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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

Mike Gerholdt:

Sri Srinivasan:

Mike Gerholdt:

Sri Srinivasan:

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:

Sri Srinivasan:

Mike Gerholdt:

Sri Srinivasan:

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:

Sri Srinivasan:

Mike Gerholdt:

Sri Srinivasan:

Mike Gerholdt:

Sri Srinivasan:

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:

Sri Srinivasan:

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:

Sri Srinivasan:

Mike Gerholdt:

Sri Srinivasan:

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:

Sri Srinivasan:

Mike Gerholdt:

Sri Srinivasan:

Mike Gerholdt:

Sri Srinivasan:

Mike Gerholdt:

Sri Srinivasan:

Mike Gerholdt:

Sri Srinivasan:

Mike Gerholdt:

Sri Srinivasan:

Mike Gerholdt:

Sri Srinivasan:

Mike Gerholdt:

Sri Srinivasan:

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:

Sri Srinivasan:

Mike Gerholdt:

Sri Srinivasan:

Mike Gerholdt:

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.

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.

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:

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 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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

Mike Gerholdt:

So Brinkal, welcome to the podcast.

Brinkal Janani:

Mike Gerholdt:

Brinkal Janani:

Mike Gerholdt:

Brinkal Janani:

Mike Gerholdt:

Brinkal Janani:

Mike Gerholdt:

Brinkal Janani:

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:

Brinkal Janani:

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:

Brinkal Janani:

Mike Gerholdt:

Brinkal Janani:

Mike Gerholdt:

Brinkal Janani:

Mike Gerholdt:

Brinkal Janani:

Mike Gerholdt:

Brinkal Janani:

Mike Gerholdt:

Brinkal Janani:

Mike Gerholdt:

Brinkal Janani:

Mike Gerholdt:

Brinkal Janani:

Mike Gerholdt:

Brinkal Janani:

Mike Gerholdt:

Brinkal Janani:

Mike Gerholdt:

Brinkal Janani:

Mike Gerholdt:

Brinkal Janani:

Mike Gerholdt:

Brinkal Janani:

Mike Gerholdt:

Brinkal Janani:

Mike Gerholdt:

Brinkal Janani:

Mike Gerholdt:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mike:

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:

Brittney:

Jennifer:

Mike:

Jennifer:

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:

Jennifer:

Mike:

Jennifer:

Mike:

Kate:

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:

Kate:

Mike:

Brittney:

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:

Kate:

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:

Mike:

Jennifer:

Mike:

Kate:

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:

Jennifer:

Mike:

Jennifer:

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:

Jennifer:

Mike:

Jennifer:

Mike:

Jennifer:

Mike:

Jennifer:

Mike:

Jennifer:

Mike:

Jennifer:

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:

Jennifer:

Mike:

Jennifer:

Mike:

Jennifer:

Mike:

Jennifer:

Mike:

Brittney:

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:

Brittney:

Mike:

Brittney:

Mike:

Brittney:

Mike:

Brittney:

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:

Kate:

Mike:

Jennifer:

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:

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.

Everyone’s excited about Agentforce and everything you can do when you combine Salesforce with AI. But what about smaller orgs? How will EE or UE orgs be able to keep up without access to all of the bells and whistles?

That’s exactly what Eddie and his team have been working on with Salesforce Foundations. It’s a free way to add the basic capabilities of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Data Cloud, and Agentforce to your org.

Salesforce Foundations eliminates the need for 3rd-party solutions to do that one little thing, like creating a payment link, or triggering a marketing campaign based on Commerce data. You can get all this cool cross-cloud functionality without having to upgrade your org, allowing you to start building that full Customer 360 in Data Cloud.

And this is crucial because Salesforce Foundations also gives you access to a freemium version of Agentforce. “What’s really cool,” he says, “is that as you do more and you use more of these cross-cloud capabilities, your data in Data Cloud gets richer and more powerful and so does Agentforce.”

And did I mention it’s free for Sales or Service EE and UE users?

