The Salesforce Admins Podcast

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Marisa Hambleton, Chief Delivery Officer and Founder of MH2X, and a member of the Salesforce MVP Hall of Fame. Join us as we chat about her experience in the TDX Agentforce Hackathon as a member of team MH4 and why clean data is essential for AI.

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

The intense Tetris of conference scheduling

Marisa is a co-leader of the Phoenix Developer Group and the lead organizer for Cactusforce, a community conference for Salesforce Developers and Architects. In other words, she knows how much work goes into scheduling speaker tracks and getting everything organized.

Juggling speaker availability and placing them in the correct conference rooms without double-booking anyone takes up hours of time behind the scenes. “It’s an intense game of Tetris,” Marisa says, “and that’s a gross understatement.” So she was thrilled when Melissa Hill Dees asked her to join team MH4 and build a conference scheduling agent for the TDX Agentforce Hackathon.

Why data hygiene is foundational for Agentforce

With only 16 hours to build a working agent, the team had to split up responsibilities so they could hit the ground running. Marisa’s focus was on the data, which they brought in from Cactusforce and Midwest Dreamin’.

Marisa’s biggest takeaway from her first time building an agent is that data quality is foundational for any work you do with AI. That needs to be the starting point. Even though they were working with a relatively small data set, they had a lot of cleanup work to do if they wanted their agent to work right.

How to get your org ready for advancements in AI

If you’re looking to implement Agentforce in your org, Marisa recommends starting with the Salesforce Well-Architected Framework. We’re only scratching the surface of what will be possible with AI, but you need to do everything you can right now to make your data easy to work with.

There’s a lot more great stuff from Marisa Hambleton about data hygiene and what’s next for Agentforce, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you can catch us every Thursday.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more

• Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: When Collaboration Meets Agentforce: The MH4 Hackathon Story
• Trailhead: Salesforce Well-Architected Framework
• Cactusforce

Admin Trailblazers Group

• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

• Marisa on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on X
• Mike on Bluesky social
• Mike on Threads
• Mike on X

Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt:

Welcome to the Salesforce Admin’s podcast. Today, we’re chatting with Marisa Hambleton, Chief Delivery Officer at MH2X, and a longtime leader in the Salesforce ecosystem. Now, this is part two of the MH to the Power of Four episodes where we talked to the team that participated in the TDX Hackathon about the agent that they built. Boy, I got to tell you, if you ever organized a community conference or just wrestled with a gnarly spreadsheet, Marisa’s insights into scheduling and automation using Agentforce technology we’re really going to hit home. I love that she’s going to walk us through how she and the Hackathon team built the agent from her perspective and what she did. Plus, she shares why clean data and a well-architected mindset are must haves for any admin looking to build for the future. Make sure to follow the podcast so you don’t miss out on more great conversations like this one. With that, let’s get Marisa on the podcast. Marisa, welcome to the podcast.

Marisa Hambleton:

I’m glad to be here.

Mike Gerholdt:

You are the second MH of the MH, I believe it’s MH quad, right? Isn’t that what Melissa Hill Dees told me? It is MH to the Power of Four.

Marisa Hambleton:

MH to the Power of Four.

Mike Gerholdt:

Power of Four.

Marisa Hambleton:

Yes, or MH four. You can just read it MH Four, but MH to the Power of Four, to the Fourth …

Mike Gerholdt:

I know, but I like the Power of Four. It sounds a little more strong.

Marisa Hambleton:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt:

We talked with Melissa Hill Dees on the last episode about the TDX Hackathon and the agent that you built, but just per chance, if somebody didn’t listen to that episode, can you tell us a little bit about, well, first, who you are and what you do, and then a brief overview of that project that you built at the Hackathon.

Marisa Hambleton:

Sure. Marisa Hambleton, I am the Chief Delivery Officer of MH2X. That is my consulting firm. I’ve been in the ecosystem over 15 years. I’m a Salesforce MVP Hall of Fame, and I am also the Phoenix developer, one of the leaders. I am the lead organizer of Cactus Force, a community conference for Salesforce developers and architects. My role in Cactus force is one of the things that led me and Melissa to connect around this agent that we built for the Hackathon.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, so tell me a little bit about that agent.

Marisa Hambleton:

Yes, so one of the difficulties in organizing a conference is scheduling, and most of our conferences we have different volunteers and we’re part of a team of organizers who come together to put these conferences on for the community, the trailblazer community. Once we get all our submissions, we go through our speaker selection, we’ve got all these speakers, and we have all of the space, the conference space, and we’ve got to put the two together. It’s calling it a intense game of Tetris would be a gross understatement because there’s always somebody that maybe if they’re flying in from across the country or if they have some other commitment, or for whatever reason, they cannot go into the slot that you put them in. We plan out our agendas and the program.

It is very time-consuming. I can’t remember exactly the number we came up with, but we had written out on our submission at the Hackathon how many hours, because we all got together as organizers of conferences and ask, okay, us individually, the time we spend on the scheduling is quite extensive and we hadn’t even really accounted for then our co-organizers, who then also spend time and we go through as a team for each of the conferences, how much time we spend on scheduling.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, no, I hear you, schedule. Oh, man. The intense game of Tetris because you think you have everything put together and then a speaker comes back and says, “Oh, by the way, I’m flying in on such and such date,” and you’re like, “Ah, I just had everything figured out.”

Marisa Hambleton:

Yes, yes. You have room size limitations or all of a sudden you’re coming into the event and you need a bigger room or just all the different things of scheduling a session. We thought that this was a fantastic idea for the agent. The other, my partners in this effort, this Hackathon, Melissa Hanson, she’s one of the RAD Women founders, and the scheduling that she does for RAD Women is at a whole other level because we are Michelle Hanson, Melissa Hill Dees and myself. We’re scheduling speakers and rooms. Melissa Hanson is scheduling coaches with the cohort members and time zones and time slots across many weeks. That’s a whole other, it’s just highly complex.

Our solution, our agent that we wanted to build really was able to handle all, at least at a minimum, let’s try to get one set in because that is very time-consuming for the RAD Women team. That was how we came up with the idea. Melissa Hill Dees has a wonderful heart for nonprofits and the community and helping organizations, and we all agreed that this was a well-worth effort to spend our Hackathon time on.

Mike Gerholdt:

No, I can. Tell me about that process of creating all of the things that you needed to get done to build that agent. I’d love to know, was there any happy accidents you’d repeat again?

Marisa Hambleton:

Gosh, I can’t think of happy accidents. There was this fast and furious effort on all our parts. There was little things that I feel like they were very Hackathon specific. The org setup, right, where everybody had a job. Melissa Hansen was our Apex Rock star. Melissa Hill Dees, the visionary. She built the agent before and then Michelle Hansen and I were primarily the data part of it. There were some of the org settings that we were like, “Oh, wait a minute. We’re trying to use this object and it’s not turned on in the org.” I had gone in and was doing some of the initial configuration. I spun up the org and was just doing that initial setup, adding the rest of the team as users and making sure everybody had all the correct permissions, doing some of the admin admin things for the project.

We’d be chugging along, getting things taken care of and all of a sudden, you hit a roadblock or Melissa’s like, “Oh my gosh, I’m getting this error.” Okay, let’s all get it, jump in and troubleshoot. I feel like I didn’t have time to really think of, I guess the reflection for me was more of the experience and not the technical part. I feel like the technical part, especially with something like Agentforce is, it’s still new and I’m very much in the exploring like, oh, what else can it do, versus like, oh, okay, I’ll know better not to do this next time. I was more on the support side. I would ask Melissa Hansen those questions because she definitely had things that she’s like, “Okay, now I know.”

Mike Gerholdt:

You talk about the experience. I’d love to know, what did you learn about agent design based on that Hackathon experience?

Marisa Hambleton:

The data modeling, the data and the data modeling really are, you have to have that first. That has to be foundational. One of the things that comes to mind is the well-architected, the Salesforce well-architected. Cactus Force is very much, we work really hard as an organization. Our organizers work really hard to always be at the forefront of what Salesforce is doing so that we can prepare content to share with our attendees and with a Salesforce well-architected, that’s really become foundational to our conference, but those principles for Agentforce, for this Hackathon and really having that mindset of an architect of like, “Okay, you’re starting from the ground up and you’re building that theoretically you’re modeling out what do we want the data to do? What kind of results are we looking for,” before we ever start building anything. That would be the thing that played a biggest part of the design for me outside of the mechanics of it.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, no, it’s good. You mentioned you were in the admin role on this team and support. Let’s talk about just giving Salesforce admins some general wisdom and your thoughts on innovation. What do you see as an admin best practice that you think gets overlooked but has a really big impact on an organization?

Marisa Hambleton:

I would stick with data. I think that data really having, again, thinking in a well-architected mindset, but as an admin, really thinking about your data. Before we started recording, we were chatting about Michelle Hansen and I being organizers with her, with Midwest Dreamin and myself with Cactus Force. We needed a data set to work through this project and make sure that we had some, we could make up fake data, but we decided we’re going to go and use the real data because it’s already public, it’s our speakers and our sessions and we did a lot of data work. It is looking through our data and really asking ourselves, “How clean is this data? How reliable is this data?”

It really forced us to see something that we as organizers probably wouldn’t have looked at just a regular scenario, but building an agent that relies on this data, well, we have to make sure that that data is, it’s clean, it’s correct. Even though, again, we were working with a very small data set, which was our speakers and sessions and rooms that are available for the conferences and we did. We made up some fake rooms to mirror that, okay, your conference and my conference, we have different spaces.

Mike Gerholdt:

Sure. Sure.

Marisa Hambleton:

It did. It came down to the quality of the data that we were feeding it that the agent could then work with and give us back something that was usable of, here’s our space, here’s our list of speakers, and feed it all that information. I think as an admin, I think an admin really has the ability to be at the forefront of that conversation in the business.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, a lot of it, people get hung up on what the tool can do, but you forget data is what powers everything, all of the responses and how good those responses are. You kicked off, when we started the podcast, you talked about the years that you’ve been in the ecosystem and how you’re in consulting. I would love for you to give admin some advice on how you help balance innovation with maintainability when you’re building on the Salesforce platform.

Marisa Hambleton:

I love that question. I am a big look to the far future person.

Mike Gerholdt:

Okay.

Marisa Hambleton:

I always think, is this something, if my team is working on a solution, is this solution going to be part of this organization for the next 10 years, 15, 20 years? I think really far out there to challenge. It’s fun to be innovative and it’s fun to use all the new, coolest, latest technology, all the newest features, but what is it going to look like in 10 years? Is it still going to look the same? Is it still going to be needed? Is the company still going to be around? I think it challenges me. It challenges my team to really think ahead that far so that you’re not just looking at an immediate, oh, I need this field. It’s like, okay, why? I think that is typical, I think, with admins, especially their experience they’ve been in the ecosystem is to question and maybe put a BA hat on and question that and then be innovative within that vision.

I think with Agentforce, it is revolutionary and I believe that it will revolutionize a lot of business. I believe Salesforce believes that as well, but it’s also allowing people to do more of the work that matters. Back to our community solution for scheduling, as organizers, these are passion projects. We’re volunteers. If we used to spend 10 to 20 hours on scheduling and now we can spend 10 minutes on it, it’ll give us more time to spend on our conference, on more valuable activities, giving our sponsors more attention, giving our attendees more attention, and just being able to be present with the people that are there and letting the agent take care of the busy work that we would prefer not to do. I think that that also comes back to the innovation and for myself, I guess a principle of innovation is create a solution that’s again, not only innovative, but lasts a long time and is maintainable and flexible and well-architected, using those buzzwords.

Mike Gerholdt:

No, I mean, that’s exactly the whole … I love what you said, think about the solution being there for the next five or 10 or even 15 years out. I think we’ve seen in tech a lot of features and innovations come and go. I don’t know that what we’re seeing with AI is a short-lived thing. I really think we’re on the early days of it and it’s only going to continue to grow, mostly because it’s only got everywhere to go in terms of what it can use and how it can help us. I would love for you, thinking big picture, can you give an elevator pitch that you would provide to a business leader on why every admin needs to understand Agentforce?

Marisa Hambleton:

Build for the future. Yeah. Building for the future.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah.

Marisa Hambleton:

I know.

Mike Gerholdt:

Your elevators are really fast, by the way.

Marisa Hambleton:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt:

Built for future, and we’re there already.

Marisa Hambleton:

Build for the … Yes. Build for the future.

Mike Gerholdt:

Holy cow. We don’t have to worry about Keanu Reeves coming to save you or anything. Nope, we’re done.

Marisa Hambleton:

Yes. Well, I love tech. I always have loved tech, and I think that working in technology is always a forward-looking, always looking to the future. A lot of change and AI, Agentforce, that’s part of it. Sometimes it is scary. Skynet, is it possible? Okay, maybe because anything’s possible. Likely, I don’t know. Again, coming back to the data conversation, if you don’t have the data for something and there’s still a lot of humans involved. I think people forget that there’s still a lot of … I mean, it took four of us, four humans to build the solution. There’s still a lot of humans involved. It’s a helper. It’s a helper. It’s like a workmate, a little digital workmate. Yes, build for the future.

Mike Gerholdt:

I like it

Marisa Hambleton:

As a company, if I was in front of my customer, I’m like, “Build for the future.”

Mike Gerholdt:

One of the things that I asked Melissa Hill Dees about, and I stumbled upon the question, and I think now, I have to ask all of you. If you could build an agent to help every admin do one thing, just one thing better, what would it be?

Marisa Hambleton:

Oh, gosh. Well, I’m going to keep coming back to the data thing.

Mike Gerholdt:

Okay.

Marisa Hambleton:

I was having a data hygiene conversation earlier today, and I feel like users in any system, but in Salesforce, you want your sales forecast to be correct. You’ve got to have that data and that hygiene, so a little agent that’s always running in the background, that goes the step beyond your validation rules and any other automation that you might have running. Let’s say you have a very large organization and you have people that are just doing a lot of different things. I think that data hygiene would really go a long way.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. I’m thinking of, did you ever watch The Jetsons as a child growing up?

Marisa Hambleton:

I did. I did.

Mike Gerholdt:

Remember Rosey, the maid that would go around. I’m envisioning every org needs a little Rosey.

Marisa Hambleton:

Yes, yes.

Mike Gerholdt:

It’s got to make those little sounds. Remember, she would just go around and dust. By the way, it was crazy. I don’t even know what year it was, like 2450 or something, but apparently, robots still use feather dusters.

Marisa Hambleton:

Yes, yes. Yeah. I think that’s probably more general. I would say the next thing is building the flow with voice commands and just talking through. This is, again, I’m thinking far into the future.

Mike Gerholdt:

That’s okay. We’re in the future.

Marisa Hambleton:

Yeah. It’s like my plane and I know there’s some AIs that can, it’s like mid-journey. You’re giving it this. You’re like, I have this. I’m looking at data from the last 10 years and I need to build an automation that pulls in quarter by quarter the delta of some of my projections or something big and just talking through the use cases and the scenarios, and here’s what I want to automate. Then, okay, here’s your automation. Here’s the flow. You wanted to write it in flow, and here’s the apex.

Mike Gerholdt:

I like that. I think that would be … I’ve often thought of if I could just click on a record and write a path that I need it to go, that would be really cool. We talk about that now, it’s 2025, and who knows? Somebody’s going to resurrect an old recording of this podcast maybe in five or 10 years and be like, “Wow, that was the future for them.”

Marisa Hambleton:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yes. It’s going to be like us talking about pencil sharpeners.

Marisa Hambleton:

Oh my gosh. I still have an old manual pencil sharpener in my garage that I’ve had forever.

Mike Gerholdt:

I mean, they were commonplace in my school.

Marisa Hambleton:

Yes. Now, I don’t have as many pencils that need sharpening anymore.

Mike Gerholdt:

I was going to say, I couldn’t name a pencil in my house right now. Let’s end on a fun note. What’s one word your teammates would use to describe you?

Marisa Hambleton:

Oh, energetic.

Mike Gerholdt:

Okay. I like that. Marisa, thanks for coming on the podcast. This was insightful and it’s such a neat way to get a view into what a team did and worked together in the Hackathon and the problem they solved, and I really like getting each of your perspectives. This is a fun little series of sitting in and having these conversations. Thanks for coming on and sharing with us.

Marisa Hambleton:

Oh, thank you for having me.

Mike Gerholdt:

Big thanks to Marisa for joining us today. Such a thoughtful perspective on innovation, data and what it really takes to build something that lasts. I love the thinking ahead into the future. If this episode got you thinking, really, I’d like for you to share it with a fellow Salesforce admin or, hey, how about a conference organizer? Bet they could ask you to build their first agent for them. You never know who might be wrestling with their own speaker schedule. Bet it’s somebody. For more tips and tools, head over to admin.salesforce.com. There, you’ll find links and a transcript of this episode, and be sure to connect with us in the Trailblazer community. Until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post Transforming Conference Scheduling With Agentforce appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Melissa Hill Dees, nonprofit Salesforce consultant and Salesforce MVP. Join us as we chat about how her TDX Hackathon team built a conference scheduling agent from scratch in 16 hours.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Melissa Hill Dees.

How to help nonprofits define goals for Salesforce

Melissa majored in computer science back when you still programmed with punched cards. However, she didn’t really start her career in tech until 2008, when the nonprofit she was working for started using Salesforce. She was hooked on how she could help these organizations use technology to do more with less, and quickly pursued an MBA in digital entrepreneurship.

One thing that came up in our conversation was the difference between how nonprofits and businesses approach Salesforce. In particular, Melissa emphasizes the importance of defining measurable goals for any tech project so you have common ground when prioritizing requests. As the capabilities of Salesforce continue to grow with Agentforce, admins need to help their organizations maintain focus.

Building an agent in 16 hours at the TDX Agentforce Hackathon

Melissa is fresh from the TDX Agentforce Hackathon, where she put together an all-women team of Salesforce MVPs called MH4. Why the name? Because everyone on the team has the same initials: Melissa Hill Dees, Michelle Hansen, Marisa Hambleton, and Melissa Hansen.

Together, they had 16 hours to make a working agent, but Melissa was the only person on the team who had built one before. However, from their experience as Dreamin’ event volunteers, they had a pretty good idea for a problem they could solve: scheduling a conference.

Finding the right-sized room for each talk when there are several concurrent speaker tracks gets complicated, especially when people are presenting more than once. It’s a problem that everyone on the team could rally around. As Melissa explains, building the agent wasn’t the hard part. It was setting up the backend to make sure it had the right information and permissions to accomplish its goal.

Why admins should get the Strategy Designer Certification

If you’re looking to learn more, Melissa highly recommends getting the Strategy Designer Certification. You can learn tons of valuable tactics, like consequence scanning, that help you align a group of people around an idea and allow everybody to feel like they have input.

Finally, Melissa emphasizes how crucial it is for admins to start learning Agentforce now, even if your organization is hesitant. “Admins have to see the big picture,” she says, “so start learning it now so you don’t have to play catch-up when everybody comes around and wants to use AI.”

Be sure to listen to the full episode for more from my conversation with Melissa, and don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you can catch us every Thursday.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more

• Certification: Strategy Designer
• MH4’s presentation at the TDX Hackathon

Admin Trailblazers Group

• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

• Melissa on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on X
• Mike on Bluesky social
• Mike on Threads
• Mike on X

Full show transcript

Mike:
You’ve got a dream team when everyone’s name starts with MH, and you’re building a functioning AI agent in 16 hours while laughing and having fun at it. This week we’ve got Melissa Hill Dees on the pod, and the vibe is totally Agentforce, nonprofit tech, and I even talk about the future of Salesforce admins in the era of AI. And we also talk about the little thing that she built at the hackathon. It’s just a scheduling tool that is really cool for all the dream and events. But let me tell you this, if you’ve ever said, “I’m not a developer, but …”, you’re going to feel right at home. So with that, let’s get Melissa Hill Dees on the podcast. So Melissa, welcome to the podcast.

Melissa Hill Dees:
Thank you, Mike. I’m so glad to be here.

Mike:
Well, I’m glad to have you on, and we’re going to kick off … I’m going to call it a few weeks of MH4s.

Melissa Hill Dees:
I love that

Mike:
All of the MH4s because you guys were such a cool little group that got together for the hackathon at TDX, which we’re going to talk about. But before we get into that, Melissa, which spells out some of the MH4, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Melissa Hill Dees:
Oh goodness. So a little bit about myself. I found Salesforce in 2008 after becoming a stay-at-home mom for a little while and not knowing what to do with myself and trying to help small businesses improve what they were doing from a customer relationship management side. I didn’t really get very deep into Salesforce then but a couple of years later, I went to work for a nonprofit and they had Salesforce and I became the classic accidental admin. Which was ironic considering that back in the dark ages when dinosaurs still roamed the earth I had majored in computer science.

Mike:
That’s back when they were inventing dirt, because I was also back in that era too.

Melissa Hill Dees:
They were literally inventing the internet. When I went to university, we still had punch cards. You remember punch cards?

Mike:
Uh-huh.

Melissa Hill Dees:
So I felt like I had come full circle. But I really loved what Salesforce was doing with nonprofits and giving them the opportunity to use the best technology that was out there to make a more impact, to improve their mission. And so the more I worked in nonprofits, the more I saw that they thought differently. They didn’t think like a business, they thought like a nonprofit, and they didn’t always use Salesforce like a business, they used it like they thought a nonprofit would. So it was really interesting. I studied. I did a lot of research and went back and got my master’s in digital entrepreneurship because I really wanted to understand the best ways to help nonprofits leverage technology because they have to. That’s the only way they can do more with less. So that’s really become my passion. How do we make it simple, easy, welcome even. Everybody fusses about technology, but it can do so much that we don’t have to do, so we have time to do the things that we really want to do.

