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Why Small Businesses Benefit From Agentforce Right Now
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Michael Rose, Senior Director of SMB Solution Engineering at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about the ever-evolving role of the Salesforce Admin and why now’s the time to start exploring what AI can do for your org.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Michael Rose.
The parallel between admins and solution engineers
It’s always a pleasure to sit down and talk about Salesforce with Mike Rose. In his new role as Senior Director of SMB Solution Engineering, he has a lot to share with the admin community about what he’s seeing with small to medium-sized businesses coming onto the platform.
Mike points out that admins and his team of solution engineers share a core responsibility: evangelism. For both, your job is to make the case for how Salesforce implementation can help your organization achieve its business goals.
The integration challenges of smaller orgs
As Mike likes to joke, many SMBs are running some version of what Mike jokingly calls POIM (Post-It On Monitor) integration. As in, someone comes over with a sticky note (or Excel file) and asks you to put that info into Salesforce. “That’s all integration,” he says, “it is taking that data and putting it somewhere where it can be more valuable.”
These workflows can be hard to change, and that’s because they work well enough to get the job done. As Mike explains, the opportunity cost of things like errors, bottlenecks, and latency doesn’t factor into the equation. It’s hard to envision a world where an entire business process could happen automatically.
For Mike, the next frontier of this conversation is Agentforce. You can develop bespoke, enterprise-grade AI solutions tailored specifically for your business, but that kind of power is hard to wrap your head around when you’re still trying to limit the number of sticky notes circulating around the office.
Why admins are the key to unlocking the power of AI
As AI solutions continue to evolve, Salesforce Admins will play a critical role in bridging the gap between humans and technology. As Mike says, “there is always going to be a border that has customs agents and couriers and envoys working across that human intelligence and machine intelligence boundary.”
Agentforce is evolving so rapidly that even the Solution Engineering team is struggling to keep up to date. So Mike recommends getting your hands dirty as soon as possible, either by spinning up a Developer Edition org or activating Salesforce Foundations.
There’s a lot more great stuff from Mike in this episode, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.
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Full show transcript
Michael:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re thrilled to welcome back Mike Rose, a 12-year Salesforce veteran who has a new role and some fresh insights. Mike and I get into the real talk about what it’s like supporting small to medium businesses, the ever-evolving role of the Salesforce admin, and how tools like Agentforce are really changing the game. Now, whether you’re a full-time admin or you’re wearing five hats in your org, this episode speaks your language. Mike also shares why now is the best time to roll up your sleeves and start exploring AI in your sandbox. So you’ve already hit play on this episode, get ready to feel seen, and let’s get Mike back on the podcast. So Mike, welcome back to the podcast.
Mike Rose:
It’s such a pleasure, Michael. I have been a long-time listener and repeat caller, but very glad to be back after years.
Michael:
I know. I feel like we used to do World Tours and we’d run into each other like we need to do a podcast together.
Mike Rose:
It’s true.
Michael:
And then we’d do a random podcast together. And then this last time I just saw you on Slack. I was like, I haven’t had Mike on the podcast in a while.
Mike Rose:
It’s true. And I actually said, “Yes, absolutely, let’s do it.” And then, I think it was a month of gap before I got back to you and then you were on vacation. By the way, folks, if you find yourselves running into the consequences of your own inaction, say, in the middle of the night on a weekend, and you say, “Oh, I really should reach out to that person, but I don’t want to do it right now, because that’s just awkward.” Slack’s scheduled messages are your friend.
Michael:
I’m telling you, I use Slacks’ scheduled messages all the time, especially when I go on vacation, I can schedule stuff. Or the best is when you have a team that’s in a different time zone. So we’ll have a team, let’s see when this airs, the London event will be happening/happened, and I can schedule stuff and it looks like I just schedule it right for 8:00 A.M. their time, but I’m off in sleepy land.
Mike Rose:
I have to say that I have one of my managers who reports up to me is on maternity leave right now, and she has set Hari Seldon Foundation style messages that pop up in Slack and they say, “Hi, it’s the ghost of Gab here to tell you.” And it’s hilarious and it’s great because it’s all the reminders that otherwise I would have to remember to do, like do your Q2 check ins and do this. But what’s particularly funny is that because she branded it as the ghost of Gabrielle, the reaction emoji that people are using to respond to those messages is the face of Fred from Scooby-Doo reacting in terror to a ghost.
I didn’t come up with this. One of her team members reacted that way. I was like, oh, no, no, no, no, this is it. Now, everybody has to react that way. It’s so much fun to see these little microculture moments that build a custom or build a tradition around something as simple as an emoji response. But yes, scheduled messages, you can just sit down and knock out a quarter’s worth of admin if you’re going to be out and do it all pre-programmed. It’s very handy.
Michael:
I would say, as a best practice, and I’m looking at a scheduled message that somebody had sent me over the weekend. They italicized, “Hey, by the way, this is a scheduled message.”
Mike Rose:
Oh, that’s really smart. That’s really smart.
Michael:
Just in case you want to, not in the heat of a moment.
Mike Rose:
Well, it’s also so awkward when there’s something that you’ve been working on with someone and you set the scheduled message for 9:00 A.M. their time on a Monday, only to discover that at 7:30 A.M. they already gave you the full rundown of everything you possibly could need. And then, your message pops in. It’s like, “Hey, just wondering if you had an update on project X.” And then like, “Dude, do you not read first?” So yeah, putting it in italics is a good, I like that custom.
Michael:
Yeah. I do a Friday message to the team and I schedule it for 1:00 my time, and 12:55, somebody had an urgent message that they posted to the team and they said, “In the spirit of the Friday message,” and I was like, oh, my Friday message is going to appear in five minutes from now and it’s totally going to look like Mike forgot to send it.
Mike Rose:
Can’t win them all. Can’t win them all.
Michael:
Well, I’m sure Slack is something we’ll talk about, but I mean, we have a lot to talk about because there’s Agentforce stuff now, you have people that report to you. You’ve always had people that report to you, but you’re demoing to different customers. Where would you like to dive in first? Because otherwise, we’ll just go off the rails and end up talking about something in New York or soup, I don’t know.
Mike Rose:
Soup would be good. Well, I could just start with on the perhaps bold assumption that previous listeners who might vaguely remember me having been here before, might think what did he used to do and what is he doing now?
Michael:
I’m sure people track that.
Mike Rose:
I actually have seen some of the Always Sunny in Philadelphia murder boards for this show, for the Admins Podcast. And they’re elaborate. There’s a lot of community investment in understanding the connection. So no, I’ve been at Salesforce 12 years, celebrated my 12th anniversary a couple months ago. Very exciting.
Michael:
Wow, congrats.
Mike Rose:
Thank you. I also am delighted to report that my brother is also now back at Salesforce. He is boomeranged, so he was part of our solution engineering world for several years. Left to go take a role at OwnData or OwnBackup.
Michael:
And then we acquired them.
Mike Rose:
And then we acquired them. So now, he is back. And so, now we have sibling force back in effect, which I’m delighted by. And so, last time I was on the program, I was managing a team of technical architects. So our pre-sales TAs are the successors of our platform solution engineering team. So these are folks who are working with customers, mostly working with the technology decision makers and technology leaders, IT leaders at customers to work on questions around security and data strategy and AI and app dev and customization and getting into the cracks or the weeds in the customer 360. A lot of conversations around integration and really with all the integration products and capabilities that we currently have and will safe harbor have in the future, the TA team has spent a lot of time working on Data Cloud and Agentforce as well.
And that was what I’ve been doing for several years, eight years actually, I think. And then, an opportunity came along last year and I have now taken over a larger team of solution engineers, not technical architects, but core solution engineers, account solution engineers working in a part of our SMB business. So this is a team of about 50 and with several different teams, geographies and verticals within it. But basically working with customers between about 50 and 250 employees in a subset of our industry’s framework to help them understand what we can offer, do discovery, do demos, talk about AI, which it seems is what we’re doing a lot of the time nowadays. And it’s been a great transition for me. It’s been really educational and informative to get closer to the customer again with some of the opportunities and some of the challenges that are out there nowadays.
Michael:
And the reason, well, first of all, I love talking to you because you’re incredibly smart human being.
Mike Rose:
Thank you.
Michael:
But the second is your job is so closely aligned to everything admins do. It’s like an aspect of their job. You just get paid to do essentially a sales role of admin stuff. But that’s essentially what a Salesforce admin does in their organization is walk around and talk with the executives and oh, well, let’s see how we can use Salesforce in your area and everything you described.