Getting started is as easy as going into Setup and clicking on the Salesforce Foundations node. You’ll go through a checklist of everything you need to get going. From there, you’re in for a whole new world of segmentation, personalization, and automation.

Listen to the full episode for more from Eddie on Salesforce Foundations and what’s coming next, and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode of the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Mike Gerholdt:

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

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

Eddie Cliff:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Eddie Cliff:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Eddie Cliff:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Eddie Cliff:

Definitely.

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Eddie Cliff:

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

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

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

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, free is always good. I also thought for a second that I was like, somebody said, “Well, did you hear about Salesforce Foundations?” And I think they dropped the S and I was like, “Yes, I’ve heard of the Salesforce Foundation.”

Eddie Cliff:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Eddie Cliff:

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

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

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

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Eddie Cliff:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Eddie Cliff:

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

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Eddie Cliff:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Eddie Cliff:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Eddie Cliff:

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

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Eddie Cliff:

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

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

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Eddie Cliff:

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

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Eddie Cliff:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

Of course.

Eddie Cliff:

So I love to tinker and fix things-

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Eddie Cliff:

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

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

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, man.

Eddie Cliff:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Eddie Cliff:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

Okay.

Eddie Cliff:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

Sure.

Eddie Cliff:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Eddie Cliff:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

I was going to say.

Eddie Cliff:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Eddie Cliff:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Eddie Cliff:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

You bet. Thanks, Eddie. 

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

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

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 from our conversation with Marianna Torres.

Growing up, Marianna was always interested in more creative pursuits and had never considered a career in tech. That all changed during the COVID-19 lockdown when she enrolled in a workforce development program called Year Up United and landed an internship with Salesforce.

Today, Marianna works on the Salesforce Labs team, curating the Salesforce employee-built apps, components, and flows that are available for free on AppExchange. Now with the release of Agentforce, the team has put together the Salesforce Labs AI Library as a resource to help you get started with AI.

If you’ve been keeping up with the pod, you know that prompt engineering can be tricky business. But what if you could copy all the best, most useful prompts from Salesforce product experts?

That’s what the Salesforce Labs AI Library is all about. It gives you everything you need to get AI agents up and running. When she’s going through submissions, Marianna asks three simple questions:

If the answer is yes, it gets included in the library, ready to help you implement Agentforce AI in your org.

If you don’t know where to start, Marianna recommends going through the Salesforce Labs Basics on Trailhead. You can also listen to the full episode, where she walks Josh through the process of looking something up in the Salesforce Labs AI Library.

That’s it for this episode, so be sure to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast and we’ll catch you next week.

Josh Birk:

All right. Today on the show, we welcome Marianna Torres to talk about the Salesforce AI Labs library. Do I have that title right or is there are more official one?

Marianna Torres:

Josh Birk:

Marianna Torres:

So as I got older, it kind of got to the point where it’s like you kind of realize that, okay, it’s like I can go to school, I could pursue this, I could potentially do something. But at the same time, I had graduated and it was shortly before COVID.

Josh Birk:

Marianna Torres:

Josh Birk:

Marianna Torres:

Josh Birk:

Marianna Torres:

Josh Birk:

Marianna Torres:

Josh Birk:

Marianna Torres:

So in school, obviously it was very strict. You can’t be using ChatGPT to write your essays. But I was using it to review it, so please fix any grammar errors and stuff. So with that, I kind of got a hand on of it, but it was here at work that I got to fine tune it. So at school, I was kind of experimenting with it, but then here I got to, okay, it’s like look at this blog post I wrote and just expand on it. So I kind of got the hands-on skills here mainly, so it’s like I had more freedom here than what I did at school. So I was using ChatGPT and then fine-tuning everything, all that kind of stuff.

And then, yeah, at the time, I was also doing a lot of promotions and stuff for Labs, so YouTube videos, just promotional videos, all that. And AI just kind of opened a whole new door for us. So before all the videos that I would make, they were silent. It’s like I wasn’t confident to have my voice out there and stuff. But then what’s it called? ElevenLabs comes out and it’s like, oh, you can have AI generated voices for your videos, and I’m like, “What?”