Mike:
Well, that’s a great intro. Holy cow. Could you ever have imagined back in 2008 that you would be at a hackathon building an agent?

Melissa Hill Dees:
Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Again, once upon a time, I could write a little Cobol or a little Fortran, but I’m sure I can’t even do that anymore. And certainly not a developer by any stretch of the imagination. And you say hackathon, I immediately think developers.

Mike:
I know.

Melissa Hill Dees:
That who goes to hackathons, right. But I had learned early on from attending the nonprofit community sprints that you didn’t have to be a developer. You didn’t have to even be a hardline admin. If you wanted to help in a sprint, you had input and you could help in so many different ways. So it made the hackathon a little less intimidating.

Mike:
Absolutely. So let’s get into that. First of all, I need you to explain the MH4s. What’s the MH4s? Am I saying it correctly?

Melissa Hill Dees:
Well, I say MH to the fourth.

Mike:
Oh, okay. Sorry. MH to the fourth.

Melissa Hill Dees:
Yeah. Because we’re exponentially awesome. And ironically, a couple of things were going on with that. One thing, ever since I’ve been involved in the ecosystem, I’ve been involved with the women in tech groups and WITness Success and all the different groups working with women in minorities. And especially when it comes to AI, I am just adamant, everywhere I speak, I tell everybody they need to get in there and help train the AI. And so I wanted almost as a social experiment to have an all female team for the hackathon. And I started thinking about what we would need on that team. And I knew we’d need a good developer. And so Michelle Hansen is who immediately came to mind. I knew we would need somebody who could write flows at the drop of a hat, do the adminning, and of course Michelle … Michelle Hansen. I’m going to get confused here. Michelle Hansen is obviously that person. She’s so good at those sorts of things.

We also needed someone that was more of an architect view. And Marisa Hambleton runs Cactusforce and does that work and so I invited her. And then I was the only one of the group that had actually built an agent before we got to hackathon.

Mike:
Oh, wow.

Melissa Hill Dees:
So it was a really exciting opportunity. And it was funny that I didn’t consciously think we need everybody named MH, initials MH. But it worked out that way. And in fact, I was going to ask Maham Hassan to be on our team as well, and she couldn’t because of the rules and regulations about folks out of the country.

Mike:
Okay.

Melissa Hill Dees:
We would’ve been MH to the fifth power. And five was all you could have. But I’m so glad I did that. It was everything I dreamed it would be. The collaboration between us. None of us have ever worked together. We’ve never been even employed by the same company, let alone in the same room to sit down together and have 16 hours to go from zero to a working agent. And I loved it. We talked and we talked and we talked. We got all the consequence scanning done and the road mapping done and everything done because we just talked and talked and talked and talked. And we didn’t have to go back and do that after we built the product. That was built into the way we thought and building the product and building the agent.

So both Melissa and Marisa and even Michelle did a little bit. We’re all like, “Oh, I don’t know if I want to go to a hackathon. I’ll have to take two days out of my work.” And I really twisted their arm a little bit and I said, “We could do something really awesome.” All of us are involved in community driven events, and we talked about could we do scheduling? What could we do? And then when we got there, of course actually, that’s what we built, was a scheduler for presentations based on the rooms that they would be in based on what we had available. And literally took what … Marisa said took her and Steve about 40 hours combined to do, and the agent does it in seconds.

Mike:
Oh, wow. So tell me … You’ve teased it out. Tell me a little bit about what you built at the hackathon.

Melissa Hill Dees:
Yeah. It was great. So we started thinking about what … All of our driven events we’re all volunteers. Nobody gets paid to do those. And so it was a situation of what can an agent do for us that will save us time? And that’s one of the huge tasks. After you actually go through all the submissions for presentations and you decide which ones you want, then how in the world do you schedule them in these different rooms? The tracks are running at the same time. You’ve probably got four or five different tracks running at the same time. Somebody may be presenting more than once. You don’t want them to overlap. The rooms, depending on how big they are and what else they’re being used for. So it just seemed like a really great idea for an agent. And we decided to build it.

After we were done we thought we probably could have done this with a flow, but because we had that 16 hour time constraint, Melissa Hanson whipped out a … She said, “I can do this with code.” We’re like, “Okay. Do it. Because we want a product when we leave here and we can update it later.” So literally … And the demo that we had to make to submit for the hackathon is on my LinkedIn page and shows you how quickly it goes to, you’ve already got all that data in your Salesforce instance, you’ve got the speaker, the session, the titles the rooms, and you hit that agent and it creates a schedule for you.

Mike:
Yeah. No. I believe me more can relate to what you’re asking that agent to do as somebody that’s involved with a lot of the events and stuff that Salesforce does.

Melissa Hill Dees:
And the best thing, I think for us about the hackathon, and it was ironic because the very next day I was invited to an executive listening session. And I said, “I would’ve come to TDX just for the hackathon.” I learned so much. And I’m a very kinetic learner. I need to do it. I don’t need you just to show it to me or tell me about it. I need to do it myself. And because I had already built some, that’s why I knew that the hard part was not building the agent, the hard part was writing the code if you needed something invocable there or getting the permissions correct on the back end for the agent itself and applying all of that. So deep dive into that agent. We were learning from each other and with all of our different skill sets, we’re all MVPs, but each of us has such different skill sets. And then we could really actually create something that would work in the real world, say in less than 16 hours. To me that’s amazing.

Mike:
Oh, absolutely. You’ve done so much to encapsulate that weekend, and I’ll point people to that video on your LinkedIn page. I’m wondering if you could bottle up one moment from that weekend and share it with the world, what would it be?

Melissa Hill Dees:
Oh, goodness. The word that comes to my mind again and again and again is the collaboration with those women. And there was not arguments. And there could have been, and that would’ve been fine because it’s okay to disagree. But we didn’t. We really aligned on what we were trying to accomplish and we knew what we wanted to do. And that level of collaboration was just like I say, everything I ever imagined something like that would be,

Mike:
Yeah. Let’s transition out of that because you’ve been in the community since we’ve invented the cloud. I say that because I’ve been around since 06 so we’ve been there a while. And I started, the first question was, could you imagine an AI agent now? How do you see the Salesforce admin role evolving in an AI forward world?

Melissa Hill Dees:
Ooh, that’s very interesting. I am fascinated by AI and how we can leverage it to do things. I think I really believe even now, admins need to at least learn how to use the agent and how to build an agent. Because right now it’s relatively simple to do, but I think about 2008, Mike, what was there of Salesforce? It was one product. It was one thing. I could learn it then. There were times when I could tell you that I felt like I knew everything you need to know about Salesforce. Now, no way. With all the product acquisitions and the different clouds and the different architectures and the different information, there’s just no way possible that I can be an expert at Field Service and at Marketing Cloud and at Slack and at all those things. So I always think of admins like architects. They have to see the big picture. And with the AI I think that’s important. Start learning it now. Don’t wait. Even if your company says, “Absolutely not. We’re not going to use AI. We don’t trust it, we don’t like it, but start learning it now so you’re not trying to play catch up when everybody comes around and is using AI.”

Mike:
Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. And to your point, I remember as an admin trying to pass my certifications and thinking, oh, but my company doesn’t use Service Cloud. I don’t know Service Cloud. And the certifications … Forced is a bad word to say, but required that I learn it. And I remember thinking to myself, but it’s good that I know it now so that when the company’s thinking about it, I’ll be ready. Or at least I’ll have a base foundation. And a lot of that is realizing where you sit between technology and strategy within an organization. So my question to you is, what’s something you wish more people understood about the intersection of being a Salesforce admin and strategy?

Melissa Hill Dees:
I think that Salesforce admins probably have the best view of what the strategy might be like. I think it’s important. I love the strategy designer certification.

Mike:
Tell me about that.

Melissa Hill Dees:
Yeah. If you’re an admin and you haven’t looked at that, you should because it’s less technical and more people management. And one of the things that I learned studying for that and from the design team from Adam Doti’s team was consequent scanning. I’d never done that before. And it was so fantastic to do that and be able to align a group of people around an idea. It wasn’t a threatening way. It wasn’t, I’m the boss and we have to do this. It wasn’t that I’m the admin and we have to do this. It was an opportunity for everybody to have that input. And I think that’s so important for admins. They have so many jobs and they’re not just the technical side of things. They’re the ones that get the complaints because the button didn’t work or it’s not where it would be easy to use or whatever, the report’s not pulling correctly. And it’s just so much responsibility when you do Salesforce admin and do it really well. That’s why I recommend that to everybody. I don’t even think you have to have your admin cert. I don’t think that’s a prerequisite. But it’s definitely worth doing and learning. At least do the trailhead on it.

Mike:
Yeah. No. I didn’t even know about now it’s on my list. Thank you.

Melissa Hill Dees:
Yeah.

Mike:
So you brought that up because the admins are responsible for a lot and they do often have that first line of reaction or giving some sort of an answer to a user and looking up an issue, whether that was something they found in discovery or not. But I’d love to know, when you think about best practices, is there something underrated that has maybe made a huge impact in one of the organizations that you’ve managed or worked on?

Melissa Hill Dees:
That’s a great question. There are a lot of things that are underrated. And right now what I’m encouraging … Especially if you’re a sales organization, encouraging folks to do is to use the agent summary function in sales. Working in a implementation partner, you don’t always talk to the customer when they’re in the sales process. You may not even talk to them when they’re in the delivery process, so you really don’t know them that well, but you’re going to write a customer success story. Well, how do you go back and capture three years worth of work or three years worth of interactions? And I’ve seen it done with the agent summary. And to me, that is the most impactful thing from an ROI. Do you want to pay me to spend five or six hours trying to track down information for something or do you want to pay me for writing a customer success story? So if I can get that summary at the click of a button, then I can write the success story, then I can write five success stories, six success stories, whereas I’d only be able to write one in the same timeframe if I were having to do it all manually. That’s just a huge thing, I think.

Mike:
And you always bring it up. There’s so many underrated things because there’s very powerful things in setup that sometimes get overlooked.

Melissa Hill Dees:
The design. The user design. There are a lot of ways to improve it significantly, and most people don’t take the time to do that. And you talk about user adoption, we all know that that’s the easy route to user adoption. It doesn’t matter how complicated it is on the backside, I just want to click a button. And we don’t think that way always as an admins, and we are the ones that would do that.

Mike:
No. Absolutely. You think about keeping up on technology, and you often talk about technology as a tool for social good. I’d love to know how do you keep that front and center when building in Salesforce?

Melissa Hill Dees:
Well, personally, I love the V2MOM. And you’re probably going to think this is crazy, but I use it with customers to suss out what the important aspects of any project we’re working on are. Something that we can set up a goal, make it a measurable goal, and that makes it so much easier to start fleshing out requirements and user stories and you turn it over to delivery and they’ve got metrics to build against. So thinking about with nonprofits, if you want to double your online donations this year, maybe that’s your goal. Then we build a new donation interface in Salesforce or in an experience and then create the report as well to be able to track that so that we can see did we accomplish that? And I don’t know if you make it purple and they’re like, “No. It needs to be pink.” And you say, “Well, so is Pink going to help increase the number of donations?” And if they say, “Okay. Let’s put that in the parking lot. Let’s go to phase two with that.” But they may say, “Well, it has to be pink because we’re breast cancer, and so pink is our signature color. People won’t even recognize us if you don’t do pink.” Then yes, it probably would help increase the donations. And so that’s worthwhile to include in that.

Just helps not get out of scope, but to be able to focus on what they’re really trying to achieve before they get to the end of the project and then go back and say, “Well, was this a successful project? Did we build something good in Salesforce?” Well, who knows?

Mike:
You said a lot. And you actually answered my next question because I do think a lot of … I was going to ask you about an admin superpower, and I think you brought it up, which is really having that critical eye and being able to look at how easy is it to use the thing that I just built, and does it align with what we’re using it for?

Melissa Hill Dees:
Right. You have to ask why. Why is my favorite word. And the five whys, that’s part of the strategy certification too. But customers don’t … And I say customers. Whether they’re internal customers, users, or if you’re a partner and working with external customers, they don’t always know what they want it. Like children. You never say to a child, “What do you want to drink?” You say, “Would you like milk or would you like juice?” And so understanding their business and what they’re trying to accomplish I think is critical to being able to help them and then asking why. The best example I have of that, we were in Prague, my husband and my daughter and I. I was speaking at CzechDreamin a couple of years ago, and we’d been there about 24 hours and my daughter came to me and she’s like, “Mom, there’s nothing left to see in Prague.”

Mike:
Wow.

Melissa Hill Dees:
I was like, “Why would you say that?” It’s a great old city. There’s tons to see in Prague. She said, “Well, there’s nothing left in walking distance.” I was like, “Okay. So why don’t you take public transportation? You’re a huge one to use public transportation.” She’s like, “Well, I can’t read the language.” And of course know Czech is not even our alphabet. So she was really struggling with that. I said, “Okay. So why don’t you take a Lyft or an Uber?” And she said, “Because I’m out of money.” So that was what she really needed. It wasn’t that there was nothing left to see in Prague, it was that she didn’t have the money to get to the places that she wanted to go to see the things she wanted to see in Prague. But you don’t get that unless you get to the root of what it is they’re trying to accomplish.

Mike:
Yeah. Wow. It’s like reaching the end of the internet. No you didn’t. You didn’t reach the end of the internet. Boy, we covered a lot. I’d love to go back. Just one thing on agents as we close it out. And this has been lingering with me. I think maybe since I’ve got all the rest of the MH4s coming … MH to the power of four coming up. Maybe I’ll ask him this. If you could build an agent to help every admin do one thing better, what would it be?

Melissa Hill Dees:
Understand the error messages in Salesforce.

Mike:
Oh, I like that.

Melissa Hill Dees:
In fact, a partner and I have been working on this. It’s not an Agentforce agent. We started it before Agentforce came out. But again, because admins speak a different language than developers do, and they both speak different languages than users. And so what we’re working on actually looks at your metadata, tells you what the problem is and speaks to you based on your role. I do. I think that that’s the most time consuming challenge that admins face. You get that error message that says, “If this error persists, contact your Salesforce administrator.” It’s like, I am the administrator.

Mike:
I love getting that message with the administrator. That’s me. Don’t you know that’s me.

Melissa Hill Dees:
And it gives you no helpful thoughts at all. And now that there’s an agent in the help, that’s fantastic because used to, I’d be like 57 tabs later and I still didn’t have an answer to fix whatever the problem was that I was getting that error message. So yeah. That’s what I would build and I am building.

Mike:
Okay. Well look at that. I asked the question that’s already stuff’s in flight.

Melissa Hill Dees:
Right.

Mike:
Melissa, this is a wonderful conversation. You need to come on the podcast more often. Talk about nonprofit tech and equitable technology. I feel like that’s a whole other podcast.

Melissa Hill Dees:
It is. It is. And so important. So, so, so very important.

Mike:
Yeah. Absolutely. And I’ve done podcasts before, but asking why … I love your example of you didn’t see everything in Czech. You’re just out of money.

Melissa Hill Dees:
Right.

Mike:
That was great. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast, Melissa.

Melissa Hill Dees:
Thank you.

Mike:
Big thank you to Melissa Hill Dees for joining us and sharing her journey of nonprofit tech advocate and AI hackathon hero. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to share it with a fellow Salesforce admin or a community member, maybe both. For more great resources, of course, head on over to admin.salesforce.com and be sure to check out that trailblazer group and let’s hope Melissa is working on building that decoding error messages agent, because I think I’ll be the first in line when that launches. Anyway, until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post When Collaboration Meets Agentforce: The MH4 Hackathon Story appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Dorian Earl, Salesforce Admin and Founder of Development Consulting Partners, LLC. Join us as we chat about the 5 steps admins can take today to lead the charge in the Agentforce era.

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

Admins are at the center of the Agentforce era

I always love having Dorian on the pod because he has an amazing origin story. He started out as a traveling sales rep for medical and dental equipment. He had to keep track of over 100,000 products and 300 clients, all in paper notebooks, until one day he left his Franklin planner on the roof of his car and realized he had to find a better way. That’s when he started looking into a new digital CRM platform called Salesforce. 

These days, Dorian helps organizations with digital transformation through Salesforce, and he sees admins as the linchpin for driving organizational change in the Agentforce era. In fact, he flagged me down at a recent event because he was so excited to share his 5-step action plan for how Salesforce Admins can lead the charge on AI.

1. Build awareness beyond the buzz

While most people have talked to an LLM by now, Dorian has noticed that most of his clients don’t quite grasp what it could mean for their organization.

Admins are in a unique position to translate the buzz into action. Start by educating your teams, surfacing practical use cases, and bringing the conversation into team meetings. This isn’t about replacing people—it’s about making everyone 10-20% smarter, faster, and more capable.

2. Prep your data for Agentforce

AI is only as good as the data you give it. And we’re not just talking about client data, though that needs to be in a healthy place. As Dorian points out, consumer-facing agents need to know things like your operating hours, company values, and brand voice. Prepping your data for Agentforce makes it easier to try new features and build something that works.

3. Identify the quick wins

Admins don’t need to wait for long-term projects to start making an impact with AI. Agentforce comes with ready-to-use features that drive value today. Dorian points to two in particular:

• Record Summaries: AI-generated account overviews save time and provide instant context, especially for reps managing hundreds of accounts or taking over a book of business.
• Quick Reporting: Need to know how many leads are in New York with a certain status? You can just ask. No more report-building marathons—admins and users alike can get insights on demand.

These tools aren’t just time-savers—they’re credibility builders. They show stakeholders the value of AI quickly and easily without much heavy lifting.

4. Find internal processes to improve

The biggest thing that should be on your radar is how Agentforce can overhaul internal business processes. There are so many places where an internal-facing agent can save clicks and smooth out a workflow. Dorian brings up the example of processing a return. An agent can take care of all the little steps, like creating a case, logging information, and authorizing a refund, instead of that being a multi-person business process.

5. Lead the AI transformation

Admins are no longer just behind-the-scenes builders—they’re transformation leaders. You understand the org’s data, its pain points, and its goals. That makes you the ideal person to customize and scale AI across departments.

As Dorian puts it, success with Agentforce isn’t just about features—it’s about alignment. Help your teams adopt AI by showing them how it can support their goals, simplify their day-to-day, and elevate their performance.

There were so many great tips in my conversation with Dorian for how admins can thrive in the Agentforce era, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday morning.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more

• Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Keeping Processes Fresh in Salesforce with Dorian Earl
• Salesforce Admins on YouTube: Agentforce Decoded
• Trailhead: Einstein Work Summaries for Service

Admin Trailblazers Group

• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

• Dorian on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on X
• Mike on Bluesky social
• Mike on Threads
• Mike on X

Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt:

This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I’m thrilled to welcome back Dorian Earle, founder and CEO of a thriving consultancy that has over 450 clients and just a massive wealth of Salesforce experience and knowledge.

Dorian has been the Salesforce ecosystem for nearly two decades. He started as a sales rep who needed a better way to track his deals and opportunities and really turn that into a career empowering companies to embrace better CRMs and smarter systems.

Now in today’s episode, we dive into Dorian’s five steps to prepare for Agentforce and AI. Now, from understanding the buzz around AI to implementing quick wins and long-term strategies, Dorian shares invaluable insights to help you, the Salesforce admin, and/or organizations you work for stay ahead of the curve this year in 2025.

Now, of course, before we jump in, I want to make sure that you’re following or subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so that you never miss a great episode like this. New episodes drop every Thursday morning. That way you’ve got them, boom, right on your phone before you head off for your dog walk or your commute to work. So with that, let’s get Dorian on the podcast.

Dorian, welcome back to the podcast

Dorian Earl:

Though this is an absolute pleasure more than you know and good to see you again at all of the events. So good to see you and good to chat with you again.

Mike Gerholdt:

You’re one of the people that I’m happiest out in the world and we get to run into each other at different events, and you and I are such easy people to miss out in a crowd.

Dorian Earl:

Well, I don’t know if that’s the case. I’m the tallest person. You have the best beard and the most charismatic smile. Everybody who sees you go, literally.

Mike Gerholdt:

I don’t know about that.

Dorian Earl:

Yeah, well, yeah. When you walk past, and for the listeners who don’t hear this, Mike had walked past us at the World Tour and two people at the table said, “I don’t know who he is, but he has to be somebody.” I said, “You don’t know who Mike Gerholdt is?” And so you have a reputation. I’m surprised there’s not three people following you carrying your briefcase and just kind of handling all of it.

Mike Gerholdt:

There used to be. I say I’m kind of in my late ’80s John Travolta stage of Salesforce celebrityism where I’m doing the really bad B movies and nobody knows who I am.

Dorian Earl:

But that’s not true.

Mike Gerholdt:

I’m hoping for the next Pulp Fiction level role to come up and then I’ll be dancing around like a Santa Claus selling Citibank cards and stuff.

Dorian Earl:

I was going to say, if you just come out with a good costume, which at every event there are people with a really good… And dance moves, I guarantee you, you’ll be more relevant.

Mike Gerholdt:

And don’t forget, I got to shave my head. Travolta had that whole time where he shaved his head too.

Dorian Earl:

Ah, that’s true. I would just tell you, you should keep yours. You got good hair.

Mike Gerholdt:

I think so.

Dorian Earl:

You got a lot happening. You got a lot happening.

Mike Gerholdt:

You know what everybody who subscribes to the podcast didn’t want to listen to?

Dorian Earl:

What’s that?

Mike Gerholdt:

Was all of that conversation. So let’s talk about something that’ll provide business value to our customers again, and that is getting ready for Agentforce and AI. And when you and I ran into each other, well, to be fair, when you beelined through a hotel restaurant to find me horsing down my chicken fingers at the bar, you had this wonderful thing, you were like, “Mike, we got to talk about this on the podcast. I have these five things that I’m helping companies do to get ready for AI.” And I said, “You’re right.” So Dorian, let’s get into that. But let’s start off just because sometimes people don’t listen to all of the episodes of the podcast. What do you do? How did you come to be in the Salesforce world?

