Salesforce Admins Podcast
The Salesforce Admins podcast features real-life Salesforce Admins, product managers, and community leaders who transform businesses, careers, and community with clicks, not code. This 20min (sometimes a bit more) weekly podcast hosted by Mike Gerholdt feature episodes to empower Salesforce Admins who are implementing Enterprise CRM solutions. There may be some (digital) confetti. For more than our most recent episodes, go to https://admin.salesforce.com/salesforce-admin-podcast.
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How Salesforce Admins Are Evolving to Run the Agentic Enterprise
03/26/2026
How Salesforce Admins Are Evolving to Run the Agentic Enterprise
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Rebecca Saar, Senior Director of Admin Relations at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about governance, productivity, and why Salesforce Admins are more essential than ever in the agentic enterprise. You should for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Rebecca Saar. Admins are becoming the guardians of trust As AI becomes an ever bigger part of our day-to-day lives, I wanted to bring Rebecca Saar on the pod to talk about what changes and what stays the same. One thing she emphasizes is that admins are here to look at the big picture for their organizations. While it might be easier to build the solution, you still need to figure out what to build in the first place. “It’s a shift in mindset and understanding where the work is happening,” Rebecca says, “because we now can leverage these super powerful tools.” Skills like gathering requirements, talking with stakeholders, and bridging the gap between departments are only going to be amplified by AI—not replaced. Admins act as translators across systems and teams Admins are a crucial intermediary for their organization, connecting the dots between multiple departments to understand what’s really going on with a business process. In other words, admins are the ones who understand who to talk to in order to get something done. In my experience as an admin, each business unit only knows their own siloed data. They know where it comes from and who they ship it off to, but they don’t know if there are better options, or where there might be a snag in the process. That’s where admins need to step in and find a solution that individual business units might not be able to figure out on their own. Strong foundations still matter in an AI world Despite new tools, core admin skills remain essential. In a way, we’ve moved from problem solver to sense maker. You might not have to spend as much time figuring out who has what permissions, but you’ll still be called on to have a conversation about how it should be handled. Just like with everything else, AI can save time on the busywork so you can focus on what matters. At the end of the day, it’s even more important to lean into the foundational admin skills to find solutions that work for everyone in your organization. Make sure to listen to the full episode for more from Rebecca Saar about what’s coming at TDX, and don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode. Podcast swag Learn more Salesforce Admins Blog Post: Salesforce Admins Blog Post: Salesforce Admins Blog Post: Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, I sit down with Rebecca Saar, the Senior Director of Admin Relations for Salesforce, to talk about how the admin role is changing as AI and agents become really part of our everyday life. Now, we're going to dig into why Salesforce admins are becoming the guardians of trust, how strong fundamentals still matter, and where human judgment fits in when automation gets smarter. I like to think this is a very thoughtful conversation about governance, productivity, and why Salesforce admins are more essential than ever. So with that, let's get Rebecca on the podcast. So Rebecca, welcome to the podcast. Rebecca: Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me. Mike: It's been a while. Last time you were on, we did an entire episode in German because international podcasts are fun. Rebecca: Yeah. What a ride. How many years ago was that? Mike: Just a few. It's like one or two in Salesforce admin years, which translate differently to the rest of the world. Rebecca: Right. And then I also say we've had a pandemic in between, so that has made time fly. Mike: Yep. Rebecca: And I think that was a pre-pandemic thing. Mike: It was. 100% pre-pandemic. Yep, absolutely. And then since then, you've been on stage quite a few times for the admin keynote. And doing a whole bunch of stuff with the admin relations team. You and I have both been on stage too. Rebecca: I know. Yes, we have been championing admins since 2014? Mike: Since forever. Rebecca: Yes. Dedicating over a decade and celebrating that big decade 10-year anniversary was a couple of years ago. And that was a big highlight for me, being able to share that with everyone on stage at Dreamforce. But yeah, since last time I was on the pod, I have now become the lead of admin relations and kind of leading this amazing team of evangelists and marketers on our mission to enable and empower and inspire all of our Salesforce admins out there. Mike: And we're doing that as a transition to talk about... Literally right before I pressed record on this podcast, I was listening to NPR talk through AI and how AI is affecting something. They quoted 60 to 80% of the people in the workplace now use AI for some sort of task. And it kind of flashed back to me because it was interesting listening to them talk. They were describing, so when you tell AI to do something, that's a prompt. And listening to people walk through the understanding that I think a lot of Salesforce admins went through two or three years ago, I remember having people on the podcast to talk about prompt engineering, and I'm listening to them now, I'm like, "How do you not know this already? What world are you living in? You should already know about prompts and prompt engineering." But leading admins now as we're not just working with AI, but AI's working with us, right? Rebecca: Yeah. AI is everywhere. I think just in the last few years, it's accelerated so, so much. Yeah, I've been thinking about this a lot because not only are our admins and our whole Trailblazer community thinking about the impact of AI. But it really is across at least tech industry, but corporate world where everyone is kind of thinking about how are we incorporating AI into our workplace. Mike: So I was thinking of the article that you published, How the Salesforce Administrator Role is Evolving in the Agentic Era. And the first kind of big bullet point or the first subhead under there is The New Mandate, The Guardian of Trust. And working on that article with you, I happened to think of the very first thing that I did when I was a Salesforce administrator. Well, the second thing I did. The first thing I did was I updated my profile. The second thing I did was I got certified and I was one of the first 500 Salesforce admins certified. And I remember posting that to... We had a local kind of intranet at the company that I was at. And I remember posting that just out of pride for myself that I had passed, but also really wanting my users and my executives to know like, "Hey, when I suggest something, it's because I'm knowledgeable about it, so you should trust me." And I think it's interesting that almost 15 years later, when AI comes around, this is the very first thing that we're talking about with admins as being the guardians of trust. Rebecca: Yeah. Trust, it's our number one value. And it's, I think, the most important thing our admins can do for their company and their users. You manage the data, you manage security, you manage automation. And these are the pieces of the system that need to come together in a trusted way. It makes the admin critical to the success. Mike: A lot of it is also helping our users and ensuring that when we implement Agentforce for a specific process like in sales or in service, that it's really something to aid them. I think of a lot of people, the discussion on NPR was, "Well, I don't know what to ask or I don't know what to do." And of course, as an admin, when you're demoing something for Agentforce, you want to show, here's the words you type in. And you'd like to think in a perfect world, all of your users are going to use that exact perfect prompt when in reality they're not. People forget prompts, people forget what they're trying to do, and then they can easily get frustrated. I think part of that guardian of trust that we're doing is, let's put it in places where it can benefit our users the most in terms of productivity that might be easy to just farm out so that really we're bringing the best out of that person. I think of now when I was deploying a contract object a long, long time ago, the people that worked in contracts, the value of them wasn't the fact that they knew how to open an envelope or read through a paper contract or photocopy it. And I say that because at the time we did all of that, it was all physical contracts. That's not what they were getting paid for. They're getting paid for their knowledge of being able to digest that information of the contract. And I think of kind of the same value for the admin. It's not the buttons they click that make it important. It's how do they implement the agent and then how do they use their judgment to say, "Let's put this agent here at this point in the process to make all of our users really use the skill that they're being hired for." Rebecca: Yeah, 100% percent. I really feel that these tools are coming to help us be more productive. We keep kind of hearing this narrative around with AI that we're replacing roles, we need less people, and does that mean there's room for my role? And I think that's really missing the big kind of upside of all of this is that there is so much work to be done. Especially when I talk to admins, they're wearing multiple hats. They've got cues and cases that they're trying to get through. And think about all the ways that AI can then help you as an admin be more productive and get more work done, which ultimately means you can serve more of your users and the company. Mike: Yeah. I think of it as... So I was trying to think of other industries that we've seen major shifts in, I think AI is really close to automation. And if you look at how auto manufacturing has evolved from the moving assembly line of the 1930s and '40s with Henry Ford up until a current day, I want to say, and I've watched a couple of YouTube videos because I think it's fascinating, but realistically a car when it's being built isn't touched by a human for the first something like 10 hours of it being built. And it only takes like 30 hours to build a car, which first of all is kind of insane when you consider how much there is that goes into it. But even if you look at stuff that would be highly profitable to be fully automated, we still haven't fully automated anything because I think even as humans, it's that level of control that we need over things to make sure. But the parts that like for the car being built, for example, we're automating is, okay, well, we can do this repetitiously. And it's a very low level skill as opposed to really hiring people. There's still people you think of 100 years later that build cars in a car manufacturing plant, robots never took over. It's just the part that they get hired to do is the very highly specialized part. And I think of that with AI where it's not going to replace Salesforce admins. It's the admins that know how to use it are going to be the hyper productive built out systems because they know when to have AI built for them and when they need to jump in. Rebecca: Yeah, exactly. I think the work shifts from the building piece more to the before planning and preparing, and all that work admins do talking with stakeholders, gathering the requirements, really getting precise on the solution. And then the work after the building where we're monitoring the agents and assessing how they are performing. It's just a shift in mindset and where the work is happening because we now can leverage these super powerful tools. Mike: Right. There's parts now, and we've even seen this. I've had Cheryl Feldman on the podcast to talk about how setup is getting better. And if you're watching any, I think this last... Well, when I recorded this is in March, I just watched Mo do the Agentforce Now tour virtual workshop and walking through agents. And there's still parts of it where the admin needs to understand what the part of the business is that I need to go to talk to, because a casual user probably doesn't know that. And then also, how is this stitching all of the data together? Because as I found when I was an admin for eight years, everybody in an organization only knows their own siloed data. And they only know where it comes from and who they ship it off to, but rarely do they know if either of those are exactly the forms of data that they need. And so for example, like when I was doing a sales implementation, the information that would come in from the opportunity, the finance team was like, "This is of no use to us. Somebody else needs this. Here's what we need." And that's the part where actually sitting down and making those judgment calls as a Salesforce admin is, "Okay, here's how the agent can help do that." The two operating divisions might never come to that conclusion on their own. Rebecca: Yeah. It's really the admin running the system. There are different departments, there's different tools we're using, there's data in different places. So how does it all come together and how are we looking at the day-to-day operations of these systems and maintaining them and scaling them? Mike: Now, I think what's interesting, Rebecca, so that article was super fun to help write and get out. This was the beginning of a journey, and I'll link to it in the show notes. You also spoke with a couple of next gen admins, we'll call them that, with Tony and Ishrat. I think so looking through those blog posts as well, what were some of the things that kind of stood out to you? Rebecca: Yeah. First of all, I'm so grateful to all of the admins I've been talking to in the last couple of months. Through those conversations, it really helped define that blog, Mike, that we wrote together, because there's so many insights that kind of came to light and a lot of grounding and agreeing on areas where it's important to have focus. I think one thing that really came to light in Ishrat's was talking around governance. And really kind of thinking about the admin as going from problem solver to sense maker, which I thought was an interesting phrase. But as the admin, you are kind of the translator of your org. You understand or need to understand what all these pieces are and how they work and why an agent is doing what it's doing, because you kind of helped bring it to life in the beginning. So that was kind of an outstanding insight there. And then from Tony, I had some great conversations around, I think a highlight for me was just thinking about the importance of the foundations and knowing the kind of foundational skills of an admin. And not losing sight of that as we leverage and use more and more AI. Still knowing what a data model is, knowing how to set up a flow, how these core kind of building blocks work well so that you can be the sense maker and understand eventually what an AI is doing and automating for you. Mike: Yeah. I think looking through both those, I love the way they ended. Tony kind of sums up, "I'm going to give you what you need, not just what you want." And essentially Ishrat says the same thing of the person who connects business intent to data quality. And I think that's always the thing. There's always the... And I used to explain this a lot when I would do training, you run the report and you think you know what it's going to say. And then the data comes back with something different. And nine times out of 10, the user would be like, "Well, the report's wrong." Not that you put the data in wrong, the data is telling you something different than what you thought. And I think with both of them, that's the role that the Salesforce admin plays so critical is, "Well, here's the intent of what we're trying to capture and here's the agent capturing it and spelling it out for us. Now, here's actually what the outcome is and maybe the business process that we need to change as a result of it, as opposed to what we were focused on. Rebecca: Yeah, love a good reporting situation. How can we change this report? Because it's not the outcome I was looking for. Mike: Right, exactly. I need more pie charts. That's always the end result is the pie charts. But this is really cool. I think right now all of the roles are really sitting back and trying to understand how they fully utilize this new tool, because I think of it like how Steve Jobs explained the bicycle of humans can move, they can put one foot in front of the other, but the bicycle makes us infinitely so much more productive. And I look at how AI is doing the same thing for Salesforce admins in terms of just allowing us to... Some of the work that Cheryl's doing was set up, asking query who has the right permissions, as opposed to spending that time trying to run reports or comparative reports, having it do that work for us so that we can sit down and have those really targeted conversations about who should have the right profiles and permission sets, as opposed to spending that time just looking through thousands of reports. Rebecca: Exactly. It's an exciting time. I really think obviously we sit in the bubble here and we see all the innovation firsthand. But it does feel like a very exciting time in our industry and for Salesforce and for the Salesforce ecosystem. There's so much opportunity for those that are excited and willing to kind of embrace this and bring this to their companies. Mike, I was curious how you're feeling. We see this incredible opportunity and the value the admin brings having talked to admins out in the community, is that resonating? Are people- Mike: I remember sitting down at Florida dreaming not too long ago, and listening to all of the Salesforce admins that were not only paying attention to what Agentforce could do, but what other AIs can do for them. I think you mentioned we live in a bubble and I think in terms of my friends, because I work in tech, I definitely know more about AI than most of them. But I would consider myself medium level intelligence of AI in the tech world. It's really, this is another tool, how do I be productive with it? And they're not looking at it as, "Oh, this is something scary." They're looking at as, how do I embrace this? And I think it's the same way that we look at how computers came about. Once upon a time, as I've seen on watching Mad Men on AMC, people typed. There was huge steno pools. If you needed a copy made, somebody literally had to type copies of that. And then the copy machine happened. Well, the copy machine didn't put people out of work. It just made people more efficient. And so companies were able to move those individuals around into places that could make them more efficient. And admins now have a tool that just kind of, it's like literally going from walking to riding a bicycle. And of course, there's lots of different bicycles and everybody has their own preference. Rebecca: Exactly. I feel like the admins who lean into this won't just be staying relevant. They're going to be the most important people at their company. Mike: Well, and as I was having the conversation with Daniel Peters talking about small business, if you think of, "Well, I'm just a Salesforce admin at a small business, what can I do?" He actually brings a point up of, if you built an agent that would literally just help the person answer questions while they're filling out a form or while they're creating a record in Salesforce, you would have so much better data. And his example was when they would take orders for cheese over the phone, there was insane amount of information that you had to know. This certain cheese could only be sold in these sizes and this certain cheese could only be sold during these months. And for the person, the on-ramp, you think...
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How Can Agentforce Help Manage a Salesforce Backlog?
03/19/2026
How Can Agentforce Help Manage a Salesforce Backlog?
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Neil Foglio, Solution Architect at Arkus. Join us as we chat about how to use a backlog to prioritize requests in your Salesforce org, and how Agentforce can help improve transparency and trust. You should for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Neil Foglio. Why Salesforce Admins need a backlog We talk a lot about forward-looking statements on this podcast, but what about that thing trailing along behind you? That’s right, it’s your technical debt. If you’re facing a mountain of requests, this episode is for you. That’s why I sat down with Neil Foglio. He explains how your backlog can be a tool to streamline your Salesforce org and help it evolve with your business. “It's not a to-do list and it's not a task list,” Neil says, “it's a commitment that something will be prioritized amongst everything else that you have on your plate.” It’s a central place to capture all requests, improvements, and ideas, and then evaluate them so you can figure out what to work on and when. Writing better backlog items For Neil, the key to making a backlog that works for you is to write better action items. Make sure that every item starts with an action verb. Instead of “create a new fundraising homepage,” be more specific: “design a new Lightning page so gift officers can see donation history.” The other key step is to evaluate and prioritize your action items. There are several different systems you can use, but you’re generally looking at value, effort, and risk. How much impact will making this change have? What resources will you need to get it done? And finally, what data do you have to support what you believe? For many organizations, there will also be custom dimensions that have their own score. For example, an educational institution may evaluate everything in terms of how it improves student learning. What’s important is to establish a clear process and get buy-in from leadership over how things are prioritized. How Agentforce can help with backlogs Managing your Salesforce backlog is even easier with Agentforce. As Neil explains, getting a clear and specific user story is crucial to creating useful action items. You can set up an agent to take requests, and go through the granular details with the user of every action they’re taking in a business process so you can get to the why behind their request. Agentforce can also help you improve transparency by explaining the why behind your prioritization decisions. You can have a helper explain what you’re working on and when you expect to deliver it. Be sure to listen to the full episode for more from Neil and hear his upright bass playing. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday. Podcast swag Learn more Salesforce Admins Blog Post: Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins podcast. And hey, you know what? That intro music you hear today, that's actually our guest, Neil Foglio, playing the upright bass. Neil is a solution architect at Arkus. And in this episode, we're talking about something every admin eventually runs into the backlog. Neil shares how thinking about your Salesforce org, more like a product than a project, can change how you manage requests, prioritize improvements, and make sure the right work gets done at the right time. We also dig into practical ways admins can evaluate ideas using simple frameworks like RICE so decisions feel fair and transparent. If you've ever wondered how to handle the constant flow of, "Hey, could we add this request?" This conversation's going to help. So with that, let's get Neil on the podcast. So Neil, welcome to the podcast. Neil Foglio: Hey, Mike, thanks for having me. Mike: I'm excited to talk about this because a lot of things on the podcast we always talk about are future-facing. And I feel like this topic is kind of future-facing, but it's also managing, well, I don't know how best to put it, the burden of debt that we somehow get ourselves into. And in that, it's backlogs, which doesn't sound interesting, but I promise you, you're going to be excited by the end of this podcast. So Neil, let's start off with introducing you to the world and kind of let people know what you do and how you got into the Salesforce ecosystem. Neil Foglio: Yeah, of course. Hello, everyone listening. My name is Neil and I'm a solution architect at Arcus, Inc, where I work with both nonprofits and enterprises implementing Salesforce. Most of my work lately has been helping organizations treat their CRM more like a product than a project, and to rethink how they steer their Salesforce org with their evolving businesses, where governance kind of comes into the picture, and that's where this topic of the backlog fits in. Mike: Yeah. Wow. That's interesting because I'm looking at the core responsibilities we have for admins, and project and product management are both core responsibilities. Neil Foglio: Yeah. I feel like a lot of admins now are really acting more like product managers, steering their Salesforce org, figuring out what elements have the most value and where you can produce the most ROI. And this is where you want to have systems that prioritize those things, and that's exactly what the backlog is. Mike: Okay. So I will confess this, that when I started as an admin a long time ago before the iPhone, we'll just say that as a date, I had no concept of some of the technical things that my developer friends knew. I didn't know about change management. I didn't know about backlogs or managing technical debt. For newer admins that are just getting started in the ecosystem and at their organizations, how do you define what a backlog is and how do you define what gets on a backlog? Neil Foglio: Yeah, absolutely. And I was in that same boat. So I started my tech career coming from healthcare. And so the first time I heard the word backlog, I thought it was a terrible thing, that something wasn't happening, work wasn't getting done, patients weren't being cared for. But when we think back to starting in a Salesforce org, you might have been in a position where you inherit an org or your company gets some new leadership that wants to make a bunch of improvements to the org and you find yourself questioning, "Well, where do I start and how do I prioritize all of these questions and features coming at me?" Without a system to rate them all, the things that typically will get done are those asked by the person with the most seniority in the room or the person that's emailing you three times a week. Mike: Right. Sometimes it's the same person. Neil Foglio: Could be. And sometimes it is especially when there is new leadership or a disruptive factor happens in the business that we need to respond to. And what the backlog is it's a tool that creates a level playing field for all of these ideas and their stakeholders. So it's a central place to do two things. Number one, to capture all of these requests and improvements and ideas, and number two, to rate them against each other using the same evaluative criteria so you can figure out which ones have the most value at this moment when you have capacity to build something new. Mike: That makes sense. I mean, to be fair, when I first started, the requests would... I would manage them basically in the order that they were received. And I very quickly had to learn, "Oh wait, creating a list view is way less effort than creating a contract management application," for example. And just because the list view is the third one down doesn't mean I can't just bump it up and knock out a whole bunch of half hour jobs as opposed to, "Well, it's going to have to wait until I get this monster of a contract application created." Neil Foglio: I mean, those little things tend to add up too, right? So if you're spending a lot of your time in a reactive mode and you're doing these requests as they're coming in, you might not really have a lot to show for it at the end of the day. Mike: You can. Yeah, absolutely. I had to learn how to manage my backlog. And I will say this, your backlog isn't your email inbox, right? Neil Foglio: No. It's not a to do list and it's not a task list. It's more of a commitment that something will be prioritized amongst everything else that you have on your plate. Mike: Sure. How do you suggest admins manage their backlog? Neil Foglio: Yeah. So if you were to Google this online, you'd see there are a bunch of different prioritization techniques. So before we get to prioritizing the items on the backlog, we should talk about what makes a good backlog item because those vague items like creating a new fundraising homepage are not something that can be easily estimated, right? So the idea here is that if you have enough detail in your backlog items, you can figure out how much time it will take, how many users it impacts, how much confidence you have that it's actually a problem that can be solved, and how much effort in terms of time, hours, or people will take to get it done. So the first kind of step is making sure that all of your backlog items start with an action verb. So using that fundraising homepage as an example, we can reframe that to say something like, "Design a new lightning page so gift officers can see donation history." In that one sentence now, we have exactly what we want to make. Maybe there's some reporting or dashboards in there too, who it's for, and what the impact would be for the organization. Mike: I like that. I think writing titles out and using different words or verbs or tenses is so my jam because when I was in sales, I would always write all my to do lists in the third person. So it was like future Mike telling present Mike what to do. And I remember all of the salespeople would make fun of me. I was like, "Yeah, but when I go to pull up my to do list, it literally tells me what I need to do right now and I don't have to decode what I was writing my notes on." So I like that you start everything with a verb. Neil Foglio: Yeah. Bring it into that trusted system, right? Mike: I mean, the backlog's there, the second you get 10 requests and you fulfill six of them, well, now you have a backlog of four, and then tomorrow you get 10 more requests. How do you balance between the two in terms of managing new requests versus shoveling all of the new stuff into the backlog? Neil Foglio: This is where the prioritization comes through. And so if we were to Google backlog prioritization techniques, you'll see a whole bunch of different methods, but what they all kind of have in common is that they convert three things: value, effort, and risk into a numerical score. So teams can compare those ideas more objectively. In doing that, you're not trying to get to an absolute value. Precision isn't really the goal, but again, we're comparing the relative priority. So what you'll see is a really common prioritization technique has the acronym RICE, where the R stands for reach. Think number of users. Let's say you have a defect and it affects a hundred users or a thousand external stakeholders who get a specific document generated. I is impact, which is usually a scale where higher numbers have more impact. The C is for confidence, which accounts for how well you have data to back up what you're saying. And this is typically given as a percentage. And E is the effort, and that is measured in time or resources. But whatever the technique, the most important thing is that this process of entering things into the backlog and revisiting the backlog happens on a regular cadence. So maybe it's appropriate if you have a pretty heavy backlog that it happens twice a month or once a month if there's not too much on it. But this consistent way to evaluate requests lets the prioritization process feel fair and transparent. And you can't put a price on that kind of trust, right? Mike: Yeah. No, that's good. So from a technology standpoint, how have you managed your backlog? Do you use cases in service or built a custom object or managed it outside of Salesforce? Neil Foglio: Well, I think I have to say that everything should be in Salesforce, right? Mike: Yes. Neil Foglio: Even if it wasn't on your podcast [inaudible 00:11:45]. Mike: If it's not in Salesforce, it doesn't count. Neil Foglio: Right. Exactly. But if you're a new admin that's starting out trying to figure out what needs to happen in your Salesforce org, you can design a custom object that has some picklist values, new in progress. You can create the custom dimensions you want to rate your backlog items on. So by custom dimensions, we just talked about reach, impact, confidence, and effort, but some sectors will have more tailored solutions. So for example, healthcare usually has a score that has something to do with patients, like risk of patient harm or impact to care coordination. Finance orgs are probably interested in reducing the likelihood of fraud or improving regulatory compliance. And I'm working with an educational institution right now, you'll think you'll find this interesting, that's evaluating every Salesforce idea on how well that idea improves student learning. Mike: Ooh. Neil Foglio: And we think about putting that all in a Salesforce object, you can have all those ratings right there as your picklist values so you can easily calculate a formula to say, "Here is the score of this backlog item, and here's how that compares to everything else that's currently in flux." Mike: Wow, that's really cool. I like that. How much... We've kind of skipped over just the request part of building a backlog. But when I was an admin, I think I always struggled with the ticketing system that I created, not in managing it, but in how many questions and how many fields do I have users fill out for a certain request? Because there's always that like, "I need a lot." And I remember a long time ago, Gary Palmatier told me, "Always ask people to tell it to you in plain English, not in Salesforce speak." Right? Neil Foglio: Right. Mike: And by that he meant, "I need to manage my incoming leads so that I ensure everybody gets called back 24 hours after a trade show and I send them a brochure." Not, "I need to manage new lead records and have your users describe what's going on in Salesforce." Where do you find there's kind of a sweet spot in terms of getting that information from users or managing that so that you can adequately decide, "Here's how much effort this one's going to take versus this one, which I'm going to put in the backlog"? Neil Foglio: That level of detail is really important because that allows you to estimate the effort. We wouldn't ask our users to tell us how long it would take us to implement a feature. And I think you're absolutely right that giving it in plain English lets you figure out what that user story is, and then maybe also lets you connect with people who can give you more guidance as to what it would take to bring that element to fruition, right? So I think getting that user story and that journey down from the person that's submitting the backlog request is probably what's most important because you'd want to know how do you replicate this? If it's a defect, what do I have to do to find this defect and resolve it? If it's a journey, if it's creating a document or sending out tax letters for donors, you want to know what those steps are so you can properly estimate it. And sometimes that comes just from doing and having your users tell you exactly what it is they are doing and what they'd want to do. Mike: Right. No, it's good. So Agentforce. Neil Foglio: Agentforce. Mike: Agentforce can help us do a lot of things. What do you see as use cases? Because this is also a great area for admins to build agents to help them manage their implementation. What do you see as use cases for admins to build agents to help with a backlog or with feature requests? Neil Foglio: Maybe the first question is, is building the agent on your backlog? Mike: Ooh, look at you going Meta. So is it people? There's the question for you. Neil Foglio: So is it? Well, I think when we think about what the agent's capabilities are, if you're already managing your backlog in Salesforce and not an external ticketing system or an Excel sheet, you can have your agent answer questions as to what similar backlog items have happened in the past because that's probably a really good use case because what happens over time with these backlogs is that they become this form of organizational memory. When you complete a backlog, you're not going to delete it from your backlog, it would be archived and completed. And that's when you start to see patterns in the requests that people make. And that's where AI is really useful in telling us what those patterns are. Mike: Yeah, absolutely. And I was also thinking too, boy, you could... There's a lot of... I don't know. Sometimes I have too many ideas and my mouth is going like, "What if it asks you had a question agent before they put in their request like, 'I'd really like to do this blah, blah, blah report'." And instead of just submitting the ticket, the agent's like, "Oh, well, that report already exists." And then it shows you the report and then it's like, "Yay, this agent saved me 18 tickets this week or something." Neil Foglio: Yeah. Or, "We're already working on this report for you and we expect to have it delivered in this quarter." Mike: Yeah. I mean, the agent could immediately look at the backlog and say, "Well, actually a similar ticket has been submitted and its status is X. So do you want to submit another one?" I think that was always something that I ran into, was one person have a good idea and then somebody in another department would have the same idea, but they think they're both the first person to have that idea. And so then you'd end up getting two or three tickets that it's like, "Well, these are all the same ticket," you know? Neil Foglio: That's where the backlog also is this collaborative tool, which if done really well, fosters this incredible sense of trust across the organization because you want to share those things with people who are interested in them. Mike: Yep. So let's talk about sharing. I created a dashboard that everybody in my org had access to. So they could see the number of tickets, they could see the status of tickets. And I felt like for me, the transparency kept everything honest. Somebody never said, "Well, it's just submitting it to a black hole." It's like, "No. When you submit it, look, the dashboard changed. Here's your ticket." What level of transparency do you suggest for admins in terms of sharing their backlog with their users? Because I think it can be tough sometimes when you have to make that decision of, "I need to pause on this because I can create these four list views and knock four tickets off my backlog as opposed to spending the next four and a half hours and creating this app or something because it can feel sometimes like favoritism." Neil Foglio: Oh, absolutely. And I think that's where backlog management isn't really a single person's job. I think the most effective teams usually have a committee, like a steering committee, that will review the backlog on a regular cadence together, which pulls in the executive sponsors of certain departments to make sure that the prioritization is happening in a fair and transparent way. And that level of commitment from leadership is pretty important for an initiative like this in large and small organizations because the backlog is your holding place, but it's also your prioritization space. And so a lot of people tend to get involved. Everyone wants to push their items up on the backlog -- Mike: Oh, yeah. Neil Foglio: ... unless their stuff...
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The Future of Salesforce Setup Is Agent-Driven
03/12/2026
The Future of Salesforce Setup Is Agent-Driven
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 for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Cheryl Feldman. From 1,300 pages to one conversation 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. How to try Setup with Agentforce right now 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. A simpler, agent-driven future for Setup 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. Podcast swag Learn more Trailblazer Community Group: Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Salesforce Admins Blog: Dreamforce ‘25 on Salesforce+: Dreamforce ‘25 on Salesforce+: Dreamforce ‘25 on Salesforce+: Admin Trailblazers Group Social Love our podcasts? Subscribe today or ! Full show transcript 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...