Josh Birk:

Marianna Torres:

Josh Birk:

Marianna Torres:

So the resource itself has gotten a lot of great feedback. It’s like everyone’s been very excited about it. And I want to say that right now, it’s like the Salesforce Labs team is a very small team, so our main goal is to evangelize it. So I want to say that not as many people know about it as we would like to yet. But whenever we’ve presented it to them, it was always like this just people have had such a great reaction to it and just they’re very eager to explore it and engage with it.

Josh Birk:

Marianna Torres:

Josh Birk:

So it’s kind of a two part question. First of all, what’s the process of writing and reviewing these? Because they’re very, very good examples. And then also just kind of, I guess the flip side of that. What’s the process for, if I submit a prompt to you, what’s the process for potentially putting that in the library?

Marianna Torres:

Josh Birk:

Marianna Torres:

Josh Birk:

Marianna Torres:

But so far, yeah, the submissions have been people who’ve built with us, people who don’t just understand the program on a general level, but on a very technical level. So this is the prompts that they’re creating, it’s like the real world problems that they’ve heard from customers. And just with their knowledge of the platform, with their knowledge of Agentforce, they’re able to kind of craft these templates to just kind of support in that way.

Josh Birk:

Marianna Torres:

Josh Birk:

Marianna Torres:

Josh Birk:

Marianna Torres:

Josh Birk:

Marianna Torres:

Josh Birk:

Marianna Torres:

So on the left side, you’ll get a little overview of the prompt. You also get the category, template type, whether it’s a flex or not, basically all that general stuff.

Then on the righthand side of the page, you’ll see the actual prompt highlighted inside of blue. And here, we have you are a highly skilled agent support working at organization name, assign a case reason to the case owner based on their subject and their description. So there’s a lot more to this prompt than what I just read, but we have this very handy copy text button that you can just click that and now the entire thing is copied to your clipboard, and it’s pretty self-explanatory. You head to Agent Builder and just drop that in there.

Josh Birk:

Marianna Torres:

Josh Birk:

These are very solid use cases that are going to apply to a lot of people, and it might help answer that question like, “Oh, Agentforce could do that for me. Why don’t I build a prompt to get that done?” So huge kudos for that.

So going back to the prompt engineering bit, when you see a prompt, what makes you think this is a good prompt?

Marianna Torres:

Another big thing is does this simplify something that historically takes a lot of time to get information from? [inaudible 00:13:30] the actual technical aspects, myself, I’m not super technical, but it’s like right away I’m like, “Okay, which objects does this reference?” Is it something that the customer has to build out themselves, or is it just right there that it just grabs and goes? That kind of thing.

Josh Birk:

Marianna Torres:

Josh Birk:

Marianna Torres:

Josh Birk:

Marianna Torres:

Josh Birk:

Okay, so let’s look forward. Do you have new material that you want to shout out? And do you want to go into the new deployable actions?

Marianna Torres:

We also have a new section, for Actions and for Agent Topics. So from my understanding, okay, so Agent Actions are, in fact, packageable now. They were not packageable when we built this out. So if you also want some quick agent actions, we got them in there too. And then some agent topics as well as some pattern templates. So the future of the site is actually, it’s like we are moving very, very fast, but it’s like this site will live as a resource for AI and Salesforce Labs, whatever that looks like in the future.

Josh Birk:

Marianna Torres:

Josh Birk:

Marianna Torres:

Josh Birk:

Marianna Torres:

Josh Birk:

Marianna Torres:

Josh Birk:

Marianna Torres:

Josh Birk:

Marianna Torres:

Josh Birk:

Marianna Torres:

Josh Birk:

Marianna Torres:

Josh Birk:

I want to once again thank Marianna for the great conversation and information. And as always, I want to thank you for listening. Head on over to admin.salesforce.com for more on the show. You can see the show notes, you can hear old episodes, and, of course, as Marianna noted, go over to Trailhead to see about the great trail, to learn more about the AI library. Thanks again, everybody. I’ll talk to you soon.