Dorian Earl:

Yeah, so I started almost 20 years ago as a sales guy. I needed a way to track my deals and opportunities, and if anybody’s around in the mid, I’m not going to give my age, in the mid 40s, we all used Franklin portfolio, Franklin Company Planners, and I would leave them at my client’s office and set them on top of my car and drive off and there goes my pipeline and all of my stuff and I couldn’t do that. So kind of being a forward-thinking salesperson, I said I need to have a way that I wouldn’t lose my notes, my deals, my opportunities, everything I had worked hard to build. Then I went to purchase programs and databases and lo and behold, I found a web-based CRM called Salesforce. That was 20 years ago. That was really became my secret sauce, Mike.

I was an average salesperson and getting good, but really my secret sauce was organization and to be able to stay on top of deals. And in my line of work as a salesperson at that time, we had over 100,000 products to keep track of. So what kind of promotion was going on? Who needed what? What was going on? I was a sales rep in the medical dental supply space. So we had a lot of manufacturers and four or five different manufacturers for each line. Like gloves, we had five or six brands of gloves and masks. So who had the promotion? Which one did my customer like? Oh, my doctor liked the left-handed glove from Crosstechs or from MedTech or from all those kind of companies. And I had to keep all those things straight because I had 300 plus clients.

The doctor would like one and their front desk would like another and the assistant, that kind of… And so all those things became really difficult for me to keep track of and I needed a better way to do that. And so lo and behold, I purchased Salesforce for myself, started to get some success. The down economy hit and I was of the few people that I could actually forecast my sales to my boss. I can go in and say, “This client mentioned this to me earlier on in the year. I think we can close them if we do these things.” I was one of the few people at our branch that could do that. Long and short of it, that grew to me going independent, started my own firm and then working with other companies, help bring in their sales or their product in the market. It was always, “Hey, I can help you lead your sales team, but you need to have a database or CRM.”

Again, 15 years ago, it was, “I have this in some spreadsheet or somebody in our office has this in a spreadsheet.” And I said, “You need to have one, a better way to track your sales and deals.” And I would tell them, “You need to go out and buy the Salesforce thing.” And so I worked in tech startup helping companies take the product in the market. One of those products was acquired by Google. And so I became a contract sales manager for Google for a while and Apple for a little bit, and that’s part of my story. And six years ago, a company actually just reached out and said, “Can you help us with the CRM and sales thing?” And then my career helping companies from the inside out versus the outside in kind of worked. And so now, I’m the founder and CEO of a company with 450 plus clients and about 20 plus team members and things are really fun. So that’s the long story short, right?

Mike Gerholdt:

Right, right. It’s interesting because we’ve known each other for a while and we’ve both been the ecosystem for a while and we’ve CRM and Salesforce change and add new features to the time. I think what we’re seeing now with AI everywhere, what is your level of, let’s start off with your five things, what is your level of awareness that you’re seeing with your clients on being AI ready or even having thoughts of how they would use that?

Dorian Earl:

Everybody knows about it. As I said, I see articles at my desk. My team is using this. There are everyday products that they are seeing now that are becoming more intelligent or adding AI. You can’t turn on a TV today every… If you’re watching football and there’s a break, one commercial will say, “This is the product with AI now.” So there’s a lot of buzz and really awareness, and now it’s starting to really be embedded into other products.

What I’m finding out with our clients is they don’t understand the real impact of what this means for their business yet. They know it’s out there, but they just don’t know how to leverage that, how LMMs work, which ones to use, use cases, but they are seeing AI being embedded into their everyday tools. They are seeing email plugins, they are seeing these things and they’re starting to encounter it. So our role is really just to say, “Look, let 2025 be the year of intelligence at your company. Let’s make everybody 10% smarter. Let’s make everybody roll in your work, let’s make everybody 10, 15, 20% smarter this quarter, this six months this year.” And they’re really getting excited with that.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. It’s kind of like the early 1900s with cars. I mean, there’s how many people making an AI product right now? And I guess we’ll find out how many survive and don’t because the early 1900s, there was over 300 car manufacturers and now there’s what? 5, 10 arguably?

Dorian Earl:

Right. Maybe. Right, yeah, maybe. Right.

Mike Gerholdt:

I’m sure more, but you know. So in the five things admins can do to get ready for Agentforce and AI, you list number one is awareness. So I feel like maybe last year that was like, “Oh, we kind of need to wake up.” And most people, I don’t want to say most people, most people I know became AI aware at the consumer grade level. I think it’s another to think of AI at the enterprise level, which is where Salesforce operates because we’re an enterprise CRM. We’re operating immediately with millions of rows of records and sometimes even data lakes or multiple organizations. So I’m sure that you probably run into a few that are aware. Let’s go on to number two, which is the preparedness. Where do people fall there?

Dorian Earl:

They are not because one, if they are aware, and I think you hit it on the head, and I don’t want to bury what you just said.

Mike Gerholdt:

Sure.

Dorian Earl:

Really, most technology comes out as a consumer facing application to catch what’s called a user adoption, right? And I remember when I was in college and Google first launched and literally people going out and say, “You can ask Google anything and it would just come back with an answer.” Or as Amazon, you can go put in any book you want. Well, it took a few years for people to understand the business implication of having all the data on the internet to ask a question. It even took Google really by storm or Amazon if you would’ve asked them when they started what their business would look like. They didn’t know. So we are in early days, but the people that are understanding, okay, there is an entity or there is a program out there that can ingest data and then come back to you with patterns, use cases, ideas, analysis, and that could have some ramification for us as a company. So how do we get prepared to use this?

And so when we start telling our clients about this, they said, “Wow, this could be really exciting. What do we do then to prepare to really turn these features on?” And so I’m going to mention this. I’m going to kind of go backward and start to go forward. This analogy I start to tell is I think it’s maybe going to ring true. So I was a previous athlete, and if I was going to ask you, Mike, “Hey Mike, my knee is swollen and it’s a little sore.” You would probably tell me rest it, elevate it, ice it. These are common things that… this is generalized intelligence, right? If my three-year-old son falls and scrapes his hand and it’s bleeding, you’re going to go wash it, you’re going to go let it air, obviously you’re going to put some things on it, you’re going to wrap it up in a Band-Aid. That’s generalized intelligence.

Now, if I told you as a 40-year-old male that’s 50 pounds overweight, that played basketball at a very high level for many years, that over exercises in my yard and my knee swells probably once a month. And you would say, “Given that relative information about you, you should probably go see a doctor. You may have a micro tear, you may have tendonitis, you may have some other things. All I did was I just gave you further background and relevant information versus general. And that’s exactly how AI works. Most people are just going asking it generalized questions and getting generalized answers. But the more relevant information you can give AI, just in general, through prompting, then it can come back and say, “Based on information you told me and the background and the person and this issue, I’m going to recommend these things.”

And really AI in general is as good as the data you give it. And so one of the things we are telling our clients is to prepare to use lists. In order for this to work at an enterprise level, where are all of your company data? Are you giving AI all the background you can on your company? Where would it find it? Do you have it in PDF? The origin story on your company, the history, the industry, how you service, the founders. So all of those things, the company data, the user. Tell us about the sales reps, their roles, their unique skills, the images on them. Products and services, where does that data set and how do we adequately get it into a place where AI can read it? One, if it’s not, obviously of course, on the internet, then we should put it there. But two, it should be in a place that’s up-to-date so AI can go in and read those things and answer questions.

And so we just want to give it as much relative information as you can. That way, it doesn’t give general answers or general information, which of course could be issues. So we want to prepare our clients and say, “If you don’t have this, let’s start to gather it. If you need help gathering it, we’re going to help you put it in a way that AI can read it. Your company data, the user data, your products and services, your customers, and any systems you would like AI to have access to.”

The good part of it is a lot of this should be in their CRM. It should already be in Salesforce. What most people don’t know is you can go into the user records and pretty much put in these custom fields about roles and background and info. And obviously, you can fill out information on the company. This is actually the good part, what a lot of people don’t really know. Your company data is stored in Salesforce, your NAP, your name, address, phone, number of the business, the website, the social. We can start enriching Salesforce with your company data. Images, logos, all of those things.

And so if we do that, we are really preparing AI, we’re really just teaching it. So what can we teach it and how much can we get AI to know about your company? And then this is what I call that preparedness stage, Mike. It may take people weeks to do this. They may say, “Wow, how much data should we give AI?” As much as you want given the relevant tasks. So sometimes it takes our clients weeks to do this. Sometimes we’re putting together an entire process on what do we want AI to have access to and learn on. So that’s kind of step two.

Mike Gerholdt:

No, I like that. I’m thinking of all of the use cases my team puts together. When we put out the Agentforce Decoded series, a lot of it is thinking from the sales or service perspective of, hey, how do you summarize this account or summarize this case. One part that you brought up that’s very salient that I think is, not to look ahead, but is like a good quick win is also what is your company about? What is your brand voice?

Dorian Earl:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt:

What are your, kind of if you had a front door, what are your window information? What’s your address? What’s your mailing address? What’s your hours? I say that because if you’re thinking of creating an agent to help your salespeople write better emails, well, it needs to be grounded in some information that it knows what it is and it knows what company you are and how to sound, right? I think it’s always important that brands have a voice, and even the admin relations, we have a brand voice. That they’re constructing that so it’s sounding cohesive. And that can just be a simple PDF or a knowledge article that an agent could reference.

Dorian Earl:

Absolutely.

Mike Gerholdt:

A lot of things, including data cleanup is important, but it’s also where do we go to get repositories of this information that’s just kind of the basic window sticker of your company? So that’s really good.

Dorian Earl:

Well, and that’s that preparedness phase. Because if you do this well, now again, I’ve thought this through because as every company you work for, you start with, “Let me give you background on the company.”

Mike Gerholdt:

Right.

Dorian Earl:

And then, “Let me tell you what we do.” And, “Let me tell you who we service and who our ideal customers are. And then let me tell you about the task you’re going to be doing.” AI is almost no different. “Let me tell you about the company that you’re going to do this work for. Let me tell you about our background. Let me tell you about our products and services.”

So if this data is not in a place where Agentforce or an agent can read it, then the challenge is it’s going to make it up. It’s going to make up the answer or it’s going to say, “I’m sorry, I don’t know.” And both of those items you don’t want. And so exactly to your point on brand voice, imagine a sales rep says, “I want to craft an email.” And you don’t tell the AI what the brand voice is, so then you have to prompt it. So if you can pre-ground Salesforce or your AI in this data already, then it’s that much further ahead, which is really kind of the secret sauce of this though. Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

Thinking ahead, moving on step three because we’re in a five-step program, got to get through our steps. But rightfully so, and even my team tries to do this, we try to come up with super complex use cases and stuff and really show the breadth of what some of these tools and features can do. But we all live in the real world. And in the real world when you’re a project manager, it’s what are the quick wins? What is the low effort, high result stuff that we can return? I think implementing Agentforce, we’re looking, as an admin you’d be looking for that too. So when you talk through quick wins and usage, what do you talk through as examples with some of your clients?

Dorian Earl:

Yeah, so this was really the thing that kind of got me excited about this because as I look at all new pieces of tech, I said, okay, who can use it and what’s the level of effort does it take to really get something out of it? And so when I turned on Agentforce and trails, one of the first trails, one of the first examples I saw were record summaries. And my mind immediately went back to, “Wow, as a sales rep, I wish I had this.” And those that haven’t seen this yet, you can literally, inside of Salesforce, pull up a record and prompt and say, “Summarize this record.” And it will read the record and it will read the related records and then give you a summary of what that record is.

Now, I’m going to go back to my previous example. I was a sales rep with 300 clients. Some days my boss would say, “This is a new client, go visit them.” I wish I could click and summarize what the previous rep was doing with them in the last three, six, nine months. How do you do that? And so if you are a sales rep, this is great. If you’re a sales manager and somebody says, “You need to do an account plan for this client.” And you haven’t seen them, or a classic, the client is upset, “I want to talk to your manager.” They talk to the sales manager or service manager. And of course, we’ve all made that phone call of, we’re calling in and they say, “Please hold. I need to look at the notes.” Record summaries save us… I know you’re laughing, but even when I’m happy, I called in and I said, “Hey, I have a question.” “Hold on please, sir, I’m going to pull up your account. Let me read the notes.”

Mike Gerholdt:

Let me get up to speed really quick here.

Dorian Earl:

Exactly, exactly. Let me get up to speed. And that person skims through as quick as they can to try to answer, “Oh, I see you called in on January 6th and you were asked about this issue. Was it ever resolved?” Do you have an open case about… ” Well, you have the data sitting right in front of you.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah.

Dorian Earl:

So record summaries are the quick wins, I think at every company you can use. And as an admin, it’s great because it comes out of the box. As a user, these things are huge because if you’re working with a mass amount of records, any individual record, or again, a large amount of related records to a parent record. Cases, tasks, notes, all of those things, and related to an account, opportunities, the record summaries are huge. It’s actually one of my favorite features if I could say. That would be one of the very first quick wins.

The second one, I would say quick reporting. I know it’s a little bit lower on my list, but I found this out just by accident. You can just query, you can ask AI to say, “How many accounts do I have in New York?” And it could come back based on the state that’s on the account. It will say, “You have 967 accounts in New York, you have 300 in Illinois.” Now imagine if you are the Salesforce admin, and I used to get this question, “Can you pull a list of leads in this city for me? I’m just curious.” I would get those questions all the time from an executive or from a manager or somebody.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, yeah.

Dorian Earl:

Now, you don’t have to ask your admin. You don’t have to go in and learn how to build a report. You can just ask, “How many of certain record do I have?” And AI can answer that question, which is pretty cool. How many leads do I have in nurture? How many leads do I have in New York? That’s in the working status? These are huge things when it comes to quick reporting. Marketing should be able to do this, sales should be able to do this. I mean, just a sales rep, “How big is my pipeline based on this product?” It could answer that question for you. So really cool. Those are just two of the quick ones I would say, which are huge.

Mike Gerholdt:

I think sometimes people confuse like, “Well, that should just be a list view.” Yeah, it could be a list view, unless it’s the one time you need that data or you also need that data plus something else. Because everything you were asking for, I could create as a list view. Why have AI do it? Well, because it can probably do it faster and I can also just add a quick filter to it. And it’s a one-off use case that’s just faster than creating a list view in your example.

Dorian Earl:

Well, yes, yes. And one of the things our clients always ask is, should I build a report for this or should I build a list view for this? Again, if you’re just doing analysis, just build the report. You may say, “Okay, there’s 900 accounts in New York.” You say, “Okay, based on that, I can assign those accounts to a person to do certain action.” To call, to follow up, to send a postcard, to do certain things, invite to an event, start targeting for this. Then you would create a list view then to take action against that. However, before you get to the action stage, you still need to do some analysis. Not every report is going to turn into a list view, something to take action on.

Mike Gerholdt:

And I’m sure you’re finding too that a lot of the quick wins are, the examples you gave, somebody could be listening like, “Well, that’s not going to work for me.” Right, the quick wins, I anticipate for what you bringing up are department specific and/or company specific. So as an admin, I may go to a department and show them record summary, and they’re like, “Well, but that’s not going to work for us.” Great. Well, here’s three other things that we can do as quick wins. That might not work. So record summary may be a quick win for a customer service team or a salesperson, but might be completely different for somebody else that has to do deal ops or a deal desk kind of thing.

Dorian Earl:

Well, you know what? I’m going to challenge your users because I’m going to ask them, send me a message on LinkedIn and tell me when a record summary would not work, would not be relevant.

Mike Gerholdt:

Okay, good. Please do.

Dorian Earl:

Because I’ve never pulled up a record of Salesforce and said, “I don’t want a summary of everything happening here.” I’ve never had it happen. I’ve never pulled up a record in Salesforce and said, “I don’t want to see everything related to it and really have that knowledge.” Now, not every single time, but I can foresee anybody that’s ever used Salesforce, you want to pull up a record and you want to know as much as you can about that record. Now, you don’t have to know everything and to take action, but I can see every user in Salesforce can take advantage of the record summary feature. That’s really my point there.

Mike Gerholdt:

No, it’s good.

Dorian Earl:

And so somebody could say, “You know what? I’m using Salesforce. I would never want a summary of a record.” I’m like, intriguing because I’ve never worked with anybody in Salesforce that would never find that feature useful.

Mike Gerholdt:

I don’t know. We’re going to find out. I’ve got some edge case listeners, man. There’s dark corners of the internet.

Dorian Earl:

Yes, please find me on LinkedIn. Now, if somebody is like a lawyer doing auditing, “Yes, I never get in there and do it.” Okay, okay, I got it. But again, I am really, really curious who would not use or who does not find that feature useful.

Mike Gerholdt:

So I guess my point was quick wins could be different wherever you go. I’m betting number four is the thing you probably run into a lot, which you have down as internal process improvement.

Dorian Earl:

Yes. And so this is what really gets people to start moving. They’re really not adopting technology for record summaries, even though it is important. I would say internal process improvement is the first place AI will show up. It’s what everybody’s talking about in articles. We are becoming so much more efficient. We don’t need to hire that many people to do this now because internal process improvement would mean you could cut tasks down from eight or nine clicks down to two. You can have AI augment the workflow or work that is being done because it is doing things on the background that would cost you time, energy, effort, all of that.

This is where the big ROI is coming in AI that a lot of people do not understand. You could say, “Please create a case. Please schedule an appointment. Please create a record. Please send a sample. Please issue a return for this record.” And just speaking of the last one, chargebacks, returns. Those usually take multiple records being opened up, some analysis being done, five or six clicks, related optics, and then emails going out, approvals. AI can handle that stuff, which is really cool because they could say, “Great, this is all done for you.” As opposed to, “Okay, give me one second, let me see which order this is from. Let me see what product this was. Let me find this view. Okay, how did you pay? Would you like a return on your card?” You could say, “AI, please go in, issue a return for this item and credit it back to their credit card.” Okay, done.

And so instead of eight or nine clicks, five or six minutes of downtime on a call, all those things. And in some companies I worked with, they just was one person that just issued returns, which is crazy. Now AI can do those things or create a case. So now you’re talking about imagine one person having the benefit of saying, “I can do my job and a quarter of another job.” If you have five people doing that, you really have five people working, getting the benefit of six. That’s huge.

Mike Gerholdt:

Wow, I wasn’t thinking about that. But your point five. So expand on this. External tasks outsourced to AI.

Dorian Earl:

Yeah, so what I mentioned for number four, this is where a lot of companies are a little scared to say, “I would not have AI talking to my clients.” Okay, I got it. But if you have internal process, if AI is handling, if an agent, and we’ll mention the Agentforce in this case because it has all the relevant context on your company, all the relevant context on your products and services, the people using it and your clients. You can enable it to do narrow tasks such as, “Hey, here are a list of leads.”

So imagine this workflow, Mike, and then I’ll get the external case in. You would say, “Pull up a lead, summarize the record, draft an email based on the record summary and their needs for this lead.” Okay, email draft. “Okay, put the email and send it out for me please.” So that could be five or six clicks. Pull up the record, click summarize the record, click draft an email, click send the email, right?

Mike Gerholdt:

Uh-huh.

Dorian Earl:

And then move along. Or you could just say, I will have an agent. I will program an agent or ask an agent in Salesforce to do that for all of my 30 leads in the New York area. Pull up, summarize, create an email, send off. Now, if it’s watching you do it for the next year, it would’ve learned what you’ve liked, what you don’t like, what the replies are like, information to add in because it gets smarter. This is the thing a lot of people aren’t realizing with AI is that it becomes smarter over time. And so you can allow it to do these narrow tasks. “Hey, follow up with these 30 leads that were nurturing in New York and do this for me.” Those are external facing AI agents that are taking action on your behalf.

And then you can say, I will have an agent for those that are interested that reply back. I have a second agent that’s just a scheduling agent. So the Salesforce Scheduler, which allows people, external people in your email to look in, look at your calendar, look at your availability, schedule blocks of time based on their availability. All you do is really send the email with the link in there. They schedule. Now, do you have to send an email, Mike, or can you have an AI agent send the email? Okay, great. Now that’s a narrow task, but that’s an external client facing that you don’t have to be involved. They can schedule. So now we have two agents. We have one that’s doing the nurturing, we have one doing the scheduling. Okay, great.

Now imagine previous to this appointment scheduling, you can say, “Summarize the record. Give me some bullet points. I want to do an account review.” Maybe that’s not a lead, maybe it’s an account in this case. Let’s do an account review of what they previously ordered or most likely to order, our recent comms, open tickets, open cases, anything that’s going on with them and give me three things that could be beneficial for us to mention. Maybe have an AI to summarize the record, come up with those things, pop that data into a field for you. So now we have the third agent that somebody nurtured, somebody followed up, somebody scheduled, somebody summarized records, prepped in account plan for you. We have three external facing agents just in the sales motion or maybe account planning motion. Those are external facing AIs because they’re dealing directly with your clients or your accounts. And just in the sales motion, those are three. Now you can have one agent to do all three. You can have three different ones. So imagine having an external facing AI that just does those three things. That’s huge, right?

Mike Gerholdt:

Absolutely.

Dorian Earl:

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, again, I’m talking about just sales motion, but there’s a whole nother workflow in there. The marketing motion, there’s a whole nother workflow and the service motion. But those are just really, really cool things though. Either way.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, going back to point three, it’s always looking for the quick wins. How do you make sure you go through each department and get them up and running and then come back? Because that’s what I always like to do as opposed to spend too long in one department and they’re fully vested, and another department is like, “Well, where’s our love?”