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How Does Agent Script Give Admins More Control?
03/05/2026
How Does Agent Script Give Admins More Control?
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 for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Joshua Birk. What is Agent Script? 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. Why can’t I copy my agents into the new Agent Builder? 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. Don’t panic, learn Agent Script 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 sunsetted 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. Podcast swag Learn more Salesforce Admins Blog: Admin Trailblazers Group Social Love our podcasts? Subscribe today or Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, if you've ever been wondering why you can't just copy and paste your old agents into the new version, this episode is for you. I'm joined by Josh 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: Thanks for having me, Mike. Mike Gerholdt: Well, we know that a few people are vibing now because of the dulcet tones of Josh Birk. So in all honesty, you were in a team meeting last week and you were kind of updating the team on stuff that's coming out for new products and beta products. And the biggest thing that you always explain is like, so why is this important? Josh Birk: Yeah. Mike Gerholdt: And of course, every now and then you end your little skit with, "Thanks for attending my TED Talk." Josh Birk: Yeah. Mike Gerholdt: And I remember last week's meeting, I was like, "Oh man, that's a podcast. I need to do that." Josh Birk: Yeah. Mike Gerholdt: Because the way that you would explained what was new with Agent Builder and Agentforce, I was just like, "Oh, that totally makes sense to me." So this is where we're at and this is what I was hoping we would talk about. Josh Birk: Yeah. And I'll have to try because I kind of remember getting into a very weird, almost like conspiracy theory level stream of consciousness. Mike Gerholdt: Oh, okay. Well, it didn't feel that way. Josh Birk: Good. I think that's years of experience of thinking in streams of consciousnesses, whatever the plural of that is. So yeah, so I think to kind of recap a little bit, so there were two things that I think are kind of important to consider about the new Agent Builder. One is what we mean by hybrid reasoning and what we mean by determinism. And then the second thing is, where does Agent Script fit into that? So the question we were kind of tackling was, why didn't we just go back and revise the old builder? Why can't we just reiterate on it? Why are we starting completely new? Mike Gerholdt: And I think you even said, not to interrupt you, but to interrupt you, why can't I just move my stuff over? Why do I have to rebuild it? Josh Birk: And why can't I just move my stuff over? Why isn't it just copy and paste? And Agent Script is part of that. So the original engine wasn't hybrid, is I think the easiest way to put it. So this came with a conversation with product management where I was trying to describe the differences between the old builder and the new builder. And they're like, well, let's ... The old builder wasn't doing anything wrong, so much is that the new builder's doing something more. And what the new builder's doing that is more is that when we say hybrid, when we think of AI, we think of AI being autonomous, making its own decisions. So we had the Atlas reasoning engine that's like, "Oh, Mike is looking to find a description on a certain account. I'm going to take these actions. I'm going to put them together into a plan and then I'm going to try to make that work." What we didn't have was the human in the loop portion of that. And where Agent Script really comes into play is it allows users to basically be like, "In this scenario, I want you to behave like this." So when we say hybrid, we mean, yeah, we're letting the engine kind of do its own magic. But then we're also applying almost ... I don't want to say flow because that's such a loaded term for a Salesforce community. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Josh Birk: But well, let's go to the name, right? A script, right? A script that a human can actually control personality, control tone, control behavior. When you see this, do this, when you need to call it human. So kind of giving this very human-friendly dialogue that you can then apply to the agent. And so that's how we provide more determinism. So the reason you can't just copy and paste your old agent into the new agent is the old agent doesn't have that connection to Agent Script. And so it's literally missing a piece of the puzzle to run the engine kind of thing. Mike Gerholdt: Right. No, I think ... I mean, hearing you explain it, sometimes, at least as an admin, I was always like, "Oh, so they just came out with another version because they had to stick another layer of something on." Josh Birk: Yeah. Mike Gerholdt: Or like a car analogy, they changed the fuzzy dice. But this is, no, no, no, no. We're really moving from this version, which ran a certain way to an even better version. And that's the part that I feel like ... Because you brought up Flow, I feel like we've been through this with Flow. Josh Birk: Yeah, totally. Mike Gerholdt: We got like a business process ... Business management process is what it used to be called. And then that thing went through iterations and then we found a different engine to run it on. And then we had ProcessBuilder for a while and then now we have the new Flow. And it's like sometimes it's not just the interface that changed, but it's actually the guts behind it. Because I mean, I can't recall ... It's sometime between after the pandemic and today that AI came around. And I feel like that's the window that works in my brain because I can't put down a time. Josh Birk: Totally. Mike Gerholdt: Was it 2022 or is it 2023? I don't know. Post pandemic, before today, AI happened. But just when you thought, okay, I've kind of got this thing figured out, nope, all of this stuff changes. Josh Birk: Yeah. And it happens in technology, right? It happened with the Lightning Web Components. We really kind of had to go back and take the new ECMAScript format and take the new ECMAScript standard and really rebuild the way our web components work so that they work in a standard based way. So that they're more similar to React and more similar to these other frameworks. And there wasn't really a way to go back to Aura, now it's called, and just be like, "Hey, Aura, be more standards based." Mike Gerholdt: Right. Josh Birk: Because Aura was effectively just ... It was pre-standards is the easiest way to put it. So this happens, right? Now, if people are listening to this and like, "Oh gosh, I have all this work in my old Agent Builder, what am I going to do?" First of all, Salesforce does not like taking away people's toys. Mike Gerholdt: Right. We've learned that. Josh Birk: We've learned that. I've said this anecdote in workshops so many times because when we did release Lightning, one of the most common questions I got was, "Are you going to end of life Visualforce?" So I went to the product manager, might have been Skip at the time. And I'm like, "Hey, when would you end of life Visualforce?" And his response was, "When I pull up a dashboard and I see there are zero active users using Visualforce, and then I'd probably wait three months after that." Mike Gerholdt: Just in case. Josh Birk: Just in case, right? Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Josh Birk: So the classic one is not going anywhere anytime soon. But I think the other important thing is a lot of our messaging when it comes to building out agents is that you're already an Agent Builder. You're already somebody who can build AIs because you know Flow, because you know Salesforce. Now you've learned topics, now you've learned actions and all of that kind of stuff. All of that is still true. It's all still true. And so you're still getting to use your existing skills in order to control it. It's really just adding the skill of knowing how to write out the Agent Script. Now, one of the cool, really cool things about ... Well, there's two cool things about the new builder that I think will really help people with that. One is the Canvas mode. And so Canvas mode takes what you write in Agent Script and puts it into a visual UI interpretation. And so this is very handy for two things. Number one, it gives you a little bit of kind of a predictive window as to what your script is going to be doing. It also gives you a very visual way of thinking about it. It's also a really neat way to go look at somebody else's Agent Script and translate it. So you don't have to read through all the thing. You can flip over to Canvas mode and be like, "Oh, that's trying to get these parameters in order to do these actions." The other thing going back to vibes and this new AI coding AI is that you'll have an AI assistant in Builder to help you build the AI. So you're not alone. Agent Builder itself will also help you create these things out. So my biggest statement back in the Lightning web component today was don't panic and learn lighting. And now it's, don't panic and learn Agent Script and you're going to build out some really powerful solutions. Mike Gerholdt: Well, and I think back to ... I mean, I was chatting with Jennifer today too, and just the way that we started using AI. And I remember, I mean, not that long ago doing workshops and saying, "Okay, you need to tell the AI your role, its role. And then what you want it to do and what it can do and what it can't do." And for everything, whatever model you were using, I remember writing prompts a certain way. And I feel like for this and with Agentforce, especially for admins, this is the least set it and forget it kind of thing. Josh Birk: Yeah. Mike Gerholdt: Because you can always go back and make it better. Josh Birk: And tweak it. Yeah. Mike Gerholdt: And this is- Josh Birk: And tweak it in theory. Yeah, exactly. In very small corners too. Mike Gerholdt: Small corners that make a huge difference because like with Flow, I mean, half the time I'm just excited that I got it to do what I needed it to do. And then I look at what Jennifer built and I feel like I'm over here rubbing two sticks together. Josh Birk: Together. Mike Gerholdt: But with Flow, that's your goal, right? You just want that, okay, boom, it's done. But with agents, people are interacting with them, they're asking them questions, I can make this so much better and I can make this better. Here's the clue when people stop using them. To your point of when you would replace Visualforce. Well, if you're looking at your Agentforce dashboard and seeing, "Hey, your users aren't using it." well, now might be a time to like, "Well, let's switch over, let's round some edges, let's change some things." And I would say this is like an every two weeks kind of thing. Which sounds crazy, but the amount at which you're going to find feedback from your users. And the amount of rounding of edges, I worked myself into an English problem here. It's going to be like, you're going to find like a star and then it's going to look like a ribbon of rounded edges that you have to work on. Because as you use that new builder, now your users are happier and being more proficient. And I think like even today, when Jennifer and I were talking, we were talking about building Gems in Gemini. And I said, "One thing that I do is I'll actually have another window open and ask it to refine my instructions in Gemini." Josh Birk: Oh, yeah. Mike Gerholdt: Because the way that I write the instructions works for me, but maybe not for it and it can refine it. And I've seen it take thousand word prompts and reduce it down to 200 and it's actually faster. And so having all of that is sometimes there's a lot to keep up with. But it's all for the better because now you're like click click, oh wow. And then you get that ... I think it's always, at the end of the day, the admin is going after that first look on a user's face and they're like, "Ooh, this- Josh Birk: Nailed it. Mike Gerholdt: ... just made my life so much easier." Josh Birk: Exactly. Yeah. And I think to kind of append to that, again, not to overuse this analogy of Visualforce. But it's like don't be in a rush to go and recreate your existing agents in the new Agent Builder. If you have a new agent you're building, I would start with the new Agent Builder and go from there. Two reasons, don't fix what's not broken. And also you'll learn more about Agent Script and things like that. So when you do decide to move your old agent to the new builder, you'll be more educated on how to do it. Now, huge forward-looking statement, asterisk, safe harbor, there is a conversation internally about creating a porting tool of some kind. It's on a roadmap somewhere, no guarantees. Mike Gerholdt: Oh. Josh Birk: But I do think people should know where we are looking at that kind of thing. So stay tuned because we do want to make this as easy as possible. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Yeah. But also there's some joy in rebuilding things and maybe that's just me. But I've always- Josh Birk: Seems like part of the tech world. Yeah, exactly. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I mean, there's that and there's also, it reintroduces you to things that at one time you were good at and brings it back. And then I think too, anytime that these new features come out, one part is, okay, well, here's the tech to change it. But also, has the process changed? Has the stuff that people do internally changed? And that might also be true. And the other point you brought up, which was really salient, just because you can change it, doesn't mean you should right now. Josh Birk: Yeah. Mike Gerholdt: One thing that ... And I was a part of this, doing a big org rollout. What are the other changes that your users are experiencing within your organization? And so you adding to that, is that one layer too many? Or when would be a better time? Like we always joke, like you're not going to roll out a sales opportunity change the last week of the quarter. Josh Birk: Right, right. Mike Gerholdt: So picking your timing, this means that gives you time to test. Josh Birk: Yes. Yeah. And I think this goes into a lot of the conversation we're having about admins in the AgentiCare. Like what kind of a steward are you being? And how are you using those existing instincts and skills as an admin to not topple over the apple cart, but now you're doing with AI? Mike Gerholdt: Right. Because in my opinion, admins are getting paid for their judgments. Josh Birk: Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. Mike Gerholdt: Josh, thanks for coming on and helping us understand the new Agent Builder. Josh Birk: Thanks for listening to my TED Talk. Yeah. Mike Gerholdt: I knew you had to fit that in. And we've got just enough time that Daryl can hopefully get his boat from home to the internal ... It's not internal. Inside the podcast joke. Josh Birk: Inside the podcast joke. Mike Gerholdt: You have to go back to the Daryl Moon episode- Josh Birk: Yeah, exactly. Mike Gerholdt: ... and then it all makes sense. It's the key to unlocking the mystery of the Dan Brown episodes. I don't think so. Josh Birk: I love it. Mike Gerholdt: Anyway. Josh Birk: I love it. Mike Gerholdt: Have a good day, Josh. Thanks for coming on. Josh Birk: Cheers, my man. You too. Mike Gerholdt: Huge thanks to Josh for coming on very impromptu and turning what could have been, I think, a little confusing of an update into something that actually makes sense. New engine, new script layer, AI helping you build AI. Awesome. I like it. So remember, don't panic, learn Agent Script, and it's all about having fun. And like any powerful tool in Salesforce, it's less about flipping a switch and more about steady improvement over time. So if this episode helped you clarify your next steps, share it with another Salesforce admin who's navigating some AI right now. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.
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What Are True to the Core Deep Dives at TDX?
02/26/2026
What Are True to the Core Deep Dives at TDX?
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 for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Kate Lessard. True to the Core Deep Dives are coming to TDX 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, we’ll have four live True to the Core Deep Dive sessions on specific topics, like flow and automation. These will be can’t-miss events, and Kate Lessard is here to tell us what she has in store. Direct access to product leaders “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+. How admins should prepare for TDX 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. 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. Podcast swag Learn more Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Saleforce Admins Blog: Saleforce Admins Blog: Saleforce Admins Blog: YouTube Series: YouTube Series: Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript 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...
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How Do I Understand a Complex Salesforce Formula Quickly?
02/19/2026
How Do I Understand a Complex Salesforce Formula Quickly?
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 for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Gaurang Mathur. The massive scale of Salesforce Formulas 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. How Setup with Agentforce simplifies formulas 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. What’s next for AI in Salesforce 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. Podcast swag Learn more Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Trailblazer Community Group: Salesforce Admins Blog: Dreamforce ‘25 on Salesforce+: Dreamforce ‘25 on Salesforce+: Dreamforce ‘25 on Salesforce+: Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike: Welcome to The Salesforce Admins Podcast. Today on the podcast, I'm joined by Gaurang Mathur, product manager on the AI App Dev team at Salesforce, and we're going to talk about something every admin has wrestled with at some point, which is formulas. And we're also going to hit on how setup with Agentforce is changing the way we create, modify, and even understand them. Hooray. I can always use some formula help. 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: Hey, Mike. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Mike: Absolutely. Well, after we talked with Cheryl, it was important that I get a lot of the people that she works with on the podcast, because you guys are doing some really exciting things around set up with Agentforce, I think I said that correctly, and just some of the things with agents. So let's get started with tell everybody what you do at Salesforce and how you got there. Gaurang Mathur: Yeah, sure. Thanks. So my journey has been pretty interesting to where I am today. I started off as a PM for the caching group, which is again, a platform product. Platform Cache is something that's widely used, and that queue is helping a lot of ISVs to accelerate and perform, make their applications better perform. 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: Yeah. Gaurang Mathur: And as part of that, as you mentioned, I closely work with Cheryl on the Agentforce setup, or setup with Agentforce, and over there, I am managing the space for formulas. I think that's where I'm going to talk mostly about in today's podcast. And the other product that I'm managing is Agentforce Vibes, which is again, zero to one product that we have all built over the last few years. There, I'm creating an MCP tool, which is basically making that agent much more smarter and getting a lot of ecosystem teams within Salesforce to contribute that, and then make it better in generating whatever metadata that it generates. So yeah, that's my portfolio here in Salesforce. 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: Yeah, wow. Two products. So you sleep only a couple hours a night, I'm guessing? Gaurang Mathur: Yeah. I mean, these days, agents have been keeping us alive. I mean ... And so yeah, I'm just, as I sometimes joke with my family, I'm making agents smarter. That's what we work on, so yeah. Mike: Right, right. Well, let's talk about formulas because I think I go back to, boy, 10, 15 years ago, a staple in admin track was always a best practices on formulas and validation rules. And I always felt like formulas as an admin was as close as some people felt to getting to code, because we could carry over a lot of the stuff that we'd learned in different spreadsheets into formulas. So tell me a little bit about what you're doing with formulas and setup and how that works. Gaurang Mathur: Yeah, thanks. I mean, I think you touched on a very fundamental point. And before I get into the actuals of what we are trying to do, but I'd like to double click on what you just mentioned, Mike, which is formulas have been a very legacy product within Salesforce. They have been integral in the whole platform since, I mean, a very long time, and I'm quite excited to carry that legendary thing. I'll just share some numbers with you in terms of how big and the scale of impact that formula has in the whole ecosystem. 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: You end very casually, but that's kind of really big. I know, if you were to look back in my search history pre-AI, 90% of it as an admin was, "Why doesn't this formula work?" And I think when AI first came out, that was one of the ... I remember I was at a user group, and that was one of the prominent use cases for using an AI, was to check your formulas, because formulas in Salesforce are much like they are in various spreadsheet programs, so you can kind of understand it. And I remember thinking to myself, "Oh, man, the hours this would've saved me if I could have just copied and pasted a formula and had an AI read it and be like, 'Oh, you forgot a parens, or you missed a comma again,'" you know? Gaurang Mathur: Correct. Exactly. I mean, and those mistakes makes us human, and this is where agents can help and chime in to just call out, "Hey, this is the error, this is the fix," and that's exactly the first principles that we are considering as we build these agents, as we are coming up with this whole agent experience for our admins. So let me just share you one example for that, I mean, what we've just recently demoed to some of the customers and which was very exciting overall. So imagine you are in a company that's managing volunteer experiences and other things. 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: Yeah, I mean, thinking through, there's two parts to really what you described, which was it can do it, but then, the second part was it can describe, and that's just such a big part of everything that we do. Plus I always feel like, at least for math and formulas felt like math, if I could see a finished product, then I was more apt to kind of understand and work through it as opposed to kind of come to that solution on my own. But you mentioned Agentforce Vibes, and I think that's also, I don't know if you could say companion product, but it's another way to develop on the platform. How have you kind of found some crossover in what you're working on for Agentforce for setup with Agentforce Vibes? Gaurang Mathur: Oh, so you can call them as different facades for different personas and end users. So let me help you with what we are trying to do with Agentforce Vibes. Agentforce Vibes is quite focused on from our developer friends in the Salesforce ecosystem as it's a plug-in that you download in Visual Studio Code, and then you can start vibing and create new schemas, the metadata that you want to, and everything and anything that's happens within Salesforce, whereas setup with Agentforce is more focused from the setup UI that you had, and how do you manage them, I mean and managing formulas, permission sets, and different other things that we are going to. So it's a bit of a persona difference that we've had here, but we're trying to have almost the same engine behind the hood, which is what one of my teams is working on, and surface it in different facades, like I said, or the agents so to say. Mike: Yeah. Now, that's kind of how Tiaan explained it too. I did a podcast with Daryl Moon, who was actually super interested in Agentforce Vibes just because it really kind of jump-starts you in terms of app creation and some of the tediousness that can be started, so you can really focus on some of that really fun stuff that you like to do, maybe like formulas, I don't know. Gaurang Mathur: Yeah. I mean, a lot of it. I mean, so considering in this day and age, wherein we've got different LLMs and frontier models that are trying to do, this is something that maintains the Salesforce trust and the ecosystem intact. It's built on those foundations, so yeah. I mean, I'm excited to just, as I said, just you can prompt it, and then make some utterances, and then play it out with some apps that gets generated by the agent there with Agentforce Vibes. Mike: I know you said you worked in search for a little bit. Has any of the things that you've had to learn about search carried over to what you've had to learn about agents or vice versa, or are they just two different worlds? Gaurang Mathur: Yeah. That's an interesting one, and thanks for asking it. So it goes back when we started off, or when the agents were just getting launched, I think a couple of years back. It seems eternity away, but yeah, that's how the Agentic universe works, right? We were given a task, I mean, we were just basically figuring out in terms of what best we could do and leverage the agents that we have in place, and create an optimal search experience for the end users, and basically enable our admins do that and leverage the AI power that we were getting in. 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: Yeah. Gaurang Mathur: So that's where that crossover happened between those two text, but yeah, there's a lot since that time has evolved overall in the ecosystem and agents that we're developing. Mike: Okay. So listening to your answer, I came up with another question. I come up with lots of questions. Gaurang Mathur: Yeah. No, excited to have that. Mike: Do you think, based on the progression of where technology was going, because I heard in your answer about search that there was some form of RAG involved, was the invention of AI just inevitable? Gaurang Mathur: I mean, so that's a very fundamental. It has been there for a while. I think we all knowingly, unknowingly have been using AI in some form and factor, I think more than a decade or two. I mean, simple considering with Google Maps that we had or the YouTube recommendations that we had, in some form and factor, knowingly, unknowingly, we all had been influenced by AI for a while now. But in current day and age, AI has taken a form, which is much more tangible and which is much more right in the face with the GPT models and the LLMs that we have. 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: Yeah. No, for sure. I mean, you're essentially creating the future. Do you envision getting to a point with AI where ... I mean, this feels very meta, but where an agent is almost helping you create a better Agentforce Vibes or a better setup with Agentforce? Gaurang Mathur: Yeah. I mean, so we are, in a way, trying to do that. I think with Agentforce itself, we have this learning curves wherein we are trying to feed the system about the feedback that we receive, and then based on that, putting it into agents to just improve that. So yeah, that's something that's very nascent. I mean, it's not mainstream right now. 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: Yeah. It's crazy to think that we have a tool that could help make a better tool. Growing up in the generation I did, where I remember having a cordless phone in the house was a big leap of technology. Gaurang Mathur: Yeah. Mike: Being able to ask something and get a very human response back is something very interesting. That leads me back to formulas, because formulas were obviously invented a long time ago. Formulas are probably a derivative of math. I don't know for sure. I don't know the history of formulas, but I'm wondering if, based on how formulas are built and the operators and the syntax that we use for formulas, if there isn't something better that AI could invent that would almost replace formulas. Gaurang Mathur: I think formulas is something, to your point, very elementary and fundamental in my opinion. So we are in chart with our teams and Agentforce and other places as well, that embed formulas into them. I mean, so simple, to your point, the math functions that we have, let's say the date functions or the operators that you have, you need those fundamental building blocks everywhere and anywhere. I mean, like I said at the start, we are supporting almost 40 odd services within Salesforce. I think those are still non-negotiable in my opinion. I mean, that's...
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How Agentforce Vibes Is Changing How Salesforce Admins Build Apps
02/12/2026
How Agentforce Vibes Is Changing How Salesforce Admins Build Apps
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 for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Tiaan Kruger. Agentforce Vibes is evolving 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. AI as a tool for reducing technical debt “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. How to help Agentforce Vibes help you 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. Podcast swag Learn more Dreamforce ‘25 Admin Keynote: Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast. So today, I'm joined by Tiaan Kruger and we're talking about something that's showing up literally everywhere right now. And that is Agentforce Vibe coding and what it really means to build with AI on the Salesforce platform. We get into how admins can use agents to move faster without losing best practices, and why oh why understanding your org still matters more than ever. And one of the things we tackle is where this whole thing is headed sooner or later than you think. So if you've ever been curious about Agentforce Vibes and not sure where it fits into your day-to-day admin life, I promise you this episode is for you. So with that, let's get Tiaan on the podcast. So Tiaan, welcome to the podcast. Tiaan Kruger: Thank you, Mike. Thank you for having me. Mike Gerholdt: Well, it was not that long ago that we had Cheryl Feldman on. And Cheryl's circle of influence outside and inside Salesforce is a gravitational pull. And of course, we all know that set up with Agentforce is going to be huge at TDX and it's huge right now. So we wanted to talk to more people that were making admins lives wonderful. And she suggested you. Plus you were in the admin keynote. And I feel like I have to have admin keynoters on the podcast too. So there's the really long intro for... But let's talk about you. How did you get started at Salesforce and what's the cool thing you're working on that we're going to talk about? Tiaan Kruger: Yeah. So I've actually been at Salesforce, I guess coming up on seven years, which is absolutely mind-boggling. I was a customer for 10 years. Spent a lot of time as an admin and Apex developer. I wrote Visualforce. Some of you may have heard of that before. But I work as part of a large team at an enterprise company trying to make Salesforce make a huge difference for our customers. And in the process, learned an incredible amount of Salesforce and got an opportunity to come over here and try to make products better for our admins and developers out there. And I grabbed the opportunity and I've loved every minute of it. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Well, we've talked to you about some cool stuff. Plus you did a really cool demo in the admin keynote at Dreamforce too. Tiaan Kruger: Yeah. Yeah. We got to do some really amazing things at the admin keynote, showing some of the things that the Agent for Setup is going to be able to do. We got to show some amazing insights into Slackbot. And we got to foreshadow a little bit the work I'm currently working on, which is focused on how we actually build with AI. So I'm working very deeply with the Vibes team to make sure that the metadata that gets created is better and great quality, not just for vibing individual pieces of metadata, but vibing entire solutions. I'm getting to work with our internal teams to figure out how we bring that same power to our admins. 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: Yeah. So I did a podcast with Daryl Moon, which I'm sure you've listened to. Daryl is fantastic. He's down in Australia. The only reason he listens to the podcast, it's a half hour between his house and the dock, so he can listen to it to go fishing. But he tried out Agentforce Vibes and was thoroughly impressed. And he literally threw the kitchen sink at it. And I think what he loved about it was it got him so much farther into the application building than what he anticipated. Tiaan Kruger: Yeah, absolutely. Vibes is quite incredible, specifically the agent that's in there. It's a very wide open agent. It's very good at problem solving. One of my favorite stories at the booth that we told at Dreamforce is one of our product managers was actually vibing a React app. We're not bearing the lead. We actually talked about this at Dreamforce. React's coming to the platform, incredibly exciting, creating pixel perfect UIs, reusing a lot of the things that's out there. And so he was actually experimenting and vibing this application. 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: So let me ask you a question. With Vibes and vibe coding... By the way, I'm still getting my head wrapped around you talk about, "He was kind of vibing." Like I'm just old enough to remember what the 70s were. I feel like you need to vibe code in bell bottoms and stuff. How long until anybody just tells an agent to build something and it won't matter if you have knowledge of development and coding or knowledge of best practices for enterprise architecture? Tiaan Kruger: If you asked me this question six months ago or nine months ago, if we've given you a different answer than I would give you today. Based on what we're seeing, the rate of innovation and change, I don't think it's going to be very long at all. We're going to have to adjust how we build and how we deploy a little bit because agents are already getting very, very good at producing targeted applications. And what I mean by that is, there's still limits when you are trying to vibe inside of a massive enterprise org with thousands of objects and a lot of complexity that somebody that's got a ton of experience would need to come into for months to understand. There's still limits there, right? You still have only so much you can actually provide the agent at a time. 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: So one of the questions that came up, this feels like a hundred years ago when we launched Process Builder, was it was so easy to create processes that people without technical knowledge could just overprocess and build way too many processes in an org when... The example would be of best practices, just write a really good trigger or deploy some Apex code and take care of it that way. With AI doing so much building, how do we know it's following and architecting best practices or building good code coverage? Tiaan Kruger: That's a great question, and actually one of the biggest challenges that we are spending a lot of energy on. We know that when we put a tool in the hands of our admins, they have very high expectations. They expect it to create best practices style orgs and configuration and really follow the practices that we want our admins to follow. And so there's a couple things we're doing to help with that. I can give you some insights into some of them. We are internally working on ways to... And this is, again, we're working in Vibes at the moment, so it's a little bit more pro code focused. But just listen to this and imagine how this is going to come forward to admins, right? 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: Yeah. I mean, one of the analogies that always comes up, and I was just doing a podcast with Josh, is, we were talking about GPS and maps. Because I feel like there is a portion probably of my listeners that are old enough, myself included, to remember stopping at gas stations when you got into a new state and buying a map for that state because it was always more detailed, and being able to read the map. And now, virtually every car you get into has some sort of GPS either built into it or it's on your phone. The funny thing is, the other day... Well, this is a few months ago. I was driving back from a bigger city in Iowa, one that's just big enough that I don't know it, even though I've lived here forever. 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. Tiaan Kruger: Interesting. Mike Gerholdt: And I had presence of mind to be like, "Okay, well, I know this road continues. There's no roadblock or anything." So I just went straight and let the GPS figure out. But I bring that back to my knowledge and ability to still understand and read maps is what helped me not blindly navigate that problem. And I feel like still having that understanding of, well, reporting structures are going to need this for object setup or relationships and making sure to almost double check your math is what I was getting at for how an AI should work. So long explanation longer. If you were heading into an organization as an admin, developer, architect, what would you focus a lot of your learning on? Tiaan Kruger: Wow. By the way, I'm a big fan of maps. I'm old enough as well to have used maps to navigate. Mike Gerholdt: You probably remember printing off MapQuest directions. Tiaan Kruger: Oh, now that I'd rather forget. I'm a bigger fan of following a paper map. Famously, we were traveling in Boston on the train and I forgot the maps on the seat. And when we got back, the maps were gone. You can imagine that feeling, right? So navigation became a little bit more of a challenge. It was like 11 o'clock at night. Mike Gerholdt: Oh. Tiaan Kruger: Yeah. Yeah. So yes, maps are very valuable. So I actually love that analogy, right? So agents are a lot like... I think they're in that MapQuest stage. They're not quite... They're getting closer to the GPSs we have today. The odds of the GPS turning you into a lake these days, I feel like it's a lot lower than it used to be. Mike Gerholdt: Right. Right. Tiaan Kruger: There's still the occasional person driving into a lake, but it's a lot lower risk than it used to be. Agents are still very much at that state of the human still ultimately needs to guide it, check it, see what it's doing, right? It's an accelerator, not a replacement. And if I were going into a company now in my old role, my role would be changing. My role is no longer just about cranking out that trigger to work perfectly. It's about understanding the bigger picture. It's about understanding what my customer is actually trying to accomplish. And hopefully being able to get more of it done because I become more... I'll actually give you a different analogy, I think, as you brought up driving. 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: Yeah. And you don't have to apologize. There'll be vibe coding sessions in the admin track for TDX. I know because I've seen you and your team submit some stuff and customers have done it as well. It's going to be a very useful product. I can see the future for it. Do you anticipate... So a lot of what you've talked about for vibe coding in Agentforce Vibes is like the creation. And I think we're always talking about the creation. But one thing you brought up in your answer was tech backlog and technical debt. That's always a big thing that comes up. As we're...