Mike Rose:
Yeah, I mean, I think that there is a partnership between the admins and the solution engineers that’s really important and that I think you highlighted very effectively, which is it’s a shared responsibility of evangelism, sort of evangelism from the outside, evangelism from the inside. And the admins are those folks who are doing discovery, internal discovery, process assessment, understanding where is their pain, where is their organizational inefficiency. And I think for our small business admins, a lot of them are accidental admins. A lot of them are people who came into the Salesforce ecosystem through the back door, not really with the awareness or intention of taking on that responsibility. And so, they’ve had to learn very tactically. They’ve had to learn based on what was the problem in front of them at that moment.
And when we arrive at those customers or come into those conversations, often the question is, well, not so much what should you be doing or what should you be doing better, but what are the things that haven’t even been examined yet? And often, it is around something like integration. I joke with customers that we see a lot of, particularly in our healthcare customers, we see a lot of PIOM data integration models, and I’ll bring that up in the course of our conversation and just let it simmer there for a minute. And sometimes someone will ask, sometimes they won’t put us like, oh, I should probably explain my acronyms. PIOM stands for Post-it on monitor. And literally, the way data gets into Salesforce is someone from the sales team goes over to the lead management person, Joanne, and leaves a Post-it on Joanne’s monitor saying, please update this record. That’s integration.
Michael:
Or update this spreadsheet so that I can insert it.
Mike Rose:
Yes. Yeah, exactly. And so, that is an integration driving the motion of data or added value on top of data through human intervention, through re-keying, through copy and paste, through let me look over your shoulder and key this in for me. That’s all integration. It is taking data that exists usually in email or Excel or in somebody’s brain or on a piece of paper and putting it someplace where it can be more valuable, where it can create a multiplier effect of visibility and actionability and observability and impacting the situational awareness for business leaders and for people on the front lines. All of that is value added for that data.
But when we see those points of pinch points and points of friction, usually it’s because there wasn’t enough perceived value to change it. It’s working the way it is, why should we change it? And usually the answer is, it is working the way it is, but you don’t understand or don’t fully account for the opportunity cost of not having that happening automatically every time like the errors and the lag, the latency of that data and all those other things. So that’s just one tiny corner of it, but it really is common, especially with smaller customers, to just see largely a great Salesforce implementation and everything working really efficiently. And then you’re like, what’s under this rock?
Michael:
Oh no, here be dragons.
Mike Rose:
Here be dragons. So yeah, so it’s a lot of fun.
Michael:
Well, I think having gone through, I feel like I’ve kind of run somewhat of the gamut. When I started out as an admin, we had 10 licenses because that’s what you got with the foundation.
Mike Rose:
Power of us, yeah.
Michael:
And then, we grew all the way up to like 1,500. So I’ve run, and we didn’t go right away. It was steps. And so, I’ve been in that 50 to 250-seat area. One thing that I think we probably do, and you work at Salesforce too, we often assume that when we talk to a Salesforce admin or developer architect and they’re in the smaller business, 50 to 250-seat, that that’s all they do. Every day, they wake up and they pine what field can I release? What training thing can I do? But I’m going to go out on a limb and say, because you said most of them come in accidentally or through the back door. What are some of the other jobs that you find that they’re also responsible for in addition to sitting in these Salesforce meetings with you?
Mike Rose:
Oh, gosh, that’s a great question. I mean, I will say for our customers, because they’re just a little bit on the larger side of the larger half of our SMB space, that by and large, by the time we get to them, they have transitioned into full-time admins. However, they’re coming from sales ops or they’re coming from being-
Michael:
They always come from sales ops.
Mike Rose:
They do.
Michael:
The sales guys are the ones that care about the CRM. That’s why.
Mike Rose:
It’s funny how that works. Sometimes it’s actually an AE or someone who was on the sales team. Sometimes it’s a business analyst or someone who is coming in from the marketing side or from lead gen. A substantial number of folks who end up as Salesforce admins are coming from office management, receptionist, executive assistant, presumptively, non-technical roles. But because of their proximity to the leadership and because their work tends to be a little more bursty and they have fallow time or downtime along with the time that they’re extremely busy and they can do stuff asynchronously, there’s a lot of folks who are coming from that front office and front of house role into a Salesforce admin role, which is great because I can’t think of another enterprise software environment where it’s as easy and as welcoming to get started and get skilled up than us, than Salesforce.
So we do have those opportunities for people to change their careers and step in a different direction. I can think of a lot of people who were either not in IT or were in IT, peripheral IT and peripheral technology roles and Salesforce was their angle and ended up being the transformative thing that brought them into a technology career. So you’d love to see it.
Michael:
I mean, mine was the same way. I was in charge of inside sales and Salesforce because sales.
Mike Rose:
Yeah, because those are it. And honestly, if you can be effective as an admin in a part-time way, that’s great because it helps you stay closer to the business and helps you stay connected to what’s driving value and where the pain points are, where things need work. The thing that I think is interesting for our smaller customers is we don’t have, to my mind, enough customers taking advantage of premier support, the delegated admin features and the ability to get Salesforce to do stuff for you, take stuff off your plate. I know we’re adding a lot of admin AI capabilities as well to speed up the work and makes things easier for admins, but honestly, if you’re going to get value out of something that Salesforce can give you, I think that’s a good thing to do because what it gives you back is time. It gives you back time to again, spend more time understanding what the business needs.
Michael:
And there’s a cost. I mean, I finally sold one of my employers on it, but the ability to, I think at the time it was log a ticket and get a dashboard made, I mean, that was an afternoon back for me. It was huge. So let’s talk, I mean, we also, it’s the age of AI. Everybody’s got AI. We’ve got Agentforce. You see the headlines of big companies building their own AI. I promise you, the NAPA Auto parts in Farmington, Minnesota that uses Salesforce, I don’t know if that’s true or not, I’m just making it up.
Mike Rose:
Well, it’s true now.
Michael:
Probably isn’t building-
Mike Rose:
Now it’s canonical since you said it on the podcast, it’s true now.
Michael:
But I mean, probably isn’t sitting down building their own AI model. What do you find are the questions or the gaps that maybe they don’t know that they should look for or is there a perceived we’re just not big enough so we’re not going to use it?
Mike Rose:
It’s a really interesting question. I mean, I think in general, the thing that we are telling customers or the thing that customers are coming to understand is that creating a bespoke AI solution for a particular business, for a particular sector, for a particular whatever is an enormous lift. It’s an enormous lift. And I mean, again, that’s true today. It may not always be true. It may not be true indefinitely into the future, probably won’t be. But if you are the NAPA Auto Parts franchise in Farmington, Massachusetts, and you’re saying to yourself, “What we really need is a custom NAPA Auto Parts AI,” the answer is not to build it from an LLM vendor up from that layer, and certainly not to train one, again today, but you can get, it always comes down to time to value.
You can get 98% of the value of a custom AI solution for your business with Agentforce today, and you get the one year, two years, three years, however long of advantage of having access to that capability, having access to the tool prior to whatever you build being ready and pressure tested and secure and highly available and supported and having someone you can call or email or text or chat for help when you need it. It’s everything about developing bespoke on-premise solutions for your business multiplied by a couple orders of magnitude.
Because i don’t think anybody or very, very few businesses today, if you said to them, “Here’s what we think you should do. We think you should start with a database solution, Microsoft SQL or Postgres or whatever, and you should build your own CRM on your own infrastructure with your own code and your own customizations from scratch.” If we were to tell a customer, “We think this is the best use of your time and resources,” most 99% of customers would say, “No. Why would we do that when Salesforce exists, when Salesforce is a thing?”
Similarly for an ERP, I think that if you go back in time, building your own ERP or constructing your own version of that system from a database and some logic could be a thing, but then vendors came along that could solve that problem, and at the smaller segments of the market. For most business applications today, you would not assume that the right thing to do is to build it yourself even under pretty extreme conditions. Sometimes, of course you will. Stuff that is a differentiator that is going to be unique to your business, that is going to offer value that makes you something special compared to your competitors. Yeah, then you might consider building it. You might consider building it on an application platform as a service, but you might consider building it.
That’s where we’re even further back in the chain right now with AI because the expertise is thin, because the effort is high, because the risks are very high. So you can do great stuff that’s a point solution with commercially available consumer-grade AI solutions. If you’re trying to integrate it and implement it in the enterprise, it’s really, to my mind, only the biggest companies that have the resources and stamina to see this through and actually deliver something that is valuable, actually deliver something that’s useful rather than getting something that works and does what you need it to do now and is driving value for customers now. Sales pitch over.