Dorian Earl:

Well, true, true. And this is where if we can step back, I know this is kind being prepared for Agentforce. To my understanding, there is not an agent that can prepare a client for Agentforce. It would be great if it could, but it’s not. But there is one. It’s called the Salesforce Admin or the Salesforce product order, or whoever is in charge or forward looking for the client and saying, “Hey, in 2025, what are we going to do with our technology stack center it around Salesforce to grow our business, make us more efficient?”

This is where some intelligence, some wisdom, some understanding some business analyst skills, some requirements gathering skills. This is what our team is doing with our clients. Actually maybe this new era of really intelligence, this is where Salesforce is really excited for all of us working in the ecosystem because they are saying, we now have a tool that you can make yourself more efficient. And we are all kind of shepherding them into this new era of really intelligence. So this is really fun.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s why you work in tech, right? Every day is a little bit something different. I never would’ve predicted this, but I remember back when it was social and mobile and it’s like, where are we going? And we’re talking about connected toothbrushes, and now I don’t know. Now the toothbrush maybe is going to start giving me advice.

Dorian Earl:

Well, it could. I mean, with all the things that are happening, obviously I used to work in the medical dental space. I give you a lot of thoughts and advice there, but I cannot wait to see in the next year as we enable customer facing agents that have been trained. There is something to that. Now, I wouldn’t put a customer facing agent out there without training. I wouldn’t put regular people out there without training. But in the next year or two, with every company that I deal with becoming smarter, the places I order pizza from, they say, “Hello, how can I help you?” I’m like, “You don’t know what I previously ordered?” “No.” That’s a lack of intelligence, right?

Mike Gerholdt:

Right.

Dorian Earl:

And so how many places that we go to and solicit, and they’re not as intelligent, that an agent can help the person on the other end do their job better, which is really cool. So I am super excited. I wish every company that we worked with, big and small, would adopt technology like this. And trust me, I’ve been singing the song to everybody going, “Hey, hey, I don’t know what systems you have internally, but let me help you.” And everything from athletics, to restaurant, to food, to the travel, to all of those things. So I’m looking forward to it.

Mike Gerholdt:

It’s going to be good. Dorian, thanks for coming by and helping admins out again. You’re always in our corner giving us advice and setting us on the right path. So I appreciate it and can’t wait to connect with you again later this year at all of our events.

Dorian Earl:

Yeah. Well, and I’ll let you know how this goes because as we shepherd clients into this new era of intelligence, I’ll tell you which ones on step two, step three, and step four. And Salesforce is really doing a good job of telling the story of what people are doing with agents and AI, which is really cool. I cannot wait. This is really, really fun. But thanks for all you do with helping us in the ecosystem. I think I mentioned to you, when I started with Salesforce 2017, I was listening. I went back and listened to all of your previous podcasts and just to get caught up, and I listened to one a day, one every other day and listened to them on one and a half or two speed. And so it was a really, really, really cool thing. One, you’ve got a great obviously voice, and you know-

Mike Gerholdt:

Even at two speed, I do?

Dorian Earl:

Even at two speed, you’d be surprised what Mike sounded like at two speed. Yep, yep, yep.

Mike Gerholdt:

I sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks. 

Dorian Earl:

Mike, and Gillian at one and a half or two speed was something, right? And so yeah, that was really good. But still having a place where people can stay up to date and knowledgeable. On behalf of me and everybody else, we thank you for having a place that where we can learn and obviously stay up to date here. This is really cool. 

Mike Gerholdt:

I appreciate it. Thanks so much.

Dorian Earl:

Yep. Yeah, thank you.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, that was another fun discussion with Dorian. I always love running into him at events. And if you’ve ever checked out his breakout sessions, they’re one for the books. He is an incredibly powerful and passionate presenter and knowledgeable, huge fan of Salesforce Admins.

I really loved his five-step approach for preparing for Agentforce. I think it gave us some actionable insights for us to think about and look forward to bringing more intelligence and efficiency to our organizations.

Now, have you found this episode helpful? Hey, do me a favor, share it with somebody. Put it out on social. I’m on Bluesky. Everybody’s on Bluesky. And if you’re on Apple Podcasts, all you have to do is tap the three dots to click share episode, and it’ll take care of posting the rest. Now, don’t forget all the links, everything that we mentioned on the episode, including a transcript, is available at admin.salesforce.com. You can find everything there, including a lot of blog posts. Tons of information.

Now, as always, if you’d love to join in the conversation, and I’d love to be there with you, jump over to the Admin Trailblazer Group. That is in the Trailblazer community. You know where the link is. It’s in the show notes, which is at admin.salesforce.com. Look at that. It’s like, “Toot, toot, toot, here we go.” Anyway, thanks again for tuning in and we’ll see you next Thursday in the cloud.

The post Level Up: The Admin’s Action Plan for Thriving in the Agentforce Era appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Mehmet Orun, SVP, GM, and Data Strategist at PeerNova. Join us as we chat about how to use Data Cloud to create trustworthy AI experiences.

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

How Data Cloud powers trustworthy AI experiences

The last time we had Mehmet on the pod, the big concern with AI was hallucinations. How can we be sure that the agents we create don’t start making stuff up? What’s more, how do we know that they won’t share data they shouldn’t? In short, how do we create trustworthy AI experiences?

As we’ve learned time and again, AI is only as good as the data you give it. But, as Mehmet explains, Data Cloud has changed the game for admins in terms of control over who sees what and in what context. Admins can create personalized experiences with Agentforce, constrained by the permission model and capabilities of Flow to ensure that everything is working as intended.

How data management best practices have changed with AI

One thing Mehmet reflects on is the way that data management techniques have changed over time. Several best practices no longer make sense in today’s context of AI. For example, duplicate records that used to be a mortal sin make more sense when you’re trying to constrain what a customer can see vs. your employees vs. your vendors.

However, the personalized engagement that is possible with Agentforce requires a complete understanding of what’s happening with someone. At the same time, you want your agents to only act on information they’re “allowed” to see, or generate insights that are relevant to the outcomes you want to achieve. As Mehmet explains, “good” data and “bad” data is really about making sure your data is structured in a way that makes it easy to use.

Data unification made easy with Data Cloud

The good news is that it’s never been easier to take care of your data with Data Cloud. Mehmet’s seen this with the nonprofits he works with. Data unification projects that used to take months or even years are now relatively simple affairs. You can identify bad data, filter out irrelevant data, and put the right data standardizations in place all in Setup.

Mehmet’s biggest piece of advice is to measure your data quality in terms of the business outcomes you are trying to achieve. As he points out, the amount of data you need to open an opportunity is different than what you need to close an opportunity. The same principle applies to AI agents. If you make sure they get everything they need and nothing extraneous, you’ll get good results.

There are a ton of great insights about data management best practices for AI in our conversation with Mehmet, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And make sure you’re subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you can catch us every Thursday.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more

• Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Understanding the Importance of Data Health in Salesforce

Admin Trailblazers Group

• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

• Mehmet on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on X
• Mike on Bluesky social
• Mike on Threads
• Mike on X

Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt:

Welcome back to the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Today we’re catching up with Mehmet Orun, longtime friend of the pod and true expert in data and AI. I’m going to tell you, a lot has changed in the world of artificial intelligence since our last chat. And Mehmet’s here to break it down from hallucination risks to the role of data cloud in creating trustworthy AI experiences. If you’ve ever been wondering how to make your data more meaningful and your AI outputs more reliable, well, you are in for a treat. So, make sure to follow the podcast so you don’t miss a single episode. And with that, let’s get Mehmet back on the podcast. Mehmet, welcome back to the podcast.

Mehmet Orun:

It is wonderful to be back, Mike.

Mike Gerholdt:

I know. You just come by with all these wisdoms and knowledge that you have in the world. Last time we were on, and I’ll link to that show, we were talking about hallucination risks. And it’s been a year. And boy, I tell you, a year in AI time, everything’s changed. So, what’s new in your world? What are you paying attention to in terms of AI and Agentforce?

Mehmet Orun:

To be honest, one of the interesting things about having been around a while is while the technologies are new, our overall objective haven’t really changed. And one of the things I’ve been really trying to look back to is what were past challenges we overcame, what were the parallels, and what were some of the best practices that people newer to the field around data integration, artificial intelligence, may not know about, so we can share this knowledge while absolutely picking up new ways of doing things? Also, because we definitely have new tools under our belt. And having a organized way to assess what may cause hallucination risk and mitigating it has been a truly hot topic. I have been visiting old friends, making new friends as I’ve been traveling across different Salesforce events as well. And the good news is people are excited about the potential. People are also excited about having tangible methods they can take back to their organization. I’m looking forward to sharing some of these with you today.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. It’s interesting, you look at some of the stuff that’s out in the world and the spectrum for people looking at what’s going on with AI goes all the way from everything that it says is right to nothing that it says it’s right, and somebody falls somewhere in between there. But I feel like I did podcasts in 2024, early ’24, I think in ’23, even talking about hallucination. The one thing that it came back to, it seems to have gone away, because I think more of the conversation is around the quality of the data and what we’re feeding Agentforce and getting your data ready. Am I right?

Mehmet Orun:

So, given you mentioned ’23, ’24, a lot of the hallucination-

Mike Gerholdt:

This was a long time ago.

Mehmet Orun:

Yeah, in the AI world, right?

Mike Gerholdt:

Uh-huh.

Mehmet Orun:

A lot of the hallucination risk conversations that were happening, and this was mostly around ChatGPT, was because the information that was available was up to a particular date. It was predominantly unstructured data available on the internet. So, if something was published past a certain date, it was not going to show up in answers. One of the big changes I think in the ecosystem is in the past we talked about IT solutions, data warehouses, analytics, which was separate than marketing segmentation and engagement.

And then we had these really interesting LLMs and generative AI for the past several months, it feels like years. The focus is the idea of a truly enterprise scale data platform that can power automation, that can power analytics. That can look at structured and unstructured data in order to provide complete, compliant, and contextual information that can also power AI. I know we both like storytelling. I had a really interesting experience with my father a couple of weeks ago. Do you mind if I tell that story?

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, please, tell me. I love a good story.

Mehmet Orun:

She’s a 90-year-old retired brigadier general. He’s a military engineer.

Mike Gerholdt:

90 years young, you mean?

Mehmet Orun:

Oh, man. I still barely keep up with him.

Mike Gerholdt:

See, that’s what I’m saying.

Mehmet Orun:

And as a military engineer, you are always given a mission and you have what you have. That is the typical mindset. And in every country, in every place, people are talking about artificial intelligence, what it may mean. And he said, “Okay, look, I think this is your field. Help me understand what is new versus what he was working with in older computing days, and why are people worried? Why are people excited?” So, I sat next to him. We brought up ChatGPT, and I asked a series of three questions. The first question was, I said, “Tell me what you know about my dad’s name, Sunday Orun, a retired engineer, a retired soldier, not even rank.” And it gave what rank he retired at, what branch of the military, where he went to school. Simple question, limited context.

I said, what else do you know about him? I said, him without the name. And I got information about article field-working for magazines in a couple of his books. Post-retirement, he did poetry, which is a wonderful way to retire. And he’s like, “Oh, it’s interesting. How does it know that?” I’m like, “Well, can people find your books in online storage?” He’s like, “Yes.” So, it’s available information. It can leverage all of these as it searches. He’s like, “Okay, it makes sense.” Then I asked the question, “What do you know about his son?” And ChatGPT says, “I do not know who his son is.” And he’s like, “So, why doesn’t it know we are related?” And I said, “Because the fact that you and I are related would be in a government database. It would not be in public records. It’s not something that’s on the internet.” And for him, this was an obvious separation.

So, you asked a question, this is a long-winded way of getting there, perhaps, so what has changed? A year ago, I could dump a bunch of knowledge articles or perhaps a meeting transcript and say summarize, or I could use knowledge articles to power chatbots. Now I can look at what do I know about a person in their transactional context based on their order history, based on their case history, based on their knowledge of the product. And I can give much more personalized recommendations, because the AI platform idea, as opposed to an LLM technology idea, is bringing together matching technology where we used to think about as duplicate management and CRM.

That mindset has evolved, and it is there to provide contextual interactions. Data cloud is not just powering the generative AI capabilities for Agentforce. It’s also providing the unified insights that can even be constrained to only what a person is supposed to know about, where admins and architects can control this, given the permission model and capabilities of flow. Which for me is incredibly exciting, because that means we can deliver more value. We can use the technology we are already deeply familiar with, and we can show the true potential of AI while minimizing risk to our organizations and minimizing confusion for our end users.

Mike Gerholdt:

That’s a fabulous story. I feel you’re spot on. Just the level of understanding why and what we have available to us is huge. In the email you sent me, I want to pull out a sentence, because we’re talking about data and we’re talking about a lot of things. But I feel this is a good foundation. You said, “Part of this helped them realize why historical CRM data management techniques do not scale versus benefits of data cloud.” To the uninitiated, and I’m one of them, so I’m asking this question for me, can you give me what you mean by historical CRM data management techniques and help me understand that versus the benefits of data cloud?

Mehmet Orun:

So, if I think about what is in the Salesforce admin data management toolkit, we talk about a distinct set of areas we expect admins to do. They configure objects, object fields with validation rules and some data management rules, such as, do you want a default value or not, if it’s required or not? We talk to them about duplicate management rules, which led the impression that all duplicates are bad. And we talk about storage optimization more around performance, because every org had a storage limit, you wanted to think about when you may want to offload storage either for cost savings or build skinny tables for large data volume handling. Those were the domains of data management we got to, which was fairly technical, focused on mostly data entry operations. Let’s fast-forward to even two years ago.

If you have a Salesforce CRM org with Experience Cloud, you need to have intentional duplicate records because the records and end user maintains their information should be separated, then how that customer’s information is maintained by employees. You may also have records maintained by partners using Experience Cloud that’s still about the same customer. So, already thinking that for a customer that should have one record is no longer sufficient and acceptable, because partners need to have their view of the information. Customers want to maintain their own perspective of what they’re called, what’s their best contact information. And companies want to be able to have their internal view as well, such as customer segment, customer risks, so on and so forth.

But personalized engagement requires a complete understanding of what’s happening with an organization, where you only act on information you’re allowed to see and you act on insights that is relevant to the outcomes you want to achieve. So, three things I really, really like that data cloud brought in to our solution kits is, first, I can provide a holistic understanding of the individual or a business contact, even though I have multiple contact or lead records in my CRM, even in the simplest of architectures. Let’s talk about a nonprofit example. Let’s say that we’re talking to Sam Smith, and Sam is a donor. Sam was a board member. Sam worked for an organization that gave us grants.

That is us interacting with Sam, the human, into a business context and in a donor relationship. We are going to want to track these through different departments, probably through different records. But when we want to know what do we know about the people we engage with, how do we send them a personalized thank you, this is where data cloud powers that unification perspective. Does that example make sense before I tie to the AI specific examples that extends this?

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, no, it does. I’m following along.

Mehmet Orun:

So, let’s say that we are now in a data model that we have accepted, we should maintain contextual transactions in our business applications, whether we have one or multiple CRM orgs, and of course, other systems. We first unify it around individuals’ business contacts and accounts. So, now, related transactions, related emails, donation history from external systems or cases, regardless of your industry, can come together in one umbrella. Now, if I want to create a personalized thank you message, we can look at overall interaction history and not just think that we have seen someone for the first time, because they’re using their new email address in their new corporate role, but they’ve been a lifetime member.

So, generative AI solutions work better when interactions across a person’s contact points can be made accessible within compliance rules, of course. And agentic solutions work better when it can understand what are all of the different type of transactions that may be associated to an individual or an account, even when they’re distributed across multiple account records, multiple contact records, even multiple CRM orgs. You can see me, I’m pointing to things on the whiteboard in front of me, but this is something that used to take organizations months, if not years to put in place. And having done this now for real with a few nonprofits as part of my pro bono work, I know we can do assessment and planning in a few days.

We can then onboard the data and configure data clouds, data unification capabilities in less than a month. And that includes identifying bad data that is in the system. [email protected], they’re still present, whether your org is three years old or 20 years old, by filtering out irrelevant data, by putting the right data standardizations in place. These are all part of a single umbrella of capability. Whereas an admin, you just worked with the admin tools in the past. And now many of these transformation capabilities, configurable rules are accessible still under the setup tree, still under the Salesforce tabs. That allows us to be more productive Salesforce professionals and allows us to decrease the total cost of ownership as we support our organizations.

Mike Gerholdt:

I mean, I’ve always thought when I’ve asked people a rhetorical question, what is the most important thing that your company owns? And 99% of the time when I ask people that question, they get it wrong, because they mention a patent or a brand, or a product that they produce. And I say, “No, it’s your data.” The data that you have is the most important thing for you to take care of. And ironically, it’s also the most least paid attention to, because we just throw things in, and we’ll sort it and figure it out later. Hurry up, move on to the next thing. And now, as you bring up the unification of all these systems, where we’ve put all this data and the management or mismanagement of it, now is the vital importance, because now we can truly link all of this information, and have AI sort through it and give us the relevant information that we need by just thinking through a few more processes.

Mehmet Orun:

I think what’s important in what you said is AI is additive to what we have had, because I agree data is the most important asset. And the fact that no organization I’ve ever been a part of or helped had perfect data. It’s something we just need to accept, but not live with.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. I have a friend that has a small marketing agency. He probably has 200 people in his little CRM. I promise you, his data isn’t good. Even in that, I mean, nobody’s got perfect data.

Mehmet Orun:

So, what matters, and this is what we talked about last year, is we can’t assess data quality as a technical concept. We can’t just look at what is in my object. Is it good? Is it not good? We always need to look at data in context of a business outcome. I think an example I give often is how much data you need to start an opportunity is different than the amount of data you need to close an opportunity. What you want to gather if you lost a big opportunity is different than what you probably would ask people to capture if you lost a small opportunity. So, these are all proportionate to the business benefit, where I don’t think historically we did a great job explaining as professionals, whether we are admins, architects, business analysts.

But when it comes to AI, because agentic AI puts so much focus and emphasis on use cases and the persona we are empowering. If it’s a sales agent, we want to find out what is the job a sales agent is supposed to do. What is the information they need? What are the rules they should follow? And whether you have 100 fields or 800 fields in your constant opportunities objects, we still need to look at what data is reliable today, if that’s sufficient. If it is not sufficient, we need to go through some type of a data improvement process or when to look at a different use case. If we have sufficiently reliable data, we need to look at how do we ensure our prompts both use data from those fields that have reliable data and sufficient metadata, and also know when a subset of records don’t have sufficient data quality in those very same fields.

And then third, just because it works today, we shouldn’t assume things are going to be the same tomorrow because processes are changing, configurations are changing, people habits are changing. So, by monitoring what’s happening in our business applications and catching deviations, we can avoid unexpected batch surprises, also in the flows. Honestly, these are things with a time machine we should have thought of and incorporated into our automation flow, into our reports, but the attention wasn’t there as much as it is today. So, people being excited about AI, but worried about hallucination risk is one of the best things that happened to ensure we can provide reliable data for all types of decision making through Salesforce.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. Well, I mean, what do they say? 2020’s hindsight? If you could go back and know the future, then you’d obviously plan for it, but it also creates opportunity for us to be creative and corrective in how we move forward. Which means that every solution you’re thinking of today moving forward is going to look very different than before Agentforce.

Mehmet Orun:

One of the things I’m still noodling on, and I’ll probably spend a few more years noodling is how do we make sure we can take better advantage of unstructured data that is the vast maturity of all interactions. I remember being excited about Einstein Activity Capture, which was a few years ago. And it’s still an untapped potential, but now we are analyzing that data, we’re incorporating that data. The more we can streamline the end user experience to capture information, know when information may be missing, incomplete, potentially out of date, so they can improve it in a tactical, surgical way, and then be able to explain to them why we’re making certain recommendations in AI assisted suggestions.

I think that’s also going to increase the confidence for agentic experiences, where humans are engaged in a secondary level. I know that I would like AI tools to give me results I can believe in when I’m directly engaging first, before I’m willing to expose it to perhaps less savvy or less aware of my underlying processes end user. I think a lot of people are going to go through the journey, so thinking about process mapping, thinking about testing strategies are also going to be important considerations for all of us.

Mike Gerholdt:

I mean, that’s the whole point, is to test. You want something reliable and to ask why. I think that the important thing is people get things wrong, too. We sometimes look at some of these technology solutions as infallible, as they’re always perfect and they’re not. They’re imperfect because they’re built by imperfect people. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t constantly iterate on your solution. I remember long time ago when I was an admin, I feel like it was Josh Burke or it was another developer who was always like, “Every year, I look at the code I wrote for the previous year and wonder why did I write it that way.” And it’s because you’re a year smarter.

Mehmet Orun:

100% agree. I have 13 years of Salesforce presentations in my Dropbox folder. And when I look at it’s fascinating to see what is still true. And it’s interesting to see when some recommendations have completely changed over the course of the last 15 years, because we are learning. And I think we need to be honest about, look, yes, this was the recommendation based on what we knew, here’s what we learned since, and here’s why we are recommending X today that is different. I think on the other side, as professionals, we need to remember none of us have all the answers. And what we knew yesterday might have changed today. So, look, I love your podcast. I love some of the things that come out of the various blogs, because people share what they’ve learned at a level of frankness, including what we stopped doing. And that is a sign us being learning humans. And it’s the best way to be.

Mike Gerholdt:

Absolutely.

Mehmet Orun:

How do we learn to be better every single day?

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, I feel like that’s a really good place to end this episode on, because I always want to learn more. And I appreciate you coming on the podcast and helping everybody else learn more.

Mehmet Orun:

It’s my pleasure. I know that there are so many thoughts we can always get into. I hope these sessions enable more personal connections. And if you’re listening to it and we run into each other at an event, let’s grab coffee. Let’s talk about data or life, because we’re going to learn from each other. We will make each other better. And thank you, Mike, for this opportunity.