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The Importance of Human in the Loop for Agentforce
02/05/2026
The Importance of Human in the Loop for Agentforce
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 for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Joshua Birk. Understanding the guardrails around AI 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. A QA engineer walks into a bar… 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. The first part of testing is planning 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. Podcast swag Learn more Salesforce Admin Blog: Salesforce Admin Blog: Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we're welcoming back our good friend, Josh Birk, to kick off February with a conversation. Well, it's part podcast, part social experiment. Josh and I sat down to talk AI, specifically how admins can plan, test, and build with confidence using guardrails in Agentforce. We cover everything from deterministic responses to chaotic desktops and why designing with trust, maybe a little touch of humor, matters most. So whether you're rolling out your first agent or refining your AI game plan, this episode's got insights for you. So give it a listen and let me know if you like the format or not because, hey, maybe we just might make this a regular thing. With that, let's get Josh on the podcast. So, Josh, welcome back to the podcast. Josh Birk: Thanks for having me, Mike. Mike: Continuing the theme, we kicked this around... No one's heard this conversation. We're just going to start here... of having two evangelists talking for a podcast. Josh Birk: Yeah. Yeah. Mike: And so we're going to start February off with that. And then we're going to do a social experiment, and for people listening, if they like this, then maybe we repeat it once a month. Josh Birk: Oh. I like these social experiments. Let's see what happens. Mike: I know. It's on the listeners. Also, Josh, we have to keep this under 30 minutes so that Daryl can make it from his house- Josh Birk: Can make it... Right. Right. Mike: ... to the dock and get his boat in the water. Josh Birk: Yeah. I remember when I first did my first 40-minute episode and I felt guilty because one of my guests was like, "I like the 20-minute episodes because that's exactly how long I walk my dog." So I'm like, "Well, okay, now you can walk your dog twice," question mark. Mike: I know. Nope. Once you hit pause, they're gone forever. I was the same way. Selfishly, that's how these podcasts are as short as they were is I wanted something I could listen to when I walked my dog. Josh Birk: Yes. Love it. Mike: Anyway, it's February, and things that are still happening in the world are artificial intelligence and Agentforce. Josh Birk: Amazing that this is still sticking around. It's almost like it's not a fad. Mike: It feels like it's not going to go anywhere for a while. Josh Birk: I think it's got legs. I think it's got a few legs. Mike: Yep. It's not a fly-by-night thing. Josh Birk: No. No. Whole ecosystem and industry being built up around it. Mike: Uh-huh. Josh Birk: Yeah. Yeah. I think we're going to be talking... I have a feeling this won't be the last time we talk about it. Mike: Probably not, for reason. Josh Birk: For reason. Mike: So it's funny. The other day, somebody asked me something, and I was like, "Oh, that's a really good question. How soon do you need me to call you back?" Because I was thinking to myself, I don't have my phone, and my phone has a lot of AI tools on it, and I really need that to answer this. And I thought, wow. Two years ago, if somebody were to ask me that, I would just Google, make something up, and call them back. And now I felt like I'd just walked outside without my shoes on. Josh Birk: I mean, it's kind of crazy. So when I was out in Arizona for Cactusforce, and my wife and I stayed the weekend, and she's like, "Well, what do you want to do this Saturday?" And I actually have a whole bit. One of my early AI talks was about how AI can kind of be dumb from time to time. And so I did this exact same thing. I'm like, "Hey, Google," or whatever, I think it might have been ChatGPT, but anyway, "give me an itinerary based on these things that I can do." And it gave me like, "Here's your itinerary," and it was like 17 things, all of them about three hours apart. And I'm like, "That's not an itinerary. It's a travel guide. I don't know what you're thinking here." 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: Right. So speaking of which, you did a couple talks around AI at different conferences last year and probably this year. And I think it's important because we're going to talk about guardrails and security stuff, not to scare people away. It's a fun conversation. But it's needed because I also think it's worth understanding why we ask you to do what we ask you to do when you set up Agentforce and why you do certain things. 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: It'd be Bob in sales to do that. Yeah. Mike: You're like, "Bob, it lives in Salesforce." Josh Birk: Yeah. Yeah. No, I've done various variations of this talk, and I think it's kind of an important thing... I think acknowledging that people have concerns and fears about how AI works and why it misbehaves and things like that, I think it's important to acknowledge that. And it's important to acknowledge that partially because there's a lot of things you can do to minimize it. And if you kind of know how and why the AI either is doing something or not doing something, and it could be Agentforce, it could be Gemini, it could be Claude, it could be anything because they all kind of operate under the same basic principles, but if you know going into it, "This is why my AI behaved in a non-deterministic way," as we seem to be liking to say these days, it'll be faster and easier for you to fix that. Mike: Yeah. No, and I think as admins are put more into a position of deciding when and when not to use AI, being able to accurately describe that is very important because it's, "So when we set this up, here's what I'm going to do. Here's the instructions I'm giving it. Here's why," and then the second part is... And this is a thing... I'm looking at sessions from TDX and looking at stuff that we presented from Dreamforce, and it's also, "Hey, I need to test the agent." It's got to go through training camp. Because if I set up these guardrails and it can't kick the soccer ball around the cones like I want it to, metaphorically speaking, then what am I doing wrong, or where is it going? And then as an admin, you need to understand that. Josh Birk: Yeah. And I think that's an excellent place to start because this is one aspect of AI that is not novel, it's not new, it's not unique. This is software engineering in general. It goes back to that old joke, a QA engineer enters a bar and he orders a beer. He orders five beers. He orders zero beers. He orders a horse. He orders the bar out of the... They keep trying really weird and random things to see how it executes because you are still at the end of the day talking to a computer, and if you just do something that you think is a reasonable thing your users are going to do and you get a reasonable response, well, your job's not done. Your job's only begun. 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: Yeah. And it will matter if 750 of those records are missing a field and you're trying to ask it to like, "What's the average zip code," and you're like, "Well, 748 of them don't have zip codes." Josh Birk: Right. Or they have five zip codes, and they're all names like zip code one, zip code two, zip code three, and none of them have help descriptions. Even a human looking at that page is like, "I don't know what happened here." And an AI is going to come to the same conclusion. Mike: I think you said it first, training your AI is like the first day on a job for somebody. Josh Birk: It sounds like me. Mike: Yeah. I mean, because- Josh Birk: I'm like, "Yeah, that's a really good way to put it." Mike: ... you brought up the help topics and description fields; that's where people would go. I remember a million years ago, I always thought Salesforce should have a third mascot and it should be an orange circle with an eye, because if you don't know what should be in a field, you just hover over the eye for what should be in this field. And agents do the same thing. You're asking me for this. I'm going to go do, but I can't understand what's in this field because you didn't tell me anything. Josh Birk: Yeah. The gamer nerd in me wants the glowing fairy from Zelda, but I think we might get sued if we went too far down that path. Mike: Right. Probably not. Probably not. Josh Birk: But yeah, you're right. We had a whole blog post about this, about how the reason why blueprints are really important for AI, because if you think of AI as your humanoid servant and you ask the humanoid servant, "Go make me a sandwich. Go get me a drink," well, the humanoid servant needs to know where your kitchen is, how big your kitchen is, where the drawers are, where you store your knives. So you have to give it those points of information so that it can reach to the conclusion that you want. Mike: I'm going through your deck, and you present a lot. Based on what you talk about, how would you advise admins to test their agents? Josh Birk: So I think the first thing to start with, so kind of layering in what we were just talking about, but also just... Okay, so when you're talking to... Let's take the new agent builder we have, and you're building on a new agent. There is already a layer of instruction that Salesforce has put in there. Every AI, in fact, you talk to has some layer of instruction that was written by a human in order to keep it from doing things or pointing it in the right direction. And so I'm not going to name names, but a very famous AI out there went mysteriously evil for a while because somebody who had access to those instruction sets was meddling with them. And that's how fundamental they are. If you have access to those and you can change them, then that's where things instantly will start going wrong, because that's where the agent starts, it's where the AI starts, with its, "What should I do next?" 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: Yeah, and before I pressed record, we were talking about just the number... I think back to when we started building, not we, the royal we, Salesforce, started building Agentforce, and we had one agent and we were trying to make it do all this, and then now you can actually pick different agents. I think the planning is part of that because it's not, "I'm just going to have one agent to do everything in my org and answer every possible..." It's like JARVIS in Ironman. Josh Birk: I was just going to say, I think a lot of us in the early days of AI, when it was really becoming prominent in our lives, had that sci-fi version of a JARVIS or a HAL 9000 or the one omnipotent AI that can do all the things. And what we have found is that the larger and more general use you try to make an AI, the less predictable it can become. In order to make it something like that, that's when you have to have the huge monster AIs like ChatGPT 3 that have billions and billions of parameters. We're not operating... We talk to those AIs, but your agent is not working within that sphere, so your agent's going to be more reliable and more predictable if it's only focused on hotel reservations or updating user information or something like that, but more task and use case-based as opposed to being a general use AI. Yeah. Mike: Right. No, I agree. I mean, to kind of put a pin and move forward with it, in the planning process, you have to have a clear delineation of, when does a human touch this before it goes out? And I say that because ironically I was watching, I think it was a TikTok, where somebody was talking about, "Hey, I took this picture of these," I think it was like Apple earbuds, "and I asked an AI to list it on Facebook and sell it for me," and it just blim, bam, boom, and done. I was like, "Oh, God, why would you do that?" And part of me was like... It's the trust thing. It's, "Okay, so if you go ahead and do all of this, I want to see the ad before you press publish." And we're so far from there because there is that level of, "Well, what is it?" 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: Yeah. And I haven't seen a lot of that, I think in part because of the design of our agents are smaller and more precise, but it's definitely still a possibility because, again, we're talking about the same principles. 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: Whatever it needs to create more paperclips. Josh Birk: Whatever it needs to infinitely create paperclips. Now, the funny thing is when I was showing this and I was using... This wasn't our code. This was Mistral, which is a really great local LLM. So I had it say, "Hey, if you were tasked with this, how would you proceed," and it gave me all this stuff. I'm like, "Okay, well, what unethical things did you do in the process of that," and it listed all these kind of horrible crimes. And then I didn't clear my project, so I had that memory bleed, and so I asked it again, and it said, "Oh, I would ethically..." It took my previous question as a retort, and then it refused to give me an unethical answer. Mike: Oh, geez. Josh Birk: But that's another example, right? It learned, "Oh, my use case is to actually not do evil, and so I'm now in the future going to try to not do evil." And that, once again, without a human in the loop, it would never have learned that. Mike: Right. I was also thinking about human in the loop in terms of... And I had a community member email me about this. But if you remember a long, long time ago, I used to talk about Salesforce administration by walking around. Josh Birk: Yes. Yes. Mike: And it got me thinking, "Well, I'm going to talk to Josh about this and setting up guardrails and doing stuff." But when every time I work with Agentforce stuff and I'm building a demo, I'm doing it in a very sterile environment. And by sterile, I mean I'm in my office, it's quiet, I know what I'm trying to do. Maybe I'm working on a Trailhead module. I've got this, this, this, and it works. And I would do that when I was in admin building stuff, and then I would sit and demo it, and well, of course, the demo is exactly the thing that I built it on, so it works consistently every time. 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...
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Setup with Agentforce Makes Salesforce Admin Tasks Easier
01/29/2026
Setup with Agentforce Makes Salesforce Admin Tasks Easier
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 for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Cheryl Feldman. Setup made simple 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 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. How you can make Setup with Agentforce even better 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?” Help shape the future of Setup 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. Podcast swag Learn more Trailblazer Community Group: Salesforce Admins Blog: Dreamforce ‘25 on Salesforce+: Dreamforce ‘25 on Salesforce+: Dreamforce ‘25 on Salesforce+: Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt : This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we're welcoming back Cheryl Feldman, Product Management Senior Director here at Salesforce. Well, to talk about something that's changing the game for admins, namely Agentforce for Setup. Cheryl's going to give us a behind the scenes look at how this conversational tool is making setups smarter, faster, and way more helpful. So from formulas to user access to cloning users, it's all about to get easier and way more admin friendly. Not to mention, Cheryl's also going to share with us how her own journey from admin to product manager helps her shape what gets built. So I can't wait. 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...
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From Invisible to Intentional: A Practical Way Admins Can Approach Salesforce Security
01/22/2026
From Invisible to Intentional: A Practical Way Admins Can Approach Salesforce Security
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 for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Laura Pelkey and Kylie McKlveen. The three key areas of Salesforce security 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: Invisibles: What Salesforce is already doing to protect your org. Examples include network-level security, infrastructure, application-level security, and a global 24/7 threat response and monitoring team. Configurables: What you can do as a Salesforce Admin to improve your Salesforce security. Think security settings, controls, and layering permission sets to follow the principle of least privilege. Enhanceables: Extra steps you can take to protect sensitive data or meet industry-specific regulations. These are tools you can add to your org, like Salesforce Shield, Security Center, and Salesforce Backup and Recover. Put it all together, and you have a clear plan of action for how you can level up the security of your org. How Agentforce will bring agentic security to 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. Walking through the security steps you can take right now 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. Podcast swag Learn more Security Keynote: The 360 Blog: The 360 Blog: The 360 Blog: YouTube series: Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript 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....
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Exploring Agentforce Vibes Through Real-World Admin Use Cases
01/15/2026
Exploring Agentforce Vibes Through Real-World Admin Use Cases
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 for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Daryl Moon. Fishing and the art of AI maintenance 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. How Daryl got started with Agentforce Vibes 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. What to build first with Agentforce Vibes 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. Podcast swag Learn more Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Salesforce Admins Blog: Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast. This week I am joined by Daryl Moon, retired fishing enthusiast, but that's not what we're talking about. He is a longtime Salesforce pro who recently dove into Agentforce Vibes and he's going to bring us along for the ride. So from tinkering with lightning web components to building a full-on job seeker app, Darryl shares how his curiosity and a test first mindset helped him explore this new AI tool. And of course, we talk about some unexpected challenges of token limits, but that's going to happen when you're learning something. So if you've ever wondered whether Agentforce Vibes is worth your time, this episode is for you. And with that, let's get Daryl on the podcast. So, Daryl, welcome to the podcast. Daryl Moon: Thanks, Mike. Mike: I'm very excited to have you on, especially after you posted on LinkedIn that you decided to jump in feet first into vibe coding, so I definitely want to talk about that. But before we get to that, I'd love to learn a little bit more about Daryl Moon. So, Daryl, tell us, how did you get started with Salesforce and what got you into vibe coding? Daryl Moon: Yeah. Look, I'll try and keep it short and sweet. But basically, I was working overseas and then returned to Australia in 2014. And obviously, was looking for a job because I'd been away for 10 years. And the IT industry, during that time, had changed a lot. I was a bit of a generalist, I'd done a bit of everything. A bit of application development, a bit of hardware, software, networking. So I came back to this environment where the job roles were very specialized and I was finding it a bit hard to find a role that really fitted me. 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: It happens quite a bit. Daryl Moon: Yeah. So the next thing was, well, how does this Salesforce thing work? We had a partner that we were working with and they were great, and they were helping do some of the heavy lifting. But also, being able to work with those consultants, I was able to start and learn my way around the admin side of things. Of course, this was about 2014, 2015, just before we had Trailhead. So it was a bit of a learn and discover as you go, until Trailhead came out, until I got hold of some resources. There was fairly limited YouTube content around at the time, but there was some really helpful posts from people like Steve Mo and Jennifer Lee, and people like that, some of those. Jennifer's obviously joined your team, and Cheryl Feldman at the time. So yeah, that was the early days when I got started. Mike: Wow. So you've grown up on the platform for a lot of the time that I've been at Salesforce. This last, I would say, year-and-a-half, two years since AI has come, how has your learning and what you work on the platform changed since that? Daryl Moon: I've been a bit of a critic of the whole AI movement and the value of it, certainly at the start. But I would have to say probably over the last six months or so, I've been starting to see that there's a little bit more beyond just the smoke and mirrors and there is actually some value there. 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: Yeah. Daryl Moon: So I cut and paste them all into one document, throw it into ChatGPT and said basically, "Summarize that for me." And it came back with a really great summary, and I went out fishing that weekend and caught six fish applying the knowledge that I'd got from that. So that was a bit of a turning point where I'm thinking, "Hang on, that's one thing it's really good at." Because it's a bit like weather forecasting, there's no black and white, true and false, 100% guarantee, but if it points you in the right direction and if it's able to take ... I think weather forecasting is probably a good analogy because there's so much data and you've got to try to make sense of it. Mike: Right. Daryl Moon: So applications like that, I think it's really well suited to. Mike: Yeah, I would agree. The amount of things that I've thrown at different AI models is always fun to say, "Here's a whole bunch of stuff, go figure it out." 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: Yeah. Actually, it was interesting because I was actually driving to the boat ramp at the time and it's about a 30-minute trip from home, which is perfect for an episode of the Admins Podcast. Mike: I'll keep that in mind so that we make sure this one's the same length. Daryl Moon: Yeah, so that worked out really nicely. Sometimes I try to play it when we're on a road trip with my wife, but she's not so keen, but sometimes. Mike: Yeah, nobody wants to listen to the Salesforce when it's just you. Daryl Moon: No, no. Mike: Because my jokes aren't that funny, I know because I read the iTunes reviews. Daryl Moon: Oh, that's all right. But look, that one caught my attention. And the other thing is Josh sounds very much like a very good friend of mine, Dr. Scott, his voice sounds so similar. So it always gets my attention when I hear him. I think, "Oh, that sounds like my good friend Dr. Scott." 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: Right. Daryl Moon: And it builds something that I know what it would look like if I built it in Flow, then I can compare. Mike: Right. Daryl Moon: It's a bit like, Mike, if I was building maybe a rocket ship and the AI agent built the rocket ship for me. I'd have nothing to compare to because I've never built a rocket ship before. So it was a really analogy to build this little component, this lightning web component, with something I was familiar with. So yeah, I'm happy to cop that criticism because it was just basically I was just going to try it out and see what it could do. Mike: Right. No, I saw that as one of the first comments and it took me back to high school when I had to take a crazy algebra or geometry class. And I remember it was one of the first times you get a scientific calculator and there's all these buttons. And I remember the math teacher telling me, "Well, you should know the answer before you put it into the calculator. The calculator is just there to double check you." 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: Oh, yeah, I'm a bit beyond that. Mike: I guess thinking through Agentforce Vibes and stuff now that you dug into it, what was something, I think we heard it in your response, but what was something that surprised you that you weren't expecting? Daryl Moon: Well, I've done some more testing since then. Mike: Oh, good. Daryl Moon: Yeah. And I thought, "Okay. So let's try maybe just a simple record-triggered flow." So let's create a flow in the lead record when the rating was set to hot. Let's just put a bit of text, just write a bit of text into the description field. And I thought, "That's nice and simple." I'll be able to read that metadata of the flow, I'll know whether it's worked. That'll be really simple and I can test it, know what the outcome's going to look like. 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: Yeah, it's all the tokens, you've used them up. Daryl Moon: Yeah, but it still kind of works. But if you didn't register that that's what happening. And it also seems to lose its ability to deploy stuff as well. So it kind of got a bit brain-dead on me and I got a bit frustrated with that and couldn't get it to work. So I left it for a couple of days, and then I'll come back and I'll try it again, and it managed to do it. Of course, because the credits have regenerated and now it's got smart again. Mike: Yeah. Daryl Moon: So I'm learning how this works. So then I think, "Okay, let's aim for the sky and let's try to build something really complicated." So I think, "Okay, what about we build a whole application?" Mike: Ooh. Daryl Moon: And let's do application for a recruiter, a job seeker. Mike: Okay. Daryl Moon: So we'll have recruitment type of app, but for the individual job seeker. So we've got an object with some jobs, and we've got applications, and we've got applicants, and we've got the whole process of recruitment in there as well. So I kind of described all this and it was a paragraph or two of text where I'd just used common business language and just explained what I wanted to do. And I did this in plan mode, and then I hit okay, go think about that. And it came back and it said, "Righto. So we need a custom object for jobs, and one for this, and one for interviews, and one for applications," et cetera. And I thought, "Wow, yeah, that's pretty clever. Let's now hit the action button and go build it." 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...
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How Can Admins Influence the Salesforce Product Roadmap?
01/08/2026
How Can Admins Influence the Salesforce Product Roadmap?
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 for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Rebecca Sherrill and Shelly Erceg. How feedback shapes the product roadmap 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. What is RoadmapExchange? 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. Get in on the conversation with Idea Insights 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: Top Trending Ideas with the most votes overall from the past year. Recently Updated Ideas by the Salesforce product team. Top Open Ideas of all time by cloud. Recently Delivered Ideas to check out in the product. 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. Podcast swag Learn more Salesforce 360 blog: Salesforce 360 blog: Sign up: Salesforce Admins blog: Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, we're diving deep into the evolution of the IdeaExchange with two very familiar voices, Rebecca Sherrill and Shelly Erceg from Salesforce's research and insights team. They're here to unpack the newest updates like Roadmap Exchange and Idea Insights. And why now is the prime time for Salesforce admins to get reengaged with the IdeaExchange. So if you've ever wondered what happens after you submit an idea, or how your feedback actually influences the product roadmap, this episode's for you. So let's get Rebecca and Shelly on the podcast. So Shelly and Rebecca, welcome to the podcast, or should I say welcome back to the podcast? Rebecca Sherrill: Thank you. Super excited to be here. Shelly Erceg: Thank you so much. Mike: Both of you are veterans of the podcast, but both are back for a different reason. So Rebecca, refresh our memories from 100 years ago when you were on the podcast and what you do at Salesforce. Rebecca Sherrill: Yes. So I've been at Salesforce for 13 years and yes, I was on this podcast 12 years ago. I had to look that up. I started out here doing user research for our platform products, including setup. And so what that means is that in my early years at Salesforce, I talked to, interviewed and observed hundreds of admins to understand what they needed, so that we could build that into our products. So I have a huge appreciation for the admin community because I spent so much time with them during those years. 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: Yeah, absolutely. And Shelly, you're a familiar voice and face in the admin community. Shelly Erceg: Admins are my jam. I started off at Salesforce in the platform as well, working on our workflow and process automation tools. Built Process Builder and part of the flow engine. And then also spent some time with our nonprofit customers over on the NGO side. And now I'm here in Research and Insights focused on the voice of the customer really on IdeaExchange, true to the core, and bringing back really what our customers need to our product teams. Mike: Yeah. So I was a huge IdeaExchange fan when I was an admin because I love to browse like, "Oh, I hope that's coming. People need to vote for it." But I think Rebecca sent me right. Like since I've been a customer and you've been around for a while, the IdeaExchange kind of changed and expanded now, hasn't it? Rebecca Sherrill: That's right. Yeah. So my team has been involved with IdeaExchange for the past three years. And what we've been doing during that time is really trying to bring it up to speed with the current needs of the community and with Salesforce, because so much has changed over these many years. And so most recently we have launched a new part of IdeaExchange called Roadmap Exchange, and hopefully we'll get into more details on that. 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: Well, we can always dive into different insights and roadmaps. Roadmaps are an admin's best friend, I feel like. Rebecca Sherrill: Yes, definitely. Mike: Shelly, you were a PM for a while. What was IdeaExchange for you? Shelly Erceg: Well, one of the things IdeaExchange was was just a great place to try to keep a pulse on what people were talking about currently. And I think that's really what we're trying to do with Idea Insights because there's so much there, right? So when I was a PM, I just thought, wow, this is just a wealth of information. But I was often overwhelmed by how much information there was there. And it can be hard for PMs to go through all of that and to pull out the things that are sort of relevant to their products and to their roadmap that they're building. 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: Well, I mean, Rebecca, if you think about it, IdeaExchange ideas, at least when I was an admin, you could submit an idea of like, why can't I change this button color? All the way to why can't part of this platform do X, which is a massive idea compared to just being able to tweak the color of a button? So I think for maybe admins who have strayed away from the IdeaExchange, you mentioned Roadmap and you mentioned Idea Insights. How does those new features help teams kind of prioritize what they should be looking at and help uncover, like Shelly was saying, the mountain of ideas? Rebecca Sherrill: Yeah. I think Roadmap Exchange is a really great new way for product teams to do this. I'll explain a little bit more what I mean. I have long thought that when somebody creates an idea, it may feel like, oh, that's going out into the universe and we're not quite sure. And I, the person who submitted that idea, I don't know why the product team is not working on it. I don't know. Are they working on it? Are they going to deliver it? What are they doing back there anyway? What are they building right now and why are they not looking at my idea? 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: I like it. Shelly, I'll ask you, but Rebecca, feel free to jump in. I would love to know, because it sounds like with the Roadmap Exchange, you kind of need that next level input. How has the ideas that admins or developers or architects, how have they evolved over the last 20 years that the IdeaExchange has been around? Shelly Erceg: Well, I think there was a couple of things in that question. One is I think, and Rebecca has really outlined this, with Roadmap Exchange, it's actually set up so it's kind of a different kind of experience. And we think that is a really great evolution for admins, in that we're talking about features that product managers are either considering building and need more information about, or are maybe about to start building. And it's such a great opportunity for admins to share what they need in those areas for those products, right? Their real world use cases so that we're keeping that in mind as we're building. But also on the early stages, it's an opportunity to really help shape what we build. 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: Absolutely. Rebecca, can you tell me a little bit more about Idea Insights? Rebecca Sherrill: Yes. Idea Insights launched this past September, October around DreamForce. And this is a new page on IdeaExchange where you can see the all time top ideas, the recently delivered ideas. Recently commented on ideas meaning that a product manager from Salesforce has left a comment or an update, and the top trending ideas. And trending ideas in particular is a new concept for us. It's showing the ideas that have received the most upvotes in the past year. And what I really like about this is, again, if you're an IdeaExchange user and you're creating a new idea, you might think, how is there any chance that my idea is going to get any eyes on it? 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: Yeah. The thing that I sit back, and even with these new features, if you were to strip all of those new features away. The thing that I still sit back and kind of I'm a bit of awe about is I have yet to find another company that I actively participate with that tells me, "Hey, here's where we think things are going. Or here's the stuff we're working on." I don't get any of that with the iPhone. I don't get any of that like, "I'm drinking a Coke Zero. I'd love to give them feedback on this lid that is the loudest lid in the world," but I don't have that, right? 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: Yeah, it's terrific. And we really get why it's so important for our customers to understand where we're going. And our biggest push over the last year has been around more transparency and more up ... we're trying to provide more updates on ideas. And admins have told us, frankly, even if you're not going to be able to deliver that, tell us that. Because we understand people are trying to plan for their business. They need to know whether or not they need to build something, whether they need to work with somebody on the app exchange to solve the gap potentially. Or whether they know that we're providing a solution for them. And that's really, really important. 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: Yeah. Well, you mentioned a lot of lanes, and Rebecca, you mentioned launching the new Idea Insights at DreamForce. So Dreamforce famously has True to the Core as a very popular session. I know this is a track lead because none of the speakers want to be opposite of True to the Core. And recently we just launched, I believe it's on LinkedIn, True to the Core Deep Dive. I had Leanne on to talk about that. So help me understand if you're a new admin or even if you've been around for a while, what's the difference between True to the Core and IdeaExchange? Rebecca Sherrill: Yes, great question. And we love True to the Core, the keynote. And speaking of ways in which I think Salesforce is unique, we organize that keynote and we often get the feedback, "Wow, I can't believe Salesforce still does this." Or even from folks inside of Salesforce who are new, who watch it for the first time and say, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe that we provide this amount of transparency. And it's totally unscripted and unpredictable and really authentic." So yeah, that just kind of follows onto what you were saying about how we have a pretty unique offering, I think, in terms of our ways of collecting feedback. 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: Yeah. I know in True the Core Deep Dive and even true the core at Dreamforce, sometimes the questions are very specific. And you can always kind of read a PM's face by, "Oh boy, this one's going to be a tough one. We're going to have to have three or four people to answer it." So I'm sure it can be that way in the IdeaExchange. 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: Yeah, it's a really interesting position and one I enjoy a lot, because I've kind of got this full picture, or at least a lot of the picture anyway. I'll say from the PM side and just thinking about ideas, PMs really, really want to deliver what people need, and I always did as well. There are often complicated contexts or a lot of constraints around how we can do that. And so I know sometimes on the idea side, something can seem very, very obvious as to why doesn't Salesforce fix this? 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...
