn't have that mindset and were looking for true, awesome admins.

Mike: Yeah. You were fortunate enough that you had worked in an org. Did you, at any one point in time in the interviewing process, think about preparing a developer org or a Trailhead org to showcase some of your skills?

David Simpson: When I was first applying for a full-time Salesforce admin, that thought did not cross my mind. That said, this was many years ago in, I think it was 2019. That said, a little over a year ago, I did get a new job at my current position, and during that job search, I did have a Salesforce developer org that I had built out, and I recreated some of my most interesting and complex solutions in that developer org, and then basically in every single job interview I had, I said, "Do you want to see my dev org? I've built some awesome flows." And most of the time they said no. But every once in a while they'd say yes, and then I get to show off my screen flow that I worked really hard on. So, nowadays, yes, I do have my dev org. I'll bring up Trailhead every now and then, or I did back then when I was in the job hunt, but really, I like to showcase the dev org whenever possible because it is something that I'm actively developing in. Even now that I have a job and I'm in a job I love, I still whatever I do at my normal job, if I say, "Oh, that's pretty interesting," I go and I rebuild it in the dev org. But of course, without confidential information.

Mike: Right. No. Oh, man. I'm the same way. I was crushed, I want to say a year and a half ago I was prepping for Dreamforce and the dev org that I'd had since 2006. I forgot to log in and it expired.

David Simpson: Oh, no. Oh, that's horrible.

Mike: And it was just more of like, it was just such an awesome little relic of stuff that I had built and things that I had tried out, and I have another one, but it's not as old and it doesn't have as much. There wasn't anything cool in it, but it was cool because it was stuff that I had built when I was, it had my first workflow in it.

David Simpson: It shows a timeline of how you've grown.

Mike: Yeah, I mean, very much so. I'd let nobody in there because they'd be like, "What were you doing?" Well, I was a kid with crayons back then.

David Simpson: Yeah, you got to make mistakes in order to get better.

Mike: Absolutely. Okay. So, I mean, we could do a whole podcast on interviewing and everybody in the comments will be like, "You should." Let's go to day one of the new job. So, you've transitioned, you're no longer 50/50. The company's bought in. Dave's our new Salesforce admin. Day one, outside of all of the HR paperwork and stuff, what did you do on day one?

David Simpson: First, I quietly panicked because I was afraid I was not going to be able to live up to expectations. But after that calmed down, I of course met the team. I was very fortunate to work with a team of several people in the Salesforce space. There was two developers, there was another admin. There were two architects, and of course the Salesforce manager. So, they showed me around the org and they showed me some of the details of what they had built, what they're currently building, how they take in tickets. It was just essentially getting a feel for the Salesforce ecosystem that was there. And then from that point, once I was left my own devices, I just continued to do some more digging. I looked, okay, they're using cases. How are they using cases? Where is the queue that stuff that we get asked to do comes in? What does their account object look like? Because the account object is always one of the busiest objects in the Salesforce ecosystem. How many validation rules do they have? I was really just trying to take the little experience that I had from my previous job and then look at those same areas in this new job. So, essentially just getting a feel for the org.

Mike: So, you joined a team of people?

David Simpson: Yes. Yes.

Mike: What was that like?

David Simpson: It was a fantastic experience. I still keep in touch with all of them to this day, despite the fact that I haven't worked with them for a few years now. They were all super friendly and super helpful, and I think that was something that really helped me to continue this admin career path is that I got paired with such great people in this team, and it wasn't just the Salesforce team that was super friendly and helpful. Everybody in the company was, but these people took me in and they knew that I had limited experience, and they said, "It's okay. Let's show you the ropes of what you don't know and make sure that you are as successful as possible." That company was actually where I learned how to build flows. The Salesforce architect there, Nick, he sat down with me one day for two hours and he said, "Okay, we're going to build a screen flow and this needs to be triggered from a button and it needs to grab all these records. Let's see you build it." And then he walked me through it step by step, and it was just such an incredible experience, and I'm super grateful for it because now I use flows every single day in my job and I talk about flows. I talked about it at Dreamforce that just recently ended. I have a YouTube channel where I talk about flows. So, it was just such a good experience and I'm forever grateful for them.

Mike: Would you advise newer admins when they're joining an organization to join as part of a team rather than trying to be a solo admin?

David Simpson: Yes, most definitely. I think a team is one of the best things that you can have as a Salesforce admin outside of a good clean org, and of course, knowledge [inaudible 00:20:22]-

Mike: Oh, a clean org. You mean the first day you get one?

David Simpson: Oh, yeah, exactly. But yeah, a team is so important. Not only do you have other people that you can bounce ideas and problems off of, but just being able to work together and help lift each other up is such a good blessing in a Salesforce org. I think it's not only going into a job that has a team, but going into a job that has a team that is friendly, helpful, and inviting. Because I have had experience at a different position where unfortunately the team wasn't as welcoming, and that was really difficult to do good work because I couldn't ask questions. I couldn't troubleshoot certain things properly, and then when I eventually made a mistake, it was coming down on me pretty hard, but this first company here, it was just nothing but super niceness.

Mike: So, having worked as part of a team, are you looking at your other team members in terms of where you want to grow your career or your skills and where are those?

David Simpson: Yeah, definitely. So, working with a team and working with a team of a variety of skill sets, such as like an architect or a developer, it really does help kind of narrow down what I want to do. The architect route is something that is certainly interesting to me. I feel like it's a slight natural progression from being an advanced administrator and doing all these complex flow work, but I've seen what developers do with Apex, and while I think it's incredibly interesting and incredibly impressive, it's not something that's necessarily for me. So, you do get those different perspectives working in a team of people that you wouldn't get all by yourself because you're just kind of in the silo trying to figure everything out yourself.

Mike: Well, and sometimes working in a silo, you have to do all those things. You just don't know that you're doing them, and then what part of it you're doing well.

David Simpson: Yeah, exactly.

Mike: I mean, I'd like to think I was an architect by drawing diagrams, but then I've seen architectural diagrams and I've realized I was just scribbling.

David Simpson: Yeah, you don't know until you see it firsthand.

Mike: Yeah. Well, and sometimes the only exposure, for me, the only exposure was talking with other people at user groups, and that's often limited as opposed to having them as coworkers.

David Simpson: Yeah. You really do get the benefit of just day-to-day exposure with working in a team. So, I'm incredibly grateful for that exposure and that opportunity.

Mike: So, last question, and maybe it's the hardest, I don't know, but if you had to rewind the clock and do it all over again, what's one thing you would do differently?

David Simpson: Great question. I think that if I were to rewind time and do stuff differently, I think back when I was still that part-time admin and I was still just getting my feet wet, I think I probably would've taken a little bit more risk in learning new things because I was just told to handle this one aspect of Salesforce at the very beginning, as I'd mentioned earlier on, I was working with opportunities and our professional service team. I really only focused on that kind of area, but if I could do it all over again, I probably would've asked more questions and said, "Hey, how does this third-party integration work? Can I do some enhancements on it? I might break something, but can I give it a shot?" Or, "Why doesn't this process work the way as intended? Can you let me try this automation?" I eventually got those skill sets over the years, especially with automation, but it took a little bit longer than expected because I was just afraid to take that leap very early on, and I should have given myself the benefit of the doubt that I could have figured it out that early on, and I think that would've made me a stronger admin from the get-go.

Mike: Yeah, I could see that. The benefit of hindsight is hindsight, right?

David Simpson: Yes.

Mike: The ability to look back and boy, if I had to do the same thing, I don't know what I would do differently other than probably be less hard on myself.

David Simpson: Yeah, that too. You need to be forgiving of yourself because as an admin, especially a newer admin, you will make mistakes. You'll accidentally use the wrong tools or the wrong process. I mean, look to the admin certification where you have to separate between sharing rules and field level security profiles, permission sets. You're going to grab the wrong thing or do the wrong process, and it might not be the end of the world, but you should give yourself some leeway that you will make those mistakes and you'll learn from them.

Mike: Yep. Well, I think that's a great way to end this podcast. David, thanks for coming on, and given is probably one of the most comprehensive overviews of switching careers that I think I've talked to in a while, so I appreciate it.

David Simpson: Yeah, of course. Thank you so much for having me on again.

Mike: So, big thanks to David Simpson for sharing his journey with us presenting at Dreamforce. It was amazing last week to see his presentations. I really appreciated how honest he was about the highs that he had, the hesitations and everything in between. So, whether you're just starting out or you're thinking of making your own pivot, there's a lot to take away from his story. And hey, if you found it helpful, pass this podcast along to somebody that might need to hear it. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Naveen Gabrani, Founder and CEO of Astrea IT Services.

Join us as we chat about why Salesforce Foundations is a game-changer for admins.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Naveen Gabrani.

Why Salesforce Foundations is a big deal This year at Dreamforce, Naveen is giving a presentation about something that Enterprise users already have access to that's criminally underrated. "Salesforce Foundations is one of those lesser-known features," he says, "but it is extremely important."

Announced last year, Salesforce Foundations brings the most useful basic features from Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Data Cloud, and Agentforce to your org. It has a modern UI that consolidates the most important features you use every day into an updated homepage.

And the best part? It's free—you simply have to enable it in Setup.

Take Agentforce for a test drive Naveen gives some examples to highlight how important Salesforce Foundations truly is. If you have Sales Cloud, you can borrow Service Cloud features like Knowledge and macros to give your customers some technical support. Or you could build a customer journey with Marketing Cloud's flow-based interface that feeds into a Commerce Cloud storefront.

With so many businesses pushing to integrate AI features, Salesforce Foundations gives you the opportunity to try before you buy. You can configure Agentforce and Data Cloud to get everything integrated with your org and then make the decision to expand functionality. It's much easier to convince stakeholders when you have something concrete to show them.

Tips from a Dreamforce veteran Naveen is a Dreamforce veteran, so I wanted to know what keeps bringing him back, year after year. "The biggest thing for me is to make sure that I get time to meet my customers, meet my friends in the ecosystem, meet my partners," he says. "Those networking aspects of the conference have helped us a lot as a company in the long term."

Each year, Naveen makes a point of writing a blog post to summarize his takeaways on what's happening with the platform. Make sure to check it out, and make sure to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

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Full show transcript

Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, we're joined by Naveen Gabrani, founder of Astrea IT Services and longtime Salesforce ecosystem veteran. Now Naveen sat down with us just a little bit before Dreamforce to share why Salesforce Foundations is a game changer for admins; offering multi-cloud access, a sleek, modern UI, and best of all, it's free with Enterprise or higher licenses. Now if you've been curious about how to do more with what you already have, this episode's for you. Now stay tuned and don't miss Naveen's tips, use cases and insights from 30 years in tech and what he does after Dreamforce. So with that, let's get Naveen on the podcast. So Naveen, welcome to the podcast.

Naveen Gabrani: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Mike: Yeah. Well, you are a string of presenters that we've had on the podcast over the last month, and today, when this episode comes out, it's the Thursday of Dreamforce. So I bet a lot of people probably listening to this on the plane flying home. But let's get started with a little bit about yourself, kind of how you got in Salesforce, how you got in the ecosystem, and then I want to talk to you more about what you're presenting at Dreamforce.

Naveen Gabrani: Great. So my name is Naveen Gabrani. I ran a Salesforce partner company called Astrea IT Services. We are based in a place called Noida in India. So I have been running this company Astrea for about 15 years, so it's been a long time. It's been a fun journey. Before this, I used to work as a program manager with a large MNC, and so my total experience is more than 30 years.

Mike: Wow, that's a long time. I was going to say your company is a teenager.

Naveen Gabrani: Yeah.

Mike: That's been around for a while. Now at Dreamforce this year, which is today. Whee. Or it could have been a few days ago, depending on when you're listening to this. You talked about Salesforce Foundation, get more from your org with Salesforce Foundations. Why was it so important for you to have admins understand how to get more from their org with Salesforce Foundations?

Naveen Gabrani: So Salesforce Foundations is one of the features that is less known, but it is extremely important feature. This was announced in last year 2024 Dreamforce, and it's about one year now, but still it is not so well known. So I wanted to work towards making it more popular in the ecosystem.

Mike: Yeah. What have you done with Salesforce Foundations? What made you so passionate about it?

Naveen Gabrani: Sure. So let me talk a little bit more about what is Salesforce Foundations, and why is it so important? So I would classify Salesforce Foundation has two different parts. One is a modern user interface, which is fun to use, and second is the access to multi-cloud. So let me talk about the user interface part first, then let me get into the multi-cloud functionality. But before that, let me just talk who has access to Salesforce Foundation. So any customer that is using Enterprise Cloud or higher of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud or Industry Cloud, has access to Salesforce Foundation out of the box. The great thing about this is that it is completely free. You just need to enable it in your setup and then you're ready to go. Okay? So that is one of the wonderful things about Salesforce Foundation is that there is no cost involved in using it. Coming back to the user interface part, there are a few different things that are provided in the Salesforce Foundation user interface. One is all the apps are accessible on the left nav bar in a very modern UI. And also for setup for admins, the most important features are available through a dropdown. So for example, managing users, you can just go to the top right and then access the most important features that you use every day. The third important feature of the new Salesforce Foundation user interface is access to a more modern homepage that will give you everything that you need the moment you'll land on the homepage. So that is the UI aspects of the Salesforce Foundation. The second part of Salesforce Foundation is the access to multi-cloud, which is more important actually. So let's say you are using Sales Cloud and you enable Salesforce Foundation. What it will give you is it'll give you access to Service Cloud's essential features, it will also give you access to essential features of Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Data Cloud, and Agentforce. The reason it is called Salesforce Foundations is because it gives you the platform on which you can start building your Agentforce applications without paying anything extra. Okay? So let me just elaborate this multi-cloud features.

Mike: Yeah.

Naveen Gabrani: So let's just say that you are using Sales Cloud. Similar things are applicable for Service Cloud as well, but let's assume you are a Sales Cloud or CRM kind of customer. So main features of Service Cloud that will be available to you, to the users, are you have access to Knowledge Base. So the commonly occurring features are available to your users to let's say you can resolve the case using standard Salesforce Knowledge features, even though you are just having the Sales Cloud license. You also have access to features like macros, so you can perform multiple tasks together by just clicking them. Single click. Okay? So that is some of the Service Cloud aspects that are available out of the box to Sales Cloud license with Foundations. The additional clouds that are available are Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud, Data Cloud and Agentforce. So let me talk about Marketing Cloud next. So Marketing Cloud here is based on a flow like interface, so it's based on top of flows. So you build journeys and you use flows to build your journeys. So let's say you want to send a mail today and send another mail after two days to a market segment. Then you can create email contents using an Experience Cloud kind of interface, and then you build a journey and set up the campaigns, and this is all included within Salesforce Foundations. Okay? So you have Sales Cloud, you are getting essential version of Marketing Cloud for free, for no other charges. Okay?

Mike: Yeah.

Naveen Gabrani: So that is another big kind of bonus you get as part of Salesforce Foundation. The next is Commerce Cloud. So as part of your Foundation license, we have access to one storefront. You already have products available as part of Sales Cloud, so we can use Experience Cloud interface, a drag-and-drop kind of functionality, to build a professional looking user interface. And it's fairly easy to set up. So we can build an e-commerce site for our clients using Commerce Cloud and Salesforce Foundations. And this is you can pretty much go live in a day, it's so easy to set up. There are some limitations on the number of transactions and the number of storefronts, etc. But that is... So the idea is if you are a very large company and you're exceeding those limits, then you work with your account manager and purchase additional transactions. Also included our Data Cloud and Agentforce. If you want to just learn Data Cloud or you want to check whether Agentforce is good for me or not, then the idea is you can set it up in your Sales Cloud or Service Cloud org, try it out, test it out, set it up, everything. And then when you are satisfied with it, only then you buy it. So basic advantage of Salesforce Foundations is that you try everything. When you're satisfied, only then go ahead and make a purchase. So that in a nutshell is various aspects that come out of the box without any charges when you have just a Sales Cloud or Service Cloud Enterprise or higher license.

Mike: Yeah, I know we did... I was just looking back, and I did a podcast with Eddie Cliff, who at the time was the product manager for Salesforce Foundations. And of course I think the benefit of everything we were talking about was it's such a simplified area to go to so that you know you're turning on all the right things and you're not really having to hop around in set up.

Naveen Gabrani: Definitely. That is the interface part of it. Everything is... Like the most easy to access aspects of the platform for end user or for admin are available at one place.

Mike: Yeah. You've mentioned you've been in the tech ecosystem for 30 years, and at your company for 15. In terms of if you had to stack rank really cool features that Salesforce has come out with, where on your list would Foundations fall?

Naveen Gabrani: Oh, that's a tough one.

Mike: Well, I did tell you there might be a few hard questions every now and then.

Naveen Gabrani: Yeah, there's so many different things and it's difficult to compare. The big thing about Foundation is obviously the access to so many different things, and it's free. I'm not aware of any great Salesforce product that is available free of cost. So that is one thing that I really like about Foundations. And obviously the things that are extremely popular are... Like because I'm from development background, I like Apex a lot. Pretty much we never have to say no to a client. We never say no for any requirements because we know that we have flows, we have Apex, and we can handle it. So those are a couple of other favorite things that I have.

Mike: Do you find, when you're working with clients, that you use Foundations more often to turn on Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud? Or do you use it to... Is it when they're expanding from Sales Cloud to Service Cloud?

Naveen Gabrani: For now the focus has been on Agentforce, because that is the buzz in the market. But I think Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud are going to be equally popular with time, but for now, Agentforce is on everybody's mind. And sometimes clients are not convinced, so they want to give it a try and see a demo before they make a decision, and that's where Salesforce Foundation comes in.

Mike: Well, sure. You got to test drive the car before you buy it. Right?

Naveen Gabrani: Exactly.

Mike: What are you excited about for Dreamforce this year, besides your session on Salesforce Foundations?

Naveen Gabrani: I'm kind of a veteran. I've been to Dreamforce I think seven or eight times, I've spoken a few times. And so I mean you make so many friends in the ecosystem over the years, so the biggest thing for me is just to make sure that I get time to meet my customers, meet my friends in the ecosystem, meet my partners. Those are kind of the networking aspects of the conference, that has long-term... That has helped us a lot as a company historically. So because we are virtual, living in a far-off place, and the clients are in the US are elsewhere in the western world, Dreamforce is a place... It's like a get-together. So we get to meet them, build relationships, and then those relationships help us out for rest of the year.

Mike: Yeah. No, I could totally understand that. So most people that are going to listen to this episode are probably listening to it after Dreamforce, because it comes out the Thursday of Dreamforce and everyone's like, "Oh my gosh, I got to run to this session. And I got to go to this place and get this food because San Francisco has a lot of food."

Naveen Gabrani: Yes.

Mike: I'd be remiss if I don't talk about food on my podcast, even though it's a non-food podcast. But my question to you, you've been to a lot of Dreamforces and you've been in the ecosystem for a long time, what is the most important thing that you do after Dreamforce?

Naveen Gabrani: So my goal is that I try to summarize a couple of things. One is summarize the key announcements.

Mike: Uh-huh.

Naveen Gabrani: And whatever I have learned, like interesting things. So I meet a lot of vendors, I go to booths, I spend time in the expo. I listen to a few keynotes and get a feel of the new features that are coming in, I look at a few Salesforce demos, I also attend a few sessions. I try to mix and match and do many different things. So at the end of the show, I have a fair idea about what are the new things that the platform is announcing, and I try to publish a blog on that. That these are my learnings, so that the people who are not able to attend get to see that. That is one. Second is just like an acknowledgement mail to all the people that I have met kind of summarizing our discussions.

Mike: Yeah.

Naveen Gabrani: So those are the two things that I do while it's fresh in my mind.

Mike: And I think you have... Well, a lot of people have a long plane ride home. I'd love for you to remember back to your first Dreamforce. If you could do your first Dreamforce differently, what would you have done?

Naveen Gabrani: The first one, I think what happened was that people... I booked a lot of sessions, and so I didn't... It was just spent some time in the expo in looking at demos and all. I was trying to attend session from morning to evening, and your brain gets exhausted. So that was probably not a good idea. That's what I learned. So I try to keep my schedule somewhat free now.

Mike: Yeah, I appreciate that as somebody who manages a lot of sessions with a lot of great content for you to have gone to. I was thinking back to my first Dreamforce, and I remember one of the best things I did was if I got to a session early I just sat down and just chit-chatted with the people around me, because we were all there to learn the same thing.

Naveen Gabrani: Sure.

Mike: And you meet some really fun people. Of course, this was I feel like 100 years ago. I also remember that was one of the first Dreamforce I was walking around with an iPad, and people were like, "Whoa, you're taking notes on iPad." I felt like I was so in the future at that time.

Naveen Gabrani: Yeah. How things have changed in the last 10, 15 years.

Mike: Right? Exactly. Naveen, I appreciate you coming on the podcast and talking about Foundations. I know I've covered this topic before, but it's really cool. The UI is super intuitive and helpful for admins. And I love that you've been in the ecosystem for a long time and are still coming to Dreamforce and still pointing out new things and inspiring people all the time.

Naveen Gabrani: Thanks a lot. Thank you so much, Mike, for having me.

Mike: Big thanks to Naveen for joining us and shedding light on Salesforce Foundations. Whether you are helping users with a streamlined interface or testing out Agentforce before you commit, Foundations gives us admins a powerful, no-cost way to do more with our org. Now don't forget to check out Naveen's post-Dreamforce blog wrap-ups, and keep an eye on what's next in the ecosystem. He is out there presenting a lot of things. So until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Sharon Klardie, Senior Director of AppExchange Labs & Innovation at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about how Labs empowers Salesforce employees to build and share solutions on the AppExchange, and what that means for admins navigating the new world of AI.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Sharon Klardie.

What is Salesforce Labs? Next year, Salesforce Labs will celebrate its twentieth birthday. If you haven’t checked it out, it’s an innovation program for Salesforce employees to create solutions, package them, and share them with customers like you.

That’s why I was so excited to sit down with Sharon Klardie. She’s the Senior Director of AppExchange Labs & Innovation, and as she puts it, her team’s job is to “showcase the art of the possible.”

If you’ve ever stared at a new feature and felt some blank canvas anxiety when it comes to how to actually implement it in your org, browsing through Salesforce Labs solutions could be a great starting point. Even if you don’t end up using something, you can see what’s possible and even look at how they did it on GitHub.

The key to AI implementation If you’re like most of the admins I talk to, you’re probably looking for new ways to use Agentforce. As Sharon puts it, “How do you have meaningful and mindful implementations of AI at your organization?”

You can get a lot of ideas looking through Labs apps that incorporate Agentforce. However, as Sharon points out, that’s only one piece of the puzzle. You need to get your data in a good place and build a solid foundation for scalable AI, and there are several Salesforce Labs solutions that can help you get started.

Best practices for AppExchange Finally, we talk through some AppExchange best practices that will help you get the most out of any Labs solutions you want to try out.

First and foremost, never install an app you haven’t used directly into production. Spin up a dev org or sandbox so you can test without breaking anything. But more importantly, make sure you have a solid rollout and change management plan for any new functionality you’re adding to your org. You need to tell users what’s new, teach them how to use it, and be ready to handle any edge cases that will inevitably pop up.

Be sure to catch Sharon’s presentations at Dreamforce, and say hi if you see her! And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

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Full show transcript

Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admin Podcast, I sit down with Sharon Klardie, who's the senior director of Salesforce Labs, to talk about, well, what else? Free innovation. Sharon shares how labs empower Salesforce employees to build and share solutions on the AppExchange and what that means for Salesforce admins navigating the new world of AI and why, this is important, you should never install a new app straight into production. Now, whether you're Dreamforce-bound or catching up after Dreamforce, this one's packed with a lot of great tips from Sharon and a lot of AI strategy gold. So tune in, take notes, and let's get Sharon on the podcast. So, Sharon, welcome to the podcast.

Sharon Klardie: Thank you for having me, Mike.

Mike: I find it hard to believe, but you are one of the few people in the world that hasn't been on the Salesforce Admin podcast despite you and me being in the ecosystem for like a thousand years.

Sharon Klardie: I know. I was thinking about this morning and I was like, "I can't believe I haven't been on here yet." So I'm super excited to share with the listeners here today.

Mike: Well, let's talk about that. So how did you get started in Salesforce and in the ecosystem, and what do you do at Salesforce?

Sharon Klardie: Oh, I love a Salesforce origin story. So picture, it's 2010, and I'm working at a software company that gets bought by an equity partner, and that equity partner implements Salesforce at every company they buy. And that was my first introduction of Salesforce back when it was just Sales and Service Cloud. And I absolutely felt in love with the platform. I felt empowered. There was community behind it. And ever since then, so from 2010 till today, I've been all Salesforce all the time.

Mike: Wow. And you joined Salesforce. What part of Salesforce did you join?

Sharon Klardie: So when I joined Salesforce in 2018, I joined leading the Salesforce Labs program. That was exclusively my focus. It's been part of my remit my entire time, almost eight years here at Salesforce. And I've added some other things to what I do on the daily basis, but the Salesforce Labs program, community innovation, it's my passion area. It's what brings me joy. I just actually love being part of it, seeing the creativity of the employee community, creating labs, and seeing the creativity of our trailblazers who are using Labs solutions.

Mike: So for anybody that hasn't heard about Labs, when you say Salesforce Labs, what do you mean?

Sharon Klardie: So Salesforce Labs is a program that's actually turning 20 next year, if you can believe it. It's an innovation program where we empower Salesforce employees to create solutions, package them, and share them on AppExchange for our customers to use. And Salesforce Labs solutions are always free. They're community-driven. You can think of them like an open-source project. So it's volunteered by employees. It's not an employee who is on a product team and this is part of their regular release roadmap. This is an employee who sees a problem in the space that they want to solve, or they have a really creative idea on how to use our technology. So the Labs program really helps trailblazers to learn new technology, play around with it, get starter packs and templates. Blank canvas anxiety is a real struggle as an admin, throwing back a few years from my admin days, but sometimes a new feature would be rolled out and you'd be like, "I'm not sure where to start." So the Labs program really tries to help trailblazers be able to adopt new technology, understand how you can use it, and showcase the art of the possible.

Mike: That's good. I know as an admin, I found Labs because I needed a project management app, and at the time, Reid Carlberg had a really cool one, so I was like, "Oh, that's kind of cool." And then from there on, I looked for the little beaker logo.

Sharon Klardie: Yeah, we love that beaker logo, and then we evolved the logo to actually use the periodic elements of tables to use labs spelled out because we're geeky like that.

Mike: Right. I know. It kind of has like a Breaking Bad feel to it.

Sharon Klardie: Yeah.

Mike: I'm all about that. So at Dreamforce you're going to talk about seven free solutions to drive your AI strategy forward, and it's going to be a really cool presentation, and some people are going to get to see it, some people aren't. Why is it important for admins to look to the AppExchange and some of our Labs apps in terms of moving AI forward in their organizations?

Sharon Klardie: Yeah. So right now, AI is moving at the speed of light or whatever is faster than the speed of light. I'm not sure what that is, but there's probably something faster than the speed of light, and that's what it feels like is happening right now. So one of the benefits that the Labs program will have is we can showcase different solutions on how to use this new technology, but also I think even more importantly is how do we think about how do we want to implement AI at our organization. And sometimes that might actually be using a Labs solution or another partner solution on AppExchange that isn't actually AI-driven, but helps set the groundwork for how do you have a strong AI strategy. So an example of that would be, is there a set of technology or tools or processes that you should have in place at your organization to really help you identify what are your goals and use cases for using AI? And we have a number of different Labs solutions that we'll share. Pro-tip for anybody who's going to see the content, it would be probably a few more solutions than seven. We'll throw a couple bonus things in there and some shout-outs. But there's a lot of technology out there to really help you frame is your data ready. Data readiness is super important as an AI strategy to move forward in the space. If you're going to train your AI or use AI on your data and if your data is no good, then you're going to have a problem. The AI isn't going to respond the way that you expect or what your business needs. So we want to showcase these solutions that you can use to get started to help ground you in strong AI strategies.

Mike: So it's not just downloading agents.

Sharon Klardie: Exactly. It's going to be more than that. It's really about thinking about how do you have meaningful and mindful implementation of AI at your organization. And we'll also have some showcases of how to use cool Agentforce and AI technology.

Mike: Oh, nice. I noticed you put the word free in your title. That implies that there's some that aren't free.

Sharon Klardie: Yes. So all Salesforce Labs solutions are free. So anything that our employees create and contribute are free to download from AppExchange. But there are other solutions from our partner ecosystem and some are free and some are paid. It is important to note for anybody who's not familiar with the Salesforce Labs program is these are not official Salesforce products, which is actually called out in the master service agreement, the MSA. These are community contributions, so you can't pick up the phone and call support and get help for them. We generally try to open-source all of our Labs solutions on GitHub so you can actually use it to learn new technology, see how an employee built that solution, or maybe that solution does 80% of what you want, but you want to change it. You can go get the source code and then go customize it for whatever works for your business. And if the solution that the employee built hits a home run and it solves your business challenge you're trying to solve, you can go install the managed package and off to the races.

Mike: Yeah. And I'm also thinking any of your Labs apps are also going to immediately be able to be agentified?

Sharon Klardie: I would say. So we have some Labs solutions. I wouldn't say that's a hundred percent guarantee, although most of them should be able to be extended, but we have over 500 Labs solutions on AppExchange and I can't say conclusively that all 500 would become-

Mike: You don't know all 500 just like the back of your hand? Come on now.

Sharon Klardie: I, unfortunately, do not. I know many of them, but not all 500. But yeah, most of them should be extended. We're actually looking at engaging with some of our more popular Labs solutions and having conversations with the builders to say like, "What are ways that we could extend this using newer technology that's come out?" Either adjacent, something like if you want to use AI, you can add onto it, but if you still want to use the main core functionality, like custom objects and flows that was there but not to have an AI arm to it, then you could still use the original. But how can we take these to the next level using the great technology that's come out over the past couple of years?

Mike: Yeah. Now, I think the use of apps within Salesforce has probably evolved since you and I were out in the world as we little admins wandering blindly through the Salesforce universe, because it's become ubiquitous that you'd use an app on your phone, right? Like there's specialized apps to do things. Oftentimes on my iPhone, I'll get an app, I'll try it out, it won't work, I'll just delete it, but I don't have a spare phone. What is best practice for admins evaluating apps, be it from Labs or somewhere on the AppExchange, in terms of trying and testing something out perhaps before it goes into production?

Sharon Klardie: There absolutely are some best practices. Number one will be we do not install brand-new apps we've never explored into production. We do not do that. I'll repeat, we do not do that. Some trailblazers like to explore in a dev org first, but the cons of that is you don't have your unique customizations. A lot of trailblazers have a lot of success in installing a Labs solution or a partner solution in a sandbox first so you can see how it interacts with the customizations you've made to the platform. But both either a dev org or a sandbox is absolutely where you want to start to check out any new solution, whether it be Labs or partner solution.

Mike: Yeah. So that was the first mistake that I made back in the day. I would just try things out in production. Why not?

Sharon Klardie: Yeah, no, hopefully nobody takes that guidance, Mike. Definitely it's much more advantageous for everyone to play around and see how things work. And it gives you a little bit more freedom as an admin to look under the hood and see how exactly it's going to work and then what your rollout plan is. Because it's just like what I tell my Labs builders, it's not if you build it, they will come. It's not if you install it, it will work, right?

Mike: Right.

Sharon Klardie: So you also need to have that kind of change management process at your organization. If you just install a new app and have some great functionality, if you don't tell your users about it once you move it to production, they might not know what to do with it or they might not use it in the way that you had in mind. I think we all know in technology, when we release things into the wild of our user base, we are going to come across some use cases and edge cases that we never thought might be the reality. So the more that you can get ahead of that and the change management process, it's just going to be smoother for both you as an admin and also for your end users.

Mike: Yeah. Now, one thing I'd be remiss not to cover, we talked a lot about consumption part, but you mentioned Labs is also open to non-Salesforce employees, correct?

Sharon Klardie: No. So only Salesforce employees today can create and distribute a Salesforce Labs solution.

Mike: Gotcha. But our AppExchange is open to non-Salesforce?

Sharon Klardie: Absolutely. We have a very robust partner ecosystem and a process to engage. It can be a free solution that somebody wants to create as a business to kind of spin up and share with the community. You can go through our partner program to do that. And of course, it's an ecosystem, so if you have a solution, idea that you believe is of value to our broader trailblazer community and customers, then you can engage with our program and list there. But anything created by Salesforce Labs is created by a Salesforce employee.

Mike: Yeah.

Sharon Klardie: And I just also want to note Labs go through the same security review process that all of our partner solutions go through as well.

Mike: Oh, so no cheating because it's a Salesforce employee?

Sharon Klardie: That's exactly right. Trust is our number one value here. We want all the Labs to adhere to that as well.

Mike: Right, yeah. No, it's same rules apply for everybody. That way you get the same quality and consistency. So that makes sense. Well, Sharon, thanks for coming on the podcast. I think this session's going to be awesome. I can't wait to hear what people have to say about it, and I can't wait to see what new stuff comes out from the Labs team.

Sharon Klardie: Yeah. Well, thank you for having me. Hopefully, it's the first time, but hopefully not the last time. I've really enjoyed chatting with you, Mike, and if anybody is at the session and shows up at Dreamforce, stop by and say hello. I'd love to meet you. And I'm on LinkedIn, and if you want to engage with that way, share any feedback about the Labs program, I'm happy to engage.

Mike: So a big thanks to Sharon for joining us and sharing some behind-the-scenes look at the Salesforce Labs. I don't know about you, but I'm ready to fire up a sandbox and test drive some :abs apps. That was always the most fun part for me as an admin. But remember, not in production, just in a sandbox or not in production. But hey, if you're heading to Dreamforce, don't miss her session on the seven, plus she says a few bonus free sessions to fuel your AI strategy. And remember, best part about Salesforce Labs apps is they're free and open, and they're built with you, the community, the Salesforce admins, developers, architects in mind. So with that, until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Abhishek Saxena, Technical Architect at Copado.

Join us as we chat about how he learned Data Cloud and why understanding context is the key to making Agentforce shine.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Abhishek Saxena.

Overcoming the complexity of Data Cloud As a developer and architect, Abhishek isn’t lacking for technical knowledge about the Salesforce platform. But even he found it hard to get his head around what Data Cloud was and what it could do.

Abhishek attended community events, scoured LinkedIn posts, studied videos, and even read a book about Data Cloud. But there were so many new terms being thrown around, and he still couldn’t explain the difference between a data lake object, a data model object, and a data source object.

“Even though there was a lot of buzz around Data Cloud and how it is such an amazing, innovative solution,” Abhishek says, “I was not able to grasp what it does in an easy fashion.” Luckily, he had an ah-ha moment that helped him see the big picture, and so he’s giving a presentation at Dreamforce to share what he’s learned.

What Data Cloud actually does Abhishek’s talk, “A Beginner’s Guide to Data Cloud,” will get you up to speed in 20 minutes or less. As he explains, the main thing to understand is that Data Cloud is about data unification.

If you have your data in a bunch of different places, you used to have to dedicate significant developer time to maintaining APIs that allowed Salesforce to share information with your other platforms. With Data Cloud, you have everything on one record, with Salesforce and Slack as the front door. You have a complete 360 view of your customer, regardless of where the information is.

Why Data Cloud is crucial for Agentforce Getting a complete picture of your customers is doubly important when it comes to Agentforce. AI agents are extremely context-dependent: they do a much better job when you “ground” them with extra parameters.

As Abhishek says, “If you give agents good data, your responses are going to be much more personalized and better.” Data Cloud allows you to give your AI agents a much more specific picture of your customers, opening the door for better and more effective automations.

If you’re coming to Dreamforce, make sure to come to Abhishek’s presentation so you can be a Data Cloud pro. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

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Full show transcript

Mike: So have you ever tried to figure out what a data lake is and then ended up wondering where the lifeguard's at? Ditto. Today on the Salesforce Admins podcast, we're talking with Abhishek Saxena, a Salesforce consultant with a developer's mindset and a teacher's heart. Abhishek's going to take us through his journey of learning Data Cloud and how it went from something buzzworthy to something he could really explain to a five-year-old. So if you've ever felt overwhelmed by new tech or just really weren't sure where to begin this episode's for you. Plus Abhishek gives us a sneak peek at his Dreamforce session and why understanding context is key in making AI tools like Agentforce shine. So with that, let's get Abhishek on the podcast. So Abhishek, welcome to the podcast.

Abhishek: Thank you so much for having me, Mike.

Mike: I'm excited to talk about this because of all the things going on at Salesforce, we've got a big event coming up in just a few weeks from when this is going to air, and you're doing a presentation there, but before we talk about that, let's find out a little bit about you. How did you get started doing stuff in the Salesforce ecosystem and want to present at Dreamforce?

Abhishek: Certainly. So I have been working in the Salesforce ecosystem for about 10 years now, it'll be 10 years later in November. I started off immediately after my college where I was studying computer science engineering. I always had an affinity to computers and how they work, so it was an easy choice to what to study. But getting into Salesforce, that was a happy coincidence. My hometown, where I'm originally from, it's called Jaipur, it's in India, and that's where I did my engineering from as well, Jaipur is traditionally not touted as a tech hub, but for some divine reasons there were several Salesforce consultancies that were trying to make it big in that area when I was just graduating, I got an offer to work for one of them as a Salesforce consultant after a series of intense grueling interviews. But yeah, that's how I got started, and I have never looked back since then.

Mike: Fresh out of college. And let's see, people heard this in the past, I've recently had somebody point out to me that my Salesforce experience is old enough it could graduate from high school. So your Salesforce experience is somewhere in middle school, I guess, at this point.

Abhishek: Yeah, sounds about right. I'm eager to get to high school and get to be the cool kid.

Mike: Well, right now it's getting its first iPhone and being popular. I don't know what ten-year-old kids do nowadays, I don't have kids, so we'll just move on. Eventually my experience will be in college and that'll scare me.

Abhishek: Yeah, I hope I can get the certified technical architect or MVP or one of those cool badges to show around everyone.

Mike: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, being in the ecosystem is just fun enough too. It's not going down the road with all those biker patches or like a race suit. It's not, what was that game? Pokemon? You don't have to collect them all. But you're talking Data Cloud, so tell me from your experience, what's so interesting about Data Cloud that admins need to know about it?

Abhishek: So as I mentioned, I've been in the ecosystem for a long time and got decent exposure on Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Experience Cloud, so yeah, just the core platform in general. But over the last few years, Data Cloud has been one of those top things, and most talked about things from Salesforce at events everywhere. So even though there was a lot of buzz around Data Cloud about how it is such an amazing innovative solution, it could replace some of the other tools that an organization might be using, I was not able to grasp what it does in an easy fashion. Especially around two years back, 2023 Dreamforce when it was relaunched after being renamed from Genie, I was trying to understand what it does, what could be its use cases, maybe look at some Trailhead modules, but at that point in time, there wasn't a lot that was available. So Trailhead modules weren't baked out completely. There weren't any demo environments that I could get hands on, and it just felt a little bit overwhelming. I knew my friends who were doing Marketing Cloud, Einstein, CDP, that sort of stuff, knew what was going on, but us commoners who were just working on the core clouds.

Mike: Us commoners.

Abhishek: Yeah, we weren't privy to that information as much as they were. So I started to get down on this journey to learn a little bit myself because yes, seems like everyone was talking about it. So I started by attending different community events in the States and Canada, trying to attend the Data Cloud specific sessions, read people's LinkedIn posts, watch some videos. I even read a book on Data Cloud-

Mike: Wow.

Abhishek: ... that one of our friends in the community had put out, but even then it was just so overwhelming trying to think about it logically. I am an engineer, I like to think about things in a logical analytical manner that, okay, I'll first learn the alphabets, then I'll start to learn words, sentences, so on and so forth. So I wasn't able to get that topography down in my mind that way to get started with Data Cloud. There was these few workshops or actually Salesforce Data Cloud trainings that Salesforce teams were doing several times a month. I had to attend that one training probably four times until it finally clicked to me that, okay, now it feels that I have the basics down of what's going on with Data Cloud, and if someone comes up to me and asks me about it, I'll probably be able to give at least a satisfactory answer on what exactly is Data Cloud. But at this point, now I had several months of experience trying to learn Data Cloud, I thought that, okay, let me go ahead and do the Data Cloud certification as well just to quiz myself if I know enough. I did that and I passed. So that was the validation I was seeking that, okay, now I am somewhat of a Data Cloud consultant. But I wanted to share this journey with everyone else because I consider myself fairly technical with a consultant and a developer background, and if it took me a lot of time to get through, then I would not blame anyone else in the ecosystem who's not as technical to not completely understand that, Hey, why Data Cloud? What is Data Cloud? Why is this important? So that's why I thought that yes, I need to share my knowledge with everyone else.

Mike: No, I get that. And what's so relevant about all that is when companies roll out features, and I'm not just speaking for Salesforce, but anybody, there's often a lot of thought and process that has gone into it, and just because you don't get it right away within a sentence or two or 10 seconds into somebody's presentation, that's not on you. That's just speaking to the complexity of perhaps the situation, where you're at in your learning journey, and then also just the complexity of the product that you're trying to understand. I think it's a lot for you to say, it took me a few months to kind of wrap my head around this. It doesn't just happen right away. And I think some people get really frustrated in themselves when they're like, well, I just don't get it.

Abhishek: No, absolutely. I agree with you. And yeah, I have been very lucky that I like what I do. So even after work, I'm not afraid to put in some hours to just sharpen my skills. But everyone's situation is not the same, you've got a life outside work as well, you've got so many things going on that sometimes you're just not able to put in those 10,000 hours to get perfect on something. And that's why I feel that if you attend my session on A Beginner's Guide to Data Cloud, at least in those 20 minutes that we are together, I could give you a good framework about, okay, after you leave it that I understand what is Data Cloud. I know what are some key use cases and why everyone says that it's needed for Agentforce. So that's what I'm trying to get out in those 20 minutes for everyone who has not yet had the opportunity and the luxury to actually focus on going through the Data Cloud trail certification modules or just having the training on the job of their own organization adopting Data Cloud yet.

Mike: Yeah. What was it for you, as you were investigating looking into and learning about Data Cloud, what was the first kind of piece of it that started to click for you that really was like, oh, I think I'm starting to understand it?

Abhishek: Yeah, great question. So when I was learning about it, and as I said, Data Cloud is a slightly different beast than the regular core clouds like Sales, Service, Experience, it's something called as a near core cloud. So it's not directly built on Salesforce, it's Salesforce adjusting, you can say. So some of the concepts that were being introduced, they were not getting my other knowledge that I had gained through learning Sales, Service and Experience Cloud. There were concepts called as Data Lakes, there were some activations, segmentations, things that I had never really learned in the other clouds while working on it. So even though it was somewhat difficult to get the vocabulary for Data Cloud to get started, once I was able to work through those first few basic things, the biggest aha moment for me was when I saw that Data Cloud can help you consolidate a lot of different records. So I'll try to explain this and I go into much more detail in my session as well. If anyone in our listeners is in the attendance, I would love to have you in my session. But just to give you a recap or a quick preview of what I'm going to talk about is that let's say your company uses Salesforce, your company also uses SAP for something else. Your company maybe uses Trello for tracking some stuff as well. So you have your record your identity as, since my name is Abhishek, all these systems have my identity there in SAP or ServiceNow, Abhishek can do certain things, maybe that has my personal email for some reason, or maybe a different phone number. And then the Abhishek on the Salesforce ecosystem, that record, that contact or user, has slightly different details. Maybe the address I put in is different. Maybe the phone number I put in is my work phone, and in the other one I put in my personal phone. So what Data Cloud ends up doing is that from these different identities of Abhishek that exist in these separate platforms that are not linked, it allows you to create one record where all of your identities are linked. So in case I want to get Abhishek's email in SAP, I can just call out to Data Cloud and Data Cloud will give that to me instead of myself having to write three or four different APIs trying to de-duplicate records, trying to find some common way or how it's called an external key of linking that, okay, this Abhishek in Salesforce and that Abhishek in SAP are the same person. Data Cloud takes all of that complexity out of this and just tells you that, okay, Abhishek's record exists in five systems, here are the values of different things in those five systems. And I could just get that. So once I understood this, I was like, wow, this unified data that Data Cloud is giving you could have so many ramifications. And that's again, one of those things that I explored in that presentation that how agents that need this sort of information can benefit from Data Cloud.

Mike: You were so close. I was about to say, wow, you just described Data Cloud and you didn't talk about agents. But no, what's crazy is thinking back in my umpteen hundred years of Salesforce experience, there's been different waves of where's your data? For a while it was, well, Salesforce is CRM, and then they had Service and then that takes care of that. But there's another system for this and there's another system for that, another system for that. And the world just kind of operated that way. It was like just understood, people had multiple systems to log into. And I remember for a long time when I was a Salesforce administrator, the big question was, well, such and such system, does X, can't Salesforce do that? And there was a big push for admins and developers to kind of rebuild all of this functionality into Salesforce. And so you would have these really robust time management or project management apps and the platform could more than easily handle it. And you didn't have to be a coder, you could build a project management app with a few objects and a couple dozen fields and some relationships, and there you're ready to go. And then it kind of became like, well, wait a minute, why are we spending all this time building on this platform when we can just connect things? But there was no sense of unification there. And I think in your description, what I heard is finally now you can have an entire enterprise where the front door is Salesforce or Slack and it can access all of that data and you're getting a complete view of a customer regardless of where the system information is, and that allows other applications and other things to run and do their job just well, but you still get that unified pull back in, and then you don't have the burden of a developer maintaining 200 APIs on the back end.

Abhishek: 100%, Mike, you got a spot on.

Mike: See, you're a good teacher. Look at what you just taught me.

Abhishek: Well, you are not a bad student either.

Mike: Well, I think a lot of people have had Data Cloud explained to them in terms of agents and Agentforce, and there's power there, but there's also the first step out the front door, which is, yeah, but what if your customer service people or your salespeople sit down and actually get that full view that we've been talking about regardless of where the system of that information lives?