Mike Gerholdt:

Absolutely. So, Mehmet took us for a ride from a 90-year-old general, his father, all the way to data that doesn’t quite behave. And the takeaway, well, AI is like a great intern. It’s only as good as the notes you give it. So, let’s feed it well and ask better questions. But anyway, a huge thanks to Mehmet for the wisdom and the stories. If you learn something today or you just enjoyed the ride, can you do me a favor and just share the podcast and spread the data love? Now, until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post How Data Cloud Enhances Contextual AI for Salesforce Admins appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Sri Srinivasan, Senior Director of Information Security at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about his recent presentation at TDX and how to build secure, reliable AI experiences with Agentforce.

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

A quick heads up before we dive in: This episode may include forward-looking statements—aka things we’re excited about that may not be here just yet. So, as always, make your purchasing decisions based only on what’s currently available. For the full legal scoop, check out salesforce.com.

Five questions to ask when you’re building with Agentforce

I caught up with Sri fresh off his TDX presentation about secure Agentforce implementation to pick his brain on how admins should think about security and AI.

For Sri, there are five things to think about in order to build secure AI agents:

1. What is the agent’s role and scope?
2. What data will the agent have access to?
3. Which actions should be public and which should be private?
4. Do you need to build any extra guardrails?
5. Which channels will the agent use?

As always with security, the key concept here is the principle of least privilege. Running through Sri’s questions helps you build an agent that can’t do something you don’t want it to do.

What’s coming next for security in Agentforce

Sri also gives us a sneak peek at the new tools his team is piloting to help admins build secure AI agents. You’ll be able to look at metrics like instruction adherence, coherence, how factual the responses are, and how grounded the agent is.

They’re also trying to simplify how user permissions work with AI agents in order to make it easier to keep things limited and secure. It’s easy to turn things on and off when you’re trying to get something to work, but you need to revisit your permissions from time to time and apply the principle of least privilege.

The role of admins in the future of Agentforce

Finally, I asked Sri about how admins fit into the future of AI on Salesforce. “Admins are key to everything that we do,” he says, “they understand everything that’s happening within their environment. They know which actions, what permissions, what they do, and agents are just another avenue to expose and interact with this crux of it.”

How fast would you drive a car with no brakes? Sure, Agentforce is a sports car in terms of everything it can do. But it’s up to admins to build the brakes and make sure that AI agents are only doing the things you want them to do. And that starts by understanding the systems and data behind them and then asking the right questions.

There’s a lot more great stuff in my conversation with Sri, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more

• Sri at TDX: 5 Easy Steps for Secure Agentforce Implementation
• More from TDX: Security Best Practices with Agentforce
• Trailhead: Trusted Agentic AI
• Blog: Best Practices for Building Secure Agentforce Service Agents

Admin Trailblazers Group

• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

• Sri on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on X
• Mike on Bluesky social
• Mike on Threads
• Mike on X

Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re talking with Sri Srinivasan about secure, reliable AI experiences with Agentforce. Now, Sri is a leader on the security compliance customer trust team at Salesforce, where he helps customers understand and implement security best practices. Of course, before we get into this episode, be sure to follow the Salesforce Admins Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. That way you get a new episode every Thursday delivered right to your phone or your mobile device. So with that, let’s get into our conversation with Sri. So Sri, welcome to the podcast.

Sri Srinivasan:
Thanks for having me here, Mike. Super excited for it.

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, I love the presentation that you gave at TDX, and I’m sure more people would love to hear about it too, which is why I wanted to have you come back on, because everything now is Agentforce and security is always top of mind. I’ve always preached security ever since I started at Salesforce. I’ve had, I think, Laura Pelkey on quite a few times. But that was the compass of what you talked about at TDX. But I’m jumping ahead. Let’s talk about you a little bit. Tell me kind of where you got started and how you got to Salesforce.

Sri Srinivasan:
Let me try to make it very sweet and sharp. So I have always been in security. I have a master’s in information management specializing in security. I worked for big four accounting firms, but not doing accounting. I did security for them, data security and data privacy. Then I ended up working for a little gaming company where I really got involved in security, due diligence. Was a small company based out of Reno, but they were not really small. They did almost all gaming systems, all gaming interactions, lottery, all across the world. So that got me exposed to different systems and more specifically around fraud and how systems can be hacked to do things that they shouldn’t be doing. That’s where I got more interested in understanding the lay of the land of security. I spent about five, six years there.

Then I got an opportunity to work for one of the biggest tax preparers in the United States. I ran their cyber fraud operations group for two years down there, and then my business teams, product teams came over to me and said, “Sri, you’ve been on the other side yelling at us to do a better job. Why don’t you come on this side and do that?” So I spent a couple of years on the product side as well.

Then during COVID, I was looking back at my life when we had lots of time at home, and I realized I’ve done a lot of the security functions in total audit, GRC, red teaming, blue teaming, security operations center, fraud operations. One thing that I thought I did not have was that customer-facing experience, and this great opportunity came about at Salesforce, and my role currently in Salesforce is to interact with customers. My team, security compliance customer trust, is the front-facing team for all customer-facing security inquiries around security, compliance, and trust. So that’s how I got here, and I’ve been here for about five years or so, almost five. It feels like I just started yesterday, and it’s amazing. Every time I meet a customer, I just feel excited.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. I mean, if I had to go back in time and pick a career in tech, I feel like security is one that you’re always going to have a job because if there’s a lock out there, I promise you there’s probably somebody trying to break it.

Sri Srinivasan:
Yep. I hear you. And the frustrating part about is that it’s oftentime not people trying to break the lock. It’s just people forgetting to lock their locks, and then figuring out like, “Hey, how did somebody get in?” Well, you didn’t lock it at the first place.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yep. Oh, man. Speaking the truth. So it feels like there’s kind of two eras. Well, I mean, we talk about different waves at Salesforce, but to me there’s the pre-AI era and then there’s the post-AI era. And for a long time, up until I saw your presentation, I kind of didn’t think about security with AI, because most of everything that we do on the platform is just so secure, but let’s talk about what your presentation at TDX was. So kind of in a nutshell, bring us into that presentation and what you talked about.

Sri Srinivasan:
Sure. I think what the intent was, AI is the hype word right now. So everybody’s talking about LLMs, everyone’s talking about how to protect those LLMs, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much more when it comes to implementing AI right. Salesforce provides you with a very secure platform, but is only as secure as you implement it. So that was kind of the crux of the presentation where we actually articulated the shared responsibility model in terms of what is expected is you as a customer, you as an admins, what are the few five or 10 things that you want to question anybody in your organization that is wanting to come up with an AI solution?

And we wanted to break it down from a business case perspective, in a sense, if you look at all of our top tracks around Agentforce, we break it down into role, data, actions, guardrails, and channels. Those are the things that your business users are very familiar with. If we can build security into those aspects, by nature of it, we’re building security into the product itself, rather than coming at the end and saying, “Now I’m going to do a security review and I’m going to add security on top of it.”

So that’s what we were focusing on during the presentation. Things around being very cognizant on what is the role of the agent, what is the scope of the agent, what will it do? What will it not do? What data it will have access to, and where is that data coming from? Do we need to bring that data into the Salesforce system? Do we need the agent to have access to that? Other critical things, such as least privilege, access controls, designing your actions securely. Those are the things that we spoke about during our presentation, most of which, if you just took it out of context and put it in a paper, none of this should be new words. All of this is standard security practices, but the way it’s applied, the lens through which you look at it, is a little different when it comes to Agentforce.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, I think it’s always interesting as we delve into new tech when you think of security as really telling the agent what it should and shouldn’t do. Wow. Because most people, I think, probably encapsulate security into permissions and profiles and data access, but also what it should and shouldn’t do is also security, right? One of the things you mentioned in your answers was guardrails. And I’m wondering, can you give us some examples of what could go wrong if guardrails aren’t set properly?

Sri Srinivasan:
Yeah. So I’m trying to give a better example here because I don’t want it to be something that is future-looking, but rather what’s in the product today. So when you give your agent guardrails, a simple one could be your agent instructions. Under no circumstances should I ask for your email address or customer name or your order number because I have all that information. If I can validate Mike, I have all that information. I shouldn’t be asking you to give me that information and assume that is right. So that’s a very simple guardrail that you can throw into your system, right? Another set of guardrails could be you shall not perform these actions without having the user verified. You need to know who the user is before you can go and reset his password, or you need to have their second factor. You need to do a step-up authentication before you can trigger these actions, things of that sort. And what agent does with our Agent Builder, you can start providing these as natural language instructions. And the system would know.

Mike Gerholdt:
One thing I was thinking of, so I’m going to ask a silly question, because when we talk security, I feel like I’m the person that has to ask the silly questions. So I’m going to do that. You mentioned one thing of, well, I’m going to set the guardrail if it shouldn’t have access, or it shouldn’t ask for the order number because the person looking at the screen has the order number. Why is that important if we’re not passing an order number to an agent? Why would we withhold data to an agent?

Sri Srinivasan:
So we’re not actually withholding the data to an agent. The reason why we don’t want to explicitly ask the user for certain information is not just to ask, but we can ask, but we shouldn’t trust that information. It’s the innate concept of trust but verify. I can ask you for this information, but that’s not a great user experience because I already know your account number, your order number. I have all that information. But rather, what I don’t have is I don’t know who’s on the other side of the system. So that’s more important for me when I say that you shall not ask for it. The reason why I explicitly state that is because I don’t need this information from you. I already have it. What I need from you is to validate who you are. Once I know you’re Mike and this is the associated user ID, I have all the other information. Are you able to connect those dots?

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, no, I totally get it now. I mean, guardrails, I guess I was envisioning guardrails as like those bumpers that you put up when you go bowling and you’re not very good at it so you roll a strike every time. And it’s kind of that, but it’s also kind of that to make sure that the conversation and the agent is flowing in a natural manner so that you’re actually being productive is the way I hear it. So that totally makes sense.

Sri Srinivasan:
100%. And what we have, it’s currently in pilot, is we have instruction adherence. So this is basically our systems, our Atlas Reasoning Engine has supervisory elements that are constantly looking at those conversations and getting metrics around key aspects such as instruction adherence, coherence, how factual it is, how grounded it is. These are then used to decide how the user experience should be.

For example, if there is an instruction that says you shall not ask for the password through the portal, and if the system has to ask for the password, then the instruction adherence will be low and it will be ungrounded because it’s going to do something that is not grounded in its instructions. So then we can set the system to say, “Block those transactions, don’t do it.” So the agent would say, “Hey, sorry, I cannot help you here.” Whereas on the other cases, maybe we can say, “We don’t have enough information,” so then we can build the system in a way that it starts asking for more information so it has all the information that it needs to help you. So these are some things that are coming out. These are our guardrails that are happening when the system’s executing.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, no, it makes sense. I mean, you wouldn’t have to teach somebody the history of math, algebra, geometry, and trigonometry if all you were going to ask them is what is two plus two? And that totally makes sense to me now. Like I’m rethinking guardrails in a completely different way now. I just learned something on my own podcast. Light bulb moment. Let’s talk about that. You mentioned you’re talking with a lot of customers. Tell me about, you don’t have to be specific, but what were some of the aha moments that stood out when you were working with admins or customers and they finally, I don’t want to say finally, but there’s always that moment where you finally make a really good egg and you’re like, “Oh my God, I know how to fry eggs now,” using that as an example because I’m cooking eggs, but can you kind of give me that, because I feel like I get to see it a lot with some of the workshops, but it’s probably a little bit different for everybody.

Sri Srinivasan:
So off-lead, one of the biggest aha moments that I have experienced with admins is I do run these AI workshops at these world tours, and it is really eye-opening for them to look at the Agent Builder in the middle section. When they start looking at the reasoning, they now know why an agent does something that it did. So what are the biggest reasons why this whole agents are a little complicated and different is under the hood, agents use LLMs, right? And we all know what LLM is famous for, right? They’re non-deterministic. What do I mean by being non-deterministic? By non-deterministic, I mean that the same input can give you different outputs at different times. And earlier, like I think about a year and a half ago, one of the bigger problems with LLMs were they hallucinate. It’s still a problem, but we have figured out how to solve it. We provide it with more data, we ground it with more truth, so that it is then working within this construct. We have RAG, we have a lot of other things that we have actually provided to solve that problem.

But the other problem of being non-deterministic is still there, right? And that is why when you start looking at the Agent Builder and you can start looking at the reasoning sections, our Atlas Reasoning Engine is basically telling you there which topic did I choose, what was the utterance that was provided. By utterance, I mean what the user typed. What topic did I choose based on the utterance. And once I chose the topic, what action I chose and I executed the action. But before I execute the action, I did a plan of executing the action. If I did execute the actions, here are the guardrails, here are the runtime guardrails that I would have triggered or I would’ve violated. And hence, I chose not to provide this answer, or hence I chose to go on to the next step.

So when admins look at it, it instantly clicks in their mind. “Okay, this is how the agent worked.” And that also allows them to understand, “Oh, if I were to tweak this one word, maybe the agent would react a different way.” And then they go in and they try that and they’re like, “Whoa, wow. Now I’ve actually cracked the code of agents.” That has personally been one of the biggest aha moments for me.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, I mean, for me, it was always, I love when I help admins and myself build a prompt, and especially when we do grounding, and then we’ll bind it to a field on a page, that’s always very simple, and they press this, I call it the sparkle button, and they get a response back and it’s like, “Wow.” And it’s consistent enough, but it’s not like a chatbot, right? It’s not like an email template. It’s a little bit different every time. But that feeling of AI isn’t scary and it’s not hard to do, you can see it sort of start to melt away.

Sri Srinivasan:
Right. 100%. And in those same scenarios, I’ve seen admins go really crazy when they do the dropdown in the prompt builder and they say, “Oh, so Sri, I can actually bring in data from an Apex class?” I’m like, “Yeah, you can.” And now they’re able to relate AI to the things that it’s dear and near to them, actions, flows, and Apex classes. Admins, that’s their bread and butter, they know that in and out. So now when they’re able to look at that and they’re like, “Oh, it’s as simple as using this in the AI world,” I feel they get very empowered and they’re like, “Okay, let me go play with it more now.”

Mike Gerholdt:
Yep. Let’s touch on permissions for a little bit because I know you covered that in your presentation… Words. What are some common pitfalls? Because I know that I’ve gotten questions at the Agentforce NOW Tour about setting up permissions and giving people access to Agentforce, but what are some things that are just real easy things that most people trip over?

Sri Srinivasan:
So one thing to understand when it comes to permissions is every time you create a service agent, those agents are running as their own designated user. We are going to be releasing employee agents pretty soon. Again, forward-looking statement supply. Employee agents actually run as the underlying user that are executing it. So if you are in your CRM panel, the right-hand side, Einstein Copilot panel we used to call it, that, now you can start interacting with it, those are kind of like the employee agents where it runs as Mike. Whereas if I create a service agent and you’re interacting it through any of the different channels through WhatsApp or through an Experience Cloud, you have to designate a running user. And oftentimes, folks will create a brand new user. And good thing is that this user comes with no permissions, which is good, but the downside of it is it will not be able to do anything. So similar to your standard profiles, licenses, permissions, object and record level, all of those needs to be assigned to this user.

And sometimes what folks forget, admins forget, is you have organization-wide defaults and role hierarchy that could overwrite this. And over time, these roles, these permissions, because they’re like, “Oh, this doesn’t work. Maybe add this, maybe add this.” And over time, that role could end up having excess permission. So it’s always important to review the access to this agent user periodically to make sure it’s appropriate and make sure that only the right folks have access to even edit the permissions for these agent users.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, I always think of, especially when you’re getting started, who are you going to roll it out to? Because you don’t need to just turn it on and let everybody just ask Agentforce whatever question it feels because you’re not set up for that. And that’s probably not the business case, and that’s a lot of the prep, is sitting down and saying, “So we have this really powerful tool, we have this really fast car. Where are we going to drive it?” It’s not like you necessarily have to drive the really fast car everywhere you go, and not everybody needs to have keys to it. So let’s end on kind of a, this not forward-looking statement, but I want to get your opinion on this. What do you think the role of admins will be in terms of shaping the future of AI at Salesforce?

Sri Srinivasan:
That’s a very interesting question. Admins are key to everything that we do. And admins, literally, they understand the Salesforce ecosystem. From my vantage point, I look at admins as the know-it-all people because they understand everything that’s happening within their environment. They know which actions, what permissions, what they do, and agents should be considered as just another avenue to expose and interact with this crux of it. So admins should take it on themselves to make sure that we are interacting with these agents in the right way. There are right guardrails in place. And I think one thing I want to just quickly peel back, you brought in the example of a sports car, right? So let me ask you, what makes the car go fast?

Mike Gerholdt:
Could be a number of things, but usually it’s the motor.

Sri Srinivasan:
Yes, I would say it’s the brake. If I gave you a Bugatti and I told you I took the brakes off, would you drive it at a hundred miles an hour?

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, you’re asking the wrong person.

Sri Srinivasan:
So that’s where I feel the admins come in. They have to put the brakes to make sure that agents are doing the right things, agents are responsible, agents are ethical, agents are doing the right things that they’re supposed to do. Yes, Salesforce does provide a lot of these out of the box, but you also need to provide. If the underlying data is biased, then the response will also be biased. So admins play a very important role, maybe not in developing all these things, but being the trusted advisors to their implementation teams to ask them the right questions.

Mike Gerholdt:
I love your example, because fast is only relative if you understand slow. And fast only matters if you can stop. Great way to frame security. See why I have smart people like you on the podcast because you got to educate us more.

Sri Srinivasan:
I’m happy to be here and thanks for this opportunity. And I think one thing I also want to emphasize is, just like everything, protecting data is a partnership. Salesforce provides you with the tools, the foundations, out-of-the-box topics, the guardrails. When we spoke about guardrails, we have runtime guardrails, detective guardrails, and then corrective ones too, so that we can actually look at things and make changes to the system. So we have all those things, self-improving guardrails, all of those things, we’re providing that as a platform, but it’s on you as the customer and admins to understand and use them. One of the biggest things that we just released was the Agentforce Testing Center. That’s something that’s very different, because like I said, how do you test non-deterministic outputs? Yes, I can put 20 people in front of the agent and have them test for 10 hours a day or for a month, and we would be able to cover a lot of use cases. But think about it, you’ve built your own agent, right, Mike?

Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, yeah. Quite a few times.

Sri Srinivasan:
How long does it take for you to build your first agent?

Mike Gerholdt:
So that’s a trick question. It doesn’t take long to turn it on, but I wouldn’t consider it built in that time.

Sri Srinivasan:
So if we have Salesforce enabled folks to quickly churn out agents we would not be able to reap that benefit if we’re going to tell the organizations, “Well, I’ve churned out 50 agents in a matter of three days. Now go ahead and spend 50 days per agent to test it.” It doesn’t scale. So that’s where Agentforce Testing Center comes in. It allows you to use AI to now start generating test cases and to evaluate your agents. So that’s a great addition. And as admins, we should be aware of that, and we should be leveraging that in order to make sure that our agents are secure and does what it says it does.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. No, I agree. I mean, does it take long to spin it up and do some configuration? No, probably faster than most. But is it ready for prime time? You can think of all the car builders. They can build cars really fast, but then they got to test them. And just because it’s built doesn’t mean it’s ready for people to use it. So it’s a great analogy.

Sri Srinivasan:
Yeah, and we’re bringing in things. One of the other things that I spoke about during my presentation was your need to bring in the user context. You need to do user validations and verifications. We are coming with newer features that we’re going to enable agent variables. These are secure session-scoped variables that capture and store data, and it can only be set by action outputs. So therefore, this is something that you can start using to improve your trust of your agents as well. The other things you can do is that you can have filtering rules now with your agents. So basically you say that only certain topics can be unlocked if you did some other activity. For example, you can only start handling refund when the user is verified. So those are some things that are coming out very shortly. We call them the agent variables, the action bindings, and then filtering rules. These are keywords. I’m just prompting it out so that you can go in after hearing this podcast, go in, search for it. You should be able to find more details in our help articles.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, and our coming up events. I’m sure there’ll be more stuff about that at Dreamforce. Yeah, I mean, so people ask me why this or why that? And you have to think of when you’re building an agent, you’re building something at an enterprise level, and it’s almost like the difference between commercial grade and household grade. When you buy a mower, there’s like for the homeowner that’s going to maybe mow a couple times a month, and then there’s mowers that are made for people that own businesses that are going to run the mower eight hours a day, five days a week, 200 hours a month, and really put it through its paces. And that’s the difference between some of the stuff that we build and some of the low lift, other stuff that’s out there. So I appreciate that perspective.

Sri Srinivasan:
Yep. I think if we’re still at time, the only other thing that I want to let folks know is we just started pilot with our Interaction Explorer, and I think as admins, this is something that we all like to do. How many times have we gone in, looked into our history or logs and we love that part, right? So Interaction Explorer takes the hard work out. It gives you all the information, one pane of observability across all your Agentforce interactions. How many users, how many sessions, what is the quality score, how many interactions per moment, what are the top ranking topics? What are the top ranking tags?

By tags, what we have done is we have taken all these interactions using AI, and we’ve generated tags and we have grouped them together. So what that allows you to do is that now you can trace in cluster sessions with granular log data, and then now you can click down on it and inspect configurations at each and every level so that you can optimize your agents. I can actually go down to a specific conversation you had with an agent at this time, and then look at that specific interaction, that message that you typed, look in the background and say, “How long did the agent take? Where did it spend its time on? How much time did it take on utterances? How much time did it take on doing trust-related activities? How much time did it take to execute another action?” All that information is available for you so that you can take a much more smart decision on your agent enablement and also on how your agent is being consumed.

Mike Gerholdt:
No, I like it. Thanks for coming on the podcast, Sri. I mean, I feel like we went through all levels and I bet if I had a two-hour podcast, you and I could talk all day.

Sri Srinivasan:
I would love to.