Michael:
I didn’t see it as a pitch. You know what’s interesting? I think of Agentforce first as a helper for admins. And listening to your answer, it was all, and Agentforce can be customer-facing. I always think of, if I could go back in time when I had 200 licenses and I had 175 questions a day, how would I create an agent that would just offload some of that lift, that I could just give it an FAQ of the last six months of questions that I’ve been getting that it could just answer those questions for my internal users because there’s probably 10 heavy question askers and then everybody else falls in the middle. And hearing you talk through that, I was like, this is so fascinating. I wonder if I’m the only person that thinks of rolling out Agentforce first as an admin assist and then as a customer assist.
Mike Rose:
Oh, my gosh, yes. I honestly think that the internal use cases for Agentforce are as compelling if not more compelling than, well, I don’t want to say more compelling than the customer-facing stuff. Because the customer-facing stuff, the externally-facing stuff, when it is aligned and when it is doing something that is a value add is incredible. And what we hear, see from customers is it’s incredible. But it also because it’s interacting with customers and it’s representing your brand externally, you have to pressure test it a little bit. You have to go in and do your validation. We have great testing tools now. The Agentforce testing center is fantastic and it’s a lot faster than it used to be, but you have to be reasonably confident that this is going to behave and not create brand risk.
Internally, you still have that, but it’s a little different. The equation is somewhat different and you can gauge the appetite and the trust of your internal stakeholders for, hey, here’s something new that is intended to save you time and effort and aggravation, and we’re putting it out there and we want your feedback and we want to be able to make it better. And you can do that innovation and that iteration as an admin in an agile way. You know, I mean, every admin knows who their frontier users are, their bleeding edge people, their cohort of down for anything people are. So you let them hit it, you let them work on it and try it out and see where it breaks, and then you are able to deliver that as an innovation for your organization that much more quickly.
Michael:
Yeah. I also, maybe this is just me, but pressure testing your AI, you roll it out and say the 500th customer, it says, “You know what? I can’t find your order. Can you give me that order number again?” And they get mad and they’re like, “Well, your AI doesn’t know that.” Think of the last time you went to anywhere where there was human interaction. I promise you, I’ve had to give humans behind a counter in order number more than once. And so, you think of which is worse for your brand and AI saying, “Hey, I need that order number again,” or some employee that’s having a bad day mouthing off to your customer on the other side of the counter.
Mike Rose:
Yes.
Michael:
We tend to forget, well, AI can never make a problem or it can never be wrong. Okay, I get that. But you’re also, you got somebody, God willing, $14 an hour on the other side of the counter, what are they going to say?
Mike Rose:
Yeah. Well, I mean, this is funny because we said before the show we weren’t going to get into the whole digital labor thing, but we’re getting a little bit-
Michael:
No, I know. We’re not. But it is one of those things where it’s like you have to give yourself some sort of leeway. I’ve used different AIs and it’s come back and I was like, but that’s not what I asked. And I realized, well, I’ve also placed orders at restaurants. And I was like, but that’s not what I asked.
Mike Rose:
Right.
Michael:
Well, humans make the same mistakes.
Mike Rose:
Humans make the same mistakes. But I think it’s funny because there’s different failure modes. There’s different points where things break down or the abstraction and the expectations get a little sideways, and with humans, it’s fatigue, it’s long shift, it’s distraction. So it’s doing multiple things at once and having thing A override the logical thinking for thing B. And for an agent, it’s a different kind of responsiveness and different kind of intelligence. So it’s not going to get tired. It’s not going to be in a different mood at 4:58 on a Friday afternoon than it is in the middle of the week. But it is going to have stronger, essentially what you might give a human support agent or human customer service rep as a boundary, a policy boundary that says you don’t talk to customers about whatever, the fact that the X300 has an open warranty, there’s warranty extension. The only way they find out about that is if they send it in, don’t tell them in advance. And you’ve set that policy. That’s the rule.
And a human agent who’s hearing from the 80th customer who says, “I’ve got an X300 and I don’t understand why this red light is blinking,” might say, “Well, you know, you didn’t hear it from me. But if you were to send that in for warranty repair, even if it’s out of warranty, it would get covered.” Their ability to operate in the liminal space between policy and practicality is what we count on humans to be able to do. That is what we depend on human, that is what we have learned as a species over millennia is that interacting with other human beings has gray areas, it has fuzziness. And by the way, we’re still not fixed as a species. We’re still not back the way we need to be from 2020 and having every single interaction that we had be through a screen as opposed to in-person, because all of our heuristics are built for in-person interaction.
So it’s like the further you get away from talking to someone face-to-face in-person, the more opportunities there are for slippage and stuff to go the wrong direction in that gray zone. Complete tangent, I don’t know if anybody saw this last week, but Google’s 3D video conferencing project, project reach, project, I forget what it’s called, but Google has these video conferencing booths that are hologram style 3D, like R2-D2 holograms, those are being commercially deployed, and it has already been announced, and I cannot wait that Salesforce is one of the initial pilot customers for these 3D video conferencing booths. I cannot wait. So we’ll do the next podcast in one of those if-
Michael:
I mean, so are we talking like Star Wars where you see the person just hologram in?
Mike Rose:
You are look-
Michael:
Or maybe Marvel, which Marvel movie is that? Where they’re like, there’s a board of directors that are all hologrammed.
Mike Rose:
It’s all the Avengers movies, and actually in Endgame, the Avengers themselves hologram into headquarters. But no, it’s not like that. It is, from what I can tell, much more like a prison visit because well, because there’s a pane of glass between you and the person. It’s like you’re looking through a pane of glass, but it’s like they’re in that space beyond the pane of glass.
Michael:
Gotcha.
Mike Rose:
So we’ll see it when it arrives at New York and at HQ.
Michael:
Wow.
Mike Rose:
But my point, which I wandered away from is that human beings are perfectly equipped by evolution and by culture and custom to operate in that ambiguity. And admins know this by the way. You are always operating in, well, am I giving them what they ask for or am I giving them what they want? You have to be able to interpret and adjust on the fly. And an agent isn’t going to do that in the same way. And operating in the ambiguity and operating in the gray area is where you’re going to learn a lot about what does and doesn’t work.
So I’ve been thinking about this and I’ll probably maybe for your listeners have a LinkedIn post on this at some point in the next week or so about what kind of careers going forward have an AI moat or have sort of a digital labor are going to be more partnership with digital labor and less being overrun or overtaken by digital labor. And I do think that Salesforce admin work is one of those categories of career where you are going to be a partner with the AI and not a-
Michael:
Replacement.
Mike Rose:
Not being replaced by it. I really think because it is that human and technology interface. It doesn’t exactly matter what is happening there, but the fact that there is always going to be a line, there’s always going to be a border that has customs agents and couriers and envoys working across that human intelligence and machine intelligence boundary, until and unless that boundary completely disappears, which I don’t expect soon, if ever, there’s always going to be work to do, there’s always going to be responsibility that accrues at that boundary, and that’s what Salesforce admins do. It’s like you’re working on that boundary. You’re working on getting the fuzzy, blurry, maybe not quite explicit human stuff over to the Salesforce side.
Michael:
It’s funny, this brings up a conversation I had with a co-worker about admins and AI and what features Agentforce is coming out with and [inaudible 00:33:06] admins and developers, because now, I mean there’s AIs that write code, tons of code. I saw, I forget which one it is, you could give it just a hand drawing of an idea of a website and it’ll code it for you. And some people look at that, oh, well, I’m going to be out of a job. And I think I relate things to various different industries. I remember not so much, but growing up, I grew up in the ’80s and robotics and car manufacturing. That was the age. The ’70s, it was still mostly men and women on a production line, putting cars together, brute force. There was some assist tools. But the ’80s is really when we started to see the age of robotic welders and robotic painters and all these people are going to be out of jobs.
But if you ever watch the news and they show a production line of cars, there’s still hoards of people, hoards of people that show up every day to put cars together. And they’re the people that know how to work with the robots. They weren’t replaced with the robots. And the discussion that we had was AI is not going to take your job. The person that’s going to take your job is the guy that knows or the woman that knows how do you use AI more effectively than you. It’s the admin that sits down and paints the picture for the organization of how Agentforce enhances everything as opposed to the admin that sits down and doesn’t understand how Agentforce can enhance anything.
Mike Rose:
Yeah, and I think that is, I mean, not to send people off to prompt engineering courses or getting into the weeds in Coursera or someplace like that, but I do think it’s worth noting for our admins, you can spin up, I’m sure this has been mentioned repeatedly and everybody knows this, but you can spin up a developer org with Agentforce and Data Cloud in it today for free. You can have that environment. Not to put too fine a point on it, you can also call your account executive or go into Digital Wallet or My Account and turn on Salesforce Foundations, which gives you a starter pack for Agentforce and Data Cloud as well, and that’s in your org and in your environment. So up to you, do you want to live dangerously and do it live or would you rather be in a nice safe developer org? But the ability to get your hands in there and start working with it is not out in the distance somewhere. It’s now.
Michael:
Right. And a lot of that is new, thankfully. But yes, attainable.
Mike Rose:
Attainable. Available, attainable, achievable, and continuing to build and change and transform along with the product. And I think true confession’s time, like hop into the confessional booth, it’s hard for us, even those of us who are in the pre-sales world where we’re supposed to be as the solution engineers, we’re supposed to be as caught up as possible on what the product is doing and where we’re at. And every release, we’ve got summer release coming out, I think next weekend for some chunk, either the first tranche or the second, it’s either R0 or R1 coming soon. And I’m looking at this release in a box and thinking, oh my God, there’s so much in here, this is crazy.
But the thing that caught us up short as an organization was we were building Agentforce agents in the very manual topic at a time, prompt at a time mode and saying, “Well, this takes us a long time to build these demos and this is very piecework and a lot of effort to even put together one thing that is representative.” And then, unbeknownst to us, the create an agent with AI button showed up in the agent builder in production. This is a real feature that’s really working today, where you can, in natural language, share your website, share what you want the agent to do, and just stand back. And Salesforce and Agentforce will create a first approximation of the agent that you describe with appropriate topics, appropriate actions. Granted, it may not be wired up to your configuration, your metadata and your flows, but it’s a pretty reasonable starting point and all from a website and a prompt.
And that enables us to do some really interesting things. That enables us to show customers that light bulb moment and enables you as admins to go in and show your stakeholders that light bulb moment so much more quickly. Again, whether you’ve turned on Foundations and have the starter credits or whether you’re doing it in a dev org, you can do it really, really fast. You can get to something that works the way you want really, really fast. And honestly, that took us by surprise. I did not know that that was, I thought that was still beta and still something we weren’t ready to talk about, much less show. Nope, there it is in the product.
So lesson learned. I feel like being an admin is a lot and being a solution engineer at Salesforce, one thing you have in common is you have to have a best served by date sticker on everything you know, on every piece of knowledge and every product awareness that you have should have a staleness timer on it, so that once this has been true for X number of years, you go back, you say, “I have to check my assumptions here. Is this truly the case?”
Great example is employee cases and anybody who deployed platform licenses into their environment and was accessing the case object and had to deal with this concept of employee cases and considering how there was a lot of product specific language about that. Well, you know what? Guess what? A year ago, we got rid of that PS, the product specific language and product specific terms. And now, there’s just cases. And the only rule is the rule that was there all along, which is if you as a user or as an employee are primarily or even partially servicing customers and working on customer cases, you need to be sitting on Service Cloud.
Otherwise, you don’t have to care quite as much of is this an employee case or is it a case case and they’re actually the same object, but we’re going to call them different things. No, all that is gone. And so, if you were operating with the old knowledge either as a customer or as an SE, you’re going to tell people to do unnecessary work or you’re going to create a lot of superstructure and a lot of effort that doesn’t have to be, and that’s the price of not keeping up.
Michael:
The price of not keeping up. That might be the title of this show.
Mike Rose:
There we go.
Michael:
Let’s end on an action item. Based on your experience, admins in what we consider small, medium business size, after hearing this podcast, what should they do?
Mike Rose:
What should they do? Well, they should take three deep breaths and touch some grass. Oh, no, what if you’re in downtown New York? You’re going to have challenges. I would say first of all, they should take a moment to remember they’re not alone in the chaotic circumstances, the macro factors and the micro factors that are all conspiring right now to make this a very challenging and a fraught time for a lot of people. So giving yourself that grace and space, which is what my team is focused on right now. Take a little space, give a little grace.
And the other thing, the other action item is to, if you don’t have Agentforce and Data Cloud active in your production environment, take a look at Foundations, see if you’re comfortable turning it on. Again, remember, it doesn’t cost anything to turn on Foundations, and if you don’t want to do that or don’t feel comfortable doing that, then by all means, please, please, please go spin up a developer org for Agentforce. It will not get easier to take the first step. It is never going to be easier than it is today. I don’t know if that’s true. We are in a local minima for easiness.
Michael:
It wasn’t true yesterday. See?
Mike Rose:
Yeah, that’s true.
Michael:
I mean, every single day, it’s not going to get easier than today.
Mike Rose:
That’s correct. Which I think we can look out to a point where it actually is going to get easier in that this will be on for everyone and certainly for new orgs and new environments, it’ll be on for everyone. So that will make it a zero effort to get access to it. Right now, you still have to effectively opt in, but it will never get easier to decide to decide to do it. And if you decide to decide to go spin up an Agentforce developer org, you then have the ability to share and evangelize and talk confidently to your stakeholders about what Salesforce is doing with Agentforce and AI. And I think that’s great. I think that’s a really good place to be starting from a place of knowledge and a place of a little bit more comfort and familiarity is always going to be easier than coming at it from, well, I haven’t seen it, but I understand what I’ve read about is, you’re admins, don’t read about it, go touch it, go get your hands-
Michael:
Or I haven’t been hands on with it yet.
Mike Rose:
Exactly. Well, guess what? Today’s the day.
Michael:
Yep. And you’re right. I mean, there are times, I’ll do the Agentforce now virtual tour stops workshops and I introduce myself and I tell people, “I’ve been doing Salesforce since 2006 when I remember the big release was a WYSIWYG page builder.”
Mike Rose:
Wow.
Michael:
Where you could actually just drag the field from a pallet onto a canvas, and it was there and I was like, “Whoa.” Anyway, those were the days. Thanks so much for being on.
Mike Rose:
My pleasure. It’s been too long and I have had too much fun this morning doing this to let it be that long again, so I will be back sooner rather than-
Michael:
Okay. I will hold you to that and we will, because I should have you on before Dreamforce. I’m sure we’re going to need to do a Dreamforce prep episode because you are in the weeds. You’re right out there and you can help. What should we prep for? Between the two of us, we’ll know what’s going to go on for admins at Dreamforce.
Mike Rose:
I mean, I am flattered that you believe that and we’ll find out if it turns out to be true, but yes, Dreamforce is going to be amazing this year. So much, so much to talk about, so much that we’re going to be able to see, and honestly, if people haven’t been tuning into World Tours and attending or watching, should do that because what you’re getting right now in World Tour, in the keynotes and in the sessions is the Dreamforce is the run-up.
Michael:
The run-up.
Mike Rose:
It’s the Dreamforce preview. Every one of those, and by the way, if you do attend and you do watch the keynotes, you do participate in sessions or the Agentforce activations or anything like that, give feedback, share it at the welcome desk, share it with the surveys that you get because that actually helps to create a better experience for everybody when we do get to Dreamforce and the big show.
Michael:
It’s never been easier to learn than today.
Mike Rose:
It’s never been easier to decide to take the first step.
Michael:
Than tomorrow.
Mike Rose:
Who knows?
Michael:
Same way.
Mike Rose:
It’s going to be just more stuff.
Michael:
Same way.
Mike Rose:
Just more stuff.
Michael:
It’ll be one more day.
Mike Rose:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure and thanks to your listeners for being such an amazing part of the Salesforce community. We love y’all.
Michael:
And that’s a wrap. Huge thanks to Mike Rose for reminding us that admins are basically the diplomats of digital labor navigating ambiguity like a pro. If you’ve ever faced the here be dragons in your org, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Now, here’s some advice from Mike. If you can go outside, take three deep breaths and touch some grass, and then spin up an Agentforce org and test out something. Also, if you get access to the hologram booth, that would be kind of cool. Maybe try that out if you got one lying around. But in any case, make sure to share this episode with fellow Salesforce admin if you found this useful and give it a rating on iTunes. I would really appreciate that. Until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.
The post Why Small Businesses Benefit From Agentforce Right Now appeared first on Salesforce Admins.