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 episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jennifer Lee.

Every year, Jen’s release readiness blog post is our most popular piece of content. So I thought I’d bring her on the pod to talk about Spring ’25 so we can hear it straight from the source. She shares four areas where there will be big changes:

With Spring ’25, more orgs than ever before will get access to Agentforce for free with Salesforce Foundations. This is a game changer for smaller orgs and solo admins, allowing you to use AI to harness the power of the Sales, Service, and Marketing Clouds to transform your business.

One thing Jen wants to highlight is the ability to add agent quick actions right on a record page. Prompting is an art, but sometimes your users just need the AI to do the thing. Now you can give them a magic button to give the agent the correct prompt.

If you have Einstein Bots, you can easily convert them into templates for agents to save some steps getting started with Agentforce.

For the flownatics out there, there are a ton of new ways that AI enhancements in Spring ’25 can help you build flows. You can describe what you want a formula or flow to do, and Einstein will build it for you. While you’ll need to go in and iron out the details, it can get you 80% of the way there. No more googling to look up how to write a specific formula.

If you’re like most admins, your Salesforce org is probably full of flows that you didn’t build yourself. With Spring ’25, you’ll be able to get Einstein to summarize what they do, which makes documentation and debugging much easier.

Meanwhile, there are several user management changes coming in Spring ’25 aimed at minimizing clicks and making permissions easier to manage. The group summary page lets you view all the sharing rules and list views in one place, so it’s much simpler to figure out why someone can see something but someone else can’t.

Action buttons let you automatically trigger a flow when your user clicks a button, but what if you could pull up the output without any other user interaction? That’s where screen flows come in. For example, when your user selects a contact you can automatically pull up the associated cases or opportunities.

Jen’s advice for going through release notes is to start with your org. What features do you rely on? Search through the release notes for those things, specifically, and make sure you know what’s new and what’s changing.

Two things that will affect every org are security updates and release updates. These security and performance enhancements will improve your org across the board, so be sure you know when they’ll be enforced and how to test them. Remember, a sandbox org is your best friend.

There’s a lot more great stuff from Jen to get ready for Spring ’25, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Mike:

Now, before we jump into the conversation with Jennifer, I want to make sure that you are following the Salesforce Admin’s podcast on your favorite platform so that you never miss an episode, which could include really cool features like this one. So with that, let’s get Jennifer on the podcast. So Jen, welcome back to the podcast.

Jennifer Lee:

Mike:

Jennifer Lee:

Mike:

Jennifer Lee:

Mike:

Jennifer Lee:

Mike:

Jennifer Lee:

Mike:

Jennifer Lee:

So let’s dive into Spring ’25. So I’m really excited about these Agentforce AI features come first because that’s what we’re talking about these days is Agentforce and AI. So really excited that folks can get their hands on Agentforce for free with Salesforce Foundation. So you can get access to Agentforce for sales and Agentforce for service and start playing around with it and getting your hands dirty. So that’s pretty cool.

Mike:

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So when you do, let’s say you do a lookup on a contact, and as soon as you select that contact, it comes back with the associated cases for example, or opportunities. You don’t even have to click the button. It does it for you. So that again, minimizes clicks. And then again, when you’re working on screen flows, you want to give your users a sense of where they are in the progression of their flow. How many times have you worked on a survey and you’re like, “How many screens is the survey?”

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This is awesome. Hey, one thing we haven’t covered, and I think it’s evolution because you and I grew up back in the olden days when we would print the release notes. Also the release notes weren’t a billion pages.

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And definitely read through the release updates. It’s also in your org and setup. It’ll go through and highlight the updates and when they’d be in force, how to go about testing them. Release updates are pieces of functionality, things like performance enhancements, security enhancements that Salesforce is pushing through to the platform. So it’s really important to be mindful of those because you are given a timeframe before that release update is in force. So you definitely want to give yourself enough time to test it out. In a sandbox, in some cases it might change the behavior or something, and you need to take action on it in your org in order for it to work once that release update is enabled. So you definitely want to get ahead of it and again, test, test, test, test.