Mike Gerholdt:
There’s always something to talk about, right?

Sri Srinivasan:
Yes, there’s definitely a lot. Again, folks know our security blogs coming out, our security sessions that happen at these world tours and other events. If you ever run into me, feel free to stop by and talk to me. I love to talk to customers. I love to talk to fellow admins.

Mike Gerholdt:
Okay, I don’t know about you, but my brain’s doing cartwheels in probably the best possible way. Just a huge thanks to Sri for coming on the podcast. I know he worked really hard on his TDX presentation, and security and AI is always a very difficult thing to wrap your head around. But hey, showed up and nailed the seatbelt on your self-driving car and came loaded with car analogies. So I thought it was fun.

And if this episode made you go, “Ooh, that’s what guardrails do,” do me a favor, send it to your favorite admin friend out in the community. And to do that, just tap those three dots and boom, share away. You can put it on social, you can put it on the Trailblazer Community, you can text it to a friend. And if you’re hungry for more Salesforce Admins Podcast, be sure to go to admin.salesforce.com. That’s where you’ll find any of the links to resources that Sri shares with us, including other podcasts and a full transcript on this entire episode. So that’s always good. I appreciate that. But one last thing. If you’re looking to bounce knowledge off, ask questions, communicate, interact with other Salesforce admins, you can go to the Admin Trailblazer group that is in the Trailblazer Community and pop over there. There’s a lot of good stuff going on. But hey, until next time, you keep those agents in line and we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post Building Secure AI Agents with Salesforce Agentforce appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Joy Shutters-Helbing, Senior Manager of Salesforce Practice at Captech and Salesforce MVP Hall-of-Famer, and Mike Reynolds, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Slack. Join us as we chat about creating community content, navigating conference submissions, and their new podcast, The JAM.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Joy Shutters-Helbing and Mike Reynolds.

Catch Mike and Joy (and me) on The JAM

Mike and Joy are movers and shakers in the Salesforce community. Joy’s in the Salesforce MVP Hall of Fame, hosts MVP office hours on the first and third Friday of every month, and has spoken at Dreamforce, TDX, and tons of community conferences. Mike has helped create 13 different Salesforce certifications as a Credential Ambassador, and he’s a regular speaker at conferences big and small.

Together, Joy and Mike are the dynamic duo behind The JAM, where they talk to folks in the Salesforce ecosystem about everything from hiring to technical talks to highlights from the release notes. In fact, they just had me on the pod to talk about the Salesforce community, so be sure to check that out at the link below.

How to come up with ideas for Salesforce presentations and content

As veteran speakers and content creators, Joy and Mike want to know that you have what it takes to give a Salesforce presentation. In their experience, most people fall into one of two camps:

1. I don’t feel like anything I have is important enough to share with anyone.
2. I have something to share, but I don’t know where to start.

If you’re in camp number one, it’s important to remember that you’re an expert on your own business’s problems, and how you solved them can help someone else facing a similar issue. “When you’ve toiled over a solution and, all of a sudden, it works and you stand up and do some sort of victory dance, that is the thing you should be sharing,” Joy says.

If you’re ready to give a Salesforce talk but don’t know where to start

If you’re in camp number two, where you think you could share something but you don’t know how to get started, Mike recommends following Salesforce Evangelists and Advocates and event organizers on social media to hear about calls for speakers. I’ve included a few links below for Midwest and Florida Dreamin’, and Mid-Atlantic Dreamin’ is right around the corner.

Smaller events like community groups and conferences are a great place to polish your presentation and practice your public speaking skills. And while you might not feel ready for the Dreamforce stage just yet, you can submit topics you’d like to hear more about or even nominate someone to give a talk.

There’s a lot more great stuff from Mike and Joy about giving presentations and creating great Salesforce content, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you can catch us every Thursday.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more

• Listen to Mike on The JAM Podcast here
• Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Unlocking Salesforce Efficiency with Joy Shutters-Helbing
• How I Solved It: Get Agentforce Ready: Move From Profiles to Permission Sets | How I Solved It with Mike Reynolds
• Squire Kerschner on the first episode of The JAM Podcast

Admin Trailblazers Group

• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

• Joy on LinkedIn
• Mike on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on X
• Mike on Bluesky social
• Mike on Threads
• Mike on X

Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt:

This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re jamming, literally, with Joy Shutters-Helbing and Mike Reynolds about creating community content, navigating conference submissions, and yes, even launching a podcast of their own. It’s called The JAM Pod. I listen to it, do you? Joy is a longtime Salesforce MVP Hall of Famer, community group leader, and admin extraordinaire with over 21 years of experience. Mike is a Salesforce credential ambassador, known for his deep knowledge on permission sets, permissions, and profiles, and now, he works with Slack. Before we get into this episode, be sure to follow the Salesforce Admins Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. That way, you get a fresh episode every Thursday, right on your phone. With that, let’s jump into the conversation with Joy and Mike. Joy and Mike, welcome to the podcast.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Hi.

Mike Reynolds:

Thank you.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Thank you.

Mike Gerholdt:

Joy, let’s start with you. You’ve been in the community, you’ve actually been on the Salesforce Admins Podcast before, but for listeners, just finding out who you are and probably missed your wonderful TDX presentation, can you tell us a little bit about what you do in the community and how long you’ve been working with Salesforce?

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

I have been working with Salesforce for 21 years, and for those of you who haven’t heard me talk about it before, it does run in parallel with the age of my son. I’ve been a Salesforce Admin for the duration. I’m a Chicago Admin Community Group leader, along with Denise and Chris. I am a Salesforce MVP Hall of Fame. I am podcast host with Mike Reynolds, and he will talk about that a little bit more in a second. I also host MVP Office Hours on the first and third Friday of every month, and I’ve spoken at Dreamforce, and TDX, and a host of other community conferences. I think that’s it.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, if not, then we’ll definitely be able to find you online.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt:

Mike, how about you?

Mike Reynolds:

Well, I have been Salesforcing for about 10 years, and I’ve been able to do a lot over that time. It’s been a wild ride. I’m a credential ambassador, so I’ve helped create, I want to say, 13 different certifications or updates to them, some Superbadges and Trailhead modules, stuff like that, maintenance modules. I’ve spoken at a lot of conferences, all sorts of different topics. Things that range from DevOps to, I think most people have heard me talk about permissions. It’s been a real big deal for the last couple of years. Spoken at a lot of conferences, it’s super fun. I love connecting, and getting out, and doing all that. Now, I work at Slack.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, yes. That’s right. Very communicative of you to work at Slack.

Mike Reynolds:

Yeah, because I like the collaboration.

Mike Gerholdt:

You almost threw me a perfect segue there, which is that you’ve been out and done a lot of presenting. One thing that I’ve seen when I was doing user groups when we were in Chicago, you guys also both host a podcast called The JAM Pod, and depending on when you choose to air my episode, I was on it.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Yay.

Mike Gerholdt:

[inaudible 00:03:52] I’ll link to that. I might have to go back and link to it depending on when it happens. But one of the things that we see ebb and flow in the community is the amount of contributions that community members, of their own free will, put out, and I know, on your podcast, we talked about speaking at user group events. Where did the idea of, “Hey, let’s sit down and create something that’s not the easiest thing in the world to create, but we want to put it out and the world,” come from?

Mike Reynolds:

I think that’s Joy’s fault.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

It’s always my fault. Everything’s always my fault. It was probably me asking a lot of questions and Mike being like, “Well, we should talk to people that have the answers to that.” I think that’s really where it started. But also, there was a challenge that happened on MVP Office Hours once upon a time from Squire. Squire, I’m sorry. Here we are, just keep talking about you. But it’s really in a good way about how he had opinions about Mike’s presentation on permissions, and I was like, “I can arrange this phone call.” There was some excitement around this throwdown-at-the-flagpole-on-the-playground situation.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh my.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Yes. People thought that, well, I’m not going to give it away, but people were very excited to see the fisticuffs that were going to happen around permissions and profiles between Mike Reynolds and Squire Kershner. If you haven’t heard our first episode, you should go back and listen to it, and you can find out how that turns out. But since then, we have spoken with a number of different people in the Salesforce ecosystem about, wow, a host of different things. Everything from hiring, to technical talks, to… The topics are very wide-ranging, including the podcast we recorded with you. Did you have something else to add, Mike Reynolds? I have two mics on this call. This is crazy.

Mike Gerholdt:

I know. I forgot to mention that Joy’s in not a good situation where she says, “Mike,” and then there are two people go up.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Yeah. I say, “Mike,” and then I roll my eyes.

Mike Reynolds:

I can tell from the tone who you’re talking to though. We were working together at the [inaudible 00:06:16] group.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

A customer? A customer.

Mike Reynolds:

Yeah. We were at a customer, but Joy and I were working together. This idea came up and I looked into it. It didn’t cost that much to get a really basic, “Here’s what we can do to record a podcast, doesn’t take a ton.” It’s not super sophisticated or anything, but it works, and we have a developer edition of Salesforce that we built out over… Yeah, it was on a Saturday. I think four hours to put together a very basic community site that we host the episodes on, and then that was kind of it. We just didn’t give up, I guess.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

I’m still adding fields in production.

Mike Reynolds:

That’s true. That’s true.

Mike Gerholdt:

Joy following all of the best practices that we speak about.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

It’s a dev org.

Mike Reynolds:

All the work has been done in prep. I think that’s the key.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Yeah, all the work. Yeah, yeah.

Mike Reynolds:

It’s the main takeaway.

Mike Gerholdt:

Gotcha.

Mike Reynolds:

But really, it’s funny because the podcast is… It’s been a lot of fun, but when I look back at how we got here, it’s basically the exact same as how we got with all these things, the conversation about permissions. I mean, I’ve given that talk so many times, people reach out, user groups reach out, and they’re like, “Hey, we would love to have you come and get this presentation.” I’m happy to do so, but the presentation came from a work meeting where we were trying to solve the problem. Yeah. I called Joy and I called another colleague, and I was like, “Hey, this is messed up. We have to find a way around this.” We worked on it for about an hour and a half and then iterated over it for maybe a week. There’s our real life business problem and our real life solution, and then we just decided to talk about it, because it’s applicable. It happens to everybody. Everybody’s got permissions, everybody’s got the same challenges.

Mike Gerholdt:

What do you feel is the biggest barrier from people going from, not necessarily starting, let’s say, a podcast, but creating and contributing community content in the Salesforce ecosystem?

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

What’s the biggest hurdle, the biggest obstacle of folks creating and sharing their content with the rest of us? I think there’s a lot of things. There’s, where to start? You have two different people. You’ve got people that have stuff and they’re ready to share, they just don’t know where to start, and then there’s the folks that are like, “I don’t know if what I have is important enough to share with anyone.” I think the first hurdle is getting folks to a place where they understand that they are experts in the business problem that they have, that they can share with the community, and they are the experts on how they’ve applied a solution to this problem. Giving these folks the confidence to say, “There is someone out here who is dealing with this similar problem, who will learn, and engage, and benefit from what you’re sharing.” Once we get folks to build that confidence and that what their experience is worth sharing, I think then we can start getting more content from them.

Mike Gerholdt:

Mike, how about you?

Mike Reynolds:

I think one of the challenges that a lot of people have is knowing that they can and then knowing when. Maybe you’ve been to a community conference. Do you think, “Oh, I could contribute to this,” but you didn’t think of that three months ago when the call for speakers was open, and so right now is a brilliant time. I mean, I know Midwest Dreamin’s call for speakers is open.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Through the 31st, I think.

Mike Reynolds:

Yeah. Right after that, Florida Dreamin, their call for speakers will be open. Mid-Atlantic has got to be soon.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Dreamforce is coming up.

Mike Reynolds:

Yeah, it will. Here before you know it, which is crazy to think about that it sets in, but it will.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Community groups and conferences are the best place to run those through for the big ones.

Mike Reynolds:

Because I think most people have something that would benefit from someone else. Most of us have done something. If you’re sitting at home going, “Oh, well, I haven’t done anything that’s that cool,” you have. You have, because there’s somebody else who wasn’t able to do it that tried. Anytime you make a flow, somebody else tried that and didn’t get it right. We’ve all got things, and I think it’s that realization that you actually do have something of value to share, because you do.

Mike Gerholdt:

I think we talk a lot like, “Oh, you got to participate, got to do this.” Whenever I’ve done end user training or just technology training, you always got to think about the what’s-in-it-for-me perspective when you are talking with an end user, because you’re generally going from one system to another when you’re switching to Salesforce. I’m going to ask you the same question. For your podcast, The JAM Pod, what’s in it for you? What do you get out of it?

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Nothing.

Mike Gerholdt:

I disagree. I disagree. I think you get something out of it, because there’s a reason people create that content in the community.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

What does Joy get out of The JAM Pod podcast? I get to create a connection with folks that I might not have been able to unless I had done this. Being a community group leader, I don’t necessarily get a lot of time to speak with the group of people about content, or I go to a conference and I only get to speak about the content and there’s less time engaging with folks on a different level. One of our listeners said to me recently, they’re like, “Joy, when I listen to The JAM Pod, I just feel like I’m in a room having a conversation with you and Mike.” That was actually the best compliment we could have gotten, I think. You learned a lot, you just felt comfortable with us. What I forget though is that there’s a lot of people that are at these conferences that introduce themselves to me, and they know me better than I know them. It’s interesting for my brain to be like, “Oh, they have been listening to you and they’re watching what’s happening, but Joy, you don’t know these folks yet, so it’s okay.”

Mike Gerholdt:

Mike, how about you?

Mike Reynolds:

I mean, I know what I get out of it. I mean, I get to meet with people, and talk about them, and learn about them, and learn how they’ve contributed. For me, very selfishly, The JAM is an excellent way to just get to know some people a little bit better than I already do. I have to suffer through time with Joy, which I actually do like, and I enjoy spending time with Joy. But I think just broadly speaking, this idea of, “Well, why would I want to go stand up on stage and contribute? Why do I want to do anything?” There have been a handful of moments where somebody comes up to you and says, “Hey, you talked about this, and I was able to do it.” Those moments, that feeling is so damn good, to know that you have been able to make somebody a little bit more successful or speed somebody’s path to success, anything, you just helped. Being helpful is such a good feeling. I mean, for me, that’s my why.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. No, I don’t think you can undersell that enough, because you forget how often in life and in your career being helpful feels good, and it can almost get a little bit addictive in terms of wanting to put content out there and getting any kind of that feedback of, “Wow, that was so helpful. I’m so appreciative of your content.”

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

I was going to say, one of the catalysts for sharing content, to be helpful so that you can get this experience that we’re talking about that can be addictive, when you have toiled over a formula, or you have toiled over the flow, or you have toiled over a solution, and, all of a sudden, it works, and you stand up and you do some sort of victory dance, that is the thing that you should be sharing, the thing that you toiled over, because we know that you did the Google search, we know that you did… You reached out for help and you cobbled together all of these things that helped you with the solution. That victory dance is why you should share your experience so that you can help folks not have to toil over the hours of cobbling together the thing.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I usually run around the neighborhood with an air horn.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

That is a different victory dance than mine, but I like it. I like it.

Mike Gerholdt:

Letting people know what I’ve accomplished feels good, keeps the neighbors awake, keeps them on their toes. All right. Last question for both of you, and you weren’t expecting any of this, but if you were on… Mike, this is kind of interesting for you because you’re on the Salesforce side, but if you were on the Salesforce side of things, how could Salesforce enable more community content creation?

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Go ahead, Mike.

Mike Reynolds:

Wow, okay. Yeah, sure.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

I’ll jump in later.

Mike Reynolds:

I think that the first thing is just awareness. We shout, and we really do. If you are following the evangelists and the people that are the mouthpieces for Salesforce, if you’re following those people on the socials, you will see that they start posting things like, “Hey, it’s time to submit your ideas.” That is, I think, we can do more of that. I feel like we do a lot, but we could do more. I think the other thing is to encourage people to just submit ideas. I think what a lot of people don’t realize is… Let’s take Dreamforce, that’s the next mega event that we have. When you submit to Dreamforce, you don’t have to submit the idea for yourself. You can submit an idea and say, “I really want to hear about this, but I’m not going to be the speaker for it.”

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

You can nominate other people.

Mike Reynolds:

Yeah. You could say, “I think this person should talk about it.” I want to hear Mike Gerholdt talk about community. I can submit that as an idea.” That doesn’t mean that you’re going to have to go do it, but it gets the idea in front of the people. I think we could do a better job of making sure that we have the megaphone at the right moments and that we are helping and getting the word out right.

Mike Gerholdt:

Joy, how about you?

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

I think that is a solid way to encourage more folks to submit to these sorts of things, whether it’s a community conference, a community group, or our Salesforce conferences. I think something that Salesforce can do, it would be maybe to, wow, this is really off the cuff here, I’m sorry, but encourage the brainstorming sessions, encourage the speaking mentorship situation. I know that there is some very soft and lighthearted speaking mentorship happening. I forget where I saw it and I’m sorry if folks are recognizing themselves. I’m not putting names, and faces, and topic together, but if folks could brainstorm, and feel like they’re being heard, and have these ideas bounced around in a way that they can validate their ideas, I think that would help with more of this content creation that is not seemingly all the same, because I think that what happens is folks see this piece of content somewhere, and then they put their own twist on it or their own flavor to it, and then they try to run with it that way.

It’s a formula and it works. If you’ve seen it in a small space and you can make it better, that’s great. But I think that if you want to really build some incredibly interesting content, having a safe space to brainstorm, like a writer’s workshop perhaps, would really help that.

Mike Gerholdt:

Those are good suggestions.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

That just came to me.

Mike Gerholdt:

Some of the best content happens on the fly. Let me tell you. Joy, Mike, I want to thank you for taking time out and being on my little podcast with all of our five listeners that we have. Hopefully, somebody from your podcast will come over and I’ll have 15 or 20 maybe.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

I think there’s going to be some crossover on this.

Mike Gerholdt:

I think it’s good.

Mike Reynolds:

I only hope so.

Mike Gerholdt:

I’m glad you guys are out there creating content in the world. Also, just as a side note, not that you asked for it, I’m glad it’s called The JAM Pod and not The Jelly Pod, because jam is better than jelly, and I, 100%, think you should have a jam chosen for every single podcast.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Like a pairing?

Mike Gerholdt:

I’m telling you, there is a shop-

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

A jam pairing?

Mike Gerholdt:

There is like two or three… Now, it’s spring, so this’ll come out in April, March something. It’s farmers’ market season.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Oh, it is.

Mike Gerholdt:

I spend an absorbent amount of money on farmers’ market jams, like blueberry jams, apple. In my house, jam does not last that long and there’s a couple shops that we definitely frequent, so I was thinking of… It’d also be a good excuse just to buy jam.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

It is, it is.

Mike Reynolds:

I’m going to admit this to you because I have no shame, I, one time, made a bracket for the best jam for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Mike Gerholdt:

I like where this is going.

Mike Reynolds:

I’m just going to tell you, it took determination, it took grit and staying power, but I have some pretty strong opinions on strawberry, strawberry jam, as being the definitive leader of the field. A lot of honorable mentions available, but a good strawberry jam, so hard to do better.

Mike Gerholdt:

With peanut butter.

Mike Reynolds:

With peanut butter for peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Mike Gerholdt:

100%. I can go with that. I can go with blueberry too. I’m indiscriminate. Let me tell you what I prefer with bacon on toast, blueberry, blueberry jam with black pepper bacon. Let me tell you, life changing.

Mike Reynolds:

This is what I’m doing tomorrow morning. All right.

Mike Gerholdt:

It’s life… You could put-

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Are you telling me I’m making blueberry jam tonight? [inaudible 00:22:34].

Mike Gerholdt:

I’m saying, you could put… Now, here’s the thing. I will also eat it with strawberry jam, but there is something about the sweetness of the blueberry and the savoriness of the bacon.

Mike Reynolds:

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. With a little bit of smokiness in there.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. I mean, in America, we smoke our bacon.

Mike Reynolds:

Do you go on with a sourdough here?

Mike Gerholdt:

No, just regular old bread, whatever’s at the store.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

This was the question, Mike, Mike and Mike. I needed to know the vehicle for the jam, because sourdough is good.

Mike Reynolds:

Is magical.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah.

Mike Reynolds:

Fresh bacon [inaudible 00:23:10].

Mike Gerholdt:

No, I enjoy… Here’s the crazy thing, because it’s been a while since I’ve worked food into the podcast, but that’s always in our feedback of, “He works food into the podcast since [inaudible 00:23:20].” Yeah, whatever.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

We talked about hamburgers last time.

Mike Gerholdt:

I saw that.

Mike Reynolds:

Look, I’m not saying we have to do this, but we can have… Here’s what we’ll do. If you create a podcast, a Salesforce podcast by Dreamforce, I will arrange… I’m saying you, anybody in the ecosystem, you go to Dreamforce, you create a podcast, I will arrange for a… We have a podcast-

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Breakfast?

Mike Reynolds:

We’re going to do… No, not a breakfast. A bracket of jams and jellies under various circumstances, and then we can just create this.

Mike Gerholdt:

I’m a part of this. [inaudible 00:24:01].

Mike Reynolds:

We will make this happen. You only get an invite if you create a podcast, but I will make it happen. [inaudible 00:24:08].

Mike Gerholdt:

I feel like we’re going to be a-

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

You just created a session, Mike. He just created a session.

Mike Gerholdt:

I feel like we’re going to be in the mezzanine of the Marriott Marquis. It’s like me and you in 30 jars of jam.

Mike Reynolds:

This sounds ideal.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

[inaudible 00:24:22].

Mike Gerholdt:

We’re just like, people are walking by, “What are those guys doing? I don’t know, they must be really into jam.” Yes, we are. Just jam all over our face. We’re just jam drunk.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Oh my god, [inaudible 00:24:35].

Mike Gerholdt:

What’s going on?

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Oh my gosh.

Mike Reynolds:

So many jars.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, that sounds like an emergency room appointment for diabetes so-

Mike Reynolds:

Appreciate that.

Mike Gerholdt:

… ought to be awesome.

Joy Shutters-Helbing:

Thanks, Mike.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, thank you both for coming on the podcast. I do like your idea, and now I’m going to go have some toasted jam for lunch.

Mike Reynolds:

It’s perfect.

Mike Gerholdt:

That’s a wrap on our jam-packed episode with Joy and Mike. Whether you’re team strawberry or blueberry, no judgment. We hope you’re walking away inspired to share your own admin wins and fumbles, flow fixes, and really all of your stories. If you like this episode, hey, spread the jam. I mean, the love. Thinking of jam. Tap those three dots, share it with a fellow admin, or shout it from the rooftops, or hey, ooh, I know, a Slack channel. If you’re hungry for more, head over to admin.salesforce.com for everything admin, including a transcript of the show. Oh, don’t forget, you can also join us in the Admin Trailblazers group, the conversation, and I bet the jam bracket planning continues there. Until next time, keep those flows flowing and those toast slices jammed. We’ll see you in the cloud.

The post Real Talk for Admins on Content, Conferences, and Agentforce appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Brinkal Janani, Director of Product Management at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about the future of AI-powered customization that’s coming with Generative Canvas.

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

Build dynamic experiences for users with no code

Brinkal has always been fascinated by how admins can build dynamic user experiences without code. He was on the original team of engineers that built Dynamic Forms, and as a product manager, he’s been leading the charge on Lightning App Builder and AI-generated apps.

Today on the pod, we’re going to take a sneak peek at what Brinkal’s working on right now. Think of all of this as one big Forward looking Statement but right now, they’re calling it Generative Canvas.

How admins can create AI-powered dynamic layouts with Generative Canvas

I’ve been in the ecosystem long enough to remember how much of a game-changer things like Lightning Forms, Lightning Page Builder, and Dynamic Forms were for admins. These tools put admins in the driver’s seat to guide users to the insights they need. However, as Brinkal points out, it’s difficult to anticipate what users will need in terms of data and workflows.

The concept of Generative Canvas is to leverage AI agents to go beyond static user interfaces to something more dynamic and responsive. The user prompts an agent that responds with Lightning Components that can be slotted directly into the UI.

As an admin, you build the agents, connect the relevant data, and Generative Canvas takes care of the rest. Suddenly, without any coding, you’ve built AI-powered dynamic layouts for your users.

Generative Canvas in action

You really have to see a video of Generative Canvas in action to get how big this is going to be. But imagine a team is collaborating for a sales meeting. You can drop the pitch deck into the UI and ask for an outline to work from. Another person can pull up data about the customer from Data Cloud, and maybe a chart built from public data showing growth in the market. And this is just scratching the surface of what Salesforce Admins will be able to build with no code.

If all of this is exciting to you, make sure to listen to the full episode for more from Brinkal. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more

• Generative Canvas demo video
• Help Article: Visualize Your Data with Generative Canvas (Preview)
• Release Notes: Generative Canvas (Preview)

Admin Trailblazers Group

• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

• Brinkal on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on X
• Mike on Bluesky social
• Mike on Threads
• Mike on X

Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re diving into the future of AI-powered customization with Brinkal Janani. Now Brinkal is a product manager here at Salesforce and he’s leading the charge on Lightning App Builder and AI-generated apps. Today, specifically we’re talking about Generative Canvas, forward-looking statement. I bet it’s going to get renamed. So we’re going to call it Generative Canvas for now, but literally watch the video that’s in the show notes. This thing is so cool because it’s going to reimagine how admins, how our users can interact with data and build dynamic experiences. And my two most favorite words, without code. Now, before we jump in, I want to make sure you’re subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast. That way when a new episode like this drops, boom, you can listen to it. I don’t want you to miss out, so be sure to pay attention in whatever app you are using to either press that follow or subscribe button. So with that, let’s get Brinkal on the podcast.

So Brinkal, welcome to the podcast.

Brinkal Janani:
Thanks, Mike, for having me.

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, we’re fresh off the heels of TDX and with AI and everything going on, I feel like the metaphor I’ve used of how fast technology changing is jumping out of a plane, it’s moving very fast. I feel like it’s jumping out of a plane and skydiving superfast towards the earth because with AI, everything’s changing. And we’re going to talk about some of the really cool stuff that you’re working on on the platform, but let’s get started with just learning a little bit more about Brinkal and what you do at Salesforce. So why don’t you tell us what you do and some of the stuff that you work on?

Brinkal Janani:
Sure. Mike, as you guys know, I’m Brinkal Janani and I’ve been at Salesforce for a little over than nine years now, and throughout my career at Salesforce. I’ve played various roles. I started my career as a software engineer in test, eventually transitioned to full stack software engineer, and now I’m a product manager overseeing a couple of product portfolios, namely Lighting App Builder and generating apps using AI. And that’s where my focus is right now.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, I feel like everybody at Salesforce working on AI stuff, right?

Brinkal Janani:
Yeah. And I’m glad to see whatever we’re building at Salesforce is for the better. So I’m glad that to give the analogy, but that also means we are doing something that’s fast-paced and would provide incremental value to our customers.

Mike Gerholdt:
Absolutely. So you want to talk about, and this is where I will insert forward-looking statement because I feel like this is probably going to change names. So as of this recording, it’s currently known as what, Generative Canvas? Is that right?

Brinkal Janani:
That is correct, yes.

Mike Gerholdt:
Okay. Let’s talk about as known as Generative Canvas right now.

Brinkal Janani:
Yeah, so I’m glad to talk about this project in particular because there’s a history to it. I don’t know if most of you know this or not, but I’m familiar that admins love concepts such as Dynamic Forms, Lightning Pages and Lightning App Builder. I mean, those are some of the popular features that admins love to play and use. And one of the fun fact that I wanted to also share was I was one of the original engineers in the team who built Dynamic Forms when it went tiered. So I have quite a bit of understanding on the expectations that admins have from the no-code tools like Lightning App Builder and the experiences they ship to our end users.

And for years I’ve seen Salesforce admin utilize technologies such as Lightning App Builder, Dynamic Forms, even Page Layouts to control how the UI appears, period. And these no-code tools are the best and have been the best in what they do, but it’s also nearly impossible to anticipate the full spectrum that the end users would need in terms of data and workflows, which is where Generative Canvas as a technology becomes really important. It unlocks a whole new way of interacting with data and workflow. So the general concept of Generative Canvas is, it goes beyond static user interfaces to more interactive and dynamic ones where you’re talking to an agent and having those responses stored as Lightning components on the layout. That’s the crux of it.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, this is one of those where the audio podcast has limitations, but I was watching the video and I’m thinking what you’re working on is so far into the future because where we’re at now with agents and admin, building agents is we add the agent, enable them, and they can be anywhere in Salesforce and we just ask them a text question. But this is actually really building a visual, well you call it a Canvas, a visual Canvas of chats plus also text and documents, right, meeting notes?

Brinkal Janani:
Yeah, that is correct. I think what would really help understand what the concept is, it’s a good example. A good example that we are starting off from is tackling meeting preparation use cases. We all have been in situations where we have back-to-back schedules where we don’t even get enough time to see who we are meeting next. And I think that’s true for most of us who will be listening in into this podcast, or have been in this situation.

So imagine a sales executive who is handling multiple accounts and is literally in back-to-back situations with meetings when it comes to talking to these accounts and customers. And what it really is, and it’s what you’ve seen with our customers, is like a very personalized approach, a personalized pitch. And executives not having enough time to prep that pitch, or even prepare for that meeting, has been the biggest disadvantage.

And even if they do get time, they usually go to multiple UIs or even leverage multiple tools to be able to create that insight, which is why this was the first use case we felt is the best fit to tackle with Generative Canvas. Because Generative Canvas will make it super easy for any executive starting with sales executives to focus on the job to be done, and not a tool. And the reason I say this is because it’s a single-page application where they are interacting with the agents on the backend.

And as I said, agents are responding via text, via components that you put and organize on the UI. And not just that, you can personalize this layout or UI by moving these responses/components around on the Canvas and even resizing them so it exactly fits the way you would have imagined the UI could look like and carry this UI into the meeting so you have something to talk about, you have talking points to break the ice, or even you have insights if you want to cross-sell or upsell any of our products. So I think that example really nails the value of what we are trying to achieve with Generative Canvas. And obviously it’s a start and we are going to grow from this use case to multiple other use cases, but hopefully this shows a value.

Mike Gerholdt:
So I think the really cool part is you’re thinking of quantitative and qualitative data because a lot of that, there’s quantitative data, there’s stuff that we can actually see in Salesforce. You brought up the sales example like number of opportunities or sum total of opportunities on this account. But the second part where your Canvas brings it together is all the qualitative data, which is all of that information, the chats, the extra documents, the insight that people need when they walk into a room to have that deeper level conversation as opposed to just the data that’s in front of them.

Brinkal Janani:
That is correct, and which is why I also feel like the future experiences is going to be both like a static experience and a dynamic one. I foresee living us in a very hybrid world where technology such as Generative Canvas will exist and coexist with technology such as Lighting Pages. To your point on Canvas, it’s beyond static data. You get these insights and summaries that AI is able to generate and piece from the vast pool of data that we have in Data Cloud and at Salesforce. And that’s the essence of it. Not just that, but once we start building in and start pulling data from public domain, you should be able to also get that data on the Canvas along with this data that’s stored in CRM in your org.

Mike Gerholdt:
Just help me elaborate on that. What would be data pulling from the public domain? What would be example of that?

Brinkal Janani:
Example would be I’d like to learn more about the competitors of my current account. What is people, what is accounts, and what are they doing? So using that data, just having that competitive analysis and the most present one, which can only be learned by pulling the data from the public domain, the sales executive can use this information and potentially create a cross-sell pitch or upsell pitch for the existing customer. Just like having that lens, having that view inside can really help them create a personalized pitch for the customers.

Mike Gerholdt:
Do you envision, and this is all me just thinking like, oh, this is kind of cool. So once somebody creates a Canvas, let’s say for an account, would you envision that they would go back to that and then of course it would live update? Because obviously if you’re pulling in news articles, it could do that. Like say six months comes down the line and the customer’s up for a renewal, you’d want to go back to that same Canvas that you used to close the deal. Right?

Brinkal Janani:
That’s a great point, Mike. And I think one thing that I also want you to touch about Generative Canvas is that this Canvas is, as you said, are persistent, which means once you create this Canvas, they are there, they’re part of your org and you can obviously revisit them. And obviously since Canvas is based on data, both static, and data coming from public domain, you would want to make sure they’re still relevant, right? Because even the record details might have changed, a number of little records might have changed, a whole lot of data. The data that existed when the Canvas was created might be completely different from what exists right now. So having an ability to refresh the Canvas entirely would be essential to keeping Canvas not just persistent, but also relevant.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. Just on a non-Generative Canvas note, you mentioned in your intro that you’d also worked on Dynamic Forms, which I love to demo because I’m from that period of time when you couldn’t have Dynamic Forms. Well, you could. My Dynamic Form was two different page layouts and a workflow rule to flip the page layout. That was my faking Dynamic Forms. What got you into the visual part of working in technology? I mean, it’s obviously something you’re really good at and something you’re really passionate about.

Brinkal Janani:
So I think I need to share this. When I was interviewing with Salesforce, I was actually interviewing the day right before my wedding.

Mike Gerholdt:
Whoa.

Brinkal Janani:
And the only reason I did this, and I’ll never do this obviously again-

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, I hope you don’t have to get married again, in case your wife’s listening.

Brinkal Janani:
… is because I knew what Salesforce was doing and what it continues doing, it’s like creating these products which also create this community and just uplevels a whole lot of folks with the career insights and the career paths. And that is huge and that really resonated with me. And ever since my career at Salesforce, I’ve played multiple roles. My focus has always been delivering value for admins through no-code tools and specifically in my case, it’s Lighting App Builder. So being an engineer or being a product manager, my focus has been how do I help admins unlock value for the end users through UI using no-code tools? And that has been my problem statement from day one at Salesforce, and which is why I’m super exciting to see how the feature’s set, how the technology’s evolving from beyond the static layouts in terms of Lighting Pages to a more dynamic world where everything is personalized, everything’s AI driven. But as I said earlier, I also feel like the reality, the future is mostly hybrid with both technologies coexisting seamlessly.

Mike Gerholdt:
When you say hybrid, do you mean humans and technology or what do you mean by hybrid?

Brinkal Janani:
When I say hybrid, I think I see a world where it’s not completely one-sided where you only have static experiences or you only have dynamic experiences. When I say hybrid, I mean I see a world where you have both kind of experiences, probably start from a static experience to a Lighting Page, and eventually transition to a more dynamic experience through technology such as a new Canvas where you’re conversing with a tool, where you’re conversing with an agent, and updating the layout on the fly.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, okay. And everything turned out okay at the wedding, I’m assuming?

Brinkal Janani:
Yes.

Mike Gerholdt:
Okay, good.

Brinkal Janani:
Safe to say that.

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, we know the job thing worked out because you’re on the podcast. So I don’t know I’ve ever had anybody on that interviewed before their wedding day. But good for you. When you sit down and think of all of the stuff that AI has to interact with now, and what you’re working on for this Generative Canvas, I’m not an engineer, but it’s very easy to get caught up in the here and now. How are you trying to plan for two to three year out technology that you might not even know exists and pull that in for the next generation of Generative Canvas? I mean, you have to know you’re building something out of Minority Report, right?

Brinkal Janani:
And I think that’s a great question again, Mike. To be honest with you, in this period of time, it’s extremely difficult to even look out two years out in advance just because the pace of technology is changing so drastically. But one thing that remains constant, regardless of what period we are in, are the problems that you want to solve for your customer base. Those are not going away. Eventually technology needs to be able to solve customer problems. So my focus always has been less on the technology itself, but figuring out the right problem set to solve in the right period of time using the right technology, and that’s what I want to achieve. And that’s what I’ve always been trying to achieve. Two different sets of technologies. So eventually in time technologies might change, but you still have the same problem set to deal with. And solving some problem sets might become just easier as in when technologies evolve. And I think we just need to keep on revisiting that list of problems that you have that you want to solve for your customers.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. Last question, because I threw some hard ones at you, but you also came with the wedding thing. That’s pretty unexpected. When your… I mean, man, this is so, “In the future we’re going to have flying cars, but we don’t know.” When you’re planning through and looking for inspiration, this is the one thing that I think I learned it from a long time ago, I had a guest on the podcast that talked about board games and how they found inspiration in board games when they were creating a product in Salesforce. Because you work in very visual products, where do you go to find inspiration for ideas like for Generative Canvas that you’re working on?

Brinkal Janani:
That’s a tough question again, Mike,

Mike Gerholdt:
I don’t ask easy ones. Nobody comes on for easy questions.

Brinkal Janani:
All right. Point taken. I think the answer is two-folded, one is very personal and one is more cooperative. I’ll start with the personal one. I’m also father to a three-year-old daughter.

Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, boy.

Brinkal Janani:
And it’s been quite a journey, and mostly good. The reason she is an inspiration is because it’s so amazing to see how a creature of such small size can learn and absorb from visual experiences, from sensory experiences, so quick. And depending on what the experience is, the message that they learn is drastically different. And I know it seems like a very far-fetched connection, but if you tie the dots, it’s actually not that far. That is my daughter has been an inspiration just to keep my mindset more agile and rapidly adopt with changing environment and learn from it and keep on delivering value. So that has been something that I’m really grateful for. The other thing is a lot of people, we have an amazing set of people in the world right now and everybody’s doing something very amazing. So this thing connected, and in the know on what’s happening around you, also serves a good idea for inspiration.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, no, I mean think a lot of us are still wrapping our heads around… I have a good friend of mine has a young child too, and he told me the other day, “He just ran up to the TV and started touching it, expecting it to do things,” much like his phone. And that to me is like, whoa, because that’s the world they live in. As a parting gift, if admins are definitely thinking about Agentforce, and AI, and everything that they can do in Salesforce, what would your best advice be for admins around getting ready for just AI and Agentforce and learning this new world that we live in?

Brinkal Janani:
I’ve always felt for Salesforce, the local community groups that we have, the Trailblazer communities that we have, Trainforce, TDX, and just like one-on-one engagement with product managers and MVPs have been a very solid ecosystem that has helped spread the knowledge and just up-level everyone by sharing knowledge, talking about the problems, and talking about how do we unlock, or solve for these problems using the technology that the Salesforce has right now. And I think it will be vital for us, especially product managers at Salesforce, being part of those communities and local groups and talking about the technology, the product that they’re working on, and helping customers connect with it. I think that would be a key, not just for success of products, but also for success of our customers.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I mean, it can be oftentimes very isolating to sit in your office and feel like you must be the only person working on this right now, and you’re not. And getting out to a user group and hearing stories and thinking, “Oh, you just need to change a couple terms, but we’re working on the same problem,” and seeing different approaches to things is always very helpful. Brinkal, thanks so much for being on the podcast. I can’t wait to have to go back and edit this once we rename Generative Canvas three or four more times.

Brinkal Janani:
And yeah, thanks Mike for having me. This has been special.

Mike Gerholdt:
No, it’ll be great. So that was a fun conversation with Brinkal. I’ll be honest, I don’t know of any podcast guests that may have interviewed the day before their wedding. Usually there’s things to do. You know what, Brinkal is like, “I’m going to work at Salesforce and build the future of applications.” So I’m so glad everything’s working out for him. But man, I can’t wait to see your reaction to some Generative Canvas stuff. Again, I’ll include all the links in the help and the video to watch it. If it works for you, go for it. I think they’re going to roll it out even farther, forward-looking statement. But this is going to be cool.

If you enjoyed this episode, hey, do me a favor, share it with a fellow admin. You can tap the dots in Apple Podcasts and click share episode and then that way you can post it on whatever social platform you are on or, text it to a friend. Or share it in your community user group. I’d be a fan of that. Of course, all the resources, including the transcript, are in the show notes for this episode. And where are those? Well, those are your one-stop shop for everything admin, which is admin.salesforce.com. Now don’t forget to join the conversation over in the Admin Trailblazer group. Don’t worry, the link is in the show notes. Where’s the show notes? Admin.salesforce.com. Look at that. It’s like we thought about this ahead of time. I promise we did. All right. Until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post AI-Powered Dynamic Layouts for Salesforce Admins 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 how she uses AI in her consulting and Salesforce Admin work, and how she’s built a career in tech without a traditional tech background.

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

The misconception about tech careers

Megan started her career at UC Berkeley as an admissions and career counselor for a data science program. Watching her students break into the tech industry without a traditional tech background inspired her to make a career shift of her own. She didn’t have to look far for inspiration—she was already using Salesforce every day to move students through the admissions process. 

Many people believe a career in tech requires a background in engineering, but Megan shares a different perspective. You don’t need to know how to code to be a business analyst, a product manager, or a Salesforce Admin. And AI is transforming the landscape even further.

AI’s impact on consulting and problem-solving

One thing that stands out to me about Megan’s story is how well she prioritized her learning. She started with her career goals, and then worked backwards to figure out which Salesforce certifications she needed to achieve those goals. And the biggest difference-maker in her career has been learning how to use AI in her consulting and Salesforce Admin work.

When she’s solutioning, Megan uses AI to help her brainstorm. For example, if she’s building something to solve a specific business problem, she might ask ChatGPT to suggest other use cases she hasn’t thought of. AI helps her generate ideas beyond her personal experience, making her consulting work more effective.

The importance of soft skills in tech

We also touched on soft skills and why they’re so important for Salesforce Admins. Getting your users to buy in to what you’re trying to do and how it can help them is all about showing that you care and that you’re here to help them.

One way you can do that is by asking questions. Don’t be afraid to ask about a business process that you don’t understand—it shows that you care and want to get it right. In tech, your soft skills will make you stand out.

If you want to hear more from Megan, be sure to check out her YouTube channel. 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 X

Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt:

This week on the Salesforce Admin’s Podcast, we’re talking to Megan Tuano 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 Tuano:

Hey, I’m happy to be here.

Mike Gerholdt:

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 Tuano:

It was the military trailblazer office hours.

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Megan Tuano:

It was happy.

Mike Gerholdt:

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 Tuano:

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 Gerholdt:

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 Tuano:

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 Gerholdt:

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 Tuano:

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 Gerholdt:

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 Tuano:

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 Gerholdt:

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 Tuano:

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 Gerholdt:

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 Tuano:

It does, exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:

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 Tuano:

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 Gerholdt:

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 Tuano:

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 Gerholdt:

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 Tuano:

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 Gerholdt:

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

Megan Tuano:

Thank you.

Mike Gerholdt:

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 Tuano:

It really was. So thank you.

Mike Gerholdt:

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 Tuano:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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 Tuano:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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 What Role Does AI Play in Consulting and Salesforce Admin Work? 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 to combine Agentforce with Slack and all the cool new things you can do with custom AI agents.

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

If you can build on Salesforce, you can build on Slack

Peanut butter and jelly, macaroni and cheese, cookies and milk—some things just go together. That’s why I’ve brought Gillian Bruce back on the pod to talk about her new role as Director of Developer Marketing at Slack. 

Gillian’s still a Salesforce Admin at heart, and she’s constantly seeing new ways that Slack can help admins with low and no-code solutions. If you can build in Salesforce, you can build in Slack. And with powerful features like Slack Canvas, Slack Lists, and Workflow Builder, you have a ton of flexibility to communicate information effectively and save time for your users.

She also has another great combo to add to our list: Agentforce and Slack.

How to combine Agentforce with Slack

Slack has over 2,600 integrations, allowing you to bring in data from Jira, Workday, Salesforce, and more. This lets you build workflows for users and share information with them without needing to set them up on every platform you’re using. But how can you help them interface with all of that data?

That’s where Agentforce comes in. With Agent Builder, you can create custom employee-facing AI agents for Slack to cut through the noise. These agents can update information in Salesforce, pull data your users need to know, give them a summary of service interactions with a customer, and it all happens in Slack.

Get started with employee-facing AI agent templates

If you need some help getting started, we’ve got you covered. Slack has built a plethora of templates for employee-facing AI agents that you can adapt as needed. For example, there’s a product specialist agent that can ingest documentation and answer questions from your users so they don’t have to pull up a bunch of PDFs.

If there’s one thing Gillian wants you to know, it’s that every Salesforce Admin should be building in Slack. “It’s going to 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.”

Be sure to listen to the full episode about more cool things you can do with Salesforce and Slack, and why you might see Gillian at your next Dreamin’ event. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more

• slack.dev
• Slack Developer Program
• Workshop: Build an automated workflow
• Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: What Can Salesforce Admins Do with Slack Integrations?

Admin Trailblazers Group

• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

• Gillian on LinkedIn
• Gillian on X
• Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on X
• Mike on Bluesky social
• Mike on Threads
• Mike on X

Full show transcript

Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re 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 the old scoll… 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 it 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-

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.

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 thing 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. 

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.

The post The Power of Agentforce and Slack for Building Custom AI Agents appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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

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

Don’t miss Jen and Kate’s sessions at TDX

We’re looking forward to seeing you at TDX next week, and we want to extend a personal invitation to friends of the pod to come to our breakout sessions.

In Unleash the Power of Modular Flows for Agentforce, Jen will be teaching you how to break down flows into smaller, modular components, so you get the most out of them. She’s also running another session, Elevate Prompt Template Agent Actions with the Power of Flow, where she’ll look at how to use flow to enrich your prompt templates with data.

Kate will be in Theater 2, presenting Demo to Deployment: Engaging Stakeholders with Agentforce. She’ll go over how to create a demo that shows your stakeholders everything Agentforce can do, enabling you to get better input and transform your organization with AI.

Where to learn more about what’s next with Agentforce

Kate’s also been working on the demos you’ll see in the keynote. We’ll be looking at how Agentforce has enabled builders with low code, no code, and pro code solutions to create agents and problem-solve for their organizations using AI.

You can also stop by the Agentforce Zone, where we’ll have plenty of introductory content to get you started with AI. You can learn about Agent Builder, find out more about Service Agents and Headless Agents, and how to use AI to test what you’ve built. We’ll also cover how you can get data from PDFs with RAG 2.0, and what happens when you combine Agentforce with Data Cloud and screen flows.

How to keep up with everything at TDX

If you’re not able to attend in person, Brittney’s got your back. You can catch key sessions on Salesforce+ and she’ll cover all the TDX action on our socials. We’re also sharing must-attend sessions and opportunities to get hands-on with Agentforce to help you plan ahead.

Listen to the full episode for more on how to get the most out of your time at TDX, and don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more

• Blog: A Salesforce Admin’s Guide to TDX 2025

Admin Trailblazers Group

• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

• Jen on LinkedIn
• Jen on X
• Kate on LinkedIn
• Kate on X
• Brittney on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on X
• Mike on Bluesky social
• Mike on Threads
• Mike on X

Full show transcript

Mike:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, well, I hope you took the over on the over-under of number of admin relations team members that can fit on a pod, because I’ve got the second most or maybe the most, but we’re all here to give you a roadmap to get prepared for TDX. I almost said Trailblazer DX, but then it was Trailhead DX. I’m going to go with TDX, that’s probably the most current name right now.

But we’re going to talk about keynotes. We’re going to talk about sessions. We’re going to talk about stuff to walk around and look at and put your fingers on the keyboards. And then also, everybody’s got a phone in their pocket and you’ve got to be on social. So Brittney’s back from 100 years ago when I first had her on the podcast to help you engage in social and share all the fun pictures and stuff. So Kate, Jennifer, Brittney, welcome to the podcast.

Kate:
Thanks for having me.

Brittney:
Thank you.

Jennifer:
Glad to be here.

Mike:
Let’s get started with sessions because I don’t know about you, but every time I sign up for a conference, it’s like I got to figure out what sessions I’m going to. So Jen, Kate, I know you’re both working diligently on some amazing sessions. Jen, you have the most, and that’s no surprise. But let’s start with you. What are the two breakout sessions you’re working on for TDX?

Jennifer:
Yeah, very excited for this. So my first breakout is called Unleash the Power of Modular Flows for Agentforce. I know that sounds a lot, but it’s your admins, you’re building out those flows. Now you could maximize those flows by building them modularly, and what I mean is breaking them down into the smallest components. So I will show you how you can go from a big flow down to a small flow and really optimize it for use with your agents. So that’s the first one. And then the second one is called Elevate Prompt Template: Agent Actions with the Power of Flow.

So there is a theme that you see flow, flownatics, right? I love flow. I love the ability to leverage that flow magic in our prompt templates to really enrich your prompt templates and ground them in data. So I’m going to step through how to do that, how to use that power of flow in your prompt templates, and then further enrich your AI agents. So those are my two sessions, and they will be available video on demand on Salesforce+ if you’re not going to be there in person at TDX.

Mike:
Oh, that’s right, because Salesforce+ is a wealth of information. When we get done with events, holy cow! I wish there was an Apple TV app for that because you could just sit and stream all of those sessions all the time. You should think about getting a Lego agent cloudy, modular flows. Be kind of cool. You could rebuild it in Legos. Nope? Anyway, I think it’s a good idea.

Jennifer:
I might need to outsource that to my nephew.

Mike:
Yeah, no, we got to find the budget for it.

Jennifer:
Because he’s a big Lego person.

Mike:
Yeah. Just see if we got budget for that first. Kate, so Jen’s going to show us some amazing flows. What session you’re working on because I think it’s going to tie in?

Kate:
Absolutely. And I am going to leave the flows to the flow queen herself, but I will be doing a theater session. It’s on day two at 12:00 PM Pacific. That’s March 6th. And we’re going to talk demo to deployment, and this is a session on engaging stakeholders with Agentforce. I’m really excited about this session because I feel like the admins and the builders getting to know Agentforce have been operating almost in a vacuum.

And while we’re creative and smart and we know our users inside and out, that doesn’t mean that we should be creating agents without input from our stakeholders and taking different business considerations into our agents and how we’re building them. So in this session, we’ll look at how to create an Agentforce demo to present to your stakeholders so that they understand the intents and capabilities of autonomous agents if they don’t already.

And then we’ll work into working with them to brainstorm and prioritize how to put this technology to work in your own organization. And this is really important because it empowers admins to know exactly what to go build, and then stakeholders know what they’re getting buy-in and building internal excitement around which is going to ensure smoother adoption for everyone.

Another shout out to Salesforce+ here. This will also be video on demand. And I personally missed TDX last year. I had a big family trip that I had to go on. It was terrible. I was in Paris. I know.

Mike:
You poor thing. However would you survive?

Kate:
I know. Somehow I made it. All the croissants and baguettes and cheese that I had while I was there helped ease my pain. But when I came back, I was able to just on my lunch breaks watch the sessions that had been recorded and were on Salesforce+ and it really helped me get up to speed and feel like I was there, even though I was not able to attend.

Mike:
So speaking of which, Brittney, you do a fabulous job of making everybody in the world feel like they’re attending our events and engaging on social. For the admins that are like Kate and just have to go to France during TDX, what do you have planned for social or what could admins that aren’t attending TDX engage with?

Brittney:
Yeah, of course. And I don’t mean to sound like an infomercial for Salesforce+ again, but really whether you’re attending in person or you’re going to be tuning in virtually, we have you covered. Leading up to the event, what we have is we’ll be sharing must attend sessions and can’t miss opportunities to get hands on with Agentforce. We’ll be calling out things that are available on demand.

So as I’m sharing things on X, LinkedIn, and Facebook, you’ll know if it speaks to you, if you are going to join us, or if you’ll be watching online. I highly recommend if you don’t follow us on social, you go do that because that’s where you’re going to get a ton of event updates before and after. And if I remember correctly, Mike always links to our social profiles in his show notes, so you should be covered there.

And then during TDX, we got a lot of fun stuff planned for you. Really we’re your go-to hub for key updates, special moments. We have an Agentforce Hackathon leading up to TDX, so we’ll be sharing some moments from that. We also just share plenty of resources. So as we’re sharing fun photos, videos, if you’re not with us in person, we always try and share something from admin.salesforce.com that you can go and get a little bit more information on that.

Like Jen’s modular flow session, I think she has a, correct me if I’m wrong, Jen, but has a blog post on that already. So you will not miss out on the action. So really just get ready, stay connected, and it’s going to be an epic TDX, whether you’re there in person or you’re hanging out with me online.

Mike:
I mean, it could be epic. If you’re having French baguettes and watching Salesforce+, I think that would work. Before we leave sessions, I’d love to get an idea of best practices for what admins could do to take notes when they attend sessions. So Kate, I’ll start with you. You were most recently an admin. When you would attend events or watch some of the content online, how would you take notes that you could translate back to the organization?

Kate:
That is a great question, and it was something that I have played around with a couple different ways that I’ve done this. And what has worked for me because when you’re sitting in these sessions, you don’t want to miss a thing. You see people there that are taking pictures on their phone of every slide that they see, and that just doesn’t work for me to jog my memory and my brain.

So I always have just a little notepad or my phone where I’ll take notes on just key concepts or things that I want to dive deeper into. That way I can still be really engaged, watch the content, take it all in much as possible, and then know those things that I want to go back and do a deeper dive into. Jen, I don’t know if you have a way that worked for you when you were an admin and a customer. It’s definitely challenging to balance all of the excitement and just take in all of the information.

Jennifer:
So Kate, I was that person with my phone taking screenshots.

Mike:
We found you. Now we know who you are.

Jennifer:
But now in the events app, afterwards you’ll have access to the PDFs of the slides. So you don’t have to be that person taking the screenshots. I would go on my phone and have a notepad up, and I would indicate the session, and then here are the things that were worthy of remembering after I go home from TDX to look further into. So those were the things that I did because there’s going to be a lot of walking around, standing around at TDX, and you don’t want to bring your heavy laptop. So definitely if you could utilize whatever’s on your phone for note-taking, I would highly recommend that.

Mike:
Yeah, big plus on that. I remember a few… Well, before I joined Salesforce, I used to walk around with an iPad. And now I know how silly I looked because it was like holding up a textbook to take a picture, a screen as opposed to a little phone. Let’s jump into keynotes because keynotes are always… People have opinions. They love them. They don’t like them. There’s a lot to take in. They’re always afraid, oh, my CEO is there. Now they just showed this and we’re going to have to do this. What do we do? Kate, you’re working on the keynote. Can you share anything for the keynote?

Kate:
Absolutely. So this is my first TDX as an employee and first time working on a keynote like this. So I’ve been learning a lot and just really taking it in. My role has been focused on the demos that you’ll see in the main keynote. So working with the team to visualize an Agentforce journey from both a customer’s perspective of how autonomous agents have revolutionized their business, but also from the builder perspective, so how admins and developers can leverage low code, no code, pro code solutions as they create agents and problem solve for their organizations using AI.

So hopefully it’ll be really inspirational, visionary. You’ll see some really great new product updates at TDX, so be sure to tune in either in person or again on Salesforce+.

Mike:
Jen, we’d be remiss to say that everything is Agentforce at TDX this year. And I know you’re working on a big Agentforce area, I’ll call it that, because activation sounds too insider baseball. But what are you working on that’s just huge for admins in Agentforce?

Jennifer:
Yeah, so I’m part of the team that’s working on the Agentforce Zone because it does take a village to put this all together.

Mike:
It takes a whole zone.

Jennifer:
So the Agentforce Zone will be on the second floor right by where the staircase is in Moscone West. Walk up the stairs, if you want. Get those steps in. Get those steps in. And it’s going to be right there. And we’re going to feature really introductionary content for Agentforce to whet your appetite for more information. So we have three sessions that we will be running throughout the two-day event.

First one being intro to building AI agents with Agentforce, and this will give you an overview of the core components of Agentforce talking about the Atlas Reasoning Engine and really diving into Agent Builder. We’re going to showcase and talk about all the different agent types that are available, but showcase the service agent. And also what is new to Agentforce is Headless Agents.

Mike:
Oh no!

Jennifer:
And what I mean by that is agents running around without a head.

Mike:
Is that like the backup movie, Headless Agents, after Agentforce?

Jennifer:
So it’s really events on a record that trigger an agent to work behind the scenes. So it’s not the user interacting them. Let’s say it could be someone submitted a comment on a case. And as a result, the agent’s going to do these things behind the scenes. So it might be sending an email out or things like that.

Mike:
Okay. We should call them like Wizard Agents or something like Wizard of Oz.

Jennifer:
Secret Agents.

Mike:
Secret. Oh yeah! Then we could play this band. That would be awesome. I’d be a fan of Secret Agents. They’re already wearing sunglasses though. Secret Agents wear two pairs of sunglasses. Just be like a dude out golfing, multiple pairs of sunglasses.

Jennifer:
Oh, and also in that demo, we’re going to showcase…

Mike:
Oh yeah, Jen, sorry, we gave you nowhere to go with that. Just completely veered off course. Thanks for bringing us back.

Jennifer:
Steering you all back.

Mike:
Yep. I know. It’s what you do.

Jennifer:
There’s some really cool things coming down the pike for creating agents by using AI and also creating test cases to test your agents. So I was playing around with that, really excited to have folks show you that. Our second session is build AI agents using the power of Agentforce and Data Cloud. So you know what Agentforce is. Some of you may or may not know what Data Cloud is, but why is Agentforce and Data Cloud together important to have?

So we’re going to show you how you can use pieces from Data Cloud like data graphs and the Agentforce data library and pulling in Data Cloud data into your agents to really take it to the next level. And we’re also going to show you RAG 2.0.

Mike:
Wow! The sequel to RAG 1.

Jennifer:
Yeah, yeah. I was playing around with it and mind blown as to how accurate being able to pull in all that instructor data from PDFs is. It can really search all those PDFs. We’re also playing around with pulling in, having it search on audio and video files. So fingers crossed, we hope it works.

Mike:
Oh man!

Jennifer:
So we could showcase that.

Mike:
You can feed it a whole bunch of these podcasts and then you can understand how many times Mike says so.

Jennifer:
And then lastly is the intro to Prompt Builder. So we’re going to showcase how you can use it in your agents, how you can use it in field generation, so the little sparkles on your field to auto-generate content and also things like screen flows. So really a lot of great introductory content. And then we’re going to send you off to our demo booth so that you can get a deeper dive of the cool things that you saw in our demos.

Mike:
Can I just tell you that sparkle fields are my jam?

Jennifer:
I love sparkles.

Mike:
I think they’re the coolest things. I love them. I need a shirt that says that. Brittney, there is a buzz at TDX, and I will say you do an amazing job of capturing it from video and pictures. What would your advice be for people attending TDX that want to share out some of the fun stuff in as cool a manner as you do?

Brittney:
Oh, I love that question, Mike, and thank you for the compliment. I guess I’d just say video content is awesome. We love to hear from our trailblazers, agent blazers, admins on social. So just don’t be scared to pull out your phone, capture some genuine reactions to some of the things that you’re experiencing. And you never know, if you tag us on X or LinkedIn, you might get a repost.

But the posts that resonate most with me that I see from our community are just general feedback and response to what you’re seeing. And I think admins who are not able to attend the event are also really excited to see what people on the ground are sharing and experiencing. So that’s my job is to make sure that I capture that so that if you’re not able to attend, you get the magic, the feel of it all.

Mike:
Yeah, and you have a whole command center set up in the room.

Brittney:
I try.

Mike:
It’s quite the setup. As long as the cord works, then all your monitors work and it’s fabulous.

Brittney:
You have to have double screens when you’re trying to see all of the action going on.

Mike:
Right. So now, but attendees don’t need double screens. You don’t have to walk around with two phones capturing everything for Brittney.

Brittney:
Do not recommend that for attendees. No.

Mike:
That would be hilarious. Okay, so we’ll wrap up here. But last question for everybody, and Brittney, you were the last to talk, so we’ll start with you. If you were going to TDX this year or you are planning agents in your org, what is one thing you would start doing today as of this podcast to help get ready and maybe some content you’d look at it for TDX?

Brittney:
I’m so glad that you asked this question because I was about to ask you if I could plug something else that is very important for admins. So we have a great resource available right now on admin.salesforce.com that our wonderful blog manager, Eliza Riley, wrote. It’s A Salesforce Admin’s Guide to TDX 2025.

It captures everything we chatted about today, but it has links and way more details about everything that you’ll get to experience in person and online. So I highly recommend if you haven’t already read that blog post, go do that now. It’s a great starting point to get ready for the event.

Mike:
I like it. It’s very good. Kate, how about you?

Kate:
To build on that, I think that getting the foundations before you go is really important. Whenever you go to TDX, there’s just so many directions that you can be pulled in and there are so many exciting things you can do. So if you have it prioritized in your mind what you want to do, like if you want to be going to sessions or if you want to make sure that you get in the demos that Jen was talking about, or you want to for sure get that hands-on time building agents or get one of the Agentforce consultations while you’re there, do the homework up front.
Get your foundations. Read the blogs that have been put out on what is Agentforce and the basics and have that knowledge going in so that you’re able to really get the most out of the event and prioritize what you need.

Mike:
That’s great advice. Jen, you’re going to back clean up because you’re our most experienced, longest lasting evangelists on the call.

Jennifer:
So because you’re at TDX and you’re in person, there’s all these hands-on trainings. I would sign up for as many as possible just so that you can get hands-on. Because I know going on Trailhead, you’re creating that Agentforce Trailhead Playground and that goes away in three days. It doesn’t give you a lot of time to play, but you’re going to be taught by experts and they’ll be there to answer your questions as well. So I would check those out.

I would definitely check out sessions where you’re learning about the new features that are coming down the pike. So anything that you’re not aware of, you should go to those sessions so that… Again, a lot of those sessions will be led by the product manager, so you can actually talk to them afterwards. And that’s what I found helpful of attending in-person events is that you get that FaceTime with the PMs to ask them additional questions.

They probably don’t like me saying that, so that people can stalk them afterwards. And I would say also build out your agenda. Make sure that you aren’t overloaded and you have time to actually go around and look at the demo booths and talk to people in addition to watching sessions and attending them.

Mike:
Yeah, I can’t agree more with you on that. The number of people that I’ve had walk up to me and say, “So what should I go to?” And it’s day one at 10:00 already. And it’s like, wow, clock’s ticking. You’re missing out on stuff. I think the one thing I would add to all of that, if you’re in-person, get as early as you can to a session and then talk to the people next to you or afterwards. And if you’re online, talk to other people that are on social.

Talk to Brittney and see the other people that are maybe tweeting or posting about stuff like that because you can also make connections with them. I think the biggest thing is a lot of the content is recorded or online later, but those happenstance conversations or people you run into, that’s a one in a million time situation, and that’s all part of what’s awesome about going. Fantastic. Well, thank you all for coming on the podcast and giving us a roadmap to TDX.

If people really like this, we might have to do a similar version for those other event, that other big event we do in October. Fabulous. So that was a fun discussion with everybody. I still think I can fit one or two more people from evangelists or admin relations on the call. So that’s going to be my goal for Dreamforce. But if you enjoyed listening to this episode and you’re on iTunes or some other podcast app, generally there’s like three dots you got to tap and you can follow or can share the episode.

Hey, share, post it on social because I would love for you to share it with more people. More people can listen and be part of this wonderful admin community. And of course, as Brittney mentioned on the call, if you’re looking for more great resources, your one stop for everything admin is admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript of the show and any links that we have mentioned. And be sure to join the conversation in the Admin Trailblazer Group.

That is in the Trailblazer Community. And you know where to find that link? In the show notes on admin.salesforce.com. It’s like we thought of this stuff in advance. Anyway, until next week, which funny enough is also TDX, I’ll see you in the cloud. Well, that just dropped there. Isn’t that fun? Just here it is. I don’t know where to go. Yeah, thanks. 20 minutes. Well, we’ll see if Dan leaves that in. Sometimes he just leaves some stuff like that.

The post Roadmap to TDX25 for Admins 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 why it’s the key to unlocking the power of Agentforce. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Eddie Cliff. […]

The post Unlocking More Value in Salesforce With Foundations for Sales and Service appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Marianna Torres, Associate Salesforce Labs Evangelist at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about the Salesforce Labs AI Library and how it can get you started with implementing AI agents in your org. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways […]

The post Boost Your AI Strategy With the Salesforce Labs AI Library appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jennifer Lee, Lead Admin Evangelist at Salesforce and the host of How I Solved It and Automate This! Join us as we chat about everything coming with the Spring ’25 release and what’s new for Agentforce and AI on Salesforce. You should subscribe for the full […]

The post Spring ’25 Salesforce Features: AI, Flows, and User Management Updates appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Erick Mahle, VP of Revenue Operations & Digital Transformation at Lendz Financial. Join us as we chat about how he’s using AI to drive digital transformation and how he started FlowFest, the largest global Salesforce Flow competition. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here […]

The post How Erick Mahle Is Using AI to Transform Mortgage Lending appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Dorian Earl, Salesforce Admin and Founder of Development Consulting Partners, LLC. Join us as we chat about the five steps you can take to prepare for Agentforce and AI. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with […]

The post 5 Steps for Admins to Get Agentforce Ready appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Lizz Hellinga, a Consultant and Salesforce MVP.  Join us as we chat about why clean data is essential for leveraging generative AI and how you can get your organization moving. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation […]

The post Agentforce’s Best Friend: Clean, Reliable Data appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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