The Salesforce Admins Podcast

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 tools like generative AI are reshaping workflows, strategies, and content creation for marketing.

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

AI and the future of marketing

Most Salesforce Admins need to work hand in hand with marketing to give them the tools they need to do their jobs. As we continue our conversation about Agentforce and the impact agents can have across an organization, I thought it would be great to hear from John Wall about the future of AI and marketing. He co-hosts the great Marketing Over Coffee Podcast, with guests like Simon Sinek, Seth Godin, and Debbie Millman.

Most marketers are already using AI for data analysis and insights, with a little help from their admins. However, the game is changing fast with the proliferation of LLMs and the ability to build custom AI agents.

How AI will revolutionize marketing personas

Recently, we’ve been hearing a lot about how Agentforce can help you manage your documentation or take the load off your customer service reps. So what can admins build for marketers?

John brings up the idea of marketing personas. “Right now, that’s four people in a conference room coming up with cute nicknames like Sally Shopper or Wally the Weekend Warrior,” he says. But with AI, you can use its classification and summarization abilities to pore over your customer data and generate personas based on statistics, not spitballing.

Where it gets even more interesting is how you can use that information to create customers on demand. John suggests building an AI agent for each marketing persona, which can answer questions as that type of customer to give you insights or plan a new campaign.

The human in the loop

Just like with any new technology, some businesses will rush to adopt the new shiny tool and mistakes are bound to happen. John emphasizes the importance of “the human in the loop,” which is a key role for Salesforce Admins going forward.

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.” 

There’s so much more great stuff in our conversation with John Wall, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss out.

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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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• Mike on Bluesky social
• Mike on Threads
• Mike on Tiktok
• Mike on X

Full Transcript

Mike Gerholdt:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re joined by John Wall, co-host of the long-running Marketing Over Coffee podcast. That’s right, we’re starting 2025 off on the right foot, because John shares with us insights into the ever evolving landscape of AI in marketing, including how tools like generative AI are reshaping workflows, strategies, and even content creation. I bet admins, you know about this.

Now, before we jump into the fascinating discussion that we have with John, I want you to be sure to jump over and press that subscribe or follow button, depending on what kind of app you’re using. It’s probably on your favorite platform. And then that way you don’t miss a single episode, because new ones come out every Thursday and I would hate for you to miss something like this discussion that I’m going to have with host of the ever-popular Marketing Over Coffee podcast, John Wall. Let’s get John on 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.

So that was a great discussion with John, and I’m so glad I could have him back on the podcast. It’s been way too long. I’ve been a long time listener, a second time interviewer. Did I say that? Anyway, if you enjoyed John’s episode, be sure to check out Marketing Over Coffee, it is definitely on my podcast playlist. They do so much to help everyone keep up. If you’re in tech, marketing is definitely something you pay attention to.

And you know what? If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to share it with a friend. On Apple Podcasts you can tap those three dots and click to share episode, or you could head on over to all of the resources that we have on admin.salesforce.com. That’s your one stop for all of the links, anything that we included, including a transcript of this episode. Now, of course, it’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that you can join the conversation in the Admin Trailblazer group, that is in the Trailblazer community. Don’t worry, link is in the show notes. So until next week, thank you so much for your time and we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post What Are the Top AI Use Cases for Modern Marketers? With John Wall appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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 ask our guests three questions about what Agentforce means for admins, content they want to highlight from 2024 to help you get started with AI in Salesforce, and what they’re looking forward to 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.

What is your Agentforce content highlight of 2024?

If you know anything about Jennifer Lee, it’s that she puts out a lot of great content for admins. Between “Automate This” and “How I Solved It,” she also finds time to write some pretty great blog posts. Her highlight for 2024 is her walkthrough on how you can build modular flows, breaking things down into smaller chunks that make it easier for your organization to take advantage of everything Agentforce has to offer.

Kate Lessard is the newest member of our team, and she makes a strong case for why you as a Salesforce Admin might be the best-positioned person in your business to become an AI specialist. She gets into all this and more in her intro to Agentforce blog post.

Finally, if you’re a regular listener to the pod, you’ve heard some of what Josh Birk has been up to. He’s been digging into the technical side of AI, including LLMs, RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation), and why prompt engineering is easier than it sounds. If you want to learn more about RAG, take a listen to his recent episode with Nochum Klein about how he’s using an AI agent to help with information security documentation at Salesforce.

What are you looking forward to in 2025?

Moving into 2025, Kate is interested in how emerging AI technologies fit into admins’ core responsibilities. In particular, she anticipates that security and the need for AI governance will become increasingly important.

Jen, meanwhile, is expanding her video empire with two new series for 2025. The first is about automation and how to build things with an eye toward what will be possible for your business with Agentforce. She’ll also be doing a series about how she’s learning Agentforce, so you can follow along.

And if the idea of RAG is getting you excited, Josh has even more in store for you in 2025. It’s going to be very, very doable to build an AI agent to interface with dense documentation and make everything faster and easier for your users. 

“It’s the end of 2025, and I can’t believe Salesforce Admins _____!”

“It’s the end of 2025, and I can’t believe Salesforce Admins found Agentforce so easy to work with,” according to Josh. He thinks you’ll be surprised how simple it is to build your own AI agents, once you get started. You can download a free version of Agentforce right now and jump in with Trailhead.

For Kate, “It’s the end of 2025 and I can’t believe Salesforce Admins are creating dynamic experiences this advanced!” She compares Agentforce to what happened when dynamic forms were released. The possibilities for creating customized, dynamic user experiences are incredible with Agentforce.

Finally, for 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!” Agentforce isn’t just about helping your users—there will also be agents that help you, too.

There’s so much more in this conversation with our Admin Evangelists about Agentforce and how to get the most out of Salesforce events, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And make sure to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss out.

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
• Video series: Automate This!
• Video series: How I Solved It

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• 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
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• Mike on X

Full show transcript

Mike:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re kicking off 2025 with an amazing lineup of guests. So today I have on the Admin Evangelist Team, Jennifer Lee, Kate Lassard, and Josh Burke. We dive into the year ahead looking at topics such as Agentforce, emerging AI technologies, and best practices for Salesforce admins navigating this transformative time.
Now, before we jump in, I want to make sure that you’re following the Salesforce Admins Podcast wherever you listen to, that way you never miss an episode. So let’s dive into our chat with Jen, Kate, and Josh.
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?

Jen:
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:
Nice and got Agentforce in the first minute of the show. Kate, you’re our newest member. Let’s go with you next.

Kate:
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:
New stuff in the new year. I like it. And of course, Josh Burke.

Josh:
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:
Awesome. Well, and of course anytime somebody goes to Trailhead, Josh, they’re using something you invented.

Josh:
I get a penny every time.

Mike:
Oh, a penny.

Josh:
A whole penny.

Mike:
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?

Jen:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
And it’s another acronym for us to learn.

Josh:
Right.

Mike:
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:
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:
Wow, budget. Budget. Katie, bar.

Kate:
I didn’t say my event bucket list.

Mike:
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?

Jen:
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:
And the time in between sessions is usually the most fun because it’s when you connect with everybody.

Jen:
Exactly.

Mike:
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:
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:
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:
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:
Okay, well, that was a great answer.
Kate, you have to follow Frank Sinatra.

Kate:
Oh my gosh.

Mike:
So it’s the end of 2025, and I can’t believe Salesforce admins.

Kate:
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:
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:
Exactly.

Mike:
Yeah. Jen, you get the final word. It’s the end of 2025, and I can’t believe Salesforce admins.

Jen:
Right. So not to copy what Josh or Kate said.

Mike:
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:
I know.

Jen:
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:
Great answer. Way to close with a bang.

Mike:
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:
Thanks for having us. You bet.

Jen:
Happy New Year. 2025 here we come.

Mike:
So I think that was a great way to kick off 2025. Big thanks to Jen, Kate, and Josh for sharing their insights and setting us up for what I believe will be a fantastic year.
In case you’re wondering, my answer to it’s the end of 2025, and I can’t believe that Salesforce admins fill in the blank, my answer is continue to be recognized within their organizations as transformative leaders of technology. That’s where I’m going.
Now, if you enjoyed this episode, share it with your fellow Salesforce admins that could use some inspiration. On Apple Podcasts, you can tap the dots and choose share episode. And of course, for more resources, visit admin.salesforce.com. You’ll find transcripts to this podcast. You’ll find blog posts. You’ll find so much. There’s literally everything you need to be a successful Salesforce admin there. And don’t forget to join our admin Trailblazer group that’s in the Trailblazer community. All the links, don’t worry, in the show notes. Where are the show notes? Show notes are at admin.salesforce.com. So until next time, here’s to an exciting 2025, and we’ll see you in the Cloud.

 

The post 2025 Roadmap for Salesforce Admins: AI, Agentforce, and Emerging Trends appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Nochum Klein, Director of Information Security at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about how Agentforce can make customer interactions and interacting with your organization’s documentation much, much easier.

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

A rabbi, a mainframe programmer, and a data security expert…

Nochum might have one of the most interesting paths to the Salesforce ecosystem of any guest we’ve had on the pod. Before he ended up as Director of Information Security at Salesforce, he originally trained as a rabbi. However, after he graduated, he realized that it wasn’t for him.

Instead, Nochum wanted to get into computers. By day, he was a coupon broker, buying and selling frequent flyer miles. By night, he went to school to learn mainframe programming in COBOL. Eventually, he got into mainframe integration and parlayed that into a career at Salesforce.

How Agentforce can help you manage your documentation

Salesforce is SOC 2 compliant, which means that Nochum’s team gets audited twice a year. As a part of the process, they have to prepare pages and pages of PDF documentation about their security measures. And while this information is also handy for fielding customer questions, it’s not exactly the most user friendly way to keep track of everything.

What the Security team used to do is take the information in their PDF documentation and compile a response database. Essentially, it’s a list of questions and their answers. But that means you needed someone to update the answers every time something changes, and things at Salesforce change fast.

With Agentforce, they’ve been able to take their documentation PDFs and break them down into a vector database, making it legible for AI. That means they can chat with an agent to get the most complete, up-to-date answer to a customer’s question in moments. For Nochum, it means he can spend less time digging through PDFs to make sure his language is correct and more time making sure his customers have the answers they’re looking for. 

Building AI agents you can rely on

None of this would be possible without the confidence that the agent they’ve built is only pulling from the correct information. That comes from thorough testing, and thinking about edge cases where you might be able to get it to give you the wrong answer. For Nochum, building an agent isn’t just about what you want it to do, it’s about being explicit about what don’t want it to do. 

There’s so much more great information in our conversation with Nochum about building agents and how to think about security with Agentforce, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss out.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more

• Build Effective Agentforce Agents for High-Impact Automation

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Social

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• Salesforce Admins on X
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• Mike on Threads
• Mike on Tiktok
• Mike on X

Full show transcript

Josh Birk:

Greetings, admins. It’s your guest host, Josh Birk here today. Today, I’m gonna bring Nochum Klein to the mic. He’s the director of security here at Salesforce and he has found a transformative experience with agents, shall we say. Uh, we’re gonna talk about use cases, we’re gonna talk about building agents, we’re gonna talk about, uh, security around agents and, um, I hope you have a lot of fun listening to that. So let’s go to the tape.

All right, today on the show, we welcome Nochum Klein. Um, am I saying your name correctly?

Nochum Klein:

Yes, you are. That’s perfect.

Josh Birk:

Alright. Uh, we are gonna be talking about agents and building agents and maybe even a little bit about security around agents, but first of all, Nochum, welcome to the show.

Nochum Klein:

Thank you. I’m really excited to be here.

Josh Birk:

Let’s, uh, let’s talk a little bit about your early years. Uh, what did you go to college for?

Nochum Klein:

I became a rabbi.

Josh Birk:

Ah. (laughs)

Nochum Klein:

So I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household, and so throughout my years of school, I never went to public school, I went to the Jewish religious school system, which prepares you for one thing and one thing only.

Josh Birk:

(laughs)

Nochum Klein:

(laughs) So I finished and, uh, I did my thing and became a rabbi and I said, “No.”

Josh Birk:

(laughs)

Nochum Klein:

“I don’t wanna do this.”

Josh Birk:

(laughs) So, so you’re saying that, uh, you didn’t have access to a lot of computer labs right out of the gate?

Nochum Klein:

No, uh, i- it’s funny you say that, because as a child, we were really poor.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

Uh, so, yeah, I had no access to that. And we had, I remember as a kid, and I’m gonna age myself-

Josh Birk:

(laughs)

Nochum Klein:

For those who can’t see me, I’ve got kind of salt and pepper beard with more salt than pepper at this point. Uh, so as a kid, I would walk past the Radio Shack and Radio Shack had just come out with a PC, uh, and …

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

… in those days, there were no hard drives they were using. We also don’t have these days, which are tape recorders with cassette tapes.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

Uh, and so I would go and just, and they were very nice to me. They would just let me go in, and that, in those days, the language du jour was basic.

Josh Birk:

Uh-huh.

Nochum Klein:

And I would go and just play on the computers and it just really excited me and interested me.

Josh Birk:

Interesting.

Nochum Klein:

And so once I determined that being a rabbi wasn’t what I wanted to do, computers was, was always something that, that really grabbed me.

Josh Birk:

Nice. Uh, first of all, I’m with you brother, (laughs) uh, basic was also my first language, which, which almost kept me from being a programmer because, uh, I was, I was pulling it out of the back of P, like computer-led magazines, right? And it’s like, if you put all of these lines of random text in, you’ll get this cool 3D game and all I wanted was the 3D game, right? And I didn’t know what a syntax error was and I didn’t care what a syntax error was. I just wanted my game to work. And so I found that my first experience is trying to get code work, just wildly frustrating and, and actually took part of a college education for me to realize, “Oh, actually, the s- stuff’s not (laughs) as hard as I thought it was.”

Nochum Klein:

Yeah, yeah. No, I’ve definitely also had to unlearn a lot of things along the way that I perceived were one way. Yes.

Josh Birk:

Yes. So, so tell me a little bit more about that transition. How did you, how did you land your first computer job?

Nochum Klein:

So that’s interesting. So I didn’t go directly from rabbi to computers because I needed to learn about computers in between while I was doing something that would actually make me money, so I could put food on the table.

Josh Birk:

Right.

Nochum Klein:

So I ended up being a coupon broker, which is someone who works with frequent flyers, who fly a lot and they have more mileage than they can possibly ever use.

Josh Birk:

Right.

Nochum Klein:

And so I would essentially, and this wasn’t my business, I was just working for somebody, but we would essentially buy the miles off somebody, say for example, uh, American Airlines was with British Airways. They, British Airways at that time had the Concorde with three-hour flights from New York to London. Uh, so you could get two of those tickets for, at the time, each ticket would normally cost on the market about $7,000. American Airlines had a, an award for 1,000, 175,000 miles for two tickets. We would turn around and sell the tickets for essentially a penny, uh, or we would buy the tickets for a penny a mile. Uh, so it’s essentially 1,750, sell it for say $3,000 a mile, a ticket.

Josh Birk:

Uh-huh.

Nochum Klein:

So everybody’s making off of it. The airlines weren’t particularly happy.

Josh Birk:

(laughs)

Nochum Klein:

Uh, but I got, I actually went to Concorde. I did a lot of traveling. That was really great.

Josh Birk:

Nice.

Nochum Klein:

So while I was doing that, I was going to school at night to learn computers, which at that time was the mainframe.

Josh Birk:

Uh-huh.

Nochum Klein:

So I learned COBOL.

Josh Birk:

And hey, once you learn COBOL, you have a job for life. I mean- (laughs)

Nochum Klein:

Especially yes, ’cause you can’t find COBOL programmers these days.

Josh Birk:

No, nope. And it will, it will be the last language (laughs) that we will probably ever end up using. Uh, so then how did you get involved with Salesforce?

Nochum Klein:

So, uh, it’s, so here’s what happened. I felt that being on the mainframe would eventually make me a dinosaur …

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

… uh, so, uh, but the challenge is, once you reach a certain level in anything kind of changing gears brings you back to square one in terms of salary.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

So what I did was I decided to work on integration. Mainframes, you know, as I indicated earlier, a bit of an island …

Josh Birk:

(laughs)

Nochum Klein:

… uh, but companies need ways to integrate their mainframes with other places. Uh, so I was working with … I’m in, I’m based in New York, so I was working with broker dealers, uh, you know, the large financial institutions and they had a need to work with their banks, uh, because many of their customers would be wiring money in or out. And many of these broker dealers take overnight loans. So they needed to know earlier in the day how much money they would need to take for overnight loans because the price of an overnight loan and interest is lower the earlier in the day that you need. It’s supply and demand.

Josh Birk:

Right, right.

Nochum Klein:

So it was a lot of swift conversations in terms of banking messages, uh, between various banks and the treasury department of the financial institution. And that got me into integrating mainframe to other platforms, which then got me to working for an integration company, uh, at the time, uh, which was TIBCO Software, which later as MuleSoft came out, uh, was a, a competitor to MuleSoft.

Josh Birk:

Okay.

Nochum Klein:

Uh, so I spent a good amount of time doing integration, and at one point, said, “Okay, I’ve done enough of that. I, I wanna do something different.” Uh, somebody I worked with at TIBCO had moved to Salesforce, introduced me to his manager and that’s how I joined.

Josh Birk:

Got it. What was, what was your first role at Salesforce?

Nochum Klein:

My first role at Salesforce was platform. Since platform and integration are very kind of fundamental foundation-y …

Josh Birk:

Uh-huh.

Nochum Klein:

… kind of pieces. So I joined as a platform solution engineer …

Josh Birk:

Got it.

Nochum Klein:

… pre-sales technology.

Josh Birk:

Nice, nice. And how would you describe your current job?

Nochum Klein:

So my current job is very different. Now, I’m in the security team at Salesforce, so I report up to our chief trust officer, Brad Arkin. And in my role, I’m still very customer-facing.

Josh Birk:

Mm-hmm.

Nochum Klein:

So that part of me hasn’t changed. And now what I do is I work with customers and help them understand the security controls that are inherent in how S- Salesforce delivers our services and capabilities.

Josh Birk:

Yes, yes. I was, I was briefly in data security, uh, for a, uh, it’s on my LinkedIn. I don’t, I don’t know why I’m always shy about saying State Farm. I think they trained me that way, uh, and I was in data security for long enough for me to realize I probably should not be in data security. (laughs) Then I fled back to the world of HTML and JavaScript. Um, alright, well, today’s topic, we’re gonna be talking about agents and Agentforce. What was, what was your first interaction … Actually, I guess l- let me take this one step back because this is kind of like the evolution we’re all going through right now where, you know, AI was this thing under a scientist’s rug somewhere and now it’s like in, in everybody’s face. What was your first interaction with AI itself?

Nochum Klein:

So at some point Salesforce has had acquired, uh, some companies that did AI. It wasn’t anything with large language models.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

Uh, it was more the predictive AI. Uh, we had some visual tools as well. For example, uh, one demo that, that actually a colleague of mine, Shane McLaughlin put together was hard hats. Uh, you know, so working with on construction sites …

Josh Birk:

Uh-huh.

Nochum Klein:

… you have to wear a hard hat. So you have some camera taking pictures of everybody who comes in, “This person’s wearing a hard hat, this person is not,” and eventually, come to figure out and be able to say with a good degree of, uh, certainty, “This person isn’t wearing a, a hard hat. Maybe you should stop them.”

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

Uh, so that was my first look at AI and that was … Uh, we weren’t dreaming of being able to talk to AI …

Josh Birk:

(laughs)

Nochum Klein:

… and get results back.

Josh Birk:

You’re right, right, because like, because I remember those days, uh, that’s a far more better enterprise solution than the, uh, bear or not bear, uh, demo that …

Nochum Klein:

(laughs)

Josh Birk:

… (laughs) I put together, but try to identify bear as humans and humans in bear suits. Uh, no, no practical (laughs) s- solution for that I think. Uh, but it was, because at that time, we were talking about models, but we were talking about models like how much training data, how many, how many imagery can you throw. Uh, it’s, it’s formally noticed [inaudible 00:11:18]. And then, and then at kind of off the side, right, there was the birth of Alexa and natural language processing.

But even, even that, as we all know, I mean it’s the classic joke, right, that this, that the, the processing abilities and the human-like c- capacities of things like Alexa and Siri, they’re just not there, right? They’re, they’re, they sound nice, but they’re, but just frequently will just get things wrong and they don’t hear you correctly or they don’t know very specifically how to have a conversation and, and that’s, and then we’ve talked a lot about like conversational UI, “Why, why is a conversational UI transformative, etcetera, etcetera?” Uh, what was your first interaction using, using today’s platform using Agentforce?

Nochum Klein:

So it’s funny ’cause you talked about Siri and my, my family knows if there’s a family emergency, I’m the first person not to reach out to because …

Josh Birk:

(laughs)

Nochum Klein:

… I’m, I’m totally disconnected from my phone and I’ll, I’ll check like WhatsApp maybe once a day and, and kind of respond to things.

Josh Birk:

Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

Nochum Klein:

So with Siri-

Josh Birk:

Y- you and my wife would get together very easily.

Nochum Klein:

(laughs)

Josh Birk:

You could write letters to each other. I, I understand. Sorry, sorry, go on, go on.

Nochum Klein:

Yeah, except it would be very stilted because it would take a week between …

Josh Birk:

(laughs)

Nochum Klein:

… each interaction. So for me, it was actually, when people on my team who know a lot more about AI than I do, started talking about ChatGPT and what it could do. And, you know, initially, you know, I got my day job, so I didn’t … You know, it’s interesting and all that, but it wasn’t really relevant to me at the time until all of a sudden I started seeing the things that ChatGPT could do and I actually started playing with it.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

And my, my jaw dropped and, and, you know, I’ve been, I haven’t been the same person ever since.

Josh Birk:

(laughs) Yeah, and I, and I think you, you fell into the rabbit hole that I, I tempt people into all the time. Uh, p- people are like, “Well, how do I get started with it?” and I’m like, “Go find one of the ones that’s free. It doesn’t matter. And just go, just go talk to it. Like the first thing you need to do is just realize the, get that feeling of how it’s different. Like, like ask it to tell you a dad joke, right? Like, like what … They’re so good at dad jokes.” And then, uh, the other one I recommend to a lot of people is ask, to play 20 Questions with it because playing 20 Questions with an AI that’s trying to guess as a random object that you’re thinking of almost reaches creepy, right? Because again …

Nochum Klein:

Yeah.

Josh Birk:

… they’re, they’re very good at it, but it also is a really good demonstration of how, what a conversational UI can do versus almost any other kind of UI. Uh, what have, what’s been your experience like with, with Agentforce itself?

Nochum Klein:

For me, Agentforce has been transformative …

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

… particularly in my current role. So in my role, you know, as I stated, I’m still customer-facing, so answering customer questions about how we do security inside of Salesforce.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

So we’ve got so much documentation and I think part of the problem is, in a sense, too much documentation or too much information becomes makes it challenging to essentially find the information you need at the time that you need it.

Josh Birk:

Mm-hmm.

Nochum Klein:

And what has been transformative really for me in my job on a day-to-day basis is one of the things that we’ve done, is we’ve taken all of these compliance documents. Salesforce gets audited twice a year for various, uh, you know, we call it SOC2 reports …

Josh Birk:

Uh-huh.

Nochum Klein:

… which are essentially we say, “These are the various security controls we have and this is how we meet them,” and the auditor comes in and reviews everything and signs off. So now we’ve got all these PDF documents that really are rich source of information about how Salesforce does security …

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

… and how cool would it be if we could just take these documents and make it available to Agentforce …

Josh Birk:

Mm-hmm.

Nochum Klein:

… and now be able to ask Agentforce questions and be able to then get answers in a much more reasonable timeframe. And there’s some history here. Before we had Agentforce, what we had was database of, of answers, so a response database. So, you know, standard question is, “How do you encrypt data?”

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

So we have an answer for that. So now we’ve got these thousands of responses, and the problem particularly here at Salesforce is we move at such a rapid velocity …

Josh Birk:

Yes. (laughs)

Nochum Klein:

… that now our answers, you know, over a very short period of time are no longer applicable.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

And nobody wants to go and review these answers. Now you’ve got answers which are purely absolutely wrong inside of the database and the challenge is how do we maintain that. It’s imp, it’s impossible.

Josh Birk:

Right.

Nochum Klein:

So what we’ve done now is we’ve taken all these compliance documents and put them inside of a data cloud, and using data cloud, you have this concept of retrieval augmented generation, which is a long term, that just simply means I have the ability to take a PDF file, break it up into chunks and now I can take each of those chunks and put it in a place, we call it a vector database, which is just a way of making it available so that an AI model can easily and efficiently access it.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

Because if you think about it, when I ask a question, you know, of that where the answer is in a PDF, PDF is 500 pages, the answer is on page 23, paragraph five, having these chunks now allows the model to efficiently just zap into paragraph five …

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

… find the answer and give it to me. And so now I’ve got all these compliance documents, I don’t even need to read them anymore, although I should.

Josh Birk:

(laughs)

Nochum Klein:

And, uh, and now because the agent is really responding in the context of the documents that I fed it, I also have a good degree of comfort that it’s not just making up answers where we know that possibility exists out in the internet because the, you know, many of the models on the internet are just trained with, you know, information on the internet, which is not often reliable.

Josh Birk:

Right.

Nochum Klein:

Here, it’s trained, you know, it’s pulling in the data that I’ve just fed it and now I get amazingly accurate results, uh, and longer results than I would ever be able to write myself in just record time and significantly increase my own productivity.

Josh Birk:

Yeah. Uh, first of all, thank you because that is one of the most straightforward, uh, descriptions of rank that I think I’ve heard and, and we’ve kind of struggled over here because, uh, and, and for exactly the way you just walked through, the, the, there are things in the AI world right now that have very technical sounding names to them because an engineer got to name them and then that name has stuck. Uh, and it’s like, to, to me, it’s like the end result is, is really, you don’t need to understand how vector database works to realize that’s the thing that’s connecting a PDF to, to your conversational agent, right? And …

Nochum Klein:

Right.