Abhishek: Certainly, and that reminds me actually, so the terminology that Data Cloud uses is that you get the customer 360 view. Meaning that, okay, your organization uses Salesforce for CRM, you are using Azure to actually log into different systems, single sign on, maybe Excel and other Azure products. You're using Workday for HR related things. You're using Asana for project tracking. And like I said, you have different identities in these different systems, different values for maybe same fields, similar fields like email address, regular address, phone number, et cetera. But with Data Cloud, you are able to unify all of these different identities of a single user and then present that within your Salesforce systems as the customer 360 where you can access all these different details and take much more intelligent decisions. So hopefully now our listeners are able to get that, okay, why is it so important for Agentforce and why is it so important in general.

Mike: Yeah. So then that's my next question. Why is it so important for Agentforce?

Abhishek: So agents, like any AI, and I'm sure our listeners must have used some sort of AI at this point, ChatGPT, Gemini or anything. When do agents do their best work? They do their best work when they have good context to go on and a good prompt that the user asks. Now, what is context? Context means that if you ask it to write me a sales email, if that's your prompt, it's going to give you a very generic answer, a generic response that, okay, Dear ABC, are you interested in our sales services? Are you interested in buying our product? But that's going to be it. It's going to imagine a few things, it's going to skip out some important details. So basically the answer is going to be generic and not as helpful for your particular organization's scenarios. Now, if you provide the agent with good context that whenever agent responds, it knows that I'm working for Coral Cloud Resorts, I am responsible for handling bookings, I can refund things, I can access customer details and which objects to look at, where to get the information from. If your agent has these informations, or again, a simpler example that if you are in ChatGPT and tell it that, okay, I want to write a sales email as a customer service agent for Coral Clouds, my name is Abhishek Saxena, when you start your email, start with the salutation. This is intended to be for the guests who are staying at the resort. And if I give all of these details and then hit enter, the response I'm going to get is going to be a lot more personalized. And that's how you can automate it to send to any user that is using your agent. That's what I mean by why context is so important for any AI to work. And with Data Cloud, as we have discussed in the podcast so far, it gives you that unified profile. It gives you the customer 360 so that your agents have all the information about your particular user who is asking the question or to wherever you're trying to use it. Because good data, if you give it good data, your responses are going to be much more personalized and better.

Mike: And that's a lot of what we do in the Agentforce Now workshops like the one I do, the intro one where we talk about just prompts and even just writing a better, more descriptive prompt. If you think about it, I kind of reference it in the same way of it's like learning to cook with one cookbook or learning to cook with a library of cookbooks. If you have more references then you have more ways of looking at things and more context into providing better information and a better response.

Abhishek: Certainly.

Mike: I love it. I'm curious to know, in learning something, there's always something you're going to run into that maybe frustrates you or maybe for me, just bounces off the surface. What was it about Data Cloud that was kind of something you really had to work to try and understand that maybe other admins might be having difficulty understanding as well?

Abhishek: Yeah, great question. Like I said, most of my experience was on Sales Service Experience Cloud, so I was not a data specialist or a data consultant. So wrapping my head around what is a data lake? What is a data warehouse? What is the difference between a data lake object versus a data model object versus a data source object? How are they getting stored? Where are they getting stored? Is it not just another Salesforce object in which we are storing everything? So that's sort of basics of data processing that a typical data engineer knows, but a typical Salesforce consultant, admin developer does not, that was somewhat difficult for me to wrap my head around because in my training on working on Salesforce platform for so many years, I have been accustomed to think about data in terms of objects, Socket queries, and that form. But with Data Cloud, it's a little bit different. So that was one of the things that threw me off initially, and I had to look at some resources even outside of Salesforce's Data Cloud trainings to understand that data lake is not actually a lake. Data warehouse is not a big factory in which there are tons of books with data. So yes, that was something that threw me off initially.

Mike: Yeah, those terms when they first came out, I know I've done some podcasts like with Skip Sauls, and he's talked about putting a cabin next to the data lake and stuff that. I'm like, okay, who comes up with these terms? It's not helping me understand. Where's the data pond? Can you have a data swimming pool? Somebody decided lake. Abhishek, this has been a fun conversation. I think it's going to be a very compelling presentation at Dreamforce, but also I think it's been very inspirational, at least for me, that even the hard stuff is still not that hard to learn. I go back to a saying, everything in the world is created by somebody at some time, and if that somebody can figure it out, you certainly can too. So Data Cloud and Data Lakes was created by somebody, which means they figured it out, so it can't be that hard for anyone else to figure it out.

Abhishek: Yeah, no, absolutely. And as I said, you got to learn the alphabet before you can learn to work with words and work with sentences. And I firmly believe that if you cannot explain something to a five-year-old, then you don't understand it yourself. And again, a five-year-old needs to have that structure to understand it. So hopefully with the session that I've put together, everyone can learn the alphabet of Data Cloud and even start to make their own sentences.

Mike: I like it. Well, we'll see how many people can describe it to a five-year-old after we're done. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. This was a lot of fun.

Abhishek: The pleasure has been mine, Mike. Thank you for having me.

Mike: Okay, big thanks to Abhishek for joining us and breaking down what it really means to learn Data Cloud. I think I picked up a few things in just that short bit of time. Now, whether you're prepping for a certification or just trying to make sense of new tech, I really think his story was a reminder that persistence pays off and that even you as a Salesforce admin don't need to have to figure it all out in one day. So be sure to catch his session if you're going to dream for us and share this episode with a fellow Salesforce admin maybe who's also struggling to understand some new technology or just getting started with Data Cloud. Either way, until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Denise Carbone, Director of Delivery at ImagineCRM.

Join us as we chat about her journey from business analyst to external consultant admin and why AI makes BA skills even more valuable.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Denise Carbone.

Why business analyst skills are so important for AI Denise was working as a business analyst when she was first handed the keys to a Salesforce org. She remembers getting a plaque in the mail for being one of the first 500 people to become Salesforce certified.

Obviously we’ve come a long way since then, but the skills needed to understand a business problem and map out the requirements for a solution haven’t changed. As Denise explains, you have to be “process first, technology second.” I sat down with her for this episode to find out how these BA skills are even more important with Agentforce.

The power of asking why In order to really do your job well, an admin needs to be more than just an order taker. But if you’re spending your time running through a list of requests without having conversations with users and really understanding the business process, well, that’s a tough row to hoe.

Instead, you need to ask why. That’s where your business analyst skills come into play. You need to have a full understanding of how things currently work, where they could be improved, and who cares about it the most.

Admins in the age of AI Another key business analyst skill is change management. You may have built the coolest solution in the world, but how do you get folks to actually use it?

As Denise explains, if you want your solution to be adopted, you need to make it adaptive. As you’re building, you need to keep going back to your users for input. If they feel like their feedback is a part of the process, they’ll have ownership over the results.

While Agentforce has greatly expanded what the platform can do, it’s still just technology you’re using to help solve a business problem. As long as you understand the why behind a request, you can build solutions that transform your organization.

Be sure to listen to the full episode for more from Denise on business analyst best practices and the importance of establishing AI governance policies. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

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Full show transcript

Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, I'm joined by Denise Carbone, longtime admin, Salesforce MVP, and all-around champion of business analysis. We unpack her journey from BA to external admin through the power of asking why, and why AI makes those foundational skills more valuable than ever. So, whether you're like me and you've just figured out dependent picklists, or you're leading delivery teams, I promise Denise's insight on governance, process and career growth is a must-listen. So with that, let's get Denise on the podcast. So Denise, welcome to the podcast.

Denise Carbone: Awesome. Thanks, Mike. I'm really happy to be here.

Mike: I know, I've been to a whole bunch of Chicago user groups, I can't believe I haven't had you on the podcast. So, I've tipped the scale a little bit in your favor, but tell us how you got into the ecosystem and what you do in Chicago.

Denise Carbone: Yeah. No, thank you. Thank you. Yes, longtime listener of the podcast so happy to be here. So, I actually started in the ecosystem in 2004. I was a BA turned external admin. I was working for a technology company in Chicago, and I was bestowed the ownership of our Salesforce platform. I was a BA operations kind of girl. I've done work in CRM systems like Goldmine and Act!, so really old system. So, when Salesforce was presented to me I wasn't totally intimidated. I knew it was a CRM platform, I just didn't know much about it. I will be honest, I did not fall immediately in love with it. Later on I found out why. It was not because of the platform or the technology, it was because of lack of governance and processes. So, when I was doing reporting and operational metrics and things weren't being presented, as the CEO was saying, as they wanted to see them, it turned out just a lack of the governance and the processes is what really caused those issues. So, I put my BA hat back on and went back to the team, and explained some of these points we had to clean up and just do better with some guidance, and some structure and rigor around using the tool in the platform me. And that was in 2004, so in 2006 I attended my first Chicago user group meeting. Completely intimidated. I had major imposter syndrome because I really didn't know much about the platform. Do I even belong here? But I needed to learn, I had that desire and curiosity to really build out my skill set. So, I got a little bit more comfortable in this ecosystem. And then, in 2008 I was presented an opportunity to help co-lead the group. The user group leader was moving on and actually going to work for Salesforce at that time, and left a vacancy in Chicago. So I said, "Yes, sure." At the time I agreed to helping co-lead the Metro Chicago area, so just anything in the city limits. And that same year I actually took the certification exam. So, in October of 2008 I was certified as an admin. So that solidified, put to rest slightly the imposter syndrome that I was carrying along, but felt really confident and good about that. And a few months later I received a plaque in the mail, I was one of the first 500 people globally to become Salesforce certified.

Mike: Welcome to the club.

Denise Carbone: Thank you. It was a really cool designation at the time, but yet looking back how many years later, I'm like, "Oh my God." And today with the number of certified professionals out there and all the different types of certifications available, it's a pretty cool little fun fact. So, I like to share that. And going into my career, and again, I was on the client side for the past, starting my career from 2004 on the client side, learning the platform, being that admin, external admin, utilizing my business analyst skills, always asking the questions of why. In 2013, I actually joined the MVP program, so super, again, imposter syndrome, why am I here? Appreciate all the peer support, love being there, but also completely intimidated. I wasn't sure if I belong, but it was a really cool opportunity for me to learn and grow, get to meet amazing people like yourself, Mike.

Mike: Oh, thank you.

Denise Carbone: And Steve Moe, actually, I was a huge fan of Steve's. Met him through the MVP program, became friends to date. The MVP program just helped me solidify my career and just learning journeys I think is where it helped me the most. In 2015 I took the leap over to the partner side, so I needed the opportunity to really stretch my skillset. Working on the client side, you really are focused on industry specific workflows and processes, your growth opportunities on the industry side, at least for me at that time, were a little bit limited. So, going over to the partner side was really an opportunity for me to stretch my skillsets in both BA and admin, working with clients, getting to know why they're building something and less about the how. So, one of my mantras I use all the time is it should always be process first and then technology second. I've seen situations where people love the shiny things and, "Oh, we can automate this and turn this on, and doesn't this look great?" And the design of the layout is, it's not intuitive, it's hard to follow. It doesn't make sense. It's over-automated, over-architected, over-engineered, so I always like to peel it back and ask the questions why, and get to learn more about the users, more about what we're trying to solve for. I love that journey, and when I joined the partner side I had the opportunity to really upskill myself in both BA, administration, and then just focused on delivery. So on the partner side today, I am a director of delivery. I stepped into a leadership role in the past 10 years. So, I started as a director of delivery in 2015 with a team of one. I was able to build a team of 14 people, which means I manage a team of consultants, and I am accountable for all of our project success. Today I'm in the same industry, work for a smaller SI. We are focused in the philanthropy space and also nonprofits. Again, I support a team of consultants and I am very client-facing. I work day-to-day with our teams, I meet with our clients, and I'm accountable for the overall project success. So, one of the things I really love about the job I do today is the coaching and the mentoring for learning and upskilling. In this space in the day and age that we're in today, things change fast. I remember last summer seeing a preview of the Dreamforce keynote where they're talking about agents, and being presented to us, and what do we think about this, and how does this work? I will say Salesforce has done an amazing job at providing enablement so that we can all start this learning journey, and you have to stay up to date with it because it changes, as you know, as the ecosystem knows, almost weekly. So, it's been fantastic. But today, again, I focus on project delivery with my teams, and upskilling, and supporting, and mentoring folks.

Mike: Wow, you said a lot in all of that answer. So, I want to dig into what you're presenting at Dreamforce, but there was a theme in your answer that's come through on quite a few podcasts, which is imposter syndrome. Do you feel that a lot of admins get into their role because they weren't pursuing something in tech and they fell into it? Is that where you were feeling your imposter syndrome? And to be fair, I also want you to clarify, when you say BA you mean business analyst, right?

Denise Carbone: Correct, yes. Business analyst.

Mike: Okay. So I mean, you had a background in business analyst skills. That's not a skill to scoff at. What do you think was giving you the imposter syndrome?

Denise Carbone: That's a great question. I think it was learning the technology and learning the platforms, I felt at the time when I fell into it, anything technology related you would be categorized as a developer, and it was very tech heavy. We used technology, we used business tools, but it was just a tool. I didn't have to learn the behind the scenes. So, I felt a little intimidated that we're learning the system, and I think the power of the platform, which really helped solidify my career and I think a lot of people's career back at that time was the clicks not code focus and everything that you're able to do declaratively. That was a huge lift for people's career. Obviously when I started back in 2004 I wasn't seeking out a role in the Salesforce ecosystem, and I'm using my air quotes here, because it wasn't really a thing. We didn't call it out at that time. It was a business tool, and it took you through a whole wave and phase of a career path. And today in this space, I think it was even maybe eight years ago when people were really talking about career transitions, and they wanted to get into the Salesforce ecosystem and they wanted to learn Salesforce, and it was definitely a shift in that learning and it became a career back in 2004. And I don't know about even yourself and folks, was that something people aim for? I think it started becoming a career path more towards maybe 2008, 9, 10, when certifications become more prevalent.

Mike: I mean, I ask because I'm the similar path. I was hired to do something else, and along the way of improving business process Salesforce became vital. And so it was, "Well, I have to learn this because it's really at the crux of improving our business process." There's only so much I can do to suggest sales stages and stuff, but without the technology supporting it. And so yeah, I mean, I accidentally fell into it, and within easily a couple years I was like, "This is my full-time job."

Denise Carbone: It does become full-time job, for sure. I think my skillset in being a business analyst, my superpower, if I'm getting asked that today what's my superpower, is being able to break down complexity and talk in layman terms. That is a huge, again, superpower, because I have this ability to hear and kind of visualize in my head a process flow chart. Like, "Okay, we start here." I always ask people if we're trying to elicit requirements and gather requirements, understand a day in the life of the X persona, "Walk me through your day," and they walk through stuff. And you start getting a visual and how you can build it, but outside of the technology is really getting to know their process and building out. Because sometimes people say, "Oh, this is so different. You've probably never seen this before." Well, some cases maybe because maybe really broken, or sometimes it's just they never took time to step a few steps back and optimize, make things more efficient. So, I love efficiencies, I love optimization, I love the ability to break down complexities, I love the ability to speak in layman terms. I think that's a learning that I've taken wholeheartedly through my journey because I can speak business speak, I don't want to speak Salesforce speak if the recipient on the other end doesn't speak Salesforce. So, I want to speak in a language that's going to be comfortable for them, and then break down the complexity and really help and work to build systems that are going to bring the client along for the journey.

Mike: I feel like we've gotten a hell of a preview of your Dreamforce presentation. Because I don't know if admins always think, "Well, I'm doing business analysis," how do you look at business analysis maybe different than somebody that's never been formally trained?

Denise Carbone: That's a great question, and this will definitely be part of my session, is I always ask why. There's been a mantra back in the admin world-

Mike: Forever.

Denise Carbone: Yeah, we're not order takers. We should ask the question on why. I've heard people say, "You should say no," but I would challenge that and say, "Well, ask why," because that is the root of what a business analyst is doing is they have this curiosity mindset where they are just like, "Well, why? Why do you do this? Have you ever considered this?" Just not saying no per se. I like to say, "Yes, and," but you give the options. Because you can do it, this, this or this, but what are the impacts of your decision if you go that route? So, I believe that admins inherently have some BA, business analyst built into their skills, it's just maybe they don't realize it yet, it's unrealized. But they actually do in a way, if they're asking what somebody wants, and they should also follow up with why. I think that should be the starting question honestly, and then go forward and then do the build if applicable. But it's definitely a learned skill. The other flip side to that is, I think there was, I've heard it before and it's so not true, that business analysts are not just note takers. They should never be a note taker. I mean, they can do documentation, but they're not glorified note takers. It's definitely a skillset where you talk about a user story, or a requirement, or use cases. Those are all three very separate things. And the reason why you do some of this documentation upfront is to make sure that what we're building as admins meet the technical requirements for the end user.

Mike: What is your best advice for an admin to not be a note taker? Because I think when I first started, I knew improvements that needed to be done because I was in sales and I was working on sales. And so, very easily out of the box I was like, "Well, I know we need this. I know we need to track that." And then it quickly became my user seeing the change and offering for, "Well, can you add this? Can you add this? Can you add that?" And I think what I realized early on was I really wanted to appease my users right away. Like, "Oh yeah, absolutely I can do this." Or I remember the time, this is going to sound silly, I remember I figured out how to do dependent picklists, and let me tell you, I was like, "I can code the internet, because I can make a picklist where if you pick hot dogs it can say 'Red Hots,' and if you pick hamburgers it can say, 'Rare, medium, well.'" And I just thought I was the cat's pajamas.

Denise Carbone: [inaudible 00:16:51] it was very powerful.

Mike: Yeah. And then your users are like, "Well, can you make it do this?" I was like, "Yes, I can. Ha-ha. That's a dependent picklist." For a while all I wanted to build was dependent picklists. But how do you move from that to like, "No, I need to set a vision. I need to understand more of what's going on"? How do you make that your approach versus piling up a bunch of tickets?

Denise Carbone: That's a great question. So, you want to make sure that it's going to be adopted, that we always talk about adoption in the space, and adapted, being adaptable to things and change. So, there's a whole change management aspect of what we do. I do believe that through the journey and empowering the admins, it's making sure, so partnering with the end user. I think it's on the consulting side we always say, "We're a partner," so we partner with our clients. It is a partnership because we can do the work but we need their input, and we want feedback. So, it's like a continuous feedback loop. So, we have a hybrid methodology in how we do things today, but it's definitely we will gather requirements, and get approval of these requirements, and do some build, and we build that. We break it up in sprints, maybe theme it out by certain features and functionality and present it back to the end user and get their feedback. "Does this work? Does this look good? Are we missing anything? Is there any key step that we did not capture?" It's really getting that buy-in as you're doing the build so that it can easily be adopted, and you're getting the feedback in the time where it's more real time. So, if it's features and functionalities that are, like you said, the bells and whistles of dependent picklists were amazing, but after a while it could become stale and they're not using it. The goal is, I always say less is more. You don't want to overkill something that's not going to be used. Even today I was talking to somebody earlier about utilizing a tool to be able to scan all the metadata and see all the unused fields that were created at one point in time that are just sitting out there and untouched for a long time. So, we have to get rid of that technical debt. So, my approach and my recommendation or suggestion is for people to really partner with who they're building it for so that they can get the buy-in, get feedback. "Does it work? What would you like to see? Does the user interface still, is that intuitive?" I feel like with the new Lightning design pages, Mike, we grew up on Classic, remember that?

Mike: Oh, I know. We've called it a few other things too, like Aloha. But yeah, Classic. I remember describing to my users, Salesforce is like the Amazon interface because at the time Amazon had those tabs. The world has gotten away from tabs on websites now.

Denise Carbone: They have.

Mike: We're too fancy for that.

Denise Carbone: When I log into something I'm like, "Wait, where do I go?" So, the intuitiveness of some of these apps and the design is escaping the newer, what's being published today. But it's really, you want to make sure whatever you're building is going to be usable, it's intuitive. All the things like practical foundational serum, best practices should always be applied, and I feel like it's really partnering with who you're building it for. And the business analyst aspect that feeds into the admin role is that why are you building it? What are you building? The how is always something, I don't necessarily know if the end users need to see behind the curtain for it, but you want to make sure that what you're building is, it works and it flows well. I always still laugh because it still comes up today, we don't want to do all these clicking. So, there's many magical ways to make things a lot faster than to do all these clickings. The automation tools that are available today on the platform are amazing, the flow automation is just next level. So, I feel like there's a lot of opportunity there to do really cool things, but you want to make sure the cool things are really going to support the folks that are going to use the platform.

Mike: I couldn't agree more. So, let's talk about the cool things. AI is everywhere, and that's in your session.

Denise Carbone: It is.

Mike: So, let's talk about why. I mean, there's been a lot. There's always new features coming out with Salesforce, and sometimes we cover features too heavily but I feel like there's AI in everything. I was at a car dealer website the other day and they had an AI chatbot on the homepage. I was like, "Man, if car dealers got it, you know everybody's got it now." So, what makes it different for admins about why we need to learn and understand business and analyst skills in the age of AI?

Denise Carbone: That is a great question. There's truly a distinction between our human skills and the strengths of AI. AI is definitely a tool. It can be your autonomous agent, it can support different tasks, but the human skills are and will always hopefully remain relevant in this space. Right now, humans bring to the table we can do critical thinking, we provide judgment. Most people have emotional intelligence. The thing about BAs too, I talk about, and I think this is a skill that crosses both the adaptability and growth mindset, we have to be able to think differently. As humans, we are, "Okay, so what's the new shiny thing out there? Do I need to learn this? How is it impacting the work I do today?" That statement I just said about, "Do I need to learn this? How does it impact the work today?" For me, just a full transparency, I did not need to learn how to actually build flows for a while. I needed to be able to document and explain what needed to happen based on a client's experience, or their workflow, or their processes. So, I would document processes and I would be able to document the heck out of how to explain or the build steps to create a flow. But I didn't have to be hands-on right away. I do know how to build flow and I can build flows, but it wasn't a skill that I had to learn because I was able to document that, write that, and I was able to articulate it well enough so that an admin or one of our builders was able to pick it up and run with it to build. But this day and age today with AI, it is here, it is not going away. It is not like a nice to learn later, it is if you don't know it or if you haven't started, you're already behind. And that's one of the pieces I really want to emphasize is that if you have, and I would beg to differ with the folks attending Dreamforce, if this is not on the radar, if they're not already in this learning journey, I'm sure a good majority of them are because it is so prevalent. But if they're not, they're already left behind. But I do feel that the human skills, storytelling, communication, ethnical reasoning, these are things that we bring to the table to it. Using AI, AI is really good at processing, data processing, or summarizing, maybe some automation. They're good at pattern recognition, but they're lacking certain human emotions, human elements that go into the work that we do today.

Mike: I can agree with that. It's also fun if you ask it for things and it's like, "Yep, that sounds bad." And you're like, "No, you wouldn't understand."

Denise Carbone: Yeah, one of another piece I'm going to hone in on a bit in the session is admin skills and BA skills are needed because you have to vet it. So many times I've seen people generate, the generative AI, I read this thing, I was like, "This is so AI generated." I'll go back to my team and I'm like, "All right, so here's my problem. What other sources did you reference this on? Is this validated? This to me," and I'll point out a spot, "This looks like a hallucination. Is this a real thing?" "I don't know." And I was like, "Well, you need to check that."

Mike: Yeah. I was recently on a long road trip and some people in the car were scrolling through Facebook ads and stuff, and the one was like, "Oh, hey. Hey, I think I found one." And they read it and I go, "That was 100% generated by AI." It was describing some 1992 used car, and it said, "With a fresh battery for those cold starts on Iowa mornings." And I was like, "Anybody that's selling a $2,000 car probably doesn't have the copy editing skills to put that level of detail into the ad." So, yeah.

Denise Carbone: Yeah, the description and the adjectives totally give it away.

Mike: I mean, I am starting to get to the point where you look at an article and you're like, "That's AI generated," and I'll just give it to another AI and be like, "Just tell me what this says." So, great. And so, I have to think back that somewhere AI is sitting going, "Isn't it fun that the humans make us type all this stuff out and then the human make us decode all of our own stuff?"

Denise Carbone: Probably, probably. It is a little humorous in what we ask it to do. I know someone that actually wanted constructive feedback on his code, so he fed, and he actually asked the bot or the agent to change his tone to be, I don't know, he called irrigate or snotty. So, he wanted to get the constructive feedback versus the, "Oh, this is great." So, it was pretty funny and it was actually a pretty fun read on some of the feedback, and there's a lot of experiments you can do with it. But yeah, in the end I think you really need to validate, at least from a solution perspective what it's doing. It's entertaining in some ways, but other ways you really need to validate against other true sources.

Mike: So I'll end on, I hope it's not a hard question but it is something I'm curious about.

Denise Carbone: Sure.

Mike: As a business analyst, what is a question you ask now because of AI that you didn't ask before?

Denise Carbone: That is a great question. One of the things we ask people or clients today is, "What is your AI policy?" And what that actually entails is also governance, because there's certain aspects of the platform that based on industry certain people not are allowed to use it. Or we have even some scenarios where we would use a Zoom recording and there's an AI summary function. Some people don't allow that. But actually when it comes to platform questions, it's relevant in that do you have a policy? You're thinking about a governance, there is a good 50-50 that don't and a good 50-50 that do. It's also what are your thoughts about using AI? Do you have any use cases today that you're thinking about using? We also recommend maybe AI readiness, which means do you have those use cases? Do you have policies or governance in place? How do you think you want to use AI? And then we can provide use case examples based on those responses, but those are the top few questions we ask.

Mike: Yeah, I could understand that because otherwise everybody's just going to be, "Well, at this point I just have Bob," because I'm waiting for somebody to call AI Bob, "Generate this," and cool. So, isn't that your job? Yes, it is. Yes, it is.

Denise Carbone: It is.

Mike: Denise, I think your session at Dreamforce is going to be amazing. I hope you can get out into the user group world and share more BA skills with admins, because I want us to be more than order takers. And I say that for all of the personas, I don't think a developer should be an order taker or an architect. I mean, bring yourself into the role, and bring your knowledge and experience because that's what they hired you for, right?

Denise Carbone: Yeah, for sure. No, I love it. And we have some really great BAs out there in the space, but I'm also happy to support and share knowledge, and just talk through these scenarios, because the work is not going away. It's only getting deeper.

Mike: Right, I know. The work's not going away, it's just going to change.

Denise Carbone: Right.

Mike: Right? Thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Denise Carbone: Awesome. Thank you, Mike.

Mike: Big thanks to Denise for sharing her story and dropping some really insightful knowledge about the intersection of business analysis and admin work in the age of AI. And her message, ask why, build smart, and don't let imposter syndrome hold you back really resonates with me. Now, if you found this episode helpful, pass it along to a fellow Salesforce admin, or a teammate, or a friend maybe. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Nicole Pomponio, Director of Delivery Management and Operations at SaltClick.

Join us as we chat about how admins can unlock the full potential of Slack in Salesforce.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Nicole Pomponio.

Why Slack is changing what it means to be an admin If you’re planning on coming to Dreamforce this year (or catching it at home), you’re probably going to hear a lot about new ways of combining Agentforce and Slack. That’s why I’m excited I got a chance to sit down with Nicole for this episode and have a conversation about her Dreamforce presentation.

Nicole is the Director of Delivery Management and Operations at SaltClick, a consultancy for Salesforce and Slack, so she’s eager to find new ways to get the most out of both platforms. The ever-deepening integration between Salesforce and Slack means there are all sorts of new ways to connect users with data.

As Nicole explains, all this means that the entire idea of what an admin can do is becoming more and more expansive.

Getting organizational buy-in for Slack If your organization isn’t using Slack, how do you get the buy-in you need to overcome inertia? And if you are using Slack, how do you get the most out of it?

Nicole is an admin, but she’s also a decision-maker at SaltClick, and when she puts on her leadership hat, she wants to hear about business problems and possible solutions. So the key to getting buy-in is to reposition Slack from something that sends messages to something that can solve real business problems.

“I think the magic of Slack is that when you're using it and when you're using it right, it's easily adopted,” Nicole says, “you don’t have to sell it because when you use it, you showcase it.” For example, identify how many meetings can be eliminated with a dedicated channel on Slack, or show how much you can simplify your team’s workflow with the Jira integration.

Tips, tricks, and best practices for Slack As Nicole explains, it’s helpful to establish some rules of the road for how your organization will use Slack. Here are a few tips to get started:

• Have consistent naming conventions for channels. SaltClick uses prefixes to keep things organized: #ext for external channels, #int for internal channels, and #salt for fun stuff like #salt-babies.
• Let your users know how to organize things for themselves, especially how to leave or mute a channel that they don’t need to use every day.
• Make a channel for dedicated Slack support, so you can quickly help folks who get stuck.
• Establish guidelines for what Slack etiquette means at your organization and any emojis you’re using.
• Make space for fun, but mostly on a different channel from work.

Make sure to check out Nicole’s Dreamforce presentation, in-person or online. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

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Learn more * Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: What Can Salesforce Admins Do With Slack and Agents? * Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: What Can Salesforce Admins Do with Slack Integrations? * Salesforce Admins Blog: Slack and Salesforce: The Power of No-Code Automation * Salesforce Admins Blog: Getting Started With Slack and Agentforce Integration

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Full show transcript

Mike: Slack-first doesn't have to mean Slack-only. And today's guest, Nicole Pomponio, tells us why. Nicole is the delivery and operations manager at SaltClick, and she's going to tell us, Salesforce admins, how we can unlock the full potential of Slack and Salesforce. In addition, Nicole shares her journey from accidental admin to leadership, and she gives us some insight into building intentional channel structure, integrating external platforms, like Jira, and reshaping the admin role in this new very connected era. So whether you're Slack-curious or already swimming in salty channels, you're going to walk away with some ideas you can use. And with that, let's get Nicole on the podcast. So Nicole, welcome to the podcast.

Nicole Pomponio: Thank you so much for having me, Mike. Super excited to be here.

Mike: I'm excited for everything that's coming up for Dreamforce. Last week we got done talking about navigating flow errors as an administrator, and the irony is I had to do a workshop and navigate my own flow error. So it's fortuitous the way things happen sometimes when you report a podcast.

Nicole Pomponio: It was meant to be. It was meant to be.

Mike: But Slack is a thing, and Slack's been a thing for a while, and you're going to present about Salesforce channels inside Slack. Before we talk about that, let's learn a little bit about you, Nicole. Tell us what you do in your everyday life and how you got into the Salesforce ecosystem.

Nicole Pomponio: Absolutely. I have been in the Salesforce ecosystem for about 14 plus years. I stopped counting because it makes me feel old. Got started reporting, and it grew from there. I was lucky enough to become a solo accidental admin, and then the opportunities just spun up from there. My day-to-day life right now, I manage delivery and operations over at SaltClick. We're a consultancy for Salesforce and Slack, so I get to work with very bright people building out super fun solutions for customers and ourselves, and that's Salesforce and Slack together, which also gets me very excited.

Mike: I reached the same kind of milestone where my Salesforce experience, somebody said, oh, it's old enough that it could have graduated from high school.

Nicole Pomponio: Oh, ouch.

Mike: Yeah, burn. Yours at least has a learner's permit.

Nicole Pomponio: I'm almost driving, yeah.

Mike: Right, almost driving.

Nicole Pomponio: I'm almost driving.

Mike: There's no segue to talk about Slack and driving. Things you shouldn't do while driving.

Nicole Pomponio: There you go.

Mike: Have your phone and use Slack. Why do admins need to discover channels in Slack?

Nicole Pomponio: It's such a great timely question, Mike. For me, there's no better time because Slack is being positioned in front of Salesforce, and I know we just aged ourselves a little bit, but it's really the first time that I've seen that happen and seen it done in a really meaningful way. So from my perspective, we're starting to see a really close merge of Slack, this communication powerhouse, with Salesforce and having the ability to understand and navigate both right now is going to be such an amazing opportunity, and I think it starts to rewrite the narrative of what an admin is.

Mike: Oh, how so?

Nicole Pomponio: An admin, I think it's been changing over the years. If we look at what a Salesforce admin historically was, we're creating workflows, we're navigating some fields, some page layouts, and then we're growing from there. We're working with flows, and we're starting to dip our toe into becoming developers maybe, if we want to take that path. And now it's merging more with other platforms. As a Salesforce admin, I need to also understand connected platforms, how to maybe connect to different systems. So over the course of, I think rapidly the past three years, what an admin has been I think is no longer just those foundational Salesforce elements. It's really starting to evolve. So I see that happening too with Slack, so bridging the gap a little bit, expanding out to other systems. So I do think it's shifting, and Slack has helped shaping that.

Mike: I mean, I always look at how many meetings are people in. And I remember when Salesforce required Slack. Of course, we had a lot of collaboration tools, and organizations have a lot of collaboration tools. With channels, does the collaboration tool become the channel, or how does it really narrowly define what some of the users are looking for in terms of supplemental data outside of what's on the record?

Nicole Pomponio: That Slack channel, now merging with Salesforce, of course, we've got Salesforce channels, really is that collaboration. It's a point where teams are coming together. They're not having to wait for that weekly meeting. I'm not having to wait for my monthly meeting, my weekly meeting. I can work async in Slack, but all of that information is being condensed and surfaced in that Slack channel, so it's easier for us to find what we're looking for. Everything stays together. If we're using threads like we should, all of those answers are within one thread. We're seeing associated files. And now with Salesforce channels, we're seeing that Salesforce data as well in details tabs and related lists. Everything's right there surfaced and condensed for us, so it really creates an efficiency that I don't think we've seen before.

Mike: Do you feel in terms of broadening the reach and looking at other platforms, I mean at Salesforce we look at Slack and Salesforce is really just the platform, how have you navigated working with others in your organization to integrate platforms into Salesforce?

Nicole Pomponio: It's one of my favorite questions.

Mike: Ooh.

Nicole Pomponio: I love to bring things into Slack. I really want to, and this is a little bit selfish of me, I just want to be in Slack. I'm biased heavily here. So the more that I can bring in, I think the better it's going to be for me. But also our teams. We talk about Slack being our work operating system and wanting to do more in the flow of work, all these buzzwords and phrases we hear. What does that really mean? It's bringing those systems in, whether it's just the data or it's actually actions and connecting out too. So I think the example that is top of mind for me, because I'm in it constantly, is Jira. So I want to connect with Jira through Slack so that I can create issues, I can update issues. I just get things done faster with pulling in those external systems, the data, but now the actions too, right?

Mike: Right.

Nicole Pomponio: Which that gets me really excited because if we're talking about our agentic era, then if I start to think about the data that's available to me and the actions I could potentially do, I think natural next step is can I get an agent to do them for me? Which, if we're talking about efficiency, frees up my time for the higher level things. I love to spend my time with people. So I know that was a long way from connecting systems and bringing things in, but it becomes my favorite question because we can start to do so much when we connect systems that we're using every day and when we're actioning in those systems too.

Mike: Well I, just for clarity's sake, I prefer the long scenic route of the answer, not the short, short route.

Nicole Pomponio: Oh, good. Oh, good. Yeah, mine are long.

Mike: Drive around the block, got to see everything, take the long way. Sunday afternoon cruise in the convertible.

Nicole Pomponio: Perfect.

Mike: So one question I have, and this goes back to maybe I was an admin in a different era, it sounds like your organization is bought in and your leadership is bought in to let's make Slack the interface for a lot of our work. Is that true?

Nicole Pomponio: Yeah, we are Slack-first.

Mike: Okay. Did you sell that vision or was that a consensus that came down from leadership that you embraced and get to work towards?

Nicole Pomponio: I mean, Mike, I would love to take all of the credit for this. Sometimes I do. Just kidding. I don't. It's a top-down, bottom-up type of approach. I think the magic of Slack is that when you're using it and when you're using it right, it's easily adopted, and I don't have to sell it, if you will, because I use it, I showcase it, and then everyone sees the power of that. My favorite thing is the light bulb moments. So the more that we can do that, the easier that story becomes. But I will say when I started at SaltClick, it was almost three years ago, time flies, it was already heavily being used, and one of my predecessors was really starting to push on what is Slack, how can we use it? And I really gravitated toward that, so I just started to pick that up, training sessions for folks, really empowering people and pushing them to Slack's help articles because they're amazing. So it just became a natural conversation for us. And now it's people coming to me saying, hey, can we do this with Slack? I just posted something about Gearset and getting notifications and then linking out to pull requests to understand what's being validated, what's failing. That wasn't my idea. Shout out to Jacob on my team because he knows that we can use Slack for many different things, and he wants to make his own life easier. So it's become a natural conversation for us. What can we do in Slack, and how can we do it? People come to me with half-baked ideas. I love it, and then I just help get it to the finish line. I might have an idea I reach out to somebody about, but it is really all hands in on Slack.

Mike: Okay, you win. You got the fun leadership. So let's play the opposite side of that coin. The admin's bought in, you, and you see the vision, you see the potential, but perhaps leadership, they're busy. They don't pay attention 24/7, like you do, to the innovation that's coming out of Salesforce and Slack. But you know your users and you know the pains and the gaps within the organization. What would your advice be for an admin that's maybe going to go to Dreamforce or maybe watched a YouTube video online about Slack or just knows that their organization has Slack, but it's like, to me it's like Slack's like a Ferrari and you use it to go to the store and buy a gallon of milk every week and you don't use it to its full potential. What would your advice be for those admins to get the organization to flip to where you are at?

Nicole Pomponio: I think that's such a great question. And just to be fair for the previous question, I am on our leadership team, so that was-

Mike: So you have sway there too.

Nicole Pomponio: ...it's an unfair advantage for me. But if I put my leadership hat on, what I'm looking for is not just the problem but the solution. So for folks that are trying to navigate, well, how do I really showcase this, it's really difficult sometimes to get enough data to show ROI. But if you go to leaders in your organization, you say, hey, I see this problem. I think that Slack can solve this for us, can fill this gap, here's how we could do it, I don't know many leaders that would just say, hard pass. I don't want to even look at that. I think taking that initiative would really show that you're invested and showing the solution to that problem I think would be phenomenal. I think as leaders we tend to see problems and we have potential solutions, but we really want input and buy-in from the people that are using the tools, right?

Mike: Right.

Nicole Pomponio: It shouldn't just be the Nicole show. I want to definitely understand that it's going to add value for folks. So if you are one of those people that are really trying to showcase what Slack can do, I would suggest going to Slack sessions at Dreamforce. I would suggest joining the Slack community and making some friends in there. I'll definitely say hi to you, but really poke around at here's a problem I'm trying to solve, what's a way I could do it With Slack? I know I would be willing to help folks, but anyone in the community would be willing to help too. And I bet you, in some of the sessions that you're going to, you're going to see a lot of use cases and a lot of ways to solve those problems. So that's what comes to mind for me when I think, how do I reposition this tool that might just be seen as a way to send messages to something that can actually solve some business problems for us.

Mike: I mean, I've felt that way. So you opened up a whole other can of questions when you said you're on leadership. I think that's incredibly awesome that you're a Salesforce admin and you're in leadership. For admins that aren't in leadership, was this just the way that your organization operates, the admin is part of leadership, or how did you get that seat at the table?

Nicole Pomponio: Such a great question. Many of your questions are great questions.

Mike: I try really hard. I'm thinking of hosting a podcast where I ask questions. What do you think?

Nicole Pomponio: I think this would be a great journey for you [inaudible 00:14:58].

Mike: Okay, we'll see how it works out.

Nicole Pomponio: I think in our organization I have the flexibility and opportunity to be the Slack owner as well as participate in being that Salesforce admin as well. It's a shared responsibility, so it's not just me doing it. But because of the experiences I've had, not only being a Salesforce admin, being a Salesforce BA, being the doer and the navigator in different business units in my past life, I've been able to take that with me wherever I go. So it is a gift that I'm able to bring at SaltClick to be able to do multiple things, but I really enjoy coaching others on that too. So for me in leadership, it's been very powerful because I can understand how we can use our systems to really solve our business needs. And again, SaltClick gives me the opportunity to continue to do the things that bring me joy.

Mike: That's a really good, really good answer. See good questions, good answers. On the subject of Slack, because I'd love to know, how often do you communicate with your users broadly? Do you have a dedicated Slack channel? Do you run help through Slack? Is there a place for them to ask questions? How do you run user engagement on your end?

Nicole Pomponio: So from the SaltClick lens, we have fun channels. We have learning channels, training channels. We have chit-chat channels. We all have some salty channels as well because we like to have fun. We have Salty Babies and Salty Pets. I'm a jokester, and I can't help but bring corny jokes into every aspect of my life. And then as a Slack community group leader, I have a channel in our Slack workspace as well. So from the Slack community lens, the engagement there is really answering questions that come in. Sometimes you're going to get a meme. Sometimes you'll get some help articles and some directions and a path forward. And it's really posting consistently there to help people understand that you're there for them, that you can bring them information in the flow of their lives that's going to help them. On the SaltClick side, it really is about trying to organize because I did some kind of research pretty recently to understand how many channels are we in, how many messages and files and all kinds of stuff are we sending around. It's a lot. I think on average people are in 100 or 200 channels, so the noise can become pretty robust. You want to try and organize that and make it meaningful. So really helping navigate with channel descriptions. What are we even doing in this channel, what's our goal, what can you expect? Letting people know that they don't have to be in a channel. They can exit it. They can leave. They can set their own notifications. I really like to advocate for not only the way that we have our channels set up, but the way that they can help themselves in that experience as well. But we have all kinds of fun. I think my favorite is probably the Salty Babies one.

Mike: I won't dig into that because who knows where that goes. I would like to know because, and we have this a little bit at Salesforce, did you enforce or did you... Enforce sounds bad. I don't have a different word for it. Parameter, I don't know, fence. Did you put out guidelines? That feels the best.

Nicole Pomponio: Guidelines feels right.

Mike: You put out guidelines. Guidepost, yeah. Because people can name channels whatever they want, did you put out a naming thing so that people know... You mentioned salty channels and chit-chat channels, and boy, say that one five times fast.

Nicole Pomponio: I can't. I can't.

Mike: I will. I'll just get myself kicked off the air. And work channels, and we have that at Salesforce too, did you put out a guide and get leadership, I mean, you're on leadership, but a corporate understanding of here's how we should name things so that people can easily quantify stuff?

Nicole Pomponio: Yes. You want to have some pretty solid channel naming conventions to help people organize their day and to make it easier to find things. So I did mention the Salty Babies channel. The fun ones could start with Salty. They could start with Fun, but you want to make sure that you are outlining what those are for your teams and that you're building out some Slack etiquette. But thinking about too not only our internal channels, our external ones as well.

Mike: Oh.

Nicole Pomponio: So yes, we don't want to confuse ourselves or our vendors or customers, so. And I'm sure you know, you might be in many different channels. And you have an external channel, you want to quickly know that it's external, so putting ext in the front of it is definitely helpful for your eye to make sure you understand you're posting something in the right location. And then if it's internal, putting an int in front of it. And then we did develop a standard naming convention for our project channels because again, we are Slack-first. So we are running our projects through Slack, and then we have our customers in Slack channels as well. So we wanted to define what those naming conventions were so that we could organize ourselves a lot more efficiently. And then we also think about too what should go in that channel. Should there be a canvas or not? So not only are we thinking about standard naming conventions for channels, we're also thinking about what would add value right there in the channel. So if I have a canvas for a project, what should I have in that canvas? If I have a canvas and a DM with one of my direct reports, what should I have in that canvas to make it meaningful? So in my mind, it's definitely thinking about the structures of the channels, how we're using Slack, what our etiquette is for each other. And even things like defining the emojis that you use. A thumbs up or thumbs down could mean something else to someone. I like to give the example of my parents texting one another back and forth. My mom sent a long paragraph to my dad, and then his response was a thumbs up, but we probably had a good five-minute conversation around what his thumbs up meant. Was it a good thumbs up? Was it a sarcastic thumbs up? So defining what your emojis mean could avoid some confusion down the line.

Mike: Yeah, I would agree. There's a few channels that, well, we have one internally on the admin team, and we use an emoji just to recognize or put your hand up for something, and I never realized how many different hands there were as emojis. Because it also kicks off a workflow that like, hey, so-and-so said, yes, and they would do this. And I'm like, I put my hand up. Why didn't the workflow fire? Oh, I used the wrong hand. I used hand two instead of hand one.

Nicole Pomponio: There are a lot. There are a lot. And then you can make your own custom emojis. That can get real.

Mike: Oh, well, that's a requirement on my team. Everybody has to have their own emoji.

Nicole Pomponio: You have to have it. I love that.

Mike: And I'm blessed enough somebody made one of me giving a thumbs up, so I got both.

Nicole Pomponio: Nice.

Mike: I got me and a thumbs up.

Nicole Pomponio: That's awesome.

Mike: Last question. For all of the stuff that you're working on for Salesforce, for Dreamforce... Sorry, so many forces. I'm sure it'll be Slackforce, right?

Nicole Pomponio: It could be.

Mike: If admins were listening to this and they had to go what's one reason I need to talk to my leadership about Slack and why because I heard it from Nicole, what would that answer be?

Nicole Pomponio: My gosh, Mike, no pressure.

Mike: No, none.

Nicole Pomponio: I truly believe that we are going to continue to see an evolution of the integration between Slack and Salesforce. It feels like we're on the arc, we're on that path, right?

Mike: Uh-huh.

Nicole Pomponio: Purchased in 2021, started to hear some rumors about things being connected, started to see it happen. We've got Salesforce channels. We have to be empowered to understand what we can do with both systems. And the best way to do that is to immerse yourself in at least three days of sessions heavily centered around what you can do with Slack, what you can do with Salesforce, and what you can do by combining them. I think it is the perfect opportunity. I was at TDX and started to hear a lot of Salesforce people asking, what's up with Slack, what can we do there? A lot of people are starting to join the Slack community. It's the perfect time. And I think with how fast things are changing, I don't want anyone to get left behind. I don't want them to feel like they're being left behind, certainly not anyone's company. So I think, for me, it's really, really being at this point of being able to understand both and connect them.

Mike: Well, I think that's very, very solid reasoning right there. I can't think of anything better.

Nicole Pomponio: It feels right. I feel like anyone would say yes to that.

Mike: I mean, it's also one of those pretty obvious things. AI is a very conversational tool, and so is Slack.

Nicole Pomponio: Yes.

Mike: It's made for each other.