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By Mike Gerholdt
4.7
200200 ratings
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Michael Rose, Senior Director of SMB Solution Engineering at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about the ever-evolving role of the Salesforce Admin and why now’s the time to start exploring what AI can do for your org.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Michael Rose.
The parallel between admins and solution engineers
It’s always a pleasure to sit down and talk about Salesforce with Mike Rose. In his new role as Senior Director of SMB Solution Engineering, he has a lot to share with the admin community about what he’s seeing with small to medium-sized businesses coming onto the platform.
Mike points out that admins and his team of solution engineers share a core responsibility: evangelism. For both, your job is to make the case for how Salesforce implementation can help your organization achieve its business goals.
The integration challenges of smaller orgs
As Mike likes to joke, many SMBs are running some version of what Mike jokingly calls POIM (Post-It On Monitor) integration. As in, someone comes over with a sticky note (or Excel file) and asks you to put that info into Salesforce. “That’s all integration,” he says, “it is taking that data and putting it somewhere where it can be more valuable.”
These workflows can be hard to change, and that’s because they work well enough to get the job done. As Mike explains, the opportunity cost of things like errors, bottlenecks, and latency doesn’t factor into the equation. It’s hard to envision a world where an entire business process could happen automatically.
For Mike, the next frontier of this conversation is Agentforce. You can develop bespoke, enterprise-grade AI solutions tailored specifically for your business, but that kind of power is hard to wrap your head around when you’re still trying to limit the number of sticky notes circulating around the office.
Why admins are the key to unlocking the power of AI
As AI solutions continue to evolve, Salesforce Admins will play a critical role in bridging the gap between humans and technology. As Mike says, “there is always going to be a border that has customs agents and couriers and envoys working across that human intelligence and machine intelligence boundary.”
Agentforce is evolving so rapidly that even the Solution Engineering team is struggling to keep up to date. So Mike recommends getting your hands dirty as soon as possible, either by spinning up a Developer Edition org or activating Salesforce Foundations.
There’s a lot more great stuff from Mike in this episode, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.
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Full show transcript
Michael:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re thrilled to welcome back Mike Rose, a 12-year Salesforce veteran who has a new role and some fresh insights. Mike and I get into the real talk about what it’s like supporting small to medium businesses, the ever-evolving role of the Salesforce admin, and how tools like Agentforce are really changing the game. Now, whether you’re a full-time admin or you’re wearing five hats in your org, this episode speaks your language. Mike also shares why now is the best time to roll up your sleeves and start exploring AI in your sandbox. So you’ve already hit play on this episode, get ready to feel seen, and let’s get Mike back on the podcast. So Mike, welcome back to the podcast.
Mike Rose:
It’s such a pleasure, Michael. I have been a long-time listener and repeat caller, but very glad to be back after years.
Michael:
I know. I feel like we used to do World Tours and we’d run into each other like we need to do a podcast together.
Mike Rose:
It’s true.
Michael:
And then we’d do a random podcast together. And then this last time I just saw you on Slack. I was like, I haven’t had Mike on the podcast in a while.
Mike Rose:
It’s true. And I actually said, “Yes, absolutely, let’s do it.” And then, I think it was a month of gap before I got back to you and then you were on vacation. By the way, folks, if you find yourselves running into the consequences of your own inaction, say, in the middle of the night on a weekend, and you say, “Oh, I really should reach out to that person, but I don’t want to do it right now, because that’s just awkward.” Slack’s scheduled messages are your friend.
Michael:
I’m telling you, I use Slacks’ scheduled messages all the time, especially when I go on vacation, I can schedule stuff. Or the best is when you have a team that’s in a different time zone. So we’ll have a team, let’s see when this airs, the London event will be happening/happened, and I can schedule stuff and it looks like I just schedule it right for 8:00 A.M. their time, but I’m off in sleepy land.
Mike Rose:
I have to say that I have one of my managers who reports up to me is on maternity leave right now, and she has set Hari Seldon Foundation style messages that pop up in Slack and they say, “Hi, it’s the ghost of Gab here to tell you.” And it’s hilarious and it’s great because it’s all the reminders that otherwise I would have to remember to do, like do your Q2 check ins and do this. But what’s particularly funny is that because she branded it as the ghost of Gabrielle, the reaction emoji that people are using to respond to those messages is the face of Fred from Scooby-Doo reacting in terror to a ghost.
I didn’t come up with this. One of her team members reacted that way. I was like, oh, no, no, no, no, this is it. Now, everybody has to react that way. It’s so much fun to see these little microculture moments that build a custom or build a tradition around something as simple as an emoji response. But yes, scheduled messages, you can just sit down and knock out a quarter’s worth of admin if you’re going to be out and do it all pre-programmed. It’s very handy.
Michael:
I would say, as a best practice, and I’m looking at a scheduled message that somebody had sent me over the weekend. They italicized, “Hey, by the way, this is a scheduled message.”
Mike Rose:
Oh, that’s really smart. That’s really smart.
Michael:
Just in case you want to, not in the heat of a moment.
Mike Rose:
Well, it’s also so awkward when there’s something that you’ve been working on with someone and you set the scheduled message for 9:00 A.M. their time on a Monday, only to discover that at 7:30 A.M. they already gave you the full rundown of everything you possibly could need. And then, your message pops in. It’s like, “Hey, just wondering if you had an update on project X.” And then like, “Dude, do you not read first?” So yeah, putting it in italics is a good, I like that custom.
Michael:
Yeah. I do a Friday message to the team and I schedule it for 1:00 my time, and 12:55, somebody had an urgent message that they posted to the team and they said, “In the spirit of the Friday message,” and I was like, oh, my Friday message is going to appear in five minutes from now and it’s totally going to look like Mike forgot to send it.
Mike Rose:
Can’t win them all. Can’t win them all.
Michael:
Well, I’m sure Slack is something we’ll talk about, but I mean, we have a lot to talk about because there’s Agentforce stuff now, you have people that report to you. You’ve always had people that report to you, but you’re demoing to different customers. Where would you like to dive in first? Because otherwise, we’ll just go off the rails and end up talking about something in New York or soup, I don’t know.
Mike Rose:
Soup would be good. Well, I could just start with on the perhaps bold assumption that previous listeners who might vaguely remember me having been here before, might think what did he used to do and what is he doing now?
Michael:
I’m sure people track that.
Mike Rose:
I actually have seen some of the Always Sunny in Philadelphia murder boards for this show, for the Admins Podcast. And they’re elaborate. There’s a lot of community investment in understanding the connection. So no, I’ve been at Salesforce 12 years, celebrated my 12th anniversary a couple months ago. Very exciting.
Michael:
Wow, congrats.
Mike Rose:
Thank you. I also am delighted to report that my brother is also now back at Salesforce. He is boomeranged, so he was part of our solution engineering world for several years. Left to go take a role at OwnData or OwnBackup.
Michael:
And then we acquired them.
Mike Rose:
And then we acquired them. So now, he is back. And so, now we have sibling force back in effect, which I’m delighted by. And so, last time I was on the program, I was managing a team of technical architects. So our pre-sales TAs are the successors of our platform solution engineering team. So these are folks who are working with customers, mostly working with the technology decision makers and technology leaders, IT leaders at customers to work on questions around security and data strategy and AI and app dev and customization and getting into the cracks or the weeds in the customer 360. A lot of conversations around integration and really with all the integration products and capabilities that we currently have and will safe harbor have in the future, the TA team has spent a lot of time working on Data Cloud and Agentforce as well.
And that was what I’ve been doing for several years, eight years actually, I think. And then, an opportunity came along last year and I have now taken over a larger team of solution engineers, not technical architects, but core solution engineers, account solution engineers working in a part of our SMB business. So this is a team of about 50 and with several different teams, geographies and verticals within it. But basically working with customers between about 50 and 250 employees in a subset of our industry’s framework to help them understand what we can offer, do discovery, do demos, talk about AI, which it seems is what we’re doing a lot of the time nowadays. And it’s been a great transition for me. It’s been really educational and informative to get closer to the customer again with some of the opportunities and some of the challenges that are out there nowadays.
Michael:
And the reason, well, first of all, I love talking to you because you’re incredibly smart human being.
Mike Rose:
Thank you.
Michael:
But the second is your job is so closely aligned to everything admins do. It’s like an aspect of their job. You just get paid to do essentially a sales role of admin stuff. But that’s essentially what a Salesforce admin does in their organization is walk around and talk with the executives and oh, well, let’s see how we can use Salesforce in your area and everything you described.
Mike Rose:
Yeah, I mean, I think that there is a partnership between the admins and the solution engineers that’s really important and that I think you highlighted very effectively, which is it’s a shared responsibility of evangelism, sort of evangelism from the outside, evangelism from the inside. And the admins are those folks who are doing discovery, internal discovery, process assessment, understanding where is their pain, where is their organizational inefficiency. And I think for our small business admins, a lot of them are accidental admins. A lot of them are people who came into the Salesforce ecosystem through the back door, not really with the awareness or intention of taking on that responsibility. And so, they’ve had to learn very tactically. They’ve had to learn based on what was the problem in front of them at that moment.
And when we arrive at those customers or come into those conversations, often the question is, well, not so much what should you be doing or what should you be doing better, but what are the things that haven’t even been examined yet? And often, it is around something like integration. I joke with customers that we see a lot of, particularly in our healthcare customers, we see a lot of PIOM data integration models, and I’ll bring that up in the course of our conversation and just let it simmer there for a minute. And sometimes someone will ask, sometimes they won’t put us like, oh, I should probably explain my acronyms. PIOM stands for Post-it on monitor. And literally, the way data gets into Salesforce is someone from the sales team goes over to the lead management person, Joanne, and leaves a Post-it on Joanne’s monitor saying, please update this record. That’s integration.
Michael:
Or update this spreadsheet so that I can insert it.
Mike Rose:
Yes. Yeah, exactly. And so, that is an integration driving the motion of data or added value on top of data through human intervention, through re-keying, through copy and paste, through let me look over your shoulder and key this in for me. That’s all integration. It is taking data that exists usually in email or Excel or in somebody’s brain or on a piece of paper and putting it someplace where it can be more valuable, where it can create a multiplier effect of visibility and actionability and observability and impacting the situational awareness for business leaders and for people on the front lines. All of that is value added for that data.
But when we see those points of pinch points and points of friction, usually it’s because there wasn’t enough perceived value to change it. It’s working the way it is, why should we change it? And usually the answer is, it is working the way it is, but you don’t understand or don’t fully account for the opportunity cost of not having that happening automatically every time like the errors and the lag, the latency of that data and all those other things. So that’s just one tiny corner of it, but it really is common, especially with smaller customers, to just see largely a great Salesforce implementation and everything working really efficiently. And then you’re like, what’s under this rock?
Michael:
Oh no, here be dragons.
Mike Rose:
Here be dragons. So yeah, so it’s a lot of fun.
Michael:
Well, I think having gone through, I feel like I’ve kind of run somewhat of the gamut. When I started out as an admin, we had 10 licenses because that’s what you got with the foundation.
Mike Rose:
Power of us, yeah.
Michael:
And then, we grew all the way up to like 1,500. So I’ve run, and we didn’t go right away. It was steps. And so, I’ve been in that 50 to 250-seat area. One thing that I think we probably do, and you work at Salesforce too, we often assume that when we talk to a Salesforce admin or developer architect and they’re in the smaller business, 50 to 250-seat, that that’s all they do. Every day, they wake up and they pine what field can I release? What training thing can I do? But I’m going to go out on a limb and say, because you said most of them come in accidentally or through the back door. What are some of the other jobs that you find that they’re also responsible for in addition to sitting in these Salesforce meetings with you?
Mike Rose:
Oh, gosh, that’s a great question. I mean, I will say for our customers, because they’re just a little bit on the larger side of the larger half of our SMB space, that by and large, by the time we get to them, they have transitioned into full-time admins. However, they’re coming from sales ops or they’re coming from being-
Michael:
They always come from sales ops.
Mike Rose:
They do.
Michael:
The sales guys are the ones that care about the CRM. That’s why.
Mike Rose:
It’s funny how that works. Sometimes it’s actually an AE or someone who was on the sales team. Sometimes it’s a business analyst or someone who is coming in from the marketing side or from lead gen. A substantial number of folks who end up as Salesforce admins are coming from office management, receptionist, executive assistant, presumptively, non-technical roles. But because of their proximity to the leadership and because their work tends to be a little more bursty and they have fallow time or downtime along with the time that they’re extremely busy and they can do stuff asynchronously, there’s a lot of folks who are coming from that front office and front of house role into a Salesforce admin role, which is great because I can’t think of another enterprise software environment where it’s as easy and as welcoming to get started and get skilled up than us, than Salesforce.
So we do have those opportunities for people to change their careers and step in a different direction. I can think of a lot of people who were either not in IT or were in IT, peripheral IT and peripheral technology roles and Salesforce was their angle and ended up being the transformative thing that brought them into a technology career. So you’d love to see it.
Michael:
I mean, mine was the same way. I was in charge of inside sales and Salesforce because sales.
Mike Rose:
Yeah, because those are it. And honestly, if you can be effective as an admin in a part-time way, that’s great because it helps you stay closer to the business and helps you stay connected to what’s driving value and where the pain points are, where things need work. The thing that I think is interesting for our smaller customers is we don’t have, to my mind, enough customers taking advantage of premier support, the delegated admin features and the ability to get Salesforce to do stuff for you, take stuff off your plate. I know we’re adding a lot of admin AI capabilities as well to speed up the work and makes things easier for admins, but honestly, if you’re going to get value out of something that Salesforce can give you, I think that’s a good thing to do because what it gives you back is time. It gives you back time to again, spend more time understanding what the business needs.
Michael:
And there’s a cost. I mean, I finally sold one of my employers on it, but the ability to, I think at the time it was log a ticket and get a dashboard made, I mean, that was an afternoon back for me. It was huge. So let’s talk, I mean, we also, it’s the age of AI. Everybody’s got AI. We’ve got Agentforce. You see the headlines of big companies building their own AI. I promise you, the NAPA Auto parts in Farmington, Minnesota that uses Salesforce, I don’t know if that’s true or not, I’m just making it up.
Mike Rose:
Well, it’s true now.
Michael:
Probably isn’t building-
Mike Rose:
Now it’s canonical since you said it on the podcast, it’s true now.
Michael:
But I mean, probably isn’t sitting down building their own AI model. What do you find are the questions or the gaps that maybe they don’t know that they should look for or is there a perceived we’re just not big enough so we’re not going to use it?
Mike Rose:
It’s a really interesting question. I mean, I think in general, the thing that we are telling customers or the thing that customers are coming to understand is that creating a bespoke AI solution for a particular business, for a particular sector, for a particular whatever is an enormous lift. It’s an enormous lift. And I mean, again, that’s true today. It may not always be true. It may not be true indefinitely into the future, probably won’t be. But if you are the NAPA Auto Parts franchise in Farmington, Massachusetts, and you’re saying to yourself, “What we really need is a custom NAPA Auto Parts AI,” the answer is not to build it from an LLM vendor up from that layer, and certainly not to train one, again today, but you can get, it always comes down to time to value.
You can get 98% of the value of a custom AI solution for your business with Agentforce today, and you get the one year, two years, three years, however long of advantage of having access to that capability, having access to the tool prior to whatever you build being ready and pressure tested and secure and highly available and supported and having someone you can call or email or text or chat for help when you need it. It’s everything about developing bespoke on-premise solutions for your business multiplied by a couple orders of magnitude.
Because i don’t think anybody or very, very few businesses today, if you said to them, “Here’s what we think you should do. We think you should start with a database solution, Microsoft SQL or Postgres or whatever, and you should build your own CRM on your own infrastructure with your own code and your own customizations from scratch.” If we were to tell a customer, “We think this is the best use of your time and resources,” most 99% of customers would say, “No. Why would we do that when Salesforce exists, when Salesforce is a thing?”
Similarly for an ERP, I think that if you go back in time, building your own ERP or constructing your own version of that system from a database and some logic could be a thing, but then vendors came along that could solve that problem, and at the smaller segments of the market. For most business applications today, you would not assume that the right thing to do is to build it yourself even under pretty extreme conditions. Sometimes, of course you will. Stuff that is a differentiator that is going to be unique to your business, that is going to offer value that makes you something special compared to your competitors. Yeah, then you might consider building it. You might consider building it on an application platform as a service, but you might consider building it.
That’s where we’re even further back in the chain right now with AI because the expertise is thin, because the effort is high, because the risks are very high. So you can do great stuff that’s a point solution with commercially available consumer-grade AI solutions. If you’re trying to integrate it and implement it in the enterprise, it’s really, to my mind, only the biggest companies that have the resources and stamina to see this through and actually deliver something that is valuable, actually deliver something that’s useful rather than getting something that works and does what you need it to do now and is driving value for customers now. Sales pitch over.
Michael:
I didn’t see it as a pitch. You know what’s interesting? I think of Agentforce first as a helper for admins. And listening to your answer, it was all, and Agentforce can be customer-facing. I always think of, if I could go back in time when I had 200 licenses and I had 175 questions a day, how would I create an agent that would just offload some of that lift, that I could just give it an FAQ of the last six months of questions that I’ve been getting that it could just answer those questions for my internal users because there’s probably 10 heavy question askers and then everybody else falls in the middle. And hearing you talk through that, I was like, this is so fascinating. I wonder if I’m the only person that thinks of rolling out Agentforce first as an admin assist and then as a customer assist.
Mike Rose:
Oh, my gosh, yes. I honestly think that the internal use cases for Agentforce are as compelling if not more compelling than, well, I don’t want to say more compelling than the customer-facing stuff. Because the customer-facing stuff, the externally-facing stuff, when it is aligned and when it is doing something that is a value add is incredible. And what we hear, see from customers is it’s incredible. But it also because it’s interacting with customers and it’s representing your brand externally, you have to pressure test it a little bit. You have to go in and do your validation. We have great testing tools now. The Agentforce testing center is fantastic and it’s a lot faster than it used to be, but you have to be reasonably confident that this is going to behave and not create brand risk.
Internally, you still have that, but it’s a little different. The equation is somewhat different and you can gauge the appetite and the trust of your internal stakeholders for, hey, here’s something new that is intended to save you time and effort and aggravation, and we’re putting it out there and we want your feedback and we want to be able to make it better. And you can do that innovation and that iteration as an admin in an agile way. You know, I mean, every admin knows who their frontier users are, their bleeding edge people, their cohort of down for anything people are. So you let them hit it, you let them work on it and try it out and see where it breaks, and then you are able to deliver that as an innovation for your organization that much more quickly.
Michael:
Yeah. I also, maybe this is just me, but pressure testing your AI, you roll it out and say the 500th customer, it says, “You know what? I can’t find your order. Can you give me that order number again?” And they get mad and they’re like, “Well, your AI doesn’t know that.” Think of the last time you went to anywhere where there was human interaction. I promise you, I’ve had to give humans behind a counter in order number more than once. And so, you think of which is worse for your brand and AI saying, “Hey, I need that order number again,” or some employee that’s having a bad day mouthing off to your customer on the other side of the counter.
Mike Rose:
Yes.
Michael:
We tend to forget, well, AI can never make a problem or it can never be wrong. Okay, I get that. But you’re also, you got somebody, God willing, $14 an hour on the other side of the counter, what are they going to say?
Mike Rose:
Yeah. Well, I mean, this is funny because we said before the show we weren’t going to get into the whole digital labor thing, but we’re getting a little bit-
Michael:
No, I know. We’re not. But it is one of those things where it’s like you have to give yourself some sort of leeway. I’ve used different AIs and it’s come back and I was like, but that’s not what I asked. And I realized, well, I’ve also placed orders at restaurants. And I was like, but that’s not what I asked.
Mike Rose:
Right.
Michael:
Well, humans make the same mistakes.
Mike Rose:
Humans make the same mistakes. But I think it’s funny because there’s different failure modes. There’s different points where things break down or the abstraction and the expectations get a little sideways, and with humans, it’s fatigue, it’s long shift, it’s distraction. So it’s doing multiple things at once and having thing A override the logical thinking for thing B. And for an agent, it’s a different kind of responsiveness and different kind of intelligence. So it’s not going to get tired. It’s not going to be in a different mood at 4:58 on a Friday afternoon than it is in the middle of the week. But it is going to have stronger, essentially what you might give a human support agent or human customer service rep as a boundary, a policy boundary that says you don’t talk to customers about whatever, the fact that the X300 has an open warranty, there’s warranty extension. The only way they find out about that is if they send it in, don’t tell them in advance. And you’ve set that policy. That’s the rule.
And a human agent who’s hearing from the 80th customer who says, “I’ve got an X300 and I don’t understand why this red light is blinking,” might say, “Well, you know, you didn’t hear it from me. But if you were to send that in for warranty repair, even if it’s out of warranty, it would get covered.” Their ability to operate in the liminal space between policy and practicality is what we count on humans to be able to do. That is what we depend on human, that is what we have learned as a species over millennia is that interacting with other human beings has gray areas, it has fuzziness. And by the way, we’re still not fixed as a species. We’re still not back the way we need to be from 2020 and having every single interaction that we had be through a screen as opposed to in-person, because all of our heuristics are built for in-person interaction.
So it’s like the further you get away from talking to someone face-to-face in-person, the more opportunities there are for slippage and stuff to go the wrong direction in that gray zone. Complete tangent, I don’t know if anybody saw this last week, but Google’s 3D video conferencing project, project reach, project, I forget what it’s called, but Google has these video conferencing booths that are hologram style 3D, like R2-D2 holograms, those are being commercially deployed, and it has already been announced, and I cannot wait that Salesforce is one of the initial pilot customers for these 3D video conferencing booths. I cannot wait. So we’ll do the next podcast in one of those if-
Michael:
I mean, so are we talking like Star Wars where you see the person just hologram in?
Mike Rose:
You are look-
Michael:
Or maybe Marvel, which Marvel movie is that? Where they’re like, there’s a board of directors that are all hologrammed.
Mike Rose:
It’s all the Avengers movies, and actually in Endgame, the Avengers themselves hologram into headquarters. But no, it’s not like that. It is, from what I can tell, much more like a prison visit because well, because there’s a pane of glass between you and the person. It’s like you’re looking through a pane of glass, but it’s like they’re in that space beyond the pane of glass.
Michael:
Gotcha.
Mike Rose:
So we’ll see it when it arrives at New York and at HQ.
Michael:
Wow.
Mike Rose:
But my point, which I wandered away from is that human beings are perfectly equipped by evolution and by culture and custom to operate in that ambiguity. And admins know this by the way. You are always operating in, well, am I giving them what they ask for or am I giving them what they want? You have to be able to interpret and adjust on the fly. And an agent isn’t going to do that in the same way. And operating in the ambiguity and operating in the gray area is where you’re going to learn a lot about what does and doesn’t work.
So I’ve been thinking about this and I’ll probably maybe for your listeners have a LinkedIn post on this at some point in the next week or so about what kind of careers going forward have an AI moat or have sort of a digital labor are going to be more partnership with digital labor and less being overrun or overtaken by digital labor. And I do think that Salesforce admin work is one of those categories of career where you are going to be a partner with the AI and not a-
Michael:
Replacement.
Mike Rose:
Not being replaced by it. I really think because it is that human and technology interface. It doesn’t exactly matter what is happening there, but the fact that there is always going to be a line, there’s always going to be a border that has customs agents and couriers and envoys working across that human intelligence and machine intelligence boundary, until and unless that boundary completely disappears, which I don’t expect soon, if ever, there’s always going to be work to do, there’s always going to be responsibility that accrues at that boundary, and that’s what Salesforce admins do. It’s like you’re working on that boundary. You’re working on getting the fuzzy, blurry, maybe not quite explicit human stuff over to the Salesforce side.
Michael:
It’s funny, this brings up a conversation I had with a co-worker about admins and AI and what features Agentforce is coming out with and [inaudible 00:33:06] admins and developers, because now, I mean there’s AIs that write code, tons of code. I saw, I forget which one it is, you could give it just a hand drawing of an idea of a website and it’ll code it for you. And some people look at that, oh, well, I’m going to be out of a job. And I think I relate things to various different industries. I remember not so much, but growing up, I grew up in the ’80s and robotics and car manufacturing. That was the age. The ’70s, it was still mostly men and women on a production line, putting cars together, brute force. There was some assist tools. But the ’80s is really when we started to see the age of robotic welders and robotic painters and all these people are going to be out of jobs.
But if you ever watch the news and they show a production line of cars, there’s still hoards of people, hoards of people that show up every day to put cars together. And they’re the people that know how to work with the robots. They weren’t replaced with the robots. And the discussion that we had was AI is not going to take your job. The person that’s going to take your job is the guy that knows or the woman that knows how do you use AI more effectively than you. It’s the admin that sits down and paints the picture for the organization of how Agentforce enhances everything as opposed to the admin that sits down and doesn’t understand how Agentforce can enhance anything.
Mike Rose:
Yeah, and I think that is, I mean, not to send people off to prompt engineering courses or getting into the weeds in Coursera or someplace like that, but I do think it’s worth noting for our admins, you can spin up, I’m sure this has been mentioned repeatedly and everybody knows this, but you can spin up a developer org with Agentforce and Data Cloud in it today for free. You can have that environment. Not to put too fine a point on it, you can also call your account executive or go into Digital Wallet or My Account and turn on Salesforce Foundations, which gives you a starter pack for Agentforce and Data Cloud as well, and that’s in your org and in your environment. So up to you, do you want to live dangerously and do it live or would you rather be in a nice safe developer org? But the ability to get your hands in there and start working with it is not out in the distance somewhere. It’s now.
Michael:
Right. And a lot of that is new, thankfully. But yes, attainable.
Mike Rose:
Attainable. Available, attainable, achievable, and continuing to build and change and transform along with the product. And I think true confession’s time, like hop into the confessional booth, it’s hard for us, even those of us who are in the pre-sales world where we’re supposed to be as the solution engineers, we’re supposed to be as caught up as possible on what the product is doing and where we’re at. And every release, we’ve got summer release coming out, I think next weekend for some chunk, either the first tranche or the second, it’s either R0 or R1 coming soon. And I’m looking at this release in a box and thinking, oh my God, there’s so much in here, this is crazy.
But the thing that caught us up short as an organization was we were building Agentforce agents in the very manual topic at a time, prompt at a time mode and saying, “Well, this takes us a long time to build these demos and this is very piecework and a lot of effort to even put together one thing that is representative.” And then, unbeknownst to us, the create an agent with AI button showed up in the agent builder in production. This is a real feature that’s really working today, where you can, in natural language, share your website, share what you want the agent to do, and just stand back. And Salesforce and Agentforce will create a first approximation of the agent that you describe with appropriate topics, appropriate actions. Granted, it may not be wired up to your configuration, your metadata and your flows, but it’s a pretty reasonable starting point and all from a website and a prompt.
And that enables us to do some really interesting things. That enables us to show customers that light bulb moment and enables you as admins to go in and show your stakeholders that light bulb moment so much more quickly. Again, whether you’ve turned on Foundations and have the starter credits or whether you’re doing it in a dev org, you can do it really, really fast. You can get to something that works the way you want really, really fast. And honestly, that took us by surprise. I did not know that that was, I thought that was still beta and still something we weren’t ready to talk about, much less show. Nope, there it is in the product.
So lesson learned. I feel like being an admin is a lot and being a solution engineer at Salesforce, one thing you have in common is you have to have a best served by date sticker on everything you know, on every piece of knowledge and every product awareness that you have should have a staleness timer on it, so that once this has been true for X number of years, you go back, you say, “I have to check my assumptions here. Is this truly the case?”
Great example is employee cases and anybody who deployed platform licenses into their environment and was accessing the case object and had to deal with this concept of employee cases and considering how there was a lot of product specific language about that. Well, you know what? Guess what? A year ago, we got rid of that PS, the product specific language and product specific terms. And now, there’s just cases. And the only rule is the rule that was there all along, which is if you as a user or as an employee are primarily or even partially servicing customers and working on customer cases, you need to be sitting on Service Cloud.
Otherwise, you don’t have to care quite as much of is this an employee case or is it a case case and they’re actually the same object, but we’re going to call them different things. No, all that is gone. And so, if you were operating with the old knowledge either as a customer or as an SE, you’re going to tell people to do unnecessary work or you’re going to create a lot of superstructure and a lot of effort that doesn’t have to be, and that’s the price of not keeping up.
Michael:
The price of not keeping up. That might be the title of this show.
Mike Rose:
There we go.
Michael:
Let’s end on an action item. Based on your experience, admins in what we consider small, medium business size, after hearing this podcast, what should they do?
Mike Rose:
What should they do? Well, they should take three deep breaths and touch some grass. Oh, no, what if you’re in downtown New York? You’re going to have challenges. I would say first of all, they should take a moment to remember they’re not alone in the chaotic circumstances, the macro factors and the micro factors that are all conspiring right now to make this a very challenging and a fraught time for a lot of people. So giving yourself that grace and space, which is what my team is focused on right now. Take a little space, give a little grace.
And the other thing, the other action item is to, if you don’t have Agentforce and Data Cloud active in your production environment, take a look at Foundations, see if you’re comfortable turning it on. Again, remember, it doesn’t cost anything to turn on Foundations, and if you don’t want to do that or don’t feel comfortable doing that, then by all means, please, please, please go spin up a developer org for Agentforce. It will not get easier to take the first step. It is never going to be easier than it is today. I don’t know if that’s true. We are in a local minima for easiness.
Michael:
It wasn’t true yesterday. See?
Mike Rose:
Yeah, that’s true.
Michael:
I mean, every single day, it’s not going to get easier than today.
Mike Rose:
That’s correct. Which I think we can look out to a point where it actually is going to get easier in that this will be on for everyone and certainly for new orgs and new environments, it’ll be on for everyone. So that will make it a zero effort to get access to it. Right now, you still have to effectively opt in, but it will never get easier to decide to decide to do it. And if you decide to decide to go spin up an Agentforce developer org, you then have the ability to share and evangelize and talk confidently to your stakeholders about what Salesforce is doing with Agentforce and AI. And I think that’s great. I think that’s a really good place to be starting from a place of knowledge and a place of a little bit more comfort and familiarity is always going to be easier than coming at it from, well, I haven’t seen it, but I understand what I’ve read about is, you’re admins, don’t read about it, go touch it, go get your hands-
Michael:
Or I haven’t been hands on with it yet.
Mike Rose:
Exactly. Well, guess what? Today’s the day.
Michael:
Yep. And you’re right. I mean, there are times, I’ll do the Agentforce now virtual tour stops workshops and I introduce myself and I tell people, “I’ve been doing Salesforce since 2006 when I remember the big release was a WYSIWYG page builder.”
Mike Rose:
Wow.
Michael:
Where you could actually just drag the field from a pallet onto a canvas, and it was there and I was like, “Whoa.” Anyway, those were the days. Thanks so much for being on.
Mike Rose:
My pleasure. It’s been too long and I have had too much fun this morning doing this to let it be that long again, so I will be back sooner rather than-
Michael:
Okay. I will hold you to that and we will, because I should have you on before Dreamforce. I’m sure we’re going to need to do a Dreamforce prep episode because you are in the weeds. You’re right out there and you can help. What should we prep for? Between the two of us, we’ll know what’s going to go on for admins at Dreamforce.
Mike Rose:
I mean, I am flattered that you believe that and we’ll find out if it turns out to be true, but yes, Dreamforce is going to be amazing this year. So much, so much to talk about, so much that we’re going to be able to see, and honestly, if people haven’t been tuning into World Tours and attending or watching, should do that because what you’re getting right now in World Tour, in the keynotes and in the sessions is the Dreamforce is the run-up.
Michael:
The run-up.
Mike Rose:
It’s the Dreamforce preview. Every one of those, and by the way, if you do attend and you do watch the keynotes, you do participate in sessions or the Agentforce activations or anything like that, give feedback, share it at the welcome desk, share it with the surveys that you get because that actually helps to create a better experience for everybody when we do get to Dreamforce and the big show.
Michael:
It’s never been easier to learn than today.
Mike Rose:
It’s never been easier to decide to take the first step.
Michael:
Than tomorrow.
Mike Rose:
Who knows?
Michael:
Same way.
Mike Rose:
It’s going to be just more stuff.
Michael:
Same way.
Mike Rose:
Just more stuff.
Michael:
It’ll be one more day.
Mike Rose:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure and thanks to your listeners for being such an amazing part of the Salesforce community. We love y’all.
Michael:
And that’s a wrap. Huge thanks to Mike Rose for reminding us that admins are basically the diplomats of digital labor navigating ambiguity like a pro. If you’ve ever faced the here be dragons in your org, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Now, here’s some advice from Mike. If you can go outside, take three deep breaths and touch some grass, and then spin up an Agentforce org and test out something. Also, if you get access to the hologram booth, that would be kind of cool. Maybe try that out if you got one lying around. But in any case, make sure to share this episode with fellow Salesforce admin if you found this useful and give it a rating on iTunes. I would really appreciate that. Until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.
The post Why Small Businesses Benefit From Agentforce Right Now appeared first on Salesforce Admins.
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