Josh Birk:

… over the, a lot of the use cases that, because that’s kind of the phase we’re in now, right? Like the, the toys are in everybody’s hands, they’re getting to play with them and we need to get, we need information from people out there in the wild who have real jobs as to what are the use cases that are, uh, that, that are, you know, really important to you, that, that are gonna make this, as you say, transformative. Before I get to that though, I just, I wanna touch on that last part that you were talking about. Uh, are there steps that you go through to kind of test it to make sure, because, you know, we have misinformation on the internet, so we skip that because you’ve just given it 500 pages it could use, instead of anything it needs on the internet, but is there, like do you test it against hallucinations to make sure it’s not just like, “Oh, Nochum wants to hear this. I don’t know if I know the answer, but I’m gonna tell him, uh, this compliance rule looks like this anyway”?

Nochum Klein:

Yes, and there’s actually a, a, a number of ways to do that.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

Firstly, in, in my specific scenario, my team handles security questionnaires, and oftentimes, these are pre-sales, “We’re making a new deal with the customer and the customer before they decide they wanna put their crown jewels and really sensitive information inside of Salesforce wanna make sure that it’s secure.” So a lot of these questionnaires, the questions on it are questions we get fairly frequently. We know the answers …

Josh Birk:

Uh-huh.

Nochum Klein:

… although, as I said, answering them is, you know, a, a, an undifferentiated heavy lift in the sense that it takes time and effort to just write all that down.

Josh Birk:

Right.

Nochum Klein:

Uh, but the good news is because we know the answers, we have the ability to essentially take these questions out of the questionnaires and feed them into, uh, you know, what we’ve just created to actually get the results.

Josh Birk:

Got it.

Nochum Klein:

Now, one thing I just read literally this morning …

Josh Birk:

(laughs)

Nochum Klein:

… was an announcement that Salesforce made and, Josh, you, I’m sure you know more about this than I do, so, so please educate me, but I saw an announcement where Salesforce just announced a testing framework …

Josh Birk:

Uh-huh.

Nochum Klein:

… for agents where actually now that we can use a model that essentially we’ve developed inside of Salesforce to create random questions …

Josh Birk:

Yup.

Nochum Klein:

… that it will ask the agent. Is that something that you’re familiar with?

Josh Birk:

I was l- literally, uh, reviewing a blog draft (laughs) for it right before this interview, so and, and this is what I love about being somebody who gets to evangelize AI, is exactly what you just described, because it’s like what was true two weeks ago is probably not gonna be true today, right? Like the answer to these questions would have been wildly different, uh, uh, because we didn’t, I didn’t know, uh, I knew this was coming down the pipe, but I didn’t know when it was going to look. Uh, I can’t get too into details because it’s still a little fluid. It is exactly what you’re describing, though it’s basically AI being able to test AI and it is looking really, really cool.

Uh, so if you’re hearing this, I don’t know when this episode’s coming out, uh, there’s probably already material by the time we get this produced and published that there’s probably material in what we’re talking about on admin.salesforce.com. But it, it is, it’s, it’s very cool and what I like about both of those aspects, right, like giving it a litmus test that, you know, the accuracy of and then also using AI to form questions to kind of poke at the AI itself, but, but the key element here is we still have the human in the loop, right? There’s still the human who’s pulling that lever and seeing what happens to it and saying, “Yes, you’re being a good AI.”

Nochum Klein:

Yes, I perceive, and as we look at Agentforce, and increasingly, we’re, we’re looking at some of the differences of say Agentforce with say Copilots that we had last year is the autonomous ability of agents. But at the same time, I perceive, before we let anything loose, it’s just really important and imperative that we make sure that it’s doing exactly what we want it to do.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

And I think that’s where, where this level of testing comes into play to give us that, that good degree of comfort.

Josh Birk:

Yeah, I agree. And it’s when you wanna have that, that, uh, QA engineer mindset a little bit. You know, the QA engineer walks into a bar, he orders, uh, he orders a beer, he orders 10 beers, he orders zero beers, he orders a milk, he asks for a cow. You know, it’s like you have to, I’ve told people like, like, “You know, test your prompts repeatedly. Uh, test them with, you know, run like like, ‘Your dataset looks like this. Oh, what if your dataset has 500 rows instead of five rows, etcetera, etcetera?'” And just make sure that we’ve, we’ve still, you’re, you’re dead on.

It’s like autonomy is great, uh, and I think it’s gonna have a lot of power, uh, for, for Salesforce users to reach, you know, their customers and their consumers, but, you know, you still have to be in the pilot seat. Now when it comes to some of these, what are, what are, going back to use cases, what are some of the other use cases that you’re seeing from the public?

Nochum Klein:

So I’m seeing a lot of internal use cases as well as potential external use cases. It boils down to essentially that undifferentiated heavy lifting. And, uh, especially going back to the trust aspect before you’re gonna have your agents do the really important stuff, you wanna make sure you get a level of comfort at the lower level stuff. If you think about it, this isn’t about replacing the high-level work that I’m doing anyways. It’s about making me just a lot more productive, because in my job, there’s a- always a lot of just lower level, what I call, and, and I think this is a term AWS coined, but I’ve stolen it …

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

… the, the undifferentiated heavy lifting, which is essentially just the lower level drudge work that all of us have in our jobs that potentially eats up hours and prevents us from doing the knowledge work from reaching out to individuals, making the human connections that will really change our business.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

So I think everybody has that. And what I’m hearing just in my conversations with customers is, in each of their particular roles, “How do we just take those little pieces and, and manage those?” Uh, another example that came up actually on my team, we produce a monthly n- newsletter in term, just highlighting, you know, “Here are the things that our team has done over the past month.” Uh, we track everything we do, we actually, internally use cases. And one of the things that we do is we’ve been using the A- Agentforce actually firstly whenever we close a case to summarize all the interactions that we’ve had back and forth with the various stakeholders, so that it’s, “Here, here was the initial problem that we were brought in to discuss or the security concern that the customer had.”

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

“Here are the points that we discussed. Here were some takeaways.” So now you take all that conversation and we’re boiling that down into a summary.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

So on the case level now, we’ve got an agent-generated case summary that looks at all these interactions and summarizes it really nicely.

Josh Birk:

Nice.

Nochum Klein:

Now take it to the next step.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

Now at the end of the month, we’ve got this aggregation of cases that we’ve worked on all month, right? Uh, how cool would it be if we could just now chew through each of these summaries and, and identify the ones that really provided the deepest value because we can’t talk about everything …

Josh Birk:

Right.

Nochum Klein:

… but, “What were the biggest problems we solved? Uh, what were the biggest customers with whom we interacted? Uh, how did we really move the needle?” And so now we’re looking at these cases over an aggregate and this is another example of using Agentforce to do that.

Josh Birk:

Uh-huh.

Nochum Klein:

So, you know, increasingly kind of the little things you do that take up the, the large amounts of time.

Josh Birk:

And you’re, that’s fascinating because I think you’re at least the second or third team that I’ve talked to, that has at least looked at something like that. I actually might sync you up with a couple people back here on Salesforce side, (laughs) uh, because I know that there’s a lot of people who are thinking in, in those terms. Uh, let’s, let me put your security hat on for you. Uh, let, let me have you put your security hat on. (laughs) Uh, when it comes to an internal use case like that, are there any extra like security questions that, because I’m trying to keep this in a format that doesn’t turn into a three-hour (laughs) walkthrough of how to make, make e- everything secure, but I mean, if, if you already are a good-minded security person, a security-first person, are there extra steps that you would recommend before deploying an internal agent? And you know, I’m gonna turn this around and ask about an external agent right after this.

Nochum Klein:

For the internal … Oh, first thing I would say is, increasingly, we’re seeing insider threat as, as a huge threat.

Josh Birk:

Okay.

Nochum Klein:

Um, so while at some level I think we need to trust our insiders. Uh, a- at the other level, insider threat is huge. So I think that’s something to keep in mind. So …

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

… while yes, you probably don’t need the same degree or the same set of tests that you would do or perhaps controls that you put in place beforehand, nevertheless, uh, you, you do need to think about that insider threat. And I think for the insiders, I would say it’s primarily looking at the access control, uh, because clearly, potentially, an agent could be used to pull in, and largely, I would say that’s, that could be inadvertent where I just ask an innocuous question because now my agent can do things that I wouldn’t normally have done myself just, you know, going and poking where I shouldn’t.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

But I’m asking an innocuous question and the agent, may realize that I have the access that perhaps I shouldn’t, uh, and is going to want to do my bidding, and inadvertently, now I get more information than I should. So that’s a question of access control where you really wanna think about uh, “For this individual, uh, what can this individual access? Because at the end of the day, the agent is always going to respect the access control, and therefore, you wanna make sure that as you build your agents and you’re looking at the various Salesforce objects that the agent is going to be accessing in order to perform its tasks, just make sure that you’re thinking in terms of the broad set of individuals who may be accessing this agent and ensuring that the access control is as it should be,” which then kind of brings us into other scenarios, which takes us out of, out of this Agentforce conversation around things …

Josh Birk:

Right.

Nochum Klein:

… like, you know, role-based access. There are so many ways where access can be granted to a user that may not necessarily be immediately, uh, intuitive to, uh, understand why a particular user is able to access this particular information. And that’s kind of a separate conversation.

Josh Birk:

Right, right. Well, I, I always, like I, I guess I’ll, I’ll frame this in, into a question, because when I have been reading, uh, when it comes to best tips for an external agent, I am reminded back to my integration roots and my roots of like, “Oh, if you’re gonna put,” you know, back when we started propping up users that were, you know, accessing systems as an anonymous guest kind of thing, how different is an external agent from those principles or i- is that i- is how much extra experience is required, but, or if you are already are familiar with setting up an integration user, principle of least privilege, etcetera, does, does an external agent change that much?

Nochum Klein:

It does a lot.

Josh Birk:

Oh, okay, okay.

Nochum Klein:

Uh, a- and here’s why. Last year, there was a famous story with an airline, uh, where an individual went on the airline website and the, and the airline had bot and the individual asked a question about, I think it was, uh, returning a ticket or flexibility around flying and they got an answer that was actually not a part of the, uh, the airline’s actual policy. So when the individual went to cash in their ticket, the airline said, “No,” and this individual had record of that bot interaction.

Josh Birk:

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Nochum Klein:

Uh, so, it’s, I think a lot of it is looking at, you know, so this does take us back to some of the testing aspects.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

Uh, it also gets us into other, you know, particularly w- wearing my security hat, it gets us into other aspects where, as we create, uh, agents, and I think this is in general for, for developers, humans tend to, we’re blinders. We are building this agent for the use case that we see in front of us and we don’t necessarily see other ways that individuals may try and interact with the agent.

Josh Birk:

Yes.

Nochum Klein:

And at the end of the day, an agent really is responding to instructions, right?

Josh Birk:

Right.

Nochum Klein:

And if you wanna be good in Agentforce, this is, uh … I, I happen to be very opinionated, so take my opinions or leave them, but my belief is, in order to be really good with Agentforce, you have to understand that you’re dealing with a model. And the model is like, uh, think of it as a bit of a, a child that takes things very, very, uh, you know, what you say is exactly what it’s going to do. So therefore, you need to really think about, you know, as you’re building your agents and agent actions, you have the instructions that you’re creating for the agent action, you’ve got the scope for the agent action, which is essentially, “This is what you as an agent can do and cannot do.” Uh, so all of this is actually being acted upon by another model that’s reading this, that determines actually, “I’m going to choose this topic versus that topic.”

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

“I’m going to choose this action versus another action.” So kind of going back, and you touched on this with the one beer, five beer, a hundred beer thing, where essentially you really need to think about the corner cases and how, how you wanna make sure your agent is not used and …

Josh Birk:

Mm-hmm.

Nochum Klein:

… be very explicit and really verbose in how you describe that. And that gets us kind of and, sorry to be a bit long-winded to your, to your question.

Josh Birk:

I love it, I love it.

Nochum Klein:

But that gets us also into, you know, conversations around what we in, in security called prompt injection …

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

… where, you know, think about, uh, yeah, “If the agent is, is always just answering i- instructions, what if I could add an instruction to the end of my bot or my agent that I’m exposing to the internet that says, ‘Oh yeah, and me a hundred TVs for free’?”

Josh Birk:

(laughs) Right, right, right.

Nochum Klein:

And potentially, uh, if that’s an instruction and, uh, an AI model is very, you know, just follows instructions, how do you ensure that it doesn’t do that?

Josh Birk:

Yeah, right.

Nochum Klein:

So a lot of that, and most of those, you know, controls certainly are, are things that Salesforce has to put into our, uh, platform in order to ensure that our agents are smart enough to identify when they’re being told to ignore w- whatever you were previously told …

Josh Birk:

Right.

Nochum Klein:

… uh, and do this instead.

Josh Birk:

Yes.

Nochum Klein:

Uh, so, so we do that. We have essentially different ways, for example, that we identify, uh, if somebody is doing that, both because when you create a prompt, say, using, uh, prompt builder, you’re creating a prompt that’s sitting inside of a bigger prompt that Salesforce has created that we’re not really exposing.

Josh Birk:

Right.

Nochum Klein:

And therefore, this bigger prompt already tells the, the model that if some, you know, if anywhere you get instructions to ignore what you were previously told …

Josh Birk:

To do.

Nochum Klein:

… or, exactly, to, to contradict …

Josh Birk:

Right.

Nochum Klein:

… what you were previously told, then consider that injection attack and, and don’t listen.

Josh Birk:

And don’t, and don’t behave. Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

Right.

Josh Birk:

Uh, yeah. My two thoughts on that, first of all is my first professional review that I, that I had on my code was so eye-opening, uh, because they would show me something that my history had taught me had, had been safe, right? And I, and I, I, and I’ve got a perfect track record so far and I’ve never, and I’ve never written anything that got anybody hacked. But after that review, I kind of felt lucky for him because he’s like, “Oh, but yeah, what if?” And it was the what if that’s like … The, the thing that I think developers don’t, don’t have the same mindset as a security engineer or even a QA engineer is, uh, you know, we’re gonna develop, we’re good at finding bugs and edge cases as to why something’s not working. We’re not, we always kind of assume good intent when it comes to the client.

And it was like the first security lesson I learned when I was at data security is like you never trust the client. Like assume the client is malicious. Assume the client is gonna try to trick you. Assume the client is gonna pull up your JavaScript code, it’s gonna pull up your HTML code, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And then the second thing is “These things are great pieces of technology. I love them. They’re really powerful. I am very excited for the future, but they need us, right? They need us to ride these guardrails, to put in these instructions, to put in the, the, the larger things to, to kind of make sure that we’re, we’re keeping safe.” And it’s like, you know, “Have fun at the swimming pool, but also don’t, don’t run. (laughs) Don’t bring glass.” Like, like there’s always gonna be rules, you know, that we’re gonna have to apply.

Uh, now, Nochum, you’ve also got a blogpost. It’s currently a draft mode. Once again, through the miracle of time travel, uh, will probably be published by the time this is out there. Do you wanna give a quick penny tour, like a quick elevator pitch for that blogpost?

Nochum Klein:

Sure. So as you create agent actions, uh, you know, so what the blogpost really tries to do is, is help you understand kind of some of the things you need to think about as you create agent actions. Uh, creating an agent action can be based on a number of different things. So firstly, when you create the action, you’re going to firstly determine, “Oh, what does my action wanna do?” and you kind of know that beforehand.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

So I think of it in, in two, two main buckets. One bucket is, “Do I need to do something that Salesforce say does well, for example, summarize records or find records?” Uh, those are very common scenarios. And oftentimes, you wanna find records based on certain criteria. So there’s a little bit additional complexity, but those would be scenarios where, for example, using a prompt template would be an ideal solution.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

Then you’ve got other types of use cases where you need to maybe update records or you’ve got very complex logic that you need to, your agent to do. And for that, uh, you know, so it’s not just find records. Uh, for something like that, you typically want to do a, um, a flow-based agent action or an apex-based agent action.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

Uh, and I find flows are just so much easier to use. Uh, apex has got, got a lot of rules around also the structure of the code in terms of how you annotate your, your apex, uh, and, and you have to pass it in a list and it has to get a list back out. Uh, whereas I find flows are just so much simpler. And just internally also for the ongoing administration and maintenance flows, y- you look at the flow and you immediately understand what it’s doing.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

Whereas with apex, that’s not always the case.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

I tend to lean more towards the flows than the apex unless there’s a really good reason to use apex.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

Um, so there’s the, firstly, you know, “What kind of flow am I building? Is it, is it, or what kind of action am I building as based on flows or based on apex or based on prompts?” Um, so that’s one aspect of it. And then, you know, is, there’s the, uh, you know, there’s the, also, you know, going back to another thing I said in terms of the types of actions because there’s a good degree of actions that Salesforce has delivered out of the box, which we call standard actions. So as admins, we’re all familiar with the standard objects versus custom objects. And so really, you can think of the agent actions as exactly the same thing …

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

… where Salesforce, we’re continuing to roll out standard actions at a fairly good clip with each new release. Uh, and that’s something I think that, that, you know, that, as admins, it’s kind of you should be plugged in …

Josh Birk:

(laughs)

Nochum Klein:

… because, uh, you know, uh, even as an internal Salesforce employee, uh, it’s just moving so quickly. Uh, but I think the first thing is just understanding also what the universe, uh, of out of the box standard actions are because oftentimes you may discover you don’t need to build one.

Josh Birk:

Yup.

Nochum Klein:

And, you know, what, you know, here we are right now on the, uh, winter ’25 release, uh, and soon it’s going to be the spring and then summer, and with each new release, you’re going to see many, many more standard actions …

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

… out of the box. Uh, so that’s kind of another thing you wanna be of in terms of as you decide you wanna build an action, just take a look at what those standard actions are, uh, because you may find a number of them that can actually meet your needs. And then you could just include those in your topic, which you may still wanna build. One thing that I’ve found is that oftentimes departments may wanna have their own separate topics and you may actually have some common standard actions that you’ll bring into each of the, of the different topics …

Josh Birk:

Uh-huh.

Nochum Klein:

… because if you think about it, what, what’s going to happen is, first, as you build your, and use your, your agents or your agent actions, it’s first going to determine the topic it wants to use and then the actions within that topic. So having the same actions in different topics is perfectly acceptable and very common. Uh, so you wanna then think about the actions that you wanna include and that will include both your standard and your custom actions. And then there’s the logic of, “How do I actually go about that?” and that’s some of the things that I describe inside of the blogposts.

Josh Birk:

Wonderful. And what I love about all of that is that it really underlies what one of our, you know, we, we keep trying to tell and, and message out to people because I think if you’re just coming fresh out of the woods and you hear, “Oh, hey, your job today is to go build an artificial intelligence conversational agent,” you probably think that’s some really overwhelming task. And, uh, and as you just described, it really isn’t because the standard actions do so much for you. And what I have found is that the standard actions will get you so far and then every now and then, it’s like, “I had a prompt built there or I had a prompt template that was hallucinating consistently on this one part.” So I’m like, “Okay, clearly you don’t wanna do that task. I’m gonna go into this flow.”

Uh, and I’m an old, I’m an old school developer and I completely agree with you. I think that’s a really good way of thinking about, thinking about standard actions, think about flows, so then if flow can’t do your use case, consider using apex. And the thing we keep telling people, the flows themselves, most of the flows I’ve written for my demos are maybe four steps long. They’re very simple. Go in, filter some data, manipulate some data, hand it back to the AI and, and walk away. So, uh, really great stuff, Nochum. Uh, o- one last question for you, what is your favorite nontechnical hobby?

Nochum Klein:

Favorite nontechnical hobby? I hike. I love kind of the outdoors. Uh, I find my work is very demanding, and luckily, I have a great manager and, who doesn’t micromanage me. So I find even between my meetings, just during the day and I happen to live in the suburbs right near the mountains, I’ll just go out for 15 minutes and just get a breath of fresh air. I have a stream near my house and just, “Ahhh” …

Josh Birk:

(laughs) Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

… just take my mind off work …

Josh Birk:

Uh-huh.

Nochum Klein:

… and I can come back and recharge.

Josh Birk:

Love it.

Nochum Klein:

And so just spending time in nature, hiking, uh, that’s just something I absolutely love.

Josh Birk:

Absolutely love it. Well, thank you so much for the great conversation and information. That was a lot of fun.

Nochum Klein:

Thank you, Josh. I really enjoyed it.

Josh Birk:

And that’s our show. I wanna thank Nochum for the wonderful conversation. Of course, I wanna thank you for listening. If you wanna learn more about the show and being a Salesforce admin, head on over to admin.salesforce.com where you can hear old episodes, see the show notes and a lot more information on being a Salesforce admin. And of course, you can subscribe to this podcast on the podcast client of your choice. Thanks again, everybody. I’ll talk to you later.

The post How Agentforce Transforms Customer Interactions at Salesforce appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Megan Tuano, Sr. Business Analyst at Accenture Federal Services and an amazing YouTube content creator. Join us as we chat about navigating career transitions in tech, the power of AI, and making your mark in the Salesforce ecosystem.

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

Overcoming barriers to a career in tech

Megan got her start working in college admissions for a data science program at UC Berkeley. “A lot of the students I talked to were scared about breaking into tech because they didn’t come from a traditional tech background,” she says.

After seeing what her students were able to accomplish in tech, Megan got curious about what she could do with her career. She was already using Salesforce to get people through the admissions process, so she started looking into how to get certified.

There’s this idea that you can’t work in tech if you don’t need to know how to code, but there are so many roles out there where that’s not important. You can be a business analyst, a product manager, a project manager, or even a Salesforce Admin.

How Megan uses AI in Salesforce consulting

One question that I always get is how to prioritize Salesforce certifications. For Megan, that comes down to setting clear goals for your career. What roles are you building towards, and what do you need to stand out?

Megan’s found that AI certifications and knowing how to use AI to help you with your work have been a difference-maker for her career. She likes to ask ChatGPT about other scenarios her solution could apply to. The AI has had conversations with many other people about similar problems, so she’s bringing all of that knowledge into her solutioning process.

Why soft skills matter for Salesforce Admins

Megan highlights how important soft skills are for Salesforce Admins. We’ve all sat in a boring meeting, or a presentation where the speaker didn’t seem to care. She always looks for ways to spice up her presentations with visuals and humor. Most importantly, you need to have passion for what you’re doing with the platform and what it can do for your users. Passion is infectious!

Finally, don’t be afraid to ask questions if you don’t understand a business process. There’s often some fear that creeps up that asking too many questions will make you seem incompetent or unqualified. But consider the opposite: asking questions shows that you care, that you’re thorough, and that you’re trying to find the absolute best solution for the business.

There’s a lot more great stuff in my conversation with Megan about shaping your career in tech, so be sure to take a listen. 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

• Megan’s YouTube channel
• Megan’s article on Salesforce Ben: Can ChatGPT Replace a Salesforce Consultant?
• Trailhead: Prepare for your Salesforce Certified AI Associate Credential

Admin Trailblazers Group

• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

• Megan on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on X
• Mike on Bluesky social
• Mike on Threads
• Mike on Tiktok
• Mike on X

Full Transcript

Mike:
This week on the Salesforce Admin’s Podcast, we’re talking to Megan about navigating career transitions in tech, the power of AI, and making your mark in the Salesforce ecosystem. Now, Megan is a senior business analyst team leader, and let me tell you, a prolific YouTube content creator with a knack for turning really complex concepts into engaging lessons. But before we dive into this insightful conversation, make sure you’re following the Salesforce Admin’s podcast on your favorite platform. I don’t know which one that is, but I bet you have yours. And if you do that, you’re never going to miss an episode because it’s just going to show up every Thursday morning. All right, enough of the promo. Let’s get to our conversation with Megan. So Megan, welcome to the podcast.

Megan:
Hey, I’m happy to be here.

Mike:
Well, I came across your YouTube channel. We did a military… What was the official name of that? Was it a happy hour that we did?

Megan:
It was the military trailblazer office hours.

Mike:
Office hours. I keep calling everything happy hour, maybe it’s wishful thinking.

Megan:
It was happy.

Mike:
It was happy hours, office hours, but it was fun doing that with you. Jennifer Lee was on, there was quite a few people on. Warren Walters, former podcast host. It was like a roundup, and I was like, “Wait a minute. Megan hasn’t been on the podcast, so it’s not a true family reunion, vet force, happy hour unless I had Megan on the podcast.” So I had to have you on the podcast to talk about career and life, your YouTube channel and all of AI and Agent Force that’s coming in everywhere in the Salesforce ecosystem. So let’s get started there. How did you get started in the Salesforce world?

Megan:
Yeah, so taking me back. So basically I was actually working for UC, Berkeley at the time. I was an admission’s counselor slash career counselor. I was helping a lot of students at the time really figure out if they wanted to start the data science program that I was a part of. And this is when data science was really hot. This was the time where a lot of students that were trying to figure out, “I love data, I love storytelling, but how do I take my non-technical background and actually apply it into the tech world?” Because a lot of the times I would speak to students and they were kind of scared about breaking into the tech because they didn’t come from that “traditional tech background.” But when data science emerged, it was a challenge for me, but also them to figure out where can we put this person who may have been an architect I worked with that designed the 9/11 memorial, or I was working with the 60-year-old that developed a police camera.

So these really cool people with non-technical backgrounds, I was figuring out how to get them to the data science space. So with working with UC, Berkeley at that time, with the admission’s counselor title that I had, we were actually using Salesforce at the time, and it was totally new to me. I was like, “This is a great way to be able to track my students.” Once they submit that they’re interested in the program, they would come to me, we would funnel them, get them through the essentially, I say sales process, because that’s kind of what it was. We’re kind of getting them to enroll in the program. But that was my first real introduction to Salesforce and I loved it. I was kind of like that admission’s counselor that was making all these data charts like, “Hey, wait, my students said that this could be better on the page. Let’s take this to the marketing team, or they said that this course could be beneficial for their career. Let’s take it to the professors.”

And I would get all these reports together and I was kind of like, “Okay, well what else can I do?” And I was very fortunate because at the time my uncle actually worked at Capgemini, and he was probably in the ecosystem for about 15 years at that time. But he was like, “Look, you’re working with Salesforce, did you know you could get certified?” I was like, “No way. Stop.” I said, “Stop. I did not know that.” I was just trying to figure out a way to break into tech myself because of working with my students. I was like, “This is super inspirational.” They’re doing things that I never imagined. So the same fear that they had about breaking into tech, I had that too. And I didn’t come from a background that was computer science or technical. My background was international affairs. I wanted to travel the world and figure out something. But yeah, no, I got certified. Took about a year and a half between early mornings, late nights, and finally broke in. It was a challenge, but it was very, very worth it now looking back.