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2026 Roadmap for Salesforce Admins: AI, Agentforce, and Emerging Trends
01/01/2026
2026 Roadmap for Salesforce Admins: AI, Agentforce, and Emerging Trends
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jennifer Lee, Joshua Birk, and Kate Lessard from the Admin Evangelist team at Salesforce. Join us as we look at what’s next for admins and Agentforce in 2026 and revisit our predictions from last year. You should for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jennifer Lee, Joshua Birk, and Kate Lessard. Revisiting our predictions for 2025 Happy New Year! Last January, I asked the Admin Evangelist team to make predictions for 2025. So let’s check in on those and see how we did. Josh Birk promised that admins would find building with Agentforce to be easier than they expected. I think that’s turned out to be true, especially with resources from Salesforce like Agentforce NOW to help you get started. However, building agents is only part of AI adoption. There’s still plenty of work to be done to get organizational buy-in and get the most out of Agentforce. Jennifer Lee was excited about the potential of Setup with Agentforce. And while these new features didn’t make it out of pilot in 2025, she’s still excited about how much easier things will be when it goes live. And if you want to see it in action, check out the Admin Keynote from Dreamforce ‘25. Finally, Kate Lessard was all about security for 2025 and how important it will be for AI adoption. Time and again, what she’s found is that getting Agentforce buy-in at your organization starts with a clear governance story. Dreamforce ‘25 featured our first-ever Security Keynote, so this is a topic that will continue to be top-of-mind for admins. What’s on the 2026 Roadmap for Salesforce Admins? Next, I wanted to ask the team to make predictions for 2026. For Josh, it’s not just about the agents that admins can build. It’s about the agents that help you get more things done on the backend. With tools like Setup powered by Agentforce, Agentforce for Security, and Agentforce Vibes, there are more and more ways to amplify your skills with AI. In other words, it’s agents all the way down. Jen, as always, is all about automation. As she puts it, “Without any type of automation, how good are your agents?” In 2026, she sees admins building with smaller, simpler flows that leave the heavy lifting to AI agents. With your Agentforce skills amplifying your automation skills, you can simplify complicated processes without breaking a sweat. Meanwhile, for Kate, 2026 will be all about finding new partners in the organization. Admins will need a seat at the table with security teams, legal teams, and business leadership to ensure a trusted AI implementation. In 2026, admins will have the agency to do what? Finally, on the theme of agents and agency, I asked the team: “In 2026, admins will have the agency to do… what?” For Jen, it’s bringing innovation into your company by being at the forefront of everything that’s going on with Salesforce. Trying new tools, looking for new ways to simplify business processes, and becoming the AI expert at your organization. Josh gives some examples of that expertise in action. He predicts that admins will feel more empowered to jump in and build Lightning Web Components or even an Apex class with the help of AI. It’s not about replacing developers, but expanding the potential for collaboration. Obviously, Kate is focused on the importance of proactive AI governance. “When governance is reactive, admins get forced into cleanup mode,” she says. So Salesforce Admins need to build strong partnerships with their stakeholders to make sure any AI implementation is safe and secure. Be sure to listen to the full episode for insights from Kate, Josh, and Jen. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday. Happy New Year! Podcast swag Learn more Dreamforce ‘25 Admin Keynote: Dreamforce ‘25 Security Keynote: Admin Trailblazers Group Social Love our podcasts? Subscribe today or Full show transcript Mike: Happy New Year and welcome to 2026 and the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Well, this year, we're going to kick things off by revisiting a tradition we started last year, which was future-gazing, with Josh Birk, Jennifer Lee and Kate Lessard on the Admin Evangelist team. Now, in this episode, we're going to get you started for 2026 by revisiting all of our predictions from 2025, and then exploring what lies ahead for Salesforce admins in this new year. From Agentforce breakthroughs to proactive governance, everybody brought some very sharp insights and a few surprises. And because it's the new year, it's a fresh start and the perfect time to plan your roadmap ahead for this year. So with that, let's get everybody back on the podcast. Okay. So welcome back everyone to the podcast. Jennifer Lee: Hello. Josh Birk: Oh, hi. Mike: Great. I didn't call you out specifically. It's always like I've heard the story of you put 10 people in a room, one person will emerge as the leader. So I like to say intros like that and then just see who's going to speak first, because it's like, "Oh, you're going to go. No, you're going to go. No, you're going to go." Josh Birk: It's a very bold interview strategy, to actually ask a question and just wait for the silence to break itself. Mike: Yeah. It also is bold interview strategy of here's a podcast and a welcome and silence. Kate Lessard: Oh, I was on mute. I apparently still haven't figured that out. Mike: Goals for 2026. Kate Lessard: Aiming high. Mike: I still feel like they sell those shirts that say, "You're on mute." Kate Lessard: Well, maybe my Secret Santa will get one for me. Mike: One can hope, right? All right. So I will link to in the show notes, we did this podcast in what sounds weird of like a hundred years ago, 2024 for 2025. And I thought it would be fun to revisit that, because we've replayed it, but also revisit each of your predictions, and then have you break out the crystal ball, or Johnny Carson used to use an envelope, that shows how old I am, and look to the future of 2026. So Josh, we're going to start with you. Josh Birk: Okay. Mike: You said last year that admins would find Agentforce easier than expected. Did that hold up? Dun, dun, dun. Josh Birk: Dun, dun, dun. First of all, I think that was almost like a cheat strategy there, because I think when we recorded this, everybody thought building agents was going to be pretty hard. So anything we've done to make that easier, I think the predictions come pretty true. I don't have the numbers on hand, on me right now, but we've had a lot of success with the Agentforce NOW, the virtual workshops that this team has helped host and present. I don't know, Mike, what was your biggest audience number? It was like a few hundred, right? Mike: Oh, easily. But that aside, I think it's more of people aren't afraid. Josh Birk: Yeah, yeah. I think people aren't afraid, and I think the tooling... First of all, the tooling has gotten really good and the tooling looks like, if we're moving into the prediction phase, the tooling looks like it's getting better too. So I think that one held true. I feel like people are... It's not the building the agents, it's the can I make this into a use case that will convince my CTO to help me buy this agent kind of thing. But when it comes to actually understanding agents and topics and actions and things like that, I think our audience has done a pretty good job of grasping it. Mike: It's almost like a Lego brick problem. We understand the Lego bricks, we've got so many things we could build, it's what do we build next. Josh Birk: Right. It's one thing when you're doing the page-by-page, step-by-step thing. It's the other thing when you've got the child's basket of random Legos. Mike: Right, Lego bricks. Josh Birk: Lego bricks. Mike: Yeah, yeah, I'm reminded of that. Jen, it's always automation with you, but a little bit of a divergent, and I feel like you were on the right path, you probably had a secret futuristic whisper. Your big prediction for 2025 was that Cheryl's team would give us agents to instantly troubleshoot user access. Did we get that? Jennifer Lee: Kind of. So that's currently in closed pilot, and what I've seen definitely matches what I had predicted. So what I've seen is the tool does figure out, why does Josh have this permission, but Kate doesn't? And you don't have to go through and dig in setup to figure that out, you can go and use the tool, Setup Powered by Agentforce, to talk to the agent, and then it'll come up and say, "Okay, here's why." It could be the sharing role or whatever the reason is, you're in some type of public group, and then it will explain to you all that, and then ask if you want them to take action. So it's even gone beyond just user access. Behind the scenes, I've seen flow creation, data modeling when you're creating a new app, being able to surface up, "Here are the requirements." Then it comes back and says, "Here's existing fields that we think you can just use, and then here are some new ones." But it all comes down to human-in-the-loop, "We're going to explain things to you. Is it okay for me to take that next step to actually do it?" So yeah, I'm excited for when this goes to GA, and I know Cheryl's team is working very hard in making that happen. Mike: Yeah. You think of the amount of stuff that has to get done in the background for it to understand all of that, insane, I'm sure. Jennifer Lee: [inaudible 00:06:26] setup assistant. Mike: Right. Kate Lessard: If you want to see it in action, you can also go back and revisit the admin keynote from Dreamforce. We've got some really great examples of what that looks like to build some excitement. Mike: I was going to say, that's exactly a great segue, Kate, I'm glad you came off mute. Kate Lessard: I've got it down. Mike: Right. It's a button, it's very important. You went a different route and said AI governance and security were going to be the sleeper topics that admins needed to watch. Did they become front page news, or did something else dominate? Kate Lessard: They really did. Security has always been one of our core responsibilities as Salesforce admins, and with new technology, we have new threats and new ways that we need to be prepared to deal with them. I would say in 2025, security really did become a front page discussion, as IT professionals focused on governance and security and addressing some of those new threats that we weren't exactly sure what they were going to look like. For Salesforce admins, I think we saw a lot of cases where admins couldn't even get Agentforce buy-in at their organizations without a clear governance story. And at Dreamforce, we even had our first ever security keynote. And then, as just mentioned, I was just talking about the admin keynote, we featured security really heavily in the admin keynote as well. I think even one of the new Agentforce features that I'm personally most excited about is security with Agentforce, because it uses Agentforce to provide that automated risk assessment and will actually be really proactive for admins detecting and alerting them to any unusual activity in their organization in their Salesforce instance. Mike: Great. All right, Josh, we're going to come back to you. Looking in your crystal ball for the future, and you can't say S-controls will continue to be deprecated. Josh Birk: No, no. I think we have mission accomplished on that one. Mike: Yeah, right. I bet there's still an S-control that's firing today. Josh Birk: I do like that as a segue from security is important. Mike: Right. Josh Birk: Security is important also, maybe not have that JavaScript running from 2010. Mike: Well, I just have to think of somebody scrolling through the transcript, S-controls, what are they talking about S-controls for? Josh Birk: Right, right. You know the generation of Salesforce ecosystem you're from if you know what an S-control is. Mike: The same generation that mentions Johnny Carson. Josh Birk: In the envelope, yes. Mike: Welcome to the handful of listeners still pushing play. No, so 2026, we accomplished a lot. I think Agentforce went farther than we even thought. What do you see ahead for admins in this next year? Josh Birk: So I think to follow up with how Jen and Kate are describing the tools, there's going to be this evolution of agents that are there to help you get things done, not just the agents that are the ones you're building. So we've got Setup Powered by Agentforce, we've got Agentforce for Security, we've got Agentforce Fives, we've got brand new Agentforce Builder coming down the path, and that Agentforce Builder has, dun, dun, dun, agents helping you build agents. So I think that's the next layer that we're going to see, is the agentic enterprise being there in places that'll be at your fingertips is the way I would put it. Where you need AI to help you, it's going to be right there for you. Mike: Right, okay. Boy, that's awfully broad, I like it. Jen, you don't have to stick with automation, but for 2026, what do you see coming for admins? Jennifer Lee: Well, I see, not to stick with automation, but- Josh Birk: Automation. Jennifer Lee: It's going to continue to play a real important role in your agents, because without any type of automation, how good is that agent with just having basic instructions? And I'm going to stick with continuing to really build with smaller flows and not building with those humongous flows that you might be used to. I was blown by a agent that I had created where I had two simple flows, and they were just to create a cupcake record and then a cupcake item record. And in the past, I would have had to build a flow that did massive loops to keep... Because you need multiple cupcake item records associated with a cupcake order, and I would have had to loop around and do some complex building of a flow to handle that. And then now, with my agent, I could just say, "Hey, there could be one to many cupcake items, and if the person said they wanted X number, just continue to use that action," and it understood that. I didn't have to make complex flows to do that. So it's really, again, having that mindset, and then just powering up your automation skills with your Agentforce skills, that's going to be where the magic happens. Mike: Wow, that's incredibly powerful. I never thought of that, that we would be building simpler flows. It's like writing stronger sentences, short declarative sentences, as opposed to long paragraph diatribes that go nowhere, which is common on this podcast. Kate Lessard: And an agent can help you build those flows, which is super cool. Mike: Yep, they usually do. The longer the intro, the more the agent had to help. Kate, are we going down the security path again for 2026, or what are we predicting for admins? Kate Lessard: I don't think that security is going to go away, I think it's going to stay a real hot topic. But I'm actually going to go back to one of my other predictions last year. I think I said that admins were set to become their orgs' AI specialist, and I think that we saw that shift start. But I think it's going to be really big this year as admins become AI orchestrators and stewards, because they're using their understanding of their organization's business and their business processes to identify those right use cases where we want to implement AI, and they're the ones that are going to be designing guardrails and bringing in decision logic. I think we're also seeing something that we've been encouraging on this team for a long time, and it's becoming more prevalent and I think is really going to be huge in 2026, which is admins having a seat at the table to partner more closely with their security teams, their legal team and their business stakeholders across the board to ensure a trusted implementation, because the AI and the knowledge that admins have gained this past year, it's just helping them move upstream in those conversations. Mike: I just realized as you were answering this, this show sounds incredibly like Family Feud. Not that I just watched Family Feud last night. But it's the host repeating the question over and over again, and it makes me think, the next time we go to a community group- Josh Birk: You want a board? Mike: ... we need to do a survey of a hundred admins. Kate Lessard: Oh, I love it. Mike: And I'm going to have you guys back on and we're going to guess the answers, because that sounds incredibly fun. Kate Lessard: That does sound fun. Mike: In a recent survey of a hundred admins, we asked them, "Karaoke or singing in the shower?" Okay. So bonus question that I just thought of and I didn't prep you guys for, so let's see how it goes, we'll start with you, Josh, to keep the order in the same. I realize we say agent a lot, and in the world, sometimes you can get confused and say agency, and I think we're all familiar with what it means to have agency. So in 2026, I wish admins had agency to do what? Josh, you're up first. Josh Birk: 2026, admins have the agency to... Gosh, I feel like I'm just stealing from Kate here. Have the agency to feel like they can be the AI expert, basically. I think that there's going to be a lot of self-empowerment there. As a next developer, this is what I was thinking when Kate and Jen were talking about this kind of stuff, when developers develop something, it's a little bit in a package, it's kind of in a bubble, and they just get something working and then they run their unit tests on it, and then boom, that goes into the org and then they walk away. And like a lot of the other things when it comes to how that runs within an org can often be the role of the admin, like making sure the users have the right permissions, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I don't think that's going to change as agents become more prolific, I think the role is simply going to become more important. I'm going to tack onto that and say, because this is where things are going to start getting weird, is when admins feel like they have the agency to build a Lightning Web Component, when admins feel like they have the agency to build an Apex class, and that's a brand new frontier we haven't really gone into, which reverses the thing I just described. But I would put the horse before the cart, so to speak, and be like you want to be that established AI expert first, because you're not trying to replace a developer, you're not trying to do their work for them. But if you understand what happens if you create a Lightning Web Component and how that belongs in your org, then you can be that proper steward for making sure that your org is going to remain healthy. Mike: I like it. Jen, I'll sound like Richard Dawson, in 2026, I hope admins have the agency to do what? Jennifer Lee: I'd say to be the person bringing the innovation into their company, being at the forefront of everything that's going on in Salesforce, being the first ones to get their hands on it, whether it's getting into a playground to play around with it and then pitching it to their company, but really being that true expert at their company. Mike: That's great, yeah. Kate? Last one. Kate Lessard: You're going to make me follow that? Mike: The hardest part when we do the Family Feud episode is I'm going to get some sort of audience clapping sound, because at some point, when everybody answers, everybody else in the team's like, "Oh yeah, good answer. Birthday cake, yeah. Birthday cake, good answer." So Kate, in 2026, I hope admins have agency to do what? Kate Lessard: All right. I'm going back to security, because I am really passionate about it, and I'm going to say to set governance standards proactively rather than retroactively after something goes wrong. I think that once AI is live in your organization, whether you're using Agentforce or any other type...
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The Gift of the Admin
12/25/2025
The Gift of the Admin
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, a holiday fable. The Gift of the Admin Once, in a company not unlike yours, There was an Admin named Riley— The kind of Admin who could fix a broken report Before the requestor even finished explaining it. Now, every season brought its own challenges. Deadlines, new features, odd little mysteries That crept into the org like snowflakes— Unique, intricate, and occasionally inconvenient. But this season felt different. People were tired. Teams were stretched. And the org itself seemed to sigh Under the weight of so many expectations. So Riley decided to give a gift. Not a wrapped one, Not a shiny one, But a gift only an Admin could give: Clarity. Riley began quietly, almost invisibly— Cleaning up old fields no one used, Fixing automation that everyone complained about But no one had time to understand. Organizing objects like a librarian Restoring order to a well-loved shelf. They documented things no one remembered building. They created a dashboard that told the truth In a way executives could finally understand. They met with a team that felt unheard And turned their ideas into something real. Little by little, the org brightened. People moved with more confidence. Decisions came easier. Work flowed instead of stumbled. And one morning, someone said, “I don’t know what changed, But everything just feels clearer.” Riley just smiled. The best Admin work often goes unseen— But never unfelt. Because the gift of the Admin Isn’t the features they build Or the bugs they squash Or the fires they quietly put out. The gift of the Admin Is alignment. The gift of the Admin Is understanding. The gift of the Admin Is a better tomorrow, Built one thoughtful choice at a time. And that’s a gift Every org needs— No matter the season. Make sure to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to hear a new episode every week. Happy holidays! Podcast swag Admin Trailblazers Group Social Love our podcasts? Subscribe today or Full show transcript Happy holidays, Salesforce Admins. Rather than a traditional episode, I’ve decided to give you a modern fable. It’s called “The Gift of the Admin.” Once, in a company not unlike yours, There was an Admin named Riley— The kind of Admin who could fix a broken report Before the requestor even finished explaining it. Now, every season brought its own challenges. Deadlines, new features, odd little mysteries That crept into the org like snowflakes— Unique, intricate, and occasionally inconvenient. But this season felt different. People were tired. Teams were stretched. And the org itself seemed to sigh Under the weight of so many expectations. So Riley decided to give a gift. Not a wrapped one, Not a shiny one, But a gift only an Admin could give: Clarity. Riley began quietly, almost invisibly— Cleaning up old fields no one used, Fixing automation that everyone complained about But no one had time to understand. Organizing objects like a librarian Restoring order to a well-loved shelf. They documented things no one remembered building. They created a dashboard that told the truth In a way executives could finally understand. They met with a team that felt unheard And turned their ideas into something real. Little by little, the org brightened. People moved with more confidence. Decisions came easier. Work flowed instead of stumbled. And one morning, someone said, “I don’t know what changed, But everything just feels clearer.” Riley just smiled. The best Admin work often goes unseen— But never unfelt. Because the gift of the Admin Isn’t the features they build Or the bugs they squash Or the fires they quietly put out. The gift of the Admin Is alignment. The gift of the Admin Is understanding. The gift of the Admin Is a better tomorrow, Built one thoughtful choice at a time. And that’s a gift Every org needs— No matter the season. Happy holidays, Salesforce Admins.
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How Agentforce Vibes Speeds Up Admin Workflows
12/18/2025
How Agentforce Vibes Speeds Up Admin Workflows
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 Agentforce Vibes can help admins debug code, create documentation, and so much more. You should for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Joshua Birk. What is vibe coding? Josh has been getting a vibe lately, and it’s not just him. More and more programmers have been adapting their workflows to incorporate AI and give themselves a helping hand. Vibe coding is here to stay, and it’s coming to Salesforce with the release of Agentforce Vibes. Pair programming, also known as someone looking over your shoulder while you code, is a classic way to get unstuck. Whether you’re missing a semicolon or calling the wrong function, having another set of eyes on your code can make all the difference. Vibe coding is the same concept, but you’re using AI for that external perspective. With an AI assistant, admins can quickly troubleshoot a wall of code to spot errors or comb through pages of documentation for a key piece of information. And now, that functionality has been built into Salesforce development environments with Agentforce Vibes. How to get started with Agentforce Vibes If you’re already a user of VS Code or Code Builder, you already have access to Agentforce Vibes. If you’re running a trial org or developer edition, you may need to download and install the extension. Like any AI tool, the things you can do with Agentforce Vibes are too many to list. Josh gives the example of product requirements documentation. PRDs are the encyclopedia of everything going on with a project: requirements, challenges, blockers, key metrics, etc. It’s an essential document for any project, but it’s difficult to create and dense to parse. Agentforce Vibes can help you with PRDs on both fronts. You can spin up a PRD for a project and get a running start, or go through an existing PRD for whatever information you need. In short, it helps you do more, faster. AI is a skillset amplifier “There's always a question of what skills are admins not going to need in the future of AI,” Josh says. “I don't know if that's the right question, because I think it's all about your skills leveraging AI—not AI taking over your skill set.” Agentforce Vibes isn’t going to replace a development team, but it can give admins a starting point to collaborate more effectively with them. If you have coding skills, it can help you debug and document. If you’ve built a ton of flows and are worried some might be redundant, it can help you find those. AI tools like Vibes won’t replace admin skills—they’ll amplify them. Like a calculator in math class, Vibes helps you move faster but still requires foundational knowledge. The key is knowing what to ask, validating results, and using AI as a supportive peer, not a replacement. Make sure to listen to the full episode for more details about Agentforce Vibes from Josh, and don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday. Until next time! Podcast swag Learn more Get started: True to the Core Deep Dive: Admin Trailblazers Group Social Love our podcasts? Subscribe today or Full show transcript Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, we're joined by Josh Birk, Senior Director Admin Evangelism, and really just all around great explainer of complicated things. Coming off of Dreamforce, there's a lot of people talking about vibe coding, what it is, where it came from, and why it matters for Salesforce admins. So we're going to dive into that, along with Agentforce Vibes and how it can change the way that Salesforce admins approach requirements, automation, and even documentation. So you want to give this one a listen to and share it with a few Salesforce admins who maybe are curious about coding in the age of AI. So with that, let's get Josh on the podcast. So Josh, welcome back to the podcast. Josh Birk: Thanks, Mike. Good to be here. Mike: We have so much to talk about. We're coming off of Dreamforce this year. I feel like we're heading into one of the busiest Decembers as a Salesforce admin I can remember, because we're still releasing, upgrading products in this age of AI. But one thing that left Dreamforce that I wanted to talk to you about is I heard a lot about vibe coding. Josh Birk: Yeah. Mike: And so I want to start there, before we talk about the Salesforce product, and just kind of level set. Because you're a developer, you've built code. Josh Birk: I have. I have. Mike: I haven't. I've shown you how to add a icon to an application. Josh Birk: Famously so, yes. Mike: That was my one win in my life. I'll take that. But this whole idea of vibe coding seems to be taking over tech. Let's talk about that. Josh Birk: Yeah, it is definitely taking over tech. And if you want to think about how blindly fast we're going right now, I think I first heard the term vibe coding somewhere during this summer. Mike: Oh. Josh Birk: This time last year, not even a speckle on somebody's eye. And now it's really all the rage. So it's moving. Yeah. Yeah. And the first time I heard it too, my first response was of course, "Well, what are you talking about? What is vibe code?" Mike: To be fair, it sounds awesome. Because I totally love tie-dye shirts, I love the 1970s, and I'm sitting around thinking like, "Yeah brother. I am going to get myself a tie-dye t-shirt and we're going to vibe." Josh Birk: Yeah. Actually, my first response was closer in that vein. I actually thought they meant flow development. Like not flows as in admin development, but when you get into your flow zone kind of thing. Mike: Oh yeah. Yeah. Josh Birk: I thought, "Oh, is there some cool new way to get into my vibe?" Mike: Hey, it's like that social media movie. That's what my friends always call it. Josh Birk: Yeah. Mike: We're like, "You can't interrupt him. He's plugged in." Josh Birk: Exactly. Mike: He's plugged in. Josh Birk: It is. And this is a good note for working with your developers. If they have their headphones on, they are probably not willing to talk to you. Just as a reminder out there for feeding and nurturing your developers. So yeah, no. So vibe coding is, as kind of an old school developer, there's a really interesting paradigm to describe it, which is peer programming. And peer programming was this thing that was kind of... I don't want to say it was kind of a fad, but the idea was get a fellow programmer to basically look over your shoulder and assist you while you're coding kind of thing. Mike: Okay. Josh Birk: And back at one of my earlier jobs, we used to do it usually when we were like we're stuck, right? And it's like we get stuck in something, "Hey Craig, can you come over and peer program with me for a little bit?" And there's this kind of myth in coding that sometimes all you literally need is another pair of eyeballs staring at your screen and your code will magically work better. But it was more of an idea of like, "Oh, you missed that semicolon." Catching little things along the way. Vibe coding, similar concept except you're using an AI assistant. The conversation you're having is with an AI who can sit there and create things for you, read files for you, analyze things for you. And so you just sort of have at your fingertips this assistant that's going to help you do tasks faster and easier. Mike: Okay. So yeah. I also totally you get that like when you're proofreading stuff. I'll be going through whatever and I'll be like, "I can't not find this word anymore because I've been looking at it forever." Josh Birk: Right, right. And old school English major, never turn in your paper until somebody else has read it, right? Mike: Uh-huh. Josh Birk: Always get another pair of eyeballs because you're too close to your source material to know what you said that sounds wrong to somebody like that. And yeah, vibes can be like that too. It can be your other pair of eyes. Mike: So Salesforce has Agentforce Vibes. Josh Birk: Yes. Mike: And we saw it at Dreamforce and the developer keynote, and you've had a chance to get hands-on with it. Josh Birk: Yeah. Mike: Let's talk about what Agentforce Vibe means for admin. Josh Birk: So let's talk software. Let's talk about, specifically when we say Agentforce Vibes, what we're talking about. And what we're talking about is an extension into Visual Studio Code. Now Visual Studio Code is the basis of Code Builder, also by the way now renamed Agentforce Vibes IDE for those who haven't seen that change yet. And that's Visual Studio Code in a browser. And the cool thing about Agentforce Vibes IDE is that it's not like a HTML representation of a development environment. It's actually running... You know when you can't log into your computer and somebody from IT logs in for you and they're like, "I'm going to take over your mouse and do a whole bunch of stuff." Mike: Mm-hmm. Josh Birk: It's like that technology, but you get to use Visual Studio Code remotely, basically. So the extension comes pre-installed, and so the nice thing about it all being in your browser is that you don't have to install anything. You just basically go to a click, pull up a window and let it start doing all of its things to initialize, and then you're pretty much good to go. And it's even had, I don't know when this improvement happened, but it used to be you had to go through this kind of awkward logging into your own org kind of thing. And that actually has been skipped, so it actually knows your org itself. Mike: Oh. Josh Birk: And then what you're going to see in the IDE is a pane off to the left side, and it's a client... And now we got to get a little nerdy here. That client logs into the Salesforce MCP server. And I don't know when the last time we've had a chance to use the term MCP, but that's model context protocol, which basically is a protocol that says, "This is how an AI client can perform actions on a Salesforce server." And so Vibes sits within VS Code and it knows kind of your org shape, and then it can go through the MCP server and be like, "Hey, can you download all the metadata for my custom objects?" And things like that. Now if you're an instance that's like a trial org or a developer edition, you may have to actually download Visual Studio Code and then install the Salesforce extension, which will include the CLI and Vibes and a whole bunch of other stuff. Nice thing is that's very simple to do. And also because of the way Agentforce Vibes ID works, it's feature parity, right? You're basically doing the same thing, you're just doing it locally on your desktop as opposed to in the cloud. Mike: So it's meant to help you build faster? Josh Birk: That is one of the things it can help you do. Yeah. Mike: Okay. Josh Birk: So let's see. A few of my favorite use cases. Mike: Yes. Josh Birk: Because this is one of the big problems with AI in general, right? Because I tell people and somebody talks, I'm like, "Look, if you haven't played with any of these, just go talk to them." Because part of it is like how a conversational UI works doesn't really click for people, I think, until they actually start using it. And then I'm like, "Ask it to tell you a dad joke. Ask it to play 20 questions. Stuff like that." Don't ask Vibes to do a dad joke. You can, I think it probably will respond. But one of the first examples I tried to do was I'm creating out this demo for a fictional company, and so I gave it basically the overview of what the company does. And then I asked it, "What kind of custom data would you recommend?" Sort of thing. It's like, "Oh, okay." And so it can recommend that, it can create those custom objects for you, it can create those custom fields for you. And then you can also take that to another step and be like, "Okay. Based on what you know about this fictional company, what you know about the data structure, what flows would you recommend? What kind of automation would you recommend?" And so it's kind of like having not just a developer in your back pocket, it's kind of like having an architect in your back pocket too. So you can kind of help solve some of these puzzle pieces without necessarily having to sit down and have a meeting with an entire development team in order to keep moving forward. Mike: So I saw in some of our presentations, like at Dreamforce and both at New York World Tour, they would talk about a product requirements document. Josh Birk: Okay. Mike: I'm going to go out on a limb and say... It's a pretty sturdy limb because it's holding me. There's probably admins that are inept and it's like second nature to kind of document requirements, especially heading into a big build. Josh Birk: Yeah, yeah. Mike: And then there isn't. And I would say I fell into the, "There isn't." I always tended to document everything after the fact. Josh Birk: Yeah. Mike: But if you've never done like a product requirements doc, which I think helps Agentforce Vibes, just helps in vibe coding, but it to me feels like also a best practice. What should a PRD include, and how should that motion kind of get started for admins? Josh Birk: Yeah. So we were talking earlier, and so I kind of brushed up on what a PRD kind of looks like. And back in my consultancy days, I kind of wish this was more of a trend. Because we didn't have a requirements doc, we had requirement docs. Mike: Oh. Josh Birk: So the designer would come up with layouts, the development team would come out with X, and the business requirements team would come out with Y. And a PRD really tries to consolidate as much of that into one document. So it's kind of a, "Here is the encyclopedia of everything that's going on with your current project." And so that's requirements, it's challenges, it's blockers, key metrics. So it's kind of a one-stop guide into like, "Where are we in the success of this project?" Mike: Mm-hmm. Josh Birk: And I think one of the cool things about a client like Vibes is when you look at something like that, it can be overwhelming, right? It can be a lot. But to Vibes, it's just a big block of text, right? It's not going to get overwhelmed over something like that. And so with a good PRD, Vibes knows where you're trying to go. And so to kind of go back to the example of like, "How should we build out this application?" You're giving it all of the touchpoints that it really needs. And you can also use Vibes to be like, "Hey, can you recommend changes to my PRD?" Kind of thing. So because when I'm looking at this document format, I'm like, "Wow, that is a lot of information we're tracking in one place. Wouldn't it be nice if I had another pair of eyeballs in order to work with this?" And so I think that's where Vibes is kind of a nice little assistant that can sit there next to you and help craft, navigate and organize a document like that. Mike: Yeah. I always try to think of how do you take this from admins who are working with many teams and it's a huge app, to like some of the times... Like I was an admin with a couple hundred users, I would get four or five people together. I didn't have anybody that was a UX or interface designer. I just kind of had to figure it out on my own. Josh Birk: Yeah, yeah. Mike: I think that's part of where Vibes can also help you, right? Josh Birk: It can. And it's kind of one of those things. Like right now I haven't had a lot of great success with Vibes creating like a complicated flow or anything like that, but this is where it's definitely going in the future. And so a use case that I think they actually demoed at the developer keynote Dreamforce was your designer gives you a Figma, you give that Figma to Vibes, and Vibes gives you a lightning web component. I don't think Vibes can do this yet, but I've done that kind of thing with AI just with like an image. Somebody says like, "Oh, this is what I want the component to look like." And I go, "Snap. Claude, hey, create this lightning web component for me." So what that does... And it kind of chills me a little bit, because one of the first talks I ever did about AI was at Forcelandia, and it was all about the convergence of roles, and it was all about how an admin can now have starting points. They're not going to replace a development team, but going back to a PRD, it can help them create the docs that the developers need in order to get their job done. Mike: Mm-hmm. Josh Birk: And some of those docs might even include, "Here's a block of code." And the admin doesn't necessarily need to know exactly how that code works, but something like Vibes can be like, "Oh, this is part of the PRD that we're going to give those developers so that they have that information moving forward." And so if you start kind of thinking about it in terms of documents in, documents out with Vibes in the center, it gives an admin a lot more interconnectivity when it comes to being able to quickly move through those tasks. Still not replacing the human in the loop, right? Mike: Right. Josh Birk: Where nobody's going to say like, "Hey admin, could you just write that apex trigger for me and get that into production as quickly as possible? That'd be great. Thanks." None of those models have changed. Those rules still apply. But we can move into another example. Let's say an admin wakes up, they get a Slack message that's like, "Hey, this flow isn't working correctly." They can pull up Vibes and run tests against that flow and ask vibes like, "Hey, I'm getting this error. Can you help me figure out what's going on in flow with that?" Mike: Very good. I was going to ask, because you said helps start or helps create the foundation. Josh Birk: Yeah. Mike: And I think that's always the thing that we're looking at is, "Oh, so I can just give Vibes this requirements doc and go to lunch, come back, and it's done." Josh Birk: Kind of where we're moving at the very least. And when I say moving, once again, we're talking in terms of AI, so we're talking months, not years. Right? Mike: Yeah. Josh Birk: Again, Vibes didn't exist six months ago. In six months, it's going to be a lot more powerful and a lot more capable. And I think that's one of the visions Salesforce has for it is it's your business analyst's buddy, it is your requirements gathering buddy, but it's also your application building buddy. And once again, creating that minimal viable product that you can just get into a sandbox, and then have people get feedback based on that. Time to delivery on that stuff is going to just start to evaporate, it's going to be so fast. And once again, we're still going to need the expertise. AI is going to get stuff wrong, it's going to go into corners it's going to need to be pulled out of. And so I don't see... There's always a question of like, "Well, what skill is an admin not going to need in the future of AI?" And I don't know if that's the right question, because I think it's all about your skills leveraging AI, not AI taking over your skillset. Mike: And also, I mean you mentioned it, I'm thinking of back to how you started the conversation which is like the peer programming. You would always double check. They're double checking your work and you're double checking their work. Josh Birk: Mm-hmm. Mike: And so I would think at times you could probably get a little over your skis with Vibes if it could create things that you're like, "Oh wow, I'm so glad it created that. I didn't know how." Now the impetus, in my opinion, is still on you to go back and learn. I use the metaphor of the first time you got to use a calculator in math class. Josh Birk: Right. Mike: You're like, "Oh my God, I can get the answer so much faster." Josh Birk: Exactly. Mike: But the math teacher's like, "Right, but you should have already knew the answer. The calculator should have just reinforced it." Josh...
