Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Cheryl Feldman, Senior Director of Product Management at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about how Agentforce is reshaping the Setup experience.

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

Let’s be honest. Setup has always been where the real admin magic happens. But it can be surprisingly complicated to answer a simple question, like, “Why can’t my user edit this record?”

As Cheryl Feldman explains, it’s because Setup has slowly grown in complexity over time. As new products and features were added to Salesforce, Setup pages multiplied. And while that level of complexity will always be necessary, it doesn’t need to be so hard for admins to navigate.

That’s where Setup with Agentforce comes in. Whether it’s troubleshooting permissions, understanding formulas, or finding the right configuration page, you can do it all with conversational AI instead of wading through 1,300 pages.

Setup with Agentforce is currently available in open beta, so you can give it a try in production, a sandbox, or a developer org. Cheryl and her team would love to get your feedback. “We want to hear from admins,” she says, “Does it help you? And what do you want us to solve next?”

Right now, Setup with Agentforce can handle common use cases, like user access, formulas, data model, and Flow. And for questions it can’t cover, the agent will pull answers from Salesforce’s help and training documentation and point you to the correct Setup pages to get the job done.

Right now, Setup with Agentforce focuses on high-impact, everyday Setup tasks. But Cheryl and her team have big plans for the future.

One area they’re looking at is multi-step orchestration, which will give admins the ability to create objects or fields, grant users access to them, and add them to a layout in one guided process. Instead of jumping between pages, you’ll be able to complete related tasks in a single conversational experience.

Most importantly, we need your feedback to shape what comes next. Jump on the open beta, reach out to Cheryl and her team, and let’s make some admin magic.

Check out the full episode for more from Cheryl Feldman. And remember to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Mike Gerholdt:

This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, well, let’s be honest, setup has always been where the real admin magic happens. On this episode, I am talking to Cheryl Feldman, Product Management Senior Director at Salesforce, and longtime admin advocate to unpack how Agentforce is reshaping the way we build, troubleshoot, and think through configuration. From solving tricky user access questions to helping us with formulas and beyond, this is about making setup smarter and more intuitive. With that, let’s get Cheryl on the podcast.

So Cheryl, welcome to the podcast.

Cheryl Feldman:

Thanks so much, Mike. I’m excited to be back.

Mike Gerholdt :

I’m excited to have you back. You were a rockstar at Dreamforce this year, and you’re probably going to be a rockstar this whole year. I know in the admin keynote, we demoed Agentforce for Setup. I think I’m using that term right, right?

Cheryl Feldman:

Setup with Agentforce, but thank you. Yes.

Mike Gerholdt :

Okay. See, I’m always backwards.

Cheryl Feldman:

Yes. I was so excited to see that work in the keynote and to see the exciting admin response and excited that we went to beta today.

Mike Gerholdt :

Oh my God. I feel like I feel as much joy for this as I do when we could customize the homepage.

Cheryl Feldman:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt :

It sounds so small. We’re getting in super knee-deep. Let’s zoom out for a second because I’m sure there’s a lot of new admins that are like, “What are they talking about?”

Cheryl, for people that haven’t met you and heard you in some of the True to the Core, and some of the Q&A sessions where I feel like Parker just calls on you constantly, could you do a little bit of an introduction of what you do and the fun stuff you get to work on at Salesforce?

Cheryl Feldman:

Sure. My name is Cheryl Feldman, and I’m a Product Manager in platform. Been at Salesforce about four and a half years now. Prior to joining Salesforce, I was actually a customer for just over 18 years in, starting out as an admin, moved into more leadership and management roles, was running a COE at a very large bank before I joined Salesforce. And when I joined Salesforce, I started in the user access area, specifically managing the authorization side of things, and then started to really advocate that we improve admin experiences. That led me to my role now where I act as the product domain lead for Setup with Agentforce, and improving experiences for admins and really addressing a lot of the issues that admins have in setup because speaking of True to the Core, setup has come up pretty much every True to the Core has ever existed. And that’s what I do here at Salesforce.

Mike Gerholdt :

Which is a lot to say the least. I will fan out a little bit because I remember when Cheryl, you were a customer, you always had questions I couldn’t answer, which challenged me. And now to see you on the inside, I mean, it’s one thing to hang an identity and say admin developer architect, but that kind of core identity that people have that you made your name on of configuring one of the most complex CRMs to meet business needs without deploying code is just so empowering. And I just, for me, on behalf of all the people like me, I’m just so appreciative to have you inside the PM org championing for people that want to be in tech that don’t understand or know how to write code. I had to say that early just because-

Cheryl Feldman:

Thank you. Thank you for saying that.

Mike Gerholdt :

… I don’t get to talk to you a whole lot. You’re a busy person, especially with the new setup stuff. I mean, I remember demoing permission sets and permission set groups and feeling like, “Holy cow, Cheryl just moved a mountain.”

But you’re like, “Yeah, I can move mountains, but what about planets?” And now you’re tackling setup. Where did this come from?

Cheryl Feldman:

This came from back, I think it was June 1st, 2022, one of our incredible Trailblazers, Andrew Russo, hope he doesn’t mind me shouting him out, stood up at True to the Core and said, “When are you actually fixing setup? When are you doing anything, something?”

And I had been pushing internally that we needed to do something. And I said, “Well, if not me, then who?” And so I started looking at the usage of setup, and something that it didn’t necessarily surprise me, but it validated a lot of things that I believe that the areas and user access were the most used areas and setup, which was the area that I was managing at that point from a product standpoint. And I said, “Well, what are the big issues that we need to sell for admins?” And a lot of it was around troubleshooting. So we introduced the user access summaries, and we did a lot of great work in user access, but we didn’t really expand beyond that.

And so we said, “What would it take to actually fix all of setup?” And trying to actually do that is… Actually, I’ll be honest, it would be an impossible task given the state and that there’s no framework behind setup. So when Agentforce started to come about, we said, “Well, what if we looked at Agentforce, and what if we could help admins and rethink setup using Agentforce, and revamp things and revamp the experience that way?” And so that’s how everything came about.

We started with, let’s improve some of the pages to then let’s see if we can tackle a larger part of setup, and that’s what we’ve been doing. And Agentforce has helped unlock that for us because I’ll be honest, the way we were going previously, we probably would’ve been here for 20 years because there were over almost 1,300 pages in setup, there’s a lot.

Mike Gerholdt :

Wow. Well, and as I come to find out, I mean, there was no real governance of setup.

Cheryl Feldman:

That’s true. That is very true.

Mike Gerholdt :

And so everybody, when they created a new product would just add it to the setup menu.

Cheryl Feldman:

Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt :

Wow. And I happened to think that the solution actually in 2022 maybe was, it had been invented. I’m sure somebody will call me out on when AI was birthed, but it wasn’t in our nomenclature for another year or so.

Cheryl Feldman:

Yep.

Mike Gerholdt :

And that was actually the solution because I remember thinking, I was at a world tour in Boston and somebody came up and said, “With the innovations coming out around AI, why can’t I just send screenshots of my problems or my formulas to AI to fix it?” And I thought, well, you should just solve that on the platform.

Cheryl Feldman:

Exactly. And we actually do, and so one of the things that Setup with Agentforce can help you with is to troubleshoot your formulas. It doesn’t just troubleshoot user access, because that’s one of the things we started looking at, what are customers asking in the Trailblazer community? And a lot of it is, I always see Steve Mo and I always say, “We need to help our agent think like Steve Mo helping out all those new admins with their formulas.”

Mike Gerholdt :

Yeah. I think one important thing, and we don’t have to get into the details of it, but one important thing is for you, this was, yes, a really cool thing to come out with, but you also dug into, “Well, but how does this help on the back end? How does this help our customer service? How does this help our admins?” And you don’t have to share it, but you really found what the percentage of cases and the reason some of the admins were calling into our customer support line.

Cheryl Feldman:

Yes. This is probably not a shock to a lot of admins out there, but it was very hard if you are not familiar with SOQL to answer the question, “Why can’t my user do a thing or why can’t my user edit this record?” That was very complicated to figure out. So unless you had a developer working with you who could run SOQL for you, you ended up contacting support. And so we started looking at how could we help admins help themselves in an experience through natural language. And so that is one of the first use cases that we took what setup with the Agentforce was around that troubleshooting.

Mike Gerholdt :

Wow. That’s amazing. So fast-forward, it’s January 2026. I almost said ’25. I don’t know why. It’s like the brain didn’t move ahead a year. How are we doing? Where are we at with our agentifying setup?

Cheryl Feldman:

The exciting announcement as of today, or you’ll be listening to us in a couple of weeks. It’ll be out for a couple of weeks already, but we are now an open beta. We were, announced our pilot at Dreamforce, so we’re now in open beta, so customers can go enable this and try it out. We solve use cases and we handle use cases across user access, formulas, data model, flow, a lot of the most common areas and setup. Now, I don’t want to say we handle everything, but we do handle a lot, but we want customer feedback. We want to hear from admins is, does it help you and what do you want us to solve next? And so that’s where we are right now.

Mike Gerholdt :

Okay. And just to clarify, because sometimes I know for a long time as an admin, I wasn’t able to do some of the things. Pilot was totally, you had to sign up, and Cheryl had to interview you, and you had to shake hands and there was a vetting process, right?

Cheryl Feldman:

Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt :

Open beta for an admin sitting there listening to the podcast means they can access it in their sandbox or?

Cheryl Feldman:

They can access it in production, or a sandbox, or in a developer org. It just has to be for developer org. It has to be the specific developer org that has access to Agentforce and Data Cloud.

Mike Gerholdt :

Okay.

Cheryl Feldman:

And then they can enable it. And so they’ll see, if their org has Agentforce and Data Cloud, they’ll see a banner at the top of setup that will redirect them to enable this.

Mike Gerholdt :

Awesome. You’re super close to the product. If you were an admin now, what would be the first thing you would suggest an admin should do when they try this out?

Cheryl Feldman:

I would say think about an issue that you had, whether it was an issue writing a formula or an issue trying to figure out what a user of access was, and ask that question to Setup with Agentforce and see where you get. One of the things that I think is really cool that I would’ve loved this when I was a customer, because I had to answer this question all the time. You could actually ask the agent, “Show me a list of users that have access to customized application or modify all data or manage users or managing public list fees,” and it’ll show you a list. There is no great way in the platform to actually figure that out without running a SOQL query.

Mike Gerholdt :

Right.

Cheryl Feldman:

And so that is something I’m actually really, really, really excited about. That’s where I would start is start thinking about some of the questions that you have. One of the other features that we have is we actually have and help a navigation action. If we don’t actually have actions that actually help you do something or analyze something, it will actually take our help in training documentation and generate an answer for you and also help you navigate to the right setup page.

Let’s say you ask the agent, “How do I setup Agentforce for sales?” Instead of having to go out to the help and training site or out to Google to figure that out, you could ask that right and setup and this will help generate an answer. And then if there’s something where you need to redirect to a setup page, it’ll give you a link that’ll just navigate you to the right setup page.

Mike Gerholdt :

Wow, okay. I mean, this takes setup from an area where I’m navigating a million little dropdown carets to a whole experience where I can actually query. I remember a while back, it was like we used to say you could talk to your data. Now, you can talk to your setup menu.

Cheryl Feldman:

Yes. Now you can talk to setup.

Mike Gerholdt :

In the lifespan of Salesforce products, you said it went from pilot to now open beta. I’m not going to hit you up for timelines, but what is the next step?

Cheryl Feldman:

The next step is we want to start enabling some more use cases and handling more of setup. We can, I’m sure, share a link to a presentation we did at Dreamforce called the Feature of Setup. We talked about introducing essentially another framework that essentially runs Setup with Agentforce. We’re working towards that. And so we handle, we actually started with, we looked at the most used areas in setup and we started with that, but that essentially the most used areas in setup are essentially sit within 40 pages within setup. I mentioned there are 1,300. The next step is how do we expand this beyond these most used common use cases to everything in setup? And that is the framework that we’re building.

The other thing that we’re working towards is how do we handle what we call multistep orchestration and being able to do multiple steps as far as setups. So think about when you create objects or fields, being able to grant access, adding it to layouts or dynamic forms, those are all multiple steps and being able to do those together. That’s essentially what we’re working towards from the framework. I can’t give out exact timelines yet, but those-

Mike Gerholdt :

No, I don’t expect you to.

Cheryl Feldman:

… that we’re working towards right now to handle more of setup. And so that’s what you’re going to see start coming as we move throughout the year.

Mike Gerholdt :

So you envision a world where on Monday an admin could sit, take some requirements, vet out a process, maybe start talking to… I say talking, hello? Typing. Typing to Agentforce for setup and start building an app and then maybe on Wednesday or Thursday, continue building it and possibly even deploy it on Friday and doing it all conversationally.

Cheryl Feldman:

I think eventually, yes, we will get there. We’re handling right now. We consider that. We’re starting to think about our building use cases, and I’m actually working, I think you’ve met my colleague, Tian, and he’s working towards the building use cases. And so he would actually be a great person to have on this podcast.

Mike Gerholdt :

I know. He’s been in the admin keynote.

Cheryl Feldman:

Yes. And so I think we’re looking at, I would say overall, yes, but we’re not handling those type of use cases yet as far as building an end-to-end app. I would say we’re looking at more of the everyday configuration use cases and setup use cases right now, but we’re starting to think about right now. So I would say Tian would be a great person to have on this podcast.

Mike Gerholdt :

Yeah, absolutely. Talk the building part. One thing that I’ve thought of, and it’s come up in other AI conversations is Josh made a mention of it in a previous podcast too of AI almost feels like that first time you get to use a calculator in math class. And I remember my math teacher saying, “Well, the calculator’s answer shouldn’t be a surprise. You should know what its output is expecting.”

Two years, one year, I don’t know the timeline down the line, it’s feasible that an admin could sit down and just conversationally build an app. What are the thought process behind also adding to that so that if they didn’t use Agentforce for setup to build that app, that they would know how to jump into the configuration of it?

Cheryl Feldman:

That’s a good question that I’m not sure I have an answer for right now, but I do see that we probably want to do something like that where, because I don’t necessarily see a day where setup is going to completely go away. I think it’ll still be there. And I think it’s important for admins to understand what the agent is helping them do and why. Something we’ve talked about long-term, and this is further out, is something that I like to call architect in a box.

Mike Gerholdt :

Ooh.

Cheryl Feldman:

And I think there’s a very big bridge between an admin and an architect. And this is not to downplay the role of an architect, super important role, but I think if you talk, and I played an architect role before I joined Salesforce, so I think it’s very much how do we help admins think more like architects on their day-to-day tasks. And so how do we explain to them if they say, “Okay, let me update. If they tell an agent or even go into setup, let me update my sharing model.” Doing that on Tuesday at three o’clock is probably not a great idea, right? And helping you think through the changes, what is the impact of the change that you’re making and that’s where we want to go directionally.

Mike Gerholdt :

Oh, I like that. I mean, that’s being context aware of, you asked me this, but it’s say January 29th and our quarter closes in three days, refactoring a sharing model or refactoring permissions might leave salespeople unable to update an important opportunity. What if we do this on February 1 and then have that delayed reaction or that delayed action in a queue or something?

Cheryl Feldman:

Yep. Or thinking about if you’re making a change, is that going to impact you negatively from a security perspective? Those are some things that we’re starting to think about on how we help admins make really good decisions.

Mike Gerholdt :

Right.

Cheryl Feldman:

It’s not that admins don’t make good decisions today. I think sometimes we make it really hard for admins to make good decisions because sometimes the tools to make those decisions are either sitting in where you have to run queries to the dev console, which not everybody is comfortable with, or you have to have read all of our documentation and have essentially what I like to call the PhD in Salesforce, which is either one of the big architect certifications or to actually be a CTA. And I think we need to bridge that gap.

Mike Gerholdt :

Yeah. No, that was always something along those lines that came up a hundred years ago when Process Builder was around was it’s so easy to build processes and an admin or anybody could just theoretically sit down and load up an org with processes that would essentially be really more efficient as just one trigger and what’s the trade-off and pros and cons there. That’s a really good way of thinking of it. I mean, the other thing, future-looking, would be to have the setup agent or whatever we call them, they should have a name.

Cheryl Feldman:

Setup with Agentforce, yeah.

Mike Gerholdt :

Yeah, I know.

Cheryl Feldman:

But our actual agent is called Enhanced Agent for Setup.

Mike Gerholdt :

Okay. But I mean a nice name like Claude or I don’t know. I can’t think of another name. I know that’s another AI, I just meant it as a human name. But to be like, “Hey, Cheryl, you just asked me this question, but I’m also chatting with your peer admin who’s in New Jersey and Robin just asked me a similar thing,” because there’s also the idea that there’s many admins working in an org to solve issues.

Cheryl Feldman:

Yeah, I don’t think we’ve actually figured out how to do something like that yet, but that’s an interesting use case.

Mike Gerholdt :

No, I mean, I’m not poking holes. Sometimes it’s fun to think about what the future is once this gets out of the box.

Cheryl Feldman:

Yeah. And I think one thing for admins is I want to hear feedback as admins are listening to, what would you want us to solve? I want to hear from admins, especially as they’re trying this out what they want us to sell.

Mike Gerholdt :

Yeah, absolutely. We’ll put a link in the post so people can do that because I was just thinking, are there already agentic setup ideas coming in to the idea exchange about this? But I mean, obviously I think you want to filter them all into one location, right?

Cheryl Feldman:

I would love ideas. I actually haven’t seen any ideas come in yet, but that is-

Mike Gerholdt :

Oh, somebody’s got to put one out there.

Cheryl Feldman:

Somebody’s got to [inaudible 00:23:12].

Mike Gerholdt :

Help Cheryl retire some points.

Cheryl Feldman:

Yeah. But there’s definitely with Setup with Agentforce, we are retiring a lot of idea exchange points. And so one of the things customers have wanted us to solve for a long time is the ability to clone and use it. We’re able to Setup with Agentforce to do that. Some of the troubleshooting things are things that customers have been asking from us forever, and so those are some really good things that we’re able to do. And we also took that lens when we were looking at the initial launch, how can we solve some of these longtime admin requests that we just have not been able to solve because either it requires us to build this really, really complicated UI, or there’s technical issues. How can we actually solve some of these things that admins have been asking for for a long time?

Mike Gerholdt :

Yeah. So you may have said this, but it just popped in my mind. It helps you with formulas, right?

Cheryl Feldman:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt :

Okay. Well, there goes a Dreamforce session. For those of us that have been in the community for a while, Daniel Hooks used to do best practices on formulas and validation rules session at Dreamforce. Packed to the walls every time. Now we have setup for Agentforce. Look at that. Efficiency.

Cheryl Feldman:

And I think we’ve actually proposed a session for TDX. Hint, hint.

Mike Gerholdt :

For the admin track, maybe?

Cheryl Feldman:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt :

Would you like it in the admin track?

Cheryl Feldman:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt :

I’ll have to talk to that guy, he’s a real stickler.

Cheryl Feldman:

And so I’ve actually started putting together a document of a number of sessions we would love that I think admins would love to see how Setup with Agentforce works live for some of their most common use cases.

Mike Gerholdt :

Oh yeah, that would be a fun thing. Almost like, this’ll date me, like a Total Request Live.

Cheryl Feldman:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt :

Remember when MTV used to do that?

Cheryl Feldman:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt :

Just show up and shout out your requests and DJ Cheryl will make Agentforce solve your problems.

Cheryl Feldman:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt :

I like that.

Cheryl Feldman:

Now there’s going to be somebody listening who’s going to be like, “What’s TRL?”

Mike Gerholdt :

I know. That’s okay. I say a lot of things that date me, so that’s definitely not the first one, but you can Google it, it’s out there. Ask an AI about what TRL is and then you’ll slowly find out.

Cheryl, I appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule. I know you’re in more meetings than one should have on their calendar about this, but I truly do mean the stuff that you’re working on is just so impactful for people in their careers who are making a name for themselves inside of organizations and building their skill. Technology is such a fun ecosystem to work in and it’s so empowering when it works the way you want it to. And I feel like you work on the stuff that you’re making it work the way we all think it should work, so thank you.

Cheryl Feldman:

Thank you so much, Mike. And to all the admins out there, thank you for your support, so many of you give me great feedback. And also, I’m willing to take the hard feedback. I also really like when admins tell me, and I know you’re all not shy, tell me if there’s something we should be doing better. And I know we still have a ways to go, but I do want all of your feedback and I do value all of your feedback. And that’s why True to the Core, even as an employee, is still my favorite session at Dreamforce and TDX because we get the hard truths that we need to look at, and that’s something that’s always near and dear to my heart. I know we can’t do everything, but I do absolutely love hearing all of the feedback from the admin community.

Mike Gerholdt :

Absolutely. Thank you, Cheryl.

Huge thanks to Cheryl Feldman for walking us through where setup is headed and how Agentforce is opening the door to a more guided, intelligent admin experience. If you’re curious about what an agent-driven future looks like in your org, now is the time to experiment, explore, and share your feedback. This evolution of setup is being shaped by you, the Salesforce admins.

So don’t sit on the sidelines. Give the episode a listen, try it out in your org. If you enjoyed it, send it to another admin to see what they can think up next. Until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post The Future of Salesforce Setup Is Agent-Driven 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 to get started with Agent Script and how it helps admins build better AI agents.

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

Big changes are coming to how admins build AI agents with Salesforce, and so I’ve brought Josh Birk on the pod to help us understand what’s going on with the new Agentforce Builder.

There are backend updates to the Atlas Reasoning Engine, but Agent Script is where the rubber meets the road for admins. It’s a simple, high-level scripting language that lets you create complex instructions and actions for your agent to follow. Agent Script puts the human in the loop for all the little decisions an AI makes, helping you build more predictable and reliable agentic solutions.

If you’re comfortable with coding, you can pop open the hood with Script view, but there’s also a visual Canvas view to help you see how things fit together and make the changes you want. And as always, you can just tell the Agentforce assistant what you want your agent to be able to do, and it’ll list out suggestions for you to accept or decline.

The biggest question most admins have about the new Agent Builder is why they can’t just copy and paste their old agents into the new system. The answer is that the new version uses a completely different engine: hybrid reasoning. 

Josh uses the example of the transition to Lightning Web Components from Aura and Visualforce. LWC was created to align with modern web standards that simply didn’t exist when these older frameworks were developed.

The same principle applies to the new Agentforce Builder and the addition of Agent Script. The control that it gives you is a result of the hybrid reasoning engine it’s built around.

Josh’s biggest piece of advice is to take things slowly. The agents you’ve built in classic will still work fine, and just like with Visualforce, they’re not going to be sunset anytime soon. “Salesforce does not like taking away people’s toys,” Josh says, “you don’t need to be in a rush to go and recreate your existing agents in the new Agentforce Builder.”

Instead, try building new agents with Agent Script. It’ll give you a better idea of just how much more control and reliability is possible. And once you’ve gotten your feet wet, you’ll have a better idea of what you’ll get when you update your existing agents. As Josh says, “Don’t panic, learn Agent Script.”

There’s more great stuff from my conversation with Josh about Agent Script and the new Agentforce Builder, so be sure to take a listen. And make sure you’re subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Mike Gerholdt:

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

So Josh, welcome back to the podcast.

Josh Birk:

Mike Gerholdt:

Josh Birk:

Mike Gerholdt:

Josh Birk:

Mike Gerholdt:

Josh Birk:

Mike Gerholdt:

Josh Birk:

Mike Gerholdt:

Josh Birk:

Mike Gerholdt:

Josh Birk:

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.”

Mike Gerholdt:

Josh Birk:

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:

Josh Birk:

Mike Gerholdt:

Josh Birk:

Mike Gerholdt:

Josh Birk:

Mike Gerholdt:

Josh Birk:

Mike Gerholdt:

Josh Birk:

Mike Gerholdt:

Josh Birk:

Mike Gerholdt:

Josh Birk:

Mike Gerholdt:

Josh Birk:

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:

Josh Birk:

Mike Gerholdt:

Josh Birk:

Mike Gerholdt:

Josh Birk:

Mike Gerholdt:

Josh Birk:

Mike Gerholdt:

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:

Mike Gerholdt:

Josh Birk:

Mike Gerholdt:

Josh Birk:

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:

Josh Birk:

Mike Gerholdt:

Josh Birk:

Mike Gerholdt:

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:

Mike Gerholdt:

Josh Birk:

Mike Gerholdt:

Josh Birk:

Mike Gerholdt:

Josh Birk:

Mike Gerholdt:

Josh Birk:

Mike Gerholdt:

Josh Birk:

Mike Gerholdt:

Josh Birk:

Mike Gerholdt:

Josh Birk:

Mike Gerholdt:

Josh Birk:

Mike Gerholdt:

Josh Birk:

Mike Gerholdt:

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 Does Agent Script Give Admins More Control? 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 the new True to the Core Deep Dive sessions coming to TDX.

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

If you’ve been enjoying the True to the Core Deep Dive video series, we’ve got something exciting coming up for you at TDX. Each month, we host a virtual Q&A session with Salesforce product leaders about a topic chosen by the community. It’s a great opportunity to dig into tough use cases and thorny questions around a specific area of the platform.

The video series has been so helpful that we’re going to take it a step further. This year at TDX, in addition to the True to the Core Keynote, we’ll also host four live True to the Core Deep Dive sessions focused on specific topics like flow and automation. These will be can’t-miss conversations, and Kate Lessard is here to tell us what she has in store.

“The chance to actually connect directly with the Salesforce product leaders on those core platform topics is worth its weight in gold,” Kate says. It’s not just about solving problems; it’s about understanding the thinking behind why things work the way they do and where the product roadmap might be headed.

If you’re newer to the Salesforce ecosystem and worried that things might get too technical, Kate encourages you to check out these breakout sessions. “There’s a lot that you can gain from just being in the room, seeing who those product leaders are, hearing what’s top of mind for them, and how they’re answering questions,” she says.

You can better prepare for what’s coming next on the platform, and you never know when a random use case you came across might apply to you and your org. And even if you can’t be there in person, you can participate virtually on Salesforce+.

TDX is such a great opportunity to level up your technical skills and get to know the product better. One thing I used to do to prepare was conduct an audit of my Salesforce org. What products are we using? Where are we having problems? Where are we going next?

Figuring out what you’re interested in can help you make the most of your time at TDX. Hopefully, you’ll come back armed with information and insights to help your stakeholders chart a path forward with Salesforce.

Don’t forget to register for TDX to join us in person. Search “True to the Core Deep Dive” in the session catalog to view and favorite the four True to the Core Deep Dive sessions:

Listen to the full episode for more from my conversation with Kate about True to the Core Deep Dives at TDX, and be sure to catch her on Kate Clicks Through It. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Mike Gerholdt:

Welcome to Salesforce Admins podcast. This week I’m joined by Kate Lessard to talk about the brand new True to the Core Deep Dive sessions coming to TDX and why they might just be your favorite part of the event. We dig into how these sessions are shaped by community feedback, what Salesforce admins, especially the newer ones, can expect, and how to ask better questions to get some real value from our product leaders. Kate also shares some practical tips on preparing for TDX, so you walk away ahead of the curve. So with that, let’s get Kate on the podcast.

So Kate, welcome to the podcast.

Kate Lessard:

Thanks. Happy to be back, it’s been a while.

Mike Gerholdt:

It’s been a while, yes or no, except if people are attuned to our YouTube page. You’re on Shorts whenever I’m not publishing something about the podcast, so they’re staying up to date. It’s not like you’ve gone missing.

Kate Lessard:

No, no. I love being able to just share those top of minds and the things that are important or the lessons that we’re learning as we really dive into Agentforce and all of the different things that we’re learning over here, especially we just went through a new release and there are always fun new features to call out.

Mike Gerholdt:

Constantly. And we’re heading into spring and spring means, besides new release, TDX.

Kate Lessard:

Yeah. That’s an exciting time of year.

Mike Gerholdt:

I think so because it’s kind of our shake the winter off, go out, see some fresh demos and some new stuff. I know as we’re recording this podcast, kind of content is in flight and things are being worked on and ironed on, and so is it fair to say sneak peek or I forget, we use all these terms and sneak peek means something, but you have stuff in the works for TDX that you’re working on that we’re going to talk about.

Kate Lessard:

Yeah, so I am working on deep dives, which is really exciting. So you might have been following along and watching our recent True to the Core Deep Dive virtual series, and we are bringing True to the Core Deep Dives to TDX as well, so that is what I have been working on lately.

Mike Gerholdt:

Wow. So tell us more about deep dive. If somebody hasn’t seen any video or anything about deep dives, what are they?

Kate Lessard:

So deep dives are really focused on diving deeper into community driven core Salesforce platform topics. So the virtual sessions, our community actually provides feedback and guides what those topics are. So they’ve been chosen using input from things like the idea exchange, past in-person True to the Core keynote sessions, as well as our virtual True to the Core sessions and feedback that the community shares. So it really gives the community a chance to guide the conversation and ask the questions that are really important to them.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, and you said True the core, which is always a popular session for anybody attending our events.

Kate Lessard:

And the thing about that True to the Core keynote, to just hop in there.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, no, no, no.

Kate Lessard:

It is, it’s really popular. I remember as an admin, it was one that I never wanted to miss. And whether I had a question to ask or whether I wanted to just sit back and listen and hear what other people were asking and get ideas and cheer with them on the different wins and things that we got approved and that we saw progress on, it’s so short that time flies by and inevitably there’s just not enough time. You always have people that are still lined up and waiting to ask questions. And then we also have people that are submitting questions online, so there’s no way to get to all of them, and I feel like these deep dives give us a chance to actually continue the conversation about certain large topics, things like flow and automation that people can come in and they can specifically ask their flow and automation questions that don’t get covered during the keynote because there’s just not enough time.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Well, that’s the beauty of like the times I’ve been at user groups where you sit down and somebody says, “We’re trying to do X, Y, and Z.” And you go around the table like a bird’s of a feather and you hear three different ways to do it and that person’s face is like, “Ugh.” And you kind of have to reassure them like there’s three different ways to do it, all three are right, but the one that’s right for you is the most right, which is why I think the True to the Core stuff is always so interesting because you kind of get people coming in with those edge cases.

Kate Lessard:

Absolutely. And the chance to actually connect directly with the Salesforce product leaders on those core platform topics, that’s worth it’s weight and gold I feel like because our community can get clarity on both upcoming features and some of the thinking behind the roadmap decisions and feel much more connected to the product and like they’re participating and influencing these future releases by asking these questions and by sharing feedback, it’s really important and impactful.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, and that’s the … Our product leaders are presenting at a lot of our events, but TDX, I know having worked on the track, they are really heavy into all of the product people. So the chances of you going to a session on flow or on Agent Builder or Lightning Web components, the chances of you seeing the product manager present and talk about that is really high at this event, moreso than a world tour or, well, Dreamforce, there’s just a problem of you need like 100 of you to go to all the sessions.

Kate Lessard:

Yeah, absolutely. And to run across all of San Francisco it feels like to get to all the sessions on your agenda.

Mike Gerholdt:

You put the Dreamforce marathon on your step tracker.

Kate Lessard:

Yep. Wear your running shoes, you’re going to need them.

Mike Gerholdt:

So True to the Core started a long, long time ago, way back when Salesforce launched Chatter, which was like, Hey, are you paying attention to the core features? Let’s break this down. If you’re a new Salesforce admin and you’re like, “So do I go to this True to the Core Deep Dive?” I could foresee somebody sitting there and being like, “I don’t understand why they’re cheering, why we get email updates when flows error out or like a obscure feature.” If you were a new Salesforce admin and you’re going to the True to the Core Deep Dive session, what should you expect?

Kate Lessard:

If you’re a new admin and you’re kind of hesitant to go, I would encourage you to just go check it out and sit there and listen. Even if you don’t have a specific question that you want to ask, I think that there’s a lot that you can gain from just being in the room, seeing who those product leaders are, hearing what’s top of mind for them and how they’re answering questions because they’re going to get questions about how they’ve built things and what’s coming next and being able to have that insight so that you can start to think, “Oh, this is how I do this now and maybe I’m new to this, but this is what is being developed, this is what is being worked on, this is what’s on the roadmap, this is kind of the future state.”

I feel like it helps you become a better admin and prepare for what’s coming next as well as to get some really insight into those use cases, as you mentioned, at community groups that get discussed so frequently because people will come with specific use cases and things that they’ve run into and really specific questions as well. And I just think it’s a ton of information to take in and just being in the room is really helpful as a new admin.

Mike Gerholdt:

I couldn’t agree more. Let’s talk about, you said questions about 100 times.

Kate Lessard:

Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, I point it out because I’ve done a lot of webinars, this is going to date me, Jesus, back in the AM/FM radio days. What’s that? But I’ve done a lot of webinars, a lot of live events, like release [inaudible 00:08:39] live, a lot of Q&A stuff. I’ve even done Q@A’s after presentations. You’ve done a lot with this True to the Core content. For people going to TDX or people asking questions at these events, what is your advice on how to get the most out of it for just yourself and for everybody in the room?

Kate Lessard:

That is a great question and there I go using the question word again.

Mike Gerholdt:

That’s okay.

Kate Lessard:

I think that how you ask a question is really important, and we do, even as we do the True to the Core Deep Dive virtual series, we even cover how to ask a good question and context is going to be key. If it’s a specific use case, provide as much information and context as possible. If you know what specific feature or even which product manager you have a question for, being able to call them out and giving that information, super helpful. If not, we’ll get there. We do have our product leaders that will be on stage and they’ll pull in the different product managers that might be able to answer that question for you. But I think that context and just having a well-thought-out use case with all of the information that you want to bring into the question is going to be the most important thing.

Mike Gerholdt:

Do you often run into, because I would sit in these sessions a lot and be like, “Oh, I totally want to ask a question, but everybody’s going to think it’s silly”?

Kate Lessard:

Yeah, no silly questions, right? I think that that’s always a concern for all of us. We want to be seen as subject matter experts in front of our peers. But if you have a question, even if you think it’s silly, like nine times out of 10 somebody else has that question, and maybe it’s even something that one of those newer admins in the room that’s just there to listen and gain exposure, they have no idea. And you’re going to be bringing that to light and getting answers for yourself and for a number of other people.

So I always say that there are no questions you shouldn’t ask, and there are different ways that you can ask them as well. I think if you’re in the room, you can get up and ask the questions at the mic. We’re going to have a way to submit questions online, and that way we’ll also be able to bring in community members who aren’t in person. So this will be on Salesforce+ for people to watch as well. So I think that just deciding what way you’re comfortable asking the questions is just going to be important for you, but get the answers that you need.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I think back to some of the True to the Cores that I would attend as a customer, and sometimes it’s really making friends with the people sitting around you and talking with them because there have been times when just happenstance I had an issue and the person sitting next to me is like, “Oh, I’ve run into that too. You know who you need to talk to?” And then they’ll tell you and it actually saves you from getting up and asking a question and moving to another question. And then you found somebody in the audience that you can be a session buddy with, so I think that’s super important.

Kate, when you were heading to a session like this as a customer, what would some of the homework be? Because admins have about, oh my, 40, is it 45 days to the TDX? I think it’s about 45 days.

Kate Lessard:

Yeah, it’s coming quick.

Mike Gerholdt:

What should they be doing for homework to get ready for sessions like this?

Kate Lessard:

Well, we’ve never had a session quite like this before, so that’s kind of a trick question. But I would say for all sessions in general, get on to the sessions on the TDX website and pick out the ones that are going to be most impactful to you. There’s just so much there, it’s impossible to attend and do them all. So pick the ones where you have questions, where you need more information, where you really want the chance to communicate directly and hear from those product leaders because as you called out, that really is the thing at TDX that makes it different, that makes it special. The opportunity to actually have those conversations with the product managers, with the product leaders and to get to know the product better, it really ups your technical skills.

Mike Gerholdt:

I couldn’t agree more. I always feel like I was doing somewhat of a technical audit before I’d head to an event, just to know what I had on my company’s roadmap and some of the features that maybe I was running into that I had issues with to come back, and it’s always nice to check those off and take notes.

Kate Lessard:

Yeah, that technical audit, that’s a really great point that I think that people should consider. Do an audit of your system. What are you using? What are you having issues with? Talk to your users about things that they might have questions about or struggles they might have. And really talk to your stakeholders as well about what their vision is for the future. Because you might be able to go to sessions and get information about products that you don’t have but that you’re considering and being able to come back and provide that information and a recommendation of either, “Yes, we should move forward,” or, “This is the implementation plan,” or, “This is the guidance that I got on this,” I think that that is going to be hugely impactful for your organization.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, especially when they say, “So what did you learn? How much did this event cost us?” And you’re like, “Well, I got to talk to these people and holy cow, I’m like four months ahead of the learning curve.”

Last question, how did you balance in-person sessions versus broadcast sessions and repeat sessions? What was your strategy?

Kate Lessard:

I think that with these deep dive sessions, the goal was to give people as much opportunity as possible to answer or to get their questions answered and to get that live time. So our goal is to have this after the True to the Core keynote so that if people were waiting in line or had questions that they were unable to ask, that they can come to these deep dive sessions and they can continue the conversation and really get the information that they need.

So thinking of that, we really were particular about the topics we chose and made sure that we went to the idea exchange and we went to our survey results we get from the True to the Core Deep Dive sessions, the ones that are done virtually, where people provide feedback about what they want to hear more about or where they have questions. And really just trying to give that space for people to be able to come in and continue the conversation. So because of that, all four of our sessions will be on Salesforce+, and then we’ve tried to kind of divide what will be able to be live versus video on demand so that we can reach the broadest amount of people.

Mike Gerholdt:

Makes sense. Kate, you have a series on YouTube. You want to talk about it real quick? Because I feel like it’s a really cool thing that, as a follow-up to this podcast, people can click over and watch some fun YouTube videos.

Kate Lessard:

Absolutely. So I am very much a person who learns by doing, as I think many Salesforce admins are. We want to really get hands-on with the different features that we’re learning about, that we’re delivering to our organizations and become those subject matter experts.

So I have a series on YouTube, it’s called Kate Clicks Through It, where we take one of these backend processes and we actually walk through it step by step, and I give you a chance to be in either a developer edition or a Trailhead Playground and actually follow along and click along beside me so that you can get hands-on versus just watching a demo and then trying to go and replicate it.

And it’s been really fun to do. I get to dive into these different topics that I think are really important for admins. And they can go ahead and do it along with me, learn by doing. And they’re pretty short and sweet, they’re all under 10 minutes so that our admins can go ahead and click through it with me on a lunch break or if they’re in between meetings or if they just want a little bit of fun learning outside of their regular workday.

Mike Gerholdt:

I like it. It’s awesome. Kate, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Kate Lessard:

It is my pleasure. I hope to see everyone. I know I’ll see you, but I hope to see all of our awesome admins at TDX and hopefully in these True to the Core Deep Dive sessions. Be sure to add them as favorites when you go and look at your sessions on the TDX site.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, I want to thank Kate for coming on and helping us get prepped for the new True to the Core sessions. And I think they’re going to give you a chance to really lean in. I think she gave you some really good advice on how to ask better questions. And most importantly, just connect with the people around you and what you’re doing. So huge thanks to her for helping break that down on what to expect and how to show up prepared.

Now, if you’re heading to TDX, make sure you favorite those sessions. And if you can attend in person, don’t forget they’ll be on Salesforce+.

Now, if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to share it with your Salesforce admin friends so they can get their questions ready too. And until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post What Are True to the Core Deep Dives at TDX? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Gaurang Mathur, Senior Product Manager on the AI App Development team at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about how Setup with Agentforce is changing the way admins create, modify, and understand formulas.

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

If you’re like me, you’ve spent more time than you’d like combing through your formulas for missing parentheses and commas. That’s where this week’s guest, Gaurang Mathur, comes in. As a Senior Product Manger on the AI App Development team at Salesforce, he’s trying to make formulas a little easier for admins with Setup with Agentforce.

According to Gaurang, there are 5 billion formulas executed on Salesforce each month. They’re created, managed, and modified by 7 million admins and developers. The scale of formulas is truly massive, and they’re a fundamental building block of Salesforce. However, that means they’re difficult to work with, and that’s where the Setup with Agentforce beta comes in.

We know that AI is really good at summarizing, debugging, and processing large amounts of information very quickly. Setup with Agentforce lets admins harness those agentic powers to make formulas easier to work with. You can diagnose problems, change an automation, or add something new.

Gaurang sees Setup with Agentforce as a game-changer for admins working with inherited orgs. If something isn’t working or you need to make changes, you’re usually spending hours wading through formulas to sort out what’s essential and what’s just buried tech debt.

With the beta, you’ll be able to get a helping hand from an AI agent that can validate, describe, and even fix your formulas. Instead of having to figure out what does what, you can focus on making decisions and building something that works faster than ever before.

As far as what’s coming next, Gaurang thinks that AI will continue to amplify what we can build in Salesforce. As he points out, we’ve actually been using AI for almost a decade in things like navigation apps, recommendations, and even autocorrect. There’s no reason to be intimidated.

Looking forward, his team is looking at ways to use AI to collect feedback and make adjustments that make it even easier to work with and more powerful for users.

Make sure to listen to the full episode for more from Gaurang about formulas and Setup with Agentforce. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Mike:

So Gaurang is going to share with us how agents can validate, fix, and describe formulas right inside setup, and why that matters, especially if you’ve inherited an org or you need to do something super fast. We also touch on Agentforce Vibes, which you heard in last week’s episode with Tiaan and some developer workflows and kind of what it means to build smarter with tools using AI. So if you’re like me and you’ve ever stared at missing parentheses and wondered why your formula won’t save, this episode’s for you. And with that, let’s get Gaurang on the podcast. So, Gaurang, welcome to the podcast.

Gaurang Mathur:

Mike:

Gaurang Mathur:

And over the past five years, I’ve also managed products in the Experience Cloud Search space, and now I’m currently managing two Agentic products, which is again, hardcore platform products meant for our Salesforce admins and developers, the superheroes in the whole ecosystem of Salesforce.

Mike:

Gaurang Mathur:

We are part of this whole group called as AIF Dev. That’s where we’ve got Tiaan, I think one of the other guests in the previous podcast, Cheryl, and Manish. These are the folks that I’m working with, and excited to be in this whole space in the current year.

Mike:

Gaurang Mathur:

Mike:

Gaurang Mathur:

So almost on a monthly basis, there are five billion formulas that get executed across Salesforce orgs, and seven million admins and developers manage, create new formulas, or modify formulas every month. So that scale is fairly huge, and these formula engines and formulas are supported across almost 40 odd Salesforce services, which includes flows, business rule engines, SLAs, fields, validation rules and whatnot. So like I said, the scale is fairly huge, and we’ve seen admins using it, developers using it, building formulas quite often, but there has been a constant ask and problems that we’ve seen that admins figure out as is creating them. Somebody is coming up in a new org, and then just trying to modify those formulas. So those scenarios have been quite error-prone and time-consuming processes, and sometimes challenging for admins.

So with agents coming in, we asked admins, “How do you see agents helping you, and what is that agents should do for you?” And among the top 10 asks, managing formulas was right number three and four. So that led us all to make a dedicated decision and team that we should be improving and working towards creating a better formula management experience for our admins with the set up with Agentforce that’s coming in. And we did a few releases. I mean, it was one of the few things that we did for formulas, I mean, almost year back.

And now with the beta coming in for setup with Agentforce, it’s right up front and center. So back to your question then, “What exactly we are doing?” So we are, as part of this beta that’s coming up in TDX, we are giving options to create a formula through a set up with Agentforce agent, modify it, fix it, and let it also describe what this formula is. So yeah.

Mike:

Gaurang Mathur:

And out there, you have a formula, which is helping you calculate the number of attendees that are there, the volunteers that are going to be participating in that event. And you have all that formula baked in and all that, but suddenly, the admin who was walking on that leaves, or there is change, and now you are on your own and you just have to just kind of get things going, because your event is coming in, or there is some business requirement that comes in. So it gets difficult for anybody to just jump in and get going right off the bat. In this case, we are coming up with modifying a formula, wherein when you see this formula there and you open the agent through the setup page, the formula page, out there, the first thing that the agent does is it’s just simply validating the formula and helping you understand what this formula does. Once you get that, now it basically helps you understand and comprehend, “Oh, this is what this formula is, these are the conditions, this is what it’ll do.”

Now, when you have to make some modifications, you can now just simply prompt it, and then the agent does the rest of the job for you in a very quick and easy way. So this is something that’s really profound, and while we were sharing it with our early users, that was a welcome, and I’m hoping the community has to see, and they’ll listen, try it out, and then figure out what it does.

Mike:

Gaurang Mathur:

Mike:

Gaurang Mathur:

Mike:

Gaurang Mathur:

So what we did was we were doing something that you even find today in Google search, when you put in a search query, you get a snippet at the top itself, which basically summarizes or creates an answer for a query. Ultimately, the answer is basically based on the search results that are floated, and then you get that summary. So that was the first time that I learned about RAGs, and RAG is Regressive Automated Generation, and all the AI technologies that are there. So I use those, and now I’m kind of applying them again in terms of creating the vibes, metadata experts that we are doing, the MCPs that I talked about. Again, we’re trying to apply the same principles in terms of there is an utterances there, “What do you best, you should be focusing on, such that the metadata that it’s generated is relevant, is relevant to the prompt, and it’s of best quality?”

Mike:

Gaurang Mathur:

Mike:

Gaurang Mathur:

Mike:

Gaurang Mathur:

I think this is where it is picked up as a mainstream for one and all, and yeah. I mean, with that, there are multiple applications that have come into, which is as we as a platform, teams are focusing on, or helping in terms of coding and generation of different codes, and configuration and all that happens. AI applications, again, coming into, I see the latest LLM models generating it, and then helping in terms of the legal services, and helping in terms of the healthcare services, helping in terms of the technology services, and where else there have been multiple applications. So you can just vibe, you can just ask the agents, and then you get appropriate collaterals developed and things that can be done.

Mike:

Gaurang Mathur:

All humans are involved in that, but I think that’s inevitable. It’s bound to happen, and then I see a lot of front-end model company’s doing that today.

Mike:

Gaurang Mathur:

Mike:

Gaurang Mathur:

I mean, that’s basically a fundamental building block that will be used, and ecosystems are built on top of it. That’s how … I mean, agents will be using those formulas to function better as part of the Agentforce scripts, if that’s one thing that we have as a product. We are coming up with in terms of, “How do you define certain logics based on certain utterances? What should be the logic that should be executed? What should be the operators?”

And based on that, we’re just trying to define that flow of things, and then all that. So again, that’s some derivative of formulas to what I just described. Yeah. Like I said, formula’s a fundamental building block. At least I don’t foresee it getting replaced completely.

Mike:

Gaurang Mathur:

Mike:

Gaurang Mathur:

Mike:

Gaurang Mathur:

Mike:

Gaurang Mathur:

Mike:

Gaurang Mathur:

Mike:

Gaurang Mathur:

But to your point, I mean, they may be that gibberish, or the beep, beep, beeps, or the whatever text we write in some other factor. You’ll definitely need basic maths, and that’s what formulas does.

Mike:

Gaurang Mathur:

Mike:

The post How Do I Understand a Complex Salesforce Formula Quickly? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Tiaan Kruger, Senior Director of Product Management at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about Agentforce Vibes and what it really means to build with AI on the Salesforce platform.

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

If you caught the Admin Keynote at Dreamforce ’25, you might recognize Tiaan from his Setup with Agentforce and Slackbot demos. Right now, he’s looking at new ways to help admins expand their toolkits with Agentforce Vibes.

As Tiaan explains, Agentforce Vibes is developing so rapidly that it often surprises the people who build it. When one of his team members was building a React demo that featured a dashboard, they realized it would look pretty boring without some sample data. They asked the Vibes Agent to spin something up, and it delivered (after a few tries).

“These agents surprise even us,” Tiaan says, “we’re still discovering where its power lies and where its potentials are.” And that’s why it’s a good time to look ahead at how Vibes will change the game for admins.

“When I was a customer developer, we always had a two-year backlog,” Tiaan says. Even with a big team, there’s always too much to do and you’re constantly accumulating technical debt. This kind of grunt work is where he sees Agentforce Vibes making a big difference, which gives you more space to look at the bigger picture.

Tiaan points to Code Analyzer as an example. You can use it to quickly scan your org and identify where there are performance or security issues that you should take a closer look at. An admin might not be able to fix it themselves, but they can hand it off to a developer team and speed up the process.

There are also some exciting things coming with React and Agentforce, which will allow you to create compelling, high-quality UIs for your apps. It’s all about giving you more tools to get the ball rolling and build apps faster than ever before.

In order to get the most out of these new features, you need to make it easy for agents to understand what’s going on in your org.

“If you don’t have good descriptions on everything in your org,” Tiaan says, “please, for the love of donuts, fill those fields in.” Having good metadata will help you get the most out of everything Agentforce has to offer. The future is bright, so Salesforce Admins need to get ready.

Make sure to listen to the full episode for more from Tiaan about how Agentforce Vibes will help admins. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

Mike Gerholdt:

So Tiaan, welcome to the podcast.

Tiaan Kruger:

Mike Gerholdt:

Tiaan Kruger:

Mike Gerholdt:

Tiaan Kruger:

So yeah, absolutely. So the work that we showed on stage continues at the same pace internally. And we’re just trying to figure out how do we bring AI to everybody, make sure that everybody can feel the lift of this incredible technology.

Mike Gerholdt:

Tiaan Kruger:

And he realized that a dashboard with no data is really boring. It’s just not very interesting to look at. And so he thought, “Maybe I should ask Vibes if it can produce me some sample data.” Not knowing if it could or not. And so he asked it to do it and it went off and turns out it generated an anonymous Apex file that actually tried it to load all the records with data. And it tried it, failed, found a bug, fixed it, did it again, found a bug, fixed it, and then successfully inserted a bunch of data. And that’s just one of the stories of how these agents surprise even us. We have this technology, we’ve put it in these tools and we see the incredible things it can do. But even with all that, we’re still discovering where its power lays and where its potentials are.

And so that’s really where I’m focused right now is like, how do I make sure that, more often than not, you actually get a good result out of it, right? Make it so it has to retry less or debug less. And so that’s a big focus for us right now.

Mike Gerholdt:

Tiaan Kruger:

But if you are focused, you are looking at problem solving around a particular application or a particular business case, it is actually getting extraordinarily good at producing not just a good backend and a good data model, but also producing incredibly compelling UI, which is actually why we are bringing React to the platform. If you are an admin and you’re like, “What’s React? I haven’t heard about React. What is this thing?” It’s just a way to build WebUI, but it turns out, because there’s so much examples of it, so many examples of them on the web, the agents are incredibly good at producing incredibly high quality UI with that.

So to answer your question more succinctly, I don’t think that future’s all that far away because it’s already starting to show up. And there’s consumer applications and mobile applications that’s out there where, for the end user, they can start vibing the mobile app that they want just with AI, just having conversations. There’s incredible tools out there that’s starting to emerge. And that exact same wave needs to come to the enterprise. We need to unlock that incredible innovation of the fact that you don’t have necessarily software created for you that kind of meets you where you’re at, but really, truly have agents create software for you that is absolutely what you need locally to solve your problems.

So we’re getting closer to it every single day. And I think the closer we get to it, the faster it’s accelerating.

Mike Gerholdt:

Tiaan Kruger:

All the work I’m doing right now is more for pro code, but we are going to start exposing it later this year for admins. As the system is producing configuration software, we are taking it through a specification phase, a plan phase. And in that plan phase, we’re feeding it all kinds of rules and guidelines in terms of how we wanted to build an architect for you when it’s constructing the experience, right? Not just the UI, but also the backend. How you want fields named, et cetera. So there’s ways that you can feed rules into the system. So that’s how we’re starting to help it architect from the get go. That’s one way.

Second way is, as part of those experts or rules that we’re providing, we can actually also guide its hand when it’s creating solutions. So if you’re creating a lightning app or you are creating a flow, we can actually guide the agent’s hand a little bit and say like, “This is the right way to build it or the best way to build it.” But even with all that, if you generate an application or you generate a capability, you still need on the flip side to actually test it. And so that’s the other areas where we are looking at, starting to develop more tools and actually add more tools to the pipeline, which is what we call validation.

Once you’ve actually produced… Let’s use the example of a web app, right? I produced a web app that created custom UI for me. How do I know that that is accessible and it is secure and it is performant? These are all things that you can measure and test, right? And so that is absolutely parts of the tools that we are looking at building and we’re developing a number of those that’s going to help people not just build random things, but actually guide the agent’s hand to build good quality, best practices style material.

Mike Gerholdt:

And the GPS actually took me down a road. It was a highway and I was like, “Okay, cool. I know this highway connects to the next highway that gets me back home.” But in two miles, it had me get off on an exit and get back on the interstate.

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I’m a big fan of full self-driving capabilities being added to vehicles. And I’ve had some different features on the cars that I’ve owned, and some of them more beta than others. And you have to do the supervising thing, right? The car will do the right thing nine out of 10 times, but that 10th time is really scary. You better be ready to grab your steering wheel. It’s that kind of behavior. You’re getting somewhere a lot more rested because you’re not doing as much of the grunt work, but it frees up some of your mind to focus on some of the bigger picture. And so that’s really what I’m looking and hoping that we’re going to see.

I’m seeing it happen already to developers here internally. I’m hoping that’s going to happen for our customers as well. So as we put more of these tools in their hands, that is going to do some of that grunt work, like building a trigger that is very well set up to do batching, for instance. And I’m sorry, it’s a developer analogy. I get it. But there’s a particular way you build triggers. And if you don’t do it right, it’s going to cause you performance issues or it limits. That’s just going to start being natural. You don’t have to think about that. So now that frees up some of your focus to say, “Okay, how can I build this better for my customer? How can I focus on actually producing more value for them?”

When I was a customer developer, we always had a two-year backlog. And business, we turned business requests away all the time because we could not get to everything. And we had giant teams doing this stuff. So the benefits of learning the platform, understanding the details, understanding if the agent is trying to turn you onto a lake, that doesn’t go away. That continues to be there. Understanding the deep, complex context of what your business needs. The agent’s not there yet. So that transformation, that translation layer is more important than ever to make sure that, again, the grunt work can be done by the agent, but that understanding, that comprehension, the translation, I think, is more and more important than ever for our admins and for our developers out there in the community.

Mike Gerholdt:

Would you envision a time when maybe Agentforce Vibes or another product could say, “Whoa, stop. We need to reevaluate this first and fix the foundation before we go building seven more stories on top of this house?”

Tiaan Kruger:

And it’s actually doing a fair job with that already. Make this React app work for mobile is something else you can do. So there’s already some tech debt you can actually tackle with agents very successfully. They tend to be a little bit more focused right now in the sense that it’s a single page or a single component or a single code file or a couple of code files. I don’t even have to say maybe. The answer is, absolutely that capability is going to continue to go further and further. The more the agent is able to understand what’s going on in your org, the more the agent is able to grasp and understand what your org does.

And this is a call-out for you. If you don’t have good descriptions on everything in your org, please, please, for the love of donuts, fill those fields in. And I know we all love to put description and description. But if you actually go put in good quality descriptions in these things, you can actually get so much better help from the agent actually understanding what your org means. When you just have four fields named contract number, it’s really difficult for the agent to know which one to use. But if you label them more carefully, you put it in the help and the metadata, you’re going to help agents help you.

So tech debt is going to get easier to resolve. No question. It’s already happening. It’s only going to get better. It’s the worst it’s ever going to be right now. I could truly say this because I’m seeing it happen. And I think we’re eventually going to get to a place… Again, I’ll give you an internal example. We have a lot of Aura components. I know I probably shouldn’t say that out loud, but we do. And we are working at fever pace to actually convert them to Lightning Web Components to LWCs. Again, developer specific terms, but just the different component frameworks that we’re moving to more of an open standard.

And we used to have to do it by hand. This is huge tech debt for us. And AI is literally having one team do hundreds of components in a month where they used to be able to do a handful. This is real tech debt help, right? So that is absolutely going to come and it’s going to show up for admins as Cheryl. You talked about Cheryl in the beginning, right? She’s a superhero of mine. I absolutely love working with her. I love watching how she works with the community. I’m always learning something from her. She recently actually helped me with the use cases. If any of the people listening got to talk to her, thank you for giving her some information. She’s just fantastic.

And so as the setup agent becomes more and more capable, it is absolutely going to help you identify tech debt, first of all, but second of all, actually help you resolve that tech debt in faster and easier ways that you’ve ever been able to do.

Mike Gerholdt:

Tiaan Kruger:

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And it’s fascinating to work with these kids and see them learn. And now AI and agents are coming in for these kids, right? And they’re trying to figure out, “Where do I use it? When is it cheating? When is it actually allowed in helping me?” So that’s been a fascinating twist to that. But you know what? There’s still something really satisfying about building things with your hands. We have some people that speed in my neighborhood. Sorry to call them out, but they do.

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The post How Agentforce Vibes Is Changing How Salesforce Admins Build Apps 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 the human in the loop is key to building reliable, predictable AI.

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

It seems like every week, there’s a new headline about an AI agent doing something it shouldn’t. As Josh explains, that’s because we’re still in the process of understanding AI as a tool. That’s why we sat down to discuss how to build predictable, reliable solutions in Agentforce.

When an agent behaves non-deterministically, it’s usually because there weren’t enough guardrails in place. The thing is, if you’re building an AI agent to do everything, it’s hard to control what it can and cannot do.

Josh’s advice is to narrow the scope of your agent and build it for a very specific purpose. This makes it easier to build guardrails and also allows you to test it thoroughly before release.

When it comes to testing, there’s an old programming joke that comes to mind. A QA engineer walks into a bar. He orders a drink. He orders five drinks. He orders zero drinks. He orders infinite drinks. He orders a horse. However, when the first real customer walks in and asks where the bathroom is, the entire bar bursts into flames.

As Josh explains, it’s important to test for all sorts of weird edge cases and make sure your agent performs predictably. But it’s even more important to think things through from the user’s perspective so you don’t miss something that should be obvious. AI can do extraordinary things, but you still need a human in the loop.

Josh emphasizes that the first part of testing is planning: “What are the Ifs? What are the Thens? What are the things you absolutely don’t want it to do?” The more specifically you can answer these questions, the easier it will be to build and test agentic solutions that are predictable and reliable.

The most effective AI agents aren’t autonomous solutions. They’re tools that give the humans who use them superpowers. You still need a human in the loop to make sure they’re used for good.

Be sure to listen to my full conversation with Josh for more about testing and building in Agentforce. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch a new episode every Thursday.

Mike:

So, Josh, welcome back to the podcast.

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But now it’s like, I’m like, “Hey…” I think it was Gemini. I’m like, “Hey, Gemini, my wife would like to go shopping, we would like to go eating, and I have an interest in museums and aquariums,” and it’s like, “Here’s your day.” And I’m like, “Can you add that to my calendar?” And it’s like, it’s added to your calendar. And I’m like, it’s moving so fast. My dark humor side of me just can’t keep up because I don’t know what I can make fun of AI anymore because it just keeps getting better.

Mike:

I recently, coming off of, I think it was last week, I wrote a blog post about service assistant, and to me it just felt so frictionless because it was easy to put in all of the prompts for the user and kind of really give AI this single mindset and repeatable, but not… I’m still trying to work through deterministic and that stuff. It felt, yes, I know what it’s going to tell me and it’s not going to go off the rails. And that, to me, felt so much more comforting if I was an admin trying to roll something out as opposed to, “Okay, I turned on Agentforce. Now ask it a question,” and you know you’re going to have that one user that’s like, “I asked it for the nearest Mexican taco place,” and you’re like, “Bob…” Because it’d be Bob in sales that would say that.

Josh Birk:

Mike:

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And even when you and I were talking AI and doing workshops together, I’m like, “We’re seeing a data set we’ve given you. But remember, these answers will change if you have 1 record, 5 record, 500 records, 750 records, 250 which should be archived and 300 of which you don’t want.” It’s like, your dataset will always matter no matter how smart and predictable your AI gets.

Mike:

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What you have as an admin is the ability to then start… So assume Salesforce… Trust is our number one, right? So we’ve already given you a very reasonable starting place to have a professional-sounding AI. Now take that and start building towards your use case. What are the ifs? What are thens? What are the things you absolutely don’t want it to do? And now we’re making it even easier to hand it off to a human. So we’re really preaching autonomy. An AI can help you find a hotel and it can help you do this, but at some point you want to make sure that the human stays in the loop. So I know we’re talking about testing, but I think the first part of testing is planning, and it’s that level of planning that’s going to let you be like, “Did my ifs, thens, and dos and don’ts, did they actually work correctly?”

Mike:

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Mike:

I think one of the things I was talking to you about is memory bleed. If Sally asks something a hundred times, then the 101st time, it’s just going to assume, “Oh, you’re asking me about this and not something else.”

Josh Birk:

The example I gave in one of the keynotes… So I know we talked about not making this too dark, but I’m just going to bring up… So one of the reasons this keynote came up was because I would go to conferences and people kept wanting to talk about these kind of brazen theories of AI. And remember, AI’s not new, so a lot of these theories have been around for a while, which is great because they’re all kind of cautionary tales. And one of the cautionary tales is the paperclip maximizer, and to make that long story short, it’s an AI whose sole purpose is to create paperclips. And without guardrails, without a human saying, “Don’t start wars. Don’t burn down rainforests,” because remember at its core, an AI is not an ethical machine, it will burn down rainforests.

Mike:

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But I think the real, I wouldn’t call it human in the loop, but it’s almost like the check-in factor is… So once you have your agent built, and once you have maybe service assistant up there on the screen, who are the two or three users you’re checking back into to say, “So how’s this going,” and then sitting with them in their environment? And I figured that out really fast when I had to go to a call center. Because at a call center, you get all kinds of different attitudes, you get all kinds of different personalities, and it’s chaotic. And some people’s desks are sterile like an operating table because they need that, and some people have 10,000 beanie babies and, what are those, Labubus all over the place and stickers, and it’s very chaotic, and you’re like, “Oh, I didn’t test Agentforce.”

Josh Birk:

Mike:

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No, I think that’s an excellent point. And also, I think it brings up, too, because I have grown angry with customer support when the customer support was a really bad IVT system, and that’s really honestly like… If you want to abuse your customer support staff, give your customers a really horrible automated system. And that is the first way… And the first human I talked to, I had to be like, “I’m angry, but not at you,” because I knew I was so angry at the time, I wasn’t going to be calming down really quickly.

But I think that plays into… First of all, the idea of Agentforce is that it’s supposed to give you this very natural conversation. And second of all, kind of on the flip side, is a good kind of a memory bleed, it’s supposed to remember and retain what was being talked about. So there’s that classic, you call your phone company, the first thing they ask you is your phone number, and you’re kind of like, “You should know that.” And then you put in your phone number, and then you do 15 things, and it figures out, “I can’t do anything,” and it calls a human, the first thing the human asks you is your phone number. It’s like, “This is not fun. This is not a productive use of my time right now.” And we really try to resolve that, noting things like the human gets a transcript of what was talking about as well. They get a little AI summary of like, “This is what’s wrong with the customer,” kind of thing.

But I think to your point, you don’t necessarily know how that plays out until the rubber hits the road. What are the right points for the agent to go in and have autonomy, and then what are the right points for the human to jump in and be that actual person that somebody can talk to?

Mike:

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Mike:

And it was funny because nobody had gone through, what happens if we ship half an order? And I get that… And this is the same for what admins deal with too. There is infinite possibilities of ways that an item can end up in a customer’s hands different than what was intended. But I feel like when they put things in there, nobody was just like, “What happens if they type half an order?” I literally got, “One of this, expected two. One of this, expected two,” and it gets down to the end and it’s like, “Yeah, I can’t help you with that. Transferring you to chat,” and then the chat didn’t carry over any of the information. I was like, “Okay. I mean, I love that you guys are trying this, but did nobody test this?”

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I think what’s interesting is we very rapidly, at least in my perception, have gone through AI is taking our jobs to it’s not. And here’s what I posit for this year. I actually think AI could lead us to full employment. And if you’ve ever studied macroeconomics, full employment isn’t every single person having a job. That’s theoretically impossible. But it’s the smallest percentage of the workforce unemployed as possible.

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And so here’s what I get at it could be better customer service. Then the person who opens up the window, instead of just being like, “Hey,” or like, “22.16,” because that’s how much it is for everything nowadays, “22.16,” they just kind of look at you, now they can be having a good day and they can turn and be like, “Hi, Mike,” because they know my name, and be like, “It’s 22.16,” and they can take my card and they can pay, and they can be like, “Here’s your food,” and it’s 100% correct. You can be a happy person working at your job because AI helped you out, and then you’re not grumpy like, “Ugh, this job sucks.” Right?

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The post The Importance of Human in the Loop for Agentforce appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Cheryl Feldman, Senior Director of Product Management at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about how Agentforce will make Setup smarter, faster, and way more helpful.

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

Cheryl Feldman is on a quest to make Setup easier for admins, and she’s the perfect person to get it done. She’s been a Salesforce customer, an admin, and an architect, so she knows how difficult it can be to answer seemingly simple questions, like, “How do I get a list of users that can modify all data?” Right now, you’d need to run a SOQL query for that.

That’s about to change with Setup with Agentforce. You’ll be able to use a conversational interface to manage users and user access, troubleshoot formulas, and much more. And Cheryl’s just getting started.

Setup with Agentforce is available now in open beta. You can access it in production, a sandbox, or a developer org. Right now, it covers the most common use cases in Setup. For other questions, the agent can give you an answer from Salesforce’s help and training documentation and help you navigate to the correct Setup page.

While these features are already game-changing, Cheryl wants your help to make Setup with Agentforce even better. “We want to hear from admins,” she says, “Does it help you? And what do you want us to solve next?”

Cheryl and her team are already building a framework to expand Setup with Agentforce beyond the most common use cases. They’re looking at multi-step orchestration, which will enable you to seamlessly create objects or fields, manage access to them, and add them to dynamic forms, all in one place.

So please, give Setup with Agentforce a try. Your feedback will help shape a smarter, simpler future for admins everywhere.

Make sure to listen to the full episode for more from my conversation with Cheryl Feldman. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

Mike Gerholdt :

So Cheryl, welcome to the podcast.

Cheryl Feldman:

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Cheryl, for people that haven’t met you and heard you in some of the True to the Core, and some of the Q&A sessions where I feel like Parker just calls on you constantly, could you do a little bit of an introduction of what you do and the fun stuff you get to work on at Salesforce?

Cheryl Feldman:

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But you’re like, “Yeah, I can move mountains, but what about planets?” And now you’re tackling setup. Where did this come from?

Cheryl Feldman:

And I had been pushing internally that we needed to do something. And I said, “Well, if not me, then who?” And so I started looking at the usage of setup, and something that it didn’t necessarily surprise me, but it validated a lot of things that I believe that the areas and user access were the most used areas and setup, which was the area that I was managing at that point from a product standpoint. And I said, “Well, what are the big issues that we need to sell for admins?” And a lot of it was around troubleshooting. So we introduced the user access summaries, and we did a lot of great work in user access, but we didn’t really expand beyond that.

And so we said, “What would it take to actually fix all of setup?” And trying to actually do that is… Actually, I’ll be honest, it would be an impossible task given the state and that there’s no framework behind setup. So when Agentforce started to come about, we said, “Well, what if we looked at Agentforce, and what if we could help admins and rethink setup using Agentforce, and revamp things and revamp the experience that way?” And so that’s how everything came about.

We started with, let’s improve some of the pages to then let’s see if we can tackle a larger part of setup, and that’s what we’ve been doing. And Agentforce has helped unlock that for us because I’ll be honest, the way we were going previously, we probably would’ve been here for 20 years because there were over almost 1,300 pages in setup, there’s a lot.

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Let’s say you ask the agent, “How do I setup Agentforce for sales?” Instead of having to go out to the help and training site or out to Google to figure that out, you could ask that right and setup and this will help generate an answer. And then if there’s something where you need to redirect to a setup page, it’ll give you a link that’ll just navigate you to the right setup page.

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The other thing that we’re working towards is how do we handle what we call multistep orchestration and being able to do multiple steps as far as setups. So think about when you create objects or fields, being able to grant access, adding it to layouts or dynamic forms, those are all multiple steps and being able to do those together. That’s essentially what we’re working towards from the framework. I can’t give out exact timelines yet, but those-

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Cheryl Feldman:

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Cheryl Feldman:

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Cheryl Feldman:

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Cheryl Feldman:

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Cheryl Feldman:

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Cheryl Feldman:

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Cheryl Feldman:

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Mike Gerholdt :

Cheryl, I appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule. I know you’re in more meetings than one should have on their calendar about this, but I truly do mean the stuff that you’re working on is just so impactful for people in their careers who are making a name for themselves inside of organizations and building their skill. Technology is such a fun ecosystem to work in and it’s so empowering when it works the way you want it to. And I feel like you work on the stuff that you’re making it work the way we all think it should work, so thank you.

Cheryl Feldman:

Mike Gerholdt :

The post Setup with Agentforce Makes Salesforce Admin Tasks Easier appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Laura Pelkey, Director of Customer Security Communications & Engagement, and Kylie McKlveen, Director of Product Marketing at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about how admins can level up the security of their orgs using a simple framework for understanding security in Salesforce. 

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

Security can feel complicated and unapproachable, especially at the pace at which the Salesforce platform is evolving and changing. How can admins keep up and make sure that their org’s data is protected?

Luckily, Laura and Kylie are here to help. It starts with a practical framework for understanding Salesforce security. They break it down into three key areas:

Put it all together, and you have a clear plan of action for how you can level up the security of your org.

“There’s a lot of amazing AI technology out there now,” Laura says, “but unfortunately, the attackers, the hackers, the bad guys, whatever you want to call them, are also leveraging this technology, and they’re doing so in ways that make it harder to spot when malware is happening.”

In the Dreamforce Security Keynote, they demonstrated this by doing a live deepfake of a Salesforce executive. It’s getting easier for attackers to use AI for social engineering or even just a better-worded phishing attack.

Luckily, Salesforce is fighting back with two new features coming soon. With Agentforce in Security Center, you will be able to detect, investigate, and remediate threats to your org with a simple conversation. Agentforce in Privacy Center will help automate some of the hard work around complying with constantly evolving regulations.

These new agentic features will make security and compliance faster, easier, and more accessible.

For now, Laura and Kylie’s advice to improve your Salesforce security is to dive into the configurables. The “Trusted Enterprise Security” video series is a handy guide to walk you through all of the steps you can take to drastically improve the security of your org.

Check out the Dreamforce Security Keynote on Salesforce+ to learn more about what threats are out there and how you can fight back. And remember to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Mike Gerholdt:

This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re diving into some security framework that you’ve either seen online or at Dreamforce, specifically wrapping your head around invisibles, configurables, and enhanceables. So this week I am joined by longtime podcaster and security champion Laura Pelkey and new voice and new to the Salesforce Trusted Services Team, Kylie McCleven. They are both here to help us unpack how we can think about the security layers baked into the platform, the settings they control, and the tools available for us to go even further. Plus we also jump into a little bit about what AI means for keeping your org secure. This is a fun podcast, and we also bring in a little bit of pop culture. I won’t ruin it, but Sylvester Stallone does make an appearance in this episode. So with that, let’s get Laura and Kylie on the podcast. So Kylie and Laura, welcome to the podcast.

Laura Pelkey:

Hey, Mike.

Kylie McKlveen:

Hey, thanks for having us.

Mike Gerholdt:

I know. This is going to be fun, even though… Well Laura’s a long time podcaster, so she makes security fun, but Kylie’s a new voice. So Laura, let’s start with you. Refresh everybody, what you’ve been up to at Salesforce since we’ve last chatted.

Laura Pelkey:

Yeah, I know it’s been a little while. I’m very happy to be back on the pod. Thank you for having me. So I’m actually coming up on my nine-year anniversary at Salesforce, which is crazy. Can’t believe it’s been that long. And lately I’ve been at Dreamforce speaking, writing a lot of blogs about security, and still just trying to get the word out there to our customers about how to be secure with their Salesforce data.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yep, absolutely. And Kylie, you’re a new voice to the podcast, so welcome. Tell us a little bit about how you got started at Salesforce and what you do.

Kylie McKlveen:

Thanks, yeah, what do they say, long time listener, first time caller? So yeah, I work on our product marketing team for our trusted services products. I’ve actually just joined this team within the last year when Salesforce acquired Own or formerly Own Backups. So loving my new role and really excited to work with Laura and yourself working with customers on helping them with their security.

Mike Gerholdt:

Now, trusted services sounds big and massive and like a lot of stuff. What are some of the products that maybe Salesforce admins are familiar with that fall under that umbrella?

Kylie McKlveen:

Yeah, that’s a great question. So Shield, Salesforce Shield, which consists of event monitoring, data detect, platform encryption, and field audit trail. It’s also security center. And then with the acquisition of Own, we also added backup and recover, archive, data mask and seed, so that was enhanced with seeding capabilities. We also have privacy center. So those are some of the products admins would be familiar with.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, no, I think we saw a few of those in the admin keynote. So Laura, you’re still on the mission and I’m with you on security-minded admins.

Laura Pelkey:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt:

Let’s talk about what being a security-minded admin is to get us in that security mode.

Laura Pelkey:

Yeah. You know Mike, I was actually just thinking about this. I think we did a podcast with that name, and I think two months after I started at Salesforce, we did a podcast together, which is-

Mike Gerholdt:

I mean, we don’t mess around. Laura was like, “We’re doing a podcast right away.”

Laura Pelkey:

Yeah, yeah, the security-minded admins, love that topic. So a security-minded admin is just someone who understands that securing their data in Salesforce and their organization’s data in Salesforce is an admin’s responsibility. Admins have many responsibilities. There’s really not enough time in the day to do all of the stuff that an admin needs to do. But security is one of the most important ones. And it’s often one of the most overlooked ones. So yeah, really, really passionate about that topic, and I feel my role is to help admins focus on the top things that they can do. Because there’s a lot of stuff that can be kind of confusing, but really if you’re doing a handful of things, best practices, using the right controls, you’re doing most of what you can to protect your organization.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Now I know Laura, at Dreamforce, you gave a presentation that took that security-minded admin up a notch because, I mean, pre-AI, we were just talking about making sure people didn’t put sticky notes on monitors and strong passwords. Oh, we got MFA. Remember, MFA was like… That was going to save the world. And now we have AI, which I saw your presentation in Dreamforce. What is security like now in the world of AI?

Laura Pelkey:

And first of all, MFA is still very important, so definitely still do that.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right, absolutely. It still saves the world, it just there’s more to it.

Laura Pelkey:

Still saves the world. There’s just more more things now. Yeah, we’re seeing a huge rise in adoption of AI. I mean, look at how many people listening to this call use LLMs like ChatGPT on a regular basis. I mean, I know I do. Of course, Agentforce, we all love Agentforce. There’s a lot of amazing AI technology out there now. But unfortunately what we’re seeing is the attackers or hackers, bad guys, whatever you want to call them, are also leveraging this technology, and they’re doing so in ways that make it harder to spot when malware is happening. They might be creating a deepfake, that’s kind of advanced, but it’s actually… It’s pretty easy to do nowadays, in order to get your user credentials and to take over your user account.

It could even just be maybe a really well phrased phishing text message. I think we all probably get those too nowadays, it’s super common. And before it would be kind of easy to spot them. There might be some spelling errors or just language related errors that would be easy to guess that maybe this isn’t really from somebody that I know, but nowadays with AI, it’s actually… The AI can craft these messages that sound much more realistic and believable. So that’s had an effect on how successful bad actors are when they’re trying to take over a user account or get user credentials or get sensitive information and data.

Mike Gerholdt:

I mean, the good news is a lot of people have access to AI, and unfortunately sometimes the people you want access to shouldn’t. It also burst my bubble, so it means you’re telling me that Bob Ross video of him wrestling Mr. Rogers wasn’t real that I just watched the other day?

Laura Pelkey:

Yeah, yeah, probably not.

Mike Gerholdt:

Because it was awesome.

Laura Pelkey:

Probably not. Just logistically, I think that would be pretty difficult. But we are seeing… If anyone watched the security keynote, we shared a really interesting video, it’s on Salesforce+ now, of one of our executives, we said, “Hey, can we have a professional ethical hacker demonstrate how easy it is to hack somebody at your level? Can we do this live?” And he was like, “Yeah.” So there’s actually a really cool video of that in the security keynote.

Mike Gerholdt:

Ooh, I’ll put a link to that in the show notes so you can watch that.

Laura Pelkey:

Oh, thank you, we would love that. Kylie and I would really appreciate that.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, and speaking of videos, Kylie, I think you worked with Laura. You put out a whole series of videos around security, talking about invisibles, configurables, and what was the third one? It’s always the third. It’s like Snap, Crackle… Who’s that third one? Pop.

Laura Pelkey:

The third child, I forget as well.

Mike Gerholdt:

I heard there was actually four at one time. You should Google that. The Snap, Crackle, Pop, there was four. Totally not on topic of talking security, but you know… So Kylie, let’s talk about that. I mean, it’s an interesting concept to think about. There’s invisible things that Salesforce does, there’s configurable things, and then there’s things that I guess we can put frosting on, right?

Kylie McKlveen:

Yeah, the pop. I think this framework is just a really easy way to understand the security that’s available to you. The invisibles are the things that we do, that Salesforce does kind of invisible to you, hence the name. The configurables things customers can do to make their org more secure, but it’s up to them to configure them. And then the enhanceables, so things they can go above and beyond what’s provided to them to really enhance their security. So the names are a bit obvious by design.

Mike Gerholdt:

So tell me a little bit about some of the invisible stuff that goes on behind the scenes that helps admins sleep at night.

Kylie McKlveen:

Yeah, I hope admins are familiar with things like network level security, our secure infrastructure, application level security, things like that. Those are really table stakes for SaaS platforms. But there’s a lot of really cool things that our cybersecurity operations center does proactively protecting our customers. And I’m actually going to throw it over to Laura to give some of those examples. I know we’ve had multiple conversations about some of the examples of the things they do and it’s really cool.

Laura Pelkey:

Yeah, so our team, our cybersecurity operations center team, they are incredible. Actually, when I started working in cybersecurity, which I’ve always worked in cybersecurity, my very first job, which I won’t say how many years ago that was anymore-

Mike Gerholdt:

Well two, because you’re 27, right?

Laura Pelkey:

Exactly, exactly, correct. But when I first started working in security, I was learning about all of the really cool things that my company at the time, we had a social engineering team, and the things that other companies would hire us to do, and they would literally go into companies and attempt to hack them by physically gaining access to a structure, their networks in their building. And this was part of something that our clients would pay for. It was so cool to me. And basically it would just reveal where the holes were in their security so that the client could then fix those. So things like that, that’s called social engineering. So at Salesforce we do things like that, we’re constantly hunting for vulnerabilities in the platform, in our networks, we call that threat hunting.

We have a global team that is working 24 7, literally just scanning all the networks for anomalies we call them, anomalous events. Does something look weird in one of our networks? Does something look weird in one of our customer’s networks? And then we have a massive team of people who, as soon as they spot something, they jump on it. And if it’s a customer issue, they’ll contact the customer right away and actually work with them to resolve it. I don’t know, it reminded me when I was first learning about this many years ago, it just was very cool work and it’s always behind the scenes and you don’t know that it’s going on, but it actually does so much to shore up the security of your organization. So we do stuff like that.

Mike Gerholdt:

No, that sounds really cool. When you were mentioning that, I was thinking of… I think it’s like an early 2000s B-level Sylvester Stallone movie where he’s like a guy that gets paid to break out a prisons to find their vulnerability.

Laura Pelkey:

Yes, it’s exactly like that, yes.

Mike Gerholdt:

That’s what I was thinking of. So that’s how I envision your whole team is.

Laura Pelkey:

I would actually love to do that kind of work. No one has asked me to, but if anyone at Salesforce is listening, I’m open to doing that, that sounds fun.

Mike Gerholdt:

Okay, all right, look at that. Laura, while we have you, can we… I mean the invisible stuff’s really cool, but it’s behind the scenes. Admins love to get their hands on stuff. Let’s talk about what we can configure.

Laura Pelkey:

So as Kylie was saying, the second piece or second pillar of this are the configurables. And the configurables are… The easiest way to think of it is the things that are within the customer’s control. So this is security settings, controls, and features that actually need to be set up properly by the customer. And Salesforce is a very robust platform, and we do provide a level of flexibility to make sure that our customer’s needs are being met, but it’s also part of our shared responsibility model where when a customer has control over these things, that they really spend the time to properly configure them to best protect their data. A couple of examples. The principle of least privilege. It’s not a setting, but it’s a principle that in cyber security is the defining principle for when you’re talking about user permissions.

So admins set up users all the time. Every day, maybe. So when an admin is setting up a user, it’s really important that they’re paying attention to the permission sets and the level of permissions that they’re granting to this user. So we still say layering permission sets and permission set groups on top of profiles is the best practice, and when you are setting up a user, make sure that the permissions you’re granting them are only what’s necessary for them to do their job. So that’s that that least privilege part. And by limiting them to only what’s necessary, it actually helps limit the exposure if in… Hopefully this doesn’t happen, but in the chance that a user account is compromised. And especially when we’re looking at people who have admin level permissions, and what are those, Mike? Modify all data, view all data.

Mike Gerholdt:

Everything’s scary.

Laura Pelkey:

Yes. So those are incredibly powerful permissions, and admins know they can do everything in their Salesforce org. But would you give, for example, okay, say like a Salesforce admin is the owner of a house. Let’s just create that metaphor. Would you give all of your keys to your mail carrier? Why would they need access to the inside of your house? Maybe they need access to the gate for the pathway that walks to your front door, so you leave that unlocked for them, but they don’t need to get inside your house. It’s kind of like the same thing when you’re setting up users. You don’t want all of your users to be able to do every single thing in your Salesforce org.

And again, it’s because users make mistakes so they could accidentally and unintentionally do something that could cause a security issue. That happens all the time, or in the off chance that a user is compromised, you don’t want the bad actor that has compromised and taken over that user account to be able to do all the things that an admin does. So yes, very long spiel about principle of least privilege and why it’s important, but basically the configurable part of this is setting up users and making sure that they only have the level of permissions that they need.

Mike Gerholdt:

And to run with your metaphor, Laura, I think even the delivery companies now, I have a code from my garage door and you can drop a package off in my garage door. So in theory, you’re only getting into my garage unless I forget to lock the door to my house from my garage. Now you have access to the whole house. And that plays into the same… They should only have access to the things they should have access to.

Laura Pelkey:

Yeah, exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:

Laura, I think this falls into maybe a product that you oversee, which is Security Center.

Laura Pelkey:

I don’t oversee it, I wish I did.

Mike Gerholdt:

Or Kylie, sorry.

Laura Pelkey:

It’s an amazing… Yes, Kylie’s team does that. And you can actually, with Security Center, see the number of people exactly who in your organization has admin-level permissions? Kylie, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think in Security Center you can actually change those permissions within Security Center itself or apply policies across all of your orgs within Security Center to limit that, is that correct?

Kylie McKlveen:

That’s correct. Absolutely, you can apply policies. And I think especially for admins who have multiple orgs that they’re managing, being able to view their security posture across and then have a sense of consistency and control, Security Center is a great product for that.

Laura Pelkey:

Yeah, we love that product.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, and we saw a lot of this in the admin keynote where Kate and Lisa did a demo of Lisa just needing additional permissions to edit a field, not the entire object. And I think what was nice is we saw Agentforce double-checking with the admin to say, “I’ve set this up, but is this correct?” Which is a huge step, the human in the loop for a lot of security and AI things that we work on.

Laura Pelkey:

Yes, it’s so important that you’re working with… And now that Security Center is enhanced with Agentforce, it’s like admins have kind of a partner, but still the admin’s responsibility to validate everything and to oversee everything. But it’s now easier to do that, which is great.

Mike Gerholdt:

Great. Especially when it goes GA. I think admins will be excited for the new setup. Kylie, Laura set you up perfectly. She mentioned enhanceables. Let’s talk about some of those security enhanceables that admins can get their hands on or help set up that take security even farther.

Kylie McKlveen:

As we talked about earlier, we have Shield and Security Center. These are the products that fall within the trusted services portfolio. Is that what you were asking, Mike?

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, just I would love to learn more about what we consider enhanceables.

Kylie McKlveen:

Yeah, so these are the products that go above and beyond to help you enhance your security. And when we talk about enhancing our security, there’s really many reasons why customers are choosing to enhance their security. A couple of years ago, when we were talking to customers, it was really those in regulated industries that had specific requirements that they needed to meet in platform encryption or things like that. But now there’s a variety of reasons, so some of these customers who are in high threat industries and need an additional layer of protection.

Or scale, we talk about scale a lot. So whether you’re resource constraint because you’re an admin of one, but you need the security power, or if your company is growing and you need something to help you scale with that. These products can really help with that. And then another thing I’ll mention is if you have a lot of sensitive data in your org, I think there’s a lot of important data in Salesforce that customers need to protect in different ways, but sensitive data, if you really need to add additional layers or prevent people from seeing certain data, we have products within this portfolio to help with those specific scenarios.

Mike Gerholdt:

I think one thing that’s interesting to me in the discussions I’ve had with Laura and Lynn over the few years that we’ve worked together is security isn’t only just keeping the bad actors out, it’s also making sure the right people have the right access at the right time. I would love to know, because in my mind, backing up data, and you came from own backup, how is backing up data really part of a security posture?

Kylie McKlveen:

This is really about continuity. So being able to ensure that if you were talking about bad actors or malicious intent, but there’s human error. If one of your users accidentally made a mistake and corrupted the data or deleted the data, being able to have a backup that you can quickly and easily restore that data in your environment is really important. That data is there and needs to be restored. So you need a tool to help you quickly respond to that. And that’s how backup is part of that.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, no, I never really thought of that. It’s one thing to have the data, make sure the right people have the right access to it, but it’s also having the history of the data and making sure… I guess it would be a paper trail of what’s happened to it and when it’s happened.

Kylie McKlveen:

We do have products. Field Audit Trail is great for understanding how your data has changed over time. But there are some cool things about backup where you can look back into the past and see how the data has changed. You can actually look up in backup to look at the signals to see if the data might’ve been corrupted. So it’s a really cool product.

Mike Gerholdt:

Now, the idea of invisibles, configurables and enhanceables isn’t something we just thought up one day. It’s actually a series of videos that I believe are out on YouTube, if I’m not correct… And this is for you, Kylie or Laura, whoever was the most involved, what are some of the things that we’re going to see in those videos, because I’ll definitely link to those videos in the show notes.

Laura Pelkey:

I could take that one. So this is something actually our Chief Trust Officer came up with. He’s so smart, his brain is just constantly working. He just explained it one day, “Invisibles, configurables, and enhanceables,” and we were like, “That is brilliant.” And really what these videos are talking about, and they’re also available on security.salesforce.com as well as YouTube, but basically he and our SMEs who are on the video series as well go into these layers. So invisibles is the bottom layer, and you can think of it’s the strong foundation. Salesforce handles this for you. We’re always working to keep our networks and our products secure and our infrastructure secure, and customers don’t need to do anything to take advantage of this. I mean Hyperforce is an example of how we are creating secure infrastructure for our customers. So we talk about the invisibles.

And then we talk about the configurables. Rachel Beard, who is featured in this video series, she’s amazing, she’s one of our security architects at Salesforce, she talks about specific things that customers can do, and these are like… If you watch these videos and just do everything she says, that’s going to be hugely impactful to the security of your Salesforce org. One of the things she goes over is login IP ranges, which is when a Salesforce admin restricts the login IP ranges so that only people within the company’s network can actually access your Salesforce org. And that’s really one of the best things. So things like that. She talks about principle of least privilege as well.

And then there’s the enhanceables where, as Kylie said, we have a suite of amazing security and privacy products that are really designed to help our customers grow and scale. Like Kylie mentioned, a lot of admins might be struggling to keep up with their growth at their company, and these products can help you do that. And then there’s actually a really cool… The last video in this series is our Chief Trust Officer speaking with a CEO and a CISO from one of our friend companies. And you just get the… From folks at that level, from these executives who think about cybersecurity all the time. You get to hear their perspective on what’s next in the cybersecurity industry. So it’s a really awesome video series. I would definitely encourage people to watch it.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, as we wrap up, Kylie, we’re fresh off of Dreamforce. What was some of the exciting things that you’re getting ready to work on heading into the coming year?

Kylie McKlveen:

Yeah, we had two really big announcements, multiple big announcements in the security keynote, but two that I just want to call out I’m so excited about. We talked at the beginning of this podcast about how AI is changing everything, but now we’re seeing AI in our security and compliance products, which is really cool. So AI is actually helping you be more secure. So we have Agentforce in Security Center, which can detect threats, and you can conversationally investigate the threats and remediate them. It will give you suggestions on how to quickly resolve those issues. And then we have Agentforce in Privacy Center too. So automating some of that hard work around complying with these constantly evolving regulations. You can tell it what’s applicable to your business and it will give you suggestions around some risks you may have, some gaps, and it can suggest policies that you may want to deploy in your org. So really just making security and compliance a lot more accessible and a lot more easier, faster. It’s just really cool how AI is actually helping us with security in this scenario.

Mike Gerholdt:

And with a lot of those centers, I mean, there’s a lot of data and to have AI comprehensively look at all of that, it might find things that you just didn’t know to look for.

Kylie McKlveen:

Oh, definitely. I think that’s the struggle. Sometimes you’re looking at this data and you don’t even know what you’re looking for, and AI can really just take the pain out of that. It can look across multiple data points and tell you what’s out of the ordinary. So saving a ton of time.

Mike Gerholdt:

Laura, similar question. We’re fresh off Dreamforce. As you help admins in the coming year become more secure, more AI proficient, what would your advice be for admins for the upcoming year?

Laura Pelkey:

Well, definitely the couple things that I mentioned when we’re looking at configuring, I think just broadly, look at your security configuration in your Salesforce org. That’s the broad thing I want all admins doing right now. And then within that the things that I think are the most important for admins to be focusing on are that setting up login IP ranges, that’s super important. Following the principle of least privilege when setting up users. And that also means doing an audit of the permissions that your users already have, that’s super important, and taking away unnecessary permissions. Admins should also be talking to their Salesforce users about things like phishing, like the security threats that are out there. They should be educating their users about that and setting them up for success so that if they ever get into a situation where they might be targeted, then they know at least to stop, think, and then disengage.

So those three things are super important. And then MFA, as we said, saving the world. That’s already required for all user logins in Salesforce, but I would also encourage everyone to set up MFA for their personal accounts. If you watch the hacking video in the security keynote, you can actually see that if you reuse your passwords across multiple user accounts, which everyone does, that’s just natural, we all have a lot of credentials to keep track of, they can possibly be leveraged… Something from your personal account can possibly be leveraged to gain access to another personal account or even a business account. So you want to make sure you’re using MFA on every account.

And then if you can do this, if it’s available to you, add a security contact in your Salesforce org so that in the event that Salesforce needs to contact you about something, like I was talking about our amazing CISOC team at the beginning of this podcast, how they’re working 24/7, they never sleep, they’re just staring at a computer looking for security things. If they need to get in touch with you, they will reach out to your security contact that’s listed in Salesforce. So it’s important that that’s up to date. So that’s my advice to admins.

Mike Gerholdt:

That’s good advice. I would also add, watch the 2013 movie Escape Plan. That’s what that movie’s called. Where Sylvester Stallone, AKA Laura, breaks out of prison. Well, Kylie, Laura, thanks for coming on and talking security. I mean, you know as well as I have since the moment I started at Salesforce, I think it’s the most important thing because we’re protecting our company’s data. So what else you got better to do besides make the data better and more secure, in my opinion. So thanks for coming on. I look forward to seeing some of the new stuff that we have coming out from your area, Kylie, and the advice that you continue to give, Laura.

Laura Pelkey:

Yeah, we’ve got a lot in store, so this will not be the last you hear from Kylie and I, I promise.

Kylie McKlveen:

I love it.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, we’re going to hold you to that, though.

Laura Pelkey:

No pressure, Kylie.

Mike Gerholdt:

We’ll be back.

Laura Pelkey:

We’ll be back.

Mike Gerholdt:

Big thanks to Laura and Kylie for walking us through the security stack that every Salesforce admin should know. Now whether it’s understanding what Salesforce has your back on, tightening up your permission sets, or leveling up with tools like Shield and Security Center, there is something here for all of us. Make sure to check out the full video series on security.Salesforce.com. Don’t worry, I’ll link to that in the show notes. And until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post From Invisible to Intentional: A Practical Way Admins Can Approach Salesforce Security appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Daryl Moon, Founder of CertifyCRM.com. Join us as we chat about how curiosity and a test-first mindset can help you get the most out of Agentforce Vibes.

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

Daryl came into tech as a generalist who did a bit of everything: hardware, software, networking, whatever needed doing. One fateful day, however, he took on a contract to import some spreadsheets into a CRM and ended up as the de facto Salesforce Admin for his organization.

Just like everyone else, Daryl has spent the last year trying to get his head around AI and how to separate the smoke and mirrors from the actual potential value. A keen fisherman, his mind was blown one day when he used AI to summarize the fishing reports from his local bait and tackle shop and immediately went out and caught six fish.

On one of his trips to the local boat ramp, Daryl decided to throw on the ol’ Salesforce Admins Podcast, where he happened to catch our episode about Agentforce Vibes with Josh Birk. He was already planning to work on a video about new Apex features in Spring ’26, so he figured he’d give Agentforce a shot.

Daryl decided that the best way to learn about Agentforce Vibes was to try to build something simple that he was already familiar with. He spun up a developer org and asked the AI to build a Lightning Web Component for open opportunities, and while there were several things about it that didn’t quite work as intended, he was impressed with how Agentforce Vibes would take things step by step using the plan and act modes.

In order to learn more about building in Agentforce Vibes, Daryl decided to take it a step further. What would happen if he tried to build an entire application? He ended up getting most of what he asked for, though the AI got stuck on building a few automations. Most importantly, it got him 80% of the way there for 10% of the time investment.

Daryl’s biggest piece of advice for any admin trying to learn Agentforce Vibes is to start by building something you already know. AI is a tool like any other, so work with something familiar so you can properly judge how well it’s working.

Make sure to listen to the full episode for more from Daryl about how he learned Agentforce Vibes. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

Mike:

So, Daryl, welcome to the podcast.

Daryl Moon:

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

So I managed to find this one that was a contract just for a couple of weeks to fix up some spreadsheets and I thought, “Excel, I can do that.” And that turned out to be fix up some spreadsheets that had all this data that they’re importing into a CRM. A CRM, which at the time wasn’t Salesforce, it was another product. And this other product had some gaps in it and it turned out to be a bit of vaporware. When we started talking about opportunities, while that was something that they were going to build. So they had the account and the contact functionality, but opportunities were something off in the future and that was a bit of a concern.

And it really came to a head when we wanted to raise some issues that we had with the existing functionality and discovered that this company was actually using Sales Cloud or Service Cloud to record these issues that we had. Our CEO at the time was a former Salesforce customer. Cut a long story short, we did a pivot and we switched to using Salesforce and I became the defacto accidental admin.

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

Just to give an example, I’m a really keen fisherman. Now that I’m retired from full-time work, I can spend a bit of time doing that. I get these emails once a week from one of the local tackle shops and they tell me, for our four local rivers, what people have been catching, and where they’ve been catching, and when and what tackle they’re using. And over a course of 12 months, I’ve got 50-odd emails and I thought, “It’d be great if I can grab all that content and summarize it, and maybe I can learn something.”

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

Mike:

So you have time, you listen to the podcast, you heard Josh talk about Agentforce Vibes. I’ve seen a demo of it at Dreamforce. And you were like, “You know what, I’ve got some time, I got extra fish,” because you’d been out fishing. And you dug into it. Tell me what you found.

Daryl Moon:

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

Anyway, yeah, it got my attention and I thought, “Okay, what’s this Vibes thing all about?” And I was actually preparing for an Apex Sales video on the new features in Spring ’26 and I wanted to create a new developer org, a pre-release org, because I wanted to get some new features in that wasn’t in my old pre-release org. So I went to sign up and it gave me a choice of professional, developer and unlimited roles, enterprise and unlimited. I thought, “Well, I’ll try the enterprise.”

I did that and it created it, and I logged in. And then when I’m going to set up, I saw this Agentforce Vibes. And I thought, “Oh, that’s interesting. Let’s have a look at that,” and I jumped in to have a look. And it fired up and it opened a new browser window, and a whole bunch of stuff happened in the background. It asked me a few questions and I just said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.” And then I’m stuck with a prompt. Okay, well, what do I do now? And I’m thinking, “Okay, so here’s my chance to ask it if it can help build something.”

So I thought, “Well, I’ll just build something really simple that I know what it should look like and what it should feel like.” So I decided just to build a little LWC, so a little lightning web component that I could put on a page that would show my current opportunities and allow me to edit the close dates on them. So give me a little component that shows my open opportunities and just let me hit edit and change the dates on it. So away I went and it built that, and I was really surprised. And it deployed it for me, so then I went to my homepage in that org and I put the component on the home page and I ran it. And I thought, “Wow, that’s really amazing. Here’s my little component, it seems to do everything that I wanted it to do.” And I got in there and I started editing dates and hitting the save button, and oh, hang on. It didn’t change the dates.

So I went back to it and basically explained that it wasn’t saving the dates. And it had a nice conversational user interface and it’d go, “Oh, I see where the problem is. I’ll just do this and I’ll do that.” And I’m going, “Okay, okay, okay.” Did that a few times and deployed again and said, “Righto, now we’re ready to go.” And so I’d go back in and have a look, and oh, still not saving them. So I did that, went through a few iterations of that and I didn’t get it. And I thought, “Oh, well, okay.” But still, I was pretty impressed.

I was pretty impressed also, there’s two stages. There’s a plan and there’s act button on the bottom of the little chat window. So when you start off, you start off in plan mode and it basically tells you what it’s going to do. And you have a look through the script and you have a look through the feedback, and you can see, okay, it’s going to create this and it’s going to do that, and blah, blah, blah. So you can get a good idea of what is going to happen before you actually do it. Then you hit the act button and it goes, “Righto, now we’re ready to roll,” and off it goes and starts doing things. And it stops every now and again and it says, “Oh, now I want to edit this file. Is that okay?” And you say, “Yes,” and it edits that file and you can see the changes occurring in the metadata on the screen beside you. And then it says, “Okay, I’ve done that, now I want to deploy that.” And you say, “Okay.”

So you’ve got control, which is good. I like that. So you’ve got control over it. And I’m not doing this in a production org, I’ll just make that very clear. I’m doing this in a standalone pre-release developer org, it’s a developer org. It’s not connected to anything so it doesn’t matter what I break. And I’m not pushing changes to production.

One of the questions that I got after I posted that to LinkedIn that I’d done this was, “What about a search facility?” And I thought, “Oh, okay. Yeah, I wonder if I can do that.” So I went back to it and I said, “Can you add a search button to that?” And it basically said, “Yeah, okay.” And a couple of okays later, we had a search button on there. It still wouldn’t save the records, but we had a search so we could search for other opportunities that weren’t displayed in that little component.

But then I’d got a bit more feedback and somebody said to me, and they basically called me out on it. They said, “Hang on. You’re the Flow guy who is saying use the right tool for the right job. And then you’re jumping in here with the developer tool not really knowing what you’re doing and just willy-nilly going yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, go deploy this thing. That’s a bit of a dilemma, isn’t it? A bit of a contradiction?”

And to be honest, I said, “Yeah. Look, fair call. Absolutely fair call.” But in this instance, I’m in a separated developer org, not doing anybody any harm. I can break things if I like. And I’m just in test mode, I’m just curious about what this thing can do.

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

Mike:

And when Josh and I were talking about Agentforce Vibes, I pointed out your … After we did the podcast and you posted that and I said, “I’m going to talk to Daryl.” He said it really comes out to that calculator standpoint where you built something knowing it would replicate standard functionality, but you’re doing that because now you know how to test the tool. You’re not using the tool to duplicate standard functionality, you’re using the tool so that you understand it and can test its outcome, so that when you do use it to build something you’re not familiar with, now you know where to look for the gap, so I thought it was interesting.

Also, it’s just wonderful that you have a great positive attitude towards somebody calling you out on something and not being defensive towards it.

Daryl Moon:

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

So I tried that and it got stuck. And I think this was at the end of a day where I’d been doing quite a bit of other stuff with Agentforce Vibes as well. One thing I missed was in the developer org with Vibes, you get 50, now I don’t know what the unit is, but you get 50 units. Once you’ve used those up, Agentforce Vibes loses half its brain and is nowhere near as capable as what it was before.

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

And it actually went and built the majority of it, including right down to the fact that when you do an interview, I specified in the description at the start to send the email to the applicant who was unsuccessful. So when you’re going through and you’re selecting who you’re going to interview, if somebody’s not suitable, then send them an email. So it was going to use a flow to send that email out, and that’s where it got stuck. And I think again, we’d ran out of tokens.

But up until that, we’re talking it probably took me 15 minutes to write the description of what I wanted. In another half-an-hour after we’d gone through the planning stage and were going through several iterations of the actions it was taking, we basically had everything built. It just ran out of tokens then and got stuck on a few flows so we didn’t actually get absolutely everything deployed, but it did deploy all the standard objects and everything. So yeah, I was blown away by that. That was amazing.

Mike:

I think it’s … I love the fact that you just sat down with Agentforce Vibes and just started throwing stuff at it to create an application. As opposed to an hour or two worth of homework and creating documents, and then giving it that. And you still go really close to an end result. I feel like what you spent for those 15 minutes was way faster than what you would have spent had you had to create all that other stuff.

Daryl Moon:

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

I also did say in my instructions, I did say because I’m more of a Flow guy than anything.

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

Yeah. Look, it was fun. It was fun pushing the buttons and try to see how far it would go. I did also try to get it to build some … Oh, now this was an interesting one. So I tried to get it to build a lightning record page for the lead that included the rating and description fields. Interestingly enough, and I didn’t realize at the time, they weren’t on the page. So they weren’t on the page layout, those two fields. And when I said, “Go build a flow using those two fields,” it came back and it said, “No, those two fields don’t exist. Do you want me to create them?” And I’m going, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on. Rating, description, they’re standard fields.” And I went back into Object Manager and had a look on the lead object, and looked at the field-level security and nobody had visibility of them.

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

You’ll see it spit out the metadata as well on your page, so your Vibes page is like a multi-panel screen, and you’ll see it spit out the metadata. If you’ve ever looked at metadata for a flow before, you’ll see it there and you’ll be able to read it. If not, it doesn’t matter, you can just ignore it and just wait until it gets deployed. And then of course, you can open your flow in that environment anyway because it’s just built a standard flow for you, there’s nothing fancy about it and you can see exactly what it’s done. And then I think advanced from that, go something a little bit more complicated after that.

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

Mike:

Well, Daryl, I appreciate you coming on the pod and sharing your story, and I appreciate you really just clicking through fearlessly and trying things out. I think that’s the biggest spirit that I was always taught and it got me to where I am today, so thank you.

Daryl Moon:

Mike:

Daryl Moon:

Mike:

The post Exploring Agentforce Vibes Through Real-World Admin Use Cases appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Rebecca Sherrill, VP, and Shelly Erceg, Product Leader, both on the Salesforce Research and Insights team. Join us as we chat about the newest updates to IdeaExchange, including RoadmapExchange and Idea Insights, and why now is the perfect time to get involved.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Rebecca Sherrill and Shelly Erceg.

If you’ve ever wondered what happens after you submit an Idea to the IdeaExchange, this episode is for you. The Product Research and Insights team has been working on several new things to improve transparency and enhance collaboration between PMs and the Salesforce community. 

Joining us for this episode are Rebecca Sherrill and Shelly Erceg. Rebecca started at Salesforce in user research, where she talked to, interviewed, and observed hundreds of admins to better understand their needs. “I have a huge appreciation for the admin community because I spent so much time with them during those years,” she says.

Shelly, meanwhile, started as a PM on workflow and process automation tools, building products like Process Builder and part of the Flow engine. “Admins are my jam,” she says. On the Product Research and Insights team, she’s focused on IdeaExchange and True to the Core.

Together, they’re here to tell us about how RoadmapExchange and Idea Insights will help you see how your feedback influences the product roadmap.

If you’ve ever submitted to IdeaExchange, it’s natural to ask yourself, “How do I know if they’re working on my Idea? Is it ever going to be implemented? If not, why?”

That was the impetus behind RoadmapExchange, which maps ideas to Salesforce product roadmaps. The goal is to offer a peek behind the curtain, allowing you to see what the product team is working on right now and what they’re considering for the future. Most importantly, it allows the community to provide feedback and use cases to help guide the product team’s decisions.

“It’s an opportunity to help shape what we build,” Shelly says, and it also gives you a better idea of what’s coming so you don’t waste resources solving a problem that the product team is already working on.

The other IdeaExchange feature that Rebecca and Shelly are really excited about is Idea Insights. After twenty years, there are a lot of ideas out there. Idea Insights provides context into what’s happening right now in four key areas:

The goal is to keep you up to date with everything happening on IdeaExchange. On the other side of things, the product team is making a push to provide more transparency and updates about Ideas, even if it’s something that’s not in the cards right now.

Finally, if you don’t have a lot of time, Rebecca encourages you to take a look at the Salesforce Research Program. All you have to do is fill out a form about yourself, and you’ll only be invited to participate in things that are really relevant to you—we’ll even pay you for your time.

The Research and Insights team wants to hear from you, so be on the lookout for Rebecca and Shelly at a Dreamin’ event near you. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Mike:

Rebecca Sherrill:

Shelly Erceg:

Mike:

Rebecca Sherrill:

And then these days I’m leading a research and insights team. And my team continues to do research with customers to understand what they need from our products, and make sure that we build that into our roadmap. But these days, my team also runs the IdeaExchange, which is I think what we’re mostly here to talk about today.

Mike:

Shelly Erceg:

Mike:

Rebecca Sherrill:

And we’ve also launched something called Idea Insights, which the goal of that is to bring more visibility into the ideas that are most important to the community. Kind of take a look at the signal through the noise because there are so many tens of thousands of ideas. How do we know which ones to focus on and which ones to make visible to our product teams? That’s a question that we wrestle with a lot. So those are two of the very concrete ways that we have evolved IdeaExchange recently in the past couple of years.

Mike:

Rebecca Sherrill:

Mike:

Shelly Erceg:

So that’s one of the things that we’re trying to do with Idea Insights is really pull out what’s the pulse happening now? What’s most relevant? What are people talking about? And try to bring that to our PMs and really highlight that so that they get a better understanding. They can just kind of more quickly see what’s happening. So I always thought it was a great treasure trove, but you also had to go digging. So that’s our goal. We’re really trying to evolve and bring out those nuggets.

Mike:

Rebecca Sherrill:

And so that was a little bit of the impetus behind Roadmap Exchange was, what if we could make it more visible to our community, what product teams are working on or thinking about working on? Maybe it’s not on the roadmap yet, but they’re considering it. What if we could make that all more visible and invite the community to come in and comment on that? Provide feedback, provide use cases, give a lot of that really rich context to our product teams, and really influence the things that are currently being worked on.

And at the same time, we could map some of the ideas to some of the roadmaps and say, “Yes, we are definitely working on some ideas, but we’re also working on a lot of things that you don’t know about that we would love your input on.” So that is one of the ways we’re thinking about this is just increasing the visibility and the opportunities for engagement between our customers and our product teams.

Mike:

Shelly Erceg:

So I think this is actually kind of the biggest opportunity for admins in terms of spending their time and looking at where they can make an impact because this is when PMs are actually in the process and actively gathering this kind of feedback and wanting to have that conversation. I think over time people are also on the IdeaExchange. They’re understanding a little bit more that what’s most helpful is not just saying, “I want to be able to do X with Y,” but really describing the business context that you’re working in.

When customers and Trailblazers tell us what they’re trying to achieve, it’s super, super helpful for the PM. Because then we actually get the idea of what you’re really trying to do. And it may not be that we provide you exactly what you ask, but we provide you a way to solve that problem. So I would just say that continuing that evolution of that kind of more sophisticated dialogue is really going to be helpful.

Mike:

Rebecca Sherrill:

Because there are some ideas that have been on there for many years and have had a lot of time to collect votes. And there’s no way that my new idea that’s been around for one week can get the number of votes that an idea has that’s been on there for 10 years. So what this does is really gives us visibility into the current ideas that are getting a lot of recent traction. And I think gives us potentially a better pulse on what’s important to the community right now? And it does give a better chance for folks to get their ideas noticed by product teams because we are elevating this as a new view that people can use to look at.

Mike:

For this to be out in just the world for admins and developers to just sit back and kind of be in reasonable awe about it is like, “Oh man, that’s kind of cool. Now I got an idea of stuff to look for in the release notes.”

Shelly Erceg:

So we’ve had a really big push and we’ve had somebody dedicated to program-wise to just getting updates from PMs about whether or not they’re going to be able to tackle some of the ideas. Trying to provide updates to the top ideas so that we can provide more transparency in that. And I think we are really unique in that way, and we know that it has a big impact on planning and on people’s businesses. So it’s great to be able to try to increase that.

Mike:

Rebecca Sherrill:

But to your question about the difference between these channels. You can think of True to the Core as a point in time live opportunity to engage with our product leaders and our product teams. So of course, the keynotes at both Dreamforce and TDX are with our most senior product leaders. And then the new monthly series is with specific product teams and it gives us an opportunity to go deeper and have that live conversation and live engagement.

IdeaExchange, on the other hand, we see that as an always on channel. Meaning you can engage with it whenever you have time. You can kind of monitor it, get updates. So it’s a little bit of point in time and more in depth, and always on, always available feedback channel. And the two are very complimentary. So for example, if a team is doing a true to the core deep dive, we can have them look at their top ideas on IdeaExchange, and engage with the community about those ideas during that phone call and during that conversation.

Mike:

Shelly, I think it’s interesting, it dawned on me that you’re probably one of the rare few people at Salesforce that has perspective on both sides of an idea from both being a PM and having to look and read ideas and respond to them. To now working with customers and understanding the IdeaExchange and reading through the ideas as they come in and probably work with customers, I don’t want to put words in your mouth. But work with customers as they’re building these ideas. What insight can you provide that I think is a learning having been on both sides of that idea as it would be?

Shelly Erceg:

And I actually recently made something for my colleagues in research and insights called How a PM Decides. And it was a massive matrix of all the factors that went into PM decision making. Everything from business strategy to whether or not fixing something required the coordination, even though if the fixing “was actually quite technically easy.” But if it required the coordination of several teams across the platform, then that raised the complexity, right?

So you’re always trying to juggle, what can I get done with the people I have? Do I have the expertise to fix that? Will I be able to work with other teams? Or are there roadmaps pulling them somewhere where I know I won’t get their time? So it’s always such a matrix trying to figure out what you can deliver. But I will say that there is just this push for PMs to deliver value. And on the other side, I think really the goal is that we need to provide as much transparency about that as possible. Because I think people really do understand once we talk with them. I know the conversations I’ve had with customers when I’ve said, “Hey, this doesn’t look like something I’m going to be able to provide, and here’s why.” People get it because we’re all human.

So I just want to say keep the ideas and sharing your use cases, keep that coming. It’s all super, super helpful. We’re working, it’s work you probably don’t hear about because it’s invisible. But my team is also working on ways to more efficiently get these ideas and input that internal employees get from their conversations with customers into the product life cycle. So we’re working a lot on that and being able to give PMs a better view of what their customers need in particular areas. So I would just say absolutely just keep erring on the side. Your voice is not going into the ether we promise. Just keep erring on the side of sharing what you’re trying to accomplish and know that there’s a really big effort to continue making customers successful.

Mike:

Rebecca Sherrill:

So I would say we are listening. We cannot build great products without deeply understanding what you need and why you need it. And that is the number one reason why I would love for folks to continue engaging in IdeaExchange. Maybe you haven’t been there in a while, maybe you are feeling like it wasn’t getting looked at. To Shelly’s point, we are doing a lot of work right now behind the scenes to evolve that, to change that. So I would love for folks to give us another try. I would love for folks to check out Roadmap Exchange.

I’ll also give a shout-out that if you are limited in time and you want to really focus your efforts and how you provide feedback to Salesforce, check out the research program. You can sign up to do a one-on-one session, or a survey to influence some of the research work that’s happening within our teams. And those are very, very focused. Like you can fill out a form that tells us which products you use, a bit of information about yourself and your company. And we will only invite you to participate in things that are really relevant to you. So that can be a really great way to give focused feedback.

You also get an incentive for your time as a reimbursement. So it can be just a really nice way. Again, if you’re limited on time and you don’t want to be writing ideas, you can have a conversation with a researcher on the team, and that’s another way to influence the product roadmap.

Mike:

Shelly Erceg:

Mike:

Shelly Erceg:

Mike:

Shelly Erceg:

So we’re going to go to, I hope, three or four different Dreamin’ events. And we’re going to be out there at TDX, of course, and Dreamforce. And be just looking to spend more time listening to admins, finding out what it is they need and how we can help.

Mike:

Rebecca Sherrill:

That we are doing our best to listen. We know we have room to grow, we have space to do better. But I do want, at the end of the day, I want to make sure that they’re heard and that they have the transparency they need to make the decisions that they need to make. So yeah, Shelly and I, our doors are always open. We love to hear from the community how we can continue to improve that for them.

Mike:

Shelly Erceg:

Mike:

Shelly Erceg:

Rebecca Sherrill:

Mike:

The post How Can Admins Influence the Salesforce Product Roadmap? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.