Mike:
It’s crazy, I was literally just looking at the Trailblazer community today, and I saw a few people asking questions like they were a new developer, they were a new admin, and they really wanted to get in Salesforce and what should they learn? And then I hear you say, “Well, I don’t have this tech background.” I wonder why tech has this kind of, I don’t know, ominous sort of theory or aura around it of, “Well, if you’re not in tech, you’re not getting in tech.” But yet you look around and I mean before we started recording, we’re talking about YouTube and some of the easy click to configure… ChatGPT and some of the AI stuff, it couldn’t be any easier. You literally just ask it a question. But the perception… That’s the word I was looking for, the perception of getting into tech is still this mountain that you have to climb.

Megan:
I think it really is. And I think kind of going back to UC, Berkeley, I was just invited to speak with some of the students and I would probably say they’re about 19, 18, 20 years old. And a lot of them are coming from their undergrads where it’s sociology or again, mirroring business. And I think a lot of them, especially being in the Silicon Valley area, they oftentimes look at companies that are the fan companies. You have Google, Meta, all these companies, and usually what they’re being fed is YouTube videos. What do you work for? What are your job titles? And you’ll hear a lot of engineers, developers, coding, and I think that gets ingrained in a lot of people’s mind when they’re not surrounded by the different positions that you can have. And that was one of the goals that I had when speaking to the students.

It’s like, “Look, I do not code. I can dabble but not code.” And it was just about opening their eyes to, you can be a business analyst, you can be a product manager, you can be product owner, project manager. There’s so many cool things that you can do in the ecosystem within the Salesforce world and really expand yourself out there. I think it’s just about knowing the differences in roles and the possibilities, and it’s listening to podcasts like this where you can really discover things and put your foot into finding maybe I want to do a PM job or BA role and just trying it out. I’ve done probably three different roles in the five years of Salesforce that I’ve been in here. And without dabbling, I couldn’t have found that. But without podcasts like this, I don’t even know if I would’ve been able to go into the BA role. So I’ve definitely seen what you’re talking about.

Mike:
Yeah, what… I’m looking at your site and it’s launching my small business and a week in life Salesforce consultant. I’m curious… Well, one of the videos was two years ago. Two years ago, we really didn’t have much AI in our world. We thought we did, let’s be honest, even Salesforce had Einstein, but it wasn’t a conversational UI, it wasn’t a learning model, it was a predictive model. And just to be nerdy, there’s differences between the two of those. To say in my nerdy voice, and I’ve had people that have had to tell me the difference. “I don’t understand the difference.” Well, one kind of predicts the future based on the data you’ve given it and the other is learning and giving you an outcome. How has your day-to-day as a consultant and with some of the businesses you’ve worked with changed now that you have AI in it?

Megan:
Well, it’s fantastic. Well, I actually used to be an expert offer for Salesforce Ben for about two years, and a lot of it was helping new consultants and new people in the tech space on how to use AI. One of the first articles I did was based off a scenario where I was given a task as a consultant. And I have found that while using AI, I can kind of bounce ideas or conversations that I’ve had with my clients. Let’s say they give us a survey and they want to have a rating system through there and they want to have automations if the survey comes out as not so well, and maybe the agent could have improved. Well that’s great, but I think that AI and using things like ChatGPT and giving them the prompts and the scenarios and continuing to build off that has really elevated my thinking skills, but also helped me prompt to ask better questions, but also take all of the stuff that I applied on ChatGPT and take that back to the client.

So now, not only do I look more creative, but I have more suggestions and solutions. You can see them really get excited. Sometimes I’m limited to my experiences and my consulting jobs and stuff that I’ve had, but ChatGPT just kind of opens up an AI, opens up a different world where it’s taken prompts from every other consultant, let’s say, that’s asked the same thing, and now it’s spitting back different scenarios where I can take my client through. Maybe I didn’t think about, well, what happens to the ratings and the survey that are conducted as well surveys, what do you want to do? How do you want to reward the agent? Because I think that’s really important. And you can tell that the customer gets so happy, they’re like, “Oh, I didn’t think about that.” “Well, no problem, ChatGPT got you.” So it’s been a huge, huge, huge, huge game changer, not just within my job, but content all over.

Mike:
Yeah, same. Also, I feel like somebody the other day said, “Well, you need to treat it kind of like if you had an intern.” I was like, “No, don’t say that because I’ll ask it too many questions that are like, ‘I don’t know where you’re going with this, Mike.’ Well, I’m just asking just to see if you knew.” But thinking through as an admin, looking at getting started as a career, I know I was always asked, what’s the most important thing that I could learn as a Salesforce admin or what’s the first thing I should learn? And you think of the large ecosystem of what’s available to learn, and there’s a lot of different ways that you can learn the platform. But to put your hat on, if you were getting started as a Salesforce admin today, where would you get started in terms of not where to learn, but in terms of what to learn?

Megan:
That’s a really great question, and I think I had an advantage because I was working with the platform as an end user, so I understood where to start and I had help, especially with my family member at the time. And especially being a part of Salesforce military, they have a very set-up structured path for you to learn. But being a content creator, I oftentimes hear like, “Hey, I saw your video. I really want to start Salesforce. Where do I start?” And I think there’s so much out there, whether it just be Salesforce material, if you’re a developer, what coding material do I need to use? There’s so much. This ecosystem of tech in general is so, so big. But if I was to start right now, I would start with the basic functionality because you need to understand how do use Salesforce. You need to understand where’s this, what’s this do, where’s that?

And then once you understand, I would combine it. Be very structured about your journey. I know it’s very tempting sometimes to kind of grab onto this or that because everything’s being pushed out at such a fast pace. But really AI, I think whether you want to be a consultant, a BA, a developer, being able to keep up with the trends of today, and you don’t need to overwhelm yourself of course, but just know what’s going on. How do you use AI? And I think Salesforce has the associate Salesforce AI cert, which doesn’t dive too deep, but it really covers the basics of what is AI, what can I do? And then it navigates you to ChatGPT. And then there’s fantastic articles where you can go on and kind of… The article that I mentioned earlier from Salesforce spend, how to be able to use chat to prompt it better and you kind of elevate yourself through that way.

So I would definitely start with the functionality, make sure you’ve got that. And then compliment it with AI because these are skills that you’re going to need to have when you go for that first job, when you’re in that first job because you need to be able to talk with your stakeholders, talk with your team, and then on top of it, just set that cherry on top. If you have great ideas, you can also kind of use AI to say, “Hey, I thought about this for my team. What do you think about X, Y, Z?” And then it can prompt you with better ideas for you to be a great team player. So I definitely think the basics, AI, and then kind of follow with Sales and Service Cloud, because those are going to compliment many of the other clouds that you have.

Mike:
Yeah, it’s interesting you said start with the platform first because for some of us, we don’t even see a platform. It’s just Salesforce. And I know I have members on my team that are the exact opposite. They don’t even see Salesforce, they just see a platform and to walk through different scenarios of problem solving. Some of us hit limitations faster than others, and that can be kind of interesting just based on your perspective and your lens. And then you add in that layer of agent force and AI and it’s like, okay, well what questions are we going to ask it? Well, what are the answers and where are they to begin with?

You have to think of if I don’t know the platform and Sales Cloud, if I start asking questions and build an agent, I better know where it’s going to grab those answers from. Oh, it’s ever-changing world. Speaking of content creator, I’m sure you do a lot of presentations and crafting stuff together, so do admins. When you’re getting ready or you’re putting together a demo or a presentation, what is some advice that you have that maybe as somebody that’s done it for a while or even a beginning Salesforce admin at a company, some best practices to kind of help them demo their new app or talk about something in front of a large group of people?

Megan:
And I think for a lot of people, if you’re new to tech, it can be kind of scary or exciting, like a mix of emotions really, because you really… Just to go off the example of showing off an app, you really put a lot of effort into this and you really want the users to be able to like it, but it’s going to be a little daunting sometimes. You’re talking to heads of departments, and I would say I’ve totally been there, kind of still do get a little nervous because you put all this time into something and you really want the people to like it and the users to benefit from it.

So I think the number one suggestion that I would have is think about the user at the end of the day, because no matter if you sit with the business executives, they do know their client, but at the end of it, you have the same end game. It’s for your user. And if you go in there confidently focusing on, “Hey, I thought about this business process, which could expedite the agents and how they’re working, overall customer satisfaction and increase efficiency with the agents.” These things that are helping at the end game. I think if you go in with that thought first, then your heart’s in the right spot and everything else can follow.

Now in terms of presentation, I would definitely say this is your time to work with a peer. It’s time to bounce ideas off of with your coworkers. “Does this sound good? Am I making my point clear?” Because sometimes if we read our own article… I’m guilty of this, I’ll read my article, I’m like, “Oh, this is fantastic.” I’ll pass it off to somebody else. And they’re like, “What did you mean here?” So just passing it to somebody for peer review is definitely always helpful.

And then I would say maybe the last thing is a lot of visuals. One thing as a content creator and as a business analyst now is we all sit through meetings. We all have that Monday through Friday, 9:00 to 5:00 things can get overwhelming. There’s a lot of text. And one thing that’s helped me as a content creator is just making learning fun, making it understandable, making sure that you’re still getting the text side across, but also making the user excited and engaged and want to actively be on the platform. So that would be my little suggestion right there is just making it fun and going into it with excitement because your energy feeds off to the user and who you’re talking to.

Mike:
Yeah, I definitely have seen people present and/or train when they were excited and knew the content versus, I won’t say not excited, but a little less than enthused and new to the content and the vibe comes off very different. And I feel like sometimes people learn more from your vibe than the words that you’re saying, and that level of confidence can really pay off.

Megan:
It does, exactly.

Mike:
So let’s go in the opposite direction. What is one thing that people overestimate about themselves when starting a career in technology or learning about AI or Salesforce?

Megan:
That is a great question. I think soft skills. I think soft skills. One of the things that I was challenged with when I was a business analyst and my first position was coming in and needing to understand different business processes. When I started my first business analyst position, I was working with five to six clients and it ranged from sales service, marketing and Pardot, and that’s just the clouds. And then every business did something different. One was healthcare. A lot of them were hospitals and one was a marketing agency.

There were so many different things that I was doing at once, where despite me learning… Because you’re balancing, you’re learning the tech, you’re also learning about the business. And I felt so confident on the tech and it’s a lot to juggle, but when I went into the business, they would kind of run through, “This is our business process, what could we do to improve it?” And it’s like, “Wait, wait, I thought I got this.” I thought I went through the website and understood things. I thought I had these sessions with them where I was breaking down things to understand their business better. But sometimes you’re going to have to figure out how to ask the same question in different ways, and you’re going to have to be okay with saying like, “Hey, I didn’t get this and what you were saying it, can you take some time to explain to me a little bit more in detail?”

And I think those are some of the challenges that people face because we’re not in the business that our clients do all the time. We don’t know exactly what goes on, but we know what to do for them. But we also need to balance configuring and advising with understanding their business. And I think learning to be okay to ask questions to follow up with clients and really show them that you’re fully invested, they’ll hear you. And I think at the end of the day, clients want to know that you have their back and being able to show that, they’ll work with you. So that was a challenging part for me. Some things I’ve seen from my coworkers as well, and being able to kind of talk through it.

Mike:
I could totally see that. Sorry, I was lost in thought. I was thinking of something else and it was like, “Wait a minute, silence. Let’s talk.” The thing I was thinking through, so overestimate that. Another question that I’ve always seen, I think actually we got this in the military office hours… About to say happy hour again, military happy hour office hours that we got was social presence. And I think too unfairly, there’s oftentimes where people put together panels, and to be fair, Jennifer Lee was on this panel and Warren, myself, even though I guess when you’ve had a social profile since dirt was invented, you’ve got a social presence. But I think too fairly, people are often put up on a pedestal, look at all these people and they have these huge social presence and people getting started in tech or admins even in tech are like, “Oh, well I have to do all that.”

What do you advise maybe people that are switching careers because that can be a starting brand new or people just getting into tech as kind of like what is the minimum thing that you should do to make sure you have a solid internet profile, I’ll call it?

Megan:
And I think that’s a fantastic question, and especially working with a lot of people who start their tech careers, like Salesforce careers. That is one of the number one questions that I would say in the top five questions that people ask is everybody’s doing so much. Their personal branding, they’re attending networking, they’re learning, and it’s so much, especially if you have a family, if you have… You’re working two jobs, whatever the case may be, there is the idea that people have to do a lot and I think it’s very easy to get overwhelmed, especially with new certs coming out and the demand for needing to do A, B, C and D. The biggest thing that when I hear people say this and I’ve fallen guilty to this as well, it’s just taking a step back and I really needed to guide myself and others and take this advice.

It’s just about painting a picture. To our point, we were talking about Canva earlier. Canva is fantastic for having a vision board, and I think that’s something that from watching other YouTubers in tech, I’ve seen people be really successful with this. Is when they create a vision board of where they see themselves, let’s say in two years, I don’t want to jump to five or 10, but just keeping your goal small and achievable. I think that’s number one step. But number two, creating that vision board of where you see yourself and what certs are going to help you get to where you need to go. I think that’s a great starting point because it helps you keep aligned, it helps you keep in your lane of where you want to go. And then if you do have a new cert that comes out, then you’re able to figure out, “Okay, I want to do this. I’m excited to do it.”

I always tell people to act on the excitement. If you have it in you and it doesn’t take you away from your ultimate goal, go for it because then you’re going to start thinking about it. But kind of keep yourself aligned and then it allows you for more opportunity to be like, “Oh, this might be good for my career. I can put it in, or “This may not be good for my career, so I’m not going to put it in.” It really helps you see clear, and I’m actually going to be setting up my 2025 vision board and going to be doing it as a YouTube video, just to be able to help people. Yeah, I think just having that vision board is really helpful.

Mike:
That’s the perfect segue into exactly the question I had, which was what is one big thing you hope to accomplish next year?

Megan:
Yeah, I actually took on a new position as a senior business analyst. It’s a kind of multi-role QA lead and product owner, but I have my own team. It’s of two gentlemen and both of them got promoted this year. So I found that I really like leading teams. I’m also kind of working as the head of the development team that we have. I led a QA specialist… Not a QA. I led a UX designer this year, and I really fell in love with building up people, and I would love to be able to continue that. I just got a new project where I’ll be more of the functional lead, leading all of the teams.

So while I think it’s going to be a challenge, I would love to be able to learn more of how to lead efficiently and be able to get my people promoted, teach others how to be a good leader. Managers make a huge difference in your career, whether you’re supported, listened to, and I want to be that for people. So that’s my goal is as I come into the new project, come the new year and lead this huge team, I’m excited and all types of nervous for it. But the goal is just to be somebody that they can look back in 10 years and hopefully when they get into a manager position, be like, “I want to lead like her,” because I lead other leaders that have made an impact in my life.

Mike:
I think that’s a very cool goal. Thanks for sharing it.

Megan:
Thank you.

Mike:
Well, Megan, appreciate you coming on the pod and breaking out of your YouTube videos and trying a new medium, maybe that was on your vision board for 2024.

Megan:
It really was. So thank you.

Mike:
If not, you can always say it is, nobody can check it. It’s like what I always tell people when you give a speech, nobody knows your script.

Megan:
It’s okay. We can vote for the happy hour now.

Mike:
Exactly. But no, thanks for coming on the podcast and giving us that advice and helping us share things together. And I’ll be sure to link to your YouTube page, that way people can check it out because you do a nice mix of shorts and videos and real life and Salesforce, and it feels very honest and attainable. So I appreciate that.

Megan:
Yeah, of course. That’s the goal, and thank you so much for having me on.

Mike:
Well, that was a fantastic conversation we had. I hope you found it helpful. If so, be sure to share it with somebody who might benefit from Megan’s insights. If you’re on Apple Podcast, just tap the three dots to share it or spread the word on social. And don’t forget, admin.salesforce.com is your one-stop shop for all the resources, including a full transcript of this episode. Now, be sure to join us in the Admin Trailblazers group to keep the conversation going. Don’t worry. Again, you’ll find those links in the show notes. So until next week, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post How Agentforce Is Changing the Career Landscape appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Gillian Bruce, Director of Developer Marketing at Slack. Join us as we chat about how Agentforce allows you to bring Salesforce to Slack, and why every admin should learn how to build Slack solutions.

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

Why Salesforce Admins should build on Slack

If you’re a longtime listener to the pod, you’ve got to be excited about this week’s guest. Gillian was my co-host for years, and I thought we should bring the dynamic duo back together to talk about her new gig as Director of Developer Marketing at Slack.

Ever since she went over to the Slack team, Gillian’s been struck by how friendly the platform is for admins. There are tons of solutions that you can implement with low or no code, and powerful features like Slack Canvas and Slack Lists that give you a lot of flexibility without the need for customizations.

All this is a cinch if you’re used to building things in Salesforce. And when you hear what Gillian has to say about combining Agentforce with Slack, you’ll want to get started today.

Bringing Agentforce to Slack

In our episode with Jim Ray about Slack integrations, he told us how Slack can be a multi-purpose tool. There are over 2,600 integrations currently out there, letting you bring information from Jira, or Workday, or Salesforce, directly into Slack. While that could be a lot of information to sift through, Agentforce is here to lend a helping hand.

You can now use Agent Builder to create employee-facing AI agents for Slack. There are special Slack actions, like searching and summarizing data in Slack, creating or updating a Slack Canvas, and sending DMs. This gives admins all sorts of new ways to integrate Salesforce into your business processes with less friction and more wow.

The future of Agentforce and Slack

Agentforce is new and we know it can be hard to get your head around everything that it can do. That’s why Slack is building some templates for employee-facing AI agents. For example, a product specialist agent that can give you quick answers so you don’t have to comb through pages of documentation.

If there’s one thing Gillian wants you to take away from this episode, it’s that Salesforce Admins should start building on Slack. “It’s going not only set yourself up to be super valuable to your organization in this era of agents,” she says, “but it also is going to open up so much more possibility for you career-wise.”

There’s so much more in this episode about tricks for Slack and why you should look out for Gillian at your next Dreamin’ event, so be 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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Full Transcript

Mike:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re thrilled to have Gillian Bruce back with us. Gillian, who now leads the Slack ecosystem marketing team and is on a mission to show why every Salesforce admin should be jumping into Slack and using it to not only build custom agents, but also amazing workflows and incredible integrations that Slack can do.

Gillian explains why learning and leveraging Slack is simply a must for an admin. I mean, it’s so easy to use. I love it. Now, before we jump in, I want to make sure that you’re following the Salesforce Admins Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. That way, you can catch every new episode immediately when it comes out on Thursdays. So be sure to hit the follow button on whatever podcast platform you’re listening for. So now, let’s welcome Gillian back and talk about Slack and Agentforce.

So Gillian, welcome back to the podcast.

Gillian:
Mike, thanks for having me.

Mike:
I know, you’ve been over overly communicating with people.

Gillian:
It’s been a while since I’ve been on the pod with you, it feels like I just rewound the clock quite a while.

Mike:
I know, in the Wayback Machine. Don’t forget, we have the Wayback Machine. I don’t have the fancy noisemaker, you just got to put it in your head and envision that. What have you been up to since we’ve last talked on ye olde podcast?

Gillian:
Oh, just a few things, you know? A few changes.

Mike:
Okay. Still all about admins, obviously.

Gillian:
Admins are always in my heart, and it’s actually been quite fun, because about, what, eight months ago at this point, I have transitioned over to Slack to lead up their ecosystem marketing team, which includes developers, community, and partners. And one of the big things I’m focused on is, as I’ve gotten to know the Slack community over here, is helping all Salesforce admins understand how awesome Slack is, and how important it is that you learn how to build and use Slack.

Mike:
Yeah, I mean, you know me, I use Slack for a ton of things, and I love building out forms and workflows in Slack. It’s so admin friendly.

Gillian:
It is very admin friendly, and the thing that I think is so interesting to me, as I’ve been getting to know the Slack community, and people who are Slack developers, and Slack builders, is there are so many commonalities and opportunities between the Salesforce, admin, and Builder audience and the Slack Builder audience. And when you’re building something with Workflow Builder. It’s very similar to building a flow. In fact, building something with Workflow Builder in Slack is, to me, honestly a lot easier than building an automation with Flow and Salesforce.

Mike:
Kind of is, a little bit.

Gillian:
A lot more straightforward, and part of that is because the platform is built to do a different thing than Salesforce is. But there’s so much you can do with being able to point and click, and do these low-code builds and low-code solutions in Slack. And it doesn’t even mean building a lot of customizations. We’ve got things like Slack canvas, and now we have Slack Lists, which are amazing for your to-do lists, if you haven’t tried those out yet. And just generally using channels and building automation between channels to help manage your notifications and work processes, there’s a lot there. But of course, there’s something on the top of everyone’s mind these days.

Mike:
I mean, I would love to talk all of the workflow stuff, but we’re Agentforce, Gillian, we have to cover agents.

Gillian:
Well, and agents are a big deal, and I think especially agents… So let’s put my developer hat on for a second. So in the Slack developer community, people have been building agents for quite a while, and they’ve been building their own agents and deploying them into Slack. There’s also agents that are already on the Slack marketplace built by our third-party vendor, so like Adobe Express, and Writer, and Cohere. They already have agents that you can interact with in Slack, but the amazing thing with Agentforce is that it’s bringing that Salesforce builder experience to being able to enable you to build your own custom agents. And Mike, I just want to take a second here. Admins, agents, I know it might feel a little overwhelming, but let’s back it up. What is an admin’s number one customer?

Mike:
Our users, always our users.

Gillian:
Our users, and so-

Mike:
Yes, I didn’t know there was a quiz. You didn’t tell me there was a quiz.

Gillian:
Sorry, I can’t just come on the pod and just be a normal guest. You know that.

Mike:
Ugh, I’m going to build an agent in Slack for the quiz now. That’s what it should be.

Gillian:
There you go. Okay, so an admin’s number one customer is the end user, which we also call an employee. Let’s say that, right? If you’re a part of an organization, you’re an employee, what is the best operating system to enable employees to collaborate with each other and with other systems?

Mike:
I feel like I have to say Slack, because you’re on-

Gillian:
Yeah, you do. It is the best one. I mean, we can debate that, but…

Mike:
I wasn’t going to. It’s like being on Family Feud.

Gillian:
Okay, so then, the third question is, so if an admin’s number one customer are the employees, and the best way to bring employees together to collaborate and to interact with other systems is Slack, then where is the best place to bring those custom agents that you’re building in Agent Builder?

Mike:
I mean, you should build them in Slack, right?

Gillian:
Ding, ding, ding. Mike, you pass.

Mike:
I tried. I was fighting really hard, I was going to say Chatter.

Gillian:
Oh, well, you know what? We can actually talk about Chatter for a second, too.

Mike:
We should.

Gillian:
We should. So real quick on the Chatter of it all, so I love Chatter. A lot of us love Chatter. Remember the highlight? What do they call it, a Chatter brag. It was a Chag.

Mike:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, a Chag. Yeah, we had templates.

Gillian:
We sure did, yeah.

Mike:
Yeah, formatting.

Gillian:
So Parker very publicly announced that, while he helped build Chatter, he is now going to help kill Chatter. And I know this might give us some heart palpitations, but let me just be really clear. Chatter is getting a major glow-up if you think about it, because we have something called Salesforce channels that are in Slack. And what this is is one of the best things about Chatter is it had a feed on every record, right? So everyone could talk about what’s going on.

Well, we already have Salesforce channels live in Slack, as of Dreamforce. This means that you can have a dedicated record channel that automatically gets spin-up for that record in Slack. So you have a channel there where you can collaborate, you can talk about it, you can interact with folks, you can bring other systems data in right there. Coming in February, that same UI, that channel experience is going to be visible in Salesforce for those records.

Mike:
Well, that’s going to be incredibly useful, because I think that was always the disconnect. You know, I’m over here for one thing, and then I’m over there for another thing. And I mean, Slack is already such a conversational UI. It makes sense that I should think about not only building agents in the Salesforce UI, but in Slack as well, because that’s where people are already talking.

Gillian:
So, yeah, and two things on that, Mike, right? So one, it’s a place where people are already talking. It’s the place where they’re being able to interact with systems beyond Salesforce as well, right? So maybe they have Workday in there, maybe they’re pulling in JIRA tickets. There’s a lot of other systems that integrate with Slack, so that people don’t have to leave and swivel chair out of that interface into something else. So by putting your agent in there, bringing that Salesforce experience into Slack, you’re again making it much more efficient for people to get their work done.

But then, that second piece of it, Mike, is that Slack is going to be the way that you’re going to be able to not just bring that systems and all of that data together, all those people together, but those agents are going to be able to interact there in Slack with you, and you’re going to be able to tell that agent to do things that are pulling from Salesforce, from all of your data cloud sources, and take action right there in Slack. And you’re going to be able to, come March, actually have that in a threaded conversation. So you’re going to be able to interact multiplayer style. So you’ll have a conversation with an agent and other people can join in in that conversation.

Mike:
And they can converse with the agent?

Gillian:
Correct.

Mike:
Oh, boy, we’re going to keep agents busy. Do you think of agents like interns? Somebody said that the other day. It’s like, if you’re trying to think of what to build an agent for, think of what if you had an intern?

Gillian:
Well, I mean, yes and no. I’d like to think that when you have an intern, you’re spending a lot more time training them, and mentoring them, and…

Mike:
Not us, we get smart interns

Gillian:
Giving them unique opportunities.

Mike:
More than just getting coffee.

Gillian:
Well, yeah. Can you find me an agent that can get you coffee? I guess you could probably-

Mike:
That would be awesome.

Gillian:
… build an agent that could order you coffee and get it delivered.

Mike:
That would 100% win every hackathon, an Agentforce that just all of a sudden, out of your screen comes a cup of coffee.

Gillian:
Well, so-

Mike:
You’re like, “Mike, this isn’t what I wanted to talk about.”

Gillian:
No, it’s good. Actually, you know what? But having your agent take an action… So one of the things I did want to highlight is when we’re talking about Agentforce and Slack, so there are kind of three main elements when you’re talking about Agentforce and Slack that are important to think about. Number one, deploying your agents in Slack, right. Taking that agent you’ve built with Agent Builder and bringing it into Slack. That second thing is having your agent take Slack actions. So in Agent Builder, you’re going to be able to tell your agent to do things with Slack, like search Slack data, so that unstructured data in Slack. These are going to be actions available in Agent Builder. You’re also going to be able to tell your agent to create or update a Slack canvas, which is pretty great. Again, you’re a fan of canvas.