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What Skills Transfer Well Into a Salesforce Admin Career?
12/11/2025
What Skills Transfer Well Into a Salesforce Admin Career?
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to David Simpson, Salesforce Administrator at the 1916 Company. Join us as we chat about how he got into the ecosystem and what skills transfer well into a Salesforce Admin career. You should for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with David Simpson. Transitioning into a Salesforce Admin career You might recognize David from his Dreamforce presentation about resolving Flow errors, or our episode about it on the podcast. However, one thing that came up was his career pivot from finance to being a Salesforce Admin, and I wanted to bring him back to talk more about it. To make a long story short, David started out as an accountant before eventually becoming a financial systems analyst. That job involves a lot of reporting and, somewhere along the way, he realized that running the reports was the most exciting part of the job for him. David decided to make a career change and focus on Salesforce. But that meant he needed to go on the hunt and figure out how to land his first full-time Salesforce role. What to look for in job descriptions David’s comfort with data, spreadsheets, and reconciliation gave him a strong analytical foundation for making the shift. These skills made it easier to understand how reporting, data cleanliness, and business processes translated to what admins build on the platform. However, having the right skills is only part of the story—he still needed to find the right jobs to apply to. “It's not uncommon now for admins to have developer skills or maybe dip their toe into the architect side of things,” David says, “but I focused mainly on positions that were only looking for admin-related work.” In general, David’s advice is to narrow things down for yourself. Look for organizations that are already committed to Salesforce, and job postings that are looking for the admin skillset instead of somebody who can do it all. A problem-solving mindset and curiosity fuel the admin journey For David, the skill that transfers best into a Salesforce Admin career is curiosity. When he was starting out, he was only interested in learning things that would be immediately applicable to the task at hand. Looking back on it now, David realizes he could have learned much faster if he had indulged his curiosity. “I should have given myself the benefit of the doubt,” he says, “and taken a little bit more risk in learning new things.” Make sure to listen to the full episode for more from David about how he transferred his skills into a Salesforce Admin career. And make sure you’re subscribed to the show to catch us every Thursday. Podcast swag Learn more Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, what if spreadsheet skills from your last job could be the secret to launching your Salesforce admin career? In this episode, we welcome back David Simpson, who shares his story from accounting to automation and how his finance background paved the way to becoming a certified Salesforce admin. We dive into the skills that transferred surprisingly well, the learning curves that came with the role, and the mindset shift that helps him grow. So whether you're thinking about making a career move or just mentoring somebody who is, this conversation's packed with insights. So with that, let's get David on the podcast. David Simpson: Thank you for having me back. Mike Gerholdt: It wasn't that long ago that we were talking, it was pre-Dreamforce about 45 days ago or so. I had you on the podcast to talk about the presentation you're giving at Dreamforce, and we've since wrapped up Dreamforce now and people are at home. Well, some people. I think some people stayed and probably went to Napa Valley and did wine tastings, which I wouldn't blame you. There's a lot of great vineyards and stuff out there. But one thing you brought up that I wanted to follow up on was your career trajectory, and we haven't talked about careers a whole lot, but let's just rewind a little bit and give one of those the last time on the Salesforce Admin podcast, because I've watched a lot of streaming things. Let's fill people in on what you do and where your career started and how you became a Salesforce admin. David Simpson: Sure. Previously on Salesforce Admins. Mike Gerholdt: Exactly. David Simpson: So, many years ago, I went to college for accounting, and my first job out of college was a staff accountant at a software company. After a few years of working in spreadsheets and doing the monotonous day-to-day that comes with being a staff accountant, I made a pivot to be a financial analyst, more specifically a financial systems analyst, and after I made that pivot, my supervisor at the time, he informed me that he was the administrator for our company's Salesforce instance, and that a lot of the work that I was doing, which was doing financial analytics for our professional service team, a lot of that data came out of Salesforce. Our professional service team would put opportunities into Salesforce, and we needed to make sure that those financials were clean. So, he suggested that I become another admin with the company, and that I would learn about the general inner workings of Salesforce and be a point of contact for cleaning up that data, for troubleshooting issues and just all the things that come with being a junior level admin. So, he gave me a system administrator license. He recommended that I go into Trailhead to just learn the basics of being a Salesforce admin, the Salesforce ecosystem, custom objects. All those general items that you learn as an admin, and then I just kind of fell in love with it. It was such an interesting pivot from doing spreadsheets and reconciliations. I was able to kind of do problem solving and be an environment that I wasn't too familiar in, but I was also able to see how Salesforce works and how we can get this data to be reportable data. So, the automation behind it or validation rules, just even something simple like setting up a page layout. It was all very interesting and new to me, so I just latched onto it a hundred percent, and then I further got sold on the whole experience after about a year or so, being a Salesforce admin, I went to my first Dreamforce in 2018 and I got my Salesforce administrator certification, and at that point, that kind of signaled to me that this is what I want to do full time. So, from that point on, it's all history. I went and unfortunately, the company I was with didn't have the resources for a full-time admin, so I did go to another company, but since then I have been an awesome admin just doing it every day. Custom objects, flows, you name it, admin work-wise, I do it. Mike Gerholdt: And I think career changes are hard. I went from sales to becoming an admin as well, and I think everybody kind of looks at like, well, what do I have to do? Or where do I have to go? Or what skills are required? And I think you, like me, kind of got fortunate you were with a company that was like, "Hey, we need these skills." And I'm assuming you probably did both jobs for a while, right? David Simpson: Yes. I was doing both jobs up until I left the company. It was essentially 50/50 financial systems analysis and then admin work. Mike Gerholdt: So, it's not like you just all of a sudden jumped in the pilot seat and took over the plane and away you go. David Simpson: Thankfully, that wasn't the case for me. I was able to kind ease myself into the admin role because I still had work to do on the financial side. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. And I think that that works out as an incredibly lucky path. David Simpson: Yeah, definitely. Mike Gerholdt: One thing, so you mentioned they didn't have the budget for a full-time admin, which is the role you wanted to pursue. Did you consider just staying at that current position and kind of dividing your time, or was this something where you were like, "No, I really, this is, I'm going to commit?" David Simpson: It was something that I really wanted to commit on. In the beginning when I had first gotten a system administrator license and started doing basic admin work, I was completely on board with splitting my time between the two. I wasn't super confident in what I was doing as a Salesforce admin. I was still learning the ropes, but after I had gotten my first certification, that kind of sold it to me and locked in that this is what I want to do as a career. So, at that point, I did bring up my interest in being a full-time admin to the company, and they said, "Unfortunately, we just don't have the bandwidth to have a full-time admin whose only job is to be a Salesforce administrator." So, unfortunately, I did have to switch companies to go and find that. Mike Gerholdt: Okay, so let's pause there because that is the point that I think everybody has questions about, which is, so what did interviewing look like? What kind of prep did you do? You're going from career A to career B, and you kind of have some experience. I mean, what was that like? Because I'm assuming you sat in interviews for jobs you didn't get. David Simpson: Yeah, I won't sugarcoat it. It was a little tough. You're going into a new job where, yes, you do have experience, but you don't have a ton of experience. So, what I focused on was first the credential side of things. By the time I decided to make the jump to be a full-time Salesforce administrator, I did have, I believe, three certifications under my belt. I had the Salesforce administrator certification, the platform app builder, and then the CPQ specialist. So, I- Mike Gerholdt: Ooh, CPQ specialist. Wow. David Simpson: Yeah. Yep. I haven't used it in a while, but it was a very challenging and interesting certification to take. I actually took the Salesforce-provided trainings for it, and it was a wealth of knowledge, but so I had these three certifications. I did lean a little bit heavier on that to say, listen, I may not have years of experience, but you can see here that I'm able to answer the tough questions. Additionally, I did focus on what projects and initiatives I was able to complete at my job while I was part-time being a Salesforce admin. So, I had done some work building a custom object for, funnily enough, our accounting team to log their calls to people for collecting payment. So, I made a point to mention that in my interviews. So, I used the certifications. I used actual project and real-world experience, but something else that was a little kind of ace up the sleeve for my interview process was that I did have finance and accounting background. The job that ultimately hired me, while I did not do finance and accounting work for them, I was able to be a point of contact to help bridge the gap between the finance team and the Salesforce team. If they needed to pull financial data from Salesforce, I would be a person that they could go to, and I could confidently answer that because of my background. So, when it comes to jumping from one career to a Salesforce career, I definitely recommend that people do lean into what they've done in the past and show how they can enhance a new job's day-to-day by focusing on those areas of expertise, but just in a Salesforce context. That's what really helped me because yes, I did unfortunately have a handful of interviews where I didn't get the job, and I think that ultimately came down to just pure raw Salesforce experience. But the job that did hire me, it was because I had a great rapport with their CFO, and I was able to talk the talk with finance as well as bridge that gap to the Salesforce side of things. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I mean, you stayed in finance. It's not like you went over to a fish distribution warehouse or something. David Simpson: Yes, exactly. Mike Gerholdt: I tried to pick something that was the opposite of finance, and my brain went blank for a second, and I was like, "Oh, I just watched a show on cooking last night." David Simpson: I mean, those are pretty different. I can't think of a much more different thing, but yeah, I mean because the Salesforce department at that new job also heavily interacted with the finance department, that was a big benefit to me. Mike Gerholdt: I can feel people listening to this podcast right now, and they're like, ask this question, ask this question, ask this question. I got like a million. What were in ... Because we're going to get to your job, I promise you, but we're going to just stay in this middle ground here for a second. In some of the job search that you were looking for in some of the, I don't know even, it sounds so old of me to call it classified ads. I'm sure it was like LinkedIn listings or Indeed job boards or something. What were some of the things that you looked for in terms of the description that you either filtered in or filtered out in terms applying for? David Simpson: Yeah, so some of the things that I looked for in my job search was making sure that the job posting focused purely on admin work. I think nowadays we focus so much on being specialized in a number of different aspects of Salesforce. It's not uncommon now for admins to have developer skills or maybe dip their toe in the architect side of things, and that is fantastic, don't get me wrong, but I focused mainly on positions that were only looking for admin-related work, so building custom objects, administering users, building validation rules, just those general kind of things were the main items I was looking for when I was transitioning to my first full-time Salesforce job. Additionally, I was looking to see what kind of qualifications and credentials they were looking for from an education side of things. If there was nothing about a Salesforce certification, then I erred on the side of caution and didn't apply there. I wanted a company that was fully bought into the Salesforce ecosystem, and that can be illustrated in a job posting by seeing that they're asking for the proper credentials. An extra little bonus, which was much more rare, was seeing your certain Trailhead status, or you have certain super badges. It's very rare for a job to ask for those sorts of things, but that's how you know you're working with a company that knows the Salesforce ecosystem and knows what they want. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. And it's done its homework. David Simpson: Exactly. So, I was looking for those types of companies, just really people who were bought into the ecosystem, people who knew what they were looking for, knew what enhancements and long-term goals they had for their Salesforce org, and also was going to treat it with the level of attention and detail that is needed in a Salesforce org. There's many times where unfortunately, due to resourcing or staffing issues, Salesforce gets a little bit put by the wayside, and instead of having great initiatives and solutions deployed, it's just a bunch of band-aids, and then that comes back to the admin saying, "Oh, we can't deliver on something truly incredible because we're not given the time and the resources for it." So, I was looking for companies that really didn't have that mindset and were looking for true, awesome admins. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. You were fortunate enough that you had worked in an org. Did you, at any one point in time in the interviewing process, think about preparing a developer org or a Trailhead org to showcase some of your skills? David Simpson: When I was first applying for a full-time Salesforce admin, that thought did not cross my mind. That said, this was many years ago in, I think it was 2019. That said, a little over a year ago, I did get a new job at my current position, and during that job search, I did have a Salesforce developer org that I had built out, and I recreated some of my most interesting and complex solutions in that developer org, and then basically in every single job interview I had, I said, "Do you want to see my dev org? I've built some awesome flows." And most of the time they said no. But every once in a while they'd say yes, and then I get to show off my screen flow that I worked really hard on. So, nowadays, yes, I do have my dev org. I'll bring up Trailhead every now and then, or I did back then when I was in the job hunt, but really, I like to showcase the dev org whenever possible because it is something that I'm actively developing in. Even now that I have a job and I'm in a job I love, I still whatever I do at my normal job, if I say, "Oh, that's pretty interesting," I go and I rebuild it in the dev org. But of course, without confidential information. Mike Gerholdt: Right. No. Oh, man. I'm the same way. I was crushed, I want to say a year and a half ago I was prepping for Dreamforce and the dev org that I'd had since 2006. I forgot to log in and it expired. David Simpson: Oh, no. Oh, that's horrible. Mike Gerholdt: And it was just more of like, it was just such an awesome little relic of stuff that I had built and things that I had tried out, and I have another one, but it's not as old and it doesn't have as much. There wasn't anything cool in it, but it was cool because it was stuff that I had built when I was, it had my first workflow in it. David Simpson: It shows a timeline of how you've grown. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I mean, very much so. I'd let nobody in there because they'd be like, "What were you doing?" Well, I was a kid with crayons back then. David Simpson: Yeah, you got to make mistakes in order to get better. Mike Gerholdt: Absolutely. Okay. So, I mean, we could do a whole podcast on interviewing and everybody in the comments will be like, "You should." Let's go to day one of the new job. So, you've transitioned, you're no longer 50/50. The company's bought in. Dave's our new Salesforce admin. Day one, outside of all of the HR paperwork and stuff, what did you do on day one? David Simpson: First, I quietly panicked because I was afraid I was not going to be able to live up to expectations. But after that calmed down, I of course met the team. I was very fortunate to work with a team of several people in the Salesforce space. There was two developers, there was another admin. There were two architects, and of course the Salesforce manager. So, they showed me around the org and they showed me some of the details of what they had built, what they're currently building, how they take in tickets. It was just essentially getting a feel for the Salesforce ecosystem that was there. And then from that point, once I was left my own devices, I just continued to do some more digging. I looked, okay, they're using cases. How are they using cases? Where is the queue that stuff that we get asked to do comes in? What does their account object look like? Because the account object is always one of the busiest objects in the Salesforce ecosystem. How many validation rules do they have? I was really just trying to take the little experience that I had from my previous job and then look at those same areas in this new job. So, essentially just getting a feel for the org. Mike Gerholdt: So, you joined a team of people? David Simpson: Yes. Yes. Mike Gerholdt: What was that like? David Simpson: It was a fantastic experience. I still keep in touch with all of them to this day, despite the fact that I haven't worked with them for a few years now. They were all super friendly and super helpful, and I think that was something that really helped me to continue this admin career path is that I got paired with such great people in this team, and it wasn't just the Salesforce team that was super friendly and helpful. Everybody in the company was, but these people took me in and they knew that I had limited experience, and they said, "It's okay. Let's show you the ropes of what you don't know and make sure that you are as...
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How Admins Build Confidence with Agentforce
12/04/2025
How Admins Build Confidence with Agentforce
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Kate Lessard, Lead Admin Evangelist at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about how the Admin Adoption Framework can help you build confidence with Agentforce and her new video series, “Kate Clicks Through It”. You should for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Kate Lessard. Tackling AI adoption overwhelm Admins are feeling the pressure to “get AI-ready,” but the pace (and the jargon) can be intimidating. The key is starting with small, actionable steps that build momentum and confidence. Remember, it’s OK not to know everything on day one. Luckily, Kate and the Evangelist team have been working on something to give you a helping hand. It’s called the Admin Adoption Framework, and it gives you a structured path to build confidence with Agentforce in five simple steps: Explore what’s possible Get curious Try it out Make it work Use it often By working through this list, Salesforce Admins can pinpoint their current phase, set goals, and identify the next best step—whether that’s learning about AI use cases or diving into hands-on experimentation with Agentforce. Keeping pace with new features While your organization is probably keen to get started with Agentforce, the great thing about the Admin Adoption Framework is that it’s a process that works for just about any implementation. For example, we know that good data is the backbone of effective AI solutions, so we can go through the same five steps with Data Cloud. Tech changes fast, but how you learn new things and build confidence with them doesn’t. Developed through extensive research and feedback from admins, Salesforce MVPs, and folks on the product team, the Admin Adoption Framework is a template for continuing success. Hands-on learning with “Kate Clicks Through It” Hands-on learning is the best way to build confidence with new features, and Kate’s been working on a new video series to help you get started. “I personally am someone who learns best by doing,” she says, “I need to get hands-on, I need to do something. In many cases, I need to do it over and over again.” In “Kate Clicks Through It,” she walks you step by step through Salesforce processes like how to build an Agentforce data library, or how to use Org Check as an alternative to Optimizer. Each 10-minute video has a demo that will let you click along with her and try things for yourself. Kate has a lot of great tips to share about how to build confidence with Agentforce, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday. Podcast swag Learn more Admin Blog: YouTube Series: Admin Trailblazers Group Social Love our podcasts? Subscribe today or Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt: Welcome to the Salesforce Admin's podcast. This week, admin evangelist Kate Lessard joins us to dive into the Agentforce adoption journey. From building a foundation AI to launching the new Kate Clicks Through It YouTube series, Kate walks us through how admins can thoughtfully and confidently bring AI into their organizations. We also chat about how feedback shaped the adoption framework. So if you've been wondering where to start or where you are on your AI journey, this episode's for you. Let's get Kate on the podcast. So Kate, welcome back to the podcast. Kate Lessard: Thanks. It's been a while. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. January. Was it when we did the kickoff? That was the last time. Kate Lessard: Maybe. Or maybe did we do a TDX, prep for TDX call maybe? Mike Gerholdt: We might've. Other podcasters would remember their episodes, but me, just crank them out. Kate Lessard: Yeah, you're a little busy. Mike Gerholdt: It's okay. So you've been busy as well. Let's talk about Agentforce stuff and YouTube stuff and everything you've been working on. Kate Lessard: Yeah, absolutely. It has definitely been a busy year. It's been flying by. And some really exciting stuff that we've been working on for admins this year. Mike Gerholdt: First up being Agentforce stuff, because Agentforce. I know there's not too much Agentforce out there. People say that, there's not. When we're recording this ChatGPT is coming out with a new model. This is our new norm. It's like when the iPhone drop, there's not enough iPhone information out in the world. There's always iPhone information out in the world. There's always going to be AI stuff for us to learn. Kate Lessard: Yeah, agreed. I think that that's the really cool thing about Agentforce and the job that we get to do is that we get to play with and learn the new things as they're coming out because it's so important for us to share with others and let them learn from our mistakes. So I think that that brings a lot of fun experimentation into our jobs. Mike Gerholdt: Right, absolutely. So speaking of that, how do we kind of walk people through the journey to Agentforce? Kate Lessard: At TDX last year we, or I guess this year, we announced that we have this Agentforce development life cycle. But then we kind of started asking what comes before that? How do we get into this cycle where we're iterating through ideation, configuration, testing, deployment, and supervising our agents? How can we get ready to actually go live with agents and Agentforce and using it? And so on the admin relations team, we kind of took a step back and started to think about adoption and how we can set up adoption for admins and get them not only familiar with Agentforce, if they have no idea what it is, where they can get started, how they can start to learn the fundamentals of AI just in general, and then dive into Salesforce and Agentforce and using AI within their CRM. That's been something we've been really focused on, is creating the concept of this adoption framework to help admins get ready to move their organizations towards actually using Agentforce consistently. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, because I think it's one thing ... I mean, it's a little different than ... And I use this a lot when we talk about Flow or some of our other products. Automation within the CRM space has always been there. We didn't really have to learn it. But with AI, we're all learning AI on top of our organizations learning AI, on top of us going, "Okay, so now how do we use this? And what's the best use of this?" And all of that has to transfer into the admin sitting there going, "Oh my, I have a lot to learn. Where am I at?" And I think that's really one of the goals of coming out with the journey, is helping people understand where are you at, where do you want to go? Kate Lessard: Agreed. I think that the development of Agentforce and of course more widely artificial intelligence, it's fast. It feels like there's something new to learn every week. I think that can cause a lot of overwhelm because we're trying to keep up without maybe even having a solid foundation. So this concept of the adoption framework was really designed as a baseline for admins to be able to take stock of where they are in their Agentforce learning journey, overcome that analysis paralysis that I think many of us have been feeling over the past couple years, and then have resources and a guide for exactly where they are now and what is coming next. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. So where is this guide or the adoption journey going to show up for us? Kate Lessard: So you will be able to see it, we have a nice blog on the admin's website right now. It is called Your Five Step Guide to Successful Agentforce Adoption. Just double checking that title, but that is correct. And this kind of introduces that adoption framework, the steps that are included with it, some resources for each step along the way. And then you might see this show up in a couple other places. It might show up in a Dreamforce session or it might show up on our website or any other place that I could maybe tease that it would come out. I think it's something that you might see here and there. And the nice thing is that it's ever-changing because we're constantly having new content and new resources to add to it in each step. So I think it's something that you're going to see in multiple places moving forward. Mike Gerholdt: And I was a part of you brainstorming this and bringing it to the team, and really it was everybody on the team had something to contribute to this. Where do you feel like admins are progressing through in terms of the journey? Are we starting off? Does everybody start off at the beginning, or we jump in steps? I mean, is it like a step method, everybody has to go through every single step? Kate Lessard: I think you go through every step, but maybe you don't recognize that you've gone through some of them. So our first step is really exploring what's possible and just really understanding what AI fundamentals are, what is Agentforce? And a lot of our admins are really active. They've already been hands-on in Trailhead. So they've maybe gone through this stage themselves without even realizing it because they've kind of figured out how the technology works. They've actually done a little hands-on work. They have been picturing use cases for their organization. And so maybe they're hopping into that next phase where they're actually sharing this and doing demos to their stakeholders and trying to bring this to their organization. So I think everyone goes through all the stages, but you might not be just starting directly at the beginning. Once you become aware of this framework, I think that you can hop in and find the point that is most relevant to where you are on your journey and be able to kind of pick up from there. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. And hopefully it kind of helps you gut check content and say, "Hmm, Maybe this is for next week when I'm moving into a different phase." Not to say that it would be a week that you would be in a phase. I'm just using it as a example. Kate Lessard: Absolutely. I mean, admins move fast. I would not be shocked if some of them were moving from phase week to week. Although I would be surprised if they didn't spend some time in that phase where they're building out a demo and getting stakeholders involved in really building that support. I feel like that always takes time. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, absolutely. So in addition to the adoption journey, what else have you been working on? Kate Lessard: Lots. It's been a busy year. I'm super excited to share some of the things that I've been working on and the team's been working on. We recently launched a new series on YouTube called Kate Clicks Through It, which has been just a labor of love. And I feel like it has been something that I'm really excited about, really excited to put out into the world because it is a series that allows admins to get hands-on and follow along different Salesforce processes step by step. And I personally am someone who learns best by doing. I need to get hands-on. I need to do something. In many cases, I need to do it over and over again. I need to try. I need to fail. That's why admins love sandboxes so much. That's why we love Trailhead, so that we can get in there and we can actually just try things out and see what works and what doesn't, and then take the best version of that to our business. So Kate Clicks Through It launched in July. We have two episodes out right now, one on Agentforce data libraries and one on using Org Check as an alternative to Optimizer, which is retiring this winter. And it's just a way to follow along step by step. They're short episodes, less than 10 minutes spent on each demo so that you can actually have your computer up and click along beside me, and by the end we've accomplished something together. Mike Gerholdt: It's kind of like a Salesforce Twitch stream. Kate Lessard: Yeah, absolutely. Mike Gerholdt: You're not playing the video game, you're building the app or clicking through the app. Kate Lessard: Exactly. Mike Gerholdt: Cool. So Kate, it is, boy, end of August. Well, end-ish of August. I swear these months, it's like it took forever ... February took like eight or nine months. And then we had TDX, and then it was spring for a day, and now Summer is flying by, it's already the end of August. The kids are back in school. Dreamforce is right around the corner. Which usually for most of us is September. It's October this year. It's not close enough to Halloween, but it still would be close enough that you could totally get away with wearing a Halloween costume at Dreamforce. I just realized that, that might be kind of fun. I mean, the biggest costume is Cloudy and Codey. They would win, I suppose. Would they wear a costume? Would the costume wear a costume? Kate Lessard: I don't know the answer to that. Mike Gerholdt: It's inception, like Astro in his Tanooki suit, would he wear another costume on top of that? These are the things that keep Mike up at night. We did wear a Yeti suit. Kate Lessard: [inaudible 00:11:30]. That is true. The Yeti suit and the safari suit. Mike Gerholdt: I forgot about the safari. Kate Lessard: I think we could all just call it a win across the board and wear some awesome admin capes. Mike Gerholdt: Right. I mean, if you don't wear that in your every day, just because you could. We're going to see some of the Agentforce adoption journey show up at Dreamforce, maybe in the keynotes, maybe in the track? Kate Lessard: Maybe. I think that the nice thing about the adoption journey is that it really is applicable to so many situations. I think that it is, even if it's not called out directly, it is going to be there and you're going to start noticing it as part of that underlying education and the foundation of how we're talking about and building things. It's also really nice because it doesn't just have to be for Agentforce either. I think that what we've created is really applicable for a lot of different adoptions of different technologies. So I think that it's something that maybe we'll see as the world continues to progress and AI gets more advanced. So it's definitely something that you'll start to notice at Dreamforce. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I'm also thinking of, it always seemed as when I was an admin going to Dreamforce, nine times out of 10 it was, I need to learn about this other cloud because we're getting ready to implement it. So I could see that Agentforce adoption journey being applicable as you're looking at additional clouds as well. Kate Lessard: Yeah, I think especially if you're using something like Data Cloud to unify your data and bring things from multiple sources, that it becomes really important to have that foundational level of adoption for your users in general and your customers, external customers as well. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. One thing we didn't touch on, and we're not giving away the chili recipe ... I always think back to Food Network where they're, I've got some ... It's always they're making a sauce and they put in, "Well, I've got some salt and pepper and some onion powder," and you're like, "Yeah, that goes in everything." And then I got my seasoning blend, and you're like, "Oh, that's you don't want to tell us everything else that you put in there." Kate Lessard: The secret admin sauce. Mike Gerholdt: The secret ... Yeah. But I mean, I don't want people to think like, "Oh, well, Kate just sat down and mapped out a journey and presented it to the team, and then now it's on the website." What was some of the process or the input that we got on the adoption journey? Kate Lessard: Absolutely. That is a great question because we involved a lot of people in creating this. Not only the team, although that's where we certainly started, but the framework was not built in a vacuum. We had a ton of feedback and interaction both internally and from the community as we developed this. So we got feedback from members of our product team at Salesforce. We did a very soft launch at TDX as part of my demo to deployment session and got some feedback from that. And then we continued to refine and then get feedback from admins in a survey that we shared at a local community conference. And then after that, we took that survey to the Salesforce MVPs and got some more feedback from some of them as well. So everyone that weighed in helped us refine this framework. They called out some things that maybe we hadn't thought were really that important for admins to include in this journey, this roadmap. But once we heard that and we saw it consistently show up, we added it in. So a lot of people weighed in and helped us create this journey map. Mike Gerholdt: And some of it was us just looking at each other and being like, "Is this what we're going through?" Because we're going through Agentforce adoption as well. I mean, from the moment the product hit some of our orgs for us to try and play around with, it was, what are we learning and is this what we're going through? Kate Lessard: Absolutely. And I think that that really hits the nail on the head. I think that we went through a lot of these different emotions that we associated with each stage here. We were curious, we were frustrated, we were feeling really proud once we got to this stage. So selfishly, this framework has kind of evolved into a game changer for our team internally and our internal content strategy as well, because we've been able to see where there are content gaps that we have experienced, as well as what we've heard from the community and what we should be focusing on to give admins the knowledge that they need for a successful Agentforce implementation. And we're able to collect that feedbacks from the admins and the community about what they've been struggling with and what resources and discussions they feel have been missing, which was the biggest thing that was contributed to us as we were building this. Mike Gerholdt: So here's a meta question. Did you use AI to create any part of the adoption journey? Kate Lessard: I did. Okay. So let's think back to this ... It's been such ... Oh gosh, we've been working on this for months. But- Mike Gerholdt: Got to do the flashback [inaudible 00:16:51]. Kate Lessard: First it started off with just a giant brain dump mind map. That was what helped us kind of sort out the emotions and the stages. And then they've shifted terminology and what we are referring to them and how we process them a few times. I think AI really helped me with the survey, is where it helped out. So I was like, "These are the things that I'm trying to get. This is how I'm trying to ask the questions. This doesn't feel quite right. Can you help me refine this?" And so I did use AI to help me with that survey. And then got feedback from our internal marketing team as well to make sure that it was capturing what we needed it to. Because I think the biggest thing that we see with surveys in general, and this is me going down a total rabbit hole from my past project management and consulting experience, when you send out surveys or you're gathering requirements or you're asking questions, if you do so without having the specific goal in mind of what you're trying to get back, you can get so much information that is valuable, but maybe not what you're looking for or answering the questions that you really need answered. So I think that AI, as well as our internal marketing team, was super helpful in refining that. Mike Gerholdt: That, or what I've found is you can ask the question in such a way that it elicits only a certain answer, as opposed to kind of an...