Nicole Pomponio: I think so. I want an agent right in there chatting with me helping me with my day.

Mike: I would love. I'm a fan of Marvel. One of these days I'm going to get my own assistant.

Nicole Pomponio: Yes, yes.

Mike: And it fires up, "Good morning, Mike."

Nicole Pomponio: I want my own J.A.R.V.I.S. I wouldn't name them J.A.R.V.I.S., but-

Mike: Oh, I would totally name them J.A.R.V.I.S., and I expect him to have a British accent because it sounds just very proper. But yes, open up my shades, tell me what the weather's going to be in my first meeting and summarize the urgency of Slack messages that I got. That's what I want.

Nicole Pomponio: I don't think we're asking for too much.

Mike: No. I mean, we were supposed to have flying cars by now.

Nicole Pomponio: Yes.

Mike: So...

Nicole Pomponio: The least we can do is have a Slack agent that could do work around our house.

Mike: That speaks in a British voice.

Nicole Pomponio: Yes.

Mike: Cool. Thanks, Nicole, for coming on the podcast. I appreciate it.

Nicole Pomponio: Thank you so much for the opportunity.

Mike: Big thanks to Nicole for sharing how she's leading with Slack and evolving the admin role along the way. I really love the fact that she is an admin for multiple platforms and has leadership in leadership at her organization. It's great to hear from her how she's building smart channel conversations and also, yes, finding that seat at the table. I don't know about you, but I got a lot of strategy. I got a ton of inspiration out of this episode. Now I know not everybody's headed to Dreamforce, but if you are, I hope this session got you excited for some of the content that's out there. If you're not, that's okay. There is a ton of content on Slack, on both Trailhead, on our YouTube channels. You're not going to miss out. We'll also broadcast a whole bunch of this. I do believe Nicole's session will probably also be online, so I'll just let that out as a sneak peek. Now, if you learned something new or you enjoyed this episode, do me a favor, share it with somebody, promote it on social, spread the word. Let other admins find some of this great content that you enjoy listening to. And with that, until next time, I'll see you in the cloud.

View Details

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to David Simpson, Salesforce Admin at the 1916 Company.

Join us as we chat about his process for troubleshooting Flow errors and his unexpected path into the Salesforce ecosystem.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with David Simpson.

Why can Flow errors be so intimidating? If you’ve ever received an emergency ticket from a user because they’ve encountered a Flow error, you know just how cryptic they can be. It’s not always clear at first glance what’s going on, or what your user can do to fix it.

What’s more, if you’re hearing about an error from a user, that means it’s made it to production. So now you need to start worrying about your testing and anything else that might pop up. And oh yeah, you need to fix the dang thing, too.

That’s why I was so excited to sit down this week with David Simpson. He’s doing a Dreamforce presentation about how to better navigate Flow errors and how to prevent them from happening in the first place.

Five steps to resolve a Flow error David breaks down the process of fixing a Flow error into five steps:

1. Gather information about the Flow error. What’s in the error notification? Is it specific to a particular user or record?
2. Try to replicate the error in a sandbox environment.
3. Find the fix.
4. Test the fix in your sandbox, and test for any similar scenarios.
5. Push your fix to production.

David emphasizes the importance of communicating with stakeholders at every stage of your solve. You don’t need to share every single detail, but you want to make sure your user knows that you’ve identified the error, how long it will take to fix it, and if there are any workarounds in the meantime.

Reach out to the community We also discuss David’s path from finance into the Salesforce ecosystem. He started out as a staff accountant, but when he was asked to take over some of the Salesforce administration duties, he realized he loved working with the platform far more than burying his head in spreadsheets.

Finally, I ask David about his top tips for getting better at solving Flow errors. He points to the Trailblazer community and Salesforce help articles as two of his best resources. However, he also suggests getting hands-on in a sandbox by trying to build things that might break. It’s a low-risk way to flex your problem-solving skills and will give you valuable experience for when a real error ends up in production.

Make sure to listen to our full conversation for more from David about how to solve Flow errors. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more * Navigating Flow Errors Session at Dreamforce * True to the Core Deep Dive: Flow Testing and Debugging * Test or Troubleshoot Flows With the Flow Builder Debugger

Admin Trailblazers Group

• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

• David 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 had a flow error throw your day off track? You're not alone. This week on the podcast, we welcome David Simpson, Salesforce Admin at the 1916 Company who's bringing his session from Dreamforce navigating flow errors as a new admin right into your old earbuds. David's going to walk us through his process for troubleshooting errors, he shares tips for smarter flow testing, and we even talk about his unexpected path from finance into the Salesforce ecosystem. Now, if you've ever stared down an Apex exception email and wondered what is this trying to tell me? I promise you this episode is for you. So with that, let's get David on the podcast. So David, welcome to the podcast.

David Simpson: Thank you for having me.

Mike: Let's get started with what you do in the Salesforce ecosystem and the topic you're going to talk about at Dreamforce this year.

David Simpson: Sounds good. My name is David Simpson. I am a Salesforce Administrator at the 1916 Company. I have been an admin for a little over eight years now and a flownatic for over five years now, and my session is Navigating Flow Errors as a New Salesforce Administrator.

Mike: Okay, do you have a robe?

David Simpson: I had a cape from being an awesome admin back at Dreamforce 2018, but that has been lost in multiple moves.

Mike: Okay, well I'll say this publicly. I have an extra one in my basement and I'm going to get it after this podcast. You getting the cape back.

David Simpson: Sounds good to me.

Mike: So there we got that solved and all 35 people who are listening are like, cool, David's getting a cape, what else can I learn? But I saw your session. So navigating flow errors as a new administrator. I think for me, I've built demos for Flow. I am nowhere near Jennifer Lee level, Jennifer Lee's admin evangelist on my team. I think she knows more about Flow than Flow knows about itself. But I've always, I'll run into that error and be like, cool. I don't know Jennifer, what do I do? And for those people that don't have Jennifers, why are flow errors daunting?

David Simpson: Flow errors can be daunting first off because the error message itself can be very vague. You're dealing with developer query language and it might not be incredibly clear on first glance what the error is. So you have this issue where your end user or your stakeholder is stopped in doing their job, and they get some cryptic error that they don't know how they can fix it and they are now looking to you and now you have to decipher this cryptic error message. So it can be pretty daunting even when you have experience in the Salesforce ecosystem to know exactly where to go and what to do to solve that error.

Mike: So when do you find... New administrators, even experienced administrators get flow errors. Are you focused on when users get the flow error or when the admin is building a flow and testing it?

David Simpson: So it's actually both. My session is planning on covering what happens when you encounter an error, more specifically once it's live in your production environment and maybe somebody has encountered it and maybe your testing didn't cover that aspect. How you can handle that, how you can troubleshoot it and get to the bottom of it. But then also how you can do some more comprehensive testing when building your flows. So if you get those errors, you can adjust them immediately or you can read those errors and understand what you have to do without going through a bunch of help documents online and figuring out what that code means.

Mike: Yeah. So let's take us through David's thought process when you get a flow error. What happens?

David Simpson: So the first thing I do is I go see how I was notified of the flow error. If it is an Apex exception email, I'll read through the Apex exception email and try and see, okay, who caused this? What's the record? What step in the process did it fail? And just all of that information that's in those emails. Alternatively, if it happened to have been triggered via a Flows fault path, I will then investigate that notification. But then what I try to do is I first see what the error message is, if it's something that I'm familiar with, if it seems like it might be related to a validation rule or permissions or just general access, I'll see if I can address that quickly. But if it's something a little bit more convoluted or harder to decipher, normally what I like to do is to take that same flow and we have sandboxes, so I'll go into the sandbox and I'll just try to replicate those steps. I will perhaps use the flow debug and run it as the user who encountered the issue. Maybe I'll try and recreate the record if it feels like a particularly daunting error and then just run through the flow and see where it fails. Those are normally my processes and through that I will eventually encounter the cause of the error. And then at that point it's just going through the process of fixing the error in the flow, performing more tests to make sure that I've covered that as well as any other potential unexpected issues that might arise from the change and then getting that pushed out, all the while communicating to whoever encountered the issue that this is being taken care of, this is the ETA, and if possible, any workarounds for that fix and error.

Mike: Wow, you're better than the local mechanic that works on your car. Here's my car, it's making a noise. Three weeks later, you find anything out?

David Simpson: Yeah. With Salesforce, it's really nice because there is so much information that it can almost seem a little bit overwhelming, but that information can be used to get to the problem a lot faster. We're not getting just some generic error that says, oh, an issue occurred, good luck. We're getting a more specific error that is pointing us where we need to go. We just need to be able to translate that into human readable language in order to solve it.

Mike: Yeah, so I'm thinking of this. You've mentioned you've been an admin for eight years now, that's a decent time in the seat. How has working with Flow changed over time for you?

David Simpson: It has gotten so much better, so much easier, but also more complicated. I remember just a few years ago having to perform a process builder that triggers an auto-launched flow that might have some issues accessing certain records or a collection of records. And throughout the years with all of these releases and updates, it's just gotten a lot easier and more intuitive. A great example would be just the introduction of an auto-layout in a flow. Being able to see that clear process and order of operations to the flows, it's really helped. But also with all of these features, it does get a little bit more complex. What is the best element to put on your flow in order for this to not only run but run efficiently? Is it multiple update records? Is it doing a loop and an assignment and then an update? Is it using Transform? There's so many options and there's no particular right way to do a lot of stuff, which is really freeing. You can get super creative with these solutions and I think that that's been an awesome thing. And not to mention testing, going back to the flow errors. The recent introduction of an enhanced flow debug has really made my life a lot easier. I can see so much more detail in what's going on in my flows than what I just built. I can see the technical specs behind it, and that's really helped me narrow down what exactly needs to be done or what needs to be fixed in my flows when I do encounter an issue.

Mike: I'm going to say this respectfully. You sound like you have a lot of technical knowledge coming into the role of Salesforce Admin.

David Simpson: Oh, well thank you.

Mike: What was your history before being a Salesforce Admin?

David Simpson: Before I was a Salesforce Admin, I actually worked in accounting and finance. I was a staff accountant.

Mike: Oh, detail. Hello?

David Simpson: Yeah. Very process-oriented, very consistent in my day to day, and I at one point made a transition from being a staff accountant to a financial analyst, which was just essentially more spreadsheets. But during that time, my supervisor said, "Hey, I administer our Salesforce instance here. I think you'd be good at it. I need some help. Our professional services team, they put their opportunities in and we need to clean up their financials at the end of each month, but you should probably know the system in which they're putting this in." So he gave me an admin license and told me go on Trailhead, start learning some of the beginner stuff, and I just instantly fell in love with it. I love the problem solving aspect. I love the ability that there's so much you can do and build, that Salesforce is just a canvas of process creativity that I said, you know what? I don't think I want to do finance related work anymore. I want to do Salesforce full time.

Mike: Wow. Okay. So that's another podcast I'm going to have you on because I want to talk about career path. I think that'd be really cool, but I can see now the structured way that Flows work really could appeal to an accounting mindset. Is that the first feature that you really gravitated to?

David Simpson: Interesting that you asked that. It did take me a few years to get into the flow space and the automation space. When I became an admin, the first automations I touched were Workflow and a little bit of Process Builder, but I was really moreso focused on user access and just general custom object setup. It wasn't until a few years into being an admin that my manager, I had switched jobs, he said, "I need you to build this automation and it's not going to work in Process Builder. It's not going to work in Workflow. You'll have to do Flow." And I was very intimidated at the point. But I had a mentor who walked me through flows that they had built and it just clicked. It was so logical and just made so much sense while still being flexible that it was, I didn't go back to Workflows and Process Builders unless I absolutely needed to.

Mike: Yeah.

David Simpson: So yeah, it took a few years, but once I was on the flow train, I could not stop.

Mike: Yeah, no, I get you. I remember seeing Flow in its early early days back in 2012 when you used to have to actually download software to use it and the various iterations that it went through. But it's very useful now I think because of the visual aspect of it.

David Simpson: Yes.

Mike: I'm a very visual person and I've always, that's the thing that I loved about Process Builder was it looked like a process flow that you would diagram, and I'm glad that Flow has caught back up to that now.

David Simpson: Yeah.

Mike: Where do you stand on, so new admins, building flows, I've seen all kinds of flows. What's your process on how complicated you get a flow and testing it as you get more complicated?

David Simpson: Well, the complexity of a flow, I try to start by being simple first and only using some basic decision elements and update or create records elements, something that is really just a simple if/then statement and then add the complexities as the business requirements change. But with every single change that is made, I just test. That debug button is right there on the flow and is so easy to use. You just click it, pick a record or put your inputs in and let it run and just make sure that you're seeing everything that should be happening with each step. It's like cooking. You should be tasting as you go to make sure that nothing unexpected is happening. And you can do the same with the flow. You add a new element, you click the debug and you test it. You add a couple of decisions or a loop, click that debug and test it. So it can get as complicated or as complex as you need it to be. But you can also just start very simple and you can test along the way and it will come out fine, just provided that you're being proactive in your testing.

Mike: Yeah, no, sometimes I just dive in, I just want to build the whole thing and then it throws a million errors and I'm like, I should have built this more step-by-step. What was I thinking? It's the reason when they build houses, they home inspectors come at every stage. There's a reason for that. Let's talk about screen flows. I'm sure you touch on them in your session. I personally think they're really cool. I'm from, I was a Salesforce admin back in '06, and I remember thinking if only I could do a screen pop that walked people through filling out an account page or something, and now I could right? My fear if somebody turned me loose as an admin or I would do screen flows for everything. What is your decisioning on should I make this screen flow or not?

David Simpson: I am incredibly pro screen flow, much like yourself. In our company, we use screen flows for almost everything that requires end user interaction. The idea is to provide our users only what they need to interact with or change or take action on, and nothing beyond that for both an efficiency sake and also to make sure that there's no confusion or there's potential bad data. So we utilize opportunities to process our sales. We actually use Salesforce as our main point of sale, and when they go to close out their sales, they click a button which triggers a screen flow that says "Have you gotten all of your tasks in order for this opportunity? Do you have the opportunity products added? Are they available for sale? Have you synced this opportunity to our external system?" And then all they have to do is just fill out a few fields, probably less than a dozen throughout the entire screen flow, and then it completes the sale for them. Similarly, when they want to create a brand new sale, they click a button on the account that creates a screen flow instead of the new opportunity standard action. Because it has many less fields on it, they only need to fill out, okay, who the customer is, what's the deal name, and then some just basic additional info that our customer experience team likes to have. So it's a very streamlined process and we find that it not only saves them clicks, but it saves them time and gets them back to helping out their clients a lot faster. So I'm very much screen flow. I just gave an example about opportunities, but we use it throughout the entire Salesforce org.

Mike: Yeah, no, I'm with you. Pop a flow for everything. That'd be what I would do. So you're going to present this at Dreamforce next month. For people going, they'll see the presentation, not everybody goes and they listen. For people not going, but still really want to dig into what are things I should understand or how should I navigate flow errors as an administrator, what are some resources that helped you learn how to read through those error messages and understand them as a Salesforce administrator?

David Simpson: So the first thing I would suggest is the Trailblazer community. There are so many helpful people on those forums, and if you encounter an issue, you can post a question and in a matter of minutes you'll get a response. But they're also just generally friendly people and they just want to see you succeed and they will help you out. So that is an incredible resource. Just the community that is built up around Salesforce and administrators is so great, and I highly recommend that if you ever run into an issue that you check out the Trailblazer community. Additionally, the Salesforce help articles have been super helpful for me. They're a little bit more technical. They're more about the steps that a process or a system can do, but those are also great for getting a foundational knowledge. And then the third and final resource that I would say is just build and break in a sandbox. Just try to make things that don't work and see what happens, and then try to fix them. Because it's a sandbox and it's not real data you're not at risk of causing any issues. But I learned the most by making mistakes, by building a flow and maybe not testing it thoroughly enough or forgetting a field or forgetting a step where I get a certain record and then seeing what that error is and then adjusting that. That generally happens to all of us eventually, but try and do it deliberately and see what error results you get back. You'll be surprised to find that they're the same errors that you get when you're not trying to make mistakes. So a great way to learn is just by simply doing.

Mike: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I'm from the days when you used to get a little help box and you just hit this most frustrating error and try it again, try it again, try it again. It goes back to that was it Thomas Edison, he didn't find one way to invent the light bulb, he found 99 ways to not invent the light bulb or something like that. I feel like we're all that way. I've found 99 different ways to make a flow not work out of trial and error. And sometimes that's all it takes. But you can only read so much and then you have to actually go do and try things out and poke around in the org. So last thing that's on my mind, and I wonder. AI in the last few years has just erupted. What in your job has changed because of AI? And I just mean in general. Doesn't have to be Agentforce, nothing like that. Just in general, has anything changed for you as an admin because of AI?

David Simpson: Yes. With the advent of AI, there is this unspoken expectation to be a little bit faster and a little bit more efficient. We are encouraged to use AI to help assist in creating solutions for the tasks that we are given and turn them around a little bit faster. It's just a general efficiency overall with AI. And I use AI in my day-to-day to help maybe create some tickets. We use Jira to spin up our tickets for the work that we need to do, and I will use AI to put my thoughts in. If I don't know a solution to something, I can say, "Give me the best recommended suggestions for implementing this type of action on the flow." Additionally, I can put in a solution that I've already had and have it output a nice format so that way if maybe I'm not the one doing the ticket, whoever I hand this off to, it can be much easier understood. So overall, just AI is making us more efficient and making us have a faster turnaround time, and that's just in turn building up the expectations for our stakeholders to deliver faster.

Mike: Yeah, plus now they're the ones feeding the error messages to AI being like I think I know what the answer is, David.

David Simpson: Yeah.

Mike: Really? Did AI tell you that? I bet it told you to go buy me a cookie and a coffee at Starbucks because if it didn't say that, then it was wrong. It's lying to you, Alice.

David Simpson: It's hallucinating.

Mike: It's hallucinating, Alice. AI's hallucinating. All right, David, this has been super fun. I look forward to your session. I will ping you after this and get you that cape because I have one downstairs and I don't like it when people lose their capes.

David Simpson: Sounds good.

Mike: We'll get that taken care of. Absolutely. Thanks for being on the podcast.

David Simpson: Yeah, thank you.

Mike: Big thanks to David Simpson for joining us and sharing his approach to navigating flow errors. Whether you're a new admin or just trying to make sense of that latest debug message, I think David's insights really offer some practical steps to take the fear out of flow troubleshooting. Now, I'd love for you to get the whole story. So if you're able to make his session at Dreamforce, that's great. If not, follow his tips and learn on Trailhead like he did. And I will say this, cape not required, but bonus if you do Trailhead with a cape on because I think that's really cool. Do me a favor, if you enjoyed this or you have friends that are navigating flow errors, share this episode with them and I would appreciate that. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

View Details

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jim Ray, Director of Developer Relations and Advocacy at Slack.

Join us as we chat about enhancements to Workflow Builder, the Slack features everyone should be using, and the future of AI and Slack.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jim Ray.

Usability upgrades to core Slack features Jim and his team have been improving the core Slack experience. “We’ve really been focusing on those little paper cuts, the smaller features that just never quite made it into the next release,” he says. So essentially, Slack is a little better everywhere.

One area they’ve focused on is Workflow Builder. In particular, they’ve added new branching functionality—allowing admins to create conditional paths like “if/then” logic.

They’ve also been hard at work upgrading canvases and lists. With new data like AI-generated meeting notes, canvases provide a central place for all the relevant information. Jim also urges you to check out lists as a sort of “semi-database” for data you want handy in Slack.

Slack’s AI vision centralizes agent interactions For Jim, Slack is one of the best tools to interact with and fully take advantage of the AI agents you build with Agentforce. It’s already the place your team communicates with each other, so why not be able to loop in AI teammates?

“In the same way that Slack is the single place where every person in your organization is communicating, now it's the place where you're all working with those agents,” Jim says. And so his team is looking at how Slack can bring together every AI agent your team uses, whether they’re built in Agentforce or another third-party platform.

Dreamforce 2025 will spotlight Salesforce-Slack integration I asked Jim for a sneak preview of what he has in store for Dreamforce 2025, and he did not disappoint. We’ve come a long way with tools like Salesforce channels and the ability to deploy an Agentforce agent directly to Slack. Now his team is working on ways to deepen the integration. So look for improvements to search and embedded Salesforce data in the coming year.

There are so many more great insights into how you can get the most out of Slack in the Agentforce era, so be sure to listen to our full conversation with Jim. And be sure to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

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Full show transcript

Mike: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast. This week we're catching up with Jim Ray from Slack because it's very conversational. He's going to walk us through what's new in Slack from major releases that you may or may not have been paying attention to on Workflow Builder, Lists, and Canvases to, of course, all of the latest around AI and Agentforce. Plus, we're going to talk about what's coming at Dreamforce this year and how admins and developers like yourself can get the most out of Slack. So whether you're all in on automation or just exploring Slack's potential, I promise you there's something here for you. So you've already got those earbuds in? Let's get Jim on the podcast. So Jim, welcome back to the podcast.

Jim Ray: Mike, thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be back. I'm excited to talk to admins and maybe we'll talk a little bit about what's coming at Dreamforce.

Mike: I mean all the things, because it's not that I didn't want you back sooner. It's just a really big platform and there's so many things to talk about.

Jim Ray: Of course.

Mike: But we use Slack every day at Salesforce and a lot of our customers do too. So it's been a while since we've chatted, but what's some of the big stuff that Slack has come out with this year that admins should be excited for if they haven't been paying attention?

Jim Ray: Oh, that's such a great question, and obviously we use Slack every day as well, and nobody uses Slack quite like Slack uses Slack.

Mike: Oh.

Jim Ray: And I think that's probably true for Salesforce in some ways too. But we've been really excited to talk to some of our admins. We're continuing to learn more about the Salesforce developers in particular, and so always excited to hear about the use cases there. A few exciting things that have come out recently that I think will be pretty interesting. So our Workflow Builder product, so this is our no-code automation product that's built right into Slack, I think that's probably something that a lot of Salesforce admins and Slack admins are using. I like to think of Workflow Builder as the front door to the platform. And it's certainly adjacent to the platform in a lot of ways. So we've had some really great development happening in Workflow Builder. Something I'm actually really proud of is we've been really focusing on the core user experience of Workflow Builder. We've got a whole team that's working on something that internally we call Back to Basics, which is really just all about focusing on those little paper cuts or the smaller features that just never quite made it into the next release. So they've been building that out. So hopefully just the experience of using Workflow Builder is a little bit nicer, which is something that we always aim for.

Mike: I never found it bad.

Jim Ray: It's not that it's been bad, it's just that as the-

Mike: To be fair.

Jim Ray: Yeah, it's a great point. As the surface area of Workflow Builder has grown, we've added lots of new functionality and we've just needed to go back and polish here and spit-shine there.

Mike: Sure. I mean, for me as an admin, it was the most intuitive thing that I could immediately jump into and kind of feel like I made a difference when we got Slack and when we started setting up channels. Because I think you probably hear this a lot, but to me the fallacy of, well, Slack is just where we communicate. No, you can actually guide the communication, and we do that with our team to help get the right information to the right spots. Because there's data and then there's contextual data, which is the conversation, and that's where we use a lot of workflows. And I was almost overwhelmed by the number of options that I had on ways and things I could do with the conversation or the input, like we use it, like an input form. I was like, "Wow."

Jim Ray: Right, exactly.

Mike: "Oh my God, now I got to go back and rethink this." It wasn't something where I was diving into it and thinking, "Okay, well, I'll just figure out what I got and just work with what I had." It was showing up to the grocery store and being like, "Oh, so you guys really do have everything? All right, cool." Kind of wasn't expecting that. I was expecting three kinds of cheeses and you got a whole cheese counter.

Jim Ray: That's really great to hear. And even with the addition of things like Lists and Canvases, which are some features that we're continuing to expand on, we released those a while ago and obviously we use them a ton internally, but we're hearing from our customers that they're putting more and more of their mission-critical data. Canvases are fantastic because it's a really lightweight form of documents. You're not overwhelmed with all the different formatting options, but they're still really quite powerful, still a great way to capture information and add context to your channels. And my team uses them with Notes and with some of the AI generated notes that are happening within huddles and things like that. But I think Lists are another place that we're seeing a ton of value with things like Workflow Builder. So you were saying you've got an input form, but where are you going to put that once somebody has filled out the form? Lists are a perfect place for that. And again, it's not a full-blown database or even as powerful as something like an Excel or a Google Sheet, but if you just need to capture that data and you want it native inside of Slack, something that's searchable inside of Slack, something that you can easily add workflows to, I love Lists. And so they're both really fantastic features.

Mike: I haven't used Lists. I can't speak for them yet, but I have used Canvases.

Jim Ray: If you don't need something as full-featured as Jira, for instance.

Mike: Maybe that's why.

Jim Ray: My team, we use Lists a lot to track the projects that we're working on. We don't need a full suite of Jira tools. We're not working [inaudible 00:06:19] and things like that. So it's actually a really great way to do some lightweight project management as well.

Mike: Ooh, I like that. You said a magic word, AI.

Jim Ray: Yes.

Mike: So I feel like Slack's built for AI because AI everywhere is just conversation, and I'm like, "Well, naturally, that's Slack." So talk to me about Agentforce and AI and Slack.

Jim Ray: Absolutely. Before I jump to AI, I do want to mention one more Workflow Builder feature-

Mike: Oh, yeah.

Jim Ray: ... that I want people to check out is this is probably the longest standing request, which is the ability to branch your workflows. Essentially think of them as an if statement or a case statement if you're a programmer. But this was, when we gave people the ability to start doing some automation, the first thing they said is, "Oh, I need to branch my automation." So if they hit this button, do this thing, and if they hit this button, do that thing. We have finally built that into the product. It's a really fantastic way to make your automations even more powerful. If you are a programmer or if you're a developer and you're building on the Slack platform, one thing that I like about the new branching feature is that you can actually handle a lot of the, for lack of a better word, validation that you would normally be doing on the back end. Now, you can do a lot of that on the front end inside of Workflow Builder itself. So quick plug for branches there, another fantastic feature that we rolled out to Workflow Builder. And it's going to make those workflows even more powerful, but now we're ready to talk AI.

Mike: Yeah, no, that's good. I do like that. I kind of want to play with that now.

Jim Ray: It's really great. So yeah, so with AI, obviously, and Mike, as you implied, Slack is the best place to interface with the agents that are popping up in every single application that we use. And in some ways this is a return to form for Slack and the Slack platform. So when Slack launched in 2014, part of the reason that we were able to be so successful is we were riding this wave of a few trends that were happening in the industry. One of them, I'm sure you remember, DevOps. And DevOps was hugely successful to Slack being successful because a lot of our earliest customers were startups, engineering-focused organizations, media organizations, places that understood kind of the basic premise of DevOps, and we could just plug Slack right into it. So many developers looked at Slack and they were like, "Oh, this will fit right into my GitHub pipeline or my Jenkins pipeline, and then I can just pipe messages right into Slack. I can have all my entire engineering team in a channel and they can all come take a look at this." But as the platform grew and evolved, we added all of these features for interactivity. We added Block Kit, which is our UI composition framework. And now that we have all of these large language model and other generative AI tools, it is kind of this return to form for the platform in many ways. And so 10 years ago, if you wanted to build a Slack app that interacted with you, it was almost like a command line more than anything. It wasn't a natural place to chat. You would kind of send off some commands and then wait for the response. It felt very much like using a terminal or a Unix command line or something like that. But now with all of these LLM tools that are being plugged into all of the various systems of record, Slack is of course the place to bring all of that into the same place where you're working with your colleagues. And that's kind of been the basic pitch of the platform for a long time.

Mike: So I do want to touch on that because it's a thing that I've been thinking of a lot. And of course it's the admin podcast, but that doesn't mean that admins don't code.

Jim Ray: Sure.

Mike: Lots of admins code and they just choose to identify as admins. Some developers only code. I don't want the perception to be, well, Slack is just for admins because they don't have to write code to do anything. But I think as you sit and look at when you're working with your team, whatever, of stakeholders, it's an admin and a developer, especially at a large organization, probably an architect. There's a lot of roles involved. Slack can really interface with a lot of different products that you have across the enterprise. What do we do for admins that had to be like, "No, let me talk to my developer because Slack is very developer friendly"? When we say Slack is very developer friendly, what do we mean by that?

Jim Ray: Well, I like to think that our platform, first and foremost, is just one that developers really like to use. Again, that was something that was really critical to the success of the platform pretty early on. It doesn't feel like developing on a piece of enterprise software. And so we would hear from these developers that were used to these massive Java stacks, or they had to use an SDK that they weren't familiar with, or even a programming language that they weren't familiar with. And the premise for the Slack platform from the very beginning, and this is still true today, is that you can bring whatever programming language you want to. We make some first party SDKs available, but you don't have to use those. We have some frameworks that are even a little bit higher level than the SDKs. Those are all available in Python, Java, and JavaScript, but you don't have to use them if you don't want to. We have some amazing community-developed SDKs and frameworks as well. So that's the initial thinking as to what makes developing on the Slack platform great. But then the other part is that you can do things with the Slack platform that really you couldn't do with other forms of communication. They just didn't make sense in the context of email, for example. Even if you wanted to use email as the ultimate endpoint, it kind of didn't make sense because an email inbox is a one-to-one relationship with every person in the organization. Well, there's no really good way to collaborate until you pull people into these channels. And so that was another part of Slack's big success we kind of created, and again, we were pulling from a lot of what was happening in the world at the time, but we pulled a lot of these ideas and we put them into this kind of channel-based interface. And now you bring groups of people together that are working on a similar project, similar feature. And then when you layer on top of that, the platform pieces, that's where it starts to get really powerful. So again, think about your engineering org within your organization. So you've got a team and they get an alert from somebody has pushed some code and the tests fail. Well, now everybody on that team can see why the tests failed. So the engineer who pushed the code, that test probably wouldn't have failed if they knew what the problem was. So another engineer that might have a different bit of context, oh, I just checked in this bit of code, that's probably why your tests are breaking, for example. They can see that. And so now you're maximizing that visibility. And so when we layer on these other tools, to bring us back to this AI, so now every tool that you're using in your organization, they're starting to add these agentic features. And we were talking about, so if you're an admin, well, Slack now becomes the place. Rather than having to administer an agent in every single platform that you use, you bring those agents into Slack, so now you have a single place to work with them. In the same place that Slack is the single place where every person in your organization is communicating, now it's the place where you're all working with those agents. And so we're not there yet. We're still working on it. Obviously Agentforce is the best place to, if you're just getting started with this and you have a ton of data inside of Salesforce, of course Agentforce is the place where you're going to go, maybe try out some of these agents built on top of your data. But as we're seeing many of our partners, many of the other SaaS tools that our customers are using, all of these agent features are being built on top of the systems of record that they manage. And so what we've got, we've made those same AI features available to everybody on the platform. So now anybody can build an agent that works inside of Slack. And if you're an admin, this is fantastic news because now you've just got one place to manage all of these.

Mike: And we use agents a lot at Salesforce. It's kind of fun. Sometimes I don't know where to look for my approvals.

Jim Ray: Yeah.

Mike: One thing to look forward to, bury the lead there, Dreamforce, it's coming now.

Jim Ray: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Mike: They just announced the band. Are you going to go?

Jim Ray: I have never made it. Usually, because I'm so swamped, I've never made it to see the show.

Mike: I know.

Jim Ray: But we've got two choices this year, I think. Is this the first time that there's going to be two different stages?

Mike: I don't know. I feel like they're doing that now because there's a generation of us that are coming up in the years, and then there's a younger generation. I remember a couple Dreamforces ago, I didn't even know one of the opening acts.

Jim Ray: Oh, boy.

Mike: And I was like, "Oh, I didn't know what my parents feel like now when I was a kid, and be like, "But Mom, of course it's Michael Jackson."

Jim Ray: Right, exactly.

Mike: "Duh." And that happened. I'm with you though. I have been once to the concert because that year we had the admin keynote the first day and we could go and it was almost like, I don't know, a celebration for us because it's like, "Yay, our keynote's over, we can go."

Jim Ray: Oh, nice.

Mike: And it was fun because it was Foo Fighters. I don't know if you were around then. I can't remember the year, but it was the one year it felt like it was out in a field or somewhere.

Jim Ray: I think that was our first year as an official Salesforce company.

Mike: Okay. I went, we got in, it was like, "Okay, I really need something to eat." They had hamburgers and stuff. I had that. And I was like, "Oh, the stage is that way. Let's walk that way." We got to what we thought the stage was, it was a giant TV screen.

Jim Ray: Oh, no.

Mike: Because they had all these satellite stages.

Jim Ray: Yeah, exactly.

Mike: And I was like, "Oh, well, this isn't so bad." And it was Foo Fighters, which was awesome. It was one of the years that Dave Grohl broke his foot, and so he was in that really cool throne. But I mean, of all the people that could still put on a show, he put on a show.

Jim Ray: Nice.

Mike: And I looked over and I was like, "Well, no, it looks like the stage is over there." Long story short, we ended up walking to all three of the satellite stages and never found the main stage because we kept thinking we were. And I was like, "You know what? I think this is the point at which I need to stop going to the concerts because-"

Jim Ray: Yeah, there you go. And so this year we have a choice between, and you were talking about that generational divide, so it'll be very obvious. We've got Metallica on one stage and then Benson Boone on the other.

Mike: Yes. Yes.

Jim Ray: I can definitely remember buying Metallica on cassette tape.

Mike: Yeah. Yep. I used to buy Metallica stuff when you could go to the convenience store and buy a glass bottle of 16-ounce Mountain Dew.

Jim Ray: Oh, wow. Now there's a throwback right there.

Mike: Everybody's like, "Oh man, old dudes on the podcast." Anyway.

Jim Ray: Yeah, exactly.

Mike: Let's give admins and developers some sneak peek stuff or what are some of the stuff, Jim, maybe that you're working on for Dreamforce this year?

Jim Ray: Well, everything is still very much in flight.

Mike: Oh, absolutely.

Jim Ray: We just had our half year-

Mike: Full-on forward-looking statement.

Jim Ray: Absolutely. We just had the half-year company kickoff, but it was super exciting. The things that we're most excited about, obviously continuing to deepen the integration between Slack and Salesforce. And I think certainly from the Slack perspective, but I think even from the Salesforce perspective, that's really going to be a big story at Dreamforce, is deepening that connection. We've had things like Salesforce channels and these agents, the ability to deploy an agent from Agentforce into Slack with just clicks without having to manage any of the deployment bits. So super excited to just see that deepening continue to happen. And we've been working behind the scenes on some things that I think will continue to make Salesforce even more embedded and useful with the context of Slack, a lot of them having to do with things like search. And so we've been releasing these new features to search that allow you to search not just your Slack corpus, but your Salesforce data and your Google Docs data and your Microsoft data. And so continuing to broaden and make search that much more useful. I feel like search is one of those hidden superpowers inside of Slack. People will sometimes come ask me a question and I don't know the answer, but I know how to search for it and where to find it.

Mike: Oh, literally how to search for it. Ha-ha. I see what you did there.

Jim Ray: Well, and you kind of become the oracle within an organization in some ways. But there are some things that we can do on the product side to make some of those things a bit more obvious. So I think that'll be good. I'm excited about our continued partnership with Heroku. Heroku is really doing some really amazing work. And they're in a big reboot phase right now over there in Heroku, and they're really leaning heavily into AI. But if you are doing custom development work, Heroku really is the best place to deploy those apps, especially if you want those apps to show up inside of Slack. But some of the work that they're doing with their custom inference and the databases that they've got for AI tools, I think is really, really cool. So if you're a developer, if you've got a team of developers that's really interested in pushing pretty hard into some of this custom AI tools, it's probably time to give another look to Heroku and see what they've got going on. Really, we're doing some workshops with that team as well, and so we'll be showcasing how to build great custom apps, deploy them to Heroku and have them show up inside of Slack.

Mike: Oh, very cool. Awesome. Well, thanks for making time out of your day, Jim. And I mean, you're always welcome back to the podcast. I'm sure after Dreamforce, we should have a debrief and be like, "Okay, remember all those things we talked about? Here's where we're at."

Jim Ray: Absolutely. And by then, we'll have figured out what we're actually going to be talking about. So that'll be great.

Mike: That's always the plan. That's always the plan. Jim, it's great to have you on the pod. You're always welcome back. So thanks for keeping us enlightened.

Jim Ray: Excellent. Thanks so much, Mike. I appreciate it.

Mike: Well, that was a Slack-tastic time with Jim. You know I had to throw that in, try something, right? I appreciate him giving us a sneak peek on what's ahead for Dreamforce. It's going to be exciting this year. And enhanced workflows, smarter agents, I'm telling you, there's just never been a better time for admins to explore what Slack can do. Now, if you enjoyed this episode, do me a favor, share it with a fellow Salesforce admin or somebody else in the community that you think would enjoy listening to it. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to LeeAnne Rimel, Senior Director of Admin and Developer Strategic Content at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about True to the Core Deep Dive and how it will give Salesforce Admins more chances to engage with product leaders, ask questions, and influence the roadmap.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with LeeAnne Rimel.

True to the Core with a spin If you’ve been to a Dreamforce or TDX, you’re probably familiar with True to the Core. Typically, it’s a keynote session with Salesforce product leaders where you can get key insights and engage them in a Q&A. However, as LeeAnne points out, we’ve noticed over the years that there isn’t always time to go deep on a particular topic.

That’s why we’re launching a special monthly video series, True to the Core Deep Dive. Each month, we’ll focus in on one core Salesforce Platform product area, with product leaders there to answer questions and really get down to the nitty-gritty.

First episode focus: Setup and user access management For our first episode, we looked at the most highly voted topic area on IdeaExchange: Setup and user access management. So we sat down with Senior PMs Cheryl Feldman and Elizabeth Martin to walk through recent feature updates and look at what’s on the roadmap.

The highlight was definitely the 40-minute question and answer section, which really let us go so much deeper than your average keynote session. Other product owners Larry Tong and Laurent Kubaski were firing away answering even more questions in the chat. If you missed it, be sure to check out the video on LinkedIn or YouTube.

We need you to help pick future topics If LeeAnne wants you to take one thing away from this episode, it’s that we need you to help us pick future topics. That’s right, this series is all about transparency and that includes topic selection. So each episode ends with a survey to determine what next month’s episode will be about.

“I read every single comment,” LeeAnne says, “we read all of the feedback and it directly informs every episode we’re going to put together.” So tune in next month for the first community-chosen topic, Flow testing and debugging, and help us figure out what to look at next.

Be sure to listen to the full episode for more from LeeAnne about what she’s working on for Dreamforce. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us in your feed every Thursday.

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Full show transcript

Mike: Welcome to Salesforce Admins Podcast. Today, we're diving into a brand new way that Salesforce is connecting with the community called True to the Core Deep Dive. So LeeAnne Rimel, who's been on the podcast before, is going to join me and talk about this new series that gives you, the Salesforce admin, more chances to engage with product leaders, ask questions, and influence the roadmap based on your feedback. You'll have to hear how the first episode went. I'll have the link in the show notes. We're going to hear a little bit about what's coming next, but more importantly, how you can shape future topics. So if you're as excited as I am, keep walking or riding the train or listening, and let's get LeeAnne on the podcast. So LeeAnne, welcome back to the podcast.

LeeAnne Rimel: Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me.

Mike: Yeah, it's been exciting. And last I checked, there was live, there some event that just melted my social feeds about True to the Core, so we have to start there. Tell me what's going on.

LeeAnne Rimel: Well, we love True to the Core and we love True to the Core so much that we are bringing it to you virtually throughout the year. So if you're not familiar with True to the Core, if you haven't attended True to the Core in the past, it's a program with Salesforce that typically is a keynote setting at TrailblazerDX and at Dreamforce where all of our senior product leadership, senior Salesforce executives get on stage and they talk about Salesforce and the future of Salesforce and they answer questions from the audience. And I think, I should know this, I can't remember exactly when it started, but it's more than 10 years old. So it's a little bit of a fan favorite if you've been in the Salesforce ecosystem for a while because it's such a great opportunity to get transparency into roadmap, to ask very direct questions about things that impact you as a Salesforce professional. However, we got feedback from our community about True to the Core that there wasn't enough of them. We only really do it at Dreamforce and at TrailblazerDX typically. And the product suite has gotten big. There's a lot of features, there's a lot of product in the Salesforce world, as we all know. So it was a little bit like a mile wide, an inch deep, I think is how people were feeling. Like, yes, maybe I got the opportunity to ask a question, but I wanted to spend more time on that question and more time in that area with the product managers. So with that context, that's why we created True to the Core Deep Dive. So that's what we launched in August. August 12th was the first episode. And it's very much directly in response to that community feedback that we heard. We want more opportunities for this feedback loop. We want more transparency into roadmap. We want to ask more questions, we want to dive deeper into specific features that matter to us. So the first episode, which you can find on LinkedIn, was in August. And it was with Cheryl Feldman and Elizabeth Martin, who look after set up and user access. And it was so much fun, Mike. We did like 40 minutes of questions, which is a ton. So it was a lot of-

Mike: It's still not enough. It's still not enough.

LeeAnne Rimel: Not enough. I know, I hear you. I did see a couple notes-

Mike: You could do 400 minutes of questions, still not enough.

LeeAnne Rimel: I know. I know. But it's definitely more than we had before. So we did over 40 minutes of questions, ton of live Q&A. We had product owners Larry Tung and Laurent we're in the chat also firing away. It was the meme of doing the keyboard and the keyboard's lighting on fire because we're typing so fast. I felt like they were just answering so many questions in the chat about pilot programs, about roadmap, and then really specific technical questions about things that members of the community are facing. So it was really exciting. I'm really proud of it. I'm really excited that it's so deeply connected to community feedback. I think it's really important. That's basically the north star of True to the Court Deep Dive is community feedback and community voting and community questions. So it was really fun. It was great.

Mike: So if they missed that first August 12th episode, we'll link to that. You could still watch, it's still worth watching, right?

LeeAnne Rimel: Oh, absolutely. I think there was a ton Cheryl and Elizabeth, like I said, they look after user access and permissions, so they shared some of what's coming. They also shared, Cheryl shared, "Here's things that we're not working on," right? Because we're really active on the idea exchange and they-

Mike: Can't work on everything.

LeeAnne Rimel: Yeah, and I think that level of transparency is one of the reasons that Cheryl is so well-connected with the community and really listens to the community is like we need to know, as admins, as developers, we need to know what's coming on the roadmap. And also we need to know for planning what's not going to be worked on. If I had my heart set on a particular feature area, I think that transparency is really valuable to have the information to make plans.

Mike: So let's talk about the future of this series. Is it series? I think that's fair to [inaudible 00:05:40]-

LeeAnne Rimel: It is a special monthly series.

Mike: Special monthly series. Oh, boy. I feel like get home from school and you get your carrot sticks and your ranch.

LeeAnne Rimel: Exactly.

Mike: That's what everybody got as a kid, right?

LeeAnne Rimel: Maybe ants on a log.

Mike: Oh, ants on a log. I forgot about that. Yeah. Okay. There's always food in the podcast. So first of all, I'm Salesforce admin and I really want to contribute to this series. What are ways that I can participate?

LeeAnne Rimel: We need you to contribute to this series, Salesforce admins. The topics for this are entirely chosen by the community. So the very first topic was chosen based on idea exchange trending topics and highly voted topic areas. But all subsequent episodes will be chosen based on the surveys and the voting that we're hosting on each episode. So in episode one, at the end of episode one, we had the episode one survey. And the top topic that came out of that and also happens to be a top trending idea exchange topic is flow, and within that, testing and debugging. So that's our next episode is flow testing and debugging. So we'll link, Mike will link in the show notes the blog announcing this, and within that we'll have both the recordings for the previous episodes, the link to register for the upcoming episode, and also the opportunity to vote on topics that are meaningful to you. So that is very much, that community feedback specifically from that voting mechanism that we will have in every episode is incredibly important for us to ensure that we are putting together episodes and shows that are directly meeting the community with what you need to talk about. And we're going very deep. We're really getting granular with the features. So notice it's not just a flow episode, which is a very popular topic, but there's so much within flow. So we went into the subtopic of what is the most hot, trending, highly voted subtopic within flow? And that was, for this round, was testing and debugging. So I think your feedback and I read every single comment, so if you've filled out a survey, thank you so much, from episode one. And then if you fill out surveys in the future, I want you to know we read every single comment, we read all of the feedback, and it directly informs every episode we're going to put together.

Mike: So you got to put Easter eggs in your comments. That's what I hear.

LeeAnne Rimel: You can throw a little joke in there.

Mike: If I was [inaudible 00:08:32] I got to put something in there.

LeeAnne Rimel: I like dad jokes. You can put little dad jokes in there if you want.

Mike: Well, but that was actually-

LeeAnne Rimel: As long as you pick a topic.

Mike: Right, pick a topic. That was actually my question is so I'm glad you're going granular. Is there a world where flow debugging gets two episodes because it just keeps rising to the top?

LeeAnne Rimel: Yeah, I think that's a really good question. I think we're going to have to see what the data show us. So I think if we see something that is really persistent in where it is on the priority list, I think we will have to talk about should we have repeat kind of follow-on episodes for that. Maybe there's additional content forms or forms that we should create for that topic area. So I think this is, I think as we face those, we'll see the best way to make sure we're meeting the community where they're asking us for more information. I would anticipate, safe harbor, but I would anticipate over the next year we're probably going to have more than one episode on flow because it is such a prevalent topic and there's so many areas within flow to talk about. And we do really want to be able to have this space to go really deep, really granular on those subtopic areas, if you will, like those feature areas within a larger area. It's a great question and I think, yeah, there's no rules around, well, we spend time on this feature area and we're never going to talk about it again. I think that that's not true to the nature of True to the Core and what we're intending here. And then also I think we'll see what the data show and what's demanded.

Mike: Yeah, because I was going to say it could also be kind of frustrating if you suggest a topic. I'll be honest, security is a topic we should cover. It never gets voted up very high. Nobody likes talking about all of the padlocks and security features, but it is important. It's in everything that we do, and so-

LeeAnne Rimel: Well, and I think we're going to-

Mike: ... it'd be kind of fun to see.