Mike:
Oh, yeah. We use it a lot.

Gillian:
Great way to aggregate and share information. The other Slack action that’s going to be available is be able to send a DM. So that’s that simple kind of direct, one-on-one, agentic experience of being able to talk to an agent. So those are going to be actions that are available natively in Agent Builder that anyone can use. Additionally, the team is going to be working on a lot more, including… I just heard about this the other day. So they’re actually going to build some template agents, some template employee-facing agents. So things like imagine a product specialist.

So you’re in Slack, and you have a question about how a product works, because you are in a conversation with a customer or you’re trying to answer a question, instead of having to go search all of the documentation and figure out, “Oh, who’s the right product manager to reach out about this?” You can just ask the agent right there in Slack your question and get served up an answer, as well as, “Hey, how do you want me to format this answer? Is this for a sales customer? Is this for a sales engineer?” And that is just one use case that I get excited about, because I’m always knee deep in product, and I can never keep up on everything. So that’s one good example, and that’s a template that’s going to be available, so that people can take that, put that in Agent Builder, and then customize it to sort from their own knowledge base.

Mike:
So when you’re thinking of agents, I mean, you probably know this, like with Salesforce, we can control the agent on the profile, and well, not profile, permission set and perm set group. If you’re deploying agents in Slack, is it to all the users, or can you do the same thing? Can you like, “Ah, I really want a test group of users to have access to this agent”?

Gillian:
Yeah, so the first thing I’ll say is that no agent you deploy to Agent Builder or you deploy to Slack will override any of your Salesforce permission structure. So all the security settings you have about visibility and who’s able to edit and make updates to different records, all of those permissions are going to carry over into Slack. So there’s never going to be a situation where you have an agent in Slack, interacting with someone who doesn’t have access to the data that they’re requesting, things like that, so it will never override.

The next thing to that is you might have a situation where you have part of your company, part of your employee base that actually doesn’t even work in Salesforce. They don’t even need Salesforce seats, but you want to build an agent experience for them, in Agent Builder that extends an agent functionality to them, so you don’t actually have to buy a Salesforce seat for them. Maybe you have a group of, I don’t know, marketers who never go into Salesforce, which is probably a bad use case, maybe, but-

Mike:
We’ll say warehouse workers. Warehouse workers.

Gillian:
Warehouse workers, right? Yeah, who don’t have to log in, [inaudible 00:13:01]-

Mike:
They’re driving forklifts all day, they don’t have time for the Salesforce.

Gillian:
Exactly. But what you could do is build an agent in Agent Builder that enables those warehouse workers to be able to be in Slack, maybe ask questions about inventory, when certain products are going to be available, and all of that information that they’re going to be able to see is, again, permissions that you control in the Salesforce side of what’s publicly available, what are people able to see, what level of permissions are accessed. But that’s a way you can extend all that information that’s otherwise just held within Salesforce, beyond Salesforce, into Slack, in that agentic experience.

Mike:
Yeah. I mean, we’ve talked about before, and Gillian, this was even back before you joined Slack, but I do think you look at the way that conversational AI and even some of the voiceover apps are going, Slack could be the front door for everything Salesforce within your organization, and then you button up data cloud on top of that. Now, they basically could, via Slack, have access to the right data anywhere in the organization, conversationally.

Gillian:
And not just Salesforce data, but data in Workday, or Asana, or any of the other of the 2,700 integration apps that we have out there in the marketplace that connect all of your systems in one place, and that is Slack.

Mike:
Yeah, that’s crazy.

Gillian:
I’m not going to lie, I’m pretty happy to be over here. I do feel like Slack is the future, and this is why I am extremely passionate about helping every Salesforce admin understand that they should be using Slack, they should be learning how to build in Slack, because it is going to be something that opens up the world beyond just Salesforce for folks in a builder capacity. And it just, I mean, imagine the value you can deliver your organization by saying, “Hey, just by using Slack as our work OS, we can bring in these six different systems that people have to log into at some point every week, and I can deploy these agents there that reduce their time of work by hours every week or hours every day.” I mean, that level of efficiency and productivity you can deliver, I mean, that is one of the number one goals of every Salesforce admin.

Mike:
Yeah. Well, and I don’t know what Slack battles with in the marketplace, but I have to believe the nice thing I like about Slack is, even if you spin up a channel and then you archive it, you can still go back and search it, and you can still… It’s like you never lose that information. And I know we used to have, I don’t know, Google had the instant messenger and stuff. The second you closed your window, it was gone, and that information, it was like Snapchat, it was just gone. But at least with Slack, it’s retained for a little bit that you can actually make it actionable and be like, “Oh, I did need to pull this thing back up,” as opposed to scrolling through a huge Chatter thread or something.

Gillian:
Oh, yeah, I use command K at least 20 times a day.

Mike:
Oh, is that what it is? That’s a shortcut?

Gillian:
A shortcut, and command K is not just search, it’s like recent history search, so-

Mike:
Oh.

Gillian:
Yeah.

Mike:
Oh, I didn’t know this. I just go [inaudible 00:16:22]-

Gillian:
Command K all day.

Mike:
… like old screwball. You know, I still use a mouse. I’m very mouse centric for a reason.

Gillian:
Well, mosey your fingers on over from the mouse to do command K, and you’ll be able to find-

Mike:
I suppose.

Gillian:
… recent things so, so much more quickly.

Mike:
I suppose. I don’t know. Tell me a little bit more about these channels. So one of the things that I think I struggled with as an admin was advising users on how much and what they should follow and when. Because with Slack, it’s tempting you, just like, “I got to pay attention to everything, because FOMO, and there’s this going on.” And it can be that way with your data and records, too. How do you think about channels, and following those, and having that information?

Gillian:
So one of the hardest things that I have experienced in transitioning from the Salesforce core side to the Slack side is the proliferation of Slack channels that I am part of, so-

Mike:
Ah. I mean, you don’t email at all. I can’t imagine you send-

Gillian:
No, I-

Mike:
When was the last time you sent an email? Like, two years ago, probably.

Gillian:
Yeah, I check it maybe once or twice a week, which is really bad, because then, sometimes I miss stuff, but-

Mike:
Eh, don’t [inaudible 00:17:37].

Gillian:
… you can find me on Slack. But for the channel organization, and I think this really relates to kind of, as we were talking about, the evolution of Chatter to Salesforce channels, you might just hear like, “Ugh, the last thing I want is another channel.” But here’s the thing, so there are two things that I think are really helpful for this. Number one, Slack AI is awesome. So Slack AI enables you to do recaps and summaries that you can check when you are ready for it, and it will automatically update, depending on how long ago it was you checked it.

So let’s say the last time you checked, I don’t know, the marketing updates channel was a week ago. It’ll say, it’ll recap the last seven days in one paragraph for you, versus every day, there’s a recap that you have to go through. That is very helpful. The other thing that’s very helpful is just asking Slack search to summarize for you. So you’re going, “Tell me what’s going on with X, Y, Z project,” and it will give you the highlights, as well as links to all the source information there. That is really useful. I love Slack AI for that. It helps really kind of sift, and sort, and prioritize the information for me. The other thing that we now have, and you may have seen it, this is brand new, is we have what’s called a VIP, so-

Mike:
I have had VIP.

Gillian:
You’ve seen this? Yeah.

Mike:
I’ve tried it. Let’s talk about it, please tell me. Tell me more.

Gillian:
So you can identify specific users as VIPs, and what that does is it gives this little teeny, tiny, little VIP like emoji right next to their name. It’ll automatically prioritize any DM or channel message that that person has that you are involved with to the top of your sidebar there. So it’ll be the first thing that you see. So I put for my VIPs, it’s like my management chain, my Agentforce group that I’m really working with every single day, and that is helpful for me, because then I don’t have to manually update which channels should be in my priority bucket every day. It’s just, “These are the people I have to pay attention to, and I know that I’m working on something hot with them, so I need to prioritize them in how I look at my Slack feed.”

Mike:
Yep. I did VIPs for like a day, and then I need to come back to it, because the only thing I needed is I need to be able to move that list, just where on the sidebar. I wanted to move the list, that would be it.

Gillian:
Oh.

Mike:
Yeah, yeah, because it sticks it right at the top, and it’s like, “Here’s where it’s going to be,” and it’s like chiseled in stone. It’s like, “Yeah, no, can I have it farther down?” I’d also like… Oh, you know what would be really cool? Besides VIPs is just like my team, because that’s one of the sections, I think that’s what it’s called, right? Sections.

Gillian:
Yep.

Mike:
That’s one of the sections I have, is just all my team members in one area, so that when they DM me, I only have to look in one thing.

Gillian:
Yep, yep. I mean, these are all things, so there’s a lot of features that-

Mike:
But it’s so easy to use. It’s so easy to do that that I was like, “Okay, I’ll come back to VIP.”

Gillian:
Well, and there’s, actually, coming out for the next few months, pay attention, because there’s a lot of features that we’re putting in this bucket calling Quiet the Noise for Slack.

Mike:
Ooh, ooh.

Gillian:
And these are honestly, a lot of them are based off of feedback we’ve gotten internally at Salesforce for people who are overwhelmed by the amount of channels or the amount of DMs, and trying to really figure out how to streamline the experience, to make it more pleasant and easier to get the information that you care most about, without having to sort through a whole bunch of different updates.

Mike:
Right, summarize things. Help me summarize-

Gillian:
Summarize things, prioritize them, be smart in terms of how you’re displaying things and enabling… Like, some of the things that you’ve talked about, Mike, just in terms of like, “Here’s a group for my team,” more features along those lines. So stay tuned. Over the next few months, there’s going to be a few more of those coming out, and I think people are going to really like them.

Mike:
I agree. And also, if you’re an admin, sitting there thinking, “How do I get all of this? Where do I start the conversation?” I think a lot of it, we’re working on redoing the core responsibilities. We’ve had a fifth core responsibility, which is product management fits well into this, because agents need to be product managed. There’s no good way to say that, that just-

Gillian:
Agents need managers.

Mike:
Agents need, yeah, whatever. But the thing that I’m thinking of is like, so how do I get this conversation going with Slack, assuming the admin doesn’t have Slack in their organization? And sitting down with the user, saying, “What do you search on?” Because that, to me, sounds like 90% of the benefit of Slack, besides the conversation, is just being able to search for stuff. And then, you throw an agent on top of that, and it’s like, “Good, I’ll be back in three months when you have some real problems.”

Gillian:
Well, and it’s, “What are you searching for? What applications are you working in all the time? What are you swivel chairing between?” And then, yeah, “What are you trying to get done?” And if you have those three answers, then you could easily whip up a solution in Slack. And I will tell you, for people who want to get hands-on with Slack who don’t have it at their organizations, first of all, anyone can get access to a free Slack workspace. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles, but you can… There’s plenty [inaudible 00:23:08]-

Mike:
It’s good enough, you can build a demo out of, right? You built demos before?

Gillian:
Totally. And actually, and one of the other thing we have is we have an actual Slack developer program, and admins, don’t get scared that it’s called a developer program. It’s basically just a way that you can go tinker around and build things with Slack, you can spin up a Slack Sandbox, and it’s totally free. You can go to slack.dev, I’m sorry to say it, it’s my new favorite website I just built it-

Mike:
Yes, okay. Eventually, while you’re over there, Gillian, you’ll have Slack admins.

Gillian:
You know, we are already talking about Slack admins quite a bit.

Mike:
We should.

Gillian:
We are. We got a lot of work to do over here, Mike. So we’re starting.

Mike:
That’s okay. I’m going to be busy challenging people to say Slack Sandbox five times fast, not mess that up.

Gillian:
But, so you can get access to a Slack Sandbox, and this is forward-looking statement, soon, you will be able to build an employee-facing agent with Agent Builder that is connected and deployed to Slack in Trailhead.

Mike:
Ooh. Ooh, that’d be awesome.

Gillian:
Yeah, so the team are-

Mike:
Oh, I’m going to do that.

Gillian:
… working on it right now. We’re hoping we might be able to get something out by TDX. So really working towards that. But already, and this was kind of released a little silently, but on Halloween, so trick or treat, we now have hands-on content for Slack in Trailhead. So if you want to learn how to build a Slack app using our Bolt framework, or if you want to learn how to use Block Kit Builder, you now have hands-on content in Trailhead for those two modules that will actually have you spin up a Slack developer environment, do the work in there, follow the instructions, and Trailhead will check it and verify it. So even as someone… I don’t think of myself as much of a developer first. I always think myself as admin first. Believe me, admins, you can all do these modules. They’re not hard.

Mike:
Oh, Block Kit Builder is the coolest thing.

Gillian:
Yeah.

Mike:
I’ve been using Block Kit. We used Block Kit Builder before you even left the team. Block Kit Builder is the closest I can come to understanding code. It’s probably the only thing that would ever teach me how to code, if I had to.

Gillian:
I also remember the first time you started using it to post our podcast updates, and everyone was like, “Oh, my gosh, how do I do that? I totally-”

Mike:
“Oh, how’d you do that? It’s so cool, the formatting.” I’m like, “Yep, Block Kit Builder.” “Wow.” And then, and there’s templates. So it’s literally just copy and paste, and steal from other people’s templates. That’s all developers do, is copy and paste code, too. That’s [inaudible 00:25:41]-

Gillian:
You know, I’m learning that a lot. Yeah.

Mike:
Yep. When somebody has something that works, copy and paste, and then it works for you. Yay, done.

Gillian:
You tweak it, you test it, you break some stuff, and then you figure it out.

Mike:
So let’s see, this is going to be very interesting to see how much new Slack there is for TDX, because I was silently making a list in my head of the number of new stuff that you were talking about that’s coming out, and you’re like, “Well, hopefully March or something.” Like, that’s TDX time. TDX is going to be bigger than Dreamforce for you is what I’m hearing.

Gillian:
It is. And I mean, which is crazy to say, because we actually did five launches at Dreamforce this year.

Mike:
Oh, just a few.

Gillian:
Just a few. But between Dreamforce and TDX, we will be launching Agentforce and Slack, Quiet the Noise, Salesforce channels, and I think there’s like two other ones that I’m not remembering.

Mike:
You know, there’s holidays coming up. You guys should celebrate Festivus with the rest of us.

Gillian:
Well, it’s Agentforce. Everyone’s really excited.

Mike:
I’m going to Agentforce an aluminum pole and send it to your team.

Gillian:
Send it to our product team, my team’s okay. It’s the product team that’s burning the midnight oil, so shout out to them.

Mike:
Oh, I have to imagine. And they also, I know we have a unique instance, but it’s really cool, the relationship that we have, that your product team has with all of Salesforce, because they’re super responsive. Any time you submit something, they really… I submitted something on VIP and one of the PMs was like, “Help me understand this.” And I don’t think anybody had given them feedback. I’m like, “I am always a wealth of feedback.”

Gillian:
You know, one of the things I’ve noticed since coming over to Slack is Slack, even though we’re part of Salesforce, is still kind of a small company and it’s very human and people first, because that was the foundation of why Slack was created, was to connect people, right? And that is very much in the culture and inherent to how Slack thinks about building everything, is thinking about that user first, and how do we make it more pleasant? How do we make it more fun? How do we give you more custom emojis? But it’s a really great place to be, and again, I’ll just, not even shameless, just full on, if you are listening to this and you have not built anything with Slack, please take a beat, do a favor for yourself, go to slack.dev. There is a super simple workshop right there.

It’s called Build an Automation with Slack. It walks you through building your first workflow automation. That’s a great place to get started. There’s also great content on Trailhead. There are so many ways to get your hands on Slack and start building things beyond just responding in channel, and I really, really hope that you do that, because it’s going to set not only yourself up to be super valuable to your organization in this era of agents, but it also is going to open up so much more possibility for you career wise, because so many organizations are going to be using Slack as their employee agent delivery mechanism and an operating interface, that it’s just, you got to get on. This is the time, I’m telling you right now, everybody get on board with Slack.

Mike:
I’m thinking of the number of community, the Dreamin’ events, almost all of the Dreamin’ events I go to have a Slack channel, is that right term?

Gillian:
Yeah.

Mike:
Workspace?

Gillian:
The Slack workspace, yeah, and the Trailblazer community. I know there’s Ohana Slack. We have almost 100,000 people just in the Slack workspace alone who are Slack community members. And you mentioned Dreamin’ events, one of the big goals I have this year for us as a Slack marketing team is to be present and to deliver really valuable Slack content at most of those Dreamin’ events. So we want to be there, we’re going to work on a way to get there.

Mike:
Well, I’m also thinking of all the cool hands-on Trailhead module stuff that’s coming out. Like, if you build something, this is worth going to one of those community Dreamin’ events and presenting it, A, but B, also getting in touch with the coordinator and saying like, “How do you put this in your workspace?”

Gillian:
Exactly, yes.

Mike:
Especially for the Agentforce stuff. Can you imagine that? You could maybe even be in a workspace and just register for a Dreamin’ event, using an agent.

Gillian:
Look at that. Mike, you’re thinking next level. I like it.

Mike:
Just thinking ahead. I mean, I’m always thinking what I can ask my agent to do next. I also like saying that. That’s what admins should think of, like, “I’m so cool, I have my own agent.”

Gillian:
Well, once you start understanding what an agent can do, there’s a zillion different agents you want to build. I was just thinking this morning, “How great would it be if we had an agent in Slack that knew Slack, knew Salesforce documentation and developer stuff,” and you could literally ask it, say, “Hey, I want to build an agent in Agentforce that does X, Y, and Z, and give me the recipe for how to build it,” and it would give you like, “You need this flow, and you need this channel, and you need to enable this in your workspace, and you need to have…” It would basically tell you all the things you need to do, to then have that employee agent deployed and ready to go.

Mike:
Yeah. I am thinking of a Jarvis for Slack. That’s what I want.

Gillian:
Of course you are.

Mike:
It’s basically, I sit down, when you sit down at your desk, and it would be like the whole screen, the whole Slack screen would just turn white and say, “Good morning, Mike.” And it would say it in the Jarvis voice, not my voice, because I’m like George Costanza. If it was in my voice, it would be very weird. But it would be like, “Good morning, Mike. Here’s what you missed overnight,” because you know, we’re global companies, we work on different time zones, and it would just give you your morning recap that you could have over coffee, until the agent can build you coffee. That’s what I’m thinking. That would be the agent I want to build. I don’t know if I’ll get there, but I will try.

Gillian:
It’s pretty good. I mean, basically, what you need is an agent with a Jarvis voice to read your Slack recaps in the morning.

Mike:
I mean, I have to believe, leaning on some of the accessibility stuff, that you’re probably in that territory? We just really haven’t perfected that voiceover, because there’s other stuff too that can do text to speech, right?

Gillian:
Mm-hmm. Well, and one of the things that we rolled out earlier this year was Slack AI for huddles. So huddle is basically a Google Meet, but with Slack and-

Mike:
And a way more pleasant ringtone.

Gillian:
Oh, yeah. And you could choose your own hold music, it’s great. But what we have now is AI can capture the conversation, not only transcribe it, but then summarize it, and then continue to alter that summary based on the feedback you give them.

Mike:
Smart. That’s the best thing, that’s literally the best thin about some of the AI stuff is meeting summaries, especially when you can’t join them. You can just read through. We did that as a team a couple of weeks ago, when most of the team was out, and we sent the meeting summary, and Josh was like, “It was amazing.” I read it, and I was like, “Yep, that was 100%, I could envision what the meeting was like, but I didn’t have to sit through the hour and a half recording.”

Gillian:
Yeah, and then, it gives you suggested, like, “Here are the next steps. So-and-so should do this and so-and-so should do that.” It’s great.

Mike:
Gillian, you have a bunch of links that you’re going to send me, so I can include those in the show notes, and it was great to have you on. Thanks for coming back over to the platform side.

Gillian:
Hey, I am so happy to be back, and I am very happy to be at Slack, but I want all of you to know that Salesforce admins are still in the center of my heart. So as I’m thinking about everything we’re building over here, I am always thinking about, “How do we enable Salesforce admins to do all this cool stuff, too?” So thank you so much for having me, Mike, and it’s so nice to be back.

Mike:
So that was a fun episode, it was great to chat with Gillian. They are doing a lot of things over in Slack. I mean, I am all about Agentforce, and they are on the Agentforce train. Is it an Agentforce train? I’m going to say it’s an Agentforce train. And the amount of cool things that Slack has going on, and just thinking of the possibilities not only of what you can integrate for applications in Slack, but also then, once you have Data Cloud hooked up into Salesforce, the integrations across your entire organization, you can basically make your conversation or your data conversational, which to me sounds really cool. I can’t wait to see all of the stuff that they’ve got rolling out in the next few months. And boy, if you’re not registered for TDX, this to me seems like one of the many reasons to come, on top of just all of the Agentforce stuff that you got to learn.

Anyway, that was fun. I hope you enjoyed listening to the podcast. If you do, can you do me a favor? There should be like three dots in the app that you’re listening on. Usually, you can hit those, and then you can share the episode. You can share it via social. There’s a lot of different social channels out there, share it on your favorite social channel. Text it to your friends, or, hey, you know what? Post it in Slack. That seems very appropriate, to post the Slack podcast in Slack.

Of course, if you’re looking for more resources and all of the links that Gillian mentioned, your one stop, your one place to go, admin.salesforce.com is where you can find that, including a transcript of the show. That ought to be fun to read. You know what we didn’t talk about? We didn’t get a recipe this time. There’s always been a recipe with Gillian. I’m going to have to maybe go back and see. You know what, we’ll have to have her back on again, just to get a recipe for some holiday thing, because I feel like that’s what we used to do when she was on the podcast. So anyway, remember, also, join the conversation. The Admin Trailblazer group, that’s over in the Trailblazer community. Don’t worry, like I said, links are in the show notes. So with that, until next week, we’ll see you in the cloud.

Gillian:
I’m back.

Mike:
Oh, boy. I don’t even know how to begin this podcast with like… This is old pair of shoes, like weird.

The post Gillian Is Back to Talk Agentforce And Slack! appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Andrew Russo, Salesforce Architect at BACA Systems. Join us as we chat about Salesforce Foundations and why it’s a game changer for solo admins and small orgs.

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

The solo admin guide to Dreamforce

Andrew calls himself a Salesforce Archi-admin-eloper. At BACA Systems he’s a team of one, managing a complex org with all sorts of flows and customizations. Despite his busy schedule, he also manages to get himself out there to all sorts of Salesforce events, so I wanted to chat with him about what caught his eye at Dreamforce as a solo admin.

Like everyone else, Andrew is psyched about the possibilities for generative AI and Agentforce. He knows that data health and cleanliness are crucial in order to take advantage of these new features, and he’s already started a project to implement Salesforce Knowledge in his org. But what he’s really psyched about is Salesforce Foundations.

What’s so exciting about Salesforce Foundations?

Like many smaller companies, Andrew can’t easily do a pilot to test out larger features. “Having access to try things before you actually fully configure them is really helpful for us to look at where we can grow and move to with the platform,” he says.

Salesforce Foundations gives you access to all of the little features you wish you had from each cloud. For Andrew, they can swap over from using an external email marketing tool to doing everything in Salesforce. They’re also looking at implementing Salesforce Payments instead of doing it over the phone. While they may not be the shiniest tools in the toolbox, the time saved with these little features adds up in a small organization like Andrew’s.

Manage requests with a Salesforce roadmap

One thing that can get tricky as a solo admin is handling requests while keeping the org on track. Andrew keeps a Lucidchart roadmap for where they’d like to be with things like data cleanup and their Salesforce Knowledge project, which helps him balance short-term needs with long-term goals. “We’re not trying to implement features just because we have them,” he says, “it has to align with ‘our company goals.”

Andrew has more to share about tips for solo admins, why you should get started going to Salesforce events, and the best cold pizza, 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

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Social

• Andrew on X
• Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on X
• Mike on Bluesky social
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• Mike on X

Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt:

Hey there, Salesforce Admins. So, buckle up because today we got Andrew Russo on board, who’s not just managing the Salesforce org, but is essentially the captain of a one-man cruise ship. That’s the analogy that we made. So, you like that? I said on board. No, but seriously, this guy is juggling a lot of flows, customizations, and data, much like we all are, and he’s steering the ship solo, so single Salesforce admin.

Now, in today’s chat, we’re talking about everything from taming data gremlins to rolling out Salesforce Knowledge, but big is what he found impactful at Dreamforce this year, which was Salesforce Foundations. And we’re also getting some insight into how Andrew’s planning on keeping his org ready for the next wave of AI. And of course, we reminisce a little bit about Dreamforce, and it wouldn’t be a Salesforce Admins podcast without food. This time we’re talking pizza. No surprise.

So, before we get Andrew on though, make sure you’re following the Salesforce Admins Podcast on your favorite podcast app or wherever you listen to podcasts. That way, as soon as a new episode becomes available, it will download. So, that being said, let’s get Andrew on the podcast. So, Andrew, welcome to the podcast.

Andrew Russo:

Thank you for having me.

Mike Gerholdt:

Absolutely. Well, it’s been a little bit since you’ve been on, so let’s refresh everybody’s memory. What have you been up to and what do you do in the Salesforce ecosystem?

Andrew Russo:

So, right now, my role is as the Salesforce architect, admin, developer. I mean, we’re a small company at BACA Systems, so I’m the solo Salesforce resource. So, I kind of play a lot of hats and I manage our entire org. So, that’s the main thing that I do here. We have a lot of flows, of customization. So, I’ve been trying to learn a lot about that and how to manage our complex org.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Captain of the ship, which is what most admins play.

Andrew Russo:

Yeah. It’s a big ship though. It’s challenging.

Mike Gerholdt:

I know. Yep. Well, the whole goal is to grow the ship and then maybe you get a fleet of people to help you.

Andrew Russo:

It started as a rowboat. Currently, it’s like a cruise ship with one person in charge of it, and cruise ships are hard to drive with one person.

Mike Gerholdt:

They could be, yes, but you need to have resident comedian, house band, buffet. I’m sure those are all fun analogies to things.

