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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike:

And has grown into a community movement bringing together admins, developers, partners, and customers to build solutions that address challenges like food insecurity, disaster relief, and volunteer coordination. We’re going to talk about why designing for inclusion leads to better outcomes, how AI can help scale impact, and why your lived experience might be one of the most valuable design credentials you have.

So if you’re thinking about how data automation, AI agents work together to create meaningful change not just inside your organization, but in the world around it, I promise you this episode is for you. So let’s get Alexandra on the podcast. So Alexandra, welcome to the podcast.

Alexandra:

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I come from 20 years of go to-market experience. I’m not a builder by background. I actually got curious in a marketing role about the products that I was marketing and how they worked. So that curiosity pulled me into the platform, into development, into force certifications that I did not see coming. And then, I went from talking about technology to building on it and that changed everything. I believe that the AI era is only worth building if it’s built for everyone.

That’s not a tagline for me. It’s a design requirement. And I truly feel that admins have always known that. Admins are the ones closest to the humans using the platform, the problems, the friction, the gaps. And I also believe they’re the closest to the solution. So I think it’s not a support function, it’s a superpower and I’m really happy to be here.

Mike:

And I remember thinking to myself, this is … closed-minded is the wrong word, but I just was unaware. And I was like, “Well, who doesn’t know how to use a mouse?” And they’re like, “Well, you don’t understand.” And I was like, “Oh, that is a huge challenge.” And sometimes until you get someone else’s perspective, do you really understand like, it’s not that you’ve been living under a rock, it’s just too often sometimes people assume their world is just like everyone else’s world and it’s not.

So there’s a Mike side of I had to remember that not everybody knows how to use a mouse sometimes.

X:

I mentioned earlier Salesforce’s business resource group for people with disabilities and their allies. And then, last year we said, “Why does it have to be about accessibility only and why does it only have to be for employees?” So then we opened it up to the community. We had partners and customers and employees all building on the platform, really stretching the platform, bringing us to TDX this year, where builders who really probably never even thought of themselves as social impact developers shipped working Agentforce Solutions for food insecurity, for nonprofit volunteer coordination, you name it.

So when we all come together to threshold platform for everybody, not the default user, we’re really shipping great technology and boy, did the admin community really show up for this.

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I’ve published a couple of articles on LinkedIn, building with Cloud Code, using Slack, Slackbot, all these things. And so, I’m just starting to get out there and really getting exposed to the possibilities of our platform. I actually don’t know how to answer that question, except for I’d love invites, I’d love to know what the community finds interesting and I’d love to facilitate doing good in the world, doing as much good as we are solving business problems.

Mike:

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And we all came together for this hackathon and we’re going to continue to do that. So likely, you’ll see us at Dreamforce and at TDX again. So I would love to have the community just continue to support this and participate and start the platform. I’ll say that our community is proving that intersectional volunteer-led initiatives drives higher engagement and faster product adoption than traditional top-down motions. And so, I just want to have a call to participation.

If your community or your listeners want to participate, we’re definitely open to having more volunteers support and would love to see these at our community events as well.

Mike:

And so, you can learn different skills that way, but I appreciate you bringing that up. That’s always very good and good for you getting up on stage. It’s okay. I do think sometimes … I’ve spoke on a lot of different stages. Sometimes it’s the smallest ones that are the hardest because once you get up on a big stage, there’s just so many people that your brain can’t absorb it. It’s crazy.

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And it also kind of, in some respects, opens up the creativity because depending on how long you’ve been a Salesforce admin, how long you’ve been a Salesforce developer, you might not have all of that kind of exposure into different businesses and different processes. I know for a long time, a lot of hackathon people were tackling things in the medical world and I won’t give away … Well, I can give away the winner because we all know it.

But the unique solution that they come up with, you have to think of it’s not what is the technology solved for, it’s what was the issue and the challenge that provided the biggest gap that technology proved out to do the most good. And I just think after talking with the winner and seeing that solution, I think a lot of people just genuinely found a lot of really satisfying things to build when it comes to solutioning … I’ll call it solutioning for good, as opposed to solutioning for profit.

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And I thought to myself, that gap probably didn’t exist, but AI solved it and AI is able to communicate with us. And I think that to me for things that do good and help others, communication is always the key and it’s always the biggest gap because communication at scale never happens.

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And so, I think the AI fluency track for us is about really bringing more of that human element back into the AI. So I’d be curious if the community would be down with participating in an AI fluency track where it’s like writing … like it’s not about building something. Maybe it’s like the most artful skill, Slackbot skill, or maybe it’s a killer Gemini prompt or something along those lines. But I think you mentioning the gap really made me think about how I want AI for all technology that empowers everybody, but I also don’t want to leave anyone behind.

Mike:

But she asked what I was going to use it for. And I said, “The biggest thing that I try to use AI for in looking at a lot of data on sheets or 10, 15 page documents, what are the blind spots for the stuff that I don’t normally pick up?” And that to me was the greatest prompts that I could use. And back to some of your Agentforce Hackathon stuff, I think actually that’s some of the biggest opportunities that admins have across their org is we always look at, well, how can the agent improve this or that?

Boy, I would just love it if … how could the agent just look at the record somebody created and be like, “Yeah, Jim, that’s not going to cut it.”

X:

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That is absolutely a credential and not a distraction. And so I am happy to hear that those are the types of thoughts you have and I hope that all of us do that. All of us have the agency to think about those things in our designs.

Mike:

And I remember saying, “Oh, well, it’s obviously a telescope.” And they said, “Yeah, but you know that because you know telescopes exist. What if you don’t know that telescopes exist or what if you didn’t know you could see the sky?” And it was because it was based for a book in New York City where I live in the middle of the Midwest, I can go outside and see the sky. I can walk two feet outside my front door, but some people … And I’ve been in parts of New York, you walk outside and the buildings are so tall, you might not ever see the sky.

And I thought, wow, what an interesting perspective. And so, I use that example with a lot of AI bots that I work with to be like, here’s an example of, not a blindness, but something I wasn’t aware of. And can you look for something similar to that in my writing or in this thing that I’m looking at? Because sometimes if you grew up in the Midwest and you could always see the stars in the sky, you might not know that there’s a sky.

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As Salesforce admins, we’re often the ones connecting systems, stakeholders, and now AI agents to solve problems at scale. So whether you’re building your business, your community, or a cause you care about, there’s an opportunity to design technology that works for you. Be sure to subscribe so that you never miss an episode. And you know what? If you found this conversation valuable, share it with a fellow Salesforce admin. Until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post Agentforce for Good Shows the Power of Inclusive Innovation appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Kate Lessard, Lead Admin Evangelist at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about why security is the foundation for how data, automation, and AI work together.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike:

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I think the coolest thing that we do in the workshop and that I really want everybody to be able to take advantage of is you can actually export the standard Salesforce baseline and customize it to your own organization’s security criteria. So if you have different security criteria like maybe your password policy has a minimum of 11 characters at your organization, the Salesforce baseline has eight characters. That is a change. And you want to compare your Salesforce security settings against your own organization standards, and you now have the ability to do that, which is just incredible.

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And I mean, I don’t have to tell you that security and user management really go hand in hand, and oftentimes are interchangeable topics about how we can better secure our orgs and create a better user experience as well.

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The post Salesforce Admins Can Reduce Risk With Proactive Security appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Nick McOwen, Senior Salesforce Administrator at Alpine Intel. Join us as we chat about his path to Salesforce and the TDX workshop he gave about the development lifecycle, sandboxes, and data masking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike:

There’s also a little Apex talk and surprisingly deep analogy involving semi-trucks and AI because you know my analogies and a confirmation that developers will always think their code is prettier. So hit subscribe, share this episode with your favorite Salesforce admin and let’s get Nick on the podcast.

Nick McOwen:

Mike:

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So I went to the developer at the time who was also the CIO and the CTO and said, “I’m going to learn Salesforce.” And he kind of looked at me in the way that an adult might look at a middle schooler who said, “Watch me hit this three point shot.” And I eventually learned it after a few misses, but they decided to take a risk on me and many, many years later here I am working with Agentforce agents writing a little bit of Apex here and there. And yeah, it just didn’t intend to get here, but here I am.

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If I couldn’t figure something out, then she would kind of help coach me through the deployment issues or level setting and expectations with users, which that was a big one.

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How did you kind of balance those two that learning path? Because I think it would be very easy to, “I don’t need to learn this. Vibes can do it for me.”

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Now, if you like this episode, please subscribe, share it with another Salesforce admin that you may know or maybe spin up a sandbox before making changes directly in production tonight. Until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post Can AI Help Salesforce Admins Build Apps More Efficiently? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s much more from Khush about Salesforce Headless 360 and what it means for admins, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

Mike Gerholdt:

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

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

So Khush, welcome back to the podcast.

Khushwant Singh:

Thank you for having me back, Mike.

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Khushwant Singh:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

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

Khushwant Singh:

Oh yeah, we did.

Mike Gerholdt:

By the way, in case you forgot.

Khushwant Singh:

Yeah, it was a massive announcement. I think, look, as you think about what’s happening in the market right now, you’ve got customers engaging through many different surface areas. We’ve got customers on ChatGPT, on Claude, on Gemini, Teams. At the same time, you’ve got developers also using a variety of different tools, different IDEs, different coding agents. And so I think Headless 360 really is a testament to acknowledging this change in the market in the industry and trying to meet the customer where they are. The customer being an end user or the customer being a developer and admin, just meeting them where they are in whichever tool, whichever interface they might be.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. I mean, do you recall ever a time in technology when it was, I hate to use the euphemism, but like the Wild West where I feel like there’s so many choices for what you can do just in regards to AI?

Khushwant Singh:

There is. And there is obviously a good side to it. There’s also a downside to it. The good side is really your [inaudible 00:04:31] for choice. There is innovation that is helping you drive productivity day in, day out.