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So how much fun was that to chat with Jennifer about the Spring ’25 release feature? Seriously, if features were a game show, she’d be the reigning champion. I know, I’m sure you’re probably nodding along, taking furious notes, but don’t worry. Links to her blog post will be included in the show notes, which can all be found on admin.salesforce.com, including a transcript in case you missed anything on the podcast.

Now, don’t forget to join the discussion over in the Admin Trailblazer group, that is in the Trailblazer community. Link for that is over in the show notes. So until next week, we’ll see you in the cloud.

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 are a few takeaways from our conversation with Erick Mahle.

Erick was always interested in technology as a kid, helping his dad build computers. However, he originally started his career in marketing. Everything changed when his manager asked him to take over Salesforce for his organization and he saw what he could do with declarative solutions. “I thought it was the grownup version of Legos,” he says.

In his role at Lendz Financial, he’s combining those problem-solving skills with the power of AI to spearhead digital transformation. The mortgage lending industry is full of complicated business processes that need to be checked and re-checked, so it’s the perfect place to put new AI capabilities to the test.

If you’ve ever bought a house, you’ll know that getting a mortgage is incredibly complex. With so many steps and regulatory requirements, Erick and his team are using AI to streamline these business processes and limit costly errors. They call it Project Lexi.

Obviously, with mortgages involved, they’re not ready to turn everything over to AI just yet. However, they’ve already found several wins by eliminating handoffs with automation and training the AI to flag potential problems.

For Erick, the key to any successful digital transformation initiative is to focus on the humans you’re supposed to be helping.

Erick also runs FlowFest, a competition where Flownatics can strut their stuff. It started with the idea that although Trailhead is great at teaching you how to build things, a big part of your job as a Salesforce Admin is to fix broken flows.

Contests are put through several rounds of debug challenges, culminating in a livestreamed event where the finalists race to be the first to find a working solution for the final flow. It’s basically an esport, complete with live commentary and dramatic photo finishes. They just did their first in-person FlowFest at Mile High Dreamin’, and it may be coming soon to an event near you.

Erick had a lot more to share about how he’s thinking about AI and some of his favorite FlowFest stories, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Josh Birk:

All right. Today on the show, we welcome Erick Mahle to talk about, of course, probably a little bit of AI since that’s what we have to do these days and Mile High Dreamin’ and FlowFast. Erick, welcome to the show.

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And really, challenged me to kind of reverse engineer Salesforce and I found a lot of joy in that. I thought it was the grown-up version of Legos. I remember when the first time I successfully wrote a formula field, I went to the software developers because we were a software development company, so I went to the software development team and said, “Hey, I’m a developer now.” And they were like, “No, you’re not.” And I’m like, “Okay, maybe I’m not right.”

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And during that time in came the President in Lens Financial that had been kind of courting me for a couple of months and he’s like, “Look, we’re growing. We’re growing really fast.” Still, very small organization like when I joined, we were in the mid-30s, now we’re 50 employees all within less than a year. But he basically was raising a round of investment to kind of take the company to the next level and he’s like, “Help me put a budget together for what a digital transformation would look like to be able to really take Lens to the next level.”

So, really when he finally got the approval and he got that round of investment cleared, he’s like, “When can you start?” And we’ve been on the run over since, working on really exciting projects including AI and several other things. So, it’s been fun to be able to go pedal to the metal and really trying to put something exciting together.

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And from an AI perspective, we have fairly ambitious visions with what we wanted to do and how we’ve been tackling over at Lens is that we’re kind of dipping our toes in the water first, trying to see what we can get away with. I think we’re still very much… We’ve grown in phases. We’re still very much in a prompting phase. Everything is a very grounded prompt to get what we want and be able to derive insights that we’re looking for.

But we’re starting to look at more serious things like building our own LLM or like training our LLM models to be able to have more specific things going on, evaluate our data, make sure that we’re on, make sure that we can identify trends and make sure that we can identify red flags early on. And really trying to bring all of the process efficiency that we can. Our industry, the industry that has so many steps and so many things that we have to take.

And what we’re looking for LEXI to do is to be an extra eyes over the shoulder to say, “Hey, is there anything that you potentially missed? Is there anything that you have to be concerned with in order to make this deal go through?” And that’s kind of one of the key things that we’re looking to use LEXI for at Lens.

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But also, back to how you’re talking about training your own LLM, I think that’s an interesting trend because we’ve had these conversations internally at Salesforce about, “Do we build our own models? What bottles do we use? Do we use the open models?” And the answer I think has been a hodgepodge of these things. But the interesting thing is you need an AI that knows about mortgage and mortgage processing and what a good document looks like. You don’t need one that knows how to cook a rotisserie chicken.

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It’s funny you say the ten-year AI thing, and this is as I often do, and I get in front of a mic date myself. In my early days, Flash was still a primary motivator for application building, shall we say. And I couldn’t get into Flash because I was a JavaScript nerd. And I learned Perl, I was kind of a programmer by default and Flash just didn’t make any sense to me. But it was always a red flag when somebody would ask for five years of Flash experience when Flash had only been invented three years ago.

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So, we’ll have something like four to six competitors on the final challenge. And then, they have to screen share. So, if you think eSports, we’re there just watching and commentating as we see people be given a challenge on a flow and they’re building it out and you’re seeing how folks interpret challenges differently or solution design things differently.

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So, 100% agreement there. Let’s dig a little bit more into the challenge. So, you have teams, they get an org, and then how are you presenting the challenges to them? And you said some are debugging challenges, but what are some of the other challenges that they go through?

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So, ultimately, you’ll have a series of challenges and we’ll try to list it almost as if it’s a certification exam question. All very scenario-based like Universal Containers is looking to accomplish X, Y, Z. So, effectively, there’ll be these four challenges. You’ll have your own dev org. So, we provide all of these instructions. We have a managed package that you’ll install, which basically will nuke all of the dev org’s data and install a fresh data set, so that way we know everybody’s using the same data.

So, please don’t install this managed package in your production environments. And I don’t think I’ve put enough disclaimers now, I probably put more in there, just in case. So, you’ll set up your managed package, you’ll have the data normalized, so all competitors have the same data. And then, they’ll have a series of challenges.

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So, I have actually someone looking in, like we’ll usually tell them like, “Hey, there are a couple of things that are off limits.” For example, you can’t have unofficial SF components in there. If we start seeing Apex sections, that’s not… You’re not giving everyone a fair shot because you thought of installing Apex actions in their invocable actions that you could, try to use to skip some steps. That’s not fair game.

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And then, in the parallel track there will be… We use StreamYard, so it’d be the live stream, and then that is a group of 12 folks. And then, for the qualifier rounds, which are those challenges where we don’t know who’s going to go in the final round yet. Then, Ben McCarthy would have guest speakers like Jen Lee was there at the last one.

We had several like Flownatics will be doing presentations on, “Hey, here’s the latest Flow releases” or any specific presentation that we want to bring in. And then, usually, there’s the turnaround point where we’ll bring the finalists for that final challenge in because then they’ll jump in on StreamYard, so they can screen share.

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Everyone’s just kind like it’s the end of the second half and everyone’s just counting the seconds and they’re just kind of like, “Who’s going to win?” And it turns out that the second guy also had gotten something wrong. So, the first one comes back and actually had fixed what he needed. So, taking the FlowFest Champion title.

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But this year, the Mile High Dreamin’ folks did have a video production company, so I know there’s video being edited. I don’t know what the final video is going to look like, but I know it’s in the works. So, check out the Mile High Dreamin’ YouTube channel. Maybe, by the time this airs, then it’ll already be out there.

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