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How Admins Can Embrace the AI Shift
11/20/2025
How Admins Can Embrace the AI Shift
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Prag Ravichandran Kamalaveni, Founder & CEO of Skilled Cohort and the Founder & Co-Chair of Salesforce Saturday Cohort Canada. Join us as we chat about his Dreamforce presentation on AI readiness and how to be a better storyteller. You should for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Prag Ravichandran Kamalaveni. Why AI is moving technology from clicks to chats I caught up with Prag fresh off his Dreamforce presentation about AI readiness. The idea for his talk came from thinking about what people were saying years ago, when he started attending the conference, compared to now. If we’re talking about Agentforce this year, what will we be talking about in five years? In ten years? “We are moving away from clicks and moving towards chats,” Prag says. AI currently sits in the application layer, working as a tool on top of your org. But as these functionalities become more deeply embedded in everything we do, Prag predicts that an “agentic layer” will sit directly on top of your data. What this all means is that data cleanup and data quality need to be top priorities for your organization to get the most out of AI. How to find presentation topics As a 10-time Dreamforce speaker, Prag has a simple and effective approach for how he turns ideas into presentations. It starts with the topics—pick something you’re excited to talk about. The best topics are in areas where you have some experience but want to learn more. “Curiosity is fundamental for success,” Prag says. Write out a list of topics that you’re curious about, and then look at the big picture of how they might fit together in a presentation. Prag also points out that you don’t need to write a fully finished 20-minute script to submit for a conference. Technology moves so quickly that by the time you’re actually giving your talk, half of the information will be out of date. Write a good abstract and focus on the core concepts. Finally, keep a sense of perspective and don’t get discouraged by rejection. As an event organizer myself, I see plenty of great presentation ideas that just don’t fit with the event as a whole. It’s all about persistence, so keep at it. Forget the script—go for flexibility and rehearsal So you’ve submitted some great topics and booked that speaking gig—how do you prepare? As he’s gained more experience as a speaker, Prag has stopped trying to write a detailed script. Instead of focusing on the exact words you have to say, think about what you want your audience to understand. Practice makes perfect, so make sure to take the time to rehearse your speech in front of friends, family, and anyone who will give you input. Prag has found ChatGPT to be effective for doing a few practice runs, once he prompted it to stop being so complimentary and give him direct feedback. Listen to the full episode for more insights from Prag about AI readiness and how to be a great presenter. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday. Podcast swag Learn more Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we're joined by Prag to talk all things AI readiness, from Dreamforce stages to real world slide decks, so if you've ever wondered how to prep for a major presentation in a fast moving AI world, or how tools like ChatGPT can play coach, creator and confidence booster, I promise you, you're in for a treat. Now, Prag shares what it takes to go from idea to impactful delivery, plus the pivotal role that data plays in getting AI ready. Now, whether you're planning your next big talk or just curious how AI fits into your workflow, this episode has something for you. So with that, let's get Prag on the podcast. So Prag, welcome to the podcast. Prag: Pleasure to be here, Mike, with you. Mike: Let's get started, for those people that didn't see your presentation at Dreamforce or haven't bumped into you in the community, let's do a little bit, tell me how you got started in the Salesforce community and what you presented at Dreamforce this year. Prag: Wow, okay. So you are backdating probably 15 years ago, that's when I started Salesforce. This was the pre-Salesforce classic version is when I started, and Salesforce evolved a lot, and I couldn't believe that it's already 15 years past, and I think this Dreamforce is my sixth or maybe seventh. Mike: Wow. Prag: But every Dreamforce for me is pretty amazing because of the energy and people around the globe who could able to come join us, exchange ideas, mostly the problems and the pain they're going through, it's fantastic. So I always look for Dreamforce every single year, and the energy that I take away from Dreamforce is obviously the biggest driver for me. I know people sometimes complain that they become tired by end of day four. I think, me, on the opposite, I allow to steal energy from others, so I take more energy, if it is crazy week like Dreamforce, and that's fantastic feeling for me. Mike: So you're taking other people's energy, oh no. I think this year you presented about getting AI ready. Can you talk to me? I mean, if you think about it, even in the short time that you've been, if you go back six or seven Dreamforces ago, I promise you we probably weren't talking AI, and now we are. How was that presentation and what did you talk about? Prag: So it's a very, very new topic to a lot of us. We are consuming AI in a lot of ways, and I'm pretty sure almost everyone who is listening to this podcast might have used some version of ChatGPT or Gemini at some point, but I started believing in my co-speaker, like we both started believing that we all are going to start using AI as part of our work. So the presentation, we started in a way that in the next five to 10 years, what we predict is we are going to move from application layer to data centric layer. What it means is the AI or the agent layer is going to sit on top of the data layer, and the phrase we actually mentioned at our session was, we are moving away from clicks and moving towards chats. So that's going to be a very interesting starting point when it comes to AI. How are we going to consume AI? Mike: Yeah, I mean, I feel like having just come off of [inaudible 00:04:26], even if people don't want to talk AI, they're still talking AI about just about everything. I even had an AI conversation with my Lyft driver, which I will tell you, that was probably the first time I've ever had that. Yeah. Prag: That's nice. Yeah, I think none of us could able to avoid the topic. Mike: So what did you see at Dreamforce this year that you're excited maybe to have come GA or just the next advancements in what could come out for Salesforce in 2026? Prag: Wow, there's a lot of things, but being very honest, I enjoyed this Dreamforce because the message was clear. If your AI needs to work, you need to have the right data. I think that message was little bit under the hood for a while, but I think it's been clearly communicated this time that any kind of AI content that you consume during Dreamforce, it's not even disclaimer, it's very clear that, "Hey, you need to have the right data to make sure that your AI works the way you want it to work." So first of all, kudos to the team who made this approach of making the message clear about the data layer, which is super important to make your AI works. But I also super excited about the naming convention and the name change of all the products. Mike: Oh? Prag: It's not easy to move from sales cloud to agent force sales. That's a big difference. That means that there is an organization switch at the company level, or at the product level, there's going to be a lot of agent force presence going to come along that we are going to start using probably much faster and much sooner. Those are all kind of an indications that I got, but at the same time, at the keynote, I was super surprised to see Patrick doing a demo of agent code wipe. That's beyond what I would expect to see at the keynote floor. Mike: Well, that's the whole reason we do keynotes is to wow and amaze you. Prag: Yeah, it is definitely worth getting the goosebumps moments there, for sure. Mike: Yeah. Well, let's talk a little bit about, so you presented at Dreamforce and you talked about getting AI ready, I think absent of talking about your presentation, one thing that's really relevant having just come off of a community conference, and I know quickly the holidays will be here and gone and it'll be January, February and community conferences, user groups, Trailblazer DX will be coming back. I'd love to hear your perspective on if you had some advice or things that you would love to share about how you got ready to present at Dreamforce that would be helpful for others. Prag: I think what I have done in the past as a mistake was, oh, I want to make sure that my presentation is ready or the content is completely ready before I even submit my topics to talk about. I think that's a biggest mistake that I have done in my own life and the moment I started coming out of it, because the things are changing much faster. You cannot have something ready assuming that you can present that in three months or four months, then you're going to be old dated content. So my suggestion would be, start picking up the topics that you are excited to talk about. You have experience, but also wants to gain more experience. So the curiosity is the fundamental success for you to have a successful content delivery and for that, pick a range of topics. So I'm always the security guy. I love talking about Salesforce security. It's just my thing. And now I love data. I started talking about data layers in different angles, and since I talk about security and data layer, I could able to start adopting AI topics because when you talk about anything AI, you need to have two most important things, which is the data and how secure that AI have access to the data. So it's kind of putting those puzzles together is going to be phase two of how you can start thinking of presenting to either the community conferences or trial ideas or even at Salesforce World Tours. So these are the two fundamental things that I would be picking before I start worrying about how to deliver that presentation. Mike: Yeah, I completely agree, I mean, selfishly, the event organizer in me would love to have everybody have all their topics ironed out, but in reality, if you have a really good idea and a really thoughtful abstract that explains it, it makes me think of the Wayne Gretzky quote, you just have to skate to where the puck will be. Which is you have to know that you're going to create that presentation even though it's not created right now, so I think that's really good advice because sometimes people can think they have to sit down and have a fully vetted idea before they submit, and you don't, you just have to know that your idea will come together and be incredibly helpful for others. Prag: Exactly. Again, I was one of those folks who made that mistake, but the moment I moved out of it, now I start my presentation with just a piece of paper or a Google Doc. I won't even go to Google Slide and have four or five bullets. I would, "Okay, this is the four or five things I want to talk about that. What could be a potential title?" And then I pick a title and I usually submit at least three or four different kinds and versions of the content, because again, don't give up if your topic didn't get selected. I have seen so many people, if they don't get selected to speak within the first two or three times, then they started believing that they are not the good presenters or they don't know how to submit their topics, and they started giving up on not taking that approach of submitting the topics. I want to tell them that my topics has been rejected many times compared to the times of the topics that's been selected. So rejection is good at times to make sure that it's not your turn yet doesn't mean that you never get your turn. Mike: Yeah, I mean, having been on both sides of the fence on that, it's amazing, but if you think about it relevant to other things like applying for a job, you apply for jobs when you're searching for a job. And yes, there's jobs that you really want, but you also apply knowing you're not just the only person applying, and to your point, it's not like you find one job and apply for it and then go, "Oh, well, I guess nobody ever will employ me again, just because I got rejected from that one." From an event standpoint, it's a combination of, what are the contents being submitted, what is the mix that the event is looking for, and what do I have to pick from? And sometimes you can be one of a thousand submissions on a certain topic, and it's not that your content isn't good, it's one of a thousand, and there's maybe only two or three slots. And other times it can be, boy, I've had it where, like in your case, I've needed one or two sessions on a certain topic, and thankfully there was one or two submissions on that. And so I hate to say it's luck, but a lot of it is. It's being open and flexible and kind of making presentations that fit for what the organizer's looking for. Prag: Exactly, exactly. So I think if people get clarity around that, I think they won't get demotivated for not getting selected. Mike: No, I mean, it's also, how many times do you buy a lottery ticket and you don't win the lottery, right? If you bought a lottery ticket, you're like, "Well, I'm going to win." And then you don't win and you're like, "I'm never buying a lottery ticket again." Come on. I mean, I hate to say it's the same way, but part of it is that's kind of just how, when you're in a big pool like that, it works, and sometimes the reverse also holds true. You can submit something and it may be a great presentation, it just doesn't fit for what the company or the organization's looking for. I mean, I've gone through lots of call for presentations for other events, and I'm like, "This is a really good subject." And from my perspective, it's really good, but from an organizer's perspective, it's good, it just doesn't fit what they're looking for. And so it's like being cinnamon and somebody's trying to make a ravioli dish, and I'm not saying cinnamon's bad, cinnamon's really good with sugar and frosting. You can make cinnamon rolls, it's just, we're trying to make ravioli over here and cinnamon doesn't work out. Prag: Yeah, yeah, no, I one hundred percent agree with that. So yeah, these are all something that I suggest people to think before submitting their topics. But once it gets accepted, I think the best thing that you can do as a presenter is not to have a pre-written script. Mike: I would agree. Prag: And I have tried it multiple times and almost every single time I failed because if things are not going as per the plan, which 90 percent of the time it doesn't, then the moment you get into the panic mode, the script that you remember magically disappeared and you started blanking, you started blinking, you started filling with words that is, even though it's appropriate, but it doesn't match the exact tone that you're trying to say certain things. So what I started practicing for the last decade is, "Okay, I'm going to talk about the things that I do know and I'm not going to stick with a specific script." And if I'm speaking with my co-speaker and if my co-speaker took more time, then if I don't have a script for me, I could able to shorten the version of the content that I plan to deliver. So there are a lot of flexibility and lot of freedom that you get if you do not have a script that's pre-written and you want to stick with it, which is not easy for people who doesn't have English as their native language because I'm coming from that background. But once you started practicing by delivering presentation without scripts, it's easy, it's comfortable, and you won't go into a panic mode any time. Mike: I couldn't agree more. As somebody that presents a lot and helps prepare presenters, there's definitely a point in time that a script is necessary to help you kind of vet out what the talking points are, but you're not in a play, you're not in a musical, you're not in a blockbuster movie where you have to say it word for word. And the thing that I always remind presenters when they get up on stage is, people will remember how they feel when they saw your presentation. People will remember the passion and the information better if you just speak to, what is the point you're trying to make across. And a script is definitely a step in that, you need something to kind of get your framework about it, but I think too often people do get hung up. Even English speakers, where we're native language, they get hung up on, "I have to say these exact words." Prag: Exactly. Mike: And you don't, you have to convey the meaning. What is the point of this slide? The script got you there, but in your own words, what is that slide? And that's often when the presentations, I can always tell when a presenter goes what we call off script, and generally the first time they rehearse it and they're off script, they go long because the need to over explain, it's in the back of your head and you're like, there's this little person inside that's like, "You didn't say enough. You got to keep talking. Say more words. They don't understand." Prag: Exactly. Mike: And the irony is, it's actually fewer words, but with more intention, because if you choose your words carefully, then you can really convey that meaning. So yeah, I mean, boy, and I've seen, you can also tell as an audience member, when somebody is up there and they're going through the script in their head and they're looking up and then they forgot something and they don't know what to do, and that's where rehearsal comes in. Just rehearsing for that. I always tell people, "You should rehearse in front of your family, your friends, and periodically have them unplug the computer or let something go wrong." Because it's like why sports and athletic people practice all the time, because the more you go through the motion of doing it, the more natural it is when something comes up. I've walked up on stage and had microphones fail, I've had screens go blank, and there's a moment where you're like, "Oh, I've practiced this. I'm just going to keep with the talk. I'm going to let the AV people do their thing, and if it comes back, great. And if it doesn't, then I just realized nobody can see what I saw and I'm going to have to describe it in my head." But if you're on script, you're like, "I don't know what to do because the script doesn't say that." Prag: Yep, exactly. No, I one hundred percent agree with that point, right? It's the pattern, and I think I've been told once that you should also explain in a way a ten-year-old should able to understand, so that you kind of avoid all the complex words and terminologies, to even explain a complex concept, but in a simple way. Mike: Yep, I agree with that. Prag: Yeah. Mike: Interesting, so I'm kind of curious, this is sort of Salesforce related, sort of not. But what role did AI play in getting you presentation ready? Did you lean on it to help create some scripts for you? Did you lean on it to help create some visuals for you? Prag: Oh, a combination of both, being very honest. I did use AI to generate specific graphics. I used to have to go rely on a graphic designer to do some graphics that gets aligned with Salesforce color factor, which changes every Dreamforce. So until last year, I was relying on another human who could able to do the magic and then get it plugged into my presentation, but this time it wasn't required, actually. I...
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Why Agentforce Is a Game Changer for Small Business
11/13/2025
Why Agentforce Is a Game Changer for Small Business
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Daniel Peter, Chief Technology Officer at Petaluma Creamery. Join us as we chat about how he manages cheese wheels with custom objects and how Salesforce and AI can level the playing field for SMBs. You should for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Daniel Peter. Modernizing business processes at a historic creamery Daniel gave out some of the best swag at Dreamforce—free cheese samples. As a Salesforce MVP Hall of Fame member, he’s held a wide range of roles on the platform, but none have been quite as delicious as his current gig as the Chief Technology Officer at Petaluma Creamery. You could say he’s the big cheese for digital transformation. The creamery is a 115-year-old business capable of producing over 140,000 pounds of cheese per day. It’s an old-school business, and that means he inherited several old-school business processes. With so many manual processes, Daniel had to move fast and focus on the biggest wins first. Digital transformation priorities for SMBs So how did Daniel take his business processes from aged Gouda to fresh mozzarella? He started with the basics: getting the cheddar through the door. In other words, simplifying the ordering process. Like a lot of SMBs, the creamery’s system dated back to a time when you could just throw more people at a logistics problem. A sales or delivery person would talk through the order with the customer, fill out a paper form, and then do some unit conversions before they could enter the data into a database. It was time-intensive, labor-intensive, and introduced all kinds of opportunities for mistakes. Daniel quickly built an order system in Salesforce that saves time, does all of the conversions on the backend, and makes it easier for his users to find the product they’re looking for. The creamery is also able to track all sorts of data about the cheese-making process, like where ingredients come from and how they were stored, which is crucial for getting a certified-organic label. Why Agentforce levels the playing field for SMBs A common misconception is that AI tools are reserved for huge corporations with the technical resources to implement them. However, as Daniel explains, affordable tools like Agentforce actually level the playing field for SMBs. Looking forward, he’s aiming to implement several agents that will streamline the creamery’s business processes: An internal agent to take orders, so a delivery driver can talk to a customer and dictate the order over the phone. A customer service agent that can use the context of a customer’s order history to decide what remediation needs to be done and how to do it. A cheese expert agent, using the decades of unstructured data from the creamery’s cheese lab to answer questions like optimal storage temperature, or what type of rennet was used to make a particular product. If all of this sounds exciting to you, be sure to check in with Daniel at TDX to see what he’s built. And, you know, try some delicious dairy. Make sure to listen to the full episode for more from Daniel, and don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday. Podcast swag Learn more Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike: Hold onto your curds folks. Today's episode is un-brie-lievable. We're chatting with Daniel Peter, CTO at Petaluma Creamery, where they're proving that even in a world full of mozzarella sticks and spreadsheets, Salesforce can be the big cheese. Now today, Daniel's going to dish on how he's gone from QuickBooks and paper trails to a cheddar-rific automation and including some AI agents. So if you've ever wondered what it's like to manage wheels of cheese with custom objects, or if curd record type is a thing, then this is your jam. I mean, cheese, let's melt into it. Let's get Daniel on the podcast. So Daniel, welcome to the podcast. Daniel Peter: Hey, thanks for having me. Mike: I know it's been a while since we've had you on, it was Talking Community and Twitter back when it was called Twitter. Daniel Peter: Yeah, I did look up that podcast, it was 2017. Mike: Oh man, that was a thousand years ago. Daniel Peter: Yup. Mike: For those people that aren't familiar with who Daniel Peters is, can you give us a quick update and kind of let everyone know what you do and how you got started in the ecosystem? Daniel Peter: Yeah. I got started way back in 2009 as a developer, and I've done a lot of things. I've worked for Salesforce customers, ISV Partners, did a stint at Robots and Pencils where I ran a SI Salesforce practice, done a lot of consulting work on the development side for ISV, and actually even for Salesforce. But my most recent venture here, I'm back in the customer seat. So I'm the chief technology officer here at the Petaluma Creamery, and we're having a lot of fun relaunching this place on Salesforce. So that's what I'm up to now. And I'm also a Salesforce MVP Hall of Famer. Mike: Aha. There, snuck it in just by the way, buried the lead. Daniel Peter: Yeah, I got that in. Mike: I think we met when you were at the nonprofit. Daniel Peter: I don't remember which nonprofit that was. Mike: I thought it was the Pencils one anyway. Daniel Peter: Oh, Robots and Pencils, yeah. Mike: Yeah, Robots and Pencils. Sorry. I knew there was pencils and paper. Pens and papers and [inaudible 00:02:42]. Daniel Peter: Yeah. So Robots and Pencils is a Salesforce nonprofit partner, but only on the higher ed side, not on the NGO side. And I know that whole organization has changed with Education Cloud and all of that. So yeah, that threw me off for a second. But yeah, technically we were, yeah, we were a nonprofit partner on the education side. Mike: Okay. So I know my friends are always like, every time I see customers, I'm like, oh yeah, I think that's a Salesforce customer. So now you work at a creamery, and I ran into you at Dreamforce. You were handing out cheese, which as a Midwesterner, that's exactly how you get straight to my heart is like you either hand somebody from the Midwest, a piece of meat or a piece of cheese. Daniel Peter: Yeah, I think I'm the only one with cheese swag [inaudible 00:03:35]. Mike: Yeah, I think you are. Tell me a little bit about what being the CTO at a creamery is like, and what are some of the challenges? I mean, what do you manage the curds in Salesforce? What do you do? Is there a curd record type? Daniel Peter: You know what there basically is, I mean, it sounds funny, but all that stuff is really important to track for all these different compliance reasons. If you want to be organic certified, you have to show the milk coming in, that batch that you made out of it, butter, cheese, yogurt. You have to show the ingredients that went in. And all of that really, I was at Canandy and we built a manufacturing ERP for Del Monte, and so I knew Salesforce was up to the task of tracing all the ingredients and manufacturing of food. So yeah, we do store all of that in Salesforce. Mike: So how were they doing it before you started? Daniel Peter: It was pretty fragmented. The main system we had for our kind of the closest thing to ERP was QuickBooks Desktop. And they used QuickBooks Desktop for 20 years, and it was the big manufacturing edition. He actually was doing a lot of business here. There was years when he did close to 50 million a year and all that ran through QuickBooks, and it did have some inventory capabilities, but it's pretty terrible to use. And then there was just a lot of paper-based, like the order forms were on paper. They would take inventory on paper and then put it into an Excel spreadsheet. Mike: Did you have to do your compliance stuff on paper too? Daniel Peter: Yeah, there's rooms here full of paper files. I mean, so it's kind of an old school industry, and I think a lot of the people in it, they know cows, they know how to make cheese, but technology isn't something that comes naturally to them. They're much more comfortable writing things on paper. Mike: Well, even the technology of cheese has changed too. I mean, I know where I live in Iowa, we have a creamery that's about 20 miles south of us, and it's run by Amish, and that's always a big trip because you got to head down there to get some Amish cheese and bread. Oh, the bread is amazing. Let me know when you work for a bakery, by the way. But the technology of cheese, because they have the open windows, that's changed. But ironically, I think sometimes the technology that manages the processes, or in your case maybe just the data, just gets left to pencil and paper because it's what we know. Daniel Peter: Yeah. And an interesting story here is that the pencil and paper at one point was an economical way to do things. I mean, that actually created a lot of jobs for people here. This creamery has been here for over 115 years, and back then you would just throw more people at the problem. But that's kind of the changing paradigm that we're in is the city of Petaluma has grown up around this creamery. This is a Bay Area kind of city, and property prices are through the roof, labor costs are through the roof, utilities are through the roof. You can't really exist anymore in a world where you're just throwing people at the problem. It's way too expensive and your margins will disappear quickly. Mike: Well, I mean there's really, to be realistic, there's only so much you could sell that block of cheese for. And you can't pay 15 people to live in a high dense area with all of that cost just to move paper around. If a one pound block of cheese is going to end up costing $400 just to make everybody's living wage, right? Daniel Peter: Exactly. And that's why most of the creameries have moved out of California, out of state into the lower cost of living. Yeah, that block of cheese is for commodity cheese it's kind of a race to the bottom who can make it for the lowest cost. But we're actually a little bit more of a differentiated product. So our cheese isn't competing for lowest price. We're actually competing more on quality and kind of a best cost. It's a pretty good price, but also really good quality. Mike: Yeah. So what was some of the first things you tackled to move off of pen and paper and give a little more structured process around what you're doing and integrate Salesforce? Daniel Peter: Yeah. Well, the very first thing was to stabilize just the IT here, which was get off of T-One lines if anyone knows what those are and get on fiber optic, get rid of on-premise servers. There was an exchange server, an Outlook server, a QuickBooks server. Somebody could walk by and accidentally turn it off or it might just die, and then all your systems are down. So getting good internet and getting on the cloud, that was the very first thing. But the first interesting thing we did in Salesforce was actually I wanted to make it, we need to stay alive here. We need to make money. So I wanted to make it super easy to take orders, get the cash in the door, the order to cash process. Mike: Sure. Daniel Peter: So QuickBooks was so painful. To put an order in QuickBooks, you had to actually do math either in your head or on a calculator. You had to convert, like if somebody ordered a case of cheese, you had to know, oh, those are eight ounce pieces and there's 14 in a case, so that's seven pounds. Okay, so they say one case. So we have to convert that to seven pounds in your head to put it into QuickBooks. And then you also had to do things like memorize the whole cheese hierarchy. So like C:J for Jack, M for Monterey, 8 for eight ounce. That's how you punch it into QuickBooks. And yeah, you basically had to have a computer in your head just to enter an order into the computer, and it was super painful. So we couldn't get orders into the system quickly, and we can't just... We'd have to highly train people and it's highly error-prone to put orders in and people would call on the phone or you'd get a written order, and then you'd have to convert that in QuickBooks. So I said, what we need to do is just bury QuickBooks on the backend. Let's build a really nice, basically an order entry screen in Salesforce. So we built it exactly like we want it for our business in Salesforce. So if customers want to order by the pound, by the piece, by the case, Salesforce does all the conversions, ultimately converts it back into pounds in QuickBooks, what's integrated with QuickBooks. But it lets you enter it in a very human friendly way, very nice auto complete. I mean, you can basically just start to type one letter of Y for yellow cheddar, and yellow cheddar just pops up. The orders almost right themselves now, and it's very easy to train new people how to put orders in the system. So that was a huge- Mike: Oh, that's good. Daniel Peter: Yeah. That was a huge win. Mike: Did you also stand up an external facing way to take orders too, to speed that up, or is that on the roadmap? Daniel Peter: That's still on the roadmap. We do have, so 99% of our business comes from wholesale to stores. Mike: Oh, okay. Daniel Peter: We do have a small segment of direct-to-consumer, so you can go to springhillcheese.com and order online. Right now that's just a Squarespace e-commerce website, and that works well, but we want to do some fancier things. So we might look into some Salesforce offerings. There's obviously things like Commerce Cloud, but there's also some ISVs have built some apps on Salesforce to sell. So we'll look into some of those. Right now during this relaunch and focusing on staying alive here in the short term, really wholesale is what we're focusing on. But there's a big opportunity in direct-to-consumer. We ship cheese in a kind of an insulated cooler. Believe it or not, it actually ships really well throughout the US, and a lot of people do order. That's on the roadmap, actually. But the tricky thing is the stores might not necessarily... The stores, a lot of them are still old school and the buyers still kind of want to call you. So even if we did give them a way to enter their own orders, not everybody would adopt it. Mike: Yeah, they'd still call you. Daniel Peter: Yeah, there's still a human element there that we need to preserve. But obviously you can start to dream about how AI can listen in on your conversation and create the order for you as you're talking, things like that. Mike: Quiet, AI is listening right now, Daniel, it's taking my cheese order. And I mean, that completely makes sense. You want, for a business, you want to send truckloads of cheese, not shoe boxes of cheese. Because even a consumer, somebody like me thinks they're ordering a lot of cheese. Well, compared to a grocery store or a supermarket chain that's ordering for five stores to stock 10 coolers, focusing on wholesale totally makes sense. So keeping that human element there, you can always go to the consumer, but then you're shipping probably smaller chunks of items. So you really need the volume first. Daniel Peter: Yeah. If people want to order just like a piece of cheese, they end up paying more for the shipping than the cheese costs. But we do free shipping over $100. That seems to be a good sweet spot. If people want to order, then it's like say it costs $100 worth of cheese and we pay the $30 shipping, that kind of thing. So there is a market for the direct-to-consumer when you want to purchase a little bit bigger order, it kind of makes more sense. But yeah, this place can make 140,000 pounds of cheese a day, and that's one of its- Mike: Wow. Daniel Peter: ... images we need to leverage. So yeah, definitely moving by the palette or by the semi-truck load is how we can make money here. Mike: Okay. So you said something, and we talked at Dreamforce that I think a lot of small or medium-sized businesses are faced with, which is they all, "I'm too small for AI." Like AI is really for the big players like the Fortune 500 or the Fortune 100 companies need AI. But you're just a creamery, not just, I mean, you're a small creamery out in California, and before I pressed record, I mean you were at Dreamforce, you saw all the Agentforce stuff, you saw where AI is going. What are your plans for AI? Daniel Peter: Yeah, I think the story we hear a lot is about AI replacing jobs. There's a lot of fear I guess, in the job market, both on the developer side, admin, but also basically any kind of a white collar worker that might be doing any type of work is my job going to be replaced by AI? But I think there's all these small businesses that really have a chance to have a renaissance because of AI. So instead of losing jobs, it's more like AI can enable them to save themselves, to save an industry or to save a small-medium business. We've seen, unfortunately, a lot of... Fortunately, or unfortunately, I guess there's been a lot of disruption over decades. A lot of mom and pop stores can't afford to be around because of places like Amazon. It's kind of changed the world, but Amazon's a great service too. I mean, you can get anything you want in a couple of days, so you could say it's fortunate or unfortunate. But I think people like to have some of these old school industries around. It kind of makes life more interesting to be able to go visit a historic place instead of everything just coming from a centralized factory. Yeah, I think the story for these smaller industries is, hey, you can actually compete. AI levels the playing field a bit now. You can actually afford AI, and it's pretty easy to use with tools like Salesforce. So you can actually make your business reinvent your business model, to be efficient enough to be profitable, this new paradigm. So that's the story we have here, and that's why it's exciting to me here. And so I think, yeah, small business, you need a little bit of tech talent. You might have to find, like my cousin that owns this creamery came and found me to help them out with that. You might have to find somebody to help you, but it's really easier now than it's ever been. And I think people are pretty comfortable now doing things like writing customer service emails with ChatGPT that we've achieved a certain threshold where the fear is kind of going away and the trust is starting to come into play. And so it's just a matter of, okay, well, how can I implement this now at scale for my business, to where I'm focusing on the things I'm really good at? Like my vision for the business and interacting with the customers that come in the door while AI is doing all the grunt work in the background for you, and at a pretty low cost. Mike: So you envision at your creamery using AI as kind of a scalable factor? Like you can scale one person, as opposed to how our conversation began, which is you would just throw people at it. AI kind of gives you that ability to throw people at it, except you're just throwing an agent at it, right? Daniel Peter: Yeah. It's sort of what the cloud did for computing when we needed elasticity. When you got a Black Friday and you got a million requests all at once and your server went down, and the cloud, kind of solve that. I think AI solves the people elasticity problem. Certain times you have a lot of orders coming in, and do you really want to have 10 people on staff all the time when they're mostly sitting around? But then once in a while, all 10 phones are ringing. AI can solve that pretty easily. Mike: So you saw a lot at Dreamforce. I mean, we've rolled out so many things, it's hard to remember everything, but I mean, even my team is sitting back trying to build examples for agents and prompting. As a small business. And I think it's fair to say that where are you looking at deploying, or hey, this could be a good use case for Agentforce, or really thinking about how we can scale there. Daniel Peter: Yeah, we've got a few...