The downside of this is you just have to be really careful about quality, about trust, about governance. And you have to ensure that while you’re going fast, you’re not sort of compromising on that trust aspect of things. And that’s what we’re trying to do here at Salesforce and just trying to be a little bit more thoughtful in our approach over here.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. So my developer friend, Josh Burke, who comes on the podcast, usually has to explain things to me every now and then. I think developers are very familiar with the term headless.

Khushwant Singh:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt:

I’m not sure outside of Headless flows, which I know what those mean, I’m not sure admins could understand or could confidently buzz in on a game show and answer what is Headless 360. So can you help them kind of understand what is Headless 360 if they had to tell their manager?

Khushwant Singh:

Yeah, sure. So one way to think about it is, let’s say you’re a customer and you’ve got your own website, it’s built out of React, it’s not built on the Salesforce platform, but there is so much of your goodness and investment that you have within the Salesforce platform that you want to be able to easily reuse in the context of this other website that you have, portal that you have, mobile application that you have. All of that may not be built on the Salesforce platform. You want to be able to reuse your investment seamlessly.

And so Headless 360 really is about how do we empower you, the customer, to be able to easily use those assets, those investments within the Salesforce platform in that surface area that you’ve got that may not be on the Salesforce platform. So it’s really about giving them that flexibility so that they can easily reuse their investments in all of these various surface areas and just meet their customers wherever they are versus bring their customers into Salesforce.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I think it makes sense. I mean, I was a customer way back in ’06 when I remember it was like transfer and move to Salesforce, and everything was “have it on the platform, have it on the platform.” And then shortly thereafter it was kind of like almost the realization that we had was, “Well, it’s a lot of friction to constantly move platforms. What if companies just integrate and we become that connector to everything?” And I feel the same way with this.

Khushwant Singh:

100%. And you know what? Look, I think the one example is if you go into the Williams Sonoma website, right? Williams Sonoma website, it’s not built in Salesforce, but if you use their sous chef AI, I think… I’m not sure what they call it, but-

Mike Gerholdt:

I’m sure it’s something really, really snappy and small.

Khushwant Singh:

Olive. Olive. There you go. 

Mike Gerholdt:

Olive. Yeah. See?

Khushwant Singh:

A snappy name right there. That agent is an Agentforce agent, right? So that’s on example where Salesforce is being used in whichever head that you’d like us to be in. And so in this particular case, the Salesforce agent is in the Williams Sonoma website. So that’s just one example where we are trying to make it easier for this integration to happen through the Headless 360 platform.

Now that’s one view. And that’s the view, I would say, an easy way to try to understand what it means for Headless 360.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, because then as an admin, as a developer, you’re not having to sit down and say, “Okay, well, if we move to the Salesforce platform, we have to deprecate everything that we just spent the last two years building on our site.” Marketing’s like, “No, no, we just got the site pixel perfect the way we want it. Now we can integrate best of everything that we want.”

For admins who aren’t thinking of maybe websites, how does Headless 360 play into other integrations that they may talk to IT or internal stakeholders about?

Khushwant Singh:

Yeah. So for example, when admins are chatting with their other internal team, they may have a custom application that they already have in place and they want to be able to have Salesforce data, Salesforce visualizations surface in whichever application they may have already, right? That’s one example. So again, it is about bringing Salesforce to wherever they may already have.

So for example, an admin may have a business application that already runs within ChatGPT. So ChatGPT, for example, it allows companies to create bespoke applications. And if you want to be able to integrate Salesforce into that application, that’s doable as well. It doesn’t have to be in ChatGPT. It could be in any other existing non-agentic application as well. But it’s about that, look, you don’t have to rebuild everything. Wherever you are, you’ve got an existing application, we’ll find a way through Headless 360 to be able to bring Salesforce to it.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. No, it totally makes sense. I mean, in that way we can really think about how are we making sure that the departments have the software and the tech that they want, but also access to all of the information that they need to do their jobs the best.

Khushwant Singh:

Mm-hmm.

Mike Gerholdt:

So Headless 360 is a big thing we talked about. I also know I saw you in some True to the Core and True to the Core Deep Dive stuff. Was there some features you were talking about in that that possibly play into what admins are going to be working on for the rest of this year?

Khushwant Singh:

Well, yeah. I mean, a few aspects as we think about Headless 360 that would be of interest to admins. So first and foremost, you’ve all seen the stack diagram of the Salesforce platform. You’ve got those four layers. You’ve got your layers of engagement, you have layers of context, you’ve got the sort of our data foundation, et cetera. So you’ve got those layers that make up the Salesforce platform. For the last 27 years, those layers have been put in place for a human, right? And now what the product teams and the engineering teams are doing are going back and saying, “How do we now open this up both for a human and an agent so the agent can do that work on behalf of the admin when the admin sort of wants a task to be done for that particular reason?” And so what that means is that we’re translating our entire platform into a set of MCPs, a set of skills, a set of metadata that is grounded so that these agents can do the work on behalf of the admins.

So one good example is the setup with Agentforce, which is so far so good. We’ve gotten great feedback on it. Now behind the scenes is a set of skills, a set of MCPs that are firing off to be able to get their tasks done. And so that’s one thing that I think our admins can look to benefit from.

The other piece is I know we have some admins who are familiar with some of these IDEs that we have out there. They use Cloud Code quite a bit. They use Vibes quite a bit. It may not be the entire admin audience, but for those audiences, again, the ability to be able to use all of these MCP skills in these development environments is another thing that our admins can really look forward towards.

Now the other thing that we’ve also worked on is, over the last few months, the foundation for these skills, these MCPs, this Headless 360 foundation has been very sort of focused on how do we unblock these pro-code use cases, whether that’s in Cloud Code, whether that’s in Vibes, et cetera. But this is the same foundation upon which as we speak in safe harbor, I share that we are building what we call our no code offering as well.

So how do you go about in an unintimidating sort of type of interface, have this conversation with an agent, which behind the scenes is interacting with that same Headless 360 layer to help you build out your agents, your applications, to help you augment your existing agents and applications, help you set up provision, configure Salesforce from a zero to one point of view, because we all know how setting it all up is quite a taxing task for our admins? So that’s the potential I see for Headless 360 for our admin personas.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. I mean, to go back on some of the stuff that you were mentioning, I remember the first time I thought, “Hey, I could have ChatGPT rewrite ChatGPT’s instructions.” And I remember thinking like, “I’m so far ahead of the curve, man. I’m making AI rebuild AI.” And then it was only a few weeks later that Cheryl was demoing Setup with Agentforce and I thought, “Oh, that makes so much more sense because all of the things that you were having that setup agent do are things that not necessarily admins don’t like doing. It’s like paper cuts.” It’s the little things that take 20, 30 minutes out of your day when you really wanted that solid hour to build that application kind of start to finish.

Khushwant Singh:

Indeed. Indeed. So we really viewed Headless 360 as the foundation upon which agents can work on behalf of the admins. And again, look, this is agents and admins working together because again, we’ve got to have the human presence to be able to validate, to be able to interrupt, to be able to initiate any actions that are performed by the agents. And if these agents can help drive greater productivity, then it’s a win-win while at the same time having governance by humans over it.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. Absolutely. Do you envision us being at a point where all of setting up Salesforce could just be a conversation with an agent based on the business and what they’re trying to accomplish?

Khushwant Singh:

We are trying to do that. We are trying to do that. Now, I’ll give you a view into our approach over here. We’re taking a steel thread approach here where just trying to, for example, set up a customer service agent. That cuts across Service Cloud, cuts across platform, cuts across Agentforce, cuts across Data Cloud. So we’ve got to take a system view, an end-to-end view versus a feature view because that’s what our admins go through. That’s what a practitioner goes through. They look at it from a steel thread point of view, and that’s what we as product teams have to do.

And so as we think about using agents to go ahead and help provision, set up, get Salesforce up and running really quickly, that’s the new strategy that we are taking over here, a steel thread view so that we can look across the board and say, “Look, which MCPs are missing? Which skills are missing? Which APIs are missing? Which metadata needs to be grounded? How do we ensure that across entire steel thread, quality is being ensured, governance is being woven into?”

So we are starting that way and we want to scale that way as well. So my hope is that come Dreamforce this year, we’ll be able to at least have a sizable number of steel threads that we feel really, really confident about on Agentforce really helping and agents helping in this particular side of things. So yeah, that’s the approach we’re taking, Mike.

Mike Gerholdt:

Wow, that’s going to be amazing. Every time you think, “Oh, we’ve probably invented everything,” technology just comes along and pulls the rug out from underneath of you and says, “Haha! There’s new stuff. You got to figure this out now.”

I’d be curious, you’re so ingrained in a lot of things that admins do on the platform, a lot of things developers do on the platform and then also having to keep up with AI. What is a piece of advice you could give people for how you personally keep up with the newest news and innovation on what’s going on with AI?

Khushwant Singh:

Wow, that’s a good question. I think first and foremost, I spend a lot of time just looking at reading publications like what’s on TechCrunch, what’s on Techmeme, trying to just understand how are technology providers adapting, how are companies using AI. That’s one.

The second one is actually you learn a lot via speaking with others in the community, right?

Mike Gerholdt:

Mm-hmm.

Khushwant Singh:

You talk to customers, you talk to other admins, you talk to other developers and you get to understand there are use cases that they’re working through and some of the very many innovative workarounds or users of AI that they’re applying. And then you’re thinking about this that, “Wow. There’s a trend here, there’s something that we should be backing up and maybe providing out of the box within the product.”

And so I think that community piece speaking with other customers, with your peers, your colleagues from different companies, that sort of brings a very practitioners and practical view to things. So I think if you combine it with some of these … So if you take a combination of both, what’s being published out in the internet, what sort of bleeding edge and all of these various publications and then you sort of marry that and juxtapose that with the practical aspects on how it’s implemented in all of these various by your peers in different companies, that’s kind of how I … That’s at least the approach that I’ve taken. And I’ve seen it help even with some of my teammates who use a similar approach as well, Mike.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I would agree. I mean, coming fresh off of being at a conference, just even talking with people, you find more resources than you think you could find and it exposes you to different levels of thought.