LeeAnne Rimel: Yeah, I hear you, right? If something isn't always a number one topic, will we get to it?

Mike: Right.

LeeAnne Rimel: And I think to that, we'll definitely be kind of moving down the list, if you will. Yeah, so to answer your question more clearly, I think we'll definitely be kind of moving down the list and moving onto the, for the episode in November, we'll be looking at, okay, based on the data that we collected so far, and we just had a flow episode, kind of what's number two? And then we'll be moving down in that way.

Mike: Gotcha. So Dreamforce will be a little over a month and a half away when this episode drops. Are there big True to the Core Deep Dive plans for Dreamforce?

LeeAnne Rimel: Well, there will be a, that we're anticipating a True to the Core keynote at Dreamforce. So I think that is, if you are newer to Dreamforce or haven't attended True to the Core at Dreamforce in the past, I really recommend, if you're going to be there in person, attending the True to the Core keynote. I think it's a really meaningful part of a Dreamforce experience. And then also, if you're not attending Dreamforce in person, it will, typically, it is on Salesforce+, so you can watch it on VOD afterwards. But I think that will be our big... Dreamforce is in mid-October. That will be the True to the Core for October will be the Dreamforce keynote. We're hoping to share more opportunities to vote, to really increase the feedback that we get on future episodes. So stay tuned for Dreamforce posts and things like that. And we're hoping to share more opportunities for Dreamforce attendees to share what they would like to see more of with True to the Core Deep Dive episodes. And then when we'll be back with our regularly scheduled programming, if you will, [inaudible 00:12:34].

Mike: Right, because Dreamforce interrupts everything. For fans of LeeAnne, because they had the how... You did the Did You Know series. That was what I was thinking of. Are there other things that you're working on that you want to share or is it all forward-looking statement right now?

LeeAnne Rimel: Forward-looking statements. I think we're working on, I think for Dreamforce this year, so I'm hard at work on Dreamforce technical content in general, sort of the experiences that you have in the Trailblazer Forest and across our technical tracks. And I think I am really excited to see what all the teams are working on for Dreamforce, specifically for our admin, developer, and architect audiences. I think there's just going to be a lot of great technical learnings. We also, I will share, are going to have more community-led sessions than ever before, so there'll be more information coming out about that. But I think we're going to have a lot of technical sessions, a lot of opportunities for admins and developers and architects and more community-led sessions than... We've always had a lot of community-led sessions, we have even more. So I'm really excited to hear and learn from our community.

Mike: Well, thank you LeeAnne, for coming on the podcast. I know one fun fact, if people are hungry at Dreamforce, you always have snacks.

LeeAnne Rimel: I do always have snacks,

Mike: Always. Not candy, but snacks. So that's always good to have

LeeAnne Rimel: Snacks to help sustain you through... I think I have a few blogs floating out about there about my preferred snacks, but-

Mike: I'm sure you do. You've always kept the team energized in a healthy way, not in a sugar inducing caffeine coma way, which is great.

LeeAnne Rimel: Yeah, if someone's having low blood sugar, I probably have a protein bar for you. You'll probably be-

Mike: Yes. Yep.

LeeAnne Rimel: Or some sort of like-

Mike: A nutritious organic environmental perfect protein bar.

LeeAnne Rimel: I do my best.

Mike: Thanks for coming on the podcast, LeeAnne. We will tune into the True to the Core sessions and I can't wait to see what you come up with for Dreamforce.

LeeAnne Rimel: Awesome. Thanks for having me, Mike.

Mike: Big thanks to LeeAnne for coming on the podcast and giving us the scoop on the True to the Core Deep Dive. I have a question for you. What after school snack did you get that wasn't carrot sticks and ranch or ants on a log? Curious minds want to know. I also got Ritz Crackers with peanut butter, chunky peanut butter because chunky peanut butter on Ritz crackers is awesome. So there we go. There's a little nugget. Share that on social, be sure to ping me. I'd be curious. Don't forget now, all these True to the Core Deep Dive episodes are going to be built on your questions and your input, so be sure to jump in, vote, share your thoughts, jump on the lives, ask questions. I don't anticipate these ending for a while. We'll have links in the show notes to the first episode and any other information that I have about it as of when this comes out. So that's it. I'm going to go maybe have some carrot sticks and ranch. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Kate Lessard, Lead Admin Evangelist at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about the new Agentforce Adoption Framework and her new YouTube series, “Kate Clicks Through It”.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Kate Lessard.

A flexible, nonlinear learning journey for admins It’s been a while since we’ve had Kate on the pod, but she’s been cooking up something cool, and I wanted to sit down with her to hear all about it. It’s called the Agentforce Adoption Framework, and it’s your guide for bringing the power of AI into your organization.

Kate and the Evangelist team identified a gap: admins needed a structured path to get up to speed with everything Agentforce has to offer. The framework breaks this down into five areas of focus:

1. Explore what’s possible
2. Get curious
3. Try it out
4. Make it work
5. Use it often

You can check out Kate’s post on the Admin Blog for more details, but the goal is to help you set goals for your organization and get ready for what’s coming next with AI.

Hands-on learning through “Kate Clicks Through It” Kate’s also started a new YouTube series, “Kate Clicks Through It,” where she walks you through Salesforce processes step by step, with demos so you can click along and try them yourself.

“I personally am someone who learns best by doing,” Kate says, “I need to get hands-on, I need to do something. In many cases, I need to do it over and over again.” The videos are around 10 minutes long, giving you quick tutorials on subjects like how to build an Agentforce data library, or how to use Org Check as an alternative to Optimizer.

A framework for learning just about anything The Agentforce Adoption Framework was developed through tons of research and feedback from admins, Salesforce MVPs, and folks on the product team. We think it’s pretty spiffy—so keep an eye out for more adoption-focused content at Dreamforce or even an event near you.

As Kate points out, while Agentforce might be the shiny new toy, the adoption framework can be adapted to just about anything you want to implement. She uses the example of Data Cloud to highlight how important it is to have that fundamental level of adoption for both your users and your external customers.

There are so many more great insights from Kate about how to level up your understanding of Agentforce, so be sure to check out the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you can catch us every Thursday.

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Full Transcript

Mike: Welcome to the Salesforce Admin's podcast. This week, admin evangelist Kate Lessard joins us to dive into the Agentforce adoption journey. From building a foundation AI to launching the new Kate Clicks Through It YouTube series, Kate walks us through how admins can thoughtfully and confidently bring AI into their organizations. We also chat about how feedback shaped the adoption framework and, sneak peek, what you might see at Dreamforce. So if you've been wondering where to start or where you are on your AI journey, this episode's for you. Let's get Kate on the podcast. So Kate, welcome back to the podcast.

Kate Lessard: Thanks. It's been a while.

Mike: Yeah. January. Was it when we did the kickoff? That was the last time.

Kate Lessard: Maybe. Or maybe did we do a TDX, prep for TDX call maybe?

Mike: We might've. Other podcasters would remember their episodes, but me, just crank them out.

Kate Lessard: Yeah, you're a little busy.

Mike: It's okay. So you've been busy as well. Let's talk about Agentforce stuff and YouTube stuff and everything you've been working on.

Kate Lessard: Yeah, absolutely. It has definitely been a busy year. It's been flying by. And some really exciting stuff that we've been working on for admins this year.

Mike: First up being Agentforce stuff, because Agentforce. I know there's not too much Agentforce out there. People say that, there's not. When we're recording this ChatGPT is coming out with a new model. This is our new norm. It's like when the iPhone drop, there's not enough iPhone information out in the world. There's always iPhone information out in the world. There's always going to be AI stuff for us to learn.

Kate Lessard: Yeah, agreed. I think that that's the really cool thing about Agentforce and the job that we get to do is that we get to play with and learn the new things as they're coming out because it's so important for us to share with others and let them learn from our mistakes. So I think that that brings a lot of fun experimentation into our jobs.

Mike: Right, absolutely. So speaking of that, how do we kind of walk people through the journey to Agentforce?

Kate Lessard: At TDX last year we, or I guess this year, we announced that we have this Agentforce development life cycle. But then we kind of started asking what comes before that? How do we get into this cycle where we're iterating through ideation, configuration, testing, deployment, and supervising our agents? How can we get ready to actually go live with agents and Agentforce and using it? And so on the admin relations team, we kind of took a step back and started to think about adoption and how we can set up adoption for admins and get them not only familiar with Agentforce, if they have no idea what it is, where they can get started, how they can start to learn the fundamentals of AI just in general, and then dive into Salesforce and Agentforce and using AI within their CRM. That's been something we've been really focused on, is creating the concept of this adoption framework to help admins get ready to move their organizations towards actually using Agentforce consistently.

Mike: Yeah, because I think it's one thing ... I mean, it's a little different than ... And I use this a lot when we talk about Flow or some of our other products. Automation within the CRM space has always been there. We didn't really have to learn it. But with AI, we're all learning AI on top of our organizations learning AI, on top of us going, "Okay, so now how do we use this? And what's the best use of this?" And all of that has to transfer into the admin sitting there going, "Oh my, I have a lot to learn. Where am I at?" And I think that's really one of the goals of coming out with the journey, is helping people understand where are you at, where do you want to go?

Kate Lessard: Agreed. I think that the development of Agentforce and of course more widely artificial intelligence, it's fast. It feels like there's something new to learn every week. I think that can cause a lot of overwhelm because we're trying to keep up without maybe even having a solid foundation. So this concept of the adoption framework was really designed as a baseline for admins to be able to take stock of where they are in their Agentforce learning journey, overcome that analysis paralysis that I think many of us have been feeling over the past couple years, and then have resources and a guide for exactly where they are now and what is coming next.

Mike: Yeah. So where is this guide or the adoption journey going to show up for us?

Kate Lessard: So you will be able to see it, we have a nice blog on the admin's website right now. It is called Your Five Step Guide to Successful Agentforce Adoption. Just double checking that title, but that is correct. And this kind of introduces that adoption framework, the steps that are included with it, some resources for each step along the way. And then you might see this show up in a couple other places. It might show up in a Dreamforce session or it might show up on our website or any other place that I could maybe tease that it would come out. I think it's something that you might see here and there. And the nice thing is that it's ever-changing because we're constantly having new content and new resources to add to it in each step. So I think it's something that you're going to see in multiple places moving forward.

Mike: And I was a part of you brainstorming this and bringing it to the team, and really it was everybody on the team had something to contribute to this. Where do you feel like admins are progressing through in terms of the journey? Are we starting off? Does everybody start off at the beginning, or we jump in steps? I mean, is it like a step method, everybody has to go through every single step?

Kate Lessard: I think you go through every step, but maybe you don't recognize that you've gone through some of them. So our first step is really exploring what's possible and just really understanding what AI fundamentals are, what is Agentforce? And a lot of our admins are really active. They've already been hands-on in Trailhead. So they've maybe gone through this stage themselves without even realizing it because they've kind of figured out how the technology works. They've actually done a little hands-on work. They have been picturing use cases for their organization. And so maybe they're hopping into that next phase where they're actually sharing this and doing demos to their stakeholders and trying to bring this to their organization. So I think everyone goes through all the stages, but you might not be just starting directly at the beginning. Once you become aware of this framework, I think that you can hop in and find the point that is most relevant to where you are on your journey and be able to kind of pick up from there.

Mike: Yeah. And hopefully it kind of helps you gut check content and say, "Hmm, Maybe this is for next week when I'm moving into a different phase." Not to say that it would be a week that you would be in a phase. I'm just using it as a example.

Kate Lessard: Absolutely. I mean, admins move fast. I would not be shocked if some of them were moving from phase week to week. Although I would be surprised if they didn't spend some time in that phase where they're building out a demo and getting stakeholders involved in really building that support. I feel like that always takes time.

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. So in addition to the adoption journey, what else have you been working on?

Kate Lessard: Lots. It's been a busy year. I'm super excited to share some of the things that I've been working on and the team's been working on. We recently launched a new series on YouTube called Kate Clicks Through It, which has been just a labor of love. And I feel like it has been something that I'm really excited about, really excited to put out into the world because it is a series that allows admins to get hands-on and follow along different Salesforce processes step by step. And I personally am someone who learns best by doing. I need to get hands-on. I need to do something. In many cases, I need to do it over and over again. I need to try. I need to fail. That's why admins love sandboxes so much. That's why we love Trailhead, so that we can get in there and we can actually just try things out and see what works and what doesn't, and then take the best version of that to our business. So Kate Clicks Through It launched in July. We have two episodes out right now, one on Agentforce data libraries and one on using Org Check as an alternative to Optimizer, which is retiring this winter. And it's just a way to follow along step by step. They're short episodes, less than 10 minutes spent on each demo so that you can actually have your computer up and click along beside me, and by the end we've accomplished something together.

Mike: It's kind of like a Salesforce Twitch stream.

Kate Lessard: Yeah, absolutely.

Mike: You're not playing the video game, you're building the app or clicking through the app.

Kate Lessard: Exactly.

Mike: Cool. So Kate, it is, boy, end of August. Well, end-ish of August. I swear these months, it's like it took forever ... February took like eight or nine months. And then we had TDX, and then it was spring for a day, and now Summer is flying by, it's already the end of August. The kids are back in school. Dreamforce is right around the corner. Which usually for most of us is September. It's October this year. It's not close enough to Halloween, but it still would be close enough that you could totally get away with wearing a Halloween costume at Dreamforce. I just realized that, that might be kind of fun. I mean, the biggest costume is Cloudy and Codey. They would win, I suppose. Would they wear a costume? Would the costume wear a costume?

Kate Lessard: I don't know the answer to that.

Mike: It's inception, like Astro in his Tanooki suit, would he wear another costume on top of that? These are the things that keep Mike up at night. We did wear a Yeti suit.

Kate Lessard: [inaudible 00:11:30]. That is true. The Yeti suit and the safari suit.

Mike: I forgot about the safari.

Kate Lessard: I think we could all just call it a win across the board and wear some awesome admin capes.

Mike: Right. I mean, if you don't wear that in your every day, just because you could. We're going to see some of the Agentforce adoption journey show up at Dreamforce, maybe in the keynotes, maybe in the track?

Kate Lessard: Maybe. I think that the nice thing about the adoption journey is that it really is applicable to so many situations. I think that it is, even if it's not called out directly, it is going to be there and you're going to start noticing it as part of that underlying education and the foundation of how we're talking about and building things. It's also really nice because it doesn't just have to be for Agentforce either. I think that what we've created is really applicable for a lot of different adoptions of different technologies. So I think that it's something that maybe we'll see as the world continues to progress and AI gets more advanced. So it's definitely something that you'll start to notice at Dreamforce.

Mike: Yeah. I'm also thinking of, it always seemed as when I was an admin going to Dreamforce, nine times out of 10 it was, I need to learn about this other cloud because we're getting ready to implement it. So I could see that Agentforce adoption journey being applicable as you're looking at additional clouds as well.

Kate Lessard: Yeah, I think especially if you're using something like Data Cloud to unify your data and bring things from multiple sources, that it becomes really important to have that foundational level of adoption for your users in general and your customers, external customers as well.

Mike: Yeah. One thing we didn't touch on, and we're not giving away the chili recipe ... I always think back to Food Network where they're, I've got some ... It's always they're making a sauce and they put in, "Well, I've got some salt and pepper and some onion powder," and you're like, "Yeah, that goes in everything." And then I got my seasoning blend, and you're like, "Oh, that's you don't want to tell us everything else that you put in there."

Kate Lessard: The secret admin sauce.

Mike: The secret ... Yeah. But I mean, I don't want people to think like, "Oh, well, Kate just sat down and mapped out a journey and presented it to the team, and then now it's on the website." What was some of the process or the input that we got on the adoption journey?

Kate Lessard: Absolutely. That is a great question because we involved a lot of people in creating this. Not only the team, although that's where we certainly started, but the framework was not built in a vacuum. We had a ton of feedback and interaction both internally and from the community as we developed this. So we got feedback from members of our product team at Salesforce. We did a very soft launch at TDX as part of my demo to deployment session and got some feedback from that. And then we continued to refine and then get feedback from admins in a survey that we shared at a local community conference. And then after that, we took that survey to the Salesforce MVPs and got some more feedback from some of them as well. So everyone that weighed in helped us refine this framework. They called out some things that maybe we hadn't thought were really that important for admins to include in this journey, this roadmap. But once we heard that and we saw it consistently show up, we added it in. So a lot of people weighed in and helped us create this journey map.

Mike: And some of it was us just looking at each other and being like, "Is this what we're going through?" Because we're going through Agentforce adoption as well. I mean, from the moment the product hit some of our orgs for us to try and play around with, it was, what are we learning and is this what we're going through?

Kate Lessard: Absolutely. And I think that that really hits the nail on the head. I think that we went through a lot of these different emotions that we associated with each stage here. We were curious, we were frustrated, we were feeling really proud once we got to this stage. So selfishly, this framework has kind of evolved into a game changer for our team internally and our internal content strategy as well, because we've been able to see where there are content gaps that we have experienced, as well as what we've heard from the community and what we should be focusing on to give admins the knowledge that they need for a successful Agentforce implementation. And we're able to collect that feedbacks from the admins and the community about what they've been struggling with and what resources and discussions they feel have been missing, which was the biggest thing that was contributed to us as we were building this.

Mike: So here's a meta question. Did you use AI to create any part of the adoption journey?

Kate Lessard: I did. Okay. So let's think back to this ... It's been such ... Oh gosh, we've been working on this for months. But-

Mike: Got to do the flashback [inaudible 00:16:51].

Kate Lessard: First it started off with just a giant brain dump mind map. That was what helped us kind of sort out the emotions and the stages. And then they've shifted terminology and what we are referring to them and how we process them a few times. I think AI really helped me with the survey, is where it helped out. So I was like, "These are the things that I'm trying to get. This is how I'm trying to ask the questions. This doesn't feel quite right. Can you help me refine this?" And so I did use AI to help me with that survey. And then got feedback from our internal marketing team as well to make sure that it was capturing what we needed it to. Because I think the biggest thing that we see with surveys in general, and this is me going down a total rabbit hole from my past project management and consulting experience, when you send out surveys or you're gathering requirements or you're asking questions, if you do so without having the specific goal in mind of what you're trying to get back, you can get so much information that is valuable, but maybe not what you're looking for or answering the questions that you really need answered. So I think that AI, as well as our internal marketing team, was super helpful in refining that.

Mike: That, or what I've found is you can ask the question in such a way that it elicits only a certain answer, as opposed to kind of an A, B, C answer. Really you're asking it, is it this or not this? And then you end up with an answer where the person really kind of hones in. And it's almost like, I don't know if the term confirmation bias is right, but I do know a friend once asked me, "When you ask somebody their opinion, it's because you really want them to confirm that you're right." And I was like, "Oh, yeah, that's kind of true."

Kate Lessard: Right. Yeah. Do I look good in this?

Mike: I mean, all of the time. Yeah. You ask questions like that, "Do you really think I should buy this house?" And it's like, you don't want them to say no. You want them to be like, "Yes, it's going to be an amazing house for you."

Kate Lessard: Yeah.

Mike: "Absolutely. It's a totally good decision." I don't know. That just stuck with me, that kind of thing.

Kate Lessard: Yeah. Big shout out to our research team that does that every day, right? They're putting together these questionnaires and they're talking to people at events like TDX and Dreamforce and having to just put together these thoughtfully designed surveys and questionnaires, and it really is an art.

Mike: Well, Kate, I appreciate you coming on the podcast and talking about adoption journey and Kate Clicks Through It. You're out there helping admins progress through different emotions, not just learning. Because that's also important, because emotions drive a lot of things, and creativity and inspiration are definitely two of those things. So I appreciate you coming on the pod and talking about that.

Kate Lessard: Absolutely. And I think that you're exactly right, those emotions are important. And they help make us better admins and the passion that we have for helping out the business and the organizations that we work with. It's just really important. It's a driving factor. And that's part of what makes us so successful and helps make both our users and our external customers happy.

Mike: Big thanks to Kate for walking us through the Agentforce adoption framework and showing us what a thoughtful community-driven AI adoption can look like. Be sure to check out her YouTube series, Kate Clicks Through It, and explore the resources linked in the show notes. Whether you're starting or already building AI demos, I promise you this journey's for you. So until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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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 we can teach AI effectively to admins and the easiest way to learn Agentforce.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Amit Malik.

The shift from knowledge to value As the Content Portfolio Lead for AI in Product Education at Salesforce, Amit is the perfect person to talk to about where admins should get started with learning Agentforce. After all, his job is all about planning the courses that are offered globally about Agentforce and Data Cloud.

What Amit emphasizes is that past knowledge matters less than what learners do in the next 12 months. Agentforce’s capabilities are growing with every release, so he recommends focusing on understanding the core concepts of how AI works and building from there.

Malik’s agent framework for admins When you’re building with AI, the first step is aligning on why an agent is needed in the first place. From there, he recommends asking five questions to guide your process:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.

It’s important to understand that Agentforce is the final layer of the org, the interface. An agent is really an aggregation of the topics you build it to solve. Those topics comprise the specific actions you enable your agent to perform, and those topics, in turn, are possible based on the data you’ve integrated into Data Cloud.

Adopting a learner’s mindset For Amit, the most important thing you can do if you want to learn Agentforce is to adopt a learner’s mindset. “The art of learning is to become curious,” he explains, “education is not about the instructor, it’s more about the learner.”

Where many businesses go wrong is viewing AI as a solution in search of a problem. But once you start to get curious about the specifics of your business processes, you’ll start to find all sorts of new ways that AI agents can help. And building around these specific, real-world use cases is the easiest way to get started mastering Agentforce.

Amit has a lot to share about learning, teaching, and working with Agentforce, so be sure to tune in for the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch a new episode every Thursday.

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Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt:

This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we're welcoming back, Amit Malik to talk about a topic that's very top of mind for every Salesforce admin right now, which is how do we teach AI effectively? Amit's going to share with us some insights from over a decade of Salesforce instruction diving into why teaching AI is a little bit different now, and how admins can use his five question agent framework to put to better use. Now, whether you're just getting started with Agent Force or you're already experimenting with Data Cloud, this conversation's packed with practical ways to bring clarity to your learning and to your users. 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:

Big thanks to Amit for joining us and sharing such a clear and thoughtful perspective on teaching AI in a way that actually works for admins, for users, hopefully for your organization. I really think his framework is something you'll want to listen to, take notes, and probably come back to again, so. Hey, if you thought this episode got you thinking about how to introduce AI to your org, share it with somebody that you are working with so they can give it a listen. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to John Wall, co-host of the Marketing Over Coffee Podcast.

Join us as we chat about how new generative AI tools are enabling marketers to get more personalized.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with John Wall.

Six core marketing use cases for AI Thanks to Agentforce, generative AI has moved from novelty to necessity for most organizations. It’s a key tool for strategic content creation, customer insight, and business transformation. That’s why I sat down with John Wall, co-host of the Marketing Over Coffee Podcast, with guests like Simon Sinek, Seth Godin, and Debbie Millman.

John identifies six key areas where marketers can lean on AI support:

1. Generation
2. Summarization
3. Extraction
4. Rewriting
5. Classification
6. Question answering

These tasks are helping marketers analyze massive datasets, repurpose content, and simulate customer feedback in ways that were previously unimaginable. So my question for John was: what can we, as admins, build to help them out?

Better data, smarter personas Marketers use personas to help them think about the specific people in their audience that they want to reach. “Right now, that’s four people in a conference room coming up with cute nicknames like Sally Shopper or Wally the Weekend Warrior,” John says.

In the future, however, AI will make it possible to decide on marketing personas based on data-driven profiling. Marketers can extract customer patterns from engagement data and train real models based on statistics, not spitballing.

Even more exciting, these new persona agents are essentially customers on demand. You can ask them questions and get their feedback while you plan your next marketing campaign.

Why you need a human in the loop As everyone rushes to deploy AI, John emphasizes the importance of the human in the loop. Mistakes are bound to happen, and rushed implementations can harm brand trust. You need to make sure that any solution you deploy has gone through a thorough internal vetting process before it goes live.

As John says, AI advancements are probably not going to put you out of a job, but they’ll definitely make your job easier. “The big thing is you have to be curious,” he says, “go play with something and see what you can make it do and what kind of results you can get from it.”

Listen to the full episode for more from John about how AI is transforming marketing. And make sure you’re subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

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Learn more * John’s Podcast: Marketing Over Coffee * Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: 2025 Roadmap for Salesforce Admins: AI, Agentforce, and Emerging Trends * Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: How Agentforce Transforms Customer Interactions at Salesforce * Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: How Agentforce Is Changing the Career Landscape

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Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt:

This week on the Salesforce Admin's Podcast, we're catching up with John Wall, longtime marketer, podcaster, and co-host of Marketing Over Coffee. We're going to dive into the rise of AI in marketing from smart summarization and rewriting tools to full-blown virtual agents. We're going to unpack how marketers can stay ahead and why AI is not magic, even though it kind of feels that way, and what smart Salesforce admins should be watching for next. Plus, you'll hear why having a human in the loop is still the secret sauce to marketing. So give this episode a listen and join me in welcoming John Wall to the podcast.

So, John, welcome to the podcast.

John Wall:

Mike, it's great to be on the mic with you again.

Mike Gerholdt:

I know, it's been a while. I feel the last time we recorded was in Boston, 100 years ago.

John Wall:

Yeah, downtown Boston. I remember we were live on Newbury Street. That was like the heart of all the action.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yep. We were recording the old style podcast. We had an Edison, it was putting it on a phonograph and some wax tubes.

John Wall:

That's right. Sitting there with my ear trumpet listening.

Mike Gerholdt:

Ear trumpet, I love it. For those people, like the two people in the world that don't listen to Marketing Over Coffee, can you give us a brief overview of what you do and what Marketing Over Coffee is?

John Wall:

Yeah, sure. So, my whole career I worked in marketing and tech, and God, going on what, 16, 17 years ago when podcasting was just done with steam engine and hammers and nails. We created Marketing Over Coffee, with my co-host Christopher Penn. And we've had this ongoing dialogue of just every week, 25 to 30 minutes talking about what's going on in marketing and tech. And just like CRM, this space is so insane and changing every week, there's no shortage of stuff to talk about. But then, and it's also grown up enough that I've been fortunate enough to get a lot of big marketing brains and authors on, like Simon Sinek and Debbie Millman, Seth Godin, folks like that. So yeah, it's really kind of opened up the world because the family doesn't want to hear what I have to say about marketing over Thanksgiving, so I have somewhere to talk about that.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, that could be another, you should rename the podcast that for the holidays, Marketing over Thanksgiving.

John Wall:

Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

Just see if anybody notices.

John Wall:

That glazed overlook when I'm talking about what I do for a living.

Mike Gerholdt:

So I make ads, I'm like Jon Hamm on Mad Men. No, and I remember the Boston. So much of what admins do I remember, is interface with marketing. And that's why I love having you on because not only as a personal brand, but also as somebody that does a lot of podcasts and content creation, it just overlaps with what admins do. And marketing is such a big facet of any organization now. I mean, you can't sit down and talk sales without, well, we should have the marketing person in here, and they always want 5,000 more requirements than what you started with, but that's why I love having you on.

So, let's dive in. I feel like we woke up from the pandemic and AI just was everywhere now. I'd love to know on what the world of AI looks like for marketers now.

John Wall:

Yeah, I mean, you totally nailed that, and the world has changed yet again. We were kind of finally, things were finally stabilizing a little bit. Platforms that matured, as far as email and text messaging and advertising and things are fairly solid, and now AI has shown up to destroy everything.

It's been a little weird though, because our world didn't change as much. We've been working a lot with machine learning to do data analysis for years. So my co-host on the show and partner at Trust Insights, Christopher Penn, had long been using machine learning to measure PR and advertising results. Doing statistical models to prove like, okay, what's actually working in your branding and your advertising? These things that you can't easily measure with clicks. And so that has been an area where we were able to kind of provide some value and insight that nobody else could get. But then really, I don't know, about a year and a half ago when generative AI became the hottest thing going on all fronts for marketing, the amount of interest in that has just exploded.

So yeah, we have a bunch of fronts that we're applying the technology and it's just amazing to see the range of how marketers adapt. There's still plenty of marketers that don't want to look at it and have their head in the sand, and all the way up to, we have clients that are like, "Hey, we want to reimagine our entire business because we think it's going to be something completely different in the next five years."

So yeah, we spent a lot of time thinking about where this stuff is going to go, and it's amazing how... And literally we have, Christopher works full time on monitoring this space and seeing what's new and what's coming next, because it's just insane when you look at the fact that we've had six major models this year. There's never been a time in tech history where you have six major products show up at once. So, yeah, everything is changing and it's just a challenge to keep track of what's happening this week.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I remember not that long ago, thinking how long in the tooth we've been working in tech, when I heard some statistic of, today we'll create more content than was ever previously created in human history. So now with AI, are we exponentially creating more? Are we creating better content? Is that the converse... I always dig into like, what's that next layer down? Are we really caring about creating better content with AI or are we just creating more content with AI?

John Wall:

Right. Well, of course, marketers ruin everything, right?

Mike Gerholdt:

Right.

John Wall:

This is nothing new. Yeah, there's a whole army of people that are taking their stuff that was pretty crappy and now we have an exponential amount of pretty crappy stuff out there. So yeah, and it's going to be really weird to see how all this goes because it's the classic antivirus defense too. It's, as soon as people are creating exponentially more junk, all of the search engines or AI powered search engines are adding defenses to pull all that stuff back out. So it's just this never ending battle and yeah, the level of content, I don't know, it's so much so that we're going to burn more electricity in the next year than the power of the sun. I mean, it's just insane how this is all changing.

Mike Gerholdt:

But we'll have better copy for our websites.

John Wall:

Right, you'll have a better landing page. It's going to convert for you. But then we do see, as with everything, right? There's people that are using the technology to automate the foolishness of the past, we have electronic yellow pages being created. But at the other end, there's people who are using these tools in totally brand new and novel ways to get some insight that they've never had before, or automate things that used to be just insanely difficult to automate, and yeah, go to new places and create advantage. So there are ways to win and yeah, there's going to be a ton of things that we never even expected that will change everything for us.

Mike Gerholdt:

I mean, the biggest thing before AI, the wave of AI hit, the biggest thing we were dealing with was data lakes and these massive data volumes. And I think even marketers were dealing with that too, because you have people going to their website and they're unauthenticated and we're assigning a profile to them. How do we dig through when you've got millions of impressions on a page? What was that journey of that person? How did they actually get to the pair of shoes that they bought? Now with AI, are we getting smarter at doing that? Is that kind of the data that we're digging into?

John Wall:

Yeah, absolutely. And so yeah, when you look back, step back and look at the landscape. Generation, we consider that one of only six different options to use AI for to help get you places. And two of them extraction and summarization, that's just what you're talking about. It's like to finally be able to have all of these different data sources all over the place, load them up into a system and have it do the heavy lifting of, okay, find the commonalities between these things.

And yet it's just, we had been promising this for decades, this idea that when people in marketing talk about personas, that's just because four people in a conference room came up with cute nicknames and an idea of who these people should be. They're like, oh yeah, Sally Shopper and George Weekend Warrior, or whatever. But now you can get actual summarizations based on the data itself. And you actually know that, okay, we do see that 40% of the buyers look like this, and they have these things in common, and it's all based on statistics, none of it's based on gut. So yeah, those kinds of insights are really interesting.

And we've actually been pushing another level. You can go ahead and create these profiles of who these people are, but then use those profiles to train the large language models. So now that you can actually treat that as a customer on demand that you can survey and ask questions to, instead of emailing everybody with every purchase of $0.35 to ask for feedback on what's going on, you just go to the large language model and say, "Hey, here's the next four marketing campaigns. Tell us what you think about those and does this resonate with you?" And you can get similar insight but not cause as much trouble and not have to wait.

Mike Gerholdt:

You mentioned six, I think you gave us one or two. What were the other four?

John Wall:

Yeah, so obviously generative AI, you've got generation, we just talked about extraction and summarization. The other three, rewriting, which is just something that can easily raise your productivity, right? If you're somebody who's having to, okay, I wrote this white paper for the construction industry. I want to write about the same kind of stuff for the food service industry. Rewriting is very easy and instant for generative AI to do.

Classification is another use case. We see this a lot where people that have multiple products, they don't know how they fit in together, or even if you just have large amounts of data. A good example is for a call center, you've got 30,000 calls a month. To have AI transcribe those and go through and find the 20 features that you should fix to make 10% of your calls go away. That kind of stuff is a huge benefit, huge lift.

And then out of the six, yeah, the last is just question answering. You can really get better insight into topics than search engine results by asking AI to not only give you the answer, but explain how it got there and educate you on, what do you need to know to kind of understand the space a little bit more.

Mike Gerholdt:

And I think we're seeing, I mean, from the Salesforce side, we're showing a lot of use cases and we have a lot of customers that are standing up agents on public facing sites. Are you seeing that more and more as a trend for marketers to work with? I think one of the things, as I say this, one of the stereotypes that most marketing falls into is, how do we drive more sales? But I think a lot of marketers are also, how do we divert service cases as well and drive sales through service? Are you seeing agents on public-facing websites as something marketers are paying attention to for that?

John Wall:

Yeah. I mean, everybody wants that, right? And unfortunately, we've all seen this cycle. This happens where there's the board meeting and the board is saying, "Hey, we got to get onto this," and so now somebody's like, okay, I need to get me one of these shiny object things. And unfortunately, it's mostly disaster-ville, right? We were seeing these things of people hooking up a chatbot or whatever, and it's starting to just spout off lies and crazy answers and it just becomes a train wreck. So yeah, that is one thing that's going to be huge over the next couple of years. The idea of, okay, yeah, you've got these bots or these agents, but which ones are enterprise-ready? There's a huge difference between something that's been vetted and tested.

For most of our clients we're saying, no, you need to have a human in the loop. A great... The use case that you just talked about would be, yeah, have the AI generate the top 2,000 answers for problems that it sees, but then that goes through the product manager for verification to prove that they're all real. You can't go live with that, but yeah, there's definitely going to be a lot of, unfortunately, we're going to see a lot of scary news as people pull the trigger on something that goes awry.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, that's kind of like we saw like the, we're not ready for the self-driving cars. We've seen that in San Francisco, but they still have somebody in the passenger seat or in the driver's seat just in case. The human in the loop.

John Wall:

Right, and that's always been, even you look back in history and it's like, yeah, escalators and elevators. There used to be people that was their job just to make sure that nothing went wrong.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, and of course not to be predictive, but I don't know the last time I rode an elevator where there was a person there to press the buttons for me.

John Wall:

Right, exactly. And yeah, there are... Well, yeah, it's just so much of that is the media and the way information gets presented to us as news. It's like, yeah, okay, these three automated cars got in some kind of weird accident, but we're not getting the story of all the ridiculous stuff humans did over the past month in cars. That's just not news for us anymore.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right, contextual. You mentioned at the beginning, sort of the great spectrum of marketers with their head in the sand, all the way to, we want to revolutionize our business. Where do most marketers fall, in terms of thinking with AI, thinking about AI? And where should that be?

John Wall:

Yeah, that's a great question because it's really, in a lot of ways this is a retooling for everybody. You have to go back and look at all your processes and figure out which ones apply. And because, and you've talked about this in the past, the fact that it's not about AI showing up and it's just like the marketing department's going to get wiped out. What's going to happen is over time, there's going to be three or four marketers that have added AI to a bunch of their workflows, things that they've hated doing, and so they've figured out how to automate them. And those people are going to be exponentially more productive than the folks that are avoiding AI and trying to stay away from it.

So yeah, where people should be. The big thing is you have to be curious. It's just like with every other major tech change. Go start playing around with something and see what you can make it do and what kind of results you can get out of it. Because at this stage of it, you're going to find these really crazy things. You're like, oh man, I never thought that I could use that to come up with an intelligent email address predictor. Every sales and marketing person has this where they're like, oh, I have to get in touch with this person and they haven't put their email up on the social networks that I normally follow. And so getting some suggestions to do that kind of stuff.

And the other one is, yeah, so much of marketing is combing through spreadsheets and trying to prove results or manage copy and things like that. So much of that stuff can be automated and give you hours back in your day. So yeah, it's a matter of having... Be bold, play around and kind of see what you can break.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I think back to, and I've tried to look this up, but I've heard the story of in the late-1800s, I forget who it was. I want to say Thomas Jefferson but that's probably not right, writing a letter to the US patent office saying, "You can shut down because everything that's been invented has been invented." And correlating that to, we can't let cars happen in the world because they'll put wagon wheel manufacturers out of business. And the labor force of wagon wheel manufacturers, it'll be devastating to the economy that all these wagon wheel manufacturers will go out of business. And I think back to, well, they just didn't understand. If you're a wagon wheel manufacturer, you're just really good at making things with wood. And if cars come around, then make things with wood for the car, as opposed to making wagon wheels.

And I feel like we're in that age now where people are, if AI comes out, AI's going to take my job. AI can generate an image, there's no more graphic designers. No. Have you seen AI's images? Graphic designers are going to be around for a while, but there will be a point where I feel we're riding on the elevator where it'll be pretty good, but the really good stuff will be the boutique stuff. And you think about it now, probably what, 90% of the furniture in your home probably was made by a robot. I mean, it's slapped together really good, but the craftsmen, the people that know how to make that stuff, they're still in high demand. There's just a smaller labor force of them.

John Wall:

Yeah, right, and that's the, we see this all the time, is the expert tools versus tools for experts, right?

Mike Gerholdt:

Right.

John Wall:

The idea that the tool is just going to do all the things for me. But yeah, no, the real neat, interesting stuff, like you said, the master woodworker who doesn't have to deal with all of the paper instructions and measuring things. They can just work on picking the right wood and thinking about the design of the furniture itself, rather than the more mundane tasks. And yeah, that's where things are going to... And you hit another great point of freeing resources up. I mean, yeah, okay, the big one is stock photo. Stock photo takes a huge hit if people are able to generate and just kind of get images that they want. But now it's the thing of, okay, all these companies that really had a hard time having quality graphics and images on their website, what happens if they finally have the ability to create a better website and be able to kind of do more with less? What kind of lift can they see from that?

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. So I'll ask a big question. Does AI make us better?

John Wall:

Well, it's like any tech tool, right? That's the problem. It can make us better and it can make us worse. It's all about whose hands is it in and what are they trying to do with it and where are they trying to go? But it is weird in that it, again, tech, it makes everything faster and bigger and accelerating. And unfortunately, our kind of caveman brains are already having enough difficulty handling the speed and volume of everything that's going on around us in the world. So yeah, it's going to get a little bit wonky and weird, and the idea of me even trying to predict something is kind of silly.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Well, I think that's the hardest part of it is, great tech appears as magic. Right? Isn't that the saying? And we're getting to the point now where we can't tell magic from great tech. So, I guess that's always where we're going, but we're always trying to out-invent ourselves. You know?

John Wall:

Yeah, and ultimately, it just comes down to the good news is, okay, what are people actually willing to pay for? I mean, we can do a lot of weird and crazy stuff, but what's actually going to find something that fits? And that's funny, that's something that's kind of evolved over the past 10 years too, is that we'd always thought about sales as kind of guiding people to your thing and moving the river to go in your direction. But really what we're seeing is that business is more about, what is the existing system already there and how do we move our business so that we can get in front of whatever's coming next and where to go? And so that idea of being able to strategically see what's coming next and already be there waiting for the customers as they show up with the money, that's a different approach and kind of changes everything for sales and marketing. Right? It's not about just banging the drum, it's more about listening ahead and figuring out where to be.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, and that's the part that I think all of this and we've never touched on, is the economics of AI, right? So we're approaching all of this now because almost everything has some sort of freemium model, which means we're the product. And it's free because they need our data, they need our prompts, they need to be able to comb the internet. They need to be able to read our blog post and our white papers. But when they don't need that anymore, then what is the economics of AI? Will there quickly become a have and have-nots layer? Because the have-nots can't afford the AI, because there is a cost to it now.

John Wall:

Yeah, that is a gigantic question that I think is just underappreciated, is the fact that AI has taken all the oxygen out of the room as far as VC. And we normally would kind of see money being sprinkled across a whole bunch of places, but everybody is just putting all their chips on this and it's, yeah, the-

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, everybody wants to have the iPod. They want to be the one that invested in the Facebook and the one that wins.

John Wall:

Right, yeah, yeah. Everybody is going for the top. But I can't think of a period of time where we're getting more powerful, free stuff than ever before.

Mike Gerholdt:

True.

John Wall:

And so, yeah, yeah, there's huge questions as far as like, okay, when this shakes out and suddenly maybe there's three winners or one winner or whatever, how does that change? Yeah, unfortunately, marketing again, has a horrible track record for like, yeah, it's great and free at the beginning, but then once it starts getting tuned for ads and traffic, yeah, it gets expensive fast, and a lot of people get left behind.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. I mean, that was just as you were answering that, that was something I was thinking of is, at some point, and I suppose we thought about this with social networks too, at some point they're going to start charging. And we didn't think that day would come, and I actually thought the model would be very different. Now, the social networks charge to verify you're a human, which I wouldn't have expected. We thought everything on social would go to a subscription price. We're seeing AI be subscription price early on, but I don't even know if in five years AILB subscription price, because there could be a completely different cost model to it because of, I don't know, right? Could you have predicted that Facebook is going to charge you to become a verified Facebook user, as opposed to a monthly subscription, which was the traditional magazine model?

John Wall:

Yeah, that's a turn that is bizarre. And I don't know, part of me too is still hoping one day we get to that point where it's more about verified users. Because when you get back to all these platforms, the problem is, they do violate the laws of communication. Right? Anybody can go on any platform and just say whatever they want and it can be unchallenged. Whereas for all of human history prior to that, if you were talking some crazy stuff, there was instant ramifications, whether it was somebody throwing a tomato at you or whatever, but there were repercussions for this. And so we see this as a crisis to entrust across the board in all institutions and yeah, I kind of think at some point somebody's going to get the bright idea that by verifying who's real and what's fake and what's not in anybody's best interest, when that stuff gets filtered, how does that make it different? But I [inaudible 00:24:35], I thought that that would've happened a long time ago and it's not here yet, so I don't know. Can it even happen?

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, selfishly, I know I've had a friend have a YouTube video of his transcribed and turned into three online magazine articles, all without his consent. And then posted to Facebook via a bot, and the bot 100% had an AI-generated profile image. So, I'd be afraid. Yeah, verified users, that would be.

John Wall:

Yeah, it would be.

Mike Gerholdt:

It's like when you get pulled over by the police, you have to hand them your ID. We need some sort of digital ID for that.

John Wall:

Yeah, that use case that you've described as crazy when you think about it, right? Because that's playing under old SEO rules. Somebody's thinking like, oh, I'm going to get in three or four more different channels and I'm going to take that traffic. And the reality is, all the search engines now, the first five things they're throwing up are their own internally-generated AI. Organic traffic just continues to crater.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, yeah. Well, especially when you take other people's stuff and you duplicate it, at least they're not rewarding that bad behavior.

John Wall:

Yeah, right.

Mike Gerholdt:

John, it was great having you on the podcast. I'm sorry it took so long, but I promise I've not stopped drinking coffee since then, nor will I ever, usually.

John Wall:

That sounds great. Yeah, no, it's good to be back. We haven't had a chance to hang out at Dreamforce like I used to do all the time, so it's good to catch up.

Mike Gerholdt:

I know, but there is still the Dreamforce Marathon. I don't even know what people are wearing now for wearables. You remember, it used to be Fitbits, and-

John Wall:

Oh, yeah. Right, yeah, yeah-

Mike Gerholdt:

I mean, we were all Fitbits and everybody had that, and it was the Dreamforce Marathon. I think, to be fair because I am Salesforce, we did hear that. And there has been a very long look at, how do we not necessarily keep people in the same space, but reduce the amount of-

John Wall:

Yeah, [inaudible 00:26:35]-

Mike Gerholdt:

... the 30-mile across San Francisco. Because it can be banned, there's a few of them hills that you just look at and be like, yep, I'm just going to stay at the bottom.

John Wall:

Always a fan. I just get the cable car pass for the week and take care of that.

Mike Gerholdt:

There you go, there you go. Well, it was great having you on. I promise to have you back on sooner, because I'm sure we're going to have more AI to talk about as it's ever evolving so quickly.

John Wall:

Yeah, yeah. Hopefully it'll still be us and not just avatars of us having to do it for us.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, that'll be fine too. We'll see. Maybe people won't know the difference, and then you and I can be riding a cable car in San Francisco.

John Wall:

Right, right, as they're watching the video of me with my third arm wave.

Mike Gerholdt:

Don't forget your sixth finger. It always gets the fingers wrong too.

Huge thanks to John for joining us and bringing his insights on AI marketing trends and why curiosity is your greatest asset right now. I know I'm always curious to hear his podcast, Marketing Over Coffee. And it being summer, I like to listen to it while I'm on my yard. That's just how I listen the podcast. How do you listen to this podcast, mowing and walking the dog? I'd love to know. Shoot me a message on social somewhere.

If this episode got you thinking or questioning some AI landing pages, hey, as an admin, time to meet with your fellow marketing peer and learn more about what we can do with Agentforce and everything else. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Derika West, IT Application Support Analyst II at KinderCare Learning Companies.

Join us as we chat about how she got started in her tech career and how she started her Salesforce journey.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Derika West.

Getting started in a tech career Derika started her career in the U.S. Army as a Carpentry and Masonry Specialist. From there, she bounced around between service industry jobs while she tried to figure out what was next. “There’s no way I could get into tech,” she told herself, “that’s way too smart for me.”

However, when Derika moved to the West Coast, her friends believed in her. She applied for a position as a QA Test Technician, and spent a lot of time figuring out how to pitch her skills in a way that would make sense for the role. And that position gave her a foothold into an entirely new career.

Getting hands-on with Salesforce In her current role, Derika is the SME for her organization’s transition from Classic to Lightning. It’s an org with over 40,000 users, so change comes slowly. She found herself in more and more conversations with end users about their pain points using their Salesforce deployment, and started looking for solutions.

One thing that has been very helpful for Derika is to reach out to the people at her organization who are more experienced with the Salesforce platform. Even learning the basics of what they do and how they got to where they are today was very helpful in making the decisions that would shape her career.

Why you should go to a Salesforce Admin Meetup Derika resolved to go to the next Portland Salesforce Admin Meetup, where she happened to meet Admin Evangelist superstar Kate Lessard. “I told everyone in the room that I’m new and I know nothing about what I’m doing,” Derika says, “and everyone was so welcoming and so helpful.”

Kate connected Derika with Supermums, an organization that provides training and volunteer opportunities to help people get started with a career in Salesforce. She’s about to take her certification exam, and let’s all send her good vibes and good luck.

Make sure to listen to the full episode for more from Derika, and don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you can catch us every Thursday.

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Love our podcasts? Subscribe today or review us on iTunes! Full show transcript

Josh Birk: Hello, everybody. Welcome to The Salesforce Admins Podcast. I am your guest host, Josh Birk, and today I'm delighted to bring Derika West onto the show, to talk about her journey into Salesforce, into the world of tech. And where she is on that journey, where she's looking for to go. Welcome to the show, Derika. All right, welcome everybody to the show. Today we are going to welcome Derika West to talk about her journey into Salesforce, where she is with it right now, and we're her future looks. And Derika, in looking at your CV, it pretty much starts with your military experience. What was it like being in the Army?

Derika West: Yeah. The Army was a wonderful thing for development for myself. I've always been a self-starter, I would say. And someone who thinks outside the box. And I just didn't know where that would fit for me in terms of which direction of a career I wanted to take. I initially started in college, and then I met somebody in my math class in college who was actively in... I think it was the reserves at the time, and I think she's full-time active duty now. But we just started talking about options of careers. And I'm always asking questions, as you'll find out. I just asked her, what is it like being a female in the military? And she just said, "There's so many things that you can do as a female that you aren't really told growing up, and even high school." For me, I never considered the military as an option for me. And then, I just learned that there's so many different routes you can take. It's a way to build yourself up and get some self-confidence, really, as a female. And so, I ended up speaking to a recruiter, got involved, and then I joined the Army. And did battle buddy things with her and talked to her throughout my journey. It was really great. Yeah, I had a good time in the military.

Josh Birk: So two follow-up questions to that. First, was there something about the Army role that you were looking at that you were... Going back to your point, I didn't know. I didn't think about me being as an engineer because I haven't seen a lot of women in tech, women in engineering, stuff like that. Was there something about the role that was like, oh, this could be something cool and new that I could learn that I hadn't thought about before?

Derika West: Yes, absolutely. That was one of the main points for me in joining the military. I really wanted self-confidence. I wanted to build myself up, and I didn't know where to start. For me, the military seemed like a wonderful route. It had a lot of structure. I was looking for discipline, I was looking for travel, I was looking for all the things that the military had to offer. And I think anybody knows that the military is very eager to get people in. Yeah, it was pretty much, once I talked to a recruiter it was no-brainer after that.

Josh Birk: Nice. I got to ask, what is traveling with the military like? I can imagine it's wildly different from commercial.

Derika West: Absolutely different. You are definitely the government's property. Anywhere that they say you're going, you're going. Luckily for me, my first duty station was Hawaii, so I got very lucky.

Josh Birk: There you go.

Derika West: And it was just, I lucked out because nobody else got a duty station like that. And I know my brother-in-law, he's currently active in the Army, he doesn't really get that much flexibility on travel. But it's definitely, it's very safeguarded when you travel. It's not picking the cheapest flight and going somewhere beautiful. It's very structured in that way.

Josh Birk: You roll the dice, sometimes you get a 20-unit up in Hawaii, but other times maybe not so much. That makes sense.

Derika West: I got very, very lucky. Yes.

Josh Birk: What was life after the military? What was that like?

Derika West: Life after the military was a bit confusing for me. I was struggling with figuring out which path I wanted to take for my long-term in terms of career. Outside of having that structured day-to-day life, I was pretty much a spinning compass at that point. I decided to move back home and start from the ground and spend more time with my family. Recharge my roots back home a bit. And then for, I would say, about five to 10 years there I was just doing service industry things and just trying to find my way. And then I made another move after that out to the West Coast. And then I got more connections out here, much different than the Midwest, and found my way into tech eventually. But it did take me a while to get to this point.

Josh Birk: You moved to a new coast and you started getting into tech. What was the appeal of tech to move all the way out there and try to get a job in it?

Derika West: Life brought me out to Oregon. I was looking for expansion. I wanted to really grow myself physically and mentally, and I wanted to learn things that were outside of my Midwestern bubble.

Josh Birk: Got it.

Derika West: I felt like when I came out to the West Coast, a lot of people acted different, they thought differently. A lot of the things that I learned about in the Midwest were produced from the West Coast, so I felt like I could [inaudible 00:06:12] to people here.

Josh Birk: I love that. I love that.

Derika West: You feel that... I don't know how to put this. You're from the Midwest.

Josh Birk: Yeah.

Derika West: You feel a bit siloed in the Midwest. And I never really considered tech as a career option for myself when I was living there. So when I moved here and I started hearing about all these new people and different career paths, I was like, I need to expand my brain and I need to think outside the box of these potential possibilities for myself longterm. I think, really, it came down to the careers before this point that didn't work out for me. The things that I liked about those careers and the things I didn't like about those careers. And then just simply networking with like-minded individuals who were really interested in self-growth and just being in a space of learning more. Yeah.

Josh Birk: What were some of those early touch points of here are other people in a similar situation that they're trying to put themselves into a new skillset and something in technology?

Derika West: Honestly, it started with meeting a software engineer in a friend group. And she worked for a local cannabis company here in Oregon. And she and I just started chatting, and I just asked her what she liked about tech, what got her into it. And she gave me the breakdown of her day-to-day. And just asked if I had ever considered getting into tech. And my response was, "I've never considered that. And also, it's way too smart for me. There's no way I could get into tech, I don't understand anything about it." That's my first touch point in getting some exposure.

Josh Birk: It's such an important one. I feel like there's so many people that I've met over the years who just needed that one friend to help demystify it a little bit.

Derika West: Definitely.

Josh Birk: It'd just be like I've done interviews where people are like, "I challenged myself to learn JavaScript by not going out socially for three months, but now I work in my dream job." So that [inaudible 00:08:27]. What was some of your early successes? What jobs were you getting into?

Derika West: My first job was a QA test technician, which I would've never pictured myself doing ever, but it was incredibly helpful to get me started into tech. It was everything that I didn't know that I needed getting into this industry. It taught me how to ask hard questions. It taught me how to put myself in uncomfortable situations, and just to get into something that I know nothing about. And I honestly didn't even think that I would get a QA job, but it really laid the foundation of my tech career. And I am very lucky and fortunate that I got that job. Because coming from a background that has zero experience in tech, I really had to talk myself up about the skillset that I had prior to that position, and that was something that I didn't know would sell. And I just did a lot of research prior to my interview and I looked up what a QA does. I looked up where you could go with it. And I just was doing a lot of homework, I guess you could say. Just doing a ton of research.

Josh Birk: Yeah. And what I love about this, and for anybody who's listening, and if this vibes with you, I know so many people who are now product managers and senior engineers, and all of these things, and a lot of them got their start in customer support or QA. And I think part of it is you get confronted with technology that even if you didn't build it, you have to understand its working parts. Right?

Derika West: Right.

Josh Birk: And then, also that QA mindset is also very similar to a programmer's mindset, to a developer's mindset. I'm going to get the joke wrong, but it's like the QA engineer enters the bar. The bartender says, "What do you want?" And it's like, "One beer, two beers, an owl, no beers, zero, null." You have to take in all these weird use cases. Then, how did you start... Was your transition into more of the software side of things, was that Salesforce itself, or was there a transition period?

Derika West: There was definitely a transition period. I went from QA to my current role, which is more software-based. My QA position was more testing hardware behind the scenes, working with our devs and working with the product owners and things like that. My current role is more end user facing, but also working with the product owners and other teams. It's a lot of cross collaboration. In my current position, that's where I work directly with Salesforce. And I work with their team, and I'm the person who's the SME of our current project. And undergoing a bunch of transition from changing our old Salesforce platform to Lightning, which is a new one, for those who don't know about it.

Josh Birk: Welcome to the club.

Derika West: It was quite the transition. Yeah, yeah, it was big. It's huge. We have 40,000 users. It's a lot.

Josh Birk: Oh, wow. You have 40,000 users?

Derika West: I can't exaggerate that enough. Yes.

Josh Birk: And how many of them are system administrators?

Derika West: Honest, on our Salesforce team, I don't know at the moment. But for me, it's just me on my team.

Josh Birk: Got it. Okay. It's the old admin joke, 200 people in the company, 180 of them are system administrators.

Derika West: Right. Yeah. Few and far between, that's all I got to say there.

Josh Birk: Nice. Which is the way it should be. What was it like... I'll just come right out on that. What was it like learning Salesforce?

Derika West: Learning Salesforce was something that was self-taught for myself. I knew absolutely nothing about it. I was like, "What? What do you sell? What products do you sell?" Even my family was like... My grandma was like, "Salesforce is you're selling things?" And I was like, "No, no, no."

Josh Birk: Right.

Derika West: Yeah. I had no idea what it was, so I just simply pulled out my resources. I started asking about it. I asked our Salesforce team, "Hey, what do you do? What is Salesforce?" And I had individual meetings with every single team member on that team for myself. And I just made it a point to let them know that, "Hey, this is something I'm very interested in. And on my outside working hours I'm learning this on my own."

Josh Birk: Got it.

Derika West: So, yes, Trailhead was my first stop. Trailhead was very overwhelming for myself. I was like, where do I start? And also, what am I supposed to be studying? And then I found Trailmixes. And then one thing just led me to another thing, and that's just how my tech journey has been since the beginning. I found that just played out in my own learning with Salesforce. So, that's how I got started with that.

Josh Birk: How long do you think you took from you, okay, I want to put this under my belt? Because you work with other applications as well. Or at least you have been, right? Like, oh gosh, I want to say Office 360, and that's the worst example.

Derika West: Office 365, yeah.

Josh Birk: Like, who doesn't?

Derika West: Yeah. What is your question?

Josh Birk: Well, no. Yeah, let me start with the question, because that was a tangent [inaudible 00:14:27]. Anyway, it worked in my brain. I swear it worked in my brain.

Derika West: It's like...

Josh Birk: How long do you think it was before you're like, oh, I really want to put this in my tool belt, I'm going to take some time that's my own personal time and I'm going to start learning it, until you were like, I feel pretty comfortable that I could help administer our Salesforce work? What are we talking weeks, months here?

Derika West: I would say about the three-month mark into our transition with our project at work is when I was like, okay, I'm fully going to dive into this and take the reins myself. Because I noticed there was a gap between our team and the Salesforce team. And I was helping these end users on a live call, and they would become extremely frustrated. It's a big pain point in our company, and I'm the one to bring it up because I'm going to bring it up, because I want change and I want things to be smoother for people. And that's really what I'm passionate about in this career is helping people.

Josh Birk: Nice.

Derika West: And I told our Salesforce team, "Hey, I do not have permissions to do X, Y and Z. Can you get them for me?" And they said no. And then, I took it upon myself to start going to more Salesforce related things so I could learn the platform better. It came down to me and wanting things to be better for myself and for other people, but no one would have bridged that gap had I not been in that gap.

Josh Birk: Right. Did you eventually get those permissions?

Derika West: No, I did not.

Josh Birk: Okay. All right.

Derika West: But I am in a place where I'm in a transition, so I understand the business needs and I understand the Salesforce side of things as well. It's my passion hobby right now is learning Salesforce on the side. And it's taught me a lot.

Josh Birk: At least you can be that interaction between a user and what Salesforce is when the Salesforce team isn't in the room. Yeah.

Derika West: Right. Exactly.

Josh Birk: Now, you recently got involved in Supermums, right?

Derika West: I did, yes.

Josh Birk: How did that get on the radar? And can you give us a quick elevator pitch on Supermums?

Derika West: I will try my best.

Josh Birk: Okay.

Derika West: As I was mentioning before, I work full-time. In my application support role, I am wanting to get into our transition to the admin role. I went on Trailhead and I found one of our local Portland admin meetup groups, and I noticed that they had one coming up. I think it was back in February, it was like four months ago. And I was like, I know nothing about automation. I have no idea how it works, but I'd love to know. I'd love to learn more about this thing. So I just went as a newbie to one of these local admin group meetups. It was my first one ever. And at the end of the meeting I met a wonderful human, her name's Kate Lessard. Shout out to you, Kate.

Josh Birk: Shout out to Kate.

Derika West: Hey, Kate. We just started connecting afterward. I told everyone in that room that I'm new, I know nothing about what I'm doing. And everyone was so welcoming and so helpful, and it just further enhanced my want to be in the Salesforce ecosystem. So that's where I got started. And then Kate introduced me and gave me a bunch of resources after that meetup, and Supermums was one of those things. And Supermums is a global training program, and it helps people transition their careers and also learn Salesforce. And it can help you get into the tech industry if you aren't already in. They offer flexible hands-on courses. They offer one-on-one mentoring sessions, and then career coaching. And then all of that bundled together at the end, you'll get hands-on work experience with nonprofits. It's a really cool program, and not something that I knew that I would get into. But I wanted more structure for myself, and so I just reached out, I just sent them an email. And I think there's one slot left.

Josh Birk: Nice.

Derika West: And I was like, sweet, okay, I'm going to take this opportunity to learn more. And I got in there.

Josh Birk: Love it.

Derika West: That's where I started, with Supermums. It's been a game changer, for sure.

Josh Birk: And I've talked with people who there are similar programs out there. But the thing I love about that structure twofold is the fact that I find that a lot of... Without the soft skills part of it, without the career advice part of it, like, okay, now you have a certificate, now what? But the nice thing about getting to work with nonprofits, first of all, nonprofits love people who work with Salesforce that can help them. They need this help so badly. Back when I was consulted, nonprofits and small businesses were always my favorite. Because that thing that you just fixed for them has probably been annoying the heck out of them for the last year. And suddenly you are the superhero, you're employee of the month. But it also solves, because I've talked to developers, I've talked to admins, and they're trying to get a new job, and it's the classic tech chicken and egg problem. You have no experience. I want a job. Well, I won't give you the job because you don't have any experience. And it's the two things. If you can work with a nonprofit and be like, "This is what I have fixed for them." I've told developers, just go get a developer edition and start coding. Just have an application that works that will prove to people that this is going to work.

Derika West: Right.

Josh Birk: Yeah. I'm assuming the learning experience has been good. Where are you in the course history right now?

Derika West: Yeah, we're actually in exam prep, so we're at the very end. And everyone is extremely nervous to take their exam, including myself. But I am also really excited, because I know that everything I've been learning over the last six months has really helped me in my full-time position, and will only further enhance my skillset moving forward. I'm really excited.

Josh Birk: And I will repeat words of advice I've gotten from people who have taken multiple exams in our own Salesforce certifications, and stuff like that, and people who are now technical architects. It's like, always remember, failure is an option. It doesn't mean you fail, it just means it's part of the learning process. They do happen, but good luck. Sorry.

Derika West: Absolutely.

Josh Birk: I didn't want to be pessimistic with that, but it's always like we have... It's part of our ecosystem a little bit, like coders who think that they have to be perfect. No, your code's going to break the first 15 times you're trying to make it. That's just the iterative process. I want to shift gears a little bit, because I get paid a nickel every time I say the word AI. And I guess this is a weird question now that I know that your current big project is moving from classic to Lightning web components, so you might be a little hindered with this, but let me ask. In general, AI has become such a focus of all of our lives. How do you think it's been... Has it impacted your work? Not necessarily even in an agent force point of view. But when you're learning things or you're researching things, has AI either impacted your work or your life?

Derika West: On the work aspect, we are gearing up for AI. And that was actually one of our meetings today was going over the impact that it's going to have on our applications. We're literally switching every application that we own over, and we're going to start implementing AI. Our daily functions, how we support users. So it's going to be really exciting, but we're not there quite yet. We're at the very beginning of that transition, and Salesforce being one of them. That's on the work front. On a personal front, I've been using AI to do so many different things for myself. To help learn at my own pace, to gather different types of documentation for myself just to organize my thoughts better. It helps me brainstorm better. It helps me get all my ideas down into a simplified version. AI is something I utilize all the time, if not daily. I love AI, and I'm excited to see how it's going to grow the ecosystem.

Josh Birk: Yes, and the same. And it's like, you're definitely sounding... From a work point of view, I think that's where a lot of people are right now. It feels like a lot of people are moving out of the awareness phase and more to an adoption phase. That was a lot of nickels, so thank you for that. Okay. I have one final question for you. What is your favorite non-technical hobby?

Derika West: Oh, goodness. Favorite non-technical hobby is probably hiking or snowboarding. I'm going to put them together because they're one in the same. Hiking as a summertime activity-

Josh Birk: I was just going to say.

Derika West: ... then snow [inaudible 00:24:12].

Josh Birk: Yep. That totally tracks. And you are in a perfect part of the world in order to do both of those things.

Derika West: Yes, yes. Those are definitely my hobbies. It's summertime here in Oregon now, so I'm taking full advantage of all the beautiful hikes nearby. And then, during the winter I go up to Mount Hood and snowboard.

Josh Birk: That's awesome.

Derika West: It's been great.

Josh Birk: Awesome.

Derika West: I love living here for those reasons.

Josh Birk: I love it. All right. Well, Derika, well, first of all, good luck on your exams. And thank you so much for the conversation, it was a lot of fun. I want to, once again, thank Derika for the wonderful conversation. And of course, I always want to thank you for listening. If you want to learn more about this show, head on over to admin.salesforce.com where you can hear old episodes, see the transcript, and also see our blogs and our videos and other aspects of being a Salesforce admin. Thanks again everybody, and I'll talk to you soon.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Chris Emmett, Salesforce Solution Architect at Capgemini.

Join us as we chat about how to clean up your data to prepare your org for Agentforce, and why data without context is useless.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Chris Emmett.

AI requires clean data I caught up with Chris hot on the heels of his TDX London session, “Prep Like a Pro: Clean Data and Metadata for Agentforce.” He’s an experienced Salesforce consultant who has helped countless organizations of all sizes reboot their business processes.

As Chris explains, unless you have a company of five people that started last week, your org probably needs some data cleanup. And if you want to get started with Agentforce, you need to do the work to make sure the agents you build can understand your data and use it to generate actionable insights. After all, if you can’t derive useful information from your data, then it’s useless.

Why cleaning data can feel like boiling the ocean When I worked in sales, we used a CRM that was so complicated that only one guy at our company knew how to use it. Talk about a bottleneck!

The truth is, if your business has been around for a little while, you’ve probably inherited all sorts of legacy data. Maybe it’s some random field created by that one guy in the 90s who didn’t document anything, or a legacy system like SAP or MSX that is essential to your day-to-day operations.

Chris has seen it all, and it can often feel like cleaning up all that data is akin to boiling the ocean. It’s a monumental task with no end in sight, let alone getting the organizational buy-in to do it in the first place.

A practical way to start cleaning your data Chris recommends focusing your data cleanup strategy on the functionality you want to build in Agentforce. For example, if you want an agent to email a customer when their opportunity is five days from the close date and still unsigned, what data do you actually need?

You don't need the 300 fields that might be on the opportunity page, or the 300 fields in that account. You might need the opportunity's name, the stage of the opportunity, the close date, the account, and maybe the primary contact of that account. That’s five pieces of information.

Suddenly, you don’t need to boil the entire ocean—you just need to boil a cup of water. So start small, focus on the functionality your data cleanup project will deliver, and get the ball rolling. Trust that the things you build with Agentforce will speak for themselves, and you’ll be able to generate momentum to clean up your data project by project.

Make sure to listen to our full conversation with Chris to learn more about how to clean up your data and provide context for AI agents. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

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Full show transcript

Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we're joined by Chris Emmett, consultant, data enthusiast and Salesforce evangelist accidentally. Well, Chris is passionate about data, and he takes us on a journey from legacy systems and those DOS screens to databases and AI-powered actions, all while sharing practical advice on how to clean up your data without making it feel like you're boiling the ocean. So if you ever wondered how to prepare your org for Agentforce or why data without context is basically useless, this one is for you. So listen in, share it with somebody who maybe is swimming in a sea of records. So let's have Chris swim his life raft over and let's get him on the podcast. So Chris, welcome to the podcast.

Chris Emmett: Thanks for having me.

Mike: Yeah. Well, it's good to be here. I got a note from Jennifer Lee. She saw the session that you and Jonathan did at TDX London about cleaning data and cleaning metadata, and last week, we talked with Jonathan about cleaning metadata, so this week, of course, we're going to clean our data because who doesn't have clean data? But let's start off first with a little bit about you, Chris. How did you get into Salesforce and why are you so passionate about clean data?

Chris Emmett: Yeah. Before I start that, you said who doesn't have clean data? It really should be the other way around.

Mike: I know. It was a rhetorical question to get people to listen and be like, oh, but there could be that one person that tunes into the podcast, like I don't need to listen to this. My data is sparkling.

Chris Emmett: You know what? If there is a company out there with five people who just opened up last week, their data is going to be impeccable, and they do want to listen to this podcast. They can tune out.

Mike: Right.

Chris Emmett: I started in the ecosystem in a weird and wonderful way because a lot of ... you've obviously got your accidental admins that find a weird and wonderful way into Salesforce. I was an accidental consultant. So I started out fresh from university as a desktop support engineer, just fixing Windows and fixing printers and fixing Office, and it was great, fun. Then I did a bit of work as a developer, cutting my teeth on Visual Basic 6.0 and .NET all the way back in 2008. But that entire team was made redundant to make way for an off-the-shelf manufacturing system. And as an SME, as an expert in how that old system worked, I was brought in, and then the project manager on that project quit, and I became a project manager, and I was a project manager for 10 years. And then about 10 years later, around 2016, I was working for a company and we were really interested in changing how we managed products. We wanted a brand new system to manage our projects, and one of the products that we looked at was Salesforce. And my word, I was blown away. Literally within one day of using Salesforce, I was creating formula fields and workflow rules as they were back then, and I just fell in love. And this is coming from a person who had spent the best part of a decade dealing with systems where if you needed to add a field, it would take two, three months to get through, and I was dealing with a system where I could start a sentence, explaining to someone what Salesforce was, and by the time I've finished that sentence, I could have created a field. I could have expanded that data model, and I fell in love with it. The company I was working for did not fall in love with it, and that pilot failed. It fell by the wayside, but I was hooked. I was like, man, I need to change my career. So I start looking for project management jobs within the Salesforce space. I had never project managed software before. I had project managed big old factory systems that were very waterfall in their approach. I had never done agile before, so I was applying and applying and applying, getting nowhere. I was probably applying for about eight months, and then this small company in Cambridge were like, dude, you are not great for a project manager but you seem really enthusiastic. Had you considered being a consultant? And I went, but yeah, because it's not managing the projects that I love. It's the system that I love. Salesforce is a platform that I love. I want to be able to empower other companies to improve themselves through Salesforce. So I got a job there as a consultant, and that was 2017, and I have just been building up and flourishing, and since then, I've got 600 odd badges on Trailhead and I think 23 certs now. So I've just gone all in and built my career up.

Mike: Wow. Holy cow. That's a lot. I feel such a kinship with you because I joined ... when I started doing Salesforce stuff, I worked at a publishing company, and we had this Apple-based CRM. I can't even remember what it was called, but there was one guy in the office that still knew how to use it, and he would create views or lenses, and that was basically the only way we got things done. All of the salespeople, I was one of them, had to go to him and be like, please, Mr. Jay, would you create a view of ... because none of us knew how to use it. It was incredibly complex. And then we tried to go to this other, this was 2004, we tried to go to this other web-based CRM thing. It was called absoluteBUSY. And if you wanted a field created, you had to log a ticket, and then the person that created the CRM in Sweden would create the field. And it would be like you. It was sometimes months. I just need another phone field. How hard can that be?

Chris Emmett: Yeah.

Mike: And then I went to another company and they had Salesforce, and I was like, oh, click, click, boom. And I remember, I was like, this is almost too easy to create a field. This is dangerous.

Chris Emmett: Dangerous is the right word. It is. I'd like to think most Salesforce professionals go through some ... it's not quite like the seven stages of grief, but it's the seven stages of Salesforce acceptance. You can't go in. You're very skeptical, and then you're like, oh, wow, this can create whatever fields I want, whatever data points I want, whatever automation I want, whatever reporting I want. And then at a certain point, you go, oh, wait a minute, I have just created a monster for myself, and then you learn to think before you build.

Mike: I feel like that's a good starting point. Is that where you find most people go off the rails, is maybe they get Salesforce and like, you know what, let's start fresh and they create too many fields? And then because there's too many fields and they're in such a hurry that they get to bad data.

Chris Emmett: I look at it a different way. It may be my exposure. I deal with a lot of existing companies. I've not really dealt with a lot of brand new companies. So a lot of existing companies, especially if they're at least 40 or 50 years old. They've got a lot of older systems. They might have a bit of SAP. They might have mainframes kicking around. They might have things written in COBOL or FORTRAN. I would even deal with companies today that have things in MSX, believe it or not. So the danger isn't, oh, let's just create everything in Salesforce. The danger is 14 years ago, Derek created this field. We don't know what it does. We don't know where it's hooked up to. It's not documented anywhere, but we feel like we should pull it over. So the real danger is actually migrating everything. If you don't know what that data point is, you don't know what use it is, you can't validate it, and you can't use it in any meaningful way. Because if you don't understand, then to bring it to the point of this pod, if you don't understand what that data is, what it means, what it's doing for your business, how can an AI agent understand that? An AI agent is not magical. It's not telepathic. It reads the information as if it's a human. It tries to interpret that information. So you've got to know what it means so your AI agent can be told what it means as well.

Mike: Yeah. I think people forget that new systems or new features won't save them if they haven't started to save themselves.

Chris Emmett: Yeah. This is genuine, by the way. I was thinking this morning as I was just leaving the gym, so I can sound like I'm healthy.

Mike: Oh, wow. Fancy. My weightlifting for this morning has been coffee cups.

Chris Emmett: Yeah. So I was thinking this morning like, oh, what intelligent things can I say on this pod? I was actually thinking about the meaning of information technology as a term for a department within a business. Information technology, what does that actually mean? It's not about the data. It is, but it's not about the data. It's not data technology. It's not technology that drives data to help a business. It's information technology. And the information that you derive from that data is the most important thing because you can throw data into a data lake or just into a database and just have it stored there. But if you can't derive useful information from it, and similarly, if an AI agent can't derive useful information from it, it's actually pointless.

Mike: Yeah. I've once heard information described as data plus context.

Chris Emmett: Yeah, absolutely.

Mike: And so if your data is bad, then it really lacks context, or you could say it doesn't provide context.

Chris Emmett: Yeah. It is all about that context. And again, just to bring it back to the whole Agentforce thing. Agentforce needs to understand that context. It needs to be able to derive some meaning from it. So just as a random example, let's say you've got an opportunity record, which is great, and you've got a date on that opportunity. Cool. Agentforce, can you tell me if there's a date on this record? Agentforce might go away and it might find that date and it might go, cool, Chris, I found a date. It's July the 24th, 2025. Now, if that's written in a note without any context, and I say Agentforce, what does this mean? It's going to go, well, I don't know. A date in the future. But if it's against the close date field, it's immediately got context, and it immediately can derive something from that. It can say, oh, right, okay, so this is the close date. I can see that we are in a negotiation stage. We've got one more stage after this, which is sign contract. It's the 24th. It's a few weeks away, or at least from when we're recording. I understand a bit of context. I understand that there's another stage ahead of this, and I've immediately got more information other than just a record with a random date. That context is everything, especially for an LLM.

Mike: But the irony is, and I've done other episodes on this, you could have a close date, continuing your idea, of July 24th. In the close date field, except your company doesn't use that, that's the date that this part of the opportunity is going to close. But then maybe there's a follow-on implementation stage, and that's the context in which you use that. However, if you haven't given your AI any kind of information about that, the context at which you use the close date, ironically, because you have a date in that field, it's bad data, even though it looks like good data.

Chris Emmett: Yeah, absolutely. And the point of the TDX talk I did with Jonathan, and I'm sure Jonathan has already mentioned this in last week's episode, the data is important, the data has to be valid, but it also has to sit within contextual metadata. Because if you have a field on your opportunity that is called installation date or delivery date or deployment date, whatever, and you have an accurate data against that, again, you're giving meaning to that data. You're giving meaning to Agentforce so it can interpret it and give you useful information because it is about information. It's not about the data. It's the information. In fact, if I had a time machine, I would go back three weeks, redo my TDX talk, and it would be called prepping your information like a pro, and I guess your meta information.

Mike: Yeah. But let's pivot into that because it's time to get actionable and less heady. And I've heard this a thousand times, it can feel like boiling the ocean to clean your data. What is your approach that you would suggest people use to start cleaning their data in preparation for deploying Agentforce?

Chris Emmett: Yeah, sure. So again, unless you are that three-day old company with three people in and the data is perfect, it's probably safe to assume you are sat on a mountain of data. If you are a relatively small company, maybe it's tens of thousands of records. If you are a medium or enterprise, you might have hundreds of thousands or millions of records. I certainly worked for a company that had 30 million accounts in the system. That is a lot of data, and you cannot possibly begin to go through that top to tail, making sure that every field is correct and accurate and has meaning. So how do you actually break that down? You're right. You cannot boil the ocean. We start off by thinking about the actions and the intents that you want your agents to do. So if you want your agents to write an email to a customer if their opportunity is within five days of the close date and they've not signed yet, well, what do you need for that? You don't need 300 fields that might be on the opportunity page or 300 fields in that account. You might need the opportunity's name. You need the stage of the opportunity. You need the close date. You need the account, and maybe the primary contact of that account. That's five pieces of information. And then you do not really need to think about all of the old opportunities because this is about an action where you are emailing people for opportunities that are about to expire or about to close. So immediately, you've gone from a million records, let's say, you've got it down to a thousand records, and then you're only looking at those five pieces of data. So you got it down to a thousand records and you got it down to five pieces of information on those thousands records. So I'm not going to do the math in my head because I'm terrible at that, but it's-

Mike: Nobody should do math live.

Chris Emmett: Yeah. You're probably looking at about less than 1% of data because you're thinking about the intent of that action, that AI action. You're thinking about exactly what pieces of information you need to help that agent. And you're making sure that that specific data is accurate. My theory behind this, my thesis, is by doing that, by getting rid of 99% of the data that you don't need to worry about today, you can get agents and agent actions out to your users quicker, which means they're happier. They're trying new things. You're getting feedback on those new things. And it means that you can improve more processes because you're getting more feedback. You're getting more insight into what is helping people, what's hindering people. And you're doing that because you're just targeting the data that matters, and everything else can wait until it's actually needed.

Mike: That is probably the most concise spot-on answer I have heard in a long time.

Chris Emmett: I felt like I was talking for about 20 or 30 minutes on that.

Mike: No, you weren't. So targeting the data that matters.

Chris Emmett: Yes.

Mike: Those words, put that on a shirt. Somebody needs to wear that shirt at Dreamforce because ... so that as you were talking through, I was realizing you're really making it from boiling the ocean to boiling a cup of water. Everything doesn't have to be perfect for you to start this project. Just the part that you need to worry about. And I was thinking back to last week. So in Iowa, in the US where I live, we had a really bad frost all winter. We didn't get the snow cover that we usually do, and some of my landscaping plans didn't make it because the roots were just burned by the frost, but not all of them. Some of them were hardy and they're fine. And so I called my landscape company. I was like, I need to replace all these, and plus I want different ones anyway. He's like, good, because if we go through another winter like this, we're just going to be replacing them. And I promise you this gets somewhere. But much like your analogy, so the landscape company came out, and just in the area that they needed to replant those bushes, they scraped all the gravel, leveled the bed, put new tarp down, replanted the bushes, put the gravel back. They didn't have to clean the entire planter bed and scoop all the gravel out and dig up all the bushes and start from scratch. They only had to do the part that mattered. And I felt like that was like, wow, that's like a real life scenario of if we're going to implement this and we're going to really laser focus on this one part of it, let's do that. But the other key thing that you said that nobody has said on a podcast about cleaning data is you improve the process while you do it. Because if you are not going to improve the process that led you to the bad data, you're always going to be cleaning data. It's almost like sending a janitor out to a sports stadium to pick up trash because there's no trash cans. Well, if you're not going to sit down and say, okay, how do we put trash cans out so that trash isn't everywhere? All you're doing is sending the janitor back out to clean up trash. You're not actually fixing the problem that led to the trash being everywhere.

Chris Emmett: Yeah. It's interesting you say that because I genuinely hadn't really thought that far ahead.

Mike: Yeah, you had-

Chris Emmett: Probably not.

Mike: ... at night in your brain while you were sleeping. Chris' brain is like, I got this idea about this process and then it was going to sound smart, and then it surfaced while you were working out.

Chris Emmett: Yeah. People are going to be so disappointed when they see a picture of me because I'm making it sound like I'm some sort of gym monkey. Gym monkey, that's probably not the right word.

Mike: Well, I could throw your picture in AI.

Chris Emmett: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You should.

Mike: You're like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Chris Emmett: You should. Yeah. I'll look exactly like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Mike: Yeah, absolutely.

Chris Emmett: I look more like Captain America at the start of the film.

Mike: That is the best description. I look more like Captain America, but at the start of the film.

Chris Emmett: Thanks. I'm glad you agree. I'm really glad you agree. Oh my, what was the point I was trying to ... yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah, back on track. So the whole point of IT, the whole point of computer systems is to improve things. So if you genuinely are taking an existing process and you are just throwing at an agent and say, robots, do my bidding, without changing anything, you really are missing the point of IT. It's about evolution, it's about simplification, and it's about making things more efficient. So why wouldn't you try and make it more efficient in the process of moving it over? Because if you don't, you are just lifting and shifting a process, and that is not going to help anyone. It's not going to fix any errors. The worst case of that is that you program an agent with all of the issues and problems that a human would have, so you are just replicating those problems. You've got to improve. You've got to evolve.

Mike: Do you find, because you mentioned you work with mature companies that often when they're doing a Salesforce implementation or they're bringing you in or they're thinking about something, that they're stuck thinking within the constraints of the legacy system that they have?

Chris Emmett: I was going to be kind. That sounds terrible.

Mike: Well, you don't have to ... I don't want you to-

Chris Emmett: I was going to be kind and say the majority of companies will try and hold onto legacy, and there's a few that don't. But actually, I would be as bold as to say every single customer I've worked with, not necessarily through any fault of their own, holds onto the past. And it is either because there's things that they don't know, there might be fields or tables or data points or integrations that no one knows why they exist, and they're afraid of removing them. And in the data, they don't know what the data means or whether it's useful. It's just there. So they don't don't know know how to cleanse it. They don't know if it's got any meaning. But then you've got companies who are just in a bind where they've got a 30-year-old system and they do not have the budget to replace it, but Salesforce has got to integrate with it, and the design decisions 30 years ago for that system that Salesforce has to adhere to. So sometimes, it is because the systems that you have to hook Salesforce into are just bound by old design, and then you have to introduce those bad data decisions into Salesforce.

Mike: I could see that. I was also thinking back as you were saying that. About a week ago, I was standing at a rental counter and I happened to see their screen and it was still a DOS screen, like the whole ... I was like, wow, you still work on that? I'm fairly certain the car you're about to hand me keys to has a stronger computing system in it than what you're sitting at right now.

Chris Emmett: Probably. The phone in that pocket is probably more powerful. I definitely worked for a company, I can't say their name, I'm pretty sure, but I worked for a company where they were using an MS-DOS program because the person who wrote it, he wrote it in his garage and then retired in the '90s. And if he's still with us, he's probably, I'd like to think, on a yacht somewhere because the software developers in the '70s probably earned quite a lot of money. He's enjoying life and not thinking about it. But that company was stuck with that MS-DOS program because it did a vital thing and it can't be removed. It can't be replaced because they know it does a vital process, but they don't know how it works. And then it becomes a business risk. It's like, do you risk the operation of the business to try and rebuild this or do you just leave it? And then another thing I was thinking about this morning, I was thinking a lot of stuff at the gym.

Mike: Apparently. Holy cow. But to be fair, you're always thinking like this. This wasn't just this morning.

Chris Emmett: You are right. You are right. I'm always thinking this. My thought process flips between IMDb trivia and Salesforce. I was thinking that I have worked with a lot of companies where it's common practice to buy old equipment from eBay.

Mike: Oh, wow.

Chris Emmett: If you're a retailer and you've got systems that haven't been made in 10, 15 years, but you need that equipment, your only course is to scour eBay. I've worked with two or three companies that have done that, and it becomes a risk. But again, not to be too mean against them, it's more often than not a budget constraint. So bad systems and bad data with those bad systems is not necessarily because people have just made bad choices or due diligence isn't being put into it. More often than not, it's about legacy systems and budget, and that's a difficult thing to overcome.

Mike: Especially the budget part.

Chris Emmett: Yeah.

Mike: I was just thinking back. I worked retail in the '90s. And retail in the '90s, if you were a smaller retailer, it was common practice for smaller retailers, when the big box companies would change systems, they would have a clearing out, and smaller retailers could buy enough POS systems that worked and then enough that didn't work for parts and literally upgrade their whole system, even though it was used systems. And that was common in retail in the '90s. Now, it's all changed. It's all online. I'm sure that doesn't happen. But I remember working for a couple retailers and like, oh, we're getting new cash registers, and they would show up, and why are some of the keys sticky? And they're like, well, they're not new. THey're new to us.

Chris Emmett: Yeah.

Mike: I wonder what's creeping around inside of those old systems. You bring up a good point. I think I've done a lot of podcasts on cleaning data and cleaning metadata, but what's interesting about this one, to put a point on it, is you pointed at something that none of the others have brought up, which is it's not necessarily bad user's fault that we have bad data. It's sometimes a systematic failure of bad decisioning or a lack of budgeting priorities that leads to it. It's not just Bob, the sales guy, who puts his call notes in the phone field because that's what he does because he pays no attention. It's sometimes working within the constraints of the budget. You're probably doing that now, even doing a Salesforce implementation with AI. You're like, well, we would love to do all this, one through five, but we can afford one now and maybe two later. They maybe even start on the second project, and then that's as far as they get on their list of one through five.

Chris Emmett: Yeah. You know what? If Bob wants to put his data in the wrong field, that is, in my opinion, that is probably a low impact. It's a quick fix because either you can tell him to move it or you can, if it's consistent, you can go in with Data Loader, export it in Excel, copy it from one column into another column, re-upload, you're done. For me, it's about all of this historical data that you may be pulling into Salesforce where you don't necessarily understand its context. You don't necessarily understand its validity. And that's where the whole point of trying to identify what's the actual action that you want your AI agents to carry out, and what are the data points that that action needs to interact with? Okay. And then let's tackle those data points and turn those data points, to go way back to the start of the conversation, you turn those data points into information, because you cannot boil the ocean. And the majority of companies, at least the ones I've dealt with, have a sea of data that just either makes no sense or comes from old systems or comes from unnecessary decisions. And you cannot ... there's no business case that will ever be put forward to say, we need to spend 10 years improving all of this data. But there definitely would be a business case that says, we need to spend a month chipping away at this opportunity data or this account data so we can deliver this agentic functionality.

Mike: Right. Spot on. Now, I want to end on a fun note. You said IMDb data trivia.

Chris Emmett: I like IMDb.

Mike: Is it trivia about the website IMDb or is it trivia about movies and TV shows?

Chris Emmett: Oh, wow. I'm really upset that I don't know the history of the website now.

Mike: Oh, I kind of do.

Chris Emmett: Oh, do tell.

Mike: So the Cliff Notes version is a guy started, I don't know when, but it was started pretty early in the ... maybe even pre-internet. I want to say he either had a huge collection of VHS tapes or he ran a rental movie store, and he created this literal database of movies and actors and actresses and roles and directors, because he found it fascinating to see what, like we've all heard, the seven, six degrees or Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, like connecting people to different movies. He found that fascinating. And I want to say early on, Amazon bought it and curated it into the big website that it is now. That's the amount of history that I know about it.

Chris Emmett: Well, I can add to that.

Mike: But it was one person's passion project.

Chris Emmett: That's crazy. I can add to that in a related way, in a very Salesforce related way.

Mike: Oh.

Chris Emmett: And if anything, that's why we're all here. So during COVID, we were all watching a lot of TV at home, I'm pretty sure. I was. And I wanted to track what I was watching. I wanted to be able to give it some fun ratings. And I could have done that in a notebook or on a spreadsheet or in my notes on my phone. But 23-time certified, of course, I'm going to build it on Salesforce.

Mike: Yeah. You have 600 badges. You can't not.

Chris Emmett: So I built it in a developer edition, salesforce.org. I was tracking all of the movies, all of the TV programs I was watching during COVID. And to just take it a step further, I didn't build it, I ripped it off the internet, an integration into IMDb to pull the correct title, the director, the Rotten Tomatoes rating, I think, and the synopsis. So all I needed to do is type in the title and my own personal rating. And when it saved, it pulled back the poster, all of the cast, the directors, genre, everything. And that took one weekend. If people are listening to this and they never touched Salesforce before, that's how quick it is to build something in Salesforce. I did that in a weekend.

Mike: So you're my long-lost brother, I swear. No lie. And I can show this to you. I'll show this to you at Dreamforce, hand to god. I was in the same scenario in December of 2013. I took a long vacation break. And for many years, up until that point, I was hooked on Top Gear, and I thought I should keep track, because you could also get all of the Top Gear episodes off of iTunes, off of that, it was called iTunes at that point.

Chris Emmett: Yeah.

Mike: And I was like, I should keep track of this so that I know which ones to buy, which ones I like and have a whole ... And so I literally spent 30 seconds. I was like, I could do this on a spreadsheet, but wait a minute, let's do this in a developer org in Salesforce. And I created a Top Gear app, and I branded the whole salesforce.org Top Gear with Jeremy Clarkson and all of them. I had cars and stars and lap times and episode ratings and titles. I ended up, for almost a whole weekend straight, just non-stop binging Top Gear and building this org.

Chris Emmett: That is awesome.

Mike: And now, it's one of those where I have to remember every month I log into it to make sure that that org dies. I would cry if that org went away. I seriously would. But yeah, I'm not fancy and smart like you. I don't know what I'd integrate it to. I guess I could integrate it to IMDb to pull that stuff in, but I more just wanted it of my own information. But it was so old. It was back in the day when you used to stick image files in resources.

Chris Emmett: Oh, yeah.

Mike: And then you would do an image. You would create a formula field that returned an image, and that's how I did star ratings on the page.

Chris Emmett: That is still a valid way to do it. I don't care what anyone says.

Mike: It just feels so old school. But I remember showing it to somebody and they're like, how did you get stars to show up on the page? It was like, well, let me tell you.

Chris Emmett: That's what it's about. I don't care what anyone says. Salesforce for me is about, as a profession, you are obviously going into businesses and building out their systems to improve the way they work, but for me, the beauty of a dev or a developer org is to be able to just do my own personal random projects where I might have an idea where it's a weekend. I want to see if it works. And nine out of 10 ideas may burn and fail, but that one idea out of 10 might be just gold. And all of a sudden, I have a movie tracker that I can use, and I've learned something. And you know what? I can then take some of that integration knowledge to my next customer. It's about just trying stuff out, exploring, being bold, being crazy.

Mike: I would argue even those other nine are still fun when they fail because there's a moment when you're like, I think this is going to work. Well, I know it's not going to work now, and now I know what not to do.

Chris Emmett: Exactly.

Mike: Chris, this was a blast.

Chris Emmett: It was amazing.

Mike: I'm so glad ... I think we talked about some clean data.

Chris Emmett: Data is important. Data and information, very important. That's the takeaway.

Mike: Yeah. We got to get some shirts made for Dreamforce. Thanks so much for being on the podcast. And I'm fairly certain you and Jonathan will have long legs in presenting your clean data and metadata information to the world.

Chris Emmett: Yeah, no doubt. Thanks for having me.

Mike: All right. So that's a wrap for today's therapy session with Chris Emmett. I can't help but say we laughed, we learned, we IMDb'd. I will say after the call, we probably went down a rabbit hole of movie fun facts from television shows from the '80s. That was incredibly fun. But again, if you're secretly running a DOS system or still mourning a lost developer org, just remember, not all your data deserves your attention. Boil a cup of water, not the ocean. And maybe for fun, build a movie tracker while you're at it or a television show tracker. So if you love this episode, be sure to give us a review on iTunes. Share it with another admin who needs a nudge in the better direction of cleaning data. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

View Details

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jonathan Fox, Head of Salesforce Architecture at IntellectAI.

Join us as we chat about why we should rethink how we label, structure, and maintain Salesforce metadata.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jonathan Fox.

How do you know if your metadata needs to be cleaned up? When we were trying to implement Agentforce on the Admin Evangelist org, we came to a sobering realization. Despite all the content we create on how to do things the right way, it turns out that we all approach metadata a little differently. That’s why I was so excited to sit down with Jonathan to talk about how to clean up your metadata for AI.

Training an agent is like showing your org to someone who knows nothing about your business. Suddenly, it’s really important what the labels mean and that they’re consistent.

Start small with metadata The thing about technical debt is that it’s not a problem until it becomes a problem. Your metadata is probably fine for most of your users, who have a working knowledge of your business processes. It’s only when you try to implement Agentforce that you realize you have a problem.

Jonathan recommends that you start small when you’re trying to clean your metadata. Roll out Agentforce for a small use case and only clean up the metadata associated with that specific task. If you need to generate buy-in, try running Agentforce as-is and then show your stakeholders just how much difference a little bit of cleanup can make.

Metadata is the foundation “Your metadata is the foundation of your Salesforce org,” Jonathan says, “you don't want to get it wrong, you don't want to make it worse. So it needs to be treated with that respect and that kind of importance when you're changing it.”

Documentation is the key to making sure that you’re keeping things usable for human and AI employees alike. You need to make sure that you fully understand the impacts of any changes you’re implementing, or you risk breaking all sorts of automations in your org.

Jonathan had so many more great insights about how to start cleaning up your metadata for AI agents, 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.

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Full show transcript

Mike: Welcome to the Salesforce Admin's podcast, and hey, how did we do last week? Did you listen to that episode to see how our 2025 admin predictions were holding up? If not, add that to your play next list, because that was a fun look back. I like listening to things from the past, but let's go ahead to the future. So in this episode this week, we're joined by Jonathan Fox, who takes us behind the scenes on something every admin deals with, and maybe you don't think you do, but it's metadata. And in fact, in next week's episode, we're going to talk about cleaning data, so buckle up folks. It's summer cleaning time. But the fun thing is we start off with a conversation around a barbecue that sparked Jonathan's career and got it into amazing directions. How many people talk Salesforce over barbecue? And Jonathan also helps us rethink how we label, structure and maintain Salesforce metadata. So whether you're prepping for Agentforce or just going through an org and wondering what some of those data labels mean, I promise you, this episode is for you, and if you love what you hear, be sure to give us a favorite or a review on iTunes. But with that, let's get Jonathan on the episode. So Jonathan, welcome to the podcast.

Jonathan Fox: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be on.

Mike: Well, I'm excited to tackle this because we've bounced around and I've done a few episodes on cleaning data and cleaning metadata and back and forth and back and forth, and I think it hit our team like a truck when we were working on implementing Agentforce in our org, and Josh, who was working on it, came to the realization that despite having three or four evangelists on the team, we'd all named fields differently and we'd all done things a little different. And he's like, "We really have to talk to people about metadata." And we'll get into that and we'll have a follow-up episode on data data, but Jonathan, let's hear about you. How did you get started with Salesforce and what do you do?

Jonathan Fox: My journey into Salesforce was, well, most people say this, a little bit unorthodox. My background is the military in the British Army, and I stumbled across Salesforce, family barbecue. My brother-in-law brought me into the Salesforce world and taught me how to be a developer basically, and I worked my way up through-

Mike: At the barbecue?

Jonathan Fox: At the barbecue, yeah. That was the riveting conversation we were having over beers and burgers, was Apex in fact. Not quite metadata, but at least a bit of Apex was the topic of conversation. He taught me how to get started in tech and how to be a developer, and the rest is history as they say.

Mike: I feel like that was the one line that he's telling his significant other. "No, this line's going to pay off. I'm going to find somebody at a party or a barbecue that wants to talk about Salesforce stuff, just trust me." Years go by, he goes to parties and nothing happens, and then he finds you and he just says something. You're like, "Yeah, that sounds good." "What?"

Jonathan Fox: His significant other and mine at the time were just sick of hearing about what is Salesforce? It's all we spoke.

Mike: You two go off, grill a burger, talk Salesforce.

Jonathan Fox: Come back later.

Mike: Come back later. That's crazy. So when we talk about data, every single feature that we roll out, it always comes back to data, but I think more so with Agentforce. Now we have to go one layer deeper with metadata, and I'm going to start off with a hard question.

Jonathan Fox: Go for it.

Mike: I think it's hard. How do you know your metadata is bad metadata?

Jonathan Fox: I think that's a really good question, and I think it is a hard question. I think it's really difficult to know whether your metadata is bad, and until you start poking around with things such as AI, you probably don't realize it. And a really good example, and probably one that we've had conversations in the past about this at your org that you use and things like that where you have these field names. Field labels for example is a type of metadata, and they often have acronyms or naming conventions that only you, the users, actually know about. And until you start trying to make AI understand what they mean, you don't realize because you've got all your industry knowledge, you've got all your organization knowledge, you've done your onboarding. You know how the org works because you've been trained and taught and you speak the lingo, but the AI doesn't know that. So it's only until you start getting to play around with these kinds of things, you go, oh, actually, a fresh set of eyes, somebody who has no idea about this hasn't got a clue, and I think it's at that point you start realizing our metadata needs to have a little bit of a revamp.

Mike: Yeah, the field labels and values that you use for fields that are going to be displayed on a page is one thing. I always got quite cavalier, I'll use the term, with fields and labels for stuff that I just needed on the object that wasn't going to be displayed on a page. And now I'm thinking, oh God, Agentforce is going to have reference those and it's totally not going to understand what SP_25Z_PRD means.

Jonathan Fox: Exactly, but you know what it means?

Mike: The whole organization knows what it means, because everybody's into acronyms, and I just need to store the value on the object for the record but I didn't need to display it for the user, but now I'm going to ask Agentforce for what's the speed record number or something, and it's going to look at me like, "I don't know. You're not capturing that. I'm going to go back over here and talk with this dude about some Apex and grill a burger."

Jonathan Fox: Yeah, exactly. There are ways we can get around it with Agentforce and it's things like putting those acronyms in instructions, but is that really the best way to do it? That's almost like hard coding references within Apex. And at that point, you start thinking, yeah, this isn't right. This isn't the best way to do it, and I think that probably answers your question. At that point, when you start having to do workarounds and figure things out like that, you know your metadata is not in a good state.

Mike: So that feels like we're walking down a path and we hit a fork in the road where we realize there's a whole bunch of these weird fields. They always include underscores. Why is that? I don't know. People like the underscore. They do that on Instagram too. Do we create this massive dictionary and feed it to Agentforce, or do we have to go back and... When we talk about clean data, you extract the data, you look at it, you fix what's wrong and you shove it back in for the most part, or should we do that with metadata?

Jonathan Fox: I think you have to take a pragmatic approach with anything that you do in the Salesforce org, and that goes for metadata, data, tidying up your flows or refactoring your Apex classes and methods. You take a look at it and go, how big is the job? You impact SS? You go, how big is the job? What's the return on investment of me doing this now versus the cumulative over the next few years? Is it worth my time to go back and fix it all? And gold standards, what we teach and what we hope to aim for is yeah, go back, refactor it, make it perfect, but sometimes it's not an issue until it becomes an issue. In this case, for example, your field labels, they weren't an issue in the past, they are now, and I think it's one of those where you have to sum up all those different variables and think, is it worth it? Now, if it's only a couple of fields and it's only ever going to be a couple of fields, maybe it's quick enough just to go back and fix it, or maybe it's not worth the effort and you write it in the instructions. But I think it's org dependent, variable dependent, even individual skill set dependent. But it's one of those that you have to... It's a really non-answer, I know that, but I think there are so many variables. You can't just blanket rule. Obviously, we want to aim for gold standard.

Mike: Well, the fallacy is we hear metadata and data and you think, "Well, I'm just cleaning data." But the cleansing of it is actually very different, so what are the implications? I'm sure Chris and I will talk about this, but if you go through your org and you're like, well, everybody has to have a proper name, and so you fix all the nicknames or shortened names. And so you come across the John Fox record. You're like, nope, it's got to be Jonathan. I can confidently say for the most part that changing John to Jonathan isn't going to fire anything, isn't going to break anything, but my question to you is if I go in and I change a field label or I change some metadata on a field, what could I break?

Jonathan Fox: Oh yeah, you are risking breaking things. You're potentially risking breaking your flows, your Apex, your validation rules. Sometimes, hopefully you referenced them through API names and we might not be changing them here. We're probably changing field labels, not API names, but you may want to change those as well, and then at that point, you are potentially impacting all of your automation in the org, your validation rules, your assignment rules, et cetera, et cetera. So you have a big knock-on effect by changing metadata, and that's because metadata in Salesforce is the replacement for you writing code on the back end. That's the whole point of it. That's why it's a SaaS and a PaaS to some degree. Salesforce themselves by producing the platform is saving you having to write how fields appear on the UI. You are just putting placeholders there and that's what metadata is on the Salesforce platform, and you change that, you're impacting everything else that references it potentially. So there are big consequences and it isn't just a case of going to object manager and going switch some characters around to make it look neat for Agentforce.

Mike: So I think oftentimes, people hear cleaning data and I'm sure cleaning metadata, which feels like next level cleaning. It's like having your carpet shampooed. It's like, cleaning your house is just vacuuming. Nope, we're calling in Stanley Steamer. They're going to do the rugs now. They're going to get all of the dirt out. It can feel like, oh, we have to do all of it. We have to clean everything. And I don't know, maybe you have a tiny house and you can spend half a day and clean your whole house. I can't clean my whole house, but people for some reason look at, "I have to clean all of my data." Given the implications of updating information and metadata, how should people approach cleaning or getting their metadata right for Agentforce?

Jonathan Fox: There's probably a couple of ways to approach it. I have a small house, I can probably clear most of mine within a day so I'm lucky. That doesn't mean I enjoy it though, so there are definitely-

Mike: No. Well, there's that. I don't know, using the big leaf blower, I could probably clean my whole house and I wouldn't enjoy it, but it'd be clean.

Jonathan Fox: Well, that's true, and it'd be good fun in the process. I suppose if you think you're going to have guests over to your house, you're going to host a dinner party or just have some friends, you don't go cleaning all the bedrooms necessarily, and you clean the places that they're going to see. You clean your living room or your kitchen and the bathroom that they're going to use. In a similar way, what is Agentforce going to be using within your org? You might be rolling out Agentforce for a small use case first to prove the ROI to your org. Fantastic. So you might have a small use case and it's only referencing fields on the contact object. Start with the contact object then. Start with those fields that Agentforce is going to be using, and you've proven out that return on investment, your organization loves it, and now they want to expand it to using data from opportunities or orders or whatever else. Then you start moving out to where your guests, your agent, is going to look next. So that's how I would personally approach it, is start with what it's going to be looking at first, because otherwise you're going to be overwhelmed with such a huge task and that's not going to be as productive. Be iterative, work on it in chunks, break it down.

Mike: No, I like that. Clean where the guests are going to be, close the doors to the rest of the house. There's nothing there.

Jonathan Fox: Exactly.

Mike: It's a doorway to a big black hole. Don't open that.

Jonathan Fox: You don't need to look in there. You don't need to see the piles of boxes.

Mike: Here be dragons. So one thing, and I'm going to have to ask Chris this when we record his podcast, because I've done data cleansing exercises before where you look at things and consultants, you're brought into jobs and stuff, and you look at the data and you're like, well, this is close date and there's July 27th, 2025. That's a valid close date. Why is that bad data? And it's bad data because the process is, well, but after the opportunity closes, we also have an implementation stage and blah, blah, blah, and so if we ask Agentforce, what's the close date? It should say August 24th because it's always a month after the close date of the opportunity. How do you know when you're looking at metadata in the same way that you're like, oh wait, this is something that Agentforce can't use, although it completely looks like usable metadata.

Jonathan Fox: I guess you have to almost treat the agent as it is your employee. It's your agent employee within your org, but it's one that hasn't gone through on board and it doesn't work day to day in your org doing all the different processes that your service agents or sales reps might be doing. So you've got to look at it and treat it as if it is a brand new fresh employee that hasn't been through any of that training, hasn't gone through any of that. Straight out of college or something, never been in the industry either, and walk through the life of what you're asking that agent to do, and if it can't do it, then that's where you need to be looking at changing that metadata, change that label. And you've also got to think as well, you don't necessarily want to change it if it's going to impact all your human employees either, so where do you draw the line and strike the balance between making your metadata perfect for agents, AI agents, and making it really confusing and changing it all after many, many years for your human employees? And I think there's a balance that needs to be struck there.

Mike: So that to me sounds like the importance of perhaps a data dictionary or just org documentation, right?

Jonathan Fox: Absolutely.

Mike: We can upload those as resources. I think that's getting better. I haven't done it. Have you done that?

Jonathan Fox: I've played around with it a little bit and I think it'll only get more powerful, and I think it only really highlights the absolute need to have strong documentation within your Salesforce org. Again, documentation is one of those really good topics that we can speak for hours about because documentation is only as good at the point in time when it's written because your org is ever evolving. As soon as you bring out a new field, you're having to update that documentation, so keeping on top of it is really important, and trying to have that living document, you upload it to Salesforce for Agentforce to use, it comes out of date immediately. So again, that's a whole topic of its own, but I think it does really highlight to Salesforce customers and people working in Salesforce orgs that tracking all these kind of things is really key if you haven't already done it, and that is a big task, but it will pay dividends.

Mike: Yeah, I think sometimes people, and myself included, you get caught up in the speed and the immediacy at which you can do things and you forget, oh, I need to, best practice, write down what I created, why I created it. So I want to pivot off that because if you have bad metadata, it could be the result of you have a bad deployment process or a bad, I don't know, requirements or discovery process. Can both be true?

Jonathan Fox: Yeah, absolutely. If you think all the way back to the beginning of their future and you've got your BAs looking into what the product owner wants and they're trying to gain this information from them and then perhaps translate it into Salesforce terms, and maybe there's a gap there or maybe the Salesforce consultant hasn't poked enough holes in the requirements and tried to transform them a bit more. You may have missed that gap all way at the beginning. Or it may be it's absolutely fine for what you've been requested to do and you've built it exactly to spec, but it gets to UAT, and at that point, it was missed that your users had no idea or your agentic employees had no idea what it was doing and it got deployed. And absolutely, that whole lifecycle of development there, there are different quality control gates that absolutely could have missed this or just never had to think about it in the past, and now we do have to think about it. And I heard you laugh a little bit then about the agentic employees and the UAT. Is that something that we maybe need to start thinking about? Testing in UAT, but with agentic employees rather than just running scripts to test things, and taking it outside of the box a little bit. If we're going to treat them as employees then perhaps that's the right stage for them to get involved in a different way.

Mike: Until you said that, I never thought about UAT for agentic employees, but it completely makes sense. And it completely makes sense you can do it with user testing because you don't want to get all the way to production and then suddenly it falls on its face so you're like, wait a minute, how come that didn't work? No, it's fascinating concept. I think one of the things you mentioned that I want to bring up, so when we have Chris on next week and we talk about data cleansing, I'm going to ask him about changing data. Because data, for everybody, they see it, it's very visual. If you change the date format, let's say, of a field and you go from European style to American style, your user is going to be, "Whoa." They're going to immediately see that. I don't know that they would immediately see, or they probably shouldn't unless they're pulling in weird fields and reports, metadata fixes. But with that, I think what is important to get in terms of sign-off or process or executives to go through this process? Because at some point, you're going to have to talk, well, we got to fix this data, we got to do this, we got to do that, and we need to make sure that we're fixing the process. I think data is a public thing, your users see it, but metadata is almost the behind the scenes. How do we make the backstage cleaner, and then how do we make sure that all the stagehands know to keep the backstage cleaner? So that's a really long question of in addition to knowing we need to fix it, if I'm sitting here saying, "Cool, I've listened to this podcast and Jonathan's hammered it into my head, I need to fix it," who should I start talking to? What are the sign-offs I should get?

Jonathan Fox: Yeah, I think you are obviously going to need sign-off. You're going to need the buy-in of the people who hold the budget within the organization, and that could be all sorts of different roles within your organization to all sorts of different levels. I don't know who that will be in your given organization, but it's whoever owns the platform ultimately and whoever has the budget to deploy the team who's going to do, one, the analysis, but two, the actual development, we'll call it the implementation and the testing and deployment afterwards. And I think the best approach for that is to even perhaps try using Agentforce today without changing your metadata, in a sandbox or something, and then show even the smallest of change and how it impacts the agent. Because listening to the podcast today and hearing that you need to transform your metadata isn't going to get the sign-off and the approval of these people within the organization. They're going to want to see how it changes, why, the metrics behind it, and I think that's the best way to do it because every org is so different. Your metadata is going to be so different from the org next to yours, there is no one rule fits all, and I think other than just showing and visually demonstrating how much Agentforce can enhance your org without it versus with the change and show how much it can speed up your users and all the automations it can do, I think that's the best way to approach it, and it is with that person who ultimately holds the budget. Because it's not a one-person job. There is going to have to be some analysis there. You're going to have to do some changes, you're going to have to test them and deploy them. It's almost a project in itself, and I think it should be treated as such because it is such an important step. And your metadata is the foundations of your Salesforce org. You don't want to get it wrong, you don't want to make it worse, so it needs to be treated with that respect and that importance when you're changing it.

Mike: Well, if you think of it, I've always answered the question, if you ask a company what's its most valuable asset, it shouldn't be the product it puts out. It's the data that it has, and its second most valuable is its metadata because that's the way that you find out what data you have.

Jonathan Fox: Yeah, exactly.

Mike: And you query it.

Jonathan Fox: Yeah. If you don't have a strong metadata structure within your Salesforce org, well, then you don't really have a Salesforce org because your data's not going to fit. So yeah, it's second because obviously the data is what you're using day-to day. That's the valuable part.

Mike: One thing we haven't touched on is we've lived in this perfect world of we're just fixing metadata in Salesforce. I don't want to say the wrong term, but when I think about it, integrations, I call it the data you inherit, the data that comes from other systems. How should we approach metadata fixes for that?

Jonathan Fox: It's difficult, especially if you're forced into a particular route because of an integration or another system, but the Salesforce platform is really flexible. There's not really any reason why the metadata that Agentforce uses today can't be specific and clean in accordance with your Salesforce org. There is no other external system out there that necessarily will force you down a rabbit hole and make you have to do it in a certain way. There are always ways that within the org, you can transform your data from where it's held on that metadata and make it work for those external systems. I think it goes back down to again though, making sure your documentation's clean, because if you are forced down a particular route through inherited metadata or third party systems and all the things that you can't control perhaps, then that's where the documentation becomes vital again as we mentioned earlier.

Mike: Yeah, especially if you're... Anytime you bring something in or Salesforce pushes data out, there has to be some documentation on that. That was always the fear that I had as an admin of did I leave enough behind so that somebody knows if things go thermonuclear, what buttons to push? And the end result is if you feel like you have enough, you're probably halfway there because you could always write more.

Jonathan Fox: Yeah, absolutely, and even look at the things that you can't control. You have some really cool app exchange apps in your org. You can't control their metadata. That's the whole point of those vendors, and perhaps they're not top of mind for AI at the moment or they're getting round to doing it, but you want to adopt it before they've had chance. That's where documentation is going to become key, because you can't control what they've produced for your org, and it works amazingly because it's the product you've been using for years. But you need it to work today for Agentforce and perhaps they're not ready or it doesn't work the way that you want it to but it works for them and all their other customers. Documentation is going to be a key there.

Mike: Right, absolutely. Well, this is fun. We dove into the scenes behind the scenes. It's like best practices on writing cue cards for comedians.

Jonathan Fox: Absolutely.

Mike: It's the person that stands behind the camera that tells the camera and the comedian what to do is often underappreciated. There's a whole world of people, just to go off on a tangent, that do write cue cards, and there's a script to learn how to write it so that it's very readable. It was a fascinating-

Jonathan Fox: I did not know that was a thing.

Mike: A fascinating little rabbit hole I went down one day on YouTube and the internet, because you can learn everything from the internet these days.

Jonathan Fox: Oh, it's so true.

Mike: Yeah, isn't it? But you'd think by now we'd be printing it, but nope, it's humans writing it. So Jonathan, this was a blast. I'm glad we came on, we got to talk about metadata. I think it's probably the thing that most people aren't looking at. They're probably like, "Oh, I got to fix my data. I got to do this," and they're just tidying up the entryway and they're forgetting there's a whole lot more to do behind the scenes in addition to just the data that Agentforce consumes, and it pays dividends outside of that too. Better reporting, better everything. I know that I'm guilty of users running reports and including fields and them saying, "I don't know what it is, but I just included it because it had numbers in it." I'm like, cool.

Jonathan Fox: Because it makes the report look fancy.

Mike: I need to fix that field and make it a little bit better. But no, this was great. Thanks for coming on the podcast.

Jonathan Fox: Yeah, thank you for having me. I've really enjoyed it.

Mike: Big thanks to Jonathan Fox for joining us and breaking down the realities and opportunities of cleaning up metadata, and as Agentforce becomes part of the how we work, taking a closer look at what's under the hood of our orgs is more important than ever. Now, before I say that and you're this far, get ready for next week's episode because in addition to cleaning metadata, I'm going to talk with Chris Emmett about cleaning data, and this is a super fun episode. We do go off the rails a little bit about movies, but that's okay. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you take the time, listen to what Jonathan has to say, talk to your executives, your stakeholders about field labels, documentation habits. And if you loved what you hear, share it with a fellow Salesforce admin, tweet it out on social, and until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jennifer Lee, Joshua Birk, and Kate Lessard from the Admin Evangelist team at Salesforce.

Join us as we revisit the team’s predictions from the beginning of the year for how Agentforce will change the game for admins in 2025.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jennifer Lee, Joshua Birk, and Kate Lessard.

Agentforce content highlights from 2024 I started by asking the team which content from 2024 still holds up. Between “Automate This” and “How I Solved It”, Jenn puts a lot of great stuff out there. However, she pointed to her modular flows walkthrough on the blog. By breaking complicated processes down into smaller chunks, you make it easier to reuse bits and pieces of them in future solutions.

Kate was more focused on the big picture. In her blog, “Introduction to Agentforce for Salesforce Admins,” she explains why admins are the perfect candidates to become the go-to AI expert in their organizations.

Unsurprisingly, Josh got a little more technical with his answer, highlighting the growing importance of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and simple prompt engineering. He points to his interview with Nochum Klein about how he uses Agentforce to organize and search information security documentation at Salesforce.

How Agentforce will help admins in 2025 The team also looked ahead to 2025, and I think it’s fun to look back on how things are shaping up now that it’s July.

Kate was focused on how Agentforce will affect admins’ core responsibilities. The agents you build make life easier for both you and your users. However, she pointed out that security and AI governance will be critical as it becomes easier for more people to interact with your data.

Jen was excited to launch two new video series in 2025. If you haven’t yet checked out “Automate with Agentforce”, it’s been incredibly helpful in showing all the cool new solutions you can build with AI. She also has a series about how she’s learning Agentforce, which is a great place to get started.

Finally, Josh was excited about building AI agents that interact with documentation and metadata, enabling faster support, onboarding, and troubleshooting experiences. When combined with Slack integration, you can save your users so much time.

What we’ll be saying at the end of 2025 To finish out the episode, I asked the team to make predictions for what we’ll be saying at the end of 2025.

• Josh: “It’s the end of 2025, and I can’t believe Salesforce Admins found Agentforce so easy to work with.”
• Kate: “It’s the end of 2025 and I can’t believe Salesforce Admins are creating dynamic experiences this advanced!”
• Jen: “It’s the end of 2025 and I can’t believe Salesforce Admins can now do things like troubleshoot user management issues faster than ever before!”

It’s halfway through the year now, so how did we do? And how is your 2025 going? Are you working with Agentforce? Navigating new AI tools? Hit us up in the Trailblazer Community and share your admin wins and lessons.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more * Jen’s 2024 blog post: Embrace Modular Flows to Build Smarter Automation for Agentforce * Kate’s 2024 blog post: Introduction to Agentforce for Salesforce Admins * Kate’s other 2024 blog post: Advance Your Admin Career With Dev Fundamentals * Josh’s 2024 Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: How Agentforce Transforms Customer Interactions at Salesforce * Blog: 6 Tips To Help You Troubleshoot Agentforce With Confidence * Blog: How Admins Drive Innovation With Core Responsibilities in the Agentforce Era * Video Series: Automate with Agentforce * Video series: Automate This! * Video series: How I Solved It

Admin Trailblazers Group

• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

• Jen on LinkedIn
• Josh on LinkedIn
• Kate on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on X
• Mike on Bluesky social
• Mike on Threads
• Mike on Tiktok
• Mike on X

Love our podcasts? Subscribe today or review us on iTunes! Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt:

Hey, Salesforce Admins! It’s July, and we’re officially halfway through 2025—which makes it the perfect time to hit pause and reflect. Back on January 1, we gathered the Admin Evangelist Team—Jen Lee, Kate Lassard, and Josh Burke—for a special kickoff episode full of predictions, priorities, and plans for the year ahead. So today, we’re rebroadcasting that conversation as a mid-year check-in. Were we right? Were we way off? You decide. Give it a listen, and then let us know how your year as a Salesforce Admin is shaping up.

Stay tuned—and see how far we’ve come.

Welcome, everybody, to the podcast. There's a lot of people to introduce, so I'm going to go in reverse order. Jen, let's start off with you. Can you give us a brief introduction and some of the cool content you've created last year at Salesforce?

Jennifer Lee:

Sure, absolutely. I am Jen Lee, Lead Admin Evangelist, and you all probably know me as the host of Automate This or How I Solved It on our Salesforce Admins YouTube channel or for reading my mega blog for each release. Some of the things I'm really excited that I created last year was, again, I love Automate This. I love the How I Solved It, bringing in trailblazers who showcase their skills and what they've built in their orgs, and I really enjoyed writing the blog on building modular flows and thinking about really chunking out and building out smaller flows to get ready for your company in moving over to Agentforce.

Mike Gerholdt:

Nice and got Agentforce in the first minute of the show. Kate, you're our newest member. Let's go with you next.

Kate Lassard:

Hi, everyone. Kate Lassard, also a Lead Admin Evangelist here at Salesforce, and I have been here since August, so still diving in. This past year, I've been really focused on Agentforce and have put together some content including an intro to Agentforce blog post, talking about why admins make great AI specialists, and then also talking about advancing your admin career with dev fundamentals. So you might've seen me on the road at one of the Agentforce tours talking about core responsibilities, and in the new year, keep your eyes open for some new content about how emerging AI technologies fit into those admin core responsibilities.

Mike Gerholdt:

New stuff in the new year. I like it. And of course, Josh Burke.

Josh Birk:

Hi, everybody. I think actually I'm technically the oldest member of the team, but that's only by chronological age. I've been on the admin team for, gosh, I think it's a little over a year now, but I've been at Salesforce for coming on 15 years in 2025. All of them in evangelism in one form or another.

And a lot of the things I've been trying to write about and post about and blog and video and some of our podcasts is really trying to explain through some of the more technical side of artificial intelligence. We have all of these terms. We've got things like LLMs, we've got RAGs, we've got vector databases, and honestly, frequently the concepts are far more simple than the tech terms actually seem to suggest. I'm on record for saying I don't like the term prompt engineering, for instance, because it sounds like you need some kind of union guy to come over and rewire your computer in order to, but is basically just talking to a conversational UI in the first place. So definitely see more of that in the near future, especially as our Agentforce features keep expanding into things like RAG and being able to pull in your knowledge libraries and your documentations and actually have a conversation with them.

Mike Gerholdt:

Awesome. Well, and of course anytime somebody goes to Trailhead, Josh, they're using something you invented.

Josh Birk:

I get a penny every time.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, a penny.

Josh Birk:

A whole penny.

Mike Gerholdt:

A whole penny. That's before taxes. Okay. Well even in 2025. So speaking of which, we would be like, if you're listening to this the day it comes out, you're in the second day of paying for a gym membership that you think you're going to use for the rest of the month, bet you're probably not going to make it to the 15th, most of us anyway. Or eating vegetables. That's usually the two things. At least those were my horribly tried out New Year's resolutions.

But I'm going to start off with Jen. So Jen, it's 2025. We've got 363 days ahead of us as Salesforce admins. What are you, as of now, going to start focusing on?

Jennifer Lee:

Well, of course, Agentforce. Who isn't? I am very excited for two video series that I'm working on and hoping to put out soon, and this will focus around one will focus around automation and thinking ahead about how that factors into Agentforce and the strategy that you should think about and work through in bringing that along with your company. So that's going to be, I think about 10 to 12 episodes. We're looking to do monthly and then we'll be going through, and just like you all are learning Agentforce, I'm learning Agentforce, so I'm going to take you on my journey of how I'm working through various pieces. So really excited to put that type of video content out.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, we're excited to see it.

Kate, similar question, but a little bit different. You were most recently in the seat as an admin. What are some things you should be thinking of as a Salesforce admin in January that would help set you up for success for the rest of the year?

Kate Lassard:

That is a great question. With all the advancements in AI and with, as I said, admins being the ideal candidates at their organizations to become their internal AI specialists due to their unique understanding of business and user needs combined with their declarative Salesforce skillset, I'm going to be paying attention to new ways of managing admin responsibilities we already have in place. So one that is top of mind for me is security. New technology like Agentforce brings advanced value to admins, but it also brings new security concerns and the need for AI governance, so I have my eyes on the innovative ways that our admin community will continue to evolve in their roles while they're addressing these emerging technologies.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, that's good.

Josh, you probably work on some of the most advanced stuff, and half of the words that you said in your previous answer I didn't understand. Are there things that you're looking ahead at 2025 to understand that you weren't on your roadmap for 2024?

Josh Birk:

Yeah. Well, not to repeat myself too much, but it's been an interesting journey with our friend RAG, which is a Retrieval Augmented Generation, which is a very fancy way of saying that the AI models can absorb information that was not part of their original training, their original model. And typically this is going to be in the form of things like PDFs and documents and things like that.

And the reason why I think it's an interesting journey is when we first started talking about RAG here internally at Salesforce, it was actually more about how our models were going to start getting trained on enterprise data. So we have all of this wonderful custom metadata, and it tells the models of what your custom objects look like, what your custom fields look like, and so they can consume that using RAG in a very nice and flexible way, and you don't have to rebuild an entire LLM for it.

We didn't talk about it much back then because that was behind the scenes, under the covers. This is how the engine is running kind of thing. Now it's actually turning into a very common use case where people are putting in 500 page documents. Think about that mega blog that Jen was talking about. Think about having release notes available to you through a conversational UI kind of thing, so it's something that's fastly growing. And when it comes to those like, oh, what's that killer use case that we could get in to have Agentforce really do good things for our company, RAG is turning in one of those big solutions.

Mike Gerholdt:

And it's another acronym for us to learn.

Josh Birk:

Right.

Mike Gerholdt:

Let's pivot. We do a lot of things as events at Salesforce, and I know our admins, I always try to make it to a lot of events, but you can't make it to them all, right? FOMO is a thing. As you're planning your year, and Kate, I'll start off with you just to mix up the questions a little bit. How would you, as a Salesforce admin for 2025, look at events and what you could or could not go to? And Katie, bar the door. There's no restrictions.

Kate Lassard:

Oh my goodness. Well, I would love to go to all of them. FOMO is real, but not a possibility. I think it's really about prioritizing what you want to learn. So at the beginning of every year, I always try to think about what are my learning goals? What do I want to come out of this year? And whether it's a specific certification or something like learning more about Agentforce and AI governance and security, to go back to my last answer. And then finding the events that are in alignment with that. So obviously things like TDX and Dreamforce are going to be great options because there's going to be a huge amount of content, but the community conferences are also fantastic, and figuring out which ones thematically match your learning goals is really the way that I like to approach events and always maybe trying to fit in a fun new destination like Irish Dreaming this year. So if you've never been to Ireland, maybe that's a good one to add to your event bucket list.

Mike Gerholdt:

Wow, budget. Budget. Katie, bar.

Kate Lassard:

I didn't say my event bucket list.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. No, that's cool. I mean, I love all of those Dreaming events. And Jen, to pivot to you, you speak at a lot of the Dreaming events. What are some of the things that, as an admin, you looked for and got out of going to some of these community-run conferences?

Jennifer Lee:

It's a different vibe from attending Salesforce events like TDX and Dreamforce, it's more low-key, but you're actually learning from the practitioner. So it's beyond the things that Salesforce is focusing on, but getting those really best practices and things like that from the people on the ground who are doing the thing that you're doing. And that's what really excites me about going to community events because you're able to learn from your peers and talk to them and ask questions. There might be something that you're working on that you ran into roadblock, but then you attend a session and then that opened your eyes and gave you ideas and inspired you to go back and try different things, so that's why I love going to community events and just seeing all the people in the community.

Mike Gerholdt:

And the time in between sessions is usually the most fun because it's when you connect with everybody.

Jennifer Lee:

Exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:

I love that.

Josh, I'm not going to ask you to pick between your two favorite children of TDX and Salesforce, but I know you've been a part of both and building activations for both. I think very real in the minds of Salesforce admins is how do I justify going to one or both? What are some of the considerations that you would give admins as advice for planning their travel to one or both of those this year?

Josh Birk:

Yeah. Well, I think it's important to point out that we've kind of acknowledged TDX's role as more of a builder-centric conference, something that's really about enablement, and it's about knowledge, and it's about learning, and it's really about upscaling your career and your skill set. And so I think that's one justification if you're trying to convince your boss that you really need to go to both is that one's a really good learning experience, and the other one is a really good networking experience. Not that you're not going to learn from Dreamforce, not that you're not going to get the good sessions and the good breakouts and all of that, but it is definitely, we are kind of trying to make TDX a little bit more of its own thing on the map as opposed to just kind of a companion event to Dreamforce itself.

And the advice I always give people is prepare, prepare, prepare. It's just like go to agenda builder, make sure you know which sessions ahead of time that you're really going to get the most bang for your buck out of. And always that constant reminder, if breakouts don't have repeats, you might want to show up early because if that's the session that you convinced your boss to send you on the plane for, make sure that you get a seat.

So yeah, no, very much looking forward to them this year. Also looking forward to the community events. I'll echo what Jen said. So I used to joke, I'm not really a developer, I just play one on TV. I guess I'm not really a developer, but I just play one on TV. But it's like we need to hear from you. You're the people on the front lines. You're the people who are actually putting these use cases together. You're going to be the people finding the weird little niche things about these features that maybe when we kick the tires of them, we didn't consider it. So it's a great way to get that wonderful feedback loop kind of closed in.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, no, I hear you. Plus going to TDX means sometimes you can eat at the restaurants around Moscone Center, right? There's some really good ones there. Always food. This podcast always has food, food and time travel, which is what we're going to do.

So last question, and this is for everybody, and now everybody's sweating like, "Oh God, don't call on me first." Okay, Mike takes an hour and a half to ask a question. You have plenty of time. You can read War and Peace in the time it takes for me to ask a question, but we often time travel on the podcast. So we're going to fast-forward. It's now the end of December 2025. You go back and listen to this podcast, and Josh, I'm going to start with you because I didn't start with you on any of the questions. You have to complete this sentence. It's the end of 2025, and I can't believe Salesforce admins blank.

Josh Birk:

Can't believe Salesforce admins found Agentforce so easy to work with. And I can kind of say that safely because it's something I've seen on the road a lot, and it's part of our job is to make it like when you say, "I'm going to go develop an artificial intelligence custom agent." It sounds like something that you better put on your scholarly hat and really dig in deep. What we're finding is it's just really not that hard.

So what I'm hoping is that as we do these enablement workshops and as we get the Trailhead Playgrounds, and people can go in and kick the tires, and they just want to give that a shout-out that that's here in the present, not just in the future, that you can go get a free version of this, and you can go to Trailhead, and you can start learning these things now. And I remember back when Lightning One components hit, and everybody's like, "Oh, what do we do?" It's like, "What do we do about LWC?" It's like, well, don't panic, but now is the time to learn it. Now is the time. And one of the things I've said many times in my keynotes is like, now is the time to determine your relationship with AI. It's your time to figure out what's going to make you more efficient, what's going to make you more productive, what's going to make your job happier.

Mike Gerholdt:

Okay, well, that was a great answer.

Kate, you have to follow Frank Sinatra.

Kate Lassard:

Oh my gosh.

Mike Gerholdt:

So it's the end of 2025, and I can't believe Salesforce admins.

Kate Lassard:

Are creating dynamic user experiences this advanced. I think that a few years ago when Salesforce announced dynamic forms, that was such a game changer for admins allowing us to create more customized dynamic user experiences right on those record pages for our users. And with Agentforce and Prompt Builder, that adds completely new functionality that admins can leverage to really create those dynamic experiences for their users, for their customers. And I think we're going to see not only a resurgence of creating those dynamic user experiences, but now we have even more capability to do so, so I can't wait to see how advanced and how exciting those experiences are.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, a hackathon at the end of 2025 is probably going to look a lot different than the hackathon we did in New York back in November.

Kate Lassard:

Exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Jen, you get the final word. It's the end of 2025, and I can't believe Salesforce admins.

Jennifer Lee:

Right. So not to copy what Josh or Kate said.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, it's the hardest when you're the third person on a panel.

Ditto. That's what you should say. Ditto. And the first guy just went ahead and went right to AI.

Josh Birk:

I know.

Jennifer Lee:

I would say, I can't believe Salesforce admins can now do things like troubleshoot user management issues faster than ever before. Just knowing what Cheryl's team is doing behind the scenes and the things that they're working on, your mind's going to be blown. We're going to have agents that help you troubleshoot those things so that you are not spending all the time trying to figure out why Josh has this permission, but Kate doesn't.

Kate Lassard:

Great answer. Way to close with a bang.

Mike Gerholdt:

You know what's going to be fun is I'm going to save this, and we're going to do this again at the end of 2025 and see how close we were. Oh, because why not? And then hopefully we'll say, "Yeah, so we could do that by June." Maybe not. Who knows?

Thanks all for coming on the podcast and helping admins get ready for the new year. I know we have a lot of content lined up, so I appreciate it, and I appreciate your perspective on bringing things.

Josh Birk:

Thanks for having us. You bet.

Jennifer Lee:

Happy New Year. 2025 here we come.

Mike Gerholdt:

What a ride, right? It’s always fascinating to look back and see what held true—and what surprised us. Huge thanks again to Jen, Kate, and Josh for setting the tone back in January. And now, we want to hear from you: how’s your 2025 going? Are you working with Agentforce? Navigating new AI tools? Hit us up in the Trailblazer Community and share your admin wins and lessons.

Until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Brinkal Janani, Director of Product Management at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about how Generative Canvas will help admins create dynamic, personalized user experiences.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Brinkal Janani.

What is Generative Canvas? Brinkal was on the team of engineers that built Dynamic Forms. Since then, he’s been looking for new ways to help admins build dynamic user experiences without code. That’s why I was so excited to sit down with him and hear about his latest project: Generative Canvas.

Generative Canvas allows Salesforce Admins to create interactive, persistent layouts by prompting AI agents. Basically, you ask an agent to run an analysis or summarize some records and it’ll respond with a Lightning Component that you can drop into your layout. Admins configure the agents, connect the data, and suddenly, their users can build their own dynamic, personalized UX.

Persistent and personalized user experiences One of the biggest challenges for admins is anticipating what your users are going to need in terms of data and workflows. Static tools like Lightning Page Builder and Dynamic Forms are great as long as you have the right requirements. But making adjustments means a lot of back-and-forth, especially when you have to balance the needs of several different users.

Generative Canvas UIs are persistent, but they’re also personalized. The admin still has control over what data can be used, but the user has control over how they see it. Instead of going through all those extra steps, they just need to ask an agent for what they want and drop the Lightning Component directly into their own individual, personalized UI.

A hybrid future for admins Brinkal envisions a hybrid future where static and dynamic tools coexist. Admins might start building with Lightning pages, but move into Generative Canvas when deeper interaction is required. This hybrid approach ensures flexibility while harnessing the power of AI-driven customization.

If all of this sounds a little vague to you, I highly recommend watching the demo video to understand what it looks like in action. As Brinkal says, the future is dynamic, personalized, and built with no code.

For more about Generative Canvas from Brinkal, make sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

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Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt:

This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we're diving into the future of AI-powered customization with Brinkal Janani. Now Brinkal is a product manager here at Salesforce and he's leading the charge on Lightning App Builder and AI-generated apps. Today, specifically we're talking about Generative Canvas, forward-looking statement. I bet it's going to get renamed. So we're going to call it Generative Canvas for now, but literally watch the video that's in the show notes. This thing is so cool because it's going to reimagine how admins, how our users can interact with data and build dynamic experiences. And my two most favorite words, without code. Now, before we jump in, I want to make sure you're subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast. That way when a new episode like this drops, boom, you can listen to it. I don't want you to miss out, so be sure to pay attention in whatever app you are using to either press that follow or subscribe button. So with that, let's get Brinkal on the podcast.

So Brinkal, welcome to the podcast.

Brinkal Janani:

Thanks, Mike, for having me.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, we're fresh off the heels of TDX and with AI and everything going on, I feel like the metaphor I've used of how fast technology changing is jumping out of a plane, it's moving very fast. I feel like it's jumping out of a plane and skydiving superfast towards the earth because with AI, everything's changing. And we're going to talk about some of the really cool stuff that you're working on on the platform, but let's get started with just learning a little bit more about Brinkal and what you do at Salesforce. So why don't you tell us what you do and some of the stuff that you work on?

Brinkal Janani:

Sure. Mike, as you guys know, I'm Brinkal Janani and I've been at Salesforce for a little over than nine years now, and throughout my career at Salesforce. I've played various roles. I started my career as a software engineer in test, eventually transitioned to full stack software engineer, and now I'm a product manager overseeing a couple of product portfolios, namely Lighting App Builder and generating apps using AI. And that's where my focus is right now.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I feel like everybody at Salesforce working on AI stuff, right?

Brinkal Janani:

Yeah. And I'm glad to see whatever we're building at Salesforce is for the better. So I'm glad that to give the analogy, but that also means we are doing something that's fast-paced and would provide incremental value to our customers.

Mike Gerholdt:

Absolutely. So you want to talk about, and this is where I will insert forward-looking statement because I feel like this is probably going to change names. So as of this recording, it's currently known as what, Generative Canvas? Is that right?

Brinkal Janani:

That is correct, yes.

Mike Gerholdt:

Okay. Let's talk about as known as Generative Canvas right now.

Brinkal Janani:

Yeah, so I'm glad to talk about this project in particular because there's a history to it. I don't know if most of you know this or not, but I'm familiar that admins love concepts such as Dynamic Forms, Lightning Pages and Lightning App Builder. I mean, those are some of the popular features that admins love to play and use. And one of the fun fact that I wanted to also share was I was one of the original engineers in the team who built Dynamic Forms when it went tiered. So I have quite a bit of understanding on the expectations that admins have from the no-code tools like Lightning App Builder and the experiences they ship to our end users.

And for years I've seen Salesforce admin utilize technologies such as Lightning App Builder, Dynamic Forms, even Page Layouts to control how the UI appears, period. And these no-code tools are the best and have been the best in what they do, but it's also nearly impossible to anticipate the full spectrum that the end users would need in terms of data and workflows, which is where Generative Canvas as a technology becomes really important. It unlocks a whole new way of interacting with data and workflow. So the general concept of Generative Canvas is, it goes beyond static user interfaces to more interactive and dynamic ones where you're talking to an agent and having those responses stored as Lightning components on the layout. That's the crux of it.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, this is one of those where the audio podcast has limitations, but I was watching the video and I'm thinking what you're working on is so far into the future because where we're at now with agents and admin, building agents is we add the agent, enable them, and they can be anywhere in Salesforce and we just ask them a text question. But this is actually really building a visual, well you call it a Canvas, a visual Canvas of chats plus also text and documents, right, meeting notes?

Brinkal Janani:

Yeah, that is correct. I think what would really help understand what the concept is, it's a good example. A good example that we are starting off from is tackling meeting preparation use cases. We all have been in situations where we have back-to-back schedules where we don't even get enough time to see who we are meeting next. And I think that's true for most of us who will be listening in into this podcast, or have been in this situation.

So imagine a sales executive who is handling multiple accounts and is literally in back-to-back situations with meetings when it comes to talking to these accounts and customers. And what it really is, and it's what you've seen with our customers, is like a very personalized approach, a personalized pitch. And executives not having enough time to prep that pitch, or even prepare for that meeting, has been the biggest disadvantage.

And even if they do get time, they usually go to multiple UIs or even leverage multiple tools to be able to create that insight, which is why this was the first use case we felt is the best fit to tackle with Generative Canvas. Because Generative Canvas will make it super easy for any executive starting with sales executives to focus on the job to be done, and not a tool. And the reason I say this is because it's a single-page application where they are interacting with the agents on the backend.

And as I said, agents are responding via text, via components that you put and organize on the UI. And not just that, you can personalize this layout or UI by moving these responses/components around on the Canvas and even resizing them so it exactly fits the way you would have imagined the UI could look like and carry this UI into the meeting so you have something to talk about, you have talking points to break the ice, or even you have insights if you want to cross-sell or upsell any of our products. So I think that example really nails the value of what we are trying to achieve with Generative Canvas. And obviously it's a start and we are going to grow from this use case to multiple other use cases, but hopefully this shows a value.

Mike Gerholdt:

So I think the really cool part is you're thinking of quantitative and qualitative data because a lot of that, there's quantitative data, there's stuff that we can actually see in Salesforce. You brought up the sales example like number of opportunities or sum total of opportunities on this account. But the second part where your Canvas brings it together is all the qualitative data, which is all of that information, the chats, the extra documents, the insight that people need when they walk into a room to have that deeper level conversation as opposed to just the data that's in front of them.

Brinkal Janani:

That is correct, and which is why I also feel like the future experiences is going to be both like a static experience and a dynamic one. I foresee living us in a very hybrid world where technology such as Generative Canvas will exist and coexist with technology such as Lighting Pages. To your point on Canvas, it's beyond static data. You get these insights and summaries that AI is able to generate and piece from the vast pool of data that we have in Data Cloud and at Salesforce. And that's the essence of it. Not just that, but once we start building in and start pulling data from public domain, you should be able to also get that data on the Canvas along with this data that's stored in CRM in your org.

Mike Gerholdt:

Just help me elaborate on that. What would be data pulling from the public domain? What would be example of that?

Brinkal Janani:

Example would be I'd like to learn more about the competitors of my current account. What is people, what is accounts, and what are they doing? So using that data, just having that competitive analysis and the most present one, which can only be learned by pulling the data from the public domain, the sales executive can use this information and potentially create a cross-sell pitch or upsell pitch for the existing customer. Just like having that lens, having that view inside can really help them create a personalized pitch for the customers.

Mike Gerholdt:

Do you envision, and this is all me just thinking like, oh, this is kind of cool. So once somebody creates a Canvas, let's say for an account, would you envision that they would go back to that and then of course it would live update? Because obviously if you're pulling in news articles, it could do that. Like say six months comes down the line and the customer's up for a renewal, you'd want to go back to that same Canvas that you used to close the deal. Right?

Brinkal Janani:

That's a great point, Mike. And I think one thing that I also want you to touch about Generative Canvas is that this Canvas is, as you said, are persistent, which means once you create this Canvas, they are there, they're part of your org and you can obviously revisit them. And obviously since Canvas is based on data, both static, and data coming from public domain, you would want to make sure they're still relevant, right? Because even the record details might have changed, a number of little records might have changed, a whole lot of data. The data that existed when the Canvas was created might be completely different from what exists right now. So having an ability to refresh the Canvas entirely would be essential to keeping Canvas not just persistent, but also relevant.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Just on a non-Generative Canvas note, you mentioned in your intro that you'd also worked on Dynamic Forms, which I love to demo because I'm from that period of time when you couldn't have Dynamic Forms. Well, you could. My Dynamic Form was two different page layouts and a workflow rule to flip the page layout. That was my faking Dynamic Forms. What got you into the visual part of working in technology? I mean, it's obviously something you're really good at and something you're really passionate about.

Brinkal Janani:

So I think I need to share this. When I was interviewing with Salesforce, I was actually interviewing the day right before my wedding.

Mike Gerholdt:

Whoa.

Brinkal Janani:

And the only reason I did this, and I'll never do this obviously again-

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, I hope you don't have to get married again, in case your wife's listening.

Brinkal Janani:

... is because I knew what Salesforce was doing and what it continues doing, it's like creating these products which also create this community and just uplevels a whole lot of folks with the career insights and the career paths. And that is huge and that really resonated with me. And ever since my career at Salesforce, I've played multiple roles. My focus has always been delivering value for admins through no-code tools and specifically in my case, it's Lighting App Builder. So being an engineer or being a product manager, my focus has been how do I help admins unlock value for the end users through UI using no-code tools? And that has been my problem statement from day one at Salesforce, and which is why I'm super exciting to see how the feature's set, how the technology's evolving from beyond the static layouts in terms of Lighting Pages to a more dynamic world where everything is personalized, everything's AI driven. But as I said earlier, I also feel like the reality, the future is mostly hybrid with both technologies coexisting seamlessly.

Mike Gerholdt:

When you say hybrid, do you mean humans and technology or what do you mean by hybrid?

Brinkal Janani:

When I say hybrid, I think I see a world where it's not completely one-sided where you only have static experiences or you only have dynamic experiences. When I say hybrid, I mean I see a world where you have both kind of experiences, probably start from a static experience to a Lighting Page, and eventually transition to a more dynamic experience through technology such as a new Canvas where you're conversing with a tool, where you're conversing with an agent, and updating the layout on the fly.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, okay. And everything turned out okay at the wedding, I'm assuming?

Brinkal Janani:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt:

Okay, good.

Brinkal Janani:

Safe to say that.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, we know the job thing worked out because you're on the podcast. So I don't know I've ever had anybody on that interviewed before their wedding day. But good for you. When you sit down and think of all of the stuff that AI has to interact with now, and what you're working on for this Generative Canvas, I'm not an engineer, but it's very easy to get caught up in the here and now. How are you trying to plan for two to three year out technology that you might not even know exists and pull that in for the next generation of Generative Canvas? I mean, you have to know you're building something out of Minority Report, right?

Brinkal Janani:

And I think that's a great question again, Mike. To be honest with you, in this period of time, it's extremely difficult to even look out two years out in advance just because the pace of technology is changing so drastically. But one thing that remains constant, regardless of what period we are in, are the problems that you want to solve for your customer base. Those are not going away. Eventually technology needs to be able to solve customer problems. So my focus always has been less on the technology itself, but figuring out the right problem set to solve in the right period of time using the right technology, and that's what I want to achieve. And that's what I've always been trying to achieve. Two different sets of technologies. So eventually in time technologies might change, but you still have the same problem set to deal with. And solving some problem sets might become just easier as in when technologies evolve. And I think we just need to keep on revisiting that list of problems that you have that you want to solve for your customers.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Last question, because I threw some hard ones at you, but you also came with the wedding thing. That's pretty unexpected. When your... I mean, man, this is so, "In the future we're going to have flying cars, but we don't know." When you're planning through and looking for inspiration, this is the one thing that I think I learned it from a long time ago, I had a guest on the podcast that talked about board games and how they found inspiration in board games when they were creating a product in Salesforce. Because you work in very visual products, where do you go to find inspiration for ideas like for Generative Canvas that you're working on?

Brinkal Janani:

That's a tough question again, Mike,

Mike Gerholdt:

I don't ask easy ones. Nobody comes on for easy questions.

Brinkal Janani:

All right. Point taken. I think the answer is two-folded, one is very personal and one is more cooperative. I'll start with the personal one. I'm also father to a three-year-old daughter.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, boy.

Brinkal Janani:

And it's been quite a journey, and mostly good. The reason she is an inspiration is because it's so amazing to see how a creature of such small size can learn and absorb from visual experiences, from sensory experiences, so quick. And depending on what the experience is, the message that they learn is drastically different. And I know it seems like a very far-fetched connection, but if you tie the dots, it's actually not that far. That is my daughter has been an inspiration just to keep my mindset more agile and rapidly adopt with changing environment and learn from it and keep on delivering value. So that has been something that I'm really grateful for. The other thing is a lot of people, we have an amazing set of people in the world right now and everybody's doing something very amazing. So this thing connected, and in the know on what's happening around you, also serves a good idea for inspiration.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, no, I mean think a lot of us are still wrapping our heads around... I have a good friend of mine has a young child too, and he told me the other day, "He just ran up to the TV and started touching it, expecting it to do things," much like his phone. And that to me is like, whoa, because that's the world they live in. As a parting gift, if admins are definitely thinking about Agentforce, and AI, and everything that they can do in Salesforce, what would your best advice be for admins around getting ready for just AI and Agentforce and learning this new world that we live in?

Brinkal Janani:

I've always felt for Salesforce, the local community groups that we have, the Trailblazer communities that we have, Trainforce, TDX, and just like one-on-one engagement with product managers and MVPs have been a very solid ecosystem that has helped spread the knowledge and just up-level everyone by sharing knowledge, talking about the problems, and talking about how do we unlock, or solve for these problems using the technology that the Salesforce has right now. And I think it will be vital for us, especially product managers at Salesforce, being part of those communities and local groups and talking about the technology, the product that they're working on, and helping customers connect with it. I think that would be a key, not just for success of products, but also for success of our customers.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I mean, it can be oftentimes very isolating to sit in your office and feel like you must be the only person working on this right now, and you're not. And getting out to a user group and hearing stories and thinking, "Oh, you just need to change a couple terms, but we're working on the same problem," and seeing different approaches to things is always very helpful. Brinkal, thanks so much for being on the podcast. I can't wait to have to go back and edit this once we rename Generative Canvas three or four more times.

Brinkal Janani:

And yeah, thanks Mike for having me. This has been special.

Mike Gerholdt:

No, it'll be great. So that was a fun conversation with Brinkal. I'll be honest, I don't know of any podcast guests that may have interviewed the day before their wedding. Usually there's things to do. You know what, Brinkal is like, "I'm going to work at Salesforce and build the future of applications." So I'm so glad everything's working out for him. But man, I can't wait to see your reaction to some Generative Canvas stuff. Again, I'll include all the links in the help and the video to watch it. If it works for you, go for it. I think they're going to roll it out even farther, forward-looking statement. But this is going to be cool.

If you enjoyed this episode, hey, do me a favor, share it with a fellow admin. You can tap the dots in Apple Podcasts and click share episode and then that way you can post it on whatever social platform you are on or, text it to a friend. Or share it in your community user group. I'd be a fan of that. Of course, all the resources, including the transcript, are in the show notes for this episode. And where are those? Well, those are your one-stop shop for everything admin, which is admin.salesforce.com. Now don't forget to join the conversation over in the Admin Trailblazer group. Don't worry, the link is in the show notes. Where's the show notes? Admin.salesforce.com. Look at that. It's like we thought about this ahead of time. I promise we did. All right. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

View Details

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Kurtis Kemple, Senior Director of Developer Relations at Slack.

Join us as we chat about what’s possible when you combine Slack, Salesforce, and AI agents.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Kurtis Kemple.

Starting at square one in tech Kurtis’s path to his career in tech is truly inspiring. Not only is he a completely self-taught programmer, but he learned those skills while incarcerated. It was hard to get any sort of job when he got out, let alone convince someone to take a chance on him as a software engineer.

Today, Kurtis is the Senior Director of Developer Relations for Slack. His role is primarily focused on advocacy, with a focus on improving the developer experience through thoughtful product design and community input. So he’s the perfect person to talk to about what’s possible with Slack, Salesforce, and AI agents.

Slack is the OS for work When it comes to collaborating with your team, Kurtis sees Slack as the OS for work. It’s a space to bring together everything you need—your communications, your documents, your data—all in one place so you can start getting things done.

Switching contexts can be a productivity killer. That’s why Slack’s integration with Salesforce is so powerful, because it allows you to have everything right at your fingertips without needing to go back and forth between windows.

Whether you’re looking at Salesforce data in Slack to have a conversation with a co-worker about an opportunity, or updating your team on what you’re building in Salesforce, seamless authentication means you can do everything from wherever you happen to be working without having to switch back and forth.

Agents and automation inside Slack The possibilities are even more exciting when you throw Agentforce into the mix. As Kurtis points out, Slack actions are part of the list of standard actions. That means you can build custom agents that use data from either platform to launch workflows, run a quick analysis, and much more.

Kurtis also gets into how you can customize Agentforce by plugging in various LLM libraries, or connecting it with external services or authentication providers. As he explains, prompt templates are powerful tools for controlling your agents’ responses so that they fit into your business processes.

This episode is a deep dive into everything you can do with Agentforce and Slack, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

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Full Transcript

Josh Birk: Hello, Salesforce admins, your guest host Josh Birk here. Today on the show, we're going to welcome Kurtis Kemple, who's overrunning developer advocacy at Slack. We're going to talk about Slack, we're going to talk about AI, we're going to talk about Kurt's beginnings, and this was a great interview. Very happy we got it on tape. And so, let's go right over to Kurt. All right. Today on the show we welcome Kurtis Kemple of Salesforce Developer Advocacy. Kurt, welcome to the show.

Kurtis Kemple: It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Josh Birk: So let's start, I usually start talking about people's early years. And you have a very, let's not say unique, but a very interesting early days of getting into computing. You're self-taught in web development and you learn that in prison. Correct?

Kurtis Kemple: Yeah, that's correct. I prefer to think of it more as self-guided. I'd like to take all the credit, but I was still reading books, watching YouTube videos, paying for courses. So you're still creating a learning environment more so than just I had... Well, in prison I did have nothing, but then I just opened a laptop and just essentially went at code with nothing. I don't want to essentially leave out all the people who I wouldn't be here without them.

Josh Birk: Did you have an interest in computers beforehand or was it just sort of a, "Here's this moment in my life and I want to make changes, and I want to learn something new"?

Kurtis Kemple: Well, it was definitely that second one, but not related to code. So it was pure happenstance. Prior to incarceration, I had very limited experience in technology. I had a pager once when I was 18, cell phones were coming out, and I would download music off LimeWire. That was it. I had to type with two fingers, like pecking at the keyboard.

Josh Birk: Did the looking over the keys with the finger on either side of it? Yeah.

Kurtis Kemple: Oh my gosh, absolutely. Absolutely.

Josh Birk: I also love doing interviews like this because we always accidentally date ourselves.

Kurtis Kemple: Oh, my lord. Yeah.

Josh Birk: In some wonderful way.

Kurtis Kemple: I know people are going like, "What's a pager?" They're like, "Oh, I've seen those on TV."

Josh Birk: I know, right? "Did they beep or something like that? They had numbers on them?" Yeah. Actually, I didn't get a cell phone for a long time because my dad's a doctor and he had a pager, and I remember hating the fact that he would be taken away from the dinner table because his pager is on his belt. I'm like, "Oh, I don't want to have constant access to people always being able to call me." And now, of course, I'm the dude that my wife slaps my wrist because I'm picking up the cell phone during dinner with friends.

Kurtis Kemple: Absolutely.

Josh Birk: Just as addicted as everybody else. So tell me a little bit, 'cause tech is not the easiest to break into, and there's ageism, there's sexism, there's racism, there's the old white guy syndrome, all this kind of stuff. With a record of a conviction, what challenges were you facing there?

Kurtis Kemple: Sheesh know, I'd say that-

Josh Birk: How many hours do we have?

Kurtis Kemple: Honestly, honestly. Look, this is for all you PMs out there, I'm going to throw in a little product analogy, but there's a ton of upfront friction. It's like they would never let me get through to the other side to realize the value. So it's like having that record, it's immediately, oh, that's like, "I don't want to mess with that." They had no idea that on the flip side of that, I was willing to work so hard to prove myself. So hard. And so, I think there's two sides to every coin, but it was a big blocker. It's just immediate nos. You have conversations with people and they're like, "Oh, that's interesting." And then they find out about the record, or back then you had to check a box, "Have you been convicted of a felony in the last seven years or since you've got out?" And it's like, "Yeah. Yeah, I have. But I thought the whole point of going through half a decade of incarceration was that I did that. I paid my dues." But no, you're doing time for forever after you get out in the US, honestly.

Josh Birk: Yeah. Well, I am very glad that you have managed to break your way into tech and join us. Tell me a little bit about your current job.

Kurtis Kemple: Yeah, so from there all the way learning and coding, I went through an entire career in software engineering, and then I ended up making a switch to DevRel about eight years ago. And then I went from IC up in DevRel, really, up to leadership. And so now, I'm senior director of developer relations here at Salesforce, and I focus on Slack, Slack platform.

Josh Birk: And tell me a few of those highlights, because you've worked for companies like, if I'm remembering your CV correctly, like Amazon. Correct?

Kurtis Kemple: Yeah, I've worked for a ton of pretty big companies, some that might not be as well known, but you'd know them in certain verticals. So I worked at Integral Ad Science, which is actually, if you've ever seen an ad, they're the analytics platform behind the analytics platforms. So it was a really big one. And then from there, a bunch of places that culminated with my last job as a full-time engineer. I was the tech lead of the UI team at Major League Soccer. And so we built-

Josh Birk: Cool.

Kurtis Kemple: Yeah, it was a really fun one. So we built all the interfaces that fans interface with, like user interface, literally, chatbots, Roku, Fire TV, websites, mobile apps. You name it, we built it.

Josh Birk: Nice. Very, very nice. Now, this is kind of a personal question for myself because it's one I get frequently, and I apparently struggle to answer it correctly because I still have people in my life who have no idea what I do. What is developer evangelism or advocacy? Which of the labels or do you land ,on evangelist or advocate?

Kurtis Kemple: So, I think at any point, you might be doing a bit of both in reality in these days, but if we wanted to put a label on it, you could say evangelism is more outbound-driven. Advocacy, ideally you're doing a lot of inbound. We're advocating, both internally and externally, we're providing feedback. I would say I lean heavily, I'm a very product-driven person, so lean on the advocacy. I want to unlock better developer experience through improvements to the product.

Josh Birk: Got it.

Kurtis Kemple: That's my main thing. But also, I love getting out there and just talking [inaudible 00:06:54] and engaging with people, interestingly enough, because I am introverted, but I love it. I absolutely love it.

Josh Birk: It's such an interesting trend in advocacy and evangelism. I remember having a beer with a former evangelist actually, and I'm like, "Well, you know I'm a closet introvert. Right?" He's like, "No, you're not." I'm like, "No, dude."

Kurtis Kemple: Yeah, they have no idea.

Josh Birk: "You have no idea." One of the first things I told my therapist is, "I have raging social anxiety, and so I decided to go into public speaking." Don't ask me why. Don't ask me why.

Kurtis Kemple: "I wanted to live my worst fear daily."

Josh Birk: Right, exactly. Exactly. Oh, yeah. Okay. So our focus is admins, and what I'm kind of curious is, because first of all, I'm a huge Slack fan. And it's one of the purchases that I'm like, "Oh, I get this one." Sometimes Mark buys a company, I'm like, "I don't know who they are. I don't know why we would use them." First of all, I'm very glad we purchased Slack because it finally answered an age-old question of which IM service should we use to talk to our teammates? And yeah, finally have a-

Kurtis Kemple: Really?

Josh Birk: Oh, it was horrible. It was G-Chat and it was Top This, and then there's Chatter, and to have everybody agree was great. But how do you see, in the Salesforce ecosystem, what is Slack's role as a product?

Kurtis Kemple: Yeah. And this is so great 'cause this ties right into administration as well. It is the operating system, without a doubt, that is, I don't know, I think of a computer, extrapolating out a bit higher level. It is aggregating all of the useful tools, access to information, communication channels, but that is very broad, very general. It's covering it for everything. Slack narrows in onto one particular aspect of your life, work. Or actually, I won't even say work, but I will say collaborative organization and communication, 'cause we have millions of communities on Slack as well. And yeah, I think that it's about that. Honestly, it's that. It's an operating system to help you organize and be productive and get things done. And especially now when you put the lens of work on it, it becomes even more valuable. That starts turning into dollars. And it's tangible, tracks billions of dollars.

Josh Birk: Yeah. Yeah. And I really love positioning it as it's kernel, is kind of the... Oh gosh, I just made an OS pun when I didn't mean to. Kernel is sort of that collaborative tool, but then there's all these other layers to it to help people be more productive and be more collaborative. And over the years, we've had tighter integrations with Slack and Salesforce. What are some of the key integrations that come to mind when I'm using Slack, but I'm also trying to interface with Salesforce?

Kurtis Kemple: Salesforce channels. Without a doubt, if those are not set up, oh my Lord, it is a game changer. So quick links at the top, taking action within Salesforce. Again, for me, it's like the work operating system, I don't want to switch context. I don't care if it's to switch a window for three seconds to click a button, or I have to go out there and do a bunch of other things, it breaks the flow of work. And to me, what I'm actually most excited about is when you look at a Salesforce channel, you've got your conversation. Let's say it's related to whatever, like an account, there might be your opportunities, or the health score or recent notes, and all this stuff is right there in the team channel as soon as you drop in. And I'm sure that we use Slack more than most people use Slack 'cause we are Slack and Salesforce. But if you are starting to take advantage of those tools, I've got all my documents related to the DevRel team, in our Dev Rel channel. It's just so convenient. But when you integrate other systems in that, like Salesforce, and now I just have a canvas, but it's real time updates and back and forth collaboration. Okay, my job keeps me mostly in Salesforce platform. A, it's day to day business as usual, but if I spend most of my time in Slack, I'm no longer breaking the flow of work, even if it is just a few times, that can really have an effect, compounded. So I would say definitely that. And now, the counterpart to that is we've got the Slack channels in Salesforce.

Josh Birk: That's so cool. That's so cool. Is that GA? How do people turn that on? Or is it just there?

Kurtis Kemple: It is GA. How do the people turn it on? I think it's just there if you already have things connected. So if you set up a Salesforce channel connection, it will show up for you in the Slack, in the Slack UI with the Slack way of doing things. And if you're in Salesforce, then you get the Slack channel, messaging still available, everyone conversation one place, but you have your Salesforce UI that you've custom designed and built around you so that you can do your work more efficiently. I'm sorry, I swear I'll let you talk right after this, but you hit on something so key, I swear to God.

Josh Birk: No, go, go, go.

Kurtis Kemple: It took us a while to get here. Look at this. We're like three, four years into this thing. More, more. But when you look at how to thoughtfully integrate something like Slack and Salesforce, there's going to be some trial and error. And I know people wanted it faster and I wish we gave it to them, but I'm actually just happy that the things we're building now are so much in the flow of work. There's some things coming up that I don't know if I can talk about. I should have ran through the list, but I cannot wait. Cannot wait for folks to see 'cause bridging Salesforce and Slack in ways that are just amazing, and are really going to close the gap for ease of use and just being able to stay where you're meant to be and do your job.

Josh Birk: Nice, nice. I want to touch on that a little bit, but I also want to kind of applaud the engineering team over there, because the demos I've done, and I'm old, I've done integrations. My first application was a CGI, getting things to work, but integrating systems sometimes isn't easy. The seamless OAuth between Slack and Salesforce is pretty cool. The idea that you have this mirror user and then you just tell Salesforce, "This is my user over here, go be Slack." And then I'm like, "What do you mean there's no OAuth window? What do you mean I don't have to worry on tokens?"

Kurtis Kemple: You're already you. You're already you.

Josh Birk: Yeah.

Kurtis Kemple: Yeah.

Josh Birk: Yeah. Did you have a follow up there, or?

Kurtis Kemple: I do. I do, I do, I do, I do. Yeah. So Seamless OAuth I think is foundational. As a matter of fact, I see this as foundational to the entire Salesforce ecosystem. And so now that's seamless, all right, so here's the deal. Imagine now it's like, oh, click of a button, I deploy a Slack workspace for my Salesforce org. That's awesome. But now, it's like I want to also extend my operating system, my Slack org, so I want to start building and deploying apps. Well, what if that user was also seamless off to Heroku and you could just deploy your apps immediately to Heroku? And what if you wanted to use MuleSoft APIs to further extend it? But guess what? You're the same user there, too. So now, it's like you can immediately spin up these really ridonkulous, enterprise-grade-ready, all seamlessly authenticated systems and just go to town.

Josh Birk: Right. Well, and that really starts to put the cap on the concept of it being an operating system.

Kurtis Kemple: Bingo.

Josh Birk: It's Slack, it's Salesforce, it's MuleSoft, it's Heroku, it's whatever in our ecosystem that you have to touch. And I'm going to be very honest, when canvases really became a thing, I was kind of like, "Okay, I've got docs, I've got this kind of stuff." And then our team recently tasked me with trying to track some pilot features, and I was struggling with, "Well, where should this live?" Because of course, this is not going to surprise you, my first instinct was, "Custom object, throw it in the enterprise org that we all collaborate on, keep them as records, blah, blah, blah, blah."

Kurtis Kemple: Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Birk: And then-

Kurtis Kemple: Permissions, groups, we're all good to go. Right?

Josh Birk: Right. And then I thought about exactly what you were talking about before, how many touch points is that for somebody to go and read something that they're not... This is something people are intended to scan.

Kurtis Kemple: That's it.

Josh Birk: This isn't a research doc. It's a "Here are some things to think about in front of Dreamforce." And I'm like, "That's why I put it into a canvas."

Kurtis Kemple: That's it.

Josh Birk: It's right there and you can just click that button and go. Now, speaking of OSs and conversational UIs, because I think this touches a little bit on what you just said about deploying workspaces and things like that, because we now have Slack actions in Agentforce as standard actions. Can you tell me a little bit about those?

Kurtis Kemple: Yes, I absolutely can. So, you want to be able to take action in Slack from Agentforce. It's like if that is the work operating system and agents are truly supposed to be doing work on my behalf, I want those reports summarized and put into a canvas and added to my channel. I want to set up DMs maybe with somebody from customer success and sales, or IT and wherever. I think as we see Agentforce start to grow more in maturity, we're going to need to see a lot more Slack actions. And fun fact, like little shout out to the DevRel team over here. If you want to extend beyond the Slack actions that exist, we've already got the docs all set up for you for building custom Slack actions for Agentforce. So you can literally just, world is your oyster with Slack. And technically, they work for any service. We're not doing anything particularly bespoke. But it's nice, because you can set up a Slack app which gives you all the proper authentication to either be you or a bot, depending on how you want to set all that up. And then you can now start taking that even further. You can have agents doing things on your behalf, like responding to messages, or summarizing things and aggregating stuff, updating records in Salesforce, or updating channels and canvases and lists within Slack, kicking off Slack work flows, all kinds of stuff. But to be honest, that's all very well and good, except I think until we get agents more deeply integrated into the UI of Slack, into your flow of work, we're just scratching the surface. And we're working on some cool stuff now that you'll see, but right now it's really just the agents are there, you know what I mean? We brought them into Slack, but they're kind of side card, they still have access to all your info, have access to the relevant channel and stuff like that, or channels. And now, you can actually message them in channel, which is a big step forward, but that's still very much the initial phases. I can't wait for all this stuff we'll be able to do. Yeah.

Josh Birk: Okay. I'm going to free you from the restraints of a forward-looking statement.

Kurtis Kemple: Let's do it.

Josh Birk: And we're going to walk right into the land of theory. So everybody listening to me right now, this is not a product roadmap, Kurtis is not promising you anything. I am just going to ask what's your dream version of an agent residing in Slack?

Kurtis Kemple: All right, so I think it's twofold. Oh my gosh. Oh man, this is going to get so deep. Here we go.

Josh Birk: I love it.

Kurtis Kemple: Number one, I think agents should be able to be preferential. They should learn about you over time, specifically. Not general knowledge, not learning about all of the people in Slack, you specifically. So, I would like to see more of that happen because then you get into generative use cases. It would better understand what actions to take, better understand what things to do because of you and how you specifically have interacted with it. So I think that's one. And then two is like, this is going to sound so funny 'cause we're the conversational interface, but it's like we've already cracked that nut. We're good there. What if agents were more in flow into literally to the micro flow of work? When I highlight texts, I should be able to kick off agent actions and send that to agents. And then I would love to see more eventually agent orchestration. So right now, we've got a few agents, but let's assume you're like X-Corp, 5,000 to 10,000 employees. You open up Agentforce for them, they build one agent per, not everyone would, but realistically, now you're talking about thousands of agents within your environment. That could be a lot to handle. So I think winning the game there is about making it a lot easier to synthesize and have AI help you manage that.

Josh Birk: A couple of meetings ago we were joking about whether or not we should consider adding a mental health topic to our Agentforce. And as you're saying that, I'm like, okay, so one of these days my Slack channel is going to have an agent in it and that agent's going to be like, "Dude, you've got too many meetings this week. Go take a walk."

Kurtis Kemple: Exactly. Exactly.

Josh Birk: I love it. I love it.

Kurtis Kemple: Or there's like, Hey, there's 13 agents in here and going through their topics and descriptions, their classification, these are all doing roughly the same thing or something like that. Or, "Here's all these agents around your org that are all doing the same thing." I think a lot of stuff, I don't know, I've just been digging AI lately in, one, non-conversational use cases, so kicking off from buttons and stuff like that. I think we should get a little bit back to that. And then two, I would like for agents to not just be specific to a topic or an industry, but specific to me.

Josh Birk: Got it. I love it. I love it. One of the things I preach often is if you are a Salesforce admin, you're already an AI builder. If you know Flow, you already know how to extend an AI.

Kurtis Kemple: Absolute.

Josh Birk: [Inaudible 00:21:56]. And one of the things that I've seen some of your use cases, and that's what I want to dig into next, but it's interesting how simple Flow can be, but also how much more power it can add to an AI, into an agent, simply because of its ability to integrate with external systems and other things. What are some uncommon use cases that you've tinkered with when it comes to... And we'll do Flow/Apex because they're pretty parity when it comes to features these days, so don't limit yourself to just Flow. But what are some uncommon use cases where maybe somebody's like, "Oh, I didn't think an agent would do that"?

Kurtis Kemple: When we think of Agentforce, we immediately just zoom in on that is our agent, we have the reasoning engine, and then we have the actual agent itself, and that's the only access to LLMs within Agentforce. And that's not true. So, Salesforce has the LLM Open Connect standard. You can attach any LLM you want to as a foundational model if you have a data cloud. And you can start doing models for all kinds of things like specific actions, like a model per action. This was kind of blowing people's minds when I started showing them this. I have actions that can help me summarize text, actions that actually help me review and rewrite text, actions that can help me with code instruction, actions that help me analyze data. I have my Salesforce developer advocate model that helps me learn Apex Lightning web components, policies and setup. I'm becoming an admin myself. I'm starting to get pretty dangerous in there.

Josh Birk: I love it. Nothing wrong with being a double or a triple threat out there, that's for sure.

Kurtis Kemple: Absolutely.

Josh Birk: Yeah. I love it. I love it.

Kurtis Kemple: I could dive more into third-party services too though, 'cause I think that's a big one that we've not tapped on.

Josh Birk: Go for it.

Kurtis Kemple: Yeah, yeah. So aside from custom LLMs, which again, now you can handle any use case you want, but Salesforce is the most integrated platform probably in a history of platforms. And I think people try to leave a lot of that at the door. And so we'll get into Flow and Apex next, but those are the gateway for this. Because I can set up external services or auth providers, or like I said, custom models, and then all of those things, prompt templates are great for really controlling the responses in Agentforce. All these tools become available to you. And so I have an agent, engineering agent that... Actually, this is a cool one. It pulls down my PRs for me that I have, and it will spin up GitHub Codespaces. And I can run the code, review it, and then be like, "This looks good. Please break that down, merge this for me." And it goes off and does it.

Josh Birk: I love it. I love it. And for the admin, non-technical group PR pull request, so basically we keep coming back to this theme. We are your engineers working? Well, they're probably talking to each other in Slack. They're probably talking about that pull request in Slack. So why get out of Slack once they've already approved it in Slack? So why get out of Slack in order to approve it and then add that to the code base?

Kurtis Kemple: That's it. I'm in the flow of work. I never left Slack. I sat down and I said, "Oh, you know what? I have a few minutes. Let me"... Okay. Now, here's the beauty. I said, "Oh, I have a few minutes. Let me see what I can tackle." If I had had to leave to go to GitHub to do that, I would've never happened. I would've looked for things I could do a few minutes within Slack.

Josh Birk: Yeah. Yeah, you know how some people have a swear jar. Right?

Kurtis Kemple: Mm-hmm.

Josh Birk: I thought about just putting a jar in the kitchen to put a penny in every time I walk into the kitchen and forgot what I was going to do.

Kurtis Kemple: Oh my gosh.

Josh Birk: So yeah, if I have to leave Slack, I'm probably getting a coffee or figuring out why the cats been away or something. Yeah, totally.

Kurtis Kemple: Literally.

Josh Birk: Totally. I want to dig a little bit more in the custom models, because that's actually one thing I have been curious about. I have not played with it much myself. And one of the things that keep kind of, when I'm talking about AI, is kind of breaking down this concept that it's a rocket science sort of thing. Yes, I've seen the math and it made my eyes bleed, basically. If you want to understand the formulas, you're probably going to be a Stanford research scientist. If you want to use the technology though, you already have the skills. And one of the things it's interesting about the concept of a custom model is when we do an API call to OpenAI, OpenAI is intended to know how to cook a rotisserie chicken. Admins don't need to know, our users don't need to know how to use a rotisserie chicken when they're in Slack.

Kurtis Kemple: Yeah. I don't need a model that can talk like a pirate. You know what I mean?

Josh Birk: Exactly. Although, prompts that talk like a pirate are a fun demo to do.

Kurtis Kemple: They are great.

Josh Birk: But what is involved in creating a custom agent, like when you say, "I created an agent that understands Apex and LWC"?

Kurtis Kemple: Yeah. Yeah, so I actually created an action and I just attach that action to the agent. So here's a cool thing, I'm not training anything. AI has gone from frontier to common product so fast. If we look at the Wardley scale, probably faster than anything else in the history of humankind. And we are now at the stage where AI, you can have access to very specifically trained models to do something very well through a simple API call. I'm sorry, I shouldn't say simple, because even API calls can be complex for those unfamiliar. My point being, is that you don't have to train your own models. You don't have to be an AI or ML engineer. You don't even have to be a developer. If you can open up Postman and figure out how to use a couple API endpoints, that's all you need to become very active with AI. And then it's just a matter of identifying which models are best for which job. And trust me, there is no shortage of that information online.

Josh Birk: Where are some of your favorite places to find custom models?

Kurtis Kemple: I definitely lean heavily into Hugging Face. So it's basically like the GitHub for models and data sets and stuff like that. I like it because it's the platform I found that opens the most transparency. So a lot of them can even record the carbon footprint of what it costs to train their models. And they have little cards right there on Hugging Face. Yeah.

Josh Birk: Oh, very cool.

Kurtis Kemple: Yeah, it is. It's cool. You can also see the data sets for a lot of them, what they're trained on, but they also have access to all your big, what I call the 100 million club models. You need $100 million or more to train. They've got access to all those as well. So, I like it because then I use one API, the Hugging Face API, and then I just switch the model as one property and I can completely change the response. Absolutely.

Josh Birk: Oh, that's very cool. That's very, very cool. So let's broaden a little bit outside of the world of Slack and Salesforce, because I know you've also talked in general about the importance of democratizing artificial intelligence. Give me a little bit of a pitch on that.

Kurtis Kemple: All right. So, it goes back to incarceration. And this is also why I said self-guided, not self-taught. The only reason I was able to succeed is because enough people had come before me in tech and been willing to share what they had learned. That is not common. Go Google how to become a doctor. There's not doctors out there writing blog posts on how to become a doctor. There's not electricians doing it, accountants, bankers, I can go down the list. Now, there are some, don't get me wrong, I don't want to talk negatively about any industry. Trust me, there are people out there, but there's not the wealth of information that there is for learning tech, for especially coding. Look, even in a Salesforce ecosystem. So I look at Trailhead, I am so blown away by what I call the opportunity funnel of something like Trailhead in the Salesforce community. Say what you want, but nothing is a career creator vacuum for people who have non-traditional or resource-deficient backgrounds and have a viable career. So sorry, circling back. Imagine if I had had a small un-internet connected device with a model, trained specifically on code instruction to help me along in there, instead of one textbook and my teacher being willing to print out some pages on JavaScript MouseEvents.

Josh Birk: Yeah. And I think a lot of that, I think there's a harmonious cycle there, because I think a lot of it is also how, especially techie people, whether they're an admin or a developer or an architect or whatever, I feel like we learn once we do it sort of thing. We can read it, we can see it, but the best... This statement alone is probably why I'm in computers. Back when I was in school and we got to play around with Apple IIs, I think they were Apple IIes, and our teacher said, "Do whatever you want in this class. You are not going to break the computer by typing code into it." And it was all of a sudden just like, it's like, "Okay, I'm going to go do go-to lines for 1,000. Let's just to see what happens." And it was so freeing, so freeing just to be able to be like... And JavaScript, and anytime somebody asks me, "How should I start?" I'm like, "Start with JavaScript." It's free. You can do it in a browser. You can instantly see the results when typing into it. It's great. And back to your point, my father was a doctor and I asked my dad how to become a doctor, and his advice was, "Don't."

Kurtis Kemple: There you go. Right?

Josh Birk: Yeah.

Kurtis Kemple: Yeah. And I just think even for becoming a doctor, I think AI changes the technology landscape, the learning curve, the accessibility. The accessibility. So I think another piece of this too, and about democratizing AI, again circling back to the $100 million club, is that a lot of information is available through AI, but you know what's not available through AI right now, honestly? Expertise.

Josh Birk: Oh yeah.

Kurtis Kemple: Right?

Josh Birk: Yeah. Yeah. I feel like we're still in that phase where we're the experts and AI is trying to catch up to us in a lot of ways. I've used ChatGPT just to write a simple Apex class, and sometimes it not only nails it, I'm like, "Okay, that's prettier code than I would've written." And then sometimes it's like, "You dumb bot."

Kurtis Kemple: That's it. That's it. And it's literal, it's statistics, it's probability. And the reason why, is 'cause if it's trained on the whole internet, chances are there's as much bad info about it as there is good.

Josh Birk: Yeah.

Kurtis Kemple: But also, I think about this, even getting deeper than that, 'cause that's still recognition. Right?

Josh Birk: Right.

Kurtis Kemple: But you could tell me every song on a Taylor Swift album as AI, but you can't tell me why Taylor Swift arranged to the tracks the way she did, what she is listening for, when she knows it's the right time to make an album, if she even cares at all. And it's just like all is actually just like, "Woo hoo." Who knows?

Josh Birk: Yeah. And I think based on how much Swifties themselves analyze her songs, that by the time AI can tell you what Taylor was thinking when she wrote a song-

Kurtis Kemple: Too Late

Josh Birk: ... we're at the singularity.

Kurtis Kemple: That's it. That's it. It's too late.

Josh Birk: It's over guys.

Kurtis Kemple: Yeah, even borgs and everybody knows why.

Josh Birk: Exactly. All right, so totally switching gears. I want to give you an opportunity to talk a little bit about Forthright.

Kurtis Kemple: Oh, okay. So Forthright, actually, I do not run that anymore, the consultancy, but it was fun. It was amazing. So I was doing DevRel consultancy actually before I joined Salesforce and Slack. I had had a number of jobs in developer relations. This is still very awesome and relevant, but I just felt like I was... I don't like to do things kind of in isolation. I don't want to make assumptions or not have other information to lean on. It makes sense when we want to put care into something, we want to ensure we do it. It's actually how I got into DevRel. When I was at Major League Soccer, we wanted to adopt React Native and GraphQL. They were both being used in production by a lot of places, big companies and stuff, but really nobody was talking about it yet.

Josh Birk: Interesting.

Kurtis Kemple: So I selfishly, very selfishly started writing blog posts about them, talking to people from the companies. I started GraphQL NYC Meetup. I started doing talks at the React Native meetup, just to hear how other people were doing things so that I could do a better job at MLS. I was a tech lead. It's literally my job to understand the tech. That kind of just stuck with me as a really good and powerful way to learn. So, after having some time in DevRel, like Gatsby, AWS, like you said, Apollo GraphQL, I had my own thoughts about how it should be done, but what I realized is that I don't have enough information, so clearly I'm missing pictures. And secondly, I'm not going to be able to really provide that type of environment for myself in a full-time job, because it's one environment and you're in that ideally for years. Right?

Josh Birk: Yeah.

Kurtis Kemple: So I did consulting. I worked with startups, scale-ups, enterprise companies, and I just went deep into DevRel. Plus I'm, of course, interested in talking to everybody in the industry. And yeah, it really helped. I really feel like I had such a better understanding at the end of that year and a half. And so coincidentally enough, there was a bit of a downturn in the market, hot leads started turning into cold leads, and then right when I was like, "This is my least favorite part of the job, do I want to keep doing this?" I actually got the referral, like a reach out about an open position at Slack.

Josh Birk: I love it. I love it. All right, Kurtis, one final question. What is your favorite non-technical hobby?

Kurtis Kemple: Oh, I have to pick between two. I'm going to say photography and street photography. It's very close to that and riding my motorcycle, but-

Josh Birk: I love it.

Kurtis Kemple: Yeah, yeah. Both of them serve the same purpose though, which is what we talked about, anxiety and pressures and work and stuff. And with my history, it's very easy for me to live in the past or the future and not in the present. And both street photography and my motorcycle forced me to be extremely present. And so I really enjoy those two hobbies because it lets me just be in the moment. I'm not worried about something, whereas I normally am worried about everything.

Josh Birk: I love it. All right, Kurtis, thank you so much for the great conversation and information. That was a lot of fun.

Kurtis Kemple: It's so much fun. I had such a good time.

Josh Birk: I want to thank you for listening, and I of course want to thank Kurt for all that great information and conversation. It was just a lot of fun. If you want to learn more about this podcast and being an admin, head on over to admin.salesforce.com. And of course, if you want to learn more about Slack and artificial intelligence, head on over to Trailhead. Thanks again everybody, and I will talk to you soon.

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Michael Rose, Senior Director of SMB Solution Engineering at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about the ever-evolving role of the Salesforce Admin and why now’s the time to start exploring what AI can do for your org.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Michael Rose.

The parallel between admins and solution engineers It’s always a pleasure to sit down and talk about Salesforce with Mike Rose. In his new role as Senior Director of SMB Solution Engineering, he has a lot to share with the admin community about what he’s seeing with small to medium-sized businesses coming onto the platform.

Mike points out that admins and his team of solution engineers share a core responsibility: evangelism. For both, your job is to make the case for how Salesforce implementation can help your organization achieve its business goals.

The integration challenges of smaller orgs As Mike likes to joke, many SMBs are running some version of what Mike jokingly calls POIM (Post-It On Monitor) integration. As in, someone comes over with a sticky note (or Excel file) and asks you to put that info into Salesforce. “That's all integration,” he says, “it is taking that data and putting it somewhere where it can be more valuable.”

These workflows can be hard to change, and that’s because they work well enough to get the job done. As Mike explains, the opportunity cost of things like errors, bottlenecks, and latency doesn’t factor into the equation. It’s hard to envision a world where an entire business process could happen automatically.

For Mike, the next frontier of this conversation is Agentforce. You can develop bespoke, enterprise-grade AI solutions tailored specifically for your business, but that kind of power is hard to wrap your head around when you’re still trying to limit the number of sticky notes circulating around the office.

Why admins are the key to unlocking the power of AI As AI solutions continue to evolve, Salesforce Admins will play a critical role in bridging the gap between humans and technology. As Mike says, “there is always going to be a border that has customs agents and couriers and envoys working across that human intelligence and machine intelligence boundary.”

Agentforce is evolving so rapidly that even the Solution Engineering team is struggling to keep up to date. So Mike recommends getting your hands dirty as soon as possible, either by spinning up a developer org or turning on Salesforce Foundations.

There’s a lot more great stuff from Mike 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.

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Full show transcript

Michael: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we're thrilled to welcome back Mike Rose, a 12-year Salesforce veteran who has a new role and some fresh insights. Mike and I get into the real talk about what it's like supporting small to medium businesses, the ever-evolving role of the Salesforce admin, and how tools like Agentforce are really changing the game. Now, whether you're a full-time admin or you're wearing five hats in your org, this episode speaks your language. Mike also shares why now is the best time to roll up your sleeves and start exploring AI in your sandbox. So you've already hit play on this episode, get ready to feel seen, and let's get Mike back on the podcast. So Mike, welcome back to the podcast.

Mike Rose: It's such a pleasure, Michael. I have been a long-time listener and repeat caller, but very glad to be back after years.

Michael: I know. I feel like we used to do World Tours and we'd run into each other like we need to do a podcast together.

Mike Rose: It's true.

Michael: And then we'd do a random podcast together. And then this last time I just saw you on Slack. I was like, I haven't had Mike on the podcast in a while.

Mike Rose: It's true. And I actually said, "Yes, absolutely, let's do it." And then, I think it was a month of gap before I got back to you and then you were on vacation. By the way, folks, if you find yourselves running into the consequences of your own inaction, say, in the middle of the night on a weekend, and you say, "Oh, I really should reach out to that person, but I don't want to do it right now, because that's just awkward." Slack's scheduled messages are your friend.

Michael: I'm telling you, I use Slacks' scheduled messages all the time, especially when I go on vacation, I can schedule stuff. Or the best is when you have a team that's in a different time zone. So we'll have a team, let's see when this airs, the London event will be happening/happened, and I can schedule stuff and it looks like I just schedule it right for 8:00 A.M. their time, but I'm off in sleepy land.

Mike Rose: I have to say that I have one of my managers who reports up to me is on maternity leave right now, and she has set Hari Seldon Foundation style messages that pop up in Slack and they say, "Hi, it's the ghost of Gab here to tell you." And it's hilarious and it's great because it's all the reminders that otherwise I would have to remember to do, like do your Q2 check ins and do this. But what's particularly funny is that because she branded it as the ghost of Gabrielle, the reaction emoji that people are using to respond to those messages is the face of Fred from Scooby-Doo reacting in terror to a ghost. I didn't come up with this. One of her team members reacted that way. I was like, oh, no, no, no, no, this is it. Now, everybody has to react that way. It's so much fun to see these little microculture moments that build a custom or build a tradition around something as simple as an emoji response. But yes, scheduled messages, you can just sit down and knock out a quarter's worth of admin if you're going to be out and do it all pre-programmed. It's very handy.

Michael: I would say, as a best practice, and I'm looking at a scheduled message that somebody had sent me over the weekend. They italicized, "Hey, by the way, this is a scheduled message."

Mike Rose: Oh, that's really smart. That's really smart.

Michael: Just in case you want to, not in the heat of a moment.

Mike Rose: Well, it's also so awkward when there's something that you've been working on with someone and you set the scheduled message for 9:00 A.M. their time on a Monday, only to discover that at 7:30 A.M. they already gave you the full rundown of everything you possibly could need. And then, your message pops in. It's like, "Hey, just wondering if you had an update on project X." And then like, "Dude, do you not read first?" So yeah, putting it in italics is a good, I like that custom.

Michael: Yeah. I do a Friday message to the team and I schedule it for 1:00 my time, and 12:55, somebody had an urgent message that they posted to the team and they said, "In the spirit of the Friday message," and I was like, oh, my Friday message is going to appear in five minutes from now and it's totally going to look like Mike forgot to send it.

Mike Rose: Can't win them all. Can't win them all.

Michael: Well, I'm sure Slack is something we'll talk about, but I mean, we have a lot to talk about because there's Agentforce stuff now, you have people that report to you. You've always had people that report to you, but you're demoing to different customers. Where would you like to dive in first? Because otherwise, we'll just go off the rails and end up talking about something in New York or soup, I don't know.

Mike Rose: Soup would be good. Well, I could just start with on the perhaps bold assumption that previous listeners who might vaguely remember me having been here before, might think what did he used to do and what is he doing now?

Michael: I'm sure people track that.

Mike Rose: I actually have seen some of the Always Sunny in Philadelphia murder boards for this show, for the Admins Podcast. And they're elaborate. There's a lot of community investment in understanding the connection. So no, I've been at Salesforce 12 years, celebrated my 12th anniversary a couple months ago. Very exciting.

Michael: Wow, congrats.

Mike Rose: Thank you. I also am delighted to report that my brother is also now back at Salesforce. He is boomeranged, so he was part of our solution engineering world for several years. Left to go take a role at OwnData or OwnBackup.

Michael: And then we acquired them.

Mike Rose: And then we acquired them. So now, he is back. And so, now we have sibling force back in effect, which I'm delighted by. And so, last time I was on the program, I was managing a team of technical architects. So our pre-sales TAs are the successors of our platform solution engineering team. So these are folks who are working with customers, mostly working with the technology decision makers and technology leaders, IT leaders at customers to work on questions around security and data strategy and AI and app dev and customization and getting into the cracks or the weeds in the customer 360. A lot of conversations around integration and really with all the integration products and capabilities that we currently have and will safe harbor have in the future, the TA team has spent a lot of time working on Data Cloud and Agentforce as well. And that was what I've been doing for several years, eight years actually, I think. And then, an opportunity came along last year and I have now taken over a larger team of solution engineers, not technical architects, but core solution engineers, account solution engineers working in a part of our SMB business. So this is a team of about 50 and with several different teams, geographies and verticals within it. But basically working with customers between about 50 and 250 employees in a subset of our industry's framework to help them understand what we can offer, do discovery, do demos, talk about AI, which it seems is what we're doing a lot of the time nowadays. And it's been a great transition for me. It's been really educational and informative to get closer to the customer again with some of the opportunities and some of the challenges that are out there nowadays.

Michael: And the reason, well, first of all, I love talking to you because you're incredibly smart human being.

Mike Rose: Thank you.

Michael: But the second is your job is so closely aligned to everything admins do. It's like an aspect of their job. You just get paid to do essentially a sales role of admin stuff. But that's essentially what a Salesforce admin does in their organization is walk around and talk with the executives and oh, well, let's see how we can use Salesforce in your area and everything you described.

Mike Rose: Yeah, I mean, I think that there is a partnership between the admins and the solution engineers that's really important and that I think you highlighted very effectively, which is it's a shared responsibility of evangelism, sort of evangelism from the outside, evangelism from the inside. And the admins are those folks who are doing discovery, internal discovery, process assessment, understanding where is their pain, where is their organizational inefficiency. And I think for our small business admins, a lot of them are accidental admins. A lot of them are people who came into the Salesforce ecosystem through the back door, not really with the awareness or intention of taking on that responsibility. And so, they've had to learn very tactically. They've had to learn based on what was the problem in front of them at that moment. And when we arrive at those customers or come into those conversations, often the question is, well, not so much what should you be doing or what should you be doing better, but what are the things that haven't even been examined yet? And often, it is around something like integration. I joke with customers that we see a lot of, particularly in our healthcare customers, we see a lot of PIOM data integration models, and I'll bring that up in the course of our conversation and just let it simmer there for a minute. And sometimes someone will ask, sometimes they won't put us like, oh, I should probably explain my acronyms. PIOM stands for Post-it on monitor. And literally, the way data gets into Salesforce is someone from the sales team goes over to the lead management person, Joanne, and leaves a Post-it on Joanne's monitor saying, please update this record. That's integration.

Michael: Or update this spreadsheet so that I can insert it.

Mike Rose: Yes. Yeah, exactly. And so, that is an integration driving the motion of data or added value on top of data through human intervention, through re-keying, through copy and paste, through let me look over your shoulder and key this in for me. That's all integration. It is taking data that exists usually in email or Excel or in somebody's brain or on a piece of paper and putting it someplace where it can be more valuable, where it can create a multiplier effect of visibility and actionability and observability and impacting the situational awareness for business leaders and for people on the front lines. All of that is value added for that data. But when we see those points of pinch points and points of friction, usually it's because there wasn't enough perceived value to change it. It's working the way it is, why should we change it? And usually the answer is, it is working the way it is, but you don't understand or don't fully account for the opportunity cost of not having that happening automatically every time like the errors and the lag, the latency of that data and all those other things. So that's just one tiny corner of it, but it really is common, especially with smaller customers, to just see largely a great Salesforce implementation and everything working really efficiently. And then you're like, what's under this rock?

Michael: Oh no, here be dragons.

Mike Rose: Here be dragons. So yeah, so it's a lot of fun.

Michael: Well, I think having gone through, I feel like I've kind of run somewhat of the gamut. When I started out as an admin, we had 10 licenses because that's what you got with the foundation.

Mike Rose: Power of us, yeah.

Michael: And then, we grew all the way up to like 1,500. So I've run, and we didn't go right away. It was steps. And so, I've been in that 50 to 250-seat area. One thing that I think we probably do, and you work at Salesforce too, we often assume that when we talk to a Salesforce admin or developer architect and they're in the smaller business, 50 to 250-seat, that that's all they do. Every day, they wake up and they pine what field can I release? What training thing can I do? But I'm going to go out on a limb and say, because you said most of them come in accidentally or through the back door. What are some of the other jobs that you find that they're also responsible for in addition to sitting in these Salesforce meetings with you?

Mike Rose: Oh, gosh, that's a great question. I mean, I will say for our customers, because they're just a little bit on the larger side of the larger half of our SMB space, that by and large, by the time we get to them, they have transitioned into full-time admins. However, they're coming from sales ops or they're coming from being-

Michael: They always come from sales ops.

Mike Rose: They do.

Michael: The sales guys are the ones that care about the CRM. That's why.

Mike Rose: It's funny how that works. Sometimes it's actually an AE or someone who was on the sales team. Sometimes it's a business analyst or someone who is coming in from the marketing side or from lead gen. A substantial number of folks who end up as Salesforce admins are coming from office management, receptionist, executive assistant, presumptively, non-technical roles. But because of their proximity to the leadership and because their work tends to be a little more bursty and they have fallow time or downtime along with the time that they're extremely busy and they can do stuff asynchronously, there's a lot of folks who are coming from that front office and front of house role into a Salesforce admin role, which is great because I can't think of another enterprise software environment where it's as easy and as welcoming to get started and get skilled up than us, than Salesforce. So we do have those opportunities for people to change their careers and step in a different direction. I can think of a lot of people who were either not in IT or were in IT, peripheral IT and peripheral technology roles and Salesforce was their angle and ended up being the transformative thing that brought them into a technology career. So you'd love to see it.

Michael: I mean, mine was the same way. I was in charge of inside sales and Salesforce because sales.

Mike Rose: Yeah, because those are it. And honestly, if you can be effective as an admin in a part-time way, that's great because it helps you stay closer to the business and helps you stay connected to what's driving value and where the pain points are, where things need work. The thing that I think is interesting for our smaller customers is we don't have, to my mind, enough customers taking advantage of premier support, the delegated admin features and the ability to get Salesforce to do stuff for you, take stuff off your plate. I know we're adding a lot of admin AI capabilities as well to speed up the work and makes things easier for admins, but honestly, if you're going to get value out of something that Salesforce can give you, I think that's a good thing to do because what it gives you back is time. It gives you back time to again, spend more time understanding what the business needs.

Michael: And there's a cost. I mean, I finally sold one of my employers on it, but the ability to, I think at the time it was log a ticket and get a dashboard made, I mean, that was an afternoon back for me. It was huge. So let's talk, I mean, we also, it's the age of AI. Everybody's got AI. We've got Agentforce. You see the headlines of big companies building their own AI. I promise you, the NAPA Auto parts in Farmington, Minnesota that uses Salesforce, I don't know if that's true or not, I'm just making it up.

Mike Rose: Well, it's true now.

Michael: Probably isn't building-

Mike Rose: Now it's canonical since you said it on the podcast, it's true now.

Michael: But I mean, probably isn't sitting down building their own AI model. What do you find are the questions or the gaps that maybe they don't know that they should look for or is there a perceived we're just not big enough so we're not going to use it?

Mike Rose: It's a really interesting question. I mean, I think in general, the thing that we are telling customers or the thing that customers are coming to understand is that creating a bespoke AI solution for a particular business, for a particular sector, for a particular whatever is an enormous lift. It's an enormous lift. And I mean, again, that's true today. It may not always be true. It may not be true indefinitely into the future, probably won't be. But if you are the NAPA Auto Parts franchise in Farmington, Massachusetts, and you're saying to yourself, "What we really need is a custom NAPA Auto Parts AI," the answer is not to build it from an LLM vendor up from that layer, and certainly not to train one, again today, but you can get, it always comes down to time to value. You can get 98% of the value of a custom AI solution for your business with Agentforce today, and you get the one year, two years, three years, however long of advantage of having access to that capability, having access to the tool prior to whatever you build being ready and pressure tested and secure and highly available and supported and having someone you can call or email or text or chat for help when you need it. It's everything about developing bespoke on-premise solutions for your business multiplied by a couple orders of magnitude. Because i don't think anybody or very, very few businesses today, if you said to them, "Here's what we think you should do. We think you should start with a database solution, Microsoft SQL or Postgres or whatever, and you should build your own CRM on your own infrastructure with your own code and your own customizations from scratch." If we were to tell a customer, "We think this is the best use of your time and resources," most 99% of customers would say, "No. Why would we do that when Salesforce exists, when Salesforce is a thing?" Similarly for an ERP, I think that if you go back in time, building your own ERP or constructing your own version of that system from a database and some logic could be a thing, but then vendors came along that could solve that problem, and at the smaller segments of the market. For most business applications today, you would not assume that the right thing to do is to build it yourself even under pretty extreme conditions. Sometimes, of course you will. Stuff that is a differentiator that is going to be unique to your business, that is going to offer value that makes you something special compared to your competitors. Yeah, then you might consider building it. You might consider building it on an application platform as a service, but you might consider building it. That's where we're even further back in the chain right now with AI because the expertise is thin, because the effort is high, because the risks are very high. So you can do great stuff that's a point solution with commercially available consumer-grade AI solutions. If you're trying to integrate it and implement it in the enterprise, it's really, to my mind, only the biggest companies that have the resources and stamina to see this through and actually deliver something that is valuable, actually deliver something that's useful rather than getting something that works and does what you need it to do now and is driving value for customers now. Sales pitch over.

Michael: I didn't see it as a pitch. You know what's interesting? I think of Agentforce first as a helper for admins. And listening to your answer, it was all, and Agentforce can be customer-facing. I always think of, if I could go back in time when I had 200 licenses and I had 175 questions a day, how would I create an agent that would just offload some of that lift, that I could just give it an FAQ of the last six months of questions that I've been getting that it could just answer those questions for my internal users because there's probably 10 heavy question askers and then everybody else falls in the middle. And hearing you talk through that, I was like, this is so fascinating. I wonder if I'm the only person that thinks of rolling out Agentforce first as an admin assist and then as a customer assist.

Mike Rose: Oh, my gosh, yes. I honestly think that the internal use cases for Agentforce are as compelling if not more compelling than, well, I don't want to say more compelling than the customer-facing stuff. Because the customer-facing stuff, the externally-facing stuff, when it is aligned and when it is doing something that is a value add is incredible. And what we hear, see from customers is it's incredible. But it also because it's interacting with customers and it's representing your brand externally, you have to pressure test it a little bit. You have to go in and do your validation. We have great testing tools now. The Agentforce testing center is fantastic and it's a lot faster than it used to be, but you have to be reasonably confident that this is going to behave and not create brand risk. Internally, you still have that, but it's a little different. The equation is somewhat different and you can gauge the appetite and the trust of your internal stakeholders for, hey, here's something new that is intended to save you time and effort and aggravation, and we're putting it out there and we want your feedback and we want to be able to make it better. And you can do that innovation and that iteration as an admin in an agile way. You know, I mean, every admin knows who their frontier users are, their bleeding edge people, their cohort of down for anything people are. So you let them hit it, you let them work on it and try it out and see where it breaks, and then you are able to deliver that as an innovation for your organization that much more quickly.

Michael: Yeah. I also, maybe this is just me, but pressure testing your AI, you roll it out and say the 500th customer, it says, "You know what? I can't find your order. Can you give me that order number again?" And they get mad and they're like, "Well, your AI doesn't know that." Think of the last time you went to anywhere where there was human interaction. I promise you, I've had to give humans behind a counter in order number more than once. And so, you think of which is worse for your brand and AI saying, "Hey, I need that order number again," or some employee that's having a bad day mouthing off to your customer on the other side of the counter.

Mike Rose: Yes.

Michael: We tend to forget, well, AI can never make a problem or it can never be wrong. Okay, I get that. But you're also, you got somebody, God willing, $14 an hour on the other side of the counter, what are they going to say?

Mike Rose: Yeah. Well, I mean, this is funny because we said before the show we weren't going to get into the whole digital labor thing, but we're getting a little bit-

Michael: No, I know. We're not. But it is one of those things where it's like you have to give yourself some sort of leeway. I've used different AIs and it's come back and I was like, but that's not what I asked. And I realized, well, I've also placed orders at restaurants. And I was like, but that's not what I asked.

Mike Rose: Right.

Michael: Well, humans make the same mistakes.

Mike Rose: Humans make the same mistakes. But I think it's funny because there's different failure modes. There's different points where things break down or the abstraction and the expectations get a little sideways, and with humans, it's fatigue, it's long shift, it's distraction. So it's doing multiple things at once and having thing A override the logical thinking for thing B. And for an agent, it's a different kind of responsiveness and different kind of intelligence. So it's not going to get tired. It's not going to be in a different mood at 4:58 on a Friday afternoon than it is in the middle of the week. But it is going to have stronger, essentially what you might give a human support agent or human customer service rep as a boundary, a policy boundary that says you don't talk to customers about whatever, the fact that the X300 has an open warranty, there's warranty extension. The only way they find out about that is if they send it in, don't tell them in advance. And you've set that policy. That's the rule. And a human agent who's hearing from the 80th customer who says, "I've got an X300 and I don't understand why this red light is blinking," might say, "Well, you know, you didn't hear it from me. But if you were to send that in for warranty repair, even if it's out of warranty, it would get covered." Their ability to operate in the liminal space between policy and practicality is what we count on humans to be able to do. That is what we depend on human, that is what we have learned as a species over millennia is that interacting with other human beings has gray areas, it has fuzziness. And by the way, we're still not fixed as a species. We're still not back the way we need to be from 2020 and having every single interaction that we had be through a screen as opposed to in-person, because all of our heuristics are built for in-person interaction. So it's like the further you get away from talking to someone face-to-face in-person, the more opportunities there are for slippage and stuff to go the wrong direction in that gray zone. Complete tangent, I don't know if anybody saw this last week, but Google's 3D video conferencing project, project reach, project, I forget what it's called, but Google has these video conferencing booths that are hologram style 3D, like R2-D2 holograms, those are being commercially deployed, and it has already been announced, and I cannot wait that Salesforce is one of the initial pilot customers for these 3D video conferencing booths. I cannot wait. So we'll do the next podcast in one of those if-

Michael: I mean, so are we talking like Star Wars where you see the person just hologram in?

Mike Rose: You are look-

Michael: Or maybe Marvel, which Marvel movie is that? Where they're like, there's a board of directors that are all hologrammed.

Mike Rose: It's all the Avengers movies, and actually in Endgame, the Avengers themselves hologram into headquarters. But no, it's not like that. It is, from what I can tell, much more like a prison visit because well, because there's a pane of glass between you and the person. It's like you're looking through a pane of glass, but it's like they're in that space beyond the pane of glass.

Michael: Gotcha.

Mike Rose: So we'll see it when it arrives at New York and at HQ.

Michael: Wow.

Mike Rose: But my point, which I wandered away from is that human beings are perfectly equipped by evolution and by culture and custom to operate in that ambiguity. And admins know this by the way. You are always operating in, well, am I giving them what they ask for or am I giving them what they want? You have to be able to interpret and adjust on the fly. And an agent isn't going to do that in the same way. And operating in the ambiguity and operating in the gray area is where you're going to learn a lot about what does and doesn't work. So I've been thinking about this and I'll probably maybe for your listeners have a LinkedIn post on this at some point in the next week or so about what kind of careers going forward have an AI moat or have sort of a digital labor are going to be more partnership with digital labor and less being overrun or overtaken by digital labor. And I do think that Salesforce admin work is one of those categories of career where you are going to be a partner with the AI and not a-

Michael: Replacement.

Mike Rose: Not being replaced by it. I really think because it is that human and technology interface. It doesn't exactly matter what is happening there, but the fact that there is always going to be a line, there's always going to be a border that has customs agents and couriers and envoys working across that human intelligence and machine intelligence boundary, until and unless that boundary completely disappears, which I don't expect soon, if ever, there's always going to be work to do, there's always going to be responsibility that accrues at that boundary, and that's what Salesforce admins do. It's like you're working on that boundary. You're working on getting the fuzzy, blurry, maybe not quite explicit human stuff over to the Salesforce side.

Michael: It's funny, this brings up a conversation I had with a co-worker about admins and AI and what features Agentforce is coming out with and [inaudible 00:33:06] admins and developers, because now, I mean there's AIs that write code, tons of code. I saw, I forget which one it is, you could give it just a hand drawing of an idea of a website and it'll code it for you. And some people look at that, oh, well, I'm going to be out of a job. And I think I relate things to various different industries. I remember not so much, but growing up, I grew up in the '80s and robotics and car manufacturing. That was the age. The '70s, it was still mostly men and women on a production line, putting cars together, brute force. There was some assist tools. But the '80s is really when we started to see the age of robotic welders and robotic painters and all these people are going to be out of jobs. But if you ever watch the news and they show a production line of cars, there's still hoards of people, hoards of people that show up every day to put cars together. And they're the people that know how to work with the robots. They weren't replaced with the robots. And the discussion that we had was AI is not going to take your job. The person that's going to take your job is the guy that knows or the woman that knows how do you use AI more effectively than you. It's the admin that sits down and paints the picture for the organization of how Agentforce enhances everything as opposed to the admin that sits down and doesn't understand how Agentforce can enhance anything.

Mike Rose: Yeah, and I think that is, I mean, not to send people off to prompt engineering courses or getting into the weeds in Coursera or someplace like that, but I do think it's worth noting for our admins, you can spin up, I'm sure this has been mentioned repeatedly and everybody knows this, but you can spin up a developer org with Agentforce and Data Cloud in it today for free. You can have that environment. Not to put too fine a point on it, you can also call your account executive or go into Digital Wallet or My Account and turn on Salesforce Foundations, which gives you a starter pack for Agentforce and Data Cloud as well, and that's in your org and in your environment. So up to you, do you want to live dangerously and do it live or would you rather be in a nice safe developer org? But the ability to get your hands in there and start working with it is not out in the distance somewhere. It's now.

Michael: Right. And a lot of that is new, thankfully. But yes, attainable.

Mike Rose: Attainable. Available, attainable, achievable, and continuing to build and change and transform along with the product. And I think true confession's time, like hop into the confessional booth, it's hard for us, even those of us who are in the pre-sales world where we're supposed to be as the solution engineers, we're supposed to be as caught up as possible on what the product is doing and where we're at. And every release, we've got summer release coming out, I think next weekend for some chunk, either the first tranche or the second, it's either R0 or R1 coming soon. And I'm looking at this release in a box and thinking, oh my God, there's so much in here, this is crazy. But the thing that caught us up short as an organization was we were building Agentforce agents in the very manual topic at a time, prompt at a time mode and saying, "Well, this takes us a long time to build these demos and this is very piecework and a lot of effort to even put together one thing that is representative." And then, unbeknownst to us, the create an agent with AI button showed up in the agent builder in production. This is a real feature that's really working today, where you can, in natural language, share your website, share what you want the agent to do, and just stand back. And Salesforce and Agentforce will create a first approximation of the agent that you describe with appropriate topics, appropriate actions. Granted, it may not be wired up to your configuration, your metadata and your flows, but it's a pretty reasonable starting point and all from a website and a prompt. And that enables us to do some really interesting things. That enables us to show customers that light bulb moment and enables you as admins to go in and show your stakeholders that light bulb moment so much more quickly. Again, whether you've turned on Foundations and have the starter credits or whether you're doing it in a dev org, you can do it really, really fast. You can get to something that works the way you want really, really fast. And honestly, that took us by surprise. I did not know that that was, I thought that was still beta and still something we weren't ready to talk about, much less show. Nope, there it is in the product. So lesson learned. I feel like being an admin is a lot and being a solution engineer at Salesforce, one thing you have in common is you have to have a best served by date sticker on everything you know, on every piece of knowledge and every product awareness that you have should have a staleness timer on it, so that once this has been true for X number of years, you go back, you say, "I have to check my assumptions here. Is this truly the case?" Great example is employee cases and anybody who deployed platform licenses into their environment and was accessing the case object and had to deal with this concept of employee cases and considering how there was a lot of product specific language about that. Well, you know what? Guess what? A year ago, we got rid of that PS, the product specific language and product specific terms. And now, there's just cases. And the only rule is the rule that was there all along, which is if you as a user or as an employee are primarily or even partially servicing customers and working on customer cases, you need to be sitting on Service Cloud. Otherwise, you don't have to care quite as much of is this an employee case or is it a case case and they're actually the same object, but we're going to call them different things. No, all that is gone. And so, if you were operating with the old knowledge either as a customer or as an SE, you're going to tell people to do unnecessary work or you're going to create a lot of superstructure and a lot of effort that doesn't have to be, and that's the price of not keeping up.

Michael: The price of not keeping up. That might be the title of this show.

Mike Rose: There we go.

Michael: Let's end on an action item. Based on your experience, admins in what we consider small, medium business size, after hearing this podcast, what should they do?

Mike Rose: What should they do? Well, they should take three deep breaths and touch some grass. Oh, no, what if you're in downtown New York? You're going to have challenges. I would say first of all, they should take a moment to remember they're not alone in the chaotic circumstances, the macro factors and the micro factors that are all conspiring right now to make this a very challenging and a fraught time for a lot of people. So giving yourself that grace and space, which is what my team is focused on right now. Take a little space, give a little grace. And the other thing, the other action item is to, if you don't have Agentforce and Data Cloud active in your production environment, take a look at Foundations, see if you're comfortable turning it on. Again, remember, it doesn't cost anything to turn on Foundations, and if you don't want to do that or don't feel comfortable doing that, then by all means, please, please, please go spin up a developer org for Agentforce. It will not get easier to take the first step. It is never going to be easier than it is today. I don't know if that's true. We are in a local minima for easiness.

Michael: It wasn't true yesterday. See?

Mike Rose: Yeah, that's true.

Michael: I mean, every single day, it's not going to get easier than today.

Mike Rose: That's correct. Which I think we can look out to a point where it actually is going to get easier in that this will be on for everyone and certainly for new orgs and new environments, it'll be on for everyone. So that will make it a zero effort to get access to it. Right now, you still have to effectively opt in, but it will never get easier to decide to decide to do it. And if you decide to decide to go spin up an Agentforce developer org, you then have the ability to share and evangelize and talk confidently to your stakeholders about what Salesforce is doing with Agentforce and AI. And I think that's great. I think that's a really good place to be starting from a place of knowledge and a place of a little bit more comfort and familiarity is always going to be easier than coming at it from, well, I haven't seen it, but I understand what I've read about is, you're admins, don't read about it, go touch it, go get your hands-

Michael: Or I haven't been hands on with it yet.

Mike Rose: Exactly. Well, guess what? Today's the day.

Michael: Yep. And you're right. I mean, there are times, I'll do the Agentforce now virtual tour stops workshops and I introduce myself and I tell people, "I've been doing Salesforce since 2006 when I remember the big release was a WYSIWYG page builder."

Mike Rose: Wow.

Michael: Where you could actually just drag the field from a pallet onto a canvas, and it was there and I was like, "Whoa." Anyway, those were the days. Thanks so much for being on.

Mike Rose: My pleasure. It's been too long and I have had too much fun this morning doing this to let it be that long again, so I will be back sooner rather than-

Michael: Okay. I will hold you to that and we will, because I should have you on before Dreamforce. I'm sure we're going to need to do a Dreamforce prep episode because you are in the weeds. You're right out there and you can help. What should we prep for? Between the two of us, we'll know what's going to go on for admins at Dreamforce.

Mike Rose: I mean, I am flattered that you believe that and we'll find out if it turns out to be true, but yes, Dreamforce is going to be amazing this year. So much, so much to talk about, so much that we're going to be able to see, and honestly, if people haven't been tuning into World Tours and attending or watching, should do that because what you're getting right now in World Tour, in the keynotes and in the sessions is the Dreamforce is the run-up.

Michael: The run-up.

Mike Rose: It's the Dreamforce preview. Every one of those, and by the way, if you do attend and you do watch the keynotes, you do participate in sessions or the Agentforce activations or anything like that, give feedback, share it at the welcome desk, share it with the surveys that you get because that actually helps to create a better experience for everybody when we do get to Dreamforce and the big show.

Michael: It's never been easier to learn than today.

Mike Rose: It's never been easier to decide to take the first step.

Michael: Than tomorrow.

Mike Rose: Who knows?

Michael: Same way.

Mike Rose: It's going to be just more stuff.

Michael: Same way.

Mike Rose: Just more stuff.

Michael: It'll be one more day.

Mike Rose: Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure and thanks to your listeners for being such an amazing part of the Salesforce community. We love y'all.

Michael: And that's a wrap. Huge thanks to Mike Rose for reminding us that admins are basically the diplomats of digital labor navigating ambiguity like a pro. If you've ever faced the here be dragons in your org, don't worry, you're not alone. Now, here's some advice from Mike. If you can go outside, take three deep breaths and touch some grass, and then spin up an Agentforce org and test out something. Also, if you get access to the hologram booth, that would be kind of cool. Maybe try that out if you got one lying around. But in any case, make sure to share this episode with fellow Salesforce admin if you found this useful and give it a rating on iTunes. I would really appreciate that. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

View Details

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

Admin Trailblazers Group

• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

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• 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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.

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Love our podcasts? Subscribe today or review us on iTunes! 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.

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

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.

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:

1. What is the agent’s role and scope?
2. What data will the agent have access to?
3. Which actions should be public and which should be private?
4. Do you need to build any extra guardrails?
5. 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.

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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

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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.

View Details

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.

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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.

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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 MH4.

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 MH4, 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.

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• 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

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Love our podcasts? Subscribe today or review us on iTunes! Full 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.

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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 MH4 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 MH4 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.

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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.

View Details

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 Hackathon Melissa is fresh from the TDX Hackathon, where she put together an all-women team of Salesforce MVPs called MH4. 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 * MH4’s presentation at the TDX Hackathon

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• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

• Melissa on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn
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• 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.

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

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.

1. 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.

2. 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:

3. 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.

4. 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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

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Love our podcasts? Subscribe today or review us on iTunes! 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.

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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.

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Love our podcasts? Subscribe today or review us on iTunes! 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.

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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 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 with Sri Srinivasan.

Quick heads up before we dive in: This episode may include forward-looking statements—aka things we're excited about that may not be here just yet. So, as always, make your purchasing decisions based only on what's currently available. For the full legal scoop, check out salesforce.com.

Five questions to ask when you’re building with Agentforce I caught up with Sri fresh off his TDX presentation about secure Agentforce implementation to pick his brain on how admins should think about security and AI.

For Sri, there are five things to think about in order to build secure AI agents:

1. What is the agent’s role and scope?
2. What data will the agent have access to?
3. Which actions should be public and which should be private?
4. Do you need to build any extra guardrails?
5. Which channels will the agent use?

As always with security, the key concept here is the principle of least privilege. Running through Sri’s questions helps you build an agent that can’t do something you don’t want it to do.

What’s coming next for security in Agentforce Sri also gives us a sneak peek at the new tools his team is piloting to help admins build secure AI agents. You’ll be able to look at metrics like instruction adherence, coherence, how factual the responses are, and how grounded the agent is.

They’re also trying to simplify how user permissions work with AI agents in order to make it easier to keep things limited and secure. It’s easy to turn things on and off when you’re trying to get something to work, but you need to revisit your permissions from time to time and apply the principle of least privilege.

The role of admins in the future of Agentforce Finally, I asked Sri about how admins fit into the future of AI on Salesforce. “Admins are key to everything that we do,” he says, “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.”

How fast would you drive a car with no brakes? Sure, Agentforce is a sports car in terms of everything it can do. But it’s up to admins to build the brakes and make sure that AI agents are only doing the things you want them to do. And that starts by understanding the systems and data behind them and then asking the right questions.

There’s a lot more great stuff in my conversation with Sri, 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.

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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.

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Real Talk for Admins on Content, Conferences, and Agentforce 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 Pod.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Joy Shutters-Helbing and Mike Reynolds.

Catch Mike and Joy (and me) on The Jam Pod Mike and Joy are movers and shakers in the Salesforce community. Joy’s in the Salesforce MVP Hall of Fame, hosts MVP office hours on the first and third Friday of every month, and has spoken at Dreamforce, TDX, and tons of community conferences. Mike has helped create 13 different Salesforce certifications as a Credential Ambassador, and he’s a regular speaker at conferences big and small.

Together, Joy and Mike are the dynamic duo behind the Jam Pod, where they talk to folks in the Salesforce ecosystem about everything from hiring to technical talks to highlights from the release notes. In fact, they just had me on the pod to talk about the Salesforce community, so be sure to check that out at the link below.

How to come up with ideas for Salesforce presentations and content As veteran speakers and content creators, Joy and Mike want to know that you have what it takes to give a Salesforce presentation. In their experience, most people fall into one of two camps:

1. I don’t feel like anything I have is important enough to share with anyone.
2. I have something to share, but I don’t know where to start.

If you’re in camp number one, it’s important to remember that you’re an expert on your own business’s problems, and how you solved them can help someone else facing a similar issue. “When you’ve toiled over a solution and, all of a sudden, it works and you stand up and do some sort of victory dance, that is the thing you should be sharing,” Joy says.

If you’re ready to give a Salesforce talk but don’t know where to start If you’re in camp number two, where you think you could share something but you don’t know how to get started, Mike recommends following Salesforce Evangelists & Advocates and event organizers on social media to hear about calls for speakers. I’ve included a few links below for Midwest and Florida Dreamin’, and Mid-Atlantic Dreamin’ is right around the corner.

Smaller events like community groups and conferences are a great place to polish your presentation and practice your public speaking skills. And while you might not feel ready for the Dreamforce stage just yet, you can submit topics you’d like to hear more about or even nominate someone to give a talk.

There’s a lot more great stuff from Mike and Joy about giving presentations and creating great Salesforce content, 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.

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Mike Gerholdt:

This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we're jamming, literally, with Joy Shutters-Helbing and Mike Reynolds about creating community content, navigating conference submissions, and yes, even launching a podcast of their own. It's called The JAM Pod. I listen to it, do you? Joy is a longtime Salesforce MVP Hall of Famer, community group leader, and admin extraordinaire with over 21 years of experience. Mike is a Salesforce credential ambassador, known for his deep knowledge on permission sets, permissions, and profiles, and now, he works with Slack. Before we get into this episode, be sure to follow the Salesforce Admins Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. That way, you get a fresh episode every Thursday, right on your phone. With that, let's jump into the conversation with Joy and Mike. Joy and Mike, welcome to the podcast.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Hi.

Mike Reynolds:

Thank you.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Thank you.

Mike Gerholdt:

Joy, let's start with you. You've been in the community, you've actually been on the Salesforce Admins Podcast before, but for listeners, just finding out who you are and probably missed your wonderful TDX presentation, can you tell us a little bit about what you do in the community and how long you've been working with Salesforce?

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

I have been working with Salesforce for 21 years, and for those of you who haven't heard me talk about it before, it does run in parallel with the age of my son. I've been a Salesforce Admin for the duration. I'm a Chicago Admin Community Group leader, along with Denise and Chris. I am a Salesforce MVP Hall of Fame. I am podcast host with Mike Reynolds, and he will talk about that a little bit more in a second. I also host MVP Office Hours on the first and third Friday of every month, and I've spoken at Dreamforce, and TDX, and a host of other community conferences. I think that's it.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, if not, then we'll definitely be able to find you online.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt:

Mike, how about you?

Mike Reynolds:

Well, I have been Salesforcing for about 10 years, and I've been able to do a lot over that time. It's been a wild ride. I'm a credential ambassador, so I've helped create, I want to say, 13 different certifications or updates to them, some Superbadges and Trailhead modules, stuff like that, maintenance modules. I've spoken at a lot of conferences, all sorts of different topics. Things that range from DevOps to, I think most people have heard me talk about permissions. It's been a real big deal for the last couple of years. Spoken at a lot of conferences, it's super fun. I love connecting, and getting out, and doing all that. Now, I work at Slack.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, yes. That's right. Very communicative of you to work at Slack.

Mike Reynolds:

Yeah, because I like the collaboration.

Mike Gerholdt:

You almost threw me a perfect segue there, which is that you've been out and done a lot of presenting. One thing that I've seen when I was doing user groups when we were in Chicago, you guys also both host a podcast called The JAM Pod, and depending on when you choose to air my episode, I was on it.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Yay.

Mike Gerholdt:

[inaudible 00:03:52] I'll link to that. I might have to go back and link to it depending on when it happens. But one of the things that we see ebb and flow in the community is the amount of contributions that community members, of their own free will, put out, and I know, on your podcast, we talked about speaking at user group events. Where did the idea of, "Hey, let's sit down and create something that's not the easiest thing in the world to create, but we want to put it out and the world," come from?

Mike Reynolds:

I think that's Joy's fault.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

It's always my fault. Everything's always my fault. It was probably me asking a lot of questions and Mike being like, "Well, we should talk to people that have the answers to that." I think that's really where it started. But also, there was a challenge that happened on MVP Office Hours once upon a time from Squire. Squire, I'm sorry. Here we are, just keep talking about you. But it's really in a good way about how he had opinions about Mike's presentation on permissions, and I was like, "I can arrange this phone call." There was some excitement around this throwdown-at-the-flagpole-on-the-playground situation.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh my.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Yes. People thought that, well, I'm not going to give it away, but people were very excited to see the fisticuffs that were going to happen around permissions and profiles between Mike Reynolds and Squire Kershner. If you haven't heard our first episode, you should go back and listen to it, and you can find out how that turns out. But since then, we have spoken with a number of different people in the Salesforce ecosystem about, wow, a host of different things. Everything from hiring, to technical talks, to... The topics are very wide-ranging, including the podcast we recorded with you. Did you have something else to add, Mike Reynolds? I have two mics on this call. This is crazy.

Mike Gerholdt:

I know. I forgot to mention that Joy's in not a good situation where she says, "Mike," and then there are two people go up.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Yeah. I say, "Mike," and then I roll my eyes.

Mike Reynolds:

I can tell from the tone who you're talking to though. We were working together at the [inaudible 00:06:16] group.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

A customer? A customer.

Mike Reynolds:

Yeah. We were at a customer, but Joy and I were working together. This idea came up and I looked into it. It didn't cost that much to get a really basic, "Here's what we can do to record a podcast, doesn't take a ton." It's not super sophisticated or anything, but it works, and we have a developer edition of Salesforce that we built out over... Yeah, it was on a Saturday. I think four hours to put together a very basic community site that we host the episodes on, and then that was kind of it. We just didn't give up, I guess.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

I'm still adding fields in production.

Mike Reynolds:

That's true. That's true.

Mike Gerholdt:

Joy following all of the best practices that we speak about.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

It's a dev org.

Mike Reynolds:

All the work has been done in prep. I think that's the key.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Yeah, all the work. Yeah, yeah.

Mike Reynolds:

It's the main takeaway.

Mike Gerholdt:

Gotcha.

Mike Reynolds:

But really, it's funny because the podcast is... It's been a lot of fun, but when I look back at how we got here, it's basically the exact same as how we got with all these things, the conversation about permissions. I mean, I've given that talk so many times, people reach out, user groups reach out, and they're like, "Hey, we would love to have you come and get this presentation." I'm happy to do so, but the presentation came from a work meeting where we were trying to solve the problem. Yeah. I called Joy and I called another colleague, and I was like, "Hey, this is messed up. We have to find a way around this." We worked on it for about an hour and a half and then iterated over it for maybe a week. There's our real life business problem and our real life solution, and then we just decided to talk about it, because it's applicable. It happens to everybody. Everybody's got permissions, everybody's got the same challenges.

Mike Gerholdt:

What do you feel is the biggest barrier from people going from, not necessarily starting, let's say, a podcast, but creating and contributing community content in the Salesforce ecosystem?

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

What's the biggest hurdle, the biggest obstacle of folks creating and sharing their content with the rest of us? I think there's a lot of things. There's, where to start? You have two different people. You've got people that have stuff and they're ready to share, they just don't know where to start, and then there's the folks that are like, "I don't know if what I have is important enough to share with anyone." I think the first hurdle is getting folks to a place where they understand that they are experts in the business problem that they have, that they can share with the community, and they are the experts on how they've applied a solution to this problem. Giving these folks the confidence to say, "There is someone out here who is dealing with this similar problem, who will learn, and engage, and benefit from what you're sharing." Once we get folks to build that confidence and that what their experience is worth sharing, I think then we can start getting more content from them.

Mike Gerholdt:

Mike, how about you?

Mike Reynolds:

I think one of the challenges that a lot of people have is knowing that they can and then knowing when. Maybe you've been to a community conference. Do you think, "Oh, I could contribute to this," but you didn't think of that three months ago when the call for speakers was open, and so right now is a brilliant time. I mean, I know Midwest Dreamin's call for speakers is open.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Through the 31st, I think.

Mike Reynolds:

Yeah. Right after that, Florida Dreamin, their call for speakers will be open. Mid-Atlantic has got to be soon.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Dreamforce is coming up.

Mike Reynolds:

Yeah, it will. Here before you know it, which is crazy to think about that it sets in, but it will.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Community groups and conferences are the best place to run those through for the big ones.

Mike Reynolds:

Because I think most people have something that would benefit from someone else. Most of us have done something. If you're sitting at home going, "Oh, well, I haven't done anything that's that cool," you have. You have, because there's somebody else who wasn't able to do it that tried. Anytime you make a flow, somebody else tried that and didn't get it right. We've all got things, and I think it's that realization that you actually do have something of value to share, because you do.

Mike Gerholdt:

I think we talk a lot like, "Oh, you got to participate, got to do this." Whenever I've done end user training or just technology training, you always got to think about the what's-in-it-for-me perspective when you are talking with an end user, because you're generally going from one system to another when you're switching to Salesforce. I'm going to ask you the same question. For your podcast, The JAM Pod, what's in it for you? What do you get out of it?

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Nothing.

Mike Gerholdt:

I disagree. I disagree. I think you get something out of it, because there's a reason people create that content in the community.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

What does Joy get out of The JAM Pod podcast? I get to create a connection with folks that I might not have been able to unless I had done this. Being a community group leader, I don't necessarily get a lot of time to speak with the group of people about content, or I go to a conference and I only get to speak about the content and there's less time engaging with folks on a different level. One of our listeners said to me recently, they're like, "Joy, when I listen to The JAM Pod, I just feel like I'm in a room having a conversation with you and Mike." That was actually the best compliment we could have gotten, I think. You learned a lot, you just felt comfortable with us. What I forget though is that there's a lot of people that are at these conferences that introduce themselves to me, and they know me better than I know them. It's interesting for my brain to be like, "Oh, they have been listening to you and they're watching what's happening, but Joy, you don't know these folks yet, so it's okay."

Mike Gerholdt:

Mike, how about you?

Mike Reynolds:

I mean, I know what I get out of it. I mean, I get to meet with people, and talk about them, and learn about them, and learn how they've contributed. For me, very selfishly, The JAM is an excellent way to just get to know some people a little bit better than I already do. I have to suffer through time with Joy, which I actually do like, and I enjoy spending time with Joy. But I think just broadly speaking, this idea of, "Well, why would I want to go stand up on stage and contribute? Why do I want to do anything?" There have been a handful of moments where somebody comes up to you and says, "Hey, you talked about this, and I was able to do it." Those moments, that feeling is so damn good, to know that you have been able to make somebody a little bit more successful or speed somebody's path to success, anything, you just helped. Being helpful is such a good feeling. I mean, for me, that's my why.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. No, I don't think you can undersell that enough, because you forget how often in life and in your career being helpful feels good, and it can almost get a little bit addictive in terms of wanting to put content out there and getting any kind of that feedback of, "Wow, that was so helpful. I'm so appreciative of your content."

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

I was going to say, one of the catalysts for sharing content, to be helpful so that you can get this experience that we're talking about that can be addictive, when you have toiled over a formula, or you have toiled over the flow, or you have toiled over a solution, and, all of a sudden, it works, and you stand up and you do some sort of victory dance, that is the thing that you should be sharing, the thing that you toiled over, because we know that you did the Google search, we know that you did... You reached out for help and you cobbled together all of these things that helped you with the solution. That victory dance is why you should share your experience so that you can help folks not have to toil over the hours of cobbling together the thing.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I usually run around the neighborhood with an air horn.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

That is a different victory dance than mine, but I like it. I like it.

Mike Gerholdt:

Letting people know what I've accomplished feels good, keeps the neighbors awake, keeps them on their toes. All right. Last question for both of you, and you weren't expecting any of this, but if you were on... Mike, this is kind of interesting for you because you're on the Salesforce side, but if you were on the Salesforce side of things, how could Salesforce enable more community content creation?

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Go ahead, Mike.

Mike Reynolds:

Wow, okay. Yeah, sure.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

I'll jump in later.

Mike Reynolds:

I think that the first thing is just awareness. We shout, and we really do. If you are following the evangelists and the people that are the mouthpieces for Salesforce, if you're following those people on the socials, you will see that they start posting things like, "Hey, it's time to submit your ideas." That is, I think, we can do more of that. I feel like we do a lot, but we could do more. I think the other thing is to encourage people to just submit ideas. I think what a lot of people don't realize is... Let's take Dreamforce, that's the next mega event that we have. When you submit to Dreamforce, you don't have to submit the idea for yourself. You can submit an idea and say, "I really want to hear about this, but I'm not going to be the speaker for it."

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

You can nominate other people.

Mike Reynolds:

Yeah. You could say, "I think this person should talk about it." I want to hear Mike Gerholdt talk about community. I can submit that as an idea." That doesn't mean that you're going to have to go do it, but it gets the idea in front of the people. I think we could do a better job of making sure that we have the megaphone at the right moments and that we are helping and getting the word out right.

Mike Gerholdt:

Joy, how about you?

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

I think that is a solid way to encourage more folks to submit to these sorts of things, whether it's a community conference, a community group, or our Salesforce conferences. I think something that Salesforce can do, it would be maybe to, wow, this is really off the cuff here, I'm sorry, but encourage the brainstorming sessions, encourage the speaking mentorship situation. I know that there is some very soft and lighthearted speaking mentorship happening. I forget where I saw it and I'm sorry if folks are recognizing themselves. I'm not putting names, and faces, and topic together, but if folks could brainstorm, and feel like they're being heard, and have these ideas bounced around in a way that they can validate their ideas, I think that would help with more of this content creation that is not seemingly all the same, because I think that what happens is folks see this piece of content somewhere, and then they put their own twist on it or their own flavor to it, and then they try to run with it that way.

It's a formula and it works. If you've seen it in a small space and you can make it better, that's great. But I think that if you want to really build some incredibly interesting content, having a safe space to brainstorm, like a writer's workshop perhaps, would really help that.

Mike Gerholdt:

Those are good suggestions.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

That just came to me.

Mike Gerholdt:

Some of the best content happens on the fly. Let me tell you. Joy, Mike, I want to thank you for taking time out and being on my little podcast with all of our five listeners that we have. Hopefully, somebody from your podcast will come over and I'll have 15 or 20 maybe.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

I think there's going to be some crossover on this.

Mike Gerholdt:

I think it's good.

Mike Reynolds:

I only hope so.

Mike Gerholdt:

I'm glad you guys are out there creating content in the world. Also, just as a side note, not that you asked for it, I'm glad it's called The JAM Pod and not The Jelly Pod, because jam is better than jelly, and I, 100%, think you should have a jam chosen for every single podcast.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Like a pairing?

Mike Gerholdt:

I'm telling you, there is a shop-

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

A jam pairing?

Mike Gerholdt:

There is like two or three... Now, it's spring, so this'll come out in April, March something. It's farmers' market season.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Oh, it is.

Mike Gerholdt:

I spend an absorbent amount of money on farmers' market jams, like blueberry jams, apple. In my house, jam does not last that long and there's a couple shops that we definitely frequent, so I was thinking of... It'd also be a good excuse just to buy jam.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

It is, it is.

Mike Reynolds:

I'm going to admit this to you because I have no shame, I, one time, made a bracket for the best jam for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Mike Gerholdt:

I like where this is going.

Mike Reynolds:

I'm just going to tell you, it took determination, it took grit and staying power, but I have some pretty strong opinions on strawberry, strawberry jam, as being the definitive leader of the field. A lot of honorable mentions available, but a good strawberry jam, so hard to do better.

Mike Gerholdt:

With peanut butter.

Mike Reynolds:

With peanut butter for peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Mike Gerholdt:

100%. I can go with that. I can go with blueberry too. I'm indiscriminate. Let me tell you what I prefer with bacon on toast, blueberry, blueberry jam with black pepper bacon. Let me tell you, life changing.

Mike Reynolds:

This is what I'm doing tomorrow morning. All right.

Mike Gerholdt:

It's life... You could put-

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Are you telling me I'm making blueberry jam tonight? [inaudible 00:22:34].

Mike Gerholdt:

I'm saying, you could put... Now, here's the thing. I will also eat it with strawberry jam, but there is something about the sweetness of the blueberry and the savoriness of the bacon.

Mike Reynolds:

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. With a little bit of smokiness in there.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. I mean, in America, we smoke our bacon.

Mike Reynolds:

Do you go on with a sourdough here?

Mike Gerholdt:

No, just regular old bread, whatever's at the store.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

This was the question, Mike, Mike and Mike. I needed to know the vehicle for the jam, because sourdough is good.

Mike Reynolds:

Is magical.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah.

Mike Reynolds:

Fresh bacon [inaudible 00:23:10].

Mike Gerholdt:

No, I enjoy... Here's the crazy thing, because it's been a while since I've worked food into the podcast, but that's always in our feedback of, "He works food into the podcast since [inaudible 00:23:20]." Yeah, whatever.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

We talked about hamburgers last time.

Mike Gerholdt:

I saw that.

Mike Reynolds:

Look, I'm not saying we have to do this, but we can have... Here's what we'll do. If you create a podcast, a Salesforce podcast by Dreamforce, I will arrange... I'm saying you, anybody in the ecosystem, you go to Dreamforce, you create a podcast, I will arrange for a... We have a podcast-

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Breakfast?

Mike Reynolds:

We're going to do... No, not a breakfast. A bracket of jams and jellies under various circumstances, and then we can just create this.

Mike Gerholdt:

I'm a part of this. [inaudible 00:24:01].

Mike Reynolds:

We will make this happen. You only get an invite if you create a podcast, but I will make it happen. [inaudible 00:24:08].

Mike Gerholdt:

I feel like we're going to be a-

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

You just created a session, Mike. He just created a session.

Mike Gerholdt:

I feel like we're going to be in the mezzanine of the Marriott Marquis. It's like me and you in 30 jars of jam.

Mike Reynolds:

This sounds ideal.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

[inaudible 00:24:22].

Mike Gerholdt:

We're just like, people are walking by, "What are those guys doing? I don't know, they must be really into jam." Yes, we are. Just jam all over our face. We're just jam drunk.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Oh my god, [inaudible 00:24:35].

Mike Gerholdt:

What's going on?

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Oh my gosh.

Mike Reynolds:

So many jars.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, that sounds like an emergency room appointment for diabetes so-

Mike Reynolds:

Appreciate that.

Mike Gerholdt:

... ought to be awesome.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Thanks, Mike.