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Salesforce Security Made Simple with Invisibles, Configurables, Enhanceables
11/06/2025
Salesforce Security Made Simple with Invisibles, Configurables, Enhanceables
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 a simple framework for thinking about security in Salesforce and what you can do to protect your org. You should for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Laura Pelkey and Kylie McKlveen. The evolving security landscape in the age of AI With Agentforce and the rise of AI, protecting your data is more important than ever before. Remember, the bad guys have access to these tools too, and that means phishing and deep fake attacks are becoming more sophisticated by the day. That’s why I wanted to bring Laura and Kylie on the pod to talk about security. They’re here to help explain how Salesforce is already hard at work to help you protect your data, and what simple steps you can take to beef up security for your org. A simple Salesforce security framework Laura and Kylie have a simple framework for the security available to you on Salesforce. There are three layers to think about: Invisibles: The things that Salesforce already does to watch your back. This includes a global, 24/7 threat hunting team that is constantly scanning the network for anomalous events. Configurables: These are actions you as a Salesforce Admin can take to make your org more secure. Taking the time to configure your security settings and think through your permission sets can go a long way towards protecting your org. Enhanceables: If you work in a heavily regulated industry or have sensitive data, you may need to take extra steps to enhance your security. Tools like Salesforce Shield and Security Center can give you an extra layer of protection. Most admins will want to focus on the configurables, and the security team has put together a handy video series to walk you through your next steps. The importance of data continuity One important piece of the security puzzle is continuity. Protecting against attacks is important, but you also need to account for human error—sometimes users make mistakes. If someone’s delete key gets stuck, tools like Backup & Restore and Field Audit Trail can help you save the day. If you want to learn more, be sure to check out the Dreamforce Security Keynote on Salesforce+. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode. Podcast swag Learn more Security Keynote: The 360 Blog: YouTube series: Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike: 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 McKlveen. 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: I mean, we don't mess around. Lynn 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: Yeah, just I would love to learn more about what we consider...
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Building Salesforce Projects to Land Your Next Role
10/30/2025
Building Salesforce Projects to Land Your Next Role
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Bradley Condon, Technology and Systems Specialist at Waste Solution Services. Join us as we chat about his Dreamforce presentation and the custom apps Bradley built to help him land his next role. You should for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Bradley Condon. From customer service rep to the Dreamforce stage This year was the first Dreamforce Bradley was able to attend, and also his first time giving a presentation—I’d say he’s off to a great start. Bradley started his career as a Service Cloud user who got curious about the platform. He clicked on the Help Section, ended up on Trailhead, “and by the end of the day, I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life,” he says. However, when he started looking for jobs, he ran into a common problem. How can you show that you have hands-on experience without landing that crucial first Salesforce role? Using personal projects to stand out Bradley decided that the best approach was to build custom apps in Salesforce and reference them on his resume. But what to build? As he explains, “I realized that in order for me to make time for it, I needed to build something I was passionate about that I wanted to use.” One thing he was definitely focused on was passing his Admin Certification exam. So he made an app to help him study by texting him a practice question every day. He also wanted to attend more Salesforce events, which led to another app that helped match Trailblazers with each other to save on accommodations. Bradley listed all of his personal projects on his resume and also shared them on Experience Cloud so interviewers could see his solutions in action. How to pick a side project In the course of building (and debugging) these projects, Bradley was able to learn by experience. By the time he was finished, he was able to sit for the Platform App Builder Certification without needing to study and pass it with flying colors. As for what to work on, Bradley encourages you to work with what you know. Can you think of an app that would help you in your day-to-day? Or, if you’re interviewing in a specific industry, something that would solve a common problem they might face? We want to hear about your side projects, so tell us about them on our socials. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us in your feed every Thursday. Podcast swag Learn more Automate This!: Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike: Welcome to Salesforce Admins Podcast. This week I'm chatting with Bradley Condon, a first-time Dreamforce presenter who has a powerful story about self-starting service cloud and personal projects that pack a punch. Now, Bradley shared this at Dreamforce about how building custom apps on the side helped him land a role and prep for certifications, and it was even something really cool he could do for a friend in a tough time. Now, Bradley's journey starts from a call center agent, all the way to creating experience cloud solutions that he could share with future employers when he was interviewing. So if you're curious about why you should do Salesforce projects on the side and do personal projects, Bradley's story is for you. So let's get Bradley on the podcast. So Bradley, welcome to the podcast. Bradley Condon: Hi. Thank you so much for having me. Mike: Yeah, well, it's exciting, you are a first-time presenter, as I learned before we pressed record, at Dreamforce, and you're going to talk about building personal projects, which I've done quite a few on the side, and I think that's really cool. I can't wait to see your presentation, but let's learn a little bit about you. Tell me how you got started in the Salesforce ecosystem and what you do. Bradley Condon: Yeah, of course. So I got started in the ecosystem as actually a call center agent using Service Cloud, working for a furniture company, just handling warranty issues and whatnot. And I got really interested in it and wanted to learn more about it, so I clicked on the Help section and ended up on Trailhead, and by the end of the day I was like, "You know what? I know what I want to do with the rest of my life," and started to make the transition to learn all I could about Salesforce and eventually, got my certification, landed a role, and then after that role, I had some time in between that I was trying to find the next one, and that's when I started building personal projects to really fill in that gap that I had to get my next role. Mike: Wow, okay. I think you might be the first person that started off in Service Cloud. Bradley Condon: Yeah, really? Mike: Yeah. A lot of admins I know, I'm not saying nobody, but admins I know always start off in sales, and you were in Service Cloud, so that was really cool. You had to have been just a dream. I'm just sitting here back thinking of what that admin must've been like when you were like, "Hey, I clicked on Help and I'm starting to do some Trailhead modules." I would've looked over and been like, "Bradley, I'm going to buy you lunch right now," because- Bradley Condon: Yeah, we didn't have an admin. Mike: Oh, okay. Oh, you just burst my bubble. That's all right. Well, you probably became the admin then, defunct. I started off doing because when you get excited with Salesforce stuff, you're probably like me, and I was doing a whole bunch of things. I was like, "Oh, I could probably track that in Salesforce. Oh, I could probably track that in Salesforce." I think I had three or four dev orgs that all had different things in it. Personal projects, you know you're doing Trailhead stuff, you're working. First of all, how did you just find time to do extra projects on the side? Bradley Condon: Well, so it all started when I was looking for another role and I was having trouble really getting my foot in the door for interviews, and I think it's because I was just looking like everyone else on paper. And I thought, "Okay, I need a different strategy. I need to do something that's going to help me standout." And that's when I decided, "You know what? I'm going to just start building, and that way, I have something to showcase during your interviews." Mike: I like that. Did, as you were interviewing, change and modify the org? I'm assuming you shared credentials with your Mike. Bradley Condon: Well, so I actually would make it so that it was available on Experience Cloud- Mike: Ooh. Bradley Condon: So that way, it also showed experience in cloud skills and made it available for them to use and made the flows available. So not only could they just see what I worked on, but they could actually play with it themselves. Mike: Wow, okay. That's next level. I like that. How did you decide what to build? Bradley Condon: So the first thing that I built was, I was studying for Salesforce certification and I needed to figure out a way to be more consistent with my study schedule. So I started to build an app that would send me a text message every day with a practice question to help study. Mike: Wow, okay. That's a really cool, that's a neat idea. I'm over here thinking, how am I tracking, I was into binge-watching shows. You're sending yourself text messages, we're totally on different planets right now. That's awesome. So as you were sitting, as you were working through different Trailhead modules, also try to build other stuff in some of that project org as you'd go through different Trailhead modules? Bradley Condon: Oh yeah, there was plenty of times where I'd be in a Trailhead module and I'm thinking, "Well, why don't they add this feature that we learned in this other module?" Well, obviously because you're not always going to be doing them in a certain order, and that's the one thing with Trailhead is there's so much to learn, you just kind of hop around and go with your interest. Mike: Yeah. Bradley Condon: But I've definitely seen times where I was like, "Okay, I've had to have this here," like this would be so perfect. Mike: Now I can only imagine going from being an end user in Service Cloud to building something, had to feel very different. What was some of the ways that you promoted yourself when you were interviewing to show people, "Hey, I also have this org that you can try out." You have to get past that initial screening process. Bradley Condon: Yeah, so the thing that I would also do is I would make sure that I included my portfolio site on my resume and also in the experience section, I would include those personal projects as part of my experience because that's something that I was working on almost full time for a while, that I just really dedicated myself to creating that project. Mike: Yeah, wow. I know when I first took the admin certification 18 years ago or 17, something like that, it was a long time ago, I had had a lot of hands-on building things in an org, trying stuff out before I actually took the certification. How did working in your developer environment or just building out sample apps give you that confidence for trying your certification? Bradley Condon: Yeah, that's a great question because most recent certification I took was the platform app builder certification, and I sat for that exam without studying at all. It all just had to do with what I learned doing on projects. So the one I've been working on recently is I'm building an app to match trailblazers who want to attend Salesforce events with one another to cut the cost of accommodations down. And so while I was building that, I learned a lot of concepts that were tested, so that really helped, especially with data modeling and stuff like that. Mike: Yeah, wow. I've seen quite a few of those. I think that's really cool. Let's talk about, so one of the things that I like about Trailhead is you're in, you've got the module, you have an org to try and build something out, and basically as long as you copy-and-paste everything, it should work, right? There's a few times you have to think through things, but when you're actually in a developer environment and you're building something that's your own idea, there's been multiple times that I've had flows not work or something just didn't fire off like I thought it would, how did that, kind of having your own space to try something out and fail help you understand more? Bradley Condon: Oh yeah, definitely 'cause that's the thing when you fail and you have that error message that you're trying to figure out what it is, that's probably when most of the learning happens, is when you don't do it correctly the first time and you really have to research and get down to the nitty-gritty and act like a detective pretty much. Mike: Yeah. There's multiple times when you sit there and you hit that error message and you're like, "Ah, I just need, please just work this time," and you're five times into it and it's like midnight and you're like, "I'm going to get this flow to work before I go to bed," the number of times I've said that. When you were working through, how did you think of stuff that you wanted to build? I think it's pretty easy to sit down and be like, "Oh, I'm going to create a custom object in these five fields," but it's another thing to think of, "I'm going to create this big app that's maybe going to take me a week or two weeks to build." How did you work that out and plan that time in your head? Bradley Condon: Yeah, so pretty much in order for me to make time for it and to really put the effort in and not to just stop building it was that I wanted to build something that I was passionate about and that I myself would use because that's going to show in the final product. If you're passionate about it, it'll show. It'll show in the user experience. It'll show in how you thought about it to be scalable 'cause you're going to want to continue to use it. So that's definitely how I did it. Mike: So this makes a kind of meta question. Did you build an app to manage your orgs or your apps that you were building and your interviews when you were doing this? Bradley Condon: No, I did not because I've seen so many of those and to me, that's not something I would use personally. Mike: Okay. Okay. Can I needle you on what was something you built that you did use, besides the text message thing? Bradley Condon: It was mainly the text message thing, but I also used it just to, so I had someone who had their mother pass away and they were really close to the mother and so as a gift for them, what I did is I had it so that it would send them different memories that they had with their mom every week, and then they could add little things about thinking-of-you messages to her. So that's something that I created that they used. Mike: Wow. I never would've thought enterprise software to be used as that way. That's kind of interesting. What gave you that idea? Bradley Condon: They were just going through a tough time, so I really wanted to do something that at the time, I didn't have that much money. So I had to do something that I could kind of make, and I'm like, you know what, I'm great at making apps. Mike: Right. Yeah, no, I mean that's super creative, that's super creative. I love that. As somebody that's gone through, built a lot of things, did you often have an idea to build something and then go and use Trailhead to learn the skill or did you try to do it in parallel or did you try to build it first and then go back to Trailhead? What was your thought process there? Bradley Condon: Yeah. So it would usually come up that I'd want to add a feature, like if I wanted to do something where I wanted to add commerce and I wanted to figure out, "Okay, well, how would I take payments if I did actually take payments?" And I had never done anything like that in my other position, so I had to go to Trailhead in order to find out how to do that. But there's also been times where I've been in Trailhead of thinking, "Oh, well, now I kind of want to add this to my app. I hadn't thought about this before." Mike: Yeah. Yep, absolutely. Take payments, I never would've thought of that. So as somebody that, I mean obviously people are going to listen to this and think, "Wow, I want to do the same." If people are looking for ideas to get started on, "I want to build out an org, maybe I'm going to look for another job, maybe I'm not, but I kind of want to test my skill," what is an idea or something they should think about in terms of building their first project? Bradley Condon: So I think a good thing to do is look at the roles you're trying to apply for and if there's a specific industry, create a project that's specific to the industry. If you're into the hospitality industry, maybe you create an app that helps with hotel room bookings, or if say maybe you find out there's a job you're applying for and they have room service, but they don't have a way to order it online, create an experience cloud site that allows people to start ordering their room service online. So you can present that in the interview. It's something that they're missing and something you could deliver. Mike: Yeah. And I've heard that in previous podcasts too, definitely start in the industry that you're in. Tell me about how the Trailblazer community helped you in building different projects or different ideas that you had. Bradley Condon: Oh, yeah. So I'm part of the Serviceblazer community, and that group has been so helpful to me. Obviously coming from Service Cloud, I gravitated to that community, but they've been really helpful. Anytime that you post anything on there, like Ask a Serviceblazer, you'll get a response usually within the next 10, 15 minutes, and everyone there is extremely knowledgeable. The amount of knowledge that comes through that channel is crazy. Mike: Yeah. Do you find, because you were in the service industry, that a lot of your apps start in Service Cloud? Bradley Condon: Yeah. And even if they don't start in Service Cloud, somehow I'll manage a way to add it into it. Mike: Yeah, I can see that. Bradley Condon: For the text message service, I used Email-to-Case to send text messages, I'd used e-mail-to-text gateways so that you send an e-mail to, e-mail that's dedicated to your phone number to get the text message to them. So even though it was not using the texting service, I used the Email-to-Case to make it [inaudible 00:15:14]. Mike: In some aspects, the limitations on those orgs actually force you to be more creative. Bradley Condon: Exactly. Mike: I didn't even think about that. It's always easy, like, "Oh, please turn this on." That's what we have at Salesforce. Just go to another PM, turn this on for me really quick and you don't think of if you actually had those limitations in place, how would you get more creative. I'm curious, so as you've done this and done different projects, have you helped anybody build projects or ideas that they've had of their own? Bradley Condon: I haven't really helped anyone build their own personal project. On the Serviceblazer community, I answer a lot of questions when it comes to people that are facing problems they're coming up with in their company that they need help with. But the funny thing is I usually end up going to a developer org and making sure that I try it out myself before I give them the answer. So I always make sure that I'm trying it and make sure that it's going to be accurate information I'm giving them. Mike: Yeah. Nope, I'm the same way. You cannot, in theory this should work, but let me log in and double-check that something hasn't changed or something is different. Is this your first Dreamforce? Bradley Condon: It is my first Dreamforce and it's also my first Salesforce event ever. I've never been to a community conference and never been to a Salesforce event, so I'm really excited. Mike: Wow. So you're just jumping in the deep end right away? Holy cow. Bradley Condon: Pretty much, yeah, pretty much. I'm a little nervous, but we'll see. Mike: It'll be fine. By the time you listen to this podcast, you'll be like, "Phew, what was I nervous for? I was awesome up there on stage. They loved me." So off the cuff question, when you present at Dreamforce, people always have questions. What's the one question you're afraid somebody's going to ask you? Bradley Condon: Oh, wow. Can you make it an agent? Mike: Well, by the end of Dreamforce, you'll know how to build plenty of agents. Bradley Condon: Yes. I'm really excited for that. My company wants to do a lot of stuff with Agentforce, so I'm really looking forward to that aspect. Mike: Yeah, and then you'll be able to come back and be like, "Well, here, let me just have you log into this," and you can build a Bradley agent of your own. Bradley Condon: Exactly. Mike: That's the plan. Thanks for coming on the podcast and telling us about this. I think it's a really cool idea. I hope people do it on their own. I know it feels like you're pressed for time. And when I was a Salesforce administrator, weekends and nights were the time that I would build stuff. I didn't have Trailhead. Back in my day, it was just the little Help box. But I think getting out of just that business world of accounts and contacts and contracts and building something fun, I remember going to user groups and having friends tell me about diaper changing apps, and I think one person talked about how they managed their wedding in Salesforce. That to me is just like, it gets you in and it gets you doing things that make you feel super empowered. So I think everybody should build on their own free time. Bradley Condon: Yes, it's a great skillset to have. Mike: Well, I look forward to seeing your presentation at Dreamforce, and I appreciate you coming on the podcast, Bradley. Bradley Condon: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. Mike: Big thanks to Bradley for joining us and sharing such...
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How Do I Transition Into a Salesforce Admin Career?
10/23/2025
How Do I Transition Into a Salesforce Admin Career?
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to David Simpson, Salesforce Administrator at the 1916 Company. Join us as we chat about how he landed his first Salesforce Admin role and what advice he has for folks who are new to the ecosystem. You should for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with David Simpson. A career pivot from finance to Salesforce If you didn’t catch David’s presentation about resolving Flow errors at Dreamforce, be sure to check out our earlier episode with him. Another thing that came up was his career pivot, and it was so interesting that I had to bring him back to talk about it. David started out as an accountant before eventually becoming a financial systems analyst. He had to run a lot of reports and quickly discovered that the thing he was actually interested in was the Salesforce platform. Soon enough, David became the part-time admin for his organization, but he quickly realized that if he wanted to just focus on Salesforce, he would need to find a new job. What to look for in a job description While David bulked up his credentials, he started looking for full-time Salesforce Admin roles to apply to. One piece of advice he has is to take a closer look at the job description and be clear about what you want. “It's not uncommon now for admins to have developer skills or maybe dip their toe into the architect side of things,” he says, “but I focused mainly on positions that were only looking for admin-related work.” David also was really specific about finding an organization that was already committed to Salesforce. He looked for green flags like job postings with specifics on certifications or Superbadges. Finally, it was important to him to join a Salesforce team as opposed to try to cut his teeth as a solo admin. Find opportunities to grow as an admin David’s advice for people new to the ecosystem is to get curious. Back when he was a part-time admin, he was laser-focused on opportunities because that was what his organization was asking him to do. “I should have given myself the benefit of the doubt,” he says, “and taken a little bit more risk in learning new things.” Reflecting now, he sees where he could have taken the initiative to try automations or enhance integrations and become a better admin in the process. There are a lot more great tips from David about his pivot into a Salesforce Admin career, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday. Podcast swag Learn more Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike: Welcome to Salesforce Admins podcast. This week I'm joined by David Simpson, who you might remember from our pre-Dreamforce chat not that long ago. It was a little over a month ago, but this time we're diving into something that really hits close to home for a lot of Salesforce admins, and that is career change. The number one question I get in my inbox is how do I find a different career? What does it look like to interview as a first time Salesforce admin and questions like that? I'm telling you, we're going to dive into all of that with David because he's going to share how he went from spreadsheets as a staff accountant to automations as a Salesforce admin and what his transition looked like. We get into certifications. We talk about job hunting. We talk about imposter syndrome, and I dig into what it looked like to be a brand new Salesforce admin on his first day at a new job. I think this might be the most comprehensive podcast interview about what it looks like to change careers that I've done since I've launched this show. If you're curious about how David did it, this is the episode for you. Give it a listen and let's get David on the podcast. So, David, welcome back to the podcast. David Simpson: Thank you for having me back. Mike: It wasn't that long ago that we were talking, it was pre-Dreamforce about 45 days ago or so. I had you on the podcast to talk about the presentation you're giving at Dreamforce, and we've since wrapped up Dreamforce now and people are at home. Well, some people. I think some people stayed and probably went to Napa Valley and did wine tastings, which I wouldn't blame you. There's a lot of great vineyards and stuff out there. But one thing you brought up that I wanted to follow up on was your career trajectory, and we haven't talked about careers a whole lot, but let's just rewind a little bit and give one of those the last time on the Salesforce Admin podcast, because I've watched a lot of streaming things. Let's fill people in on what you do and where your career started and how you became a Salesforce admin. David Simpson: Sure. Previously on Salesforce Admins. Mike: Exactly. David Simpson: So, many years ago, I went to college for accounting, and my first job out of college was a staff accountant at a software company. After a few years of working in spreadsheets and doing the monotonous day-to-day that comes with being a staff accountant, I made a pivot to be a financial analyst, more specifically a financial systems analyst, and after I made that pivot, my supervisor at the time, he informed me that he was the administrator for our company's Salesforce instance, and that a lot of the work that I was doing, which was doing financial analytics for our professional service team, a lot of that data came out of Salesforce. Our professional service team would put opportunities into Salesforce, and we needed to make sure that those financials were clean. So, he suggested that I become another admin with the company, and that I would learn about the general inner workings of Salesforce and be a point of contact for cleaning up that data, for troubleshooting issues and just all the things that come with being a junior level admin. So, he gave me a system administrator license. He recommended that I go into Trailhead to just learn the basics of being a Salesforce admin, the Salesforce ecosystem, custom objects. All those general items that you learn as an admin, and then I just kind of fell in love with it. It was such an interesting pivot from doing spreadsheets and reconciliations. I was able to kind of do problem solving and be an environment that I wasn't too familiar in, but I was also able to see how Salesforce works and how we can get this data to be reportable data. So, the automation behind it or validation rules, just even something simple like setting up a page layout. It was all very interesting and new to me, so I just latched onto it a hundred percent, and then I further got sold on the whole experience after about a year or so, being a Salesforce admin, I went to my first Dreamforce in 2018 and I got my Salesforce administrator certification, and at that point, that kind of signaled to me that this is what I want to do full time. So, from that point on, it's all history. I went and unfortunately, the company I was with didn't have the resources for a full-time admin, so I did go to another company, but since then I have been an awesome admin just doing it every day. Custom objects, flows, you name it, admin work-wise, I do it. Mike: And I think career changes are hard. I went from sales to becoming an admin as well, and I think everybody kind of looks at like, well, what do I have to do? Or where do I have to go? Or what skills are required? And I think you, like me, kind of got fortunate you were with a company that was like, "Hey, we need these skills." And I'm assuming you probably did both jobs for a while, right? David Simpson: Yes. I was doing both jobs up until I left the company. It was essentially 50/50 financial systems analysis and then admin work. Mike: So, it's not like you just all of a sudden jumped in the pilot seat and took over the plane and away you go. David Simpson: Thankfully, that wasn't the case for me. I was able to kind ease myself into the admin role because I still had work to do on the financial side. Mike: Yeah. And I think that that works out as an incredibly lucky path. David Simpson: Yeah, definitely. Mike: One thing, so you mentioned they didn't have the budget for a full-time admin, which is the role you wanted to pursue. Did you consider just staying at that current position and kind of dividing your time, or was this something where you were like, "No, I really, this is, I'm going to commit?" David Simpson: It was something that I really wanted to commit on. In the beginning when I had first gotten a system administrator license and started doing basic admin work, I was completely on board with splitting my time between the two. I wasn't super confident in what I was doing as a Salesforce admin. I was still learning the ropes, but after I had gotten my first certification, that kind of sold it to me and locked in that this is what I want to do as a career. So, at that point, I did bring up my interest in being a full-time admin to the company, and they said, "Unfortunately, we just don't have the bandwidth to have a full-time admin whose only job is to be a Salesforce administrator." So, unfortunately, I did have to switch companies to go and find that. Mike: Okay, so let's pause there because that is the point that I think everybody has questions about, which is, so what did interviewing look like? What kind of prep did you do? You're going from career A to career B, and you kind of have some experience. I mean, what was that like? Because I'm assuming you sat in interviews for jobs you didn't get. David Simpson: Yeah, I won't sugarcoat it. It was a little tough. You're going into a new job where, yes, you do have experience, but you don't have a ton of experience. So, what I focused on was first the credential side of things. By the time I decided to make the jump to be a full-time Salesforce administrator, I did have, I believe, three certifications under my belt. I had the Salesforce administrator certification, the platform app builder, and then the CPQ specialist. So, I- Mike: Ooh, CPQ specialist. Wow. David Simpson: Yeah. Yep. I haven't used it in a while, but it was a very challenging and interesting certification to take. I actually took the Salesforce-provided trainings for it, and it was a wealth of knowledge, but so I had these three certifications. I did lean a little bit heavier on that to say, listen, I may not have years of experience, but you can see here that I'm able to answer the tough questions. Additionally, I did focus on what projects and initiatives I was able to complete at my job while I was part-time being a Salesforce admin. So, I had done some work building a custom object for, funnily enough, our accounting team to log their calls to people for collecting payment. So, I made a point to mention that in my interviews. So, I used the certifications. I used actual project and real-world experience, but something else that was a little kind of ace up the sleeve for my interview process was that I did have finance and accounting background. The job that ultimately hired me, while I did not do finance and accounting work for them, I was able to be a point of contact to help bridge the gap between the finance team and the Salesforce team. If they needed to pull financial data from Salesforce, I would be a person that they could go to, and I could confidently answer that because of my background. So, when it comes to jumping from one career to a Salesforce career, I definitely recommend that people do lean into what they've done in the past and show how they can enhance a new job's day-to-day by focusing on those areas of expertise, but just in a Salesforce context. That's what really helped me because yes, I did unfortunately have a handful of interviews where I didn't get the job, and I think that ultimately came down to just pure raw Salesforce experience. But the job that did hire me, it was because I had a great rapport with their CFO, and I was able to talk the talk with finance as well as bridge that gap to the Salesforce side of things. Mike: Yeah, I mean, you stayed in finance. It's not like you went over to a fish distribution warehouse or something. David Simpson: Yes, exactly. [inaudible 00:10:41]- Mike: I tried to pick something that was the opposite of finance, and my brain went blank for a second, and I was like, "Oh, I just watched a show on cooking last night." David Simpson: I mean, those are pretty different. I can't think of a much more different thing, but yeah, I mean because the Salesforce department at that new job also heavily interacted with the finance department, that was a big benefit to me. Mike: I can feel people listening to this podcast right now, and they're like, ask this question, ask this question, ask this question. I got like a million. What were in ... Because we're going to get to your job, I promise you, but we're going to just stay in this middle ground here for a second. In some of the job search that you were looking for in some of the, I don't know even, it sounds so old of me to call it classified ads. I'm sure it was like LinkedIn listings or Indeed job boards or something. What were some of the things that you looked for in terms of the description that you either filtered in or filtered out in terms applying for? David Simpson: Yeah, so some of the things that I looked for in my job search was making sure that the job posting focused purely on admin work. I think nowadays we focus so much on being specialized in a number of different aspects of Salesforce. It's not uncommon now for admins to have developer skills or maybe dip their toe in the architect side of things, and that is fantastic, don't get me wrong, but I focused mainly on positions that were only looking for admin-related work, so building custom objects, administering users, building validation rules, just those general kind of things were the main items I was looking for when I was transitioning to my first full-time Salesforce job. Additionally, I was looking to see what kind of qualifications and credentials they were looking for from an education side of things. If there was nothing about a Salesforce certification, then I erred on the side of caution and didn't apply there. I wanted a company that was fully bought into the Salesforce ecosystem, and that can be illustrated in a job posting by seeing that they're asking for the proper credentials. An extra little bonus, which was much more rare, was seeing your certain Trailhead status, or you have certain super badges. It's very rare for a job to ask for those sorts of things, but that's how you know you're working with a company that knows the Salesforce ecosystem and knows what they want. Mike: Yeah. And it's done its homework. David Simpson: Exactly. So, I was looking for those types of companies, just really people who were bought into the ecosystem, people who knew what they were looking for, knew what enhancements and long-term goals they had for their Salesforce org, and also was going to treat it with the level of attention and detail that is needed in a Salesforce org. There's many times where unfortunately, due to resourcing or staffing issues, Salesforce gets a little bit put by the wayside, and instead of having great initiatives and solutions deployed, it's just a bunch of band-aids, and then that comes back to the admin saying, "Oh, we can't deliver on something truly incredible because we're not given the time and the resources for it." So, I was looking for companies that really didn't have that mindset and were looking for true, awesome admins. Mike: Yeah. You were fortunate enough that you had worked in an org. Did you, at any one point in time in the interviewing process, think about preparing a developer org or a Trailhead org to showcase some of your skills? David Simpson: When I was first applying for a full-time Salesforce admin, that thought did not cross my mind. That said, this was many years ago in, I think it was 2019. That said, a little over a year ago, I did get a new job at my current position, and during that job search, I did have a Salesforce developer org that I had built out, and I recreated some of my most interesting and complex solutions in that developer org, and then basically in every single job interview I had, I said, "Do you want to see my dev org? I've built some awesome flows." And most of the time they said no. But every once in a while they'd say yes, and then I get to show off my screen flow that I worked really hard on. So, nowadays, yes, I do have my dev org. I'll bring up Trailhead every now and then, or I did back then when I was in the job hunt, but really, I like to showcase the dev org whenever possible because it is something that I'm actively developing in. Even now that I have a job and I'm in a job I love, I still whatever I do at my normal job, if I say, "Oh, that's pretty interesting," I go and I rebuild it in the dev org. But of course, without confidential information. Mike: Right. No. Oh, man. I'm the same way. I was crushed, I want to say a year and a half ago I was prepping for Dreamforce and the dev org that I'd had since 2006. I forgot to log in and it expired. David Simpson: Oh, no. Oh, that's horrible. Mike: And it was just more of like, it was just such an awesome little relic of stuff that I had built and things that I had tried out, and I have another one, but it's not as old and it doesn't have as much. There wasn't anything cool in it, but it was cool because it was stuff that I had built when I was, it had my first workflow in it. David Simpson: It shows a timeline of how you've grown. Mike: Yeah, I mean, very much so. I'd let nobody in there because they'd be like, "What were you doing?" Well, I was a kid with crayons back then. David Simpson: Yeah, you got to make mistakes in order to get better. Mike: Absolutely. Okay. So, I mean, we could do a whole podcast on interviewing and everybody in the comments will be like, "You should." Let's go to day one of the new job. So, you've transitioned, you're no longer 50/50. The company's bought in. Dave's our new Salesforce admin. Day one, outside of all of the HR paperwork and stuff, what did you do on day one? David Simpson: First, I quietly panicked because I was afraid I was not going to be able to live up to expectations. But after that calmed down, I of course met the team. I was very fortunate to work with a team of several people in the Salesforce space. There was two developers, there was another admin. There were two architects, and of course the Salesforce manager. So, they showed me around the org and they showed me some of the details of what they had built, what they're currently building, how they take in tickets. It was just essentially getting a feel for the Salesforce ecosystem that was there. And then from that point, once I was left my own devices, I just continued to do some more digging. I looked, okay, they're using cases. How are they using cases? Where is the queue that stuff that we get asked to do comes in? What does their account object look like? Because the account object is always one of the busiest objects in the Salesforce ecosystem. How many validation rules do they have? I was really just trying to take the little experience that I had from my previous job and then look at those same areas in this new job. So, essentially just getting a feel for the org. Mike: So, you joined a team of people? David Simpson: Yes. Yes. Mike: What was that like? David Simpson: It was a fantastic experience. I still keep in touch with all of them to this day, despite the fact that I haven't worked with them for a few years now. They were all super friendly and super helpful, and I think that was something that really helped me to continue this admin career path is that I got paired with such great people in this team, and it...