As we kind of close things out, I’d love to know I’m always big, especially when I’m coaching people for events, for TDX, for keynotes, because I’ve been in keynote with you. I feel like when people are done listening to something, I always want to give them something very actionable that they should do when they get done listening to a session or they get done listening to a podcast like this. So if you are a Salesforce admin listening to this podcast, what is one thing you think you should do right after you listen to this podcast?

Khushwant Singh:

Good one. It’s a tricky question. I would say that, look, I would encourage everyone to go ahead and use and try and give Setup with Agentforce a run, right? Take it out for a spin. It’s available in an open beta. And I would encourage all of you all to give it a try, please. We’ve gotten so much great feedback. We are a stone’s throw away before we make it generally available. And this is our first approach to using Agentforce, using AI to help improve the productivity and quality of life of our admins. It’s not our last, but it is definitely our best foot forward right now. And we’d love to get your feedback. Like I said, we are in the final mile and your feedback is much appreciated, so try it out.

Mike Gerholdt:

I love it. Khush, you’ve always been a fan of admins. And I am so grateful to have you back on the podcast and even more thankful that you are constantly helping Salesforce innovate for everybody in the tech industry to be successful. So I appreciate you spending a little time with us today.

Khushwant Singh:

No, of course it’s my pleasure. Admins are the lifeblood of Salesforce. You’re out there, you’re representing our products, you’re using our products, you’re championing our products, you’re giving us tough love. And we can’t be more appreciative. And so this is an honor to be here on this podcast to speak with you, Mike, and to speak with all of our admins.

Mike Gerholdt:

And a big thanks to Khushwant Singh for joining me and sharing how Headless 360 and Agentforce are reshaping the way admins build and manage systems across the business.

My big takeaway? Well, the future admin isn’t just configuring Salesforce. They’re designing trusted systems where automation, data, agents, and people all work together for better outcomes. And as Khush said, trust and governance will still sit right at the center of all that work. So if you haven’t already, take Setup with Agentforce for a spin and start exploring what human plus agent collaboration can look like in your org.

And of course, be sure to subscribe, leave a review. And as always, I would love it if you share this episode with your friends. Until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post How Headless 360 Helps Admins Bring Salesforce Anywhere appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Adam Stark, CRM Systems Administrator at Belmont University. Join us as we chat about how his experience as a musician with learning and pattern recognition has set him up for success as a Salesforce Admin.

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

I met Adam Stark at TDX, and he had such an interesting path to becoming a Salesforce Admin that I had to bring him on the show. Based out of Nashville, he’s been a professional touring musician for twenty years. But when everything shut down during COVID, he spent his days on Zoom making an album, and his nights on Trailhead working towards his Admin Certification.

Adam’s experience in the studio made it surprisingly easy to jump into automations on Salesforce—they made sense to him. “As a music producer, one of the things I got really good at doing was accomplishing signal flow, like trying to get a sound source to a final, presentable stage,” he says, “and that sort of signal flow process is the same with flows.” Whether it’s building tracks in a DAW or building solutions in Salesforce, Adam discovered that it’s still the same underlying logic.

Starting out in Salesforce can feel overwhelming because the platform is robust. But, as Adam explains, the same could be said for learning guitar, and he realized that he could draw on his experience as a music teacher and performer.

A part of learning any instrument is pattern recognition. You practice scales or licks in isolation so that it’s easy to find them and play them when you’re performing. “The more you do it, the more familiar you get, the more you begin to recognize patterns,” Adam says, “and once you see the patterns, things start to feel smaller.”

Over time, something that seems very big, like learning a piece of music or trying to use campaigns in Salesforce, becomes more manageable.

I also wanted to hear how Adam got through the interview process and landed his first job as a Salesforce Admin. His experience as a musician helped here, too, because he was already used to doing interviews with radio stations while on tour. But nerves aside, Adam feels the key to his success was honesty. “I don’t know everything,” he says, “but if I don’t know it, I’ll figure it out, and we’ll find a solution.”

For the folks out there who are still breaking into the ecosystem, Adam encourages you to get out there and meet working Salesforce professionals as soon as you can. Go to a community group, or even TDX, and pick someone’s brain. It can help you piece together what you’re learning in Trailhead by understanding what Salesforce looks like in action.

There’s so much more great stuff from Adam about how he learned Salesforce and landed his first admin role, so make sure to listen to the full episode. And as always, make sure you’re subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, and we’ll see you next time.

Mike:

Adam Stark:

Mike:

Adam Stark:

And this is me not knowing anything about it. I didn’t even know what a CRM was, but went on Trailhead and shout out to the Trailhead team because what an incredible resource, like unbelievable resource for people to learn the platform. Just really, really impressive. But yeah, I would spend my days working on music with my… I was a duo, if you will. I was in a band with another guy and he and I produced our records and we wrote all of our songs. And we’re doing that virtually during the day during COVID where we’re songwriting over Zoom, which is a complete interesting exercise to try to be creative over Zoom. And then we’re recording audio files and sending them back and forth and compiling them into a record, which was wild.

Doing that during the day. And then at night, I would just get on Trailhead and just start learning. And the more that I learned, the more interesting it got to me. And yeah, I got hooked and was really fascinated with what Salesforce as a platform was capable of doing and honestly how beneficial it is to businesses and organizations.

Mike:

Adam Stark:

Mike:

Adam Stark:

And really that signal flow process is the same with flows. And then I just watched what it could do with data and I was like, “This is actually really fun because you’re building solutions.” As a songwriter, you’re building songs. As a producer, you’re building tracks and you’re building records and I’m still building. It’s just a different medium now.

Mike:

Adam Stark:

Mike:

Adam Stark:

Mike:

And so I would get to the point where I could learn the chords and figure out the finger and then they started to get to the point where they’re like, “We’re going to teach you music.” And those notes on those bars, it might as well have been a foreign language. It was to me. It just didn’t make sense. And I’m sitting here, during the day, I do Salesforce and we’re dealing with complex flows and data validation and all this other stuff. And I’m like, “Why can’t music make sense to me?” And it’s funny because the reverse almost sometimes doesn’t hold true. What works for you in understanding music did not work for me in taking understanding Salesforce to music. It’s crazy. So anyway, so the moral of the story is I have a really nice acoustic guitar-

Adam Stark:

Mike:

Adam Stark:

And I think the best way I could describe it is, that has been my journey with Salesforce. To get started, it felt like this massive undertaking. And the concept of campaigns, it’s like, what are those for? I still don’t really know why someone… There seems like there’s several different angles to use campaigns, and it’s just trying to get your head around it without ever being a user in Salesforce. But then you start seeing one example of campaigns, and then you see another, and then you’re like, “Oh, well, now I’ve got some creative ideas because I recognize some patterns and I know what the functionality of this thing is.” So yeah, I just think the longer you work at something, you recognize those patterns and then it’s like, “All right, this actually is starting to make a little bit more sense to me.”

Mike:

Adam Stark:

Mike:

Adam Stark:

Mike:

Adam Stark:

Mike:

Adam Stark:

Mike:

Adam Stark:

I really wasn’t trying to put on that I knew more than I actually did. I wasn’t trying to talk technical where I didn’t understand it. I was honest with the idea of who I was as a person, what I’d learned. I’d achieved my certification. I have a pretty good base of knowledge for what Salesforce is and what it can do, but I don’t know everything, but I’m determined to find out. If I don’t know something, I’m the person that will figure it out. That’s what I’ve always done. In my music career, where there were technical needs, we didn’t always have resources to have somebody else meet those needs for. So I would be the one that would go and dive into it.

I would figure out how to code lighting rigs and write DMX and program a light show for us because we needed a light show. So that’s just my makeup is I’m a hard worker, I’m a learner, and I was honest about that in my interview. If I don’t know it, I’ll figure it out. We’ll find a solution. And it worked to a point. Obviously, the organization took a chance on me because of an experience gap, but they saw something in me, I guess in my integrity and honesty, but also my drive to find solutions and not be afraid to go learn was attractive to them.

Mike:

Adam Stark:

Mike:

Adam Stark:

Mike:

Adam Stark:

Mike:

Adam Stark:

Mike:

Adam Stark:

Mike:

Adam Stark:

Mike:

Adam Stark:

Mike:

Adam Stark:

Mike:

Adam Stark:

And there’s great hands-on training… Not training, but almost hands-on demos and hands-on with certain products, which was really cool, too. I don’t get to mess around with agents a lot because we don’t use agents yet. So being able to go and sit and work on, build some agents and see how that’s working with Salesforce was really great. But mainly the thing I wanted to do was just go have conversations and glean from those who are far ahead of me in their Salesforce journey and help determine what path am I most excited about going forward? Do I want to be a developer or do I want to go more of a consultant, like client facing route? What’s the next thing for me? So yeah, that was my goal.

Mike:

Adam Stark:

Mike:

And then when you would open up Salesforce and be like, “Oh, you can configure this and you just go into set up, here I can just configure this whole page.” And it’s immediate. It’s right there when you press Save. I was like, wow, okay, wait, this is… I still remember, I don’t know if you’ve built this. This makes me feel so old. The very first time I built a dependent picklist, I was like-

Adam Stark:

Mike:

Adam Stark:

Mike:

Adam Stark:

Mike:

Adam Stark:

Mike:

Adam Stark:

Mike:

Adam Stark:

Because I’m that person where I don’t have confidence in what I’m doing unless I have a conceptual understanding of how the whole thing is working. So I don’t like just blindly building something saying, “I think this ought to do what we want it to do. ” It’s like, I need to understand on a deeper level how it ticks, if that makes sense. And for better or for worse, that’s just how I’m wired. And I will say AI is a behemoth. It is to get your head around it and to understand what it can do and then try to keep up with all the changes. Wow, it is daunting, but very impressive.

I have been really excited since the conference and since I’ve been learning more about the possibilities with AI. It’s starting to spark some creative ideas for me and some creative ideas for how it could be implemented in my organization. So that’s side note there. But overall, I feel a sense of excitement of where we’re going with all this stuff. And I encourage everybody else, if you feel overwhelmed with the idea of AI or having to implement AI tools, rather than just fighting it and putting your heels into the ground and saying, “I’m not doing it,” just start learning and start seeing what it can do, what the possibilities are, and then see where your creativity takes you. You might surprise yourself. But yeah, I’m still in my infancy of learning and getting my hands on the tools, but I will say I’m excited about where we’re going.

Mike:

Adam Stark:

And then you wonder like, “How have I found myself configuring SSO and I don’t even know how opportunities work?” So I think I would have really tried to have gotten involved with community, either the Trailhead community or user group meetups locally, but just start getting plugged in with working professionals and start having conversations because again… And even TDX is a perfect example, sitting down on tables and just asking questions with technical architects. And 15, 20 minutes of that is just so helpful to connect all those dots and have that little bit of a light bulb moment of like, “Oh, all right, that makes sense now.” So yeah, get involved, get in a community. I think that’s going to be the most beneficial if you’re just getting started.

Mike:

Adam Stark:

Mike:

Adam Stark:

Mike:

Adam Stark:

Mike:

The post Why Pattern Recognition Matters for Salesforce Admins appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Avi Shah, Senior Director of Product Management for Salesforce AI. Join us as we chat about Agentforce Grid, a new way to coordinate data, automation, and AI agents.

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

Salesforce Admins deal with data, automations, and AI every day. But how do you make everything work together in a way that makes sense? That’s why I sat down with Avi Shah to talk about Agentforce Grid, a spreadsheet-like tool for creating AI workflows.

“Agentforce Grid is, in our opinion, the fastest and easiest way to build AI workflows,” Avi says. “You have columns for your data and the actions you want to take with it.” Some columns are AI-based, enabling you to run prompts or agents you’ve built, and others are action-based, allowing you to update records or call an invokable action to send an email.

Put it all together, and you can build complex AI automations that transform your organization’s workflows.

As Avi explains, Agentforce Grid gives you a simple, spreadsheet UI to perform powerful transformations on your data. You can pull things from Data 360, uploads, or even the web into a data column.

Action columns give you a way to act. You can run prompt templates, agents you’ve already built, or inline prompts. Not everything needs to be an AI step, however, you can also perform more deterministic actions like formulas, updating records, or invoking flows.

All of this makes more sense when we talk about actual use cases. For example, you can use Agentforce Grid to assist with case categorization, working with a list of cases, a prompt column to analyze them, and another prompt column to look at those analyses and categorize them based on theme, priority, or issue.

Avi has also seen customers take advantage of Agentforce Grid for transcript and session analysis for customer-facing agents. You can use the prompt column to analyze, classify, and extract information from transcripts to make sure that everything is working the way you want it to work.

Be sure to listen to the full conversation for more from Avi on Agentforce Grid. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Mike:

Avi’s going to walk us through how Grid lets you move from reacting to data to actually activating it. From running prompts alongside your data to triggering actions in real time, to designing workflows where humans and AI play their role. We also get into some real use cases like case categorization and pipeline updates, but through a little bit of a different lens, not a “how I built this,” but how does this change the way my org operates?

So if you’ve been thinking about how AI fits into your day-to-day as an admin, this episode’s for you. Let’s get Avi on the podcast.

So Avi, welcome to the podcast.

Avi Shah:

Mike:

Avi Shah:

Mike:

Avi Shah:

And that’s where I’ve been now for the past couple of years, and currently the proud product owner of a new product called Agentforce Grid.

Mike:

Avi Shah:

And so long story short, we’ve got all of these different column types and we’ve seen customers kind of stitch them together in really interesting ways to create kind of these AI-powered workflows.

Mike:

Avi Shah:

Mike:

Avi Shah:

And then we also recognize that a lot of users, when they’re building out these workflows, not every step needs to be an AI step. So we’ve got a bunch of other action columns that they can use to help do kind of more deterministic things. So we’ve got a formula column, which just allows you to build formulas using Salesforce expression language. So formulas that output things like strings or bullions or numbers or dates, like all of that is supported in that column. We’ve got an update record column, which allows you to take any value from the Grid and just write it back to any of your records instead of Salesforce.

Mike:

Avi Shah:

Mike:

Avi Shah:

Similarly, if you’re trying to either pull or write to data inside of CRM or data cloud, it first does a permissions check on your user to make sure that you have access to that entity before you can actually interact with it.

Mike:

So I’ve thought of different use cases admins would have for this. What are some of the use cases that our customers are coming up with in terms of how they’re using Grid and kind of this AI action power?

Avi Shah:

In a similar but different vein, we’ve seen things around transcript and session analysis. So as a lot of our customers get up and running with either Agentforce Service Agent or some of the other customer-facing agents that we have, something that’s really top of mind for them is being able to audit and kind of QA those agent conversations. And so we’ll see them bring in those actual session transcripts from Data Cloud and then again, use things like prompts on top of them to kind of analyze, classify, extract, like, competitor mentions and do a bunch of kind of like really cool ad hoc analysis to better understand what’s going on. Other use cases are things like meeting an account prep, pipeline and data quality audits, general like CRM hygiene and enrichment. It really kind of spans the gamut.

Mike:

I think the second one, the part that has me really jazzed about it is it’s a tool where I can, for lack of a better word, kind of have like a workbench that I can work with the data, I can query, I can make sure that the stuff that I’m about to put in is actually updating a record because the biggest problem I had a long, long time ago was you go to a trade show, half your customers would be leads, and then you put them back in the system as leads, but they’re already customers. And this to me feels like I could really get a bunch of data together and manipulate it and make my data better without it having to be on a system or outside of Salesforce.

Avi Shah:

And that, I absolutely agree that admins and ops leaders are going to be kind of some of the power users here, but we’ve also started to see a little bit of traction from more of the business user who just wants an easier way to be able to use LLMs on their data.

So a really cool example is someone was responsible for generating status updates basically based off of like an entire pipeline view and they had to send those out every other week. And this was, there was 20 to 40 open opportunities inside of this pipeline view every time. And it would take them a couple of hours to actually go through and look at the latest activity, draft the status report and send it. And instead, what they did was they just built a Grid and they brought those opportunities in. They used a prompt to do the analysis. They defined that prompt once, ran it across all 40 in a single click, then used another prompt to, based off the analysis, draft a really quick status update, and then they just had it connected to the actual deal channels in Slack. And using an invocable action, they just sent out the status reports every other week. And then now all they have to do is they just go in and they refresh the Grid every other week and they’re done.

Mike:

So terminology-wise, let me get it straight, do we call them Grids that we create so you can create multiple Grids?

Avi Shah:

Mike:

Avi Shah:

Mike:

Avi Shah:

Mike:

Avi Shah:

Mike:

Avi Shah:

Mike:

Avi Shah:

Mike:

Avi Shah:

But in terms of the roadmap, I alluded to it a little bit before. So one of the things that a lot of our customers ask for is, “Hey, I’ve built a grid, it’s working great. How do I schedule this? How do I run it programmatically? How do I have this thing run every time a new lead comes in or every time a new case comes in?” And so those automations are something that is on the very top of our priority list. We will have a solve for that coming in the next couple of months, if not sooner. So automations is a big one.

Another thing is we’re really leaning into this idea of even though it’s easy and familiar to build grids today and it’s all clicks, not code, we want to make it even easier. So rather than forcing you to go in and configure a grid, we’re going to lean heavily into AI so that you can just describe what you want, whether that’s to a native grid agent or whether it’s to Claude. We’re building out a Claude code skill right now. And through the APIs, these AI assistants will actually be able to go in and build your grids for you. They’ll be able to edit them, they’ll be able to answer questions around them. And so really excited about kind of both the automations as well as the AI-first approach that we’re taking.

Mike:

Avi Shah:

Mike:

Avi Shah:

Mike:

Avi, I’d love to ask you, outside of building Grid stuff for Salesforce and some other really cool projects, I feel like you’ve got to put your hands on a lot of fun stuff at Salesforce. Is there any hobbies or any nonprofits that you like to do on the side when you’re not building Grids?

Avi Shah:

And then another one is, on the side, I’m actually a big golfer. And so a couple of great organizations, Youth on Course and First Tee in the Bay Area are awesome vehicles to kind of grow the game. And it’s been fun watching and participating in some of those events as well.

Mike:

Avi Shah:

Mike:

Avi Shah:

Mike:

Avi, appreciate you coming on the podcast. And let’s see. I’m sure people are going to be able to run into you at some of the upcoming Salesforce events and see Agentforce Grid. It’ll give us something to do over the summer in between perfecting our golf shot, right?

Avi Shah:

Mike:

Avi Shah:

Mike:

The post Agentforce Grid Enables Next-Gen Admins To Scale AI Workflows appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Joshua Birk, Senior Director of Admin Evangelism at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about how Agent Script helps admins build more predictable and reliable AI solutions.

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

The new Agentforce Builder gives admins new tools to create effective AI agents to help their orgs. Chief among them is Agent Script, which gives you more control than ever before over how your agents operate and behave. I sat down with Josh Birk to find out how it all works and why Agent Script redefines the admin role.

Agent Script is a simple, high-level scripting language that lets you create complex instructions and actions for your agent to follow. You can step in as the human in the loop and create a framework for agent behavior and context, helping you build more predictable and reliable AI solutions.

In simple terms, Agent Script lets you look under the hood at how your agents function. If you’re comfortable with coding, Script view allows you to make fast, precise changes and analyze error messages. Canvas view, meanwhile, uses visual blocks to make it easy to understand what’s going on with your agent. And of course, the Agentforce assistant is always available with suggestions if you get stuck.

With so much more control over agentic behavior, Agent Script puts admins in the driver’s seat for how their organization will evolve with AI. You’re not just building a solution—you’re designing interactions between humans and agents. In the big picture, the role of the admin starts to look less like traditional system configuration and more like experience design, governance, and operational strategy.

All of this requires a great deal of thought in terms of how you’re building new agentic solutions and rolling them out to your organization. Josh’s biggest piece of advice is to take it slow: “Don’t panic, learn Agent Script,” he says.

Your existing agents will continue to work, so take your time to experiment with Agent Script to get a better understanding of what’s possible. Build some new agents and take it one step at a time.

Listen to the full episode for more from Josh about what admins can do with Agent Script. And subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us in your feed every Thursday.

Mike Gerholdt:

This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, if you’ve ever been wondering why you can’t just copy and paste your old agents into the new version, this episode is for you.

I’m joined by Josh Burke, who recently walked our admin relations team through what’s really changing with Agent Builder and Agentforce. And more importantly, why it matters. We’re going to unpack a little bit of hybrid reasoning, what determinism really means for admins, and how Agent Script gives you even more control without losing all of that magic. So with that, let’s get Josh on the podcast.

So Josh, welcome back to the podcast.

Josh Birk:

Thanks for having me, Mike.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, we know that a few people are vibing now because of the dulcent tones of Josh Burke. So in all honesty, you were in a team meeting last week and you were kind of updating the team on stuff that’s coming out for new products and beta products. And the biggest thing that you always explain is like, so why is this important?

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

And of course, every now and then you end your little skit with, “Thanks for attending my TED Talk.”

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

And I remember last week’s meeting, I was like, “Oh man, that’s a podcast. I need to do that.”

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

Because the way that you would explained what was new with Agent Builder and Agentforce, I was just like, “Oh, that totally makes sense to me.” So this is where we’re at and this is what I was hoping we would talk about.

Josh Birk:

Yeah. And I’ll have to try because I kind of remember getting into a very weird, almost like conspiracy theory level stream of consciousness.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, okay. Well, it didn’t feel that way.

Josh Birk:

Good. I think that’s years of experience of thinking in streams of consciousnesses, whatever the plural of that is. So yeah, so I think to kind of recap a little bit, so there were two things that I think are kind of important to consider about the new Agent Builder. One is what we mean by hybrid reasoning and what we mean by determinism. And then the second thing is, where does Agent Script fit into that? So the question we were kind of tackling was, why didn’t we just go back and revise the old builder? Why can’t we just reiterate on it? Why are we starting completely new?

Mike Gerholdt:

And I think you even said, not to interrupt you, but to interrupt you, why can’t I just move my stuff over? Why do I have to rebuild it?

Josh Birk:

And why can’t I just move my stuff over? Why isn’t it just copy and paste? And Agent Script is part of that.

So the original engine wasn’t hybrid, is I think the easiest way to put it. So this came with a conversation with product management where I was trying to describe the differences between the old builder and the new builder. And they’re like, well, let’s … The old builder wasn’t doing anything wrong, so much is that the new builder’s doing something more.

And what the new builder’s doing that is more is that when we say hybrid, when we think of AI, we think of AI being autonomous, making its own decisions. So we had the Atlas reasoning engine that’s like, “Oh, Mike is looking to find a description on a certain account. I’m going to take these actions. I’m going to put them together into a plan and then I’m going to try to make that work.”

What we didn’t have was the human in the loop portion of that. And where Agent Script really comes into play is it allows users to basically be like, “In this scenario, I want you to behave like this.” So when we say hybrid, we mean, yeah, we’re letting the engine kind of do its own magic. But then we’re also applying almost … I don’t want to say flow because that’s such a loaded term for a Salesforce community.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah.

Josh Birk:

But well, let’s go to the name, right? A script, right? A script that a human can actually control personality, control tone, control behavior. When you see this, do this, when you need to call it human. So kind of giving this very human-friendly dialogue that you can then apply to the agent. And so that’s how we provide more determinism.

So the reason you can’t just copy and paste your old agent into the new agent is the old agent doesn’t have that connection to Agent Script. And so it’s literally missing a piece of the puzzle to run the engine kind of thing.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. No, I think … I mean, hearing you explain it, sometimes, at least as an admin, I was always like, “Oh, so they just came out with another version because they had to stick another layer of something on.”

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

Or like a car analogy, they changed the fuzzy dice. But this is, no, no, no, no. We’re really moving from this version, which ran a certain way to an even better version. And that’s the part that I feel like … Because you brought up Flow, I feel like we’ve been through this with Flow.

Josh Birk:

Yeah, totally.

Mike Gerholdt:

We got like a business process … Business management process is what it used to be called. And then that thing went through iterations and then we found a different engine to run it on. And then we had ProcessBuilder for a while and then now we have the new Flow. And it’s like sometimes it’s not just the interface that changed, but it’s actually the guts behind it. Because I mean, I can’t recall … It’s sometime between after the pandemic and today that AI came around. And I feel like that’s the window that works in my brain because I can’t put down a time.

Josh Birk:

Totally.

Mike Gerholdt:

Was it 2022 or is it 2023? I don’t know. Post pandemic, before today, AI happened. But just when you thought, okay, I’ve kind of got this thing figured out, nope, all of this stuff changes.

Josh Birk:

Yeah. And it happens in technology, right? It happened with the Lightning Web Components. We really kind of had to go back and take the new ECMAScript format and take the new ECMAScript standard and really rebuild the way our web components work so that they work in a standard based way. So that they’re more similar to React and more similar to these other frameworks. And there wasn’t really a way to go back to Aura, now it’s called, and just be like, “Hey, Aura, be more standards based.”

Mike Gerholdt:

Right.

Josh Birk:

Because Aura was effectively just … It was pre-standards is the easiest way to put it. So this happens, right?

Now, if people are listening to this and like, “Oh gosh, I have all this work in my old Agent Builder, what am I going to do?” First of all, Salesforce does not like taking away people’s toys.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. We’ve learned that.

Josh Birk:

We’ve learned that. I’ve said this anecdote in workshops so many times because when we did release Lightning, one of the most common questions I got was, “Are you going to end of life Visualforce?” So I went to the product manager, might have been Skip at the time. And I’m like, “Hey, when would you end of life Visualforce?” And his response was, “When I pull up a dashboard and I see there are zero active users using Visualforce, and then I’d probably wait three months after that.”

Mike Gerholdt:

Just in case.

Josh Birk:

Just in case, right?

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah.

Josh Birk:

So the classic one is not going anywhere anytime soon. But I think the other important thing is a lot of our messaging when it comes to building out agents is that you’re already an Agent Builder. You’re already somebody who can build AIs because you know Flow, because you know Salesforce. Now you’ve learned topics, now you’ve learned actions and all of that kind of stuff. All of that is still true. It’s all still true. And so you’re still getting to use your existing skills in order to control it. It’s really just adding the skill of knowing how to write out the Agent Script.

Now, one of the cool, really cool things about … Well, there’s two cool things about the new builder that I think will really help people with that. One is the Canvas mode. And so Canvas mode takes what you write in Agent Script and puts it into a visual UI interpretation. And so this is very handy for two things. Number one, it gives you a little bit of kind of a predictive window as to what your script is going to be doing. It also gives you a very visual way of thinking about it. It’s also a really neat way to go look at somebody else’s Agent Script and translate it. So you don’t have to read through all the thing. You can flip over to Canvas mode and be like, “Oh, that’s trying to get these parameters in order to do these actions.”

The other thing going back to vibes and this new AI coding AI is that you’ll have an AI assistant in Builder to help you build the AI. So you’re not alone. Agent Builder itself will also help you create these things out. So my biggest statement back in the Lightning web component today was don’t panic and learn lighting. And now it’s, don’t panic and learn Agent Script and you’re going to build out some really powerful solutions.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, and I think back to … I mean, I was chatting with Jennifer today too, and just the way that we started using AI. And I remember, I mean, not that long ago doing workshops and saying, “Okay, you need to tell the AI your role, its role. And then what you want it to do and what it can do and what it can’t do.” And for everything, whatever model you were using, I remember writing prompts a certain way. And I feel like for this and with Agentforce, especially for admins, this is the least set it and forget it kind of thing.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

Because you can always go back and make it better.

Josh Birk:

And tweak it. Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

And this is-

Josh Birk:

And tweak it in theory. Yeah, exactly. In very small corners too.

Mike Gerholdt:

Small corners that make a huge difference because like with Flow, I mean, half the time I’m just excited that I got it to do what I needed it to do. And then I look at what Jennifer built and I feel like I’m over here rubbing two sticks together.

Josh Birk:

Together.

Mike Gerholdt:

But with Flow, that’s your goal, right? You just want that, okay, boom, it’s done. But with agents, people are interacting with them, they’re asking them questions, I can make this so much better and I can make this better. Here’s the clue when people stop using them.

To your point of when you would replace Visualforce. Well, if you’re looking at your Agentforce dashboard and seeing, “Hey, your users aren’t using it.” well, now might be a time to like, “Well, let’s switch over, let’s round some edges, let’s change some things.” And I would say this is like an every two weeks kind of thing. Which sounds crazy, but the amount at which you’re going to find feedback from your users. And the amount of rounding of edges, I worked myself into an English problem here. It’s going to be like, you’re going to find like a star and then it’s going to look like a ribbon of rounded edges that you have to work on.

Because as you use that new builder, now your users are happier and being more proficient. And I think like even today, when Jennifer and I were talking, we were talking about building Gems in Gemini. And I said, “One thing that I do is I’ll actually have another window open and ask it to refine my instructions in Gemini.”

Josh Birk:

Oh, yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

Because the way that I write the instructions works for me, but maybe not for it and it can refine it. And I’ve seen it take thousand word prompts and reduce it down to 200 and it’s actually faster. And so having all of that is sometimes there’s a lot to keep up with. But it’s all for the better because now you’re like click click, oh wow. And then you get that … I think it’s always, at the end of the day, the admin is going after that first look on a user’s face and they’re like, “Ooh, this-

Josh Birk:

Nailed it.

Mike Gerholdt:

… just made my life so much easier.”

Josh Birk:

Exactly. Yeah. And I think to kind of append to that, again, not to overuse this analogy of Visualforce. But it’s like don’t be in a rush to go and recreate your existing agents in the new Agent Builder. If you have a new agent you’re building, I would start with the new Agent Builder and go from there.

Two reasons, don’t fix what’s not broken. And also you’ll learn more about Agent Script and things like that. So when you do decide to move your old agent to the new builder, you’ll be more educated on how to do it.

Now, huge forward-looking statement, asterisk, safe harbor, there is a conversation internally about creating a porting tool of some kind. It’s on a roadmap somewhere, no guarantees.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh.

Josh Birk:

But I do think people should know where we are looking at that kind of thing. So stay tuned because we do want to make this as easy as possible.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Yeah. But also there’s some joy in rebuilding things and maybe that’s just me. But I’ve always-

Josh Birk:

Seems like part of the tech world. Yeah, exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. I mean, there’s that and there’s also, it reintroduces you to things that at one time you were good at and brings it back. And then I think too, anytime that these new features come out, one part is, okay, well, here’s the tech to change it. But also, has the process changed? Has the stuff that people do internally changed? And that might also be true.

And the other point you brought up, which was really salient, just because you can change it, doesn’t mean you should right now.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

One thing that … And I was a part of this, doing a big org rollout. What are the other changes that your users are experiencing within your organization? And so you adding to that, is that one layer too many? Or when would be a better time? Like we always joke, like you’re not going to roll out a sales opportunity change the last week of the quarter.

Josh Birk:

Right, right.

Mike Gerholdt:

So picking your timing, this means that gives you time to test.

Josh Birk:

Yes. Yeah. And I think this goes into a lot of the conversation we’re having about admins in the AgentiCare. Like what kind of a steward are you being? And how are you using those existing instincts and skills as an admin to not topple over the apple cart, but now you’re doing with AI?

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. Because in my opinion, admins are getting paid for their judgments.

Josh Birk:

Yeah. Yeah. Agreed.

Mike Gerholdt:

Josh, thanks for coming on and helping us understand the new Agent Builder.

Josh Birk:

Thanks for listening to my TED Talk. Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

I knew you had to fit that in. And we’ve got just enough time that Daryl can hopefully get his boat from home to the internal … It’s not internal. Inside the podcast joke.

Josh Birk:

Inside the podcast joke.

Mike Gerholdt:

You have to go back to the Daryl Moon episode-

Josh Birk:

Yeah, exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:

… and then it all makes sense. It’s the key to unlocking the mystery of the Dan Brown episodes. I don’t think so.

Josh Birk:

I love it.

Mike Gerholdt:

Anyway.

Josh Birk:

I love it.

Mike Gerholdt:

Have a good day, Josh. Thanks for coming on.

Josh Birk:

Cheers, my man. You too.

Mike Gerholdt:

Huge thanks to Josh for coming on very impromptu and turning what could have been, I think, a little confusing of an update into something that actually makes sense. New engine, new script layer, AI helping you build AI. Awesome. I like it.

So remember, don’t panic, learn Agent Script, and it’s all about having fun. And like any powerful tool in Salesforce, it’s less about flipping a switch and more about steady improvement over time. So if this episode helped you clarify your next steps, share it with another Salesforce admin who’s navigating some AI right now. And until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post How Agent Script Is Redefining the Admin Role appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jagan Nathan, Senior AI Architect at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about how he built a Slack app for Salesforce’s “Million Dollar Puzzle” ad, where millions of concurrent users raced to solve riddles by chatting with Slackbots.

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

If you were watching the big game, you might have seen Salesforce’s “Million Dollar Puzzle.” As soon as the ad aired, the race was on for contestants to solve puzzles by chatting with Slackbots to discover the location of a secret vault.

My guest this week, Jagan Nathan, built the Agentforce-powered Slack app that made everything possible. They needed Slackbots that could act as a conversational gateway for millions of concurrent users. And with a million dollars on the line, they needed to be sure it couldn’t be tricked into giving away the answer.

Even more incredibly, Jagan pulled all of this off in only six weeks. I sat down with him to find out how he did it and what he learned along the way.

Just like with any project, the first step was to gather requirements—though it’s more fun when your stakeholder is the “Puzzle Master.” Jagan and his team needed a thorough understanding of what they were dealing with and how they could translate those gaming mechanics into the application.

The clock was ticking, and AI was pivotal for accelerating the development timeline. Jagan and his team used Salesforce Vibes for quick prototypes and wireframes to help them decide what to build. But the development team still needed to take these ideas the rest of the way. “AI cannot help us solve all of the architecture problems,” Jagan explains, “we have to have a human in the loop.”

With millions of concurrent users, they needed to do thorough testing—and quickly. Luckily, they could use Salesforce Scale Center to stress-test for performance issues and identify bottlenecks so they could be sure that when the ad ran, the app would work flawlessly.

I know this might be shocking, but when you’re holding a contest with a million-dollar prize, some people will try to cheat. So Jagan and his team needed to make sure there were plenty of guardrails in place to make sure someone could win it fair and square.

They needed to start with a security mindset and think through any security vulnerabilities as they designed the application. The Einstein Trust Layer was crucial for toxicity detection and monitoring for anything malicious, like prompt injections.

Most importantly, they were very careful with what information the Slackbot knew and what it didn’t. It didn’t have the solutions to the puzzles, so even if someone managed to crack it, they wouldn’t be able to get very far. Instead, puzzle answers were always validated by humans.

There’s a lot more from Jagan about building for scale quickly, so make sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Podcast swag

Mike Gerholdt:

When you think about building on Salesforce, it’s easy to focus on features. But today’s admins aren’t just implementing features. They’re designing systems that have to perform, scale, and hold up under real world pressure.

In today’s episode, I’m going to sit down with Jagan, an architect who helped deliver a high stakes, high scale experience serving millions of users through a custom Slack-based AI system. We’re going to unpack what it actually takes to compress months of work into weeks and how to design for trust and guardrails from day one, and where human judgment still matters in an AI-driven architecture.

So if you’ve ever wondered how your role evolves from building flows to orchestrating full systems, this is the conversation because this just isn’t about speed. It’s about responsibility at scale. Now if you enjoy this episode, hit Subscribe, share it with a fellow admin and let’s get Jagan on the podcast.

So Jagan, welcome to the podcast.

Jagan Nathan:

Hi, Mike. Thank you for having me.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Well, I was excited when you sent me the Slack DM about some of the projects that you’ve worked on here at Salesforce. But for people that don’t know you or maybe didn’t listen to the episode of the Developer Podcast you were on, could you tell us a little bit about what you do at Salesforce and the fun project you got to work on recently?

Jagan Nathan:

Sure. Hey everyone. I’m Jaganir. I’m architect part of our AA practice team here at Salesforce, building agents for our customers. This is my third podcast on our channel. My previous episodes were focused on event monitoring and threat detection.

Mike Gerholdt:

Wow.

Let’s talk about some of the stuff that you got to work on around the big football game that happens in February that Salesforce had an ad on.

Jagan Nathan:

Yeah, sure. Very excited. This is our first ever online puzzle app, which was built entirely on our Salesforce platform.

Mike Gerholdt:

So you got to be a part of that. I’d love to know from a Salesforce admin listening to this, we used the platform for the puzzle. Can you give me a little insight into that?

Jagan Nathan:

Yeah, so let’s unpack this. So what we did is we didn’t just build a chatbot. We deployed our custom Slackbot, of course, powered by our Agentforce, which acted as a conversation gate for millions of participants grounded in real-time data. So we just collapsed a nine-month roadmap into just six weeks, which is 42 days. Within that, we designed iterator and we went live on day of February 8th.

Mike Gerholdt:

Wow. Nine-month roadmap. Holy cow. That’s insane. I mean, can you talk a little bit about the architecture problem solving and how you moved so fast so quickly?

Jagan Nathan:

Yeah, sure. Of course, we are a customer zero company. So we leverage our internal tools and the external tools, what we have developed. So for this entire application, we use our Agentforce Vibes to accelerate the development. We quickly do a lot of wireframes and the prototypes, and then we figure out what sort of user experience and what sort of applications we need to build using the power of Agentforce Vibes that accelerated our development timeframe to start with.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, that’s nice. I mean, I’ve definitely seen Vibes do a lot of things. I’m assuming we really took it out for a test spin on this one.

Jagan Nathan:

Yeah. So we use Agentforce Vibes to do this. And then we also leverage our scale testing product because this particular application, we anticipated there’s going to be at least millions of users who is going to access this application concurrently. So performance is super important for this application. So we leverage scale testing product to identify quickly and resolve all the problem bottlenecks as well.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Wow.

I’ve had some talks with PM for, was it Scale Center? Is that what you used?

Jagan Nathan:

Yep. Yes.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. And we’ve put out a couple of blog posts about those. So for admins that aren’t familiar with what Scale Center is and what some scale testing helps them do, what did you use it for?

Jagan Nathan:

Yeah, Scale Test is the performance evaluation tool. So that gives a lot of metrics. Before customers used to run some automated performance testing to figure out what sort of performance bottlenecks they have in the ACRM instance. But with the power of Scale Test, we can write a test plan creation. We can do a test environment set up. And we can also simulate all those real-time performance challenges, and then we can schedule those test trend to see where exactly fails and at what threshold it fails so that we can understand the spike and then we can fine tune our application.

Mike Gerholdt:

Okay. That’s super helpful. I mean, was there any surprises that happened in your testing?

Jagan Nathan:

Oh, yeah. Since we anticipated there’s going to be at least millions of concurrent users, there’s going to be a lot of DB rights back and forth. And then we ran into a lot of issues. We were able to figure out with the help of scale testing, we figured out all those in the sandbox, and then we fine-tuned our code and the logic and everything to make sure it is scalable for concurrent users as well.

Mike Gerholdt:

That sounds like a lot. Holy cow. I don’t think I’ve ever built an application where I had to plan on a million people using it concurrently.

So you talked about Agentforce Vibes. I’m sure we leaned into a lot of AI to build this. How did you decide really what AI should do versus what humans should still control during the project?

Jagan Nathan:

Yeah, that’s a great question. So of course we can use AI, but AI cannot help us solve all the architecture problems. One of the architecture problems, we have to use human in the loop. For an example, when we started designing this application, considering the scale of users, we thought just by writing a prompt, it’s not going to solve the problems. Prompt is going to give, based on the request prompt is giving the response back, but that alone is not sufficient enough. So that’s where we use humans power to understand and architect well for this [inaudible 00:06:50] game.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Wow.

On top of that, you got to think of guardrails because I’m sure somebody was thinking, “Well, since Slackbot was in use, what if somebody just asked it, what’s the answer?” That seems like the most obvious guardrail to put in place, but how did you sit down and think about some of the guardrails to put in place for an experience like that?

Jagan Nathan:

Yeah. So there’s an aha moment here. So when we built this custom Slackbot, we intentionally built in a such a way that this custom Slackbot doesn’t know the puzzle answers. So even if someone tries to crack the puzzle Slackbot, they would not be able to get the answers out of it. So that is the first so that no one walks away with the puzzle answer, right?

Mike Gerholdt:

Right.

Jagan Nathan:

So that is the first thing what we did. And then the next thing what we did is automated toxicity detection at the hedge. So what we tried to do is we leveraged, of course, the power of Einstein Trust Layer and then it’s not like a traditional AI chatbot. So we just built intentionally a custom Slackbot with all those automated toxicity detection so that if the Slackbot finds some harmful response or some sort of response which is not supposed to do it, if the user on the other side, if the user is a bad actor trying to do some prompt injections or whatnot, our platform is able to monitor and mitigate the risk immediately. It’s being very proactive stage of monitoring.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. No, I guess I just thought the Slackbot would have access to the answer and you’d just have to guard it really well. But if you set it up and never give it access the answer, then it can’t accidentally hallucinate and give the answer. So wow, that was probably a little bit of planning on your end.

So looking at what you built and deployed, if a Salesforce admin wanted to recreate some of the best learnings that you had from this, what were some of the key takeaways that you had?

Jagan Nathan:

Yeah. So I had that security mindset to start with. Let’s say you are a bad actor or else you are trying to act the system, what sort of loopholes you might find in the system and then find all those security vulnerabilities, why you designed the application itself. It’s like having a security mindset is super important. And that too for the scale of the cash prize is one million. So definitely there’s going to be a lot of participants going to crack the Slackbot or else they try to trick the Slackbot and try to get the puzzle’s data out of it. So I would say security mindset is super important. And then start with the understanding of, basic understanding of how prompts work and then try to build a Hello World app in Slack to start with.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah.

Did you have a whole team of people that were just, I guess it’s called negatively testing because there’s always positive testing, which is test it to make sure it does what it’s supposed to, but then there’s negative testing, which is to make sure it doesn’t do what it’s not supposed to, right?

Jagan Nathan:

Yes. So we did advisory testing as well. So of course, we used the power of AI. We built our own agents to try to craft this agent to see where it bakes. And then we try to enhance our prompts and all the safety guardrails to make sure. We did a ton of testing during our design and implementation phase just to make sure Slackbot is not supposed to provide any information which is not needed or which is kind of out of privacy zone.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Wow.

So given the scale of everything that you did, what is something that you maybe hit a limit with AI that you didn’t know would exist?

Jagan Nathan:

What we felt down the road is like, AI cannot solve all the problems for sure. That too for the scale of millions of concurrent users trying to access the system. We thought there might be places in which there might be some timeouts happening, but knock on the wood, nothing happened. We were able to build a scalable application.

Now, we don’t rely 100% on AI. We also added a human in the loop, for example, some sort of puzzle answer validation, mainly the final puzzle answer validation. We don’t just rely only on the AI. We use a human in the loop. So that we brought in experts on the puzzles who validated the answers and lot of stuff at the backend.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, that’s interesting.

What was it like to have to translate a puzzle into a technical requirement? Because I feel like a lot of Salesforce admins often get business processes that can sound like a puzzle and they have to translate that into a technical requirement.

Jagan Nathan:

Yeah. Great question. That was very interesting and challenging because not all of our teammates worked on the puzzles or solved the puzzles before. If you take me as an example, right? I haven’t solved any puzzle in the past. I went through the basics of understanding what sort of puzzles exist in the real world. Some are logical puzzles, a lot more Sudoku puzzles, some are mathematical puzzles, some are geolocation puzzles. So for us, it took some time for us to understand the basics of what sort of puzzles we have. And then we had conversations with the puzzle masters and then who built this puzzle. We tried to understand from the puzzle master what sort of application they wanted to build because they know very much on the gaming side and we know very much from the technical side. It goes hand in hand.

That was very interesting and challenging conversations we had to understand. It took some time for us to understand and translate the gaming mechanics into our application.

Mike Gerholdt:

Wow. Okay. So be honest, how cool wouldn’t it be to have a title named Puzzle Master? Right?

Jagan Nathan:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt:

So one of the last questions, because I bet you use Slack a lot as the project team to get things done. I’ve noticed as I work at Salesforce and we use Slack in different channels, I’ve noticed changes in behavior, ways that we work faster with Slack. Was there something you left this project with where you’re like, “Oh, I’m going to start posting this way in Slack or I’m going to start sharing information this way in Slack,” because it was something that actually was a way that you worked in that team.

For example, I’ve noticed that when we have really long threads rather than posting one big post that could take up a lot of screen, somebody will post a comment thread about a topic and then put all of that into the comments because then it keeps their feed kind of cleaner.

Was there anything like that that you kind of learned as like, “Ooh, I’m going to start doing this more often now in Slack?”

Jagan Nathan:

Well, yeah. So what we did is when we started working on this project, we had a 14 member team, few members were focusing on the technical side, few members were having conversations with the puzzle master. So we used Slack as a project management tool.

So what we did is we created a Slack Canvas with a list of team members and then what sort of priority task we need to work on. And then we automated to the next level by adding a Slack list as well. We created a list, like what is the roles and responsibilities for each team member? And we started tracking the list. And then every week we were running the Slack workflows.

We extensively used the Slack workflows. We created a ton of workflows, one workflows for summarizing the Slack channel so that what happened in this one week’s … Because see, we had at least six weeks to develop and build and deploy, right?

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah.

Jagan Nathan:

So each week we were running the Slack summary workflows to understand what is the latest going on around them. And then we were extensively using Slack, mainly the Slack Canvas and then the Slack list to start with.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Wow. I love building workflows. I tell you, they’re really cool. I can almost build too many sometimes.

Well, I appreciate you coming on and sharing what you could about this. I think the amount of work that was completed for this project and in the amount of time is super incredible and I’m sure it was quite the learning for you. So it also teaches us that even the biggest projects we can still accomplish very quickly. So thanks for coming on the podcast.

Jagan Nathan:

Thank you for having me, Mike.

Mike Gerholdt:

So it was great of Jagan to come on and share his experience on that project. I think it’s a good reminder that building on Salesforce today means thinking beyond automation. It’s about really designing systems that are resilient, trustworthy, and ready for real world scale. From AI guardrails to perform testing to human in the loop decision-making, this is the work that the modern admin is balancing speed with responsibility.

Now, if you found this episode helpful, share it with another Salesforce admin who’s thinking bigger about the systems they run and making sure that you’re subscribed so you don’t miss what’s next. Until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post How Salesforce Built a Scalable AI Puzzle App in Six Weeks appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jennifer Lee, Lead Admin Evangelist, and Eliza Riley, Content Manager for Admin Marketing at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about what’s coming at TDX and how to get the most out of your visit.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jennifer Lee and Eliza Riley.

TDX is around the corner, and I sat down with Eliza and Jen to talk about must-see content for admins and how to get the most out of your visit.

One thing you won’t want to miss out on this year is Sneak Peeks, a special theater experience where you’ll be able to see previews of in-progress features in action. We’ll be showcasing things like the new App Studio and Setup with Agentforce so you can get an idea of what’s coming. There will also be a Q&A with the product teams so you can give feedback and better understand the roadmap.

There will also be True to the Core Deep Dives covering flow and automation, reporting and analytics, Agentforce, and low-code and pro-code development. These extended Q&As offer you a chance to connect with product leaders and ask all of your burning questions.

Finally, if you have a thorny problem that needs solving, you can visit the Ask the Experts zone for a one-on-one conversation with a Salesforce expert. 

We’ve been talking a lot on the pod about Agentforce Vibes, so maybe it’s time to see it for yourself. In the Agentforce Vibes Zone, you’ll be able to get hands-on with how you can build using natural language. There will be demos, a guided project, and sessions to help you get started.

You’ll also want to check out the Hackathon Showcase in the keynote room, where the three finalists will pitch their builds live to the judges. As Jen says, it’s always interesting to see how different people solve problems and get some inspiration for what you’re building in your org.

If you’re coming alone, make sure to stop by the Community Cove. It’s the spot for networking with other admins and other folks in the ecosystem, and a great jumping-off point for exploring TDX.

As you’re getting ready for TDX, it’s important to remember to balance planning with flexibility. “You’re going to be connecting with people,” Eliza says, “you might see a cool activation that catches your eye, or a robot you might want to stop and grab a picture with.”

Wear comfortable shoes, bring water and snacks, remember that some sessions require headphones, and make sure you have a swag bag. Most importantly, come find us and say hi.

Make sure to listen to the full episode for more on what’s coming at TDX. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

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The post How Admins Can Get the Most Out of TDX 2026 appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to John Maxey, Senior Product Manager at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about how My Trust Center can help admins communicate incidents, plan releases, and operate with transparency.

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

When I was early in my admin career in 2008, keeping track of status updates was as simple as loading up Salesforce Trust. These days, with so many different products and services, it’s gotten a lot more complicated.

That’s why I was so excited to sit down with John Maxey. He’s working on My Trust Center, a personalized, authenticated experience that only shows you information that’s relevant to your org.

With the new My Trust Center, you’ll be able to get more specific information about upcoming maintenance and how it affects your org. Everything is tailored to what products and services you’re actually using, instead of having to sift through unrelated incidents and interpret whether or not they apply to you.

As John explains, Salesforce can be much more granular about any specific maintenance or updates and how they will affect you. And that makes it easier to make decisions like when to promote new features, when you need to do testing, or when there might be downtime. You can coordinate better with your team and avoid surprises.

At its core, My Trust Center is about improving transparency both internally and externally. For admins, it will provide more visibility into what’s going on when something doesn’t work and when a particular service will be back online.

If there’s an incident, you won’t need to ask your CSM or contact customer support to figure out what happened. RCAs will be attached to each incident, so the entire process is self-serve. And you can configure notifications via SMS, Slack, or email to keep your entire team up to speed.

Make sure to listen to the full episode for more from John about what’s coming with My Trust Center. And make sure you’re subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

Mike Gerholdt:

We’re going to dig into what My Trust Center means for how you communicate incidences, plan releases, and operate with clarity across increasingly complex environments. So if you’re the person everyone turns to when something breaks or when they just think something’s broke, this episode’s for you. Let’s get John on the podcast.

John Maxey:

Mike Gerholdt:

But before we talk about some of the cool stuff that you’re working on, let’s learn a little bit about John Maxey. So John, how did you get to Salesforce and what is the cool thing that you oversee?

John Maxey:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Maxey:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Maxey:

Mike Gerholdt:

But we’re going to talk about … So the blog post that went up today on admin.salesforce.com is the same topic as this podcast, which is My Trust Center, which I can’t tell you how excited I am for this. Because I remember back to my days early admin, like ’08, just going to having to pay. It never dawned on me until one of my users couldn’t log into Salesforce a long, long, long, long time ago. And I was like, oh, I wonder why that is. But I never thought about like, oh, cloud services can go offline. I need to pay attention to this.

And at the time, trust.salesforce.com was literally just like a handful of blinky lights. That’s all it was because there was a handful of pods that you paid attention to and you just checked to see if yours was up and that was it. And then over the years, I mean, there’s so much more to pay attention to. Everything that goes into trust.salesforce.com. So can you kind of take us on that journey of like Mike from 2008, just having to remember if NA1 is up to everything that the new My Trust Center is going to give us?

John Maxey:

So fast-forward 18 years and we’ve acquired companies, we’ve developed new technologies and new products. Some of them are on the platform and others are what we call off core or they’re not directly in our application. They’re separate different types of architecture. And then we’ve also moved into the public cloud. We’ve also been selling to enterprise customers and we think about an enterprise customer and their implementations are far more complicated, multi-cloud. So they may have marketing and commerce, as well as sales and service. And then we have all our industries.

So in talking to customers when I became the product manager of the trust site in 2018, just sort of realized that their experience, especially for our larger customers was harder to deal with. When you look at, I mean, I think we have 950 some odd instances in our sales service industry, we have over a thousand DBs in marketing cloud engagement. It’s just kind of daunting to try and figure out where you are. And so at the time we were figuring out tools to make it easier to find that.

But really the answer was to get personal and to create an authenticated site. So then we know our customers. I believe that’s like CRM 101, know your customer. And then when we know who they are, when you log in, we can present you with what you have with the things you already purchased, the products and services. So in this first release, we’re starting that path, that journey to true personalization. And so there’s still some gaps here and there, but one of them is the support for all our products. So we have requests out to all of our different products like MuleSoft and Tableau to do a little bit of work to get them ready for the My Trust Center. But yeah, so that’s, I mean, it’s just grown and this My Trust Center really just has come out of customer feedback and wanting a better experience.

And the other thing about the personal, I know a lot of folks are going to probably jostle a little bit at the move away from a purely public site to the authenticated site. But there’s an opportunity there to not only provide the personalization, but also be able to expand the types of services we can provide, product communications, things like that, that we may do via email today, but we can provide an experience to consolidate all that into one single spot, seeing as we will know who those customers are, being able to target the communications. As if we did it today and it was public, it would just be too much. It would be information overload. And so being able to segment that because we know who you are is really a powerful driver for that.

Mike Gerholdt:

And there was rarely a case, but this also speaks to why My Trust Center makes so much more sense. If I were to go there, “Oh, my instance is down, but these three instances aren’t.” Well, it’s not like I could do anything. It’s not like if my lights are out in the neighborhood, but my neighbor’s lights are on, I can grab my dog and I can put my slippers on and walk across the street and be like, “Hey, can we sit at your house until our lights come on?” It never dawned on me when I would go to trust.salesforce.com and see, “Oh, well, everyone else is online, just this one pod is off.” Okay, cool. Next. Right?

And that matters now because now if you think about it from what admins, developers, architects, they have so much to pay attention to. And all of a sudden, especially in a highly regulated industry, you talked about being in Finserv, why is this down? And you can feel that user looking over your shoulder and then you having to sift through a trust site, multi-layers, multi-things, and kind of give them an answer. This is, why can’t you just present me with the dashboard that makes sense? I mean, the dashboard in my car only tells me about my car. It doesn’t tell me about every other car on the road. So it kind of feels like a natural evolution.

John Maxey:

So yeah, definitely making sure that we’re giving you the information. And then also being able to expand on it more. Like I mentioned, the public nature of that, we’ve got press watching it, we’ve got competitors and things like that. And sometimes we just don’t want … We don’t have to be guarded with what we say because of how that could be used. When we know we’re talking to customers, we can be a lot more open, even drafty as they might say. We know that something’s going on. Maybe we don’t know exactly what it is.

And that’s not really necessarily appropriate when you’re speaking to a public audience. But when you’re talking to customers and they just want to know that you know that there’s a problem and that Salesforce is working on it. Like your analogy, when the power goes out, typically the customers don’t need to know when the application is having an issue. They know that the application’s that. They want to know that Salesforce knows that there’s an issue and what are we doing to fix it?

Mike Gerholdt:

John Maxey:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Maxey:

And in the past, it would have been as much of how much downtime would there be, but that’s almost a thing of the past. But really it’s more about when will my features? Maybe I’ve been working on those in Sandbox and I’m ready to promote them. When do I know to promote them? If we’re talking about an operations persona, they need to know when there need to be a little more diligent because there’s a release going on.

Some of our customers do testing after we do a release to make sure that there’s no conflicts or anything. Obviously as people customize their orgs, we do our best at Salesforce to make sure that there’s no conflicts in the code that we release, but there’s always, folks are very inventive in the way they do their solutions. And so there could be a conflict. A lot of customers like to test that, they want to know when. Especially if you have a large application, a lot of people in to test, you want to know the best use of their time because it’s usually on a weekend.

Mike Gerholdt:

John Maxey:

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John Maxey:

But then because Trailblazer ID just takes an email address, you could use your group email to sign up for a Trailblazer ID. And then that ID, that email address, would have to be attached to a license in the orgs you want to see. So that’s the way to do that. Today, we understand it’s a challenge. Not everybody has a bunch of extra licenses to use for this type of purpose for folks who are monitoring. So we are working on a solution for a license that would have very limited or maybe no access to the org at all. But you could attach it to say a group email and then be able to get all the monitoring information you needed from that.

Mike Gerholdt:

John Maxey:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Maxey:

In the future, we’re thinking about ways maybe we could provide some visualization to say that it’s in process and maybe how far in the process. I mean, the more we can self-serve, the better. And then we’ll look at other ways of being able to surface that type of information and similar type of communications directly in the portal and through notifications and all of that.

Mike Gerholdt:

John Maxey:

I mean, in small things is accessibility, making sure that we’re accessible to finding out about the need for the license solution so that folks can see this. Whether we have big companies that outsource or have operations teams that manage all of that for the whole company. And Salesforce is just a piece of that. We also have a gap of getting an API that matches our UI, so it’ll be personalized. And if you use a monitoring application, you can just feed the signals right into that so you can have a single place to monitor all of your operations across your whole company.

So those are the types of things that we got in formatting. And actually the initial iteration of the 90 days upcoming maintenance and releases was originally 30 days and people were like, “But you only do a major release every 90 days. You can’t see enough.” And so we expanded that. And I think we need to add a little more navigation capabilities because some of that … Sometimes like for me, I have a bunch of instances that I have orgs on. So I get a bunch, a bunch of those and it’s just hard to deal with. So we’re still improving. We have a feedback farmer. We’re always looking at that feedback to see if there’s an opportunity to improve what we have.

Mike Gerholdt:

John, I’d be curious, in the past I’ve asked people, when we work in tech, often our hobbies or the things that we love to do are a little more tactile because like I told a friend of mine, I said, “Well, when the power goes out, you can’t ever see what I built.” And he was like, “Wow, that’s super powerful.” And I was like, “I know, right? It’s kind of crazy.” But I’d be curious, outside of security and building the My Trust Center, is there something fun that you like to do on the side?

John Maxey:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Maxey:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Maxey:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Maxey:

Mike Gerholdt:

John, thanks for coming on to talk about this, I’m sure. Well, I know for certain, when you have stuff to talk about, you’re going to come back. Because this is so, so incredibly useful for admins and it really helps us kind of understand the whole state of everything that’s going on with our orgs so that we can communicate that internally to our stakeholders, which keeps the wheels running. So I appreciate you filling in all of the dots and keeping our status green for us.

John Maxey:

Mike Gerholdt:

The post What Is My Trust Center and How Does It Help Admins? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.