Before we go down the cruise ship line, that’s for another podcast, let’s talk about, you were at Dreamforce and I think a few Salesforce Admins were at Dreamforce. If not, they definitely saw some of the content that’s online. I’d love to know when you get back from, was it three days of Dreamforce now? And the content that you’re a part of and the notes that you’ve taken, what are some of the things that you do to think about what’s next or to put into action some of the things that you learned?

Andrew Russo:

Yeah. I think when I’m there, really the big thing is I like to take high-level notes when I’m there. I think if you get too in the details trying to take notes, it’s hard for me at least to go and actually take actual things. So, generally what I’ve learned to do is I take some of the high-level notes of key areas and then I go back to them. So, when I’m there, I’m able to just focus on the content and the learning and connecting with other people in the community, and then I go back to the content that I thought was really helpful and I look at it.

But for me, right now, if I think about some of the big takeaways, one of them was data quality and really getting everything in shape is probably the most critical thing that you can do for an existing org like us. Trying to fix those type of things that are just foundational to support all of our future things we’re trying to do.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. I mean, I know anecdotally from seeing some of the session data, all of the sessions that were about data and cleanliness were really well attended, and it makes sense, right? Because good data in, good data out, and now good data for AI to consume.

Andrew Russo:

Exactly. I think that’s probably one of the biggest drivers is looking forward of the AI, and it’s also thinking about what can we do to position ourselves to be ready for generative AI and how that will play a role. Thinking about on our service side, one of the big projects that became probably one of our top projects we’re going to be rolling out, Salesforce Knowledge, I think was probably one of the biggest takeaways or actionable things that I now am … That’s my big project for this fall is to get our Knowledge base for service up and going to help our customers.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, that’s no small feat. I feel like that’s building your own library.

Andrew Russo:

It is building a library, an organization system and structure for a library, and then getting everyone who hasn’t gone to the library in years to want to go to this library, and authors.

Mike Gerholdt:

Free library cards for everybody. Exactly. Yeah, I know authoring, ah, fun times.

Andrew Russo:

That’s probably the hardest part is getting the content created.

Mike Gerholdt:

Mm-hmm. You mentioned you’re an admin of one, and I want to get into some of the stuff that was announced at Dreamforce because that’s why I had you on. But one other thing that crossed my mind, for admins of companies that are smaller and everybody defines their own size, how do you see AI and some of the new Agentforce features rolling into orgs like that?

Andrew Russo:

I think, for me, I was actually lucky enough to be able be part of some of the pilot stuff that happened. And one of the biggest ones, which it sounds crazy, but the formula one, that’s to help you with formula fields. So, you could do it when you’re making a formula field for a row level summary for reporting as well as on the admin side to just explain a formula. It sounds so simple, but the amount of effort that that has saved me from finding those pesky, you’re missing the parentheses, or you had a curly comma or the curly single quote instead of it being a straight single quote. So, it doesn’t work. Those kind of things, having it where it just fixes it, it’s like the quality of life features for an admin that are amazing.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I never thought about it that way. That’s a good perspective.

Andrew Russo:

Especially if you think about copying and pasting. That’s where it’s challenging.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, that’s 90% of how I wrote all my formulas was copy and paste. “Somebody else, please write the formula. Okay, there’s about 90% of the formula that I need. Let me just plug in the fields that it makes sense to.”

A lot of this stuff … I mean, obviously Agentforce was the big headliner at Dreamforce this year, but you pointed out you really see also the not off Broadway show that Salesforce talked about, which was Foundations. So, tell me from your perspective why as a Salesforce admin, Foundations was so big at Dreamforce this year for you?

Andrew Russo:

Yeah. I think Foundations, I mean, when I was watching the keynote, it was almost, I think kind of the last … I think it was soft announced just right before Dreamforce, but then during the keynote it was also kind of re-announced it. I think that what was announced of what’s included with it, having some of the different parts, like we’re a small company, I don’t really have the opportunity to just go try out some of the big, more expensive or larger features. I don’t have the ability to just, “Oh, well let me go try and do some pilot…” It’s kind of challenging. So, having access to a try before you actually go fully configure is really helpful for us to be able to look at where can we grow and move to with the platform?

Mike Gerholdt:

I mean, are you looking at data integrations across marketing or commerce or service? I mean, I know you mentioned Knowledge.

Andrew Russo:

Yeah. So, having Knowledge now is definitely a big thing. So, some of the little parts like sales and service cloud that were really heavily overlap, but just a little couple things, now that it’s kind of more unified to be one thing, it makes it a lot easier. So, now we have access to Knowledge for all of our search [inaudible 00:08:41]. So, it kind of enabled that project, which we need to support generative AI as we go into the future too.

Mike Gerholdt:

I suppose we jumped maybe a little bit of the cart in front of the horse. For you, if you had to describe Foundations to another Salesforce admin, maybe they didn’t hear about that, how would you describe it?

Andrew Russo:

All of the features that you wish you had five months ago that you now have. Just the little bits of the features, I think, that’s how I look at it, as like, they’re the features that you wish you had, but you would’ve had to go buy multiple cloud to just get the small, little piece that you wish you had.

Mike Gerholdt:

Gotcha. Well, that sounds awesome. So, it can be, like I remember sitting in Dreamforce keynotes and hearing sometimes about features that we were using, sometimes about features that we weren’t using. With multiple features being announced as part of Foundations, for you, how did you prioritize your one admin, your one org? Obviously, you just can’t go and it’s like a gym locker and turn all the light switches on. How are you kind of prioritizing what features to use and how to roll them out?

Andrew Russo:

Yeah. So, for us, it’s really about looking at where do we want to be strategically. So, I actually have a lucid chart, which I took one of the … I think on the architect website, they have a roadmap one, so I kind of just copied that and then I just changed it a little bit and did a lot of copy paste and modified it. So, it’s just a really high-level view of what we’re doing as a company with Salesforce, just so that I can also show from a strategic point of view when people have these requests of like, “Oh, well, I want this.” “Okay, but here’s kind of what we have. We don’t have an unlimited bandwidth here, so is that more important than all of these?” And then, that helps to keep requests that don’t really make sense or align with the company goals.

So, that kind of became still the guiding light to it, and I think that even after Dreamforce, that didn’t change a lot because it’s still what are the company priorities? We’re not just trying to go implement features because now we have them. It has to align with what our company goals are.

Mike Gerholdt:

That makes sense. That definitely also helps you prioritize, right?

Andrew Russo:

It helps me prioritize and also it helps me keep focused on what’s the important thing that we need to do to keep our business growing overall?

Mike Gerholdt:

So, I realized this when I was sitting down, what are we going to talk about? A lot of the times we talk about the benefit to the admin, because that’s the person listening, right? “What’s it matter to me?” But so often, everything that we implement, everything that we do is on behalf of a user because we know sitting in their chair what their pain points are. How for you, is the admin looking to communicate some of the benefits of Foundations to your users?

Andrew Russo:

Yeah. I think it’s looking at where the challenges are. An example for us that’s why I’m also really excited for it is today we use an external marketing email sending tool that we just take exports of emails, put them in, send email list. So, on the sales side, we use sales engagement to send the sales cadences, right?

Mike Gerholdt:

Sure.

Andrew Russo:

Just a very small tree one just for trying to drip information about a specific product, but we’re not doing full-scale marketing across the board, but for that use case today, right now, we’re sending it out like that, but with Foundations now, we can use the marketing emails that get sent and it’s essentially can do exactly what that is, but just from Salesforce. So, we can skip the whole having to send it out, then the emails will log in Salesforce, so our sales team can see when they were sent. Right now, the ones that are sent as bulk mail don’t show up in Salesforce.

So, just that little quality of life thing and it’s just easier overall. That’s kind of a big thing, but we don’t have a strong use case to go get a giant marketing automation system because honestly, we don’t have the people to go generate all the content for that. Right?

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think it’s always, you never have to apologize for the size that you are. I think that’s, “Oh, we’re not a big organization.” That’s okay. You’re the size that you are and you’re also proportionate. You always need a couple more admins, right? But you’re proportionate to the size that you can support. You don’t need to apologize for, “Well, we’re not this massive $10 billion email monster.”

Andrew Russo:

It would be nice, but also I feel like if I got a bunch of emails from us every day, I would be a little … Just thinking from the customer point of view, who I get emails from vendors and stuff like that all the time. I’m like, “Lululemon, how do you get me an email every day, 5:00 to 6:00 PM?” But I look at them like, “I should unsubscribe.” But I also am like, “Okay. Well, I haven’t yet, but I get them every day 5:00 to 6:00 PM.”

Mike Gerholdt:

No. Sure.

Andrew Russo:

So, somehow it’s enough that … So, it’s like, how do we become the company that can give information that’s valuable enough that people don’t want to unsubscribe because they find value in the content, but also be able to manage doing that?

Mike Gerholdt:

I know. I’ve got a whole folder of emails that’s like that, that I don’t want to unsubscribe because that one time that I need to get something, chances are they probably will have emailed me maybe a 20% off code. I’m just cheap enough that I want to keep those emails going to get that 20% off.

You mentioned marketing and email and stuff like that, that makes you think of the app exchange and the upgrade includes access to third-party extensions through the app exchange. Are you looking at ways or maybe things you could do now with that?

Andrew Russo:

Yeah. I think for us, a couple of the areas that we’re excited also to extend out is one of those is on collecting payments and stuff. Right? We’ve got sales cloud, we’ve got service, which means we’ve got revenue, but we need to collect payments.

Mike Gerholdt:

It’s very important. Right?

Andrew Russo:

It is very important. Today, right now, when they want to take … They just log into this separate system. They type in a card number, right? The customer calls over the phone, they type it in, they process the payment, they download the PDF receipt, they send it to the customer. Right? So, it’s not a good experience. It also takes time. But if we could send a link-

Mike Gerholdt:

Sure.

Andrew Russo:

… that then the customer could put their stuff into themselves. And maybe we include that link on the invoice ahead of time so the customer could self enter it in and we don’t even have to have that phone conversation because it’s just not a good experience. That’s kind of big, and we could do that now.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. And I mean, you think of that person’s time, rarely are they hired to just do that. There’s also other things they need to do, but they’ve … It just so happens, I imagine maybe over the lunch hour they get busy because that’s when everybody calls in to make their payments really quick because they have to talk to a person.

Andrew Russo:

Exactly. The exact problem of like … Or, they’re busy working on sending out invoices to some of the other customers and now they’re, “Oh, well, a phone call came in.” You can’t hold off on a phone call because you don’t want to put a customer on hold or have it just ring continuously. So, you have to pick up that. Trying to prioritize ways to not have to do that type of thing.

Also, from a customer point of view, if I got a link that I could pay with Apple Pay or that I could put a card into myself, and when I’ve got an iPhone, it auto-fills my card that I have saved, that’s a lot better of an experience.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. I had no idea, not that I want to turn this into an Apple Pay podcast, about a year and a half ago, finally the Luddite in me got to using Apple Pay, and since then, the frictionless payment method of Apple Pay has caused me to buy a lot more things than I probably should have.

Andrew Russo:

I think, honestly, for me, if I think about as a customer experience, everyone hates paying utility bills, right? Became a homeowner, I have utility bills that come in. The easiest one I have to pay, that’s not an auto-pay one, because auto-pay is kind of scary to an extent. You don’t realize how much money goes out. It’s nice. But the one that I have is the water bill. It literally has a QR on it. It comes quarterly. The QR code, you scan it with your phone, it opens. You can click Apple Pay. You put in the amount, which you just type the amount that’s on it. You click pay and it’s done. It’s the easiest thing I’ve ever had.

Mike Gerholdt:

That’s nice.

Andrew Russo:

That’s the kind of experience we want to deliver as a company.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Well, congrats on being a homeowner. That’s a big step.

Andrew Russo:

It is a big step. Midwest homeowner life.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, did you just become a homeowner over the summer?

Andrew Russo:

No, it’s a year now.

Mike Gerholdt:

Okay. So, you’ve been through a winter, so you already know.

Andrew Russo:

Oh, yeah, we had an ice storm last winter.

Mike Gerholdt:

The water bill isn’t the scariest thing that’ll come in.

Andrew Russo:

No, the water bill is not. The when you get sod bill after that with the water bill is. Also, when you have woods around you and I have corn fields that are relatively close, that’s really fun when there’s a big ice storm.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yes.

Andrew Russo:

And you go to Harbor Freight to get a generator, so the next move that I did during that.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Those battery generators, I will tell you, I stumbled across one of those over the summer to go for a lot of the shows that I do. And man, I really like that, having that in my house. I got one that’s just big enough that’ll run a refrigerator for a day. I hope I never have to use it, but knowing I have it, it’s peace of mind.

Andrew Russo:

It’s peace of mind. Exactly. Going back into the Salesforce world for off of our Midwest problems and woes.

Mike Gerholdt:

I mean, every now and then, you got to … It’s like a commercial break. You got to have a commercial break.

Andrew Russo:

Well, if we want commercial, I know that you don’t unsubscribe to the Casey’s Pizza email coupon.

Mike Gerholdt:

No, I don’t. And they use Salesforce too.

Andrew Russo:

You got to be careful when those come through.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Well, speaking of which, they have a jalapeno popper pizza, and if you listen to this podcast and you get Casey’s Pizza and you get the jalapeno popper pizza, which say that five times fast, let me tell you how amazingly good it is when you put it in your fridge right away and eat it the next day. Don’t eat it hot. It’s okay hot. It is amazing as cold pizza because then the cream cheese sets up. Aces.

Andrew Russo:

Honestly, cold pizza, for me, I’m a big fan.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, yeah. I mean, I’ll always eat cold pizza, but this pizza in particular, Andrew, I’m telling you it is life-changing because it tastes like a jalapeno popper, but when you get it and it’s fresh and it’s warm, it just doesn’t work for me. I don’t know. Also, I want them to bring back their bacon cheeseburger pizza because that was the best pizza they ever had.

Andrew Russo:

That does sound good.

Mike Gerholdt:

It’s amazing. It’s amazing. And they put some sort of brisket thing. They keep dancing around, not bringing back the best pizza they ever made, which people would argue is the taco, and their taco is good.

Andrew Russo:

They might be listening and it might come soon.

Mike Gerholdt:

I hope, man.

Andrew Russo:

It’d be a wish.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, God. Anyway, we should talk Foundations. Back to the show. Ladies and gentlemen, now resuming progress. Already in progress, whatever. I mentioned a lot about Foundations. What haven’t I mentioned that stands out to you is like admins should know about this?

Andrew Russo:

I think one of the biggest areas that admins haven’t all been able to fully touch, like I think if I step back and look at what was the most impactful thing at Dreamforce? I had another admin who was talking to me. They did the Agentforce launchpad and they have said that experience, just sitting down and you’re just talking with your voice and it generated an agent for you, a proof of concept of it, they said that alone was worth going to Dreamforce.

Mike Gerholdt:

Wow.

Andrew Russo:

So, that type of thing, Agentforce, as much as it’s like, “Okay. Well, is it just hype?” I think it has a lot of utility. Even yesterday, I was having a conversation with someone and they were asking, and I didn’t know exactly the context. They had asked, “Is there any way to chat with your Knowledge-based [inaudible 00:22:18]?” I was like, I think I just said, “What do you mean?” And then it was, “Elaborate…” Like, what do they mean? And they were like, “Well, if you wanted to just have a conversation with it and ask question about how to set stuff up.” And I’m like, “Um, that’s called Agentforce.”

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah.

Andrew Russo:

It can do that. That’s kind of the whole point of it. It’s like, think about the customer experience of it. You’re like, “Well, I don’t have a thing.” Say that you’re selling software. Your customer installs the software, like a trial version, wants to get up and running. They want help setting it up. Do you want them to have to call and wait on hold possibly and then not buy the software? Because they’re like, “Hey, I’m going to go to this other company who’s got it that you don’t have to wait on hold talking to somebody.” That type of experience, it starts to make a lot of sense.

Mike Gerholdt:

Absolutely. It’s a good example. As we wrap up, you go to a lot of Salesforce events. As a Salesforce admin, if you had advice for other admins out there looking at the breadth of what is available for them to go to, because there’s user groups, there’s world tours, there’s TrailblazerDX, there’s obviously Dreamforce. How do you kind of plan out … I know you go to a lot, but strategically, if you had to give admins advice on what events should they go to, how should they plan their year so that they stay up to date, they stay knowledgeable, they stay connected?

Andrew Russo:

If I was going to pick, I’m going to say one Salesforce official event that Salesforce hosted, if I had to choose one, I would probably say TrailblazerDX. Honestly, if you’re an admin, that’s the one to be at. Dreamforce has a lot of announcements and stuff, but it was a lot more technical, I will say, this year than ever in the past. But TrailblazerDX, it’s a smaller event. It’s a lot more manageable to go to. You’re seeing a lot more. It’s admin focused. The admin is the heart of TrailblazerDX.

But the other thing is, go to a local community event that’s there, or even just Trailblazer Community groups are a great resource to go to. And for me, when I go to the events, like I said at the beginning, it’s like full circle. When I go, I focus on high level and then I come back to the content after. I’ll take the notes and I’ll try and go back to it. But I really like just connecting with people. I think the friendships that you build in person are the most valuable thing out of going to different events.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. No, I couldn’t agree more. Andrew, thanks so much for coming on the podcast and opening my eyes to Foundations because I know I was knee-deep into Agentforce at Dreamforce, so I appreciate that.

Andrew Russo:

Yeah, no problem. It was a really great time. And also, pizza. I think I might get pizza or Culver’s.

Mike Gerholdt:

I’m telling you, if you’re a regular listener to the podcast, the food diversion is going to happen at some point in every episode. I’ve had people call out the fact that I’ve talked about Casey’s Pizza before. And if you don’t live in the Midwest, it’s literally mind-boggling for people to be like, “That’s gas station pizza.” Yeah, it’s gas station pizza at another level. Also, their breakfast pizza, in my opinion, now that they got rid of the bacon cheeseburger, their breakfast pizza might be the single best pizza on the planet.

Andrew Russo:

I just realized something, and we might talk, there might be food diversions, but the caramel apple spice or pumpkin spice, or what is it? Do you remember? I’m thinking back, it’s October though. It’s like the exact month.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. I mean, it’s pumpkin spice season right now. My mom’s huge into pumpkin spice. I think growing up I had too much pumpkin pie as a kid. I can’t do pumpkin pie.

Andrew Russo:

Well, is a PSL pumpkin spice latte or permission set license?

Mike Gerholdt:

No. I can do that. I know, right? Both. And that’s the one exception that I make to the ick of pumpkin spice is I do like at least one pumpkin spice latte, which sounds weird.

Andrew Russo:

I can say I haven’t had one in probably three-plus years.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, when you have one-

Andrew Russo:

I don’t know-

Mike Gerholdt:

… you’re going to realize the mistake you’ve made by not having one.

Andrew Russo:

I know. I might get one tomorrow.

Mike Gerholdt:

You should, along with some Casey’s breakfast pizza, because that sounds amazing. Literally, all the time. Andrew, thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Andrew Russo:

Thank you for having me.

Mike Gerholdt:

So, that was a fun conversation with Andrew. I hope you enjoyed the episode. He really seems to have his head wrapped around a lot of different things and is really paying attention to both keeping in sync with features that Salesforce is rolling out, along with the needs and direction that his organization is looking for him to go to.

And of course, I warned you, if you’re hungry, and probably not hungry no more, you’re going to order pizza tonight. But if you’re looking for some tips, not necessarily pizza tips, although there are a few podcasts with recipes in them, you can find all of that over at admin.salesforce.com for everything that you’ll need, including a full transcript of the episode. And if you’d like to get more information, follow along, connect with other Salesforce Admins, be sure to join the Admin Trailblazer group in the Trailblazer Community. Of course, all those links will be in the show notes for the episode.

So, with that, I think we’ve covered a lot. We’ve laid a good foundation, as you would say. Until next week, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post How Can Small Teams Benefit from Salesforce Foundations and Generative AI? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, Josh Birk talks to Jagan Nathan, Technical Architect with Customer Success at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about guest user anomalies and what you can do about them with the Threat Detection app.

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

The most important thing for a successful Data Cloud migration

Jagan works as a Technical Architect with the Customer Success Group at Salesforce. He’s focused on helping businesses use Data Cloud to de-silo their data so they can get a full picture of their customers.

Jagan estimates that 60-70% of the time you spend on a Data Cloud migration is used to make sure you understand what needs to be done. That’s because the most important decisions are around what objects and data sources you want to map and how it all fits together. If you need help getting started, his team has put together the Data Cloud Workbook Template to walk you through everything.

What is a guest user anomaly and why is it dangerous for your data security?

The biggest security issues Jagan encounters in orgs come from changes made to profiles and permissions over time. All those consultants can begin to add up! At some point, you need to do an audit of who can see what and apply the principle of least privilege.

And that’s the reason we brought Jagan on the pod, because one way this can happen is through something called a guest user anomaly. Essentially, it’s when a guest user account has more access than it otherwise than it should. For example, an Apex class that allows them pull all of your data. It’s the kind of thing that’s difficult to identify but can leave you primed for a data breach if you don’t know about it. 

How the Threat Detection app can help you identify guest user anomalies

The good news is that there’s something you can do about guest user anomalies. If your org has Event Monitoring, you can use the Threat Detection app to identify problematic accounts and take action. It uses the power of machine learning to figure out where the gaps are in your permissions and flag them for you.

In fact, the Threat Detection app can help you monitor all sorts of other anomalies, too. Like if a user who does their reports in the same time window each week suddenly logs in at 3 a.m. to pull a bunch of data, or someone based in Albuquerque logs in from Finland. It can even monitor your APIs. And the best part is that enabling Threat Detection is as easy as turning on the permission set.

Jagan gets into more specifics in our interview, so be sure to take a listen. 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 Security Guide: Threat Detection
• Salesforce Security Guide: Guest User Anomaly
• Salesforce Help: Best Practices for Investigating Guest User Anomalies
• Trailhead: Get Started with Event Monitoring

Admin Trailblazers Group

• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

• Jagan on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on X
• Mike on Threads
• Mike on Tiktok
• Mike on X

Full show transcript

Josh Birk:
Hello Admins, it’s your guest host Josh Birk here. Today, I’m going to welcome Jagan Nathan to talk about some very specific things about security, specifically quirks in security that can sometimes be a little difficult to detect and how we’re going to help you detect them. So without further ado, let’s go to Jagan.

All right. Today on the show we welcome Jagan. Did I do that right, Jagan?

Jagan Nathan :
Yes.

Josh Birk:
All right. We’re going to talk about some very interesting security things, but first of all, welcome to the show.

Jagan Nathan :
Thank you, once again, for having me.

Josh Birk:
Thanks. All right, well, let’s start, once again, in some of your early years. How did you originally get into computing?

Jagan Nathan :
Oh, yeah. So back then during school days, we used to play Counter-Strike. We have in-house network connected with a group of friends.

Josh Birk:
Nice.

Jagan Nathan :
So that is how we started into it. We started in a playful mode and then we slowly started programming and all those aspects to it.

Josh Birk:
Did you actually get into modding Half-Life and all that stuff?

Jagan Nathan :
Not really.

Josh Birk:
Got it. Nice. How did you originally get involved with Salesforce?

Jagan Nathan :
Salesforce, initially I got trained in the Java platform and then back then we got a new project on Salesforce and we have been asked if we could try this out and then I initially thought of giving it a try. I initially thought Salesforce is purely sales driven or some sort of MBA-related work, but that is how it was. And then slowly I got into it. It was quite interesting. And then back then it was even more interesting without Trailhead. We had a lot of learnings. We used to push in developer forums. It was quite challenging and interesting. From that point of time, there’s no looking back. We just love this platform.

Josh Birk:
Nice. How did you find the transition from Java to Apex?

Jagan Nathan :
So I was able to correlate most of our things through the basic modules. I usually compare Java-related world with Salesforce Apex related, so that it was easy for me during the transition phase.

Josh Birk:
Got it. And how would you describe your current job?

Jagan Nathan :
So current job is more of a technical architect part of customer success group. Work with different set of customers. Each customers have their own set of challenges and problems to be solved. So right now I’m even focusing on the Data Cloud related piece of it. Try to stitch in the data from multiple data source what customer is having. They have a lot of silos data across the platform. We are using the power of Data Cloud to bring in and harmonize all those data.

Josh Birk:
Got it. I feel like that’s a very common thing at the company right now. So welcome to the club. Just as on that topic itself, especially when it comes to Admins, are you finding any particular specific challenges that run into when they start adopting Data Cloud?

Jagan Nathan :
Our Data Cloud, the best part is we at Salesforce, we have a template called Data Cloud Workbook Template, which is mainly recommended for all the admins and then whoever is trying to configure Data Cloud. So Data Cloud, what we have seen so far is 60 to 70 percentage of time we need to spend on understanding what needs to be done, like what objects we’re going to map, what are the data sources we’re going to map. So we have a pretty good decent template out there called Data Cloud Workbook Template, which is highly recommended for our customers so that they spend a lot of time on what needs to be done, what fields needs to be mapped, what should be the data sources. So once we have that in place, admin life looks even more simple.

Josh Birk:
Got it. Nice. And I think I’m going to ask this in the right way because I believe I don’t know the answer, but since we’re talking about security today, does Data Cloud offer any new thoughts on what to be concerned with security, or does it just kind of bolt itself on the platform and the platform is taking care of security like it normally would?

Jagan Nathan :
Yes. So Data Cloud currently supports our data spaces. We have this concept called data space filters through which we can set up the security of it so that authorized users can access a particular set of data instead of accessing all Data Cloud data.

Josh Birk:
Got it. Before we get into some of the specifics, when you first start talking to clients and customers, are there very common security issues that you find people aren’t concerned about or aren’t aware of that they should be aware of?

Jagan Nathan :
Yeah, so the main concerns or challenges what customer was facing right now is down the line, Salesforce or a lot of consulting companies work for them and then they have tons of changes made on the profiles and the permissions, and then someone got access to something which they are not supposed to. For example, I have seen customers, some marks, they have lot of sales users have export report function permissions and a customer is thinking about do they really need those export reports permission? Definitely not, only a subset of users need that. So it is all about backtracking and trying to find out how did they got this permission? Do we really need to give this user a permission to those reports? That is one of the challenges there.

Josh Birk:
Right. Nice. It’s amazing how many of the security issues really can be boiled down to the concept of lease privilege.

Jagan Nathan :
Oh, yeah. There are a lot of things happening around the permissions and then recently we also rolled out object permissions and permission sets, for example, how the particular permission got assigned to the particular user. Is it through profiles or a permission set? So we have all those enhancements as part of recent releases too.

Josh Birk:
Right. Now today we’re going to talk about a very specific one, and I’m going to give you credit because I had not heard of this, although I think I was kind of aware of the concept, I swear back from my IoT days, but we’re going to talk about what a guest user anomaly is. Let’s start at the beginning. Define that for me. What is a guest user anomaly?

Jagan Nathan :
So this guest user anomaly, before we talk about it, in the last podcast we discussed about event monitoring in general, what are the events we have as part of event monitoring. For the listeners, to give a quick background, event monitoring is a subscription-based QVF. The beauty of our Salesforce platform is everything is built on top of event-driven architecture, right from the user logs in, logs out, when the user access the list views or reports, all those are captured as events at the backend.

So when it comes to threat detection, threat detection is one of the submodule of the event monitoring, which comes free of cost. If customer has event monitoring, then they would be able to use threat detection free of cost. So threat detection has a lot of events built into it and one of the events is a guest user anomaly event. So guest user anomaly is one of the interesting event because there are a lot of customers who are using guest users in their communities or back then they used to have a Force.com site. So they have built a business process surrounding guest user. So here at Salesforce what we thought is why can’t we build a guest user anomaly even so that customers would be able to identify if there is any threat around the guest user.

Josh Birk:
What sort of traffic is the threat detector picking up that says this is a guest user and then this is a guest user anomaly?

Jagan Nathan :
So behind the scenes we have a lot of machine learning methods through which we constantly understand the profile of a guest user, what they are supposed to access. And there are a lot of parameters at the backend, which is quite black box for the customer, which is totally handled at the product side. So at the higher level we use a machine learning algorithm to detect if there are any information which the guest user is not supposed to access to, but due to some different options, if the guest user is able to access it, then we are throwing that as guest user anomaly events to our customers.

Josh Birk:
So go down one more level to that for me because it was interesting that, so I’ve set up a guest user, I expect him to have this set of lease privileges, but you’re saying there might be some things that I did in setup that would cause an unexpected ability to access data. Is that what the anomaly is?

Jagan Nathan :
For an example to deep dive into it, let’s say we have lightning community, which is running on a guest user mode, and then behind the scenes it all starts with the OWD settings. So our recommendation for a default external access is a public read or some customers might have a public read. It depends on the business use cases. Let’s say if there is any suspicion even caused by a guest user, for example, if there is a Apex class which runs in without sharing mode for an example, and then if that guest user through some ways, if they are able to get the data, which they are not supposed to get. So in this scenario in general, guest users should not have access to the objects. But in a worst case, if something happens and if there is any Apex class without sharing, if they’re able to get some information out of it, so it is inadvertently permitting the guest user to access some data which they are not supposed to.

Josh Birk:
Got it. So it’s nothing necessarily that the admin would see from a setup point of view when it comes to inspecting profiles or permission sets or anything like that, but it would be access to et cetera, et cetera, something else like an Apex class and then how that was designed is giving them access to something that’s outside of their profile.

Jagan Nathan :
Exactly. From the admin standpoint, what we recommend is whatever list views which are getting shared, make sure it is getting shared only with a certain set of groups which are set to private. That is one recommendation, what we could say to our customers. And then the next one is make sure to do a proper analysis on all the sharing rules we have. Do we have any sharing rules, which is sharing with any side guest user? That is one option we would recommend.

Josh Birk:
What are some inherent risks here? Is it simply access to data that they shouldn’t have or can it get more nefarious than that?

Jagan Nathan :
Let’s say if that guest user is not supposed to access the data what they should have, then what happens at the background, it could lead to a data breach in the near future because there could be some guest user, there could be some data Apex class which runs in without sharing mode, for example. It gives a view all data of all the accounts, then the guest user would get all the accounts. Then that eventually turned out to be a data breach.

Josh Birk:
Got it. Got it. In reference to these tools, let’s assume that an admin, they’re not familiar with it. What does it look like? Is this a report that they’re going to run from time to time? Is this an app that’s going to alert them that maybe something is wrong? What’s the user interface here that’s letting them know that there’s a red flag?

Jagan Nathan :
So it all starts with a permission. So there is a permission called view threat detection event. So once that permission get assigned to us through a permission set, then we will get access to a threat detection app. So threat detection app, once you navigate to a threat detection app, we should be able to see the list of anomalies. For example, if there is any guest user anomaly happens, then we will see a record on the threat detection that says guest user anomaly event. Then it is up to customer to take up a decision if they really think it’s a threat, or else, if they think it’s not a threat, they can provide feedback back to Salesforce.

Josh Birk:
Got it. So it is kind of a constant monitoring, taking action when they feel like that was definitely a set of data that this person shouldn’t be able to have access to.

Jagan Nathan :
Exactly. So in addition to it, we are also giving customers option to build a transaction security policy as well. Transaction security policy is something like it is automatically monitoring the trades. For example, guest user anomaly is one event. So we have an anomaly event called report anomaly event. For example, user is everyday logging in on a particular time interval and they are working on the reports, but suddenly if the user works over the weekend or suddenly if the user tries to connect from a different VPN network altogether, and if that particular user is trying to export a report, if that report count is more than 10 million rows, for an example, then Salesforce can throw that as an anomaly event and then customer can take up an action. If they really feel it’s a threat, then they can block it or else they can add it in some audit log for their purposes.

Josh Birk:
Got it. Without going into too much detail, what are some of the other events that the threat detector is monitoring?

Jagan Nathan :
One of the event is a session hijacking event. This is more of a customer-focused attack event. For example, if any attacker is trying to steal information from using client access to their web application, then through session hijacking event we would be able to identify if the attacker tries to hijack the client’s session by obtaining some session token.

Josh Birk:
Got it. How about APIs?

Jagan Nathan :
API, that is super important. Thanks for bringing that up. So behind the scenes what we do is once we have the streaming and storage enabled for API anomaly, let’s say there’s an integration user who periodically runs the API scan and then they get data out for business processes, but suddenly out of nowhere, if the integration user is trying to export more than X number of records or else the way the integration user is pulling the data, for example, the row count might be new or else they might be logging in from a different IP address or some sort of anomalies. So what Salesforce does at the backend is it constantly understand the pattern of how that API user is being used for all the API requests. And if Salesforce thinks the new request is quite different from the existing request in the past, then Salesforce will throw it as an anomaly.

Josh Birk:
Got it. So kind of at a high level, because if we look at the session hijacking, that’s where I steal your cookie for lack of a better term. I steal your session ID, I hijack your identity, I try to access Salesforce as you, that would be something very difficult for somebody, a human on the Salesforce side to detect, well, that’s not Jagan, that’s Josh. With the APIs it’s sort of similar. It looks like somebody knocking on the door and the fact that they are doing something once that door is open that’s anomalous is not something easy for a detect and then finally going back to the guest user. So at a high level, the threat detector is giving us this machine learning eyeball into what the traffic is coming out and saying, “Hey, that thing doesn’t…” It’s kind of like when you get the fraud alerts, right? It’s like you don’t normally buy $300 worth of goods in Ohio,. Maybe you should call us before we spend $300. But it gives us this suite of tools to be able to do that kind of investigation.

Jagan Nathan :
Yeah, perfect. Exactly.

Josh Birk:
Nice. Where can people learn more?

Jagan Nathan :
Oh, yeah. So we have a help article, which we’ll be adding it in the podcast as well. That help article talks about threat detection and how the machine learning algorithm at high level works and how customers can proactively build a transaction security policy on top of it to play around with the threat detections.

Josh Birk:
Nice. And once again, this is not a licensed add-on, it’s on a SKU, it’s once somebody turns on the permission set, they’re good to go.

Jagan Nathan :
Yes, exactly.

Josh Birk:
Very nice. In general, do you have any security resources that you’d like to share?

Jagan Nathan :
Oh, yeah. In general?

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Jagan Nathan :
I will add that as well.

Josh Birk:
Okay, perfect. Well, Jagan, thank you so much for the great conversation information. That was a lot of fun.

Jagan Nathan :
Good. Thank you so much to, Joshua, for having me again.

Josh Birk:
I want to thank Jagan for the great conversation information. And as always, I want to thank you for listening. If you want to learn more about this podcast, head on over to admin.salesforce.com and of course you can subscribe to it in the podcast client of your choice. Thanks again for listening everybody. I’ll talk to you soon.

The post Key Security Best Practices for Salesforce Admins Using Data Cloud appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to John Demby, Director of Solution Engineering at Tableau. Join us as we chat about Pulse for Salesforce, Tableau Einstein, and how easy it is to get started.

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

Getting to know Pulse for Salesforce and Tableau Einstein

John leads a team of demo engineers for Tableau. What that means is they get their hands on all the new solutions and products ahead of time, and use them to make cool things. And two of the coolest, newest things out there are Pulse for Salesforce and Tableau Einstein.

Tableau Einstein takes all of the goodness of Tableau, the powerful features of Data Cloud, a new semantic layer called Tableau Semantics, and brings that into Salesforce. There’s also a Tableau Agent, allowing you to open up the power of business intelligence and analytics to everyone on your team through Agentforce.

Introduction to Pulse for Salesforce

“We started thinking about how people consume data,” John says, “and I think it’s changed.” People want to consume data within the flow of their work. They don’t want to have to go looking around for things, or sift through multiple dashboards to figure out what information is relevant.

That’s where Pulse for Salesforce comes in. It provides contextual, relevant insights from your data directly into Salesforce. With a simple KPI scorecard, you and your users can see what metrics are up, what metrics are down, and get insights about the next steps you should take.

AI-infused and ready to share

The scorecards Pulse for Salesforce provides are just the beginning because you can also ask it questions. Pulse is AI-infused, meaning you can ask plain language questions to generate specific insights about your data. It’s also built for collaboration, so it’s easy to take these insights and start a conversation with anyone else in your organization.

Getting Pulse for Salesforce is as easy as installing a managed package in your Salesforce instance. “We’ve made it really for a Salesforce Admin to set this up with little to no Tableau experience,” John says. There are nine premade dashboards to get you started, and it’s easy to customize things to get something that works for you.

John shares a lot more great stuff about Pulse for Salesforce and Tableau Einstein, so be sure to take a listen. 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

• Get Tableau Pulse
• More about Tableau Pulse
• What is Tableau Einstein?

Admin Trailblazers Group

• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

• John on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on X
• Mike on Threads
• Mike on Tiktok
• Mike on X

Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’ve got the much loved John Demby, our resident Tableau guru, here to talk about some of the really super cool things that Tableau has come out with, specifically Tableau Pulse and Tableau Einstein. Now, you may remember John and his team create these amazing demos that really show all of the possibilities of Tableau Pulse and Tableau Einstein. And boy, we get into it, about how we’re driving insights with AI, and of course we talk about why pie charts are so out. This is really a fun episode. Now before we get started just a quick reminder, if you want to hit that follow button, that way whatever podcast app you’re listening to, every Thursday a new episode will be downloaded right to your phone. So with that, let’s talk Tableau Pulse and Tableau Einstein and get John on the podcast. John, welcome to the podcast.

John Demby:
Hey Mike, it’s great to be back.

Mike Gerholdt:
I know, it’s been a while. So what have you been up to? What do you do at Salesforce, for the people that haven’t run into you at our many events?

John Demby:
Well, I have I think today the coolest job in the world. I work in our pre-sales organization in solution engineering but what I do is, I lead a team of demo engineers. You might go, demo engineers, why is that really cool? Well, we get our hands on the solutions and the products ahead of our customers. We get to put it through its paces and figure out what it really can do and how it can do it, and then we build these just really … pardon the expression, kick-ass demos to show to our customers and to anybody else that wants to see them. So yeah, that’s what I do. I lead a team and they are all all-stars and amazing people, and we have just been killing it.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, it sounds like fun. I mean, that’s also what admins do, get our hands on stuff and try and build killer demos to get our executives to fund it.

John Demby:
Yeah, we’ve got a lot of similarities there.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. Well, I mean, also a very close kinship. You kind of started out with Tableau the same way I did, you were just a super admin power user that got hired on.

John Demby:
Yeah. My story goes back to a long time ago … man, probably about 12, 13, 14 years ago, I was working with Salesforce data. I was leading at that time a pre-sales organization, and I couldn’t get a decent report out of Salesforce, no offense to dashboards and reports. It was partly because of the way we had configured our Salesforce data. I mean, we had the same company in Salesforce maybe 70 times because they were all around the globe and stuff like that. I couldn’t figure out where my solution engineers were spending their time. I did a Google search, found this really cool thing called Tableau, downloaded it, and within about 10 minutes I had the report that I’d been wanting to make for months. So I filed that away and became a power user of Tableau, and then when I was ready for a career change, it just worked out. Tableau and I made things happen, came to work for Tableau. I did some pre-sales work for Tableau and then we got acquired by Salesforce.

And then I got to do all sorts of cool things, like move into the office of the chief product officer where I worked on Salesforce Tableau integration strategies, and now I get to lead my fun team.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. I remember … Well, I mean, you’re right, there’s totally a limitation on the reports and dashboard stuff. But I remember the last time we talked, one of the things you gave me the insight into was just all the visualizations that Tableau could do. I think it was, “The biggest common mistake is, everybody makes a pie chart.”

John Demby:
Oh yeah, pie charts are not very good for analyzing data, believe it or not. But yeah, we build that into the product. In fact, when you start analyzing your data in Tableau, we actually propose or suggest or give you the best practice visualization for what you’re trying to find.

Mike Gerholdt:
So it’s not a dashboard of pies.

John Demby:
No, not a dashboard of pies.

Mike Gerholdt:
That’s okay. We have AI now, so let’s talk about that because we’ve got Tableau Einstein and Pulse. Help me figure out what these are because these sound fun.

John Demby:
Well, I want to talk to you a lot about Pulse today, but let’s talk about Tableau Einstein real quick. So Tableau Einstein … Well, just back up. AI in general is disrupting everything and very much so in the business analytics space. Two years ago I went to the Gartner Data and Analytics Conference, and all the vendors were starting to talk about AI. Last year, it was the subject of everybody. It was everybody had a cockpit, or a copilot rather, and were starting to feed data into LLMs, and now it just got to be part of the table stakes of the application. You’ve got to be able to use the power of AI to be able to generate and understand and see things even quicker. So what we did with Tableau Einstein is, we are envisioning a new paradigm infused with AI and built on the Salesforce platform. So we’re actually taking all of the goodness of Tableau, we’re bringing it over to Salesforce, we’re using all of the fantastic features of Data Cloud. We’re adding things like a new semantic layer that we call Tableau Semantics, and then on top of all that we have Tableau Agent, which is part of the Agentforce family. It is going to be an evolving product, we showed our vision at Dreamforce.
It’ll take us the next couple of releases to fully get it realized, but it is an amazing leap forward as it relates to AI and especially integrating into Salesforce data.

Mike Gerholdt:
I mean, is it really any surprise? Because I feel like for the last couple of years, especially once we talked about Data Cloud, I remember having guests on talking about data lakes, and joked about putting the cabin out on a data lake. I mean, we’re at the point now where the amount of organizational data that we are creating, it’s almost incomprehensible to be analyzed by any human.

John Demby:
Oh, absolutely. In fact, what AI gives us, which is kind of cool is … traditionally BI tools rely on structure. They need the data in rows and columns or in a database or in something of that format. And what AI begins to do is, it allows us to reach unstructured data and that’s a big value prop for Data Cloud right now, is that people are able to ingest unstructured data. Tableau Einstein is on top of that and able to see both structured and unstructured data through AI. So it’s really, to me it’s exciting. I’ve been in this space for a long time, and to see this disrupt and then us embrace the transformation has been pretty fantastic.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. I think back to the early days of Salesforce, talking about Einstein, and us talking about having to feed it 100,000 rows for the LLM to understand in a very simple use case, what makes an opportunity more likely to be won versus lost? And to feed it all of that data, but boy, you had to get your data in line. Everything was, get your ducks in a row, data, data, data this. And now it’s data but it’s like, well, let the AI figure it out. Right?

John Demby:
Yeah. I think that’s one of the things that Salesforce has really hammered home, especially with our AI vision is, context is everything when it comes to AI. As much context and information that you can drive … and we have it in Salesforce just out of the box, begins to really drive that AI interactivity in a way that without the context, yeah, AI is pretty dumb at that point if it doesn’t really understand the context of what you’re asking.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. Now, you sounded excited for Tableau Einstein, but you sounded over the moon for Tableau Pulse. So tell me about Pulse.

John Demby:
We released Pulse back in February … I guess, here’s my question for you, Mike. When is the last time you picked up an actual newspaper?

Mike Gerholdt:
You mean, outside of needing it to start a charcoal fire?

John Demby:
Yeah. Or actually read it or something like that. But you were probably like me, you probably got the Sunday paper back in … now, we’re dating ourselves here-

Mike Gerholdt:
I know, little age. Absolutely, the Sunday, because it had the thickest classifieds.

John Demby:
Oh, yeah. Well, thickest classified, but it had all the-

Mike Gerholdt:
And the Sunday cartoons.

John Demby:
… cartoons and for me it had the score, all the information about the college games from around the country and stuff like that. But even when we had Sunday papers, if you were like me, you didn’t read it in order, you went and grabbed your favorite section. Maybe for you it was the classifieds, maybe it was the comics or something like that, so you would pick and choose. And then when you actually go through the newspaper, you probably would read a headline and if the headline didn’t grab you, you probably just moved on. Since the pandemic and since the advent of smartphones, and our attention spans really coming down considerably … there’s lots of research that talk about that, now most people consume their news maybe on their smartphone. I know I use a news app and I’ve curated what I want, I pick the sources that I’m interested in, and it surfaces me high-level summaries. In the morning when I wake up, I look at the news, want to make sure the world is still around.

I scroll through and I find something, maybe the latest story about Taylor Swift and that other dude she’s dating.

Mike Gerholdt:
He plays football.

John Demby:
Yeah. He plays football and they were saying, at the Taylor Swift concert Sunday they were actually playing the football game on the big screen. So go figure how far we’ve come. But yeah, it’s really a different paradigm where we look for information so we started thinking about, how do people consume data? I think it’s changed. I think people want to consume data in the flow of their work. I think they don’t necessarily want to have to go look for it. They don’t want to have to go interrogate a very complex dashboard. They want it to be contextual, they want it to be informational, they want it to be relatable to what they’re looking at. And then they want it to tell them maybe in plain language, maybe through AI, things that they should be worried about and things that they should double-click on. So that’s what we did with Pulse was, we totally re-imagined how people consume data for information. We built an app that’s very similar in some ways to a newspaper app on your phone, that lets you pick the metrics that you’re interested in, you can double-click on them. It’ll tell you what’s up, what’s down.

It has AI infused in it, it has the ability to really give you insights very quickly. So then what you need to do is to take action, either early warning or corrective action, or even if something’s going great, letting your team know it’s going great.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. I mean, listening to you describe it, for the longest time that I’ve built reports and dashboards, I’ve never really thought about it in the way that you described it. But the way that I hear you talk now, it makes sense. Because if you think about driving your car down the road, you look down at the speedometer and some gauges, make sure you have gas. You get real-time information in your car so that if you’re coming up on an exit and your car is getting low on fuel, you know to exit to get fuel. Whereas traditional reporting, you would do most of the trip and then you’d stop and go, okay, so how fast was I going and when do I need fuel? You’re like, oh, I actually ran out of fuel a mile ago, as a traditional dashboard. So when you say it gives insights in the flow of work, where does that surface? What should an admin be thinking about, where should they put these insights and what should they be looking for?

John Demby:
Well, we launched the original product, Tableau Pulse, in February. Since then we have over 5,000 customers, that were basically Tableau customers that have adopted the product. About the beginning of the summer we started asking the question, what if we could do, bring Pulse natively to the Salesforce platform? What would that look like? How would people consume it? And things like that. So we were very aggressive. We took a very agile approach, maybe almost like a startup, and we built a companion product to Pulse that we called Pulse for Salesforce. And what it does is, it takes these metrics really show up in the form of a KPI card. The KPI card, like I said, has a big number. It tells you if you’re up or down, gives you a spark line, begins to tell you in plain language what’s happening. So you can read that and then as you double-click into it, it gives you all of the additional information you’ve asked for. The outliers, the what’s up, what’s down, what’s causing this, what should I be looking at? So over the summer we built Pulse for Salesforce and we released it a couple of weeks before Dreamforce. It is as simple as installing a managed package, and then we drop in nine pre-configured Sales Cloud metrics. So we started with Sales Cloud, we’re looking at expanding into the other clouds, into the industries and Service Cloud. But it actually gives you nine pre-built metrics.

The good news is, we gave you permissions to be able to create all the metrics you want on any of the data, as long as you surface it inside of Salesforce from that perspective. If you’ve got some external data that your salespeople would really value and seeing right there on the opportunity record or the home page or something like that, you can actually add those metrics, not just the nine that we ship. It’s just embedded in Salesforce. It works on Salesforce mobile. We actually made it to pop up off the utility bar, which people think is really cool. So I’m right there in the sales app and at any point I want, I hit the button and I’ve got Pulse metrics. But yeah, you can stick it anywhere inside of Salesforce. We give you those nine pre-built ones, but we don’t limit you to that. It’s a simple app but it is a very powerful app, and we’re already seeing demand. We’ve got hundreds of customers already lined up that want to get onboard with Pulse for Salesforce.

Mike Gerholdt:
I mean, that utility bar is so underutilized, I need to work that into demos more. As you explain through that, I’m hearing yet another reason for Data Cloud. Because it’s not only the data in Salesforce but the data that you bring to, or surface as you said. So if I had Data Cloud and I was just bringing in data, then Tableau Pulse can help me bring insight to that as well.

John Demby:
Oh yeah, absolutely. Pulse for Salesforce assumes that maybe you don’t have Data Cloud, so we don’t make that a requirement. But if you do have Data Cloud … or if you are moving along with us because you really see the value of Agentforce and all the things that Data Cloud is going to power, then yes, Tableau has a live connector to Data Cloud. You could create these additional metrics or data that you bring into Data Cloud or Zero Copy or any of that kind of stuff right there in Data Cloud, and then have these Pulse metrics sit on top of them, so that you’re giving your people the most up-to-date information possible so they can make data-driven decisions.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. I think I heard you say this, but I just want to make sure because this is really cool. Tableau Pulse helps me understand the what, but I think you were getting at more than that, it also helps me understand the why. Can you explain that?

John Demby:
One of the things we’ve built into Pulse for Salesforce and Tableau Pulse is, in addition to surfacing insights that may be relevant and popping those up immediately … Let’s just say for instance I’m looking, one of the out-of-the-box metrics for Pulse for Salesforce is conversion rate. The metric card tells me my conversion rate is down over the last month and gives me some indicators from that perspective. I double-click in, and maybe the first thing that Pulse tells me is, these are the segments that you’re underperforming in. So I can begin to take some analysis, maybe I need to look at that. But maybe I want to ask it a question, so we do have Q&A built into the product. I’m not bound by what Pulse tells me, I can actually click the ask button and then just type a plain language question like, tell me what industries are in decline? Or something like that. And then it will source that information for me and I can begin to do that additional analysis, and then with tools like Slack and others I can take those insights and even share them with others in my organization.

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, that was going to be my next question is, it’s fun if one person knows about it, but how do they broadcast that out? It sounds like you’ve got that figured out with collaboration.

John Demby:
Yeah, collaboration is built into the product. This idea of sharing is really critical in the solution, I could share a number of different ways. But keep in mind, we do usually encourage customers to adhere to some level of security. So if I try to share an insight with somebody they don’t have access to, that I’ve set up in Tableau, they won’t see it. But that’s fine because we want governance, we want data governance and stuff like that. But it still gives you that ability for that data you do share and you do have, to very quickly share those insights and start a conversation about it.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. I mean, that to me is one of the often overlooked things, you set up your profile, your permission set groups, once in Salesforce, and then everything on the platform respects that. You don’t have to worry about, oh, we use this third-party tool and then going over there and learning their terminology, and then configuring that and then hoping you got it right. I like that. As an admin, who do you often talk to in organizations about Tableau Pulse? Because more often than not admins are square in the middle of business process. They’re like the BAs. They often do BA work. They know the pain points of the end user and they often need to translate that up to executives to say, here’s a way that we can improve our process better, but also it’s going to cost money. Where often in organizations are you talking to people about Tableau Pulse?

John Demby:
Well, Pulse is really, it’s interesting, when Tableau first started, Tableau really spoke to the business user. We made it really easy that a business user … like I said in my introduction with how I found Tableau, could easily go and get a license and start using Tableau. We still do that today. We still have an online store and anybody can buy Tableau, even if it’s one license to get started and things like that. But it’s usually the business that drives this. It’s like, okay, I need these insights. I would imagine it’s the same customers that admins deal with on a day-to-day basis, is their end users and leaders and people that are overseeing things in Salesforce, they want these kind of things. And what we’ve done, especially with Pulse for Salesforce is, because of the managed package we’ve made it really easy for a Salesforce admin to set this up with really little to no Tableau experience, and then get started. And then they can expand their usage and learn more about the product and stuff like that. But yeah, it’s the business I think is really who’s driving a lot of this. In fact, one of the things, it’s a stat that’s out there is, if I remember it right, 70% of leaders really want their organizations to be data-driven.

But when you look at it, only about 30% of the potential knowledge workers … think of a knowledge worker as really anybody that could use data to influence a decision, so that could be all the way down to the shop floor. So knowledge workers are everywhere, they’re not just behind a desk and things like that, but only about 30% of those actually have access to data. Sometimes, like I said, it’s locked away. It may be in a dashboard, so we actually ask them to go find it. But the future is really bringing it in the flow, embedding it in where they are, being able to show it on things like mobile devices and tablets and all those accelerated devices where you can get more information. Yeah. I think admins will find that it’s a very common conversation to have with the business. We’re happy to have it with you, to talk to you about all the different industry use cases and all the different options that we’ve seen people use Pulse for.

Mike Gerholdt:
The perfect segue. I was going to ask, is one thing that I don’t ask enough on this podcast, I try to keep things generic and applicable to most. But industry use cases in industries, is there any industries this is specifically geared for, or which ones are really benefiting the most?

John Demby:
That’s a great question. In fact, in case my team actually listens to this … I don’t know if they will or not.

Mike Gerholdt:
Of course they do. Everybody listens to the admin podcast.

John Demby:
Everybody listens to the podcast, but I’ll actually compliment them. Because once we launched Pulse, we started on a mad project to enable and create as many industry demos as we could on Pulse. And do everything from HLS, healthcare to financial services to non-profit, to public sector to manufacturing, to … I’m going to leave some of them out, Salesforce, all the Salesforce clouds, really marketing, HR. There’s really not a use case out there that Pulse doesn’t meet some need for, because everybody’s got KPIs. And what’s kind of fun to me is, I had a sales … I’m going to talk about how great it is to use AI here too. I had a sales rep come to me and says, “Hey, I’ve got a customer, they’re buying Loyalty Management from Salesforce. I want to know what I could do from a Pulse perspective.” Well, we have 50 plus demos out there but we haven’t got the 51 done for Loyalty Management yet. It’s a product that I’m not as familiar with, so I turned to my friend AI that we actually have licensed in-house, so it’s secure and everything like that.

I simply ask it, tell me the Pulse metrics for Loyalty Management and next thing I know, I had about 10 Pulse metrics they called out that you could actually write on Loyalty Management. It was very simple, very clean. I could actually take those definitions, create my dataset for Loyalty Management, and build out those metrics just in a matter of minutes and then share them with the organization. So AI is helping us even figure out what ways to deploy our software, which I think is really cool.

Mike Gerholdt:
I mean, yeah, that’s always beneficial. You think of, especially for an organization like Salesforce, how much documentation and video and just even internal assets we create, it can be hard to know where it all is and what’s what too. John, thanks for coming on and talking Tableau Einstein and Pulse with us. It’s always good to hear. Are you going to any world tours this-

John Demby:
I think I may end up at the Dallas World Tour since it’s local.

Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, well, that makes sense. I would say, look for the guy in the cowboy hat, but if you’re going to the Dallas World Tour …

John Demby:
Surprisingly enough, even if-

Mike Gerholdt:
… you’re probably not the only person.

John Demby:
… the Dallas World Tour, I will probably be the only person in a cowboy hat. Because I seem to be pretty … Although it was interesting, I will say this, I was at, of course, Dreamforce with you a couple of weeks ago or a month ago or however long it was. I’m coming down the escalator-

Mike Gerholdt:
I don’t really know, it was in the past, in the time.

John Demby:
Yeah, it’s in the past. But I’m coming down the escalator and I’m going to do a session in one of the broadcast theaters, I literally walked by a guy with a cowboy hat. I was like, wait a minute, I’m the only one out of the 45,000 people who are supposed to have a cowboy hat in San Francisco.

Mike Gerholdt:
Didn’t you get the memo?

John Demby:
Yeah, there you go. But no, look for me at the Dallas World Tour. I would love to catch up with you in any other way, just reach out to me on LinkedIn or however you want to find me, I’d be happy to chat.

Mike Gerholdt:
Was it a white cowboy hat? Because I will say this, you have the most crisp white cowboy hat.

John Demby:
Yes. Well, I have a collection-

Mike Gerholdt:
I’m sure.

John Demby:
… much to the chagrin of my wife, but I do have a collection of cowboy hats. And yes, for Dreamforce I was wearing a nice, silver/white hat.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. No, I remember it. So did the other person have a white cowboy hat or do you not remember?

John Demby:
I think it was brown.

Mike Gerholdt:
Right. See, so you’re one of-

John Demby:
I was the only one with the silver cowboy hat there.

Mike Gerholdt:
Exactly.

John Demby:
There you go.

Mike Gerholdt:
No, it’s awesome. Good. Well, people make it down to Dallas, then look for you, I’m sure it will be hard to find anybody else walking around with a white cowboy hat. But also think of it, they can also just go, they’re in the perfect city to get themselves a white cowboy hat.

John Demby:
Yeah, there we go. Or ask me, I live in Fort Worth, I’ll hook you up with my hat guy if you want a hat.

Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, man. A good haberdasher that can form and foam, that is … I have gone down that rabbit hole of TikTok before for a couple of hours and watch them, how they can make those hats and steam and form, it’s an art.

John Demby:
In fact, I have one sitting by my desk, that I need to go see my hat guy and have him shape it back up because it’s a little crooked. I need to do that this week.

Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, so cool, I could watch those too. Thanks so much, John. Have a great world tour and we’re going to go check out some more Tableau Einstein and Pulse.

John Demby:
All right, sounds good.

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, it was another great discussion with John. I hope you enjoyed this episode, I know I did. It was a fun reminder of just all the amazing things that Tableau can help us Salesforce admins do in terms of driving insight across our orgs. Now, if you enjoyed the episode, please be sure to share it with a friend or a colleague, especially if you’re listening on Apple Podcast or wherever you listen. Generally there’s three dots in the corner and you can click share episode, and then you can post it to social or maybe text it to a friend. Now, we mentioned a few things, any resources and really just a lot of content for you to check out is over at admin.salesforce.com. That’s where you can find a ton of blog posts that me and the whole admin team create to help you be successful with our product and in your career. Of course, you can find everything that we mentioned, links in the show notes, including an episode transcript if you need to go back and check that out.

And don’t forget to join the conversation with other Salesforce admins over in the admin Trailblazer group that is over in the Trailblazer Community. Again, you know where to find the link, it’s in the show notes. So until next week, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post What Makes Tableau Pulse Essential for Salesforce Admins? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, guest host Josh Birk talks to Katie Villanueva, Golden Hoodie winner and Salesforce Administrator at 10K Advisors. Join us as we chat about her work with mental health advocacy and mindfulness principles that you can apply to your work as a Salesforce Admin.

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

Mental health advocacy in the Salesforce ecosystem

Katie started out as an accidental admin, getting her degree in radio and television. These days, she works as a Salesforce Administrator for 10K Advisors, where she’s hard at work updating legacy code with flows and improving workflow processes.

Katie’s also the founder of the Mental Health and Illness Trailblazer Community Group. It’s a space in the ecosystem to make meaningful connections, share resources, and share stories. “We’re not alone in our struggles,” Katie says, and what’s important is to build that support network and talk about it.

Mindfulness principles for stress management and personal growth

Recently, Katie gave a talk at Midwest Dreamin’ entitled “Appreciate Your #AwesomeAdmin Self,” based on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s seven principles of mindfulness. The principles are a skill and something you have to practice, but they can help you overcome fear, doubt, imposter syndrome, burnout, stress, and negative self-talk.

The principles are:

1. Non-judgement
2. Patience
3. Beginner’s mindset
4. Trust
5. Non-striving
6. Acceptance
7. Letting go

In the talk, Katie gets into how you can apply those principles to your work as a Salesforce Admin. 

As seen on the Dreamforce stage

At Dreamforce, Katie presented “Automate with AI: Prompt Builder, Flow, and Slack,” about the magic you can make when you get all three working together. If you missed out, she recently covered the same topics on How I Solved It with Jennifer Lee. 

Katie has so many great insights to share, so be sure to listen to the full episode to learn more. 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

• Trailblazer Group: Salesforce Mental Health + Illness Group (Virtual)
• How I Solved It: Harness the Power of AI, Flow, and Slack to Summarize and Notify Users

Admin Trailblazers Group

• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

• Katie on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on X
• Mike on Threads
• Mike on Tiktok
• Mike on X

Full show transcript

Josh:
Hello, Admins! Guest host Josh Birk here, and today I’m going to bring you my guest, Katie Villanueva. You may have known Katie Villanueva from her recent Golden Hoodie Win. Also, Katie and I share a long history of mental health advocacy, and indeed, today we are going to talk about mental health and wellness tips for the workplace. Now a quick note due to the Gravity, well, which is Dreamforce. We actually recorded this shortly before Dreamforce, but it is not coming out until well after Dreamforce. So just kind of imagine when Katie’s talking about the session that she’s going to do at Dreamforce that she already did it. I attended it and it was wonderful. Now over to Katie. Alright, today on the show we welcome Katie Villanueva to talk about her work with mental health advocacy and some of her upcoming presentations. Katie, welcome to the show.

Katie:
Hi, thanks for having me.

Josh:
Alright, well let’s start with your early years. What did you go to school for?

Katie:
I went to school for radio. Television. Yeah. Well, no, actually a farmer. And then I graduated with radio, television, so I bounced around until I found my niche in the world, which is Salesforce being an admin.

Josh:
Okay. And what was your first involvement with Salesforce?

Katie:
I was an accidental admin, accidental on purpose admin. I wanted to do the job so they didn’t have anybody doing the job. So at a company that didn’t have a team or didn’t have any experience with Salesforce, you always have that one person who ends up being the accidental admin. I sought out that position and said, I want to do it.

Josh:
So you were kind of a voluntold admin, but you sort of voluntold yourself?

Katie:
Yeah, yeah. I had a lot of really good ideas and nobody was going to execute ’em the way that I wanted to execute them, so I just decided to steer the ship myself.

Josh:
A classic form of if you want a job done. Right. Got it.

Katie:
Yes. Love it.

Josh:
And how would you describe your current job?

Katie:
Oh, my current job, I am no longer steering ships. I am absorbing all the things about Salesforce. I went to, the first role that I had was at a smaller company, no integrations, we only use Sales Cloud. It was a great role to wrap my arms around Salesforce and what its core capabilities were. But I graduated into this role. Now I’m with 10 K advisors. They’re amazing, made up full of great people, and they have a really old org and it’s full of code, and they’re looking to update it with flows and retire those old workflow rules and put ’em into flows and clean up that old code and put it into something that now Salesforce is capable of doing that it wasn’t able to do eight years ago. So I’m learning a lot about Code and Flow and also just the mega massive org that it is. And I’m working with a team, so I’m also learning best practices and how to work with others and share the helm.

Josh:
Got it. Nice. Nice. Well, we’re focusing on mental health for the most part today and awareness. So tell me a little bit about the Trailblazer community that you started. Yeah,

Katie:
So I created the mental health and illness user group, and it is a space in the ecosystem where we can make meaningful connections and share resources and share stories and try to figure out this not only work-life balance and build up a support system around you, but understand that we’re not alone in the struggles that folks have that I think everybody has at one point or another in their lives, or folks that are dealing with mental illnesses such as myself, I have bipolar disorder and I get to meet other people with bipolar disorder, and we get to talk about how that affects us doing the job and how we get through that. So all kinds of, everybody’s got stuff going on and we weren’t talking about it that much prior to the group, openly, at least that I was aware of. And I started talking about it and folks gathered around and I went to Salesforce and said, Hey, I think there’s a community here that could use some support and can flourish. And they agreed and we created the user group. It’s a virtual user group, but at conferences we try to meet up and color Well, I mean, conferences are so exhausting.

Katie:
You get zapped or whatever the word you want to use, you get drained really easily over socialized, overstimulated. And some folks use it as a quiet time and put on some music and chill out. And then other folks just use it as icebreakers too, to meet some other people, conference goers, and then it’s very library vibes. It’s quiet, there’s small talk or there’s no talk. I love it.

Josh:
Which is sometimes exactly what people need. So that’s good. Yeah, no, I agree. And I feel like it’s actually Dreamforce and Trailhead DX have only gotten, I think is the way I’d put it. Being on the floor on Moscone can just be visually overstimulating even before you start lingering in sounds and social interactions and things like that. And I know it’s become even more important for me to remind myself that sometimes you just have to take a walk, get outside, enjoy that wonderful park that’s right next to Meko before things get a little haywire. Tell me a little bit about before you started grappling with your bipolar disorder and with stress and anxiety, what were some symptoms that you saw at work that were causing you pain?

Katie:
Oh man. I was a wreck. I think the first thing that comes to mind was probably the most impactful that had happened to me is that I had a manager just blow up at me on one day and say, I don’t know which version of you I’m going to get.

Katie:
Some days you come in here, you’re on top of it, you’re productive, you’re all over it. I don’t have to worry about anything. And then other days it’s like you don’t know what’s going on or you’re crying or you just aren’t thinking through some simple tasks, stuff like that. And he couldn’t depend on me, which broke my heart because I am a hard worker and I put so much of myself into my work because, and this was at the radio station, I loved the radio station. I found a direction at that time in my life and the fact that I was failing it and failing at what I’m capable of really just hurt me to my core. So that was an issue. And then a lot of times I cried a lot. I cried so much if my personal life was not steady, which at age 20, trying to figure life out, it’s not really one thing

Katie:
Yeah, yeah. You don’t have balance in your life. That was a trigger. And then some personal stuff, deaths in the family, stuff like that, just like anybody else would react to. But for me, when I had those triggers, it was exponential. I mean, here’s good example. Just recently my dog died and it was my soulmate dog, and I had a manic episode after she died. Yes, I was grieving, but I took that for the nth degree and abandoned my everyday life. And just because I was so obsessed about, I went to a manic episode about creating a photo album. I created three, I printed 400 pictures out of, I only had 200 out of my dog and I printed 400. I had triplets of the same picture, and I kept on printing them. And then I bought photo album after photo album after photo album because the photo albums weren’t good enough for the kind of book that I wanted to make. And then I spent time obsessing and I wasn’t doing my work. I wasn’t going to the gym. I was eating crappy food, I was also depressed. So I was drinking every night and I was just going through pictures, and I spent a ridiculous amount of money on this more than anybody really should when they want to put together a photo album for a dog that may have passed away.

Katie:
So when life gets imbalanced for me, it trickles into my work life. And unfortunately, that just means, I guess my manager said, I can be unpredictable or unreliable. It’s hard. It’s hard to hear because I know I can do a good job and I know I am a good worker and I know I produce good work.

Josh:
Yeah. Well, and we’ve talked about this back on the dev pod days, and it’s so important to be able to talk about it because first of all, I think in the tech industry, it’s really hard for people to admit that they might become unreliable for some reason because so much of our jobs, it is supposed to be show up. I was just at a user group meeting and they were joking about how they figured out that the best way to learn how to do flow was by failing at it five times. Right? It’s the same thing with coding. You’re going to break it three times to Sunday before you ever get anything work. But our outer image is like, oh, you need that code to get you to work. The train’s going to come on time, boss. You’re going to just kind of get it done. But if you don’t talk about it, you don’t normalize it. You don’t rationalize it. And then we realize so much that we’re not alone, that there are so many people out there dealing with depression, anxiety, chronic illnesses, or even just basic,

Katie:
I can’t be, there’s 10 million people with bipolar disorder. I cannot be the only person that this company who employs not 10 K, but I mean a company of however, a hundred, I worked for larger companies, national, global companies with a hundred thousand plus workers. I can’t be the only one with this. So how are you going to deal with this? How do we learn how to deal with this when it comes up? So yeah, you got to talk about it.

Josh:
Yeah. And I’m on the record on a different session than I did, basically saying to people, managers, I know you didn’t sign up to be somebody’s therapist, and we’re not asking you to be somebody’s therapist. That’s not your job. However, part of your job as a people manager is to recognize, acknowledge and work around mental health challenges because it will happen. It will happen to somebody who has, I don’t even know if normal brains exist in a post pandemic world, to be honest. When somebody loses a dog or a mom or a father or something like that, every now and then life is going to break you down a little bit and you’re not going to show up to work and be a hundred percent and maybe not showing up to work for a while is exactly what you need. And I will, as I always do, give a shout out to the wonderful people I’ve worked with at Salesforce who have been so supportive in things that I’ve done in the past and really helping prioritize mental health days and be able to take time off and the important things. So the self-care is very important to the employee, but it’s very important to have a safe space that management can help provide that as well.

Katie:
Yeah, agreed. I think, I don’t know, I got nothing. I feel like we hold so much back

Josh:
Because

Katie:
We’re spending so much energy trying to cover it up. When I let go of holding back and I got my medication and I found my balance and I went to therapy, all that energy that I had trying to hide, it turned into something really productive and my career skyrocketed.

Josh:
Yeah. Yeah. Nice. What are some things that you do on the day-to-day that kind of help you regulate your stress and monitor your stress?

Katie:
Definitely workout. Workout and eating. That is what I can keep in my control

Katie:
When I, I reduce my stress levels, which evens out my moods. And then I also, I get a boost of serotonin in my brain, which is pretty much a dose of happy medicine. Then you put that on top of the actual medicine. Then it keeps me my boat upright. Nice. I like it. Yeah. Eating. I try to eat healthy and I control how much I drink. Unfortunately, like I said, when my dog passed, I wasn’t monitoring those things and I spiraled and I felt like junk and alcohol’s a depressant. So when I was depressed, I, and I knew I was digging myself deeper in the hole. I didn’t have the energy to stop myself, but it was enough for warning signs for my loved ones to know, Hey, Katie doesn’t drink that much. And my husband said, if you’re sad, we can’t drink. He helped me. He was like, I’m not going to buy any alcohol this week.

Josh:
Nice.

Katie:
And it helped and it just broke the chain and we got alcohol back in the house. Again, not that I’m an alcoholic, but I couldn’t stop myself, but my support was able to see these signs that this is irregular, this is not everyday, Katie. So when I stopped going to the gym and when I stopped eating healthy, those were signs.

Josh:
I had somebody, actually, I think it was an article I was reading, and this is mostly about anxiety. So serotonin inhibitors, they work by forcing serotonin to go back to the front lines and keep working. And then she’s like, so it’s a very healthy thing because you’re basically just tricking your brain into doing what it was supposed to be doing in the first place. And then if you smoke marijuana, marijuana goes after the same receptors, it goes after the same serotonin receptors, so it doesn’t let this SSRIs do their job. And so she’s like, now think if your house is on fire, right? Serotonin is like a sprinkler system in your house goes off, fire is down, your house is fine. Marijuana is kind of like you call the fire department even though it’s just a kitchen fire. So now the fire is out, but your entire house is drenched and you have all this property damage.

Josh:
And then she’s like, alcohol is like you have your house on fire and you call in the military and send in a tank to blow up your house. That’s how much more powerful alcohol is taking the attention away from what your brain is supposed to be doing. Alright, well let’s shift gears here a little bit. Move into kind of positive vibe mode. And I want to talk about the talk that you did at Midwest streaming, which is appreciating your awesomeness as an admin. And the first thing I want to ask you, because you kind of set up the session is like, this is about you. This is about a person, but you bring up somebody, John Cabot, Z, and I don’t know if I’m saying that right, but who is John Cabot Zi and how did he impact your session?

Katie:
Oh my gosh. Actually, I have a funny full circle story about him. So I’ll just start with, so the session is based off of the seven principles of mindfulness, which he is known to have created or at least put pen to paper and say, these are the seven principles. I’m sure they existed prior before that, but he popularized the principles. So the principles are widely accepted around the world for its impact on stress. It will, and this is what I tell the folks that come to my session. It’ll help you overcome fear and doubt and imposter syndrome and burnout and stress and negative. The principles are a skill and it’s something you have to practice. But if you practice, you will be able to manage your stress. And sometimes I even catch myself thinking, oh, I am not applying a principal right now. But the principles themselves are non-judgment. So I relate that to folks. I say, are you comparing yourself to others? Because that means you’re passing judgment on yourself.

Josh:
Yes.

Katie:
Which everybody does at one point or the other. And then the second question is, are you patient with yourself? We all want to learn everything right now, especially the new stuff that comes out. I remember when AI came out and people were experts the next day, they’re self proclaiming experts.

Josh:
That is a very important addition to that phrase because I assure you, as somebody who jumped on that bandwagon and had to do a lot of reading, unless you were already an AI researcher, nobody was an expert when this certain bandwagon started rolling up.

Katie:
Yeah. Yep. Exactly. So the second one is be patient and give yourself time and space to learn. The third question that he cited was having a beginner’s mindset. So are you being open to learning new things, which is so important. I mean, you can’t be in this profession without it. And if you don’t have it, you probably aren’t very good at your job. And I’d say that sounds harsh, but what I’m saying is having a beginner’s mindset is being open to new things. We always have new releases. It’s being open to new solutions. If you come to a table and think that you already have the fix and you haven’t heard other ideas or other things that may snag it up in the process, then you’re being very closed-minded and may not have the best solution. And then being open to learn, like I said. And so it’s having a beginner’s mindset. And I say this in the session and it’s my favorite line in the entire session is having a beginner’s mindset is the thing that prevents you from getting stuck. It allows you to grow.

Josh:
Yeah, yeah. Well, and as you’re saying, it’s very important in our culture and Salesforce culture because we do stuff changes so quickly. Three releases a year, new features, new products. The joke that I’ve been putting on the road these days is at one point you could actually learn the whole platform. You could learn almost everything about being an admin. You could learn almost everything about being a developer. And it wasn’t, wasn’t a mind killer. And now it’s practically impossible because even within just the Salesforce platform itself, there’s so many moving gears, but then you add in MuleSoft and Tableau and Slack and they have their own releases and they’re constantly updating stuff. But I think it even goes farther than that. It goes exactly what you’re talking about with your new job. If you don’t assume that there might be a better thing on the table now than when you made the thing three years ago, you might be missing out. And I always told my developer teams, don’t rely on the code you wrote last year because chances are somebody at Salesforce fix that 15 lying piece of code that you wrote just to get that one thing to work. It’s probably one line of code now, and if you don’t go researching it, you won’t find that out.

Katie:
Yeah. I mean, I don’t mean to be so harsh, but it’s so important in this line of business is to open yourself to all the things available and to all the possibilities and all the ideas and all the learning, and that’s what keeps us moving forward. But going back to the principles, the fourth principle of mindfulness is trust. So I feel like a lot of us don’t trust ourselves. We’re not confident in questioning or even I gave them an example of saying no to somebody, especially maybe somebody in a leadership position. But sometimes we don’t do that because we’re afraid we’re going to make a mistake. But I remind folks that mistakes are okay. It’s not failure, it’s just learning in action, but still trust your gut. So that’s the fourth principle. The fifth principle is non-striving. And people are like, what? Non-striving, you mean don’t cry? No, what I mean is that if you’re always breaching and striving for the next thing, how can you be happy with what you did accomplish? And I say the example of how often do you see somebody work really hard for a certification and they post on LinkedIn that they got it, they’re certified now, but before the end of the post, they’re already onto that next one.

Katie:
And so they’re not in the moment and they’re not supporting themselves and they’re not appreciating their accomplishments. So a non-striving is definitely appreciate how your accomplishments make you feel and tap into that. The sixth principle is acceptance. And that’s another what I get from people. The acceptance is see things as they are. But I quickly follow that up as that does not mean keep things as they are. I mean, how many of us are in a situation with either rose colored glasses and something is so great, whether it be a work experience or a job or maybe a skillset that you think you have spot on and you really don’t. Or maybe you’re in a situation that’s really negative, but maybe it’s not so negative because you’re not being open to what’s coming at you and you are not really benefiting from it. You just are so against it. So the sixth question really challenges people to open their minds and their hearts to the situations they’re in. Because I say and what Mr. John says, he says, if you can see a situation for what it truly is, that’s what helps you decide to change it.

Katie:
And that’s what gets you organized and motivated to take on the next challenge. And I tell folks, I said, you have to appreciate that you have the power to change what you see.

Josh:
Nice.

Katie:
Yeah, it’s really cool because sometimes we feel like we don’t have that power. It is like we don’t have the power to grow. We don’t have the power to learn will take us forever to get to where we want to go. We can’t say no to somebody that is all inside you. We have that. We just have to recognize it. And then the seventh principle is the hardest one, but the simplest. And that is to let go, just let go. This is where we’re at, this is what we’re learning. This is the situation I’m in and I’m going to change it, but it’s going to take time. And I’m working towards those goals and just let go of that stress

Katie:
I just fixating on what isn’t really isn’t healthy.

Josh:
So I love all of that. And the two things that come to mind, first of all is there are so many things that you’re describing that are so similar to how cognitive behavioral therapy works, which CBT is a lot about reframing and asking questions. Do you have evidence for this thought that you’re having? And if you don’t have evidence to it, does that mean it’s an irrational thought or a rational thought? And it’s like investigating the emotions that we jump to before we actually try to make change. So there you’ve got acceptance there, you have patience. The other thing I love about it is how they kind of play with each other a little bit. You have to give yourself patience to not know something, but also open a beginner’s mindset to go learn something new. So it sounds like it’s a very good lesson in balance. It’s not just all our favorite statement and no insult to yoga people because yoga is wonderful, but when people are like, oh, you’re having a bad mental health day, why don’t you just go do yoga? It’s just not that simple people. It just doesn’t work that way. How do you find yourself dealing with, when does this introduce into your daily life? Do you find yourself in a situation and then you take a step back and be like, oh, I should leverage this principal at this point?

Katie:
Oh, for sure not. Yeah. And I’ll be honest, I was introduced to this when I was going through yoga teacher training. It’s not the seven principles of mindfulness, it’s the eight branches of yoga, and it’s very similar and it’s theories of mostly being letting go, not being possessive of things and so on and so forth. So that’s what got me to looking for something that I can bring to the Salesforce community along those lines. And I stumbled upon these. So when I wrote this up, I was like, I need this. And every time I give this session, it’s like a love letter to myself from my past self. It is just a reminder that I am imperfect. It’s a reminder that I am on a journey and to be patient. And so when I get mean at my job at 10 K, I’m still in my first year. Everybody there. I don’t know if you know this is a hall of Famer or an MVP. Oh, I know that. No. Oh gosh. It’s really intimidating. And I’ve only been in the ecosystem for four years. I’ve the least amount of experience and everybody on the Team.

Katie:
I get really insecure about that. But you know, it’s where I’m at.

Katie:
Yeah, it’s where I’m at and I’m learning and I’m growing. So when I get upset about work stuff, I do think about these principles or I’m prepping for Dreamforce and I’m really excited to give my presentation, but I’m like, am I going to get it done in time? Am I going to remember all the words? Am I going to get tongue tied? And I just take a step back when I get really upset or really wrapped up into something, something that’s stressing me out that I’m trying to be productive on. That’s when the principles come to me. And then I take a step back and I think through them and I’m like, how am I applying this? What is the one that’s stressing me out the most? And so it’s taking that step back and it definitely calms me down a lot.

Josh:
Got it. So kind of preparing your mind to go prepare yourself to go do something.

Katie:
Yeah. Yeah.

Josh:
Nice. What are some of the things that you’re going to be doing at Dreamforce?

Katie:
Oh, I will be giving my first technical session about automating with ai. I’ll be reviewing Prompt Builder flow and Slack and what happens when you combine them all and what kind of magic comes out of that?

Josh:
Nice.

Katie:
I’m really excited about it. I keep on making a joke. I was like, I’ve talked about my feelings a lot. I am ready to talk.

Josh:
Yeah, I hear you. I hear you. I’m trying to teach my status as the guy who really bums people out. Oh, she’s going to talk about something dark again.

Katie:
I just say I’m an admin. I want to show people that I do admin stuff too. Nice. I love it. But oh, speaking of which, I did say that I called it John Kebas. You called it his name different, I don’t know, I should probably look that up exactly. But I said it was a full circle thing because when I went to my first community conference, I went to my first Salesforce tower in Atlanta and I was really excited and they had all these books on the shelves and they said, we can grab one. And I grabbed Barack Obama’s book, I grabbed his book, and it’s a book on mindfulness.

Josh:
Nice.

Katie:
I didn’t realize that when I wrote this session last year, I didn’t realize that I had grabbed that book two years prior because I never read it because it’s not a graphic novel, but I’ll get to it when I put my comic books down, I will get to it. But I just thought it was weird. I was like, this guy has been in my life before and now I’m talking about him. That’s

Josh:
Nice. That’s nice. Are there any mental health and illness events coming up soon?

Katie:
Well, let’s see. We’re still trying to figure out what we’re going to do for Dreamforce. We do want to color, unfortunately, it will not be in the community networking area, but they do have coloring posters though. So I still suggest people go and decompress with their coloring posters. But we are looking at maybe having a nonprofit event where we raised money for a charity by coloring.

Josh:
Oh, nice.

Katie:
Teaming up with Green Power, who’s interested in giving back to the community. And they reached out to me and loved the coloring event, and I was like, I’m looking for somewhere to host, so someone to host. So doing that. And then also October 10th is World Mental Health Day,

Katie:
And I saw a speaker at Dreaming in Color this year. She was speaking about mindfulness, and her name’s Nick e Thomas, and she’s not part of the ecosystem. She actually was a radio DJ who went rogue and wanted to do more mindful and self-care talks and helping people find their purpose and balance and center. And it was a wonderful session. So I invited her to come for World Mental Health Day and teach us a little bit about self-care. We’re going to do a little bit of meditation, a little bit of chair yoga, and then just learn about centering ourselves a lot. Like these principles next tell us to do so. Yeah, we got

Josh:
That’s awesome. And that’s a virtual event. I love the Rogue DJ who went out to try to help the world. That’s a movie I would watch. I’d watch that.

Katie:
Yeah, she’s awesome. I’m really happy that I stumbled upon her.

Josh:
Nice. Alright, well one final question. Do you have a favorite comfort food?

Katie:
97% dark chocolate.

Josh:
Oh wow. That’s a good one.

Katie:
I like it. Dark and bitter,

Josh:
Not a lot of

Katie:
Sugar. And it’s

Josh:
Creamy. Nice, nice. I like it a lot. I like it a lot. I always go back to meatloaf. I think it’s because my mom used to make meatloaf. I think it’s a mom

Katie:
That’s on the whole other spectrum for me. No way. Although my husband introduced me to smoked meat loafs and that’s actually really good. So if it’s smoked, I’ll eat it.

Josh:
And this is the thing I have learned since cooking meatloaf. There are a lot of different ways to do it. So yeah, wrap them in bacon sometimes works really well.

Katie:
Oh wow.

Josh:
Alrighty, Katie. Well thank you so much for the great conversation information. That was a lot of fun.

Katie:
Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Josh:
I want to thank Katie for the great conversation and information. And as always, I want to thank you for listening. Now, if you want to learn more about this show, head on over to admin.salesforce.com or go to your podcast client of choice. And of course, as always, join us over on admin.salesforce.com to learn more about being an admin. Thanks again everybody. I’ll talk to you soon.

The post How Can Salesforce Admins Overcome Imposter Syndrome and Stress? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Eddie Cliff, VP of Product Management at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about Salesforce Foundations and how it can give you access to even more capabilities within Sales, Service, and beyond.

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

Introduction to Salesforce Foundations

Eddie is the lead PM for Salesforce Foundations, and he’s here to tell us how it can be a game changer for orgs looking to incorporate AI. Now, if you’re a longtime listener to the podcast you know that AI tools are only as good as the data you give them. And while Data Cloud is meant to help you bring all your data into one place, it’s not always easy for customers to make the transition.

That’s where Salesforce Foundations comes in. It adds the basic capabilities of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Data Cloud, and Agentforce to your org, for free.

How to get started with Salesforce Foundations

The goal with Salesforce Foundations is to make it easy to get that 360° view of your customers. As Eddie says, their philosophy is “Easy by default, advanced by choice.” And you’ll find that as you start doing more with segmentation and personalization, you’ll realize just how much further you can go.

Right now, customers with Sales or Service EE or UE can get Salesforce Foundations for free. All you have to do is go into Setup and click on the Salesforce Foundations node, and you’ll be presented with a handy-dandy checklist with everything you need to get started.

Preparing for Agentforce

Foundations makes it easy to get your org ready for Agentforce. That’s why Eddie and his team have included a freemium version of Agentforce in Foundations. “What’s really cool,” he says, “is that as you do more and you use more of these cross-cloud capabilities, your data in Data Cloud gets richer and more powerful and so does Agentforce.”

There’s a lot more in this episode about how Foundations was developed, what’s coming in the future, and the ins and outs of sea kayaking, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode of the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more

• Trailhead: Salesforce Foundations: Quick Look
• Help docs: Considerations for Salesforce Foundations
• Salesforce Admins Blog: Connect Teams and Data with the New Salesforce Foundations

Admin Trailblazers Group

• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

• Eddie on X
• Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on X
• Mike on Threads
• Mike on Tiktok
• Mike on X

Full show transcript

Mike:
This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, we’re talking with Eddie Cliff, VP of Product Management at Salesforce, about some exciting developments in Salesforce Foundations. It was the subline to Agentforce that you heard at Dreamforce this year. Eddie has been at Salesforce for nearly 14 years, transitioning from roles in go-to-market and solution engineering to now product management. And in this episode, Eddie shares insights into the evolution of Salesforce products like Starter, Pro Suite, and we learn about Salesforce Foundations.

Now, before we get started, I just want to make sure that you’re subscribed to the Salesforce Admins podcast on whatever platform you get your Salesforce podcast on. Go ahead and click that subscribe, or sometimes it’s a follow button. And that way, when new episodes come in every Thursday morning, they will be downloaded to your phone. So with that, let’s jump into our conversation with Eddie where he explains how Salesforce Foundations is designed to give customers access to even more capabilities within sales, service and beyond, including all of their existing Salesforce implementations at no cost. So Eddie, welcome back to the podcast.

Eddie Cliff:
Hey, thanks for having me again. Good to be here.

Mike:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, product managers that work on good features that admins love, we love to have on the podcast. So if people aren’t avid listeners, let’s refresh their memory. Tell me what exactly you do at Salesforce and how you came to be?

Eddie Cliff:
Yeah, definitely. So my name is Eddie Cliff, VP of Product Management, leading product for our Starter, Pro and now Foundation Suite, which I’m really excited to talk about today. I’ve been at Salesforce for almost 14 years now, and I’ve done a variety of roles, from go-to-market and sales and solution engineering and customer success prior to moving into product management about eight years ago now.

Mike:
Wow, I didn’t know you were an SC. I don’t think you said that in the last podcast. That’s awesome.

Eddie Cliff:
Yeah, SCs are amazing in what they can bring from their technical understanding and how Salesforce works, but also working with our customers to understand their requirements and needs, and ultimately designing the solutions that they can present back to the customer to hopefully prove out the value of Salesforce as they look to explore it. So actually, have a couple of SCs on my team… Well, former SCs that are now PMs. SCs make really great PMs because of that solutions mindset that’s really tied to customer outcomes, which is super valuable.

Mike:
Yeah, no, I hear you. I also steal from the SC pot as well because they make for good evangelists too.

Eddie Cliff:
Definitely.

Mike:
And they help us present and run demos at Dreamforce, so it doesn’t hurt. Speaking of Dreamforce, maybe not lost in, but the byline under Agentforce was Salesforce Foundations, which we announced, and your leading as the PM force. So let’s talk about what Salesforce Foundations is.

Eddie Cliff:
So it was buried there at the very end of the keynote. So perhaps some people missed it because it was all about Agentforce and it was an amazing keynote. But we’re really excited about Foundations because it’s going to help customers unlock Agentforce. And so before I talk about Foundations a little bit more, I want to take a step back to talk about AI in general, which I know is top of mind for a lot of businesses today and probably a lot of the admins listening today. And I promise we’re going to get to the meat of Foundations, but I think it’s important to talk about this first. So first and foremost, great AI starts with great data, and you can only have great data if all of your apps and systems are connected and you have that single source of truth. And that’s what Data Cloud really does for a lot of our customers.

Now, bringing all that data into one system will lead to happier customers because now you can do targeted marketing, smarter commerce, and more effective sales. And what’s really cool is that this also gets all of your data centralized and ready for AI, but it’s not easy for a lot of our customers to go from say just Sales Cloud or just Service Cloud on their own to the full Customer 360 that we talk about a lot. You need time and resources, and I know from a lot of customers I talk to, that’s not something that they have the luxury of having. And so that’s the goal here with Foundations is we’re making this easier by bringing all of these capabilities to all of our customers through Salesforce Foundations.

So Foundations gives all of these sales and service customers access to more of Salesforce included with their existing Salesforce implementation, and this is free. I want to make sure that’s clear. That’s not something we’re charging for, and you can add this to your existing organ, we’ll talk a little bit about that. But ultimately, with Foundations, we’ve made it easier than ever before to get started with that Connected Customer 360 by building our foundational apps into your CRM. And this includes the basic capabilities within Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Data Cloud, and now Agentforce, which is really exciting because as of today, it’s now available at no additional cost as part of Foundations.

Mike:
Yeah, free is always good. I also thought for a second that I was like, somebody said, “Well, did you hear about Salesforce Foundations?” And I think they dropped the S and I was like, “Yes, I’ve heard of the Salesforce Foundation.” That’s not what we’re announcing.

Eddie Cliff:
No, that’s right. Yeah, I know there’s a lot of words that we use at Salesforce and a lot of them sound familiar. This is Foundations with an S, not our .org and all of the amazing things that we do via the Salesforce Foundation. This is, if you think about it, like the foundations, the platform, the beginning point of your Salesforce journey and all the power you can bring.

Mike:
So I feel like all of this existed prior, we just brought together… I’ve seen all this stuff. How did Foundations come to be?

Eddie Cliff:
Yeah, and I think, Mike, last time I was on, we were talking about the Pro Suite and hopefully everybody had an opportunity to listen to that, but this is a refresher, the journey we’ve been on over the last few years with Salesforce Starter launching back in 2022. We really built this with this ethos of being easy by default and advanced by choice and creating that 360 out of the box, sales, service, commerce and marketing with a hidden version of Data Cloud that was powering all this behind the scenes. And we were getting a lot of great feedback on Starter. It’s really a self-service product. You didn’t need any help to get up and running. You didn’t need to talk to an account executive. You could sign up online, try it for free and purchase with a credit card. But what we started to hear from our customers is they wanted more, either because they were growing or they just needed more advanced capabilities and more customization options.

And so that’s why we launched Pro Suite last year to allow for that seamless upgrade from Starter, and to allow our customers to get that enhanced set of capabilities and customization options. And again, we were getting really great feedback, which is awesome. And so what we started to hear from customers is they wanted to go up, they wanted to expand to Enterprise or even to Unlimited Edition, but they didn’t want to lose any of that 360. They didn’t want to go to Sales EE and lose the marketing and the commerce and the service capabilities that came with Starter and Pro Suites.

So that was the beginning of, “Well, let’s create this in a way that we can allow customers of Starter and Pro Suites to upgrade and not lose any capabilities.” But at the same point, we realized, “Well, we should make this base set of capabilities available for all of our customers so they can get that value, and they don’t have to start with Starter or Pro Suite. So they can do this directly in their EE or UE org.” And so doing things like allowing sellers to speed up things with payment links, and so they can send people to a digital storefront to take care of transactional deals that might free them up to focus on more strategic opportunities or doing cross-cloud scenarios like driving loyalty with Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud, working together to create onboarding journeys and loyalty campaigns.

And then also allowing marketing teams to get into the mix with really targeted Data Cloud segmentation and personalization tools to execute their email marketing campaigns. And ultimately allowing all the teams within an organization to get better cross-functional visibility by working out of that same system, all underpinned by Data Cloud.

Mike:
I think some of that, I’m thinking through as you were talking through that, a lot of that saw in the keynote with how… I forget the retailer we were talking about, but retailer can go in and the person can shop online and then look at it and then immediately pay in the store, making everything a little bit more seamless as opposed to having to send a link or somebody just call in with a credit card or paying online the modern way.

Eddie Cliff:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. So bringing all of these pieces together and making it easy to consume and connecting all of the dots so you don’t have to do that on your side, allows you to do more with Data Cloud, to do more segmentation and personalization because you’re capturing that full Customer 360 in that unified profile that you can then use. So if you have say your commerce order data flowing in, that can be used to trigger marketing campaigns or can be used to surface in a service interaction within a case. And as you start to think about all of the Agentforce use cases you saw at Dreamforce, it’s predicated on the fact that you have a connected view of your customer. You built that Customer 360, which we know is a challenge for a lot of our customers. And so again, that’s the hope here with Foundations is it will help give you a starting point to start building that Customer 360 that you can grow with and scale up with as you need to.

Mike:
So one thing that struck me as you are walking through your last answer is thinking, I started as an admin and admins start in different orgs that are of different size. I started in enterprise level, so we were EE with days of always becoming a UE org, the big shiny emerald city. But you said in your answer, customers wanted to expand to EE and above. Was a lot of this predicated on our organizations that were below EE that set up very transactional use cases?

Eddie Cliff:
Yeah, good question. It was primarily with those that had started with Starter or with Pro Suite for one reason or another, maybe that fit their business needs when they were first evaluating Salesforce, and then their needs grew and they needed the EE level of capabilities from a sales standpoint, from a service standpoint or just from a platform standpoint. And so that’s where we wanted to create this seamless motion that they could go up to EE without losing any of the functionality as well as the experience. It’s something we haven’t talked about that we’ve brought in with the Starter and Pro Suites with things like the Left Nav and our homepage, but ultimately allow them to grow as they need to without losing anything was really important to us.

And again, as I was talking about before, we realized that there was a large opportunity here to say, “Hey, there’s a lot of EE customers.” It’s by far and large the most adopted addition for us. There’s an opportunity to bring this starter level functionality from marketing, from commerce and from service to let’s say, a sales EE customer to start taking advantage of, to start trying out and using and see if it’s a good fit. They can start to bring in more team members across the organization, and then those solutions will scale and grow with them. But again, all can underpin by Data Cloud. So this makes it really easy for them to create that 360 view and sets it up really nicely now for the launch of Agentforce.

Mike:
Yeah, so that begs the question then, who’s eligible to get Salesforce Foundations?

Eddie Cliff:
So right now, customers with sales and/or service, EE or UE, so Enterprise Edition or Unlimited Edition can get Foundations for free, and that’s something that you can do. It just takes a couple of minutes, we’ll talk about it. But for those customers that have industries or might have some additional capabilities already in their org, we are working really hard to make Foundations available for you in the near future as well. So stay tuned there. And if you’re unsure of what your Salesforce org has, and if it’s eligible for Foundations, we have a lot of documentation, but of course, you’re also always able to reach out to your account executive and talk with them and learn more, and they can even assist with getting Foundations turned on.

Mike:
Right, because it normally was available to people EE and below, right?

Eddie Cliff:
That’s right. Yeah. So if you think about what we’ve done in Starter and Pro Suites, I think probably a simple way to think about what Foundations is, is the Pro Suite level of capabilities that we built, which is based on professional edition, sales, service, marketing and commerce. And in bringing that level of functionality up to EE and UE so that you get those additional capabilities that you didn’t have access to before. If you had sales EE or sales UE, you didn’t have a lot of this service or marketing or commerce capabilities and you didn’t have Data Cloud. And so that’s really what we’re trying to bring when you think about a foundational layer of capabilities and value that we can bring to all editions so everybody can take advantage of it and see the value from it.

Mike:
It’s almost, I think of the the Steve Jobs early Apple mantra of them looking at remotes and seeing 1,000 buttons and saying, “Well, yeah, anybody can make something complicated. It’s really hard to make something simple,” and bringing that motion forward. Sometimes you can overcomplicate things and set up. In this way, it’s just bringing it forward and making it very simple and logical to set up.

Eddie Cliff:
Yeah, that’s certainly the goal and that’s the ethos that we took with Starter, that easy by default, advanced by choice, that you don’t need to be a Salesforce expert to get started with Salesforce. And we’ve carried that forward as we launch Pro Suite and now as we’re launching Foundations, to try to make this as easy as possible for everyone to set up and use and save everyone time in the implementation or adoption of these key features. And you’re right, Mike, it’s really hard to take something that’s hard and to make it easier, and we have a better, better, never best mentality as we approach this. There’s always work to be done and sharp edges and rough corners to round off and make the experience better and easier to use and fewer clicks to accomplish key tasks.

And so that’s near and dear to my heart, my team’s heart, on everything that we do in Starter and Pro and Foundations to hopefully make their products experiences as easy to use as possible and as delightful to use as possible as well.

Mike:
So you mentioned customers with sales and service, EE or UE are eligible. How do they turn it on? Is it light switch? That was the joke we made with Lightning, right?

Eddie Cliff:
Yeah. And as I transitioned into product management, you gave me some PTSD a little bit for the early days of Lightning back… When was that? 2015, 2016. And yeah, we had to do a lot of work to really make it so Lightning was something that large organizations could adopt. Foundations is a little bit different, which is really exciting and it is really simple to add it to your word. And actually, in setup now, there’s a new Salesforce Foundation setup node, which you’ll notice at the top left. So if you go into setup and you click on Salesforce Foundations, you’ll see all of the steps you need to do in a section called Start Here. And so we’ve made this super simple to get Foundations added and to get started with in your work. And it does require that you’ll need to add some skews as we call them, some licenses that you get added to your order to provision the right level of functionality.

And so you’ll have to accept some terms and go through that process, top power via your account, hopefully everybody’s seen that really cool self-service capabilities to manage what you have access to in Salesforce. But again, this is free. You’re not paying anything. It’s just adding these capabilities, accepting the terms because it’s some addendum cinema says, and that’s legal terms and the lawyers required it. But once you agree to all that, then we take care of the rest and provisioning and adding everything to your work. And so then all of the necessary pieces will then be present. And so you can go through the rest of the steps once you’ve added it in. There’s some more sections in that set up node. So if you want to go ahead and enable Data Cloud, you can go through that process. If you want to get started with Marketing Cloud, you can enable that, and Commerce Cloud and so forth.

And we’re going to continue to add on to this page as well to make it simpler, and so that you can take advantage of some of the experience pieces too, like being able to add the Left Nav, to get our homepage in the quick settings enabled for your users. So we’re really excited about that. So it’s just the beginning of what you’ll see if you log into your org today. More will be coming in the following months and releases.

Mike:
Good. I like when things just show up in setup. That’s a lot easier for me. Early in the podcast, we talked about how Agentforce stole all the headlines at Dreamforce. I know there was at least one session in the admin track that talked about Marketing Cloud and Data Cloud and their importance, and I’ve heard you mention all of those in your answers. So I think tying Foundations to Agentforce, how does this help an admin get ready for Agentforce?

Eddie Cliff:
Yeah, we hadn’t intended on this. When we started on Foundations, we didn’t intend on this being the foundation for Agentforce. It was something that just organically happened. In partnership with that team, we realized, “Wow, we’ve got a huge opportunity here because in Foundations, we have all the necessary pieces that are really required for somebody to get started with Agentforce.” And so you may have heard at Dreamforce, but there’s a freemium offering of Agentforce that’s being included in Salesforce Foundations, and that includes some of those agents that the Autonomous Service Agent, ASA, and the BDR, some of those sales use cases, which was really exciting. And this podcast that you’re listening to this, it’s October 24th or after, and that’s the same day as Agentforce is going live in Salesforce Foundations. So if you’re listening now, you can get started with agents as part of Foundations.

And as I mentioned, all those pieces that you need are there. And so you get Data Cloud out of the box alongside Agentforce, and you get that full Foundations Suite experience across sales, service, marketing and commerce. And what’s really cool here is as you do more and you use more of these cross-cloud capabilities, your data and Data Cloud gets richer and more powerful, and so does Agentforce. So a great example of this, you think about the service use cases, which I’m really excited about the possibilities and what our customers are going to do with the Autonomous Service Agents. Really, really cool stuff, where you get that base level of Service Cloud now that has knowledge base. And so you can create those knowledge articles and you can start to build out that wealth of information that can then flow into Data Cloud and be used via Agentforce, which is just really cool and not something that you’d been able to do without Foundations previously.

Mike:
Oh, absolutely. That’s always a question that admins get asked is, “How do I turn this on?” Eddie, one of the things I figured out this weekend was working in tech and having done this podcast for so long, I feel like everybody that does technology stuff, secretly on the side also has a very tactile hobby of theirs. And this weekend, I used some scrap wood because I live in a housing development and they’re building new houses around me. So there’s piles of scrap wood that I reclaim as my own, and I just build random stuff out of it, and it was incredibly fun. I’m wondering, is there a fun hobby that you like to do when you’re not working on Salesforce Foundations?

Eddie Cliff:
Yeah, tons. And if you go in my garage, there’s power tools everywhere.

Mike:
Of course.

Eddie Cliff:
So I love to tinker and fix things-

Mike:
You have to buy a new power tool just for every project. Right? That’s the whole reason you do a project.

Eddie Cliff:
That’s the best part. Yeah, that’s the best part. Pick up projects you get a new power tool for. So I’m always constructing something, whether it’s something that we need for the house or something that we like to do. For example, we have this hobby, Kayak is a trimaran, a sailing kayak in the seats. Being a product person, you just find the things that really annoy you and you come up with solutions for fixing them. And these seats sit in the bottom of the kayak. And so as you’re going around, you start to get wet. So, “There’s a solution to this. I can come up with something. Get some PVC pipe, I can construct some plans and get some mounts and some boat seats.” And voila, I’ve got some nice cheap seats that I can put into the kayak that’s going to keep me dry as I’m going out with my family, which is… I’ve got a 6-year-old. And so he loves to go out on that and go out on the water. And so that was really important to me to have, so a little bit more comfortable.

And also the utility of keeping me dry because it’s got these pedals that you have to use with your feet to propel the kayak. So it’s really important that you have a comfortable seat so that your back isn’t killing you at the end of the day.

Mike:
Oh, man.

Eddie Cliff:
So we do a lot of that kind of stuff. And then this past weekend, it was just tons of gardening that we were finally getting done around the house. It’s not so hot anymore. So getting all those plants in place was really exciting and it looks great.

Mike:
And you said sailing kayak. Are they bigger than just the regular kayaks that I’m thinking of?

Eddie Cliff:
Yeah, it’s a two-person kayak and it’s got the Ama, as they call them, the little outriggers on either side.

Mike:
Okay.

Eddie Cliff:
So it’s super stable, and then it’s got a fairly big sail that goes into it, so you don’t have to use the sail, but in light winds, it sure does make it a lot easier so you’re not pedaling the whole time.

Mike:
Sure.

Eddie Cliff:
And so you can beach launch it, so it’s really easy to get onto the water and get back onto the trailer. And so it’s something that we really enjoy doing as a family together.

Mike:
Wow, okay. I had no idea these things existed. I’ve thought of kayaks before, but that sounds incredible. And pedaling would be… I guess there’s no motor.

Eddie Cliff:
Yeah, you get to work out. Actually, my next project is to put a mount on the back and so I can put a trolling motor-

Mike:
I was going to say.

Eddie Cliff:
For those days where the current’s a little stronger.

Mike:
Electric motors are getting better. I see them on the prices. These little things that divers can hang onto. They look like wings or whatever, and they pull them under, get a couple of those.

Eddie Cliff:
Yeah, exactly. And that’s a fun thing. You get these types of things and you can modify it to fit your needs and your requirements. You can come up with solutions to really make it work for you. So I apply that same level of thinking that I do at Salesforce to my day-to-day, and the things that I use in my day-to-day life outside of work, which is always fun.

Mike:
Yeah. Well, Eddie, thanks for coming on the podcast and talking about Foundations. I’ll have to work on getting somebody on the podcast to see what they think of Foundations as a customer and what they’re excited for as a follow-up.

Eddie Cliff:
Yeah, thanks for having me. And we’re really excited about the future of Foundations. Stay tuned to release notes. There’s more coming. We’re going to be adding more capabilities to Foundations for you to take advantage of, and those will continue to be free. So keep an eye out for those release notes. And as you turn it on and try it out, we’d love to hear your feedback. So please share your feedback with us, or if you have any ideas going out to the Idea Exchange and share those with us because we’re constantly reviewing those and seeing what we can implement to help make it better, better, never best. So thank you for listening and I appreciate your feedback.

Mike:
You bet. Thanks, Eddie. So that was a fun conversation with Eddie. I had no idea there were sailing kayaks. Maybe you did. I grew up in the Midwest. We don’t have a lot of water around here, so no surprise, but sounds cool. Sounds very cool. Except for the pedaling part, always a fan. If you can have a motor, I’m on board. But if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to share it with at least one person who you think could benefit. I think a lot of people can benefit from understanding and learning more about Salesforce Foundations. And of course, whatever podcast platform you’re listening on, go ahead and click that follow or subscribe button. That way, new episodes will come out and will be immediately on your phone.

And if you’re looking for more resources, we’ve got those. So you can learn about Salesforce Foundations. Just head on over to admin.salesforce.com for a wealth of content, all for Salesforce admins, directly for you, including a transcript of today’s show. And don’t forget to join our conversation in the Admin Trailblazer group, that’s in the Trailblazer community. Again, link is in the show notes. Show notes are at admin.salesforce.com. We keep it all together for you in one place. Speaking of keeping it all together, until next week, we’ll see you in the cloud.

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