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Get More from Your Org with Salesforce Foundations
10/16/2025
Get More from Your Org with Salesforce Foundations
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Naveen Gabrani, Founder and CEO of Astrea IT Services. Join us as we chat about why Salesforce Foundations is a game-changer for admins. You should for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Naveen Gabrani. Why Salesforce Foundations is a big deal This year at Dreamforce, Naveen is giving a presentation about something that Enterprise users already have access to that’s criminally underrated. “Salesforce Foundations is one of those lesser-known features,” he says, “but it is extremely important.” Announced last year, Salesforce Foundations brings the most useful basic features from Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Data Cloud, and Agentforce to your org. It has a modern UI that consolidates the most important features you use every day into an updated homepage. And the best part? It’s free—you simply have to enable it in Setup. Take Agentforce for a test drive Naveen gives some examples to highlight how important Salesforce Foundations truly is. If you have Sales Cloud, you can borrow Service Cloud features like Knowledge and macros to give your customers some technical support. Or you could build a customer journey with Marketing Cloud’s flow-based interface that feeds into a Commerce Cloud storefront. With so many businesses pushing to integrate AI features, Salesforce Foundations gives you the opportunity to try before you buy. You can configure Agentforce and Data Cloud to get everything integrated with your org and then make the decision to expand functionality. It’s much easier to convince stakeholders when you have something concrete to show them. Tips from a Dreamforce veteran Naveen is a Dreamforce veteran, so I wanted to know what keeps bringing him back, year after year. “The biggest thing for me is to make sure that I get time to meet my customers, meet my friends in the ecosystem, meet my partners,” he says. “Those networking aspects of the conference have helped us a lot as a company in the long term.” Each year, Naveen makes a point of writing a blog post to summarize his takeaways on what’s happening with the platform. Make sure to check it out, and make sure to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode. Podcast swag Learn more Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, we're joined by Naveen Gabrani, founder of Astrea IT Services and longtime Salesforce ecosystem veteran. Now Naveen sat down with us just a little bit before Dreamforce to share why Salesforce Foundations is a game changer for admins; offering multi-cloud access, a sleek, modern UI, and best of all, it's free with Enterprise or higher licenses. Now if you've been curious about how to do more with what you already have, this episode's for you. Now stay tuned and don't miss Naveen's tips, use cases and insights from 30 years in tech and what he does after Dreamforce. So with that, let's get Naveen on the podcast. So Naveen, welcome to the podcast. Naveen Gabrani: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Mike: Yeah. Well, you are a string of presenters that we've had on the podcast over the last month, and today, when this episode comes out, it's the Thursday of Dreamforce. So I bet a lot of people probably listening to this on the plane flying home. But let's get started with a little bit about yourself, kind of how you got in Salesforce, how you got in the ecosystem, and then I want to talk to you more about what you're presenting at Dreamforce. Naveen Gabrani: Great. So my name is Naveen Gabrani. I ran a Salesforce partner company called Astrea IT Services. We are based in a place called Noida in India. So I have been running this company Astrea for about 15 years, so it's been a long time. It's been a fun journey. Before this, I used to work as a program manager with a large MNC, and so my total experience is more than 30 years. Mike: Wow, that's a long time. I was going to say your company is a teenager. Naveen Gabrani: Yeah. Mike: That's been around for a while. Now at Dreamforce this year, which is today. Whee. Or it could have been a few days ago, depending on when you're listening to this. You talked about Salesforce Foundation, get more from your org with Salesforce Foundations. Why was it so important for you to have admins understand how to get more from their org with Salesforce Foundations? Naveen Gabrani: So Salesforce Foundations is one of the features that is less known, but it is extremely important feature. This was announced in last year 2024 Dreamforce, and it's about one year now, but still it is not so well known. So I wanted to work towards making it more popular in the ecosystem. Mike: Yeah. What have you done with Salesforce Foundations? What made you so passionate about it? Naveen Gabrani: Sure. So let me talk a little bit more about what is Salesforce Foundations, and why is it so important? So I would classify Salesforce Foundation has two different parts. One is a modern user interface, which is fun to use, and second is the access to multi-cloud. So let me talk about the user interface part first, then let me get into the multi-cloud functionality. But before that, let me just talk who has access to Salesforce Foundation. So any customer that is using Enterprise Cloud or higher of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud or Industry Cloud, has access to Salesforce Foundation out of the box. The great thing about this is that it is completely free. You just need to enable it in your setup and then you're ready to go. Okay? So that is one of the wonderful things about Salesforce Foundation is that there is no cost involved in using it. Coming back to the user interface part, there are a few different things that are provided in the Salesforce Foundation user interface. One is all the apps are accessible on the left nav bar in a very modern UI. And also for setup for admins, the most important features are available through a dropdown. So for example, managing users, you can just go to the top right and then access the most important features that you use every day. The third important feature of the new Salesforce Foundation user interface is access to a more modern homepage that will give you everything that you need the moment you'll land on the homepage. So that is the UI aspects of the Salesforce Foundation. The second part of Salesforce Foundation is the access to multi-cloud, which is more important actually. So let's say you are using Sales Cloud and you enable Salesforce Foundation. What it will give you is it'll give you access to Service Cloud's essential features, it will also give you access to essential features of Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Data Cloud, and Agentforce. The reason it is called Salesforce Foundations is because it gives you the platform on which you can start building your Agentforce applications without paying anything extra. Okay? So let me just elaborate this multi-cloud features. Mike: Yeah. Naveen Gabrani: So let's just say that you are using Sales Cloud. Similar things are applicable for Service Cloud as well, but let's assume you are a Sales Cloud or CRM kind of customer. So main features of Service Cloud that will be available to you, to the users, are you have access to Knowledge Base. So the commonly occurring features are available to your users to let's say you can resolve the case using standard Salesforce Knowledge features, even though you are just having the Sales Cloud license. You also have access to features like macros, so you can perform multiple tasks together by just clicking them. Single click. Okay? So that is some of the Service Cloud aspects that are available out of the box to Sales Cloud license with Foundations. The additional clouds that are available are Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud, Data Cloud and Agentforce. So let me talk about Marketing Cloud next. So Marketing Cloud here is based on a flow like interface, so it's based on top of flows. So you build journeys and you use flows to build your journeys. So let's say you want to send a mail today and send another mail after two days to a market segment. Then you can create email contents using an Experience Cloud kind of interface, and then you build a journey and set up the campaigns, and this is all included within Salesforce Foundations. Okay? So you have Sales Cloud, you are getting essential version of Marketing Cloud for free, for no other charges. Okay? Mike: Yeah. Naveen Gabrani: So that is another big kind of bonus you get as part of Salesforce Foundation. The next is Commerce Cloud. So as part of your Foundation license, we have access to one storefront. You already have products available as part of Sales Cloud, so we can use Experience Cloud interface, a drag-and-drop kind of functionality, to build a professional looking user interface. And it's fairly easy to set up. So we can build an e-commerce site for our clients using Commerce Cloud and Salesforce Foundations. And this is you can pretty much go live in a day, it's so easy to set up. There are some limitations on the number of transactions and the number of storefronts, etc. But that is... So the idea is if you are a very large company and you're exceeding those limits, then you work with your account manager and purchase additional transactions. Also included our Data Cloud and Agentforce. If you want to just learn Data Cloud or you want to check whether Agentforce is good for me or not, then the idea is you can set it up in your Sales Cloud or Service Cloud org, try it out, test it out, set it up, everything. And then when you are satisfied with it, only then you buy it. So basic advantage of Salesforce Foundations is that you try everything. When you're satisfied, only then go ahead and make a purchase. So that in a nutshell is various aspects that come out of the box without any charges when you have just a Sales Cloud or Service Cloud Enterprise or higher license. Mike: Yeah, I know we did... I was just looking back, and I did a podcast with Eddie Cliff, who at the time was the product manager for Salesforce Foundations. And of course I think the benefit of everything we were talking about was it's such a simplified area to go to so that you know you're turning on all the right things and you're not really having to hop around in set up. Naveen Gabrani: Definitely. That is the interface part of it. Everything is... Like the most easy to access aspects of the platform for end user or for admin are available at one place. Mike: Yeah. You've mentioned you've been in the tech ecosystem for 30 years, and at your company for 15. In terms of if you had to stack rank really cool features that Salesforce has come out with, where on your list would Foundations fall? Naveen Gabrani: Oh, that's a tough one. Mike: Well, I did tell you there might be a few hard questions every now and then. Naveen Gabrani: Yeah, there's so many different things and it's difficult to compare. The big thing about Foundation is obviously the access to so many different things, and it's free. I'm not aware of any great Salesforce product that is available free of cost. So that is one thing that I really like about Foundations. And obviously the things that are extremely popular are... Like because I'm from development background, I like Apex a lot. Pretty much we never have to say no to a client. We never say no for any requirements because we know that we have flows, we have Apex, and we can handle it. So those are a couple of other favorite things that I have. Mike: Do you find, when you're working with clients, that you use Foundations more often to turn on Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud? Or do you use it to... Is it when they're expanding from Sales Cloud to Service Cloud? Naveen Gabrani: For now the focus has been on Agentforce, because that is the buzz in the market. But I think Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud are going to be equally popular with time, but for now, Agentforce is on everybody's mind. And sometimes clients are not convinced, so they want to give it a try and see a demo before they make a decision, and that's where Salesforce Foundation comes in. Mike: Well, sure. You got to test drive the car before you buy it. Right? Naveen Gabrani: Exactly. Mike: What are you excited about for Dreamforce this year, besides your session on Salesforce Foundations? Naveen Gabrani: I'm kind of a veteran. I've been to Dreamforce I think seven or eight times, I've spoken a few times. And so I mean you make so many friends in the ecosystem over the years, so the biggest thing for me is just to make sure that I get time to meet my customers, meet my friends in the ecosystem, meet my partners. Those are kind of the networking aspects of the conference, that has long-term... That has helped us a lot as a company historically. So because we are virtual, living in a far-off place, and the clients are in the US are elsewhere in the western world, Dreamforce is a place... It's like a get-together. So we get to meet them, build relationships, and then those relationships help us out for rest of the year. Mike: Yeah. No, I could totally understand that. So most people that are going to listen to this episode are probably listening to it after Dreamforce, because it comes out the Thursday of Dreamforce and everyone's like, "Oh my gosh, I got to run to this session. And I got to go to this place and get this food because San Francisco has a lot of food." Naveen Gabrani: Yes. Mike: I'd be remiss if I don't talk about food on my podcast, even though it's a non-food podcast. But my question to you, you've been to a lot of Dreamforces and you've been in the ecosystem for a long time, what is the most important thing that you do after Dreamforce? Naveen Gabrani: So my goal is that I try to summarize a couple of things. One is summarize the key announcements. Mike: Uh-huh. Naveen Gabrani: And whatever I have learned, like interesting things. So I meet a lot of vendors, I go to booths, I spend time in the expo. I listen to a few keynotes and get a feel of the new features that are coming in, I look at a few Salesforce demos, I also attend a few sessions. I try to mix and match and do many different things. So at the end of the show, I have a fair idea about what are the new things that the platform is announcing, and I try to publish a blog on that. That these are my learnings, so that the people who are not able to attend get to see that. That is one. Second is just like an acknowledgement mail to all the people that I have met kind of summarizing our discussions. Mike: Yeah. Naveen Gabrani: So those are the two things that I do while it's fresh in my mind. Mike: And I think you have... Well, a lot of people have a long plane ride home. I'd love for you to remember back to your first Dreamforce. If you could do your first Dreamforce differently, what would you have done? Naveen Gabrani: The first one, I think what happened was that people... I booked a lot of sessions, and so I didn't... It was just spent some time in the expo in looking at demos and all. I was trying to attend session from morning to evening, and your brain gets exhausted. So that was probably not a good idea. That's what I learned. So I try to keep my schedule somewhat free now. Mike: Yeah, I appreciate that as somebody who manages a lot of sessions with a lot of great content for you to have gone to. I was thinking back to my first Dreamforce, and I remember one of the best things I did was if I got to a session early I just sat down and just chit-chatted with the people around me, because we were all there to learn the same thing. Naveen Gabrani: Sure. Mike: And you meet some really fun people. Of course, this was I feel like 100 years ago. I also remember that was one of the first Dreamforce I was walking around with an iPad, and people were like, "Whoa, you're taking notes on iPad." I felt like I was so in the future at that time. Naveen Gabrani: Yeah. How things have changed in the last 10, 15 years. Mike: Right? Exactly. Naveen, I appreciate you coming on the podcast and talking about Foundations. I know I've covered this topic before, but it's really cool. The UI is super intuitive and helpful for admins. And I love that you've been in the ecosystem for a long time and are still coming to Dreamforce and still pointing out new things and inspiring people all the time. Naveen Gabrani: Thanks a lot. Thank you so much, Mike, for having me. Mike: Big thanks to Naveen for joining us and shedding light on Salesforce Foundations. Whether you are helping users with a streamlined interface or testing out Agentforce before you commit, Foundations gives us admins a powerful, no-cost way to do more with our org. Now don't forget to check out Naveen's post-Dreamforce blog wrap-ups, and keep an eye on what's next in the ecosystem. He is out there presenting a lot of things. So until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.
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How Can Admins Use Labs Apps to Get AI-Ready?
10/09/2025
How Can Admins Use Labs Apps to Get AI-Ready?
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Sharon Klardie, Senior Director of AppExchange Labs & Innovation at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about how Labs empowers Salesforce employees to build and share solutions on the AppExchange, and what that means for admins navigating the new world of AI. You should for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Sharon Klardie. What is Salesforce Labs? Next year, Salesforce Labs will celebrate its twentieth birthday. If you haven’t checked it out, it’s an innovation program for Salesforce employees to create solutions, package them, and share them with customers like you. That’s why I was so excited to sit down with Sharon Klardie. She’s the Senior Director of AppExchange Labs & Innovation, and as she puts it, her team’s job is to “showcase the art of the possible.” If you’ve ever stared at a new feature and felt some blank canvas anxiety when it comes to how to actually implement it in your org, browsing through Salesforce Labs solutions could be a great starting point. Even if you don’t end up using something, you can see what’s possible and even look at how they did it on GitHub. The key to AI implementation If you’re like most of the admins I talk to, you’re probably looking for new ways to use Agentforce. As Sharon puts it, “How do you have meaningful and mindful implementations of AI at your organization?” You can get a lot of ideas looking through Labs apps that incorporate Agentforce. However, as Sharon points out, that’s only one piece of the puzzle. You need to get your data in a good place and build a solid foundation for scalable AI, and there are several Salesforce Labs solutions that can help you get started. Best practices for AppExchange Finally, we talk through some AppExchange best practices that will help you get the most out of any Labs solutions you want to try out. First and foremost, never install an app you haven’t used directly into production. Spin up a dev org or sandbox so you can test without breaking anything. But more importantly, make sure you have a solid rollout and change management plan for any new functionality you’re adding to your org. You need to tell users what’s new, teach them how to use it, and be ready to handle any edge cases that will inevitably pop up. Be sure to catch Sharon’s presentations at Dreamforce, and say hi if you see her! And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode. Podcast swag Learn more Trailhead Module: Trailhead Module: AppExchange: AppExchange: YouTube channel: GitHub: Help Article: Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admin Podcast, I sit down with Sharon Klardie, who's the senior director of Salesforce Labs, to talk about, well, what else? Free innovation. Sharon shares how labs empower Salesforce employees to build and share solutions on the AppExchange and what that means for Salesforce admins navigating the new world of AI and why, this is important, you should never install a new app straight into production. Now, whether you're Dreamforce-bound or catching up after Dreamforce, this one's packed with a lot of great tips from Sharon and a lot of AI strategy gold. So tune in, take notes, and let's get Sharon on the podcast. So, Sharon, welcome to the podcast. Sharon Klardie: Thank you for having me, Mike. Mike: I find it hard to believe, but you are one of the few people in the world that hasn't been on the Salesforce Admin podcast despite you and me being in the ecosystem for like a thousand years. Sharon Klardie: I know. I was thinking about this morning and I was like, "I can't believe I haven't been on here yet." So I'm super excited to share with the listeners here today. Mike: Well, let's talk about that. So how did you get started in Salesforce and in the ecosystem, and what do you do at Salesforce? Sharon Klardie: Oh, I love a Salesforce origin story. So picture, it's 2010, and I'm working at a software company that gets bought by an equity partner, and that equity partner implements Salesforce at every company they buy. And that was my first introduction of Salesforce back when it was just Sales and Service Cloud. And I absolutely felt in love with the platform. I felt empowered. There was community behind it. And ever since then, so from 2010 till today, I've been all Salesforce all the time. Mike: Wow. And you joined Salesforce. What part of Salesforce did you join? Sharon Klardie: So when I joined Salesforce in 2018, I joined leading the Salesforce Labs program. That was exclusively my focus. It's been part of my remit my entire time, almost eight years here at Salesforce. And I've added some other things to what I do on the daily basis, but the Salesforce Labs program, community innovation, it's my passion area. It's what brings me joy. I just actually love being part of it, seeing the creativity of the employee community, creating labs, and seeing the creativity of our trailblazers who are using Labs solutions. Mike: So for anybody that hasn't heard about Labs, when you say Salesforce Labs, what do you mean? Sharon Klardie: So Salesforce Labs is a program that's actually turning 20 next year, if you can believe it. It's an innovation program where we empower Salesforce employees to create solutions, package them, and share them on AppExchange for our customers to use. And Salesforce Labs solutions are always free. They're community-driven. You can think of them like an open-source project. So it's volunteered by employees. It's not an employee who is on a product team and this is part of their regular release roadmap. This is an employee who sees a problem in the space that they want to solve, or they have a really creative idea on how to use our technology. So the Labs program really helps trailblazers to learn new technology, play around with it, get starter packs and templates. Blank canvas anxiety is a real struggle as an admin, throwing back a few years from my admin days, but sometimes a new feature would be rolled out and you'd be like, "I'm not sure where to start." So the Labs program really tries to help trailblazers be able to adopt new technology, understand how you can use it, and showcase the art of the possible. Mike: That's good. I know as an admin, I found Labs because I needed a project management app, and at the time, Reid Carlberg had a really cool one, so I was like, "Oh, that's kind of cool." And then from there on, I looked for the little beaker logo. Sharon Klardie: Yeah, we love that beaker logo, and then we evolved the logo to actually use the periodic elements of tables to use labs spelled out because we're geeky like that. Mike: Right. I know. It kind of has like a Breaking Bad feel to it. Sharon Klardie: Yeah. Mike: I'm all about that. So at Dreamforce you're going to talk about seven free solutions to drive your AI strategy forward, and it's going to be a really cool presentation, and some people are going to get to see it, some people aren't. Why is it important for admins to look to the AppExchange and some of our Labs apps in terms of moving AI forward in their organizations? Sharon Klardie: Yeah. So right now, AI is moving at the speed of light or whatever is faster than the speed of light. I'm not sure what that is, but there's probably something faster than the speed of light, and that's what it feels like is happening right now. So one of the benefits that the Labs program will have is we can showcase different solutions on how to use this new technology, but also I think even more importantly is how do we think about how do we want to implement AI at our organization. And sometimes that might actually be using a Labs solution or another partner solution on AppExchange that isn't actually AI-driven, but helps set the groundwork for how do you have a strong AI strategy. So an example of that would be, is there a set of technology or tools or processes that you should have in place at your organization to really help you identify what are your goals and use cases for using AI? And we have a number of different Labs solutions that we'll share. Pro-tip for anybody who's going to see the content, it would be probably a few more solutions than seven. We'll throw a couple bonus things in there and some shout-outs. But there's a lot of technology out there to really help you frame is your data ready. Data readiness is super important as an AI strategy to move forward in the space. If you're going to train your AI or use AI on your data and if your data is no good, then you're going to have a problem. The AI isn't going to respond the way that you expect or what your business needs. So we want to showcase these solutions that you can use to get started to help ground you in strong AI strategies. Mike: So it's not just downloading agents. Sharon Klardie: Exactly. It's going to be more than that. It's really about thinking about how do you have meaningful and mindful implementation of AI at your organization. And we'll also have some showcases of how to use cool Agentforce and AI technology. Mike: Oh, nice. I noticed you put the word free in your title. That implies that there's some that aren't free. Sharon Klardie: Yes. So all Salesforce Labs solutions are free. So anything that our employees create and contribute are free to download from AppExchange. But there are other solutions from our partner ecosystem and some are free and some are paid. It is important to note for anybody who's not familiar with the Salesforce Labs program is these are not official Salesforce products, which is actually called out in the master service agreement, the MSA. These are community contributions, so you can't pick up the phone and call support and get help for them. We generally try to open-source all of our Labs solutions on GitHub so you can actually use it to learn new technology, see how an employee built that solution, or maybe that solution does 80% of what you want, but you want to change it. You can go get the source code and then go customize it for whatever works for your business. And if the solution that the employee built hits a home run and it solves your business challenge you're trying to solve, you can go install the managed package and off to the races. Mike: Yeah. And I'm also thinking any of your Labs apps are also going to immediately be able to be agentified? Sharon Klardie: I would say. So we have some Labs solutions. I wouldn't say that's a hundred percent guarantee, although most of them should be able to be extended, but we have over 500 Labs solutions on AppExchange and I can't say conclusively that all 500 would become- Mike: You don't know all 500 just like the back of your hand? Come on now. Sharon Klardie: I, unfortunately, do not. I know many of them, but not all 500. But yeah, most of them should be extended. We're actually looking at engaging with some of our more popular Labs solutions and having conversations with the builders to say like, "What are ways that we could extend this using newer technology that's come out?" Either adjacent, something like if you want to use AI, you can add onto it, but if you still want to use the main core functionality, like custom objects and flows that was there but not to have an AI arm to it, then you could still use the original. But how can we take these to the next level using the great technology that's come out over the past couple of years? Mike: Yeah. Now, I think the use of apps within Salesforce has probably evolved since you and I were out in the world as we little admins wandering blindly through the Salesforce universe, because it's become ubiquitous that you'd use an app on your phone, right? Like there's specialized apps to do things. Oftentimes on my iPhone, I'll get an app, I'll try it out, it won't work, I'll just delete it, but I don't have a spare phone. What is best practice for admins evaluating apps, be it from Labs or somewhere on the AppExchange, in terms of trying and testing something out perhaps before it goes into production? Sharon Klardie: There absolutely are some best practices. Number one will be we do not install brand-new apps we've never explored into production. We do not do that. I'll repeat, we do not do that. Some trailblazers like to explore in a dev org first, but the cons of that is you don't have your unique customizations. A lot of trailblazers have a lot of success in installing a Labs solution or a partner solution in a sandbox first so you can see how it interacts with the customizations you've made to the platform. But both either a dev org or a sandbox is absolutely where you want to start to check out any new solution, whether it be Labs or partner solution. Mike: Yeah. So that was the first mistake that I made back in the day. I would just try things out in production. Why not? Sharon Klardie: Yeah, no, hopefully nobody takes that guidance, Mike. Definitely it's much more advantageous for everyone to play around and see how things work. And it gives you a little bit more freedom as an admin to look under the hood and see how exactly it's going to work and then what your rollout plan is. Because it's just like what I tell my Labs builders, it's not if you build it, they will come. It's not if you install it, it will work, right? Mike: Right. Sharon Klardie: So you also need to have that kind of change management process at your organization. If you just install a new app and have some great functionality, if you don't tell your users about it once you move it to production, they might not know what to do with it or they might not use it in the way that you had in mind. I think we all know in technology, when we release things into the wild of our user base, we are going to come across some use cases and edge cases that we never thought might be the reality. So the more that you can get ahead of that and the change management process, it's just going to be smoother for both you as an admin and also for your end users. Mike: Yeah. Now, one thing I'd be remiss not to cover, we talked a lot about consumption part, but you mentioned Labs is also open to non-Salesforce employees, correct? Sharon Klardie: No. So only Salesforce employees today can create and distribute a Salesforce Labs solution. Mike: Gotcha. But our AppExchange is open to non-Salesforce? Sharon Klardie: Absolutely. We have a very robust partner ecosystem and a process to engage. It can be a free solution that somebody wants to create as a business to kind of spin up and share with the community. You can go through our partner program to do that. And of course, it's an ecosystem, so if you have a solution, idea that you believe is of value to our broader trailblazer community and customers, then you can engage with our program and list there. But anything created by Salesforce Labs is created by a Salesforce employee. Mike: Yeah. Sharon Klardie: And I just also want to note Labs go through the same security review process that all of our partner solutions go through as well. Mike: Oh, so no cheating because it's a Salesforce employee? Sharon Klardie: That's exactly right. Trust is our number one value here. We want all the Labs to adhere to that as well. Mike: Right, yeah. No, it's same rules apply for everybody. That way you get the same quality and consistency. So that makes sense. Well, Sharon, thanks for coming on the podcast. I think this session's going to be awesome. I can't wait to hear what people have to say about it, and I can't wait to see what new stuff comes out from the Labs team. Sharon Klardie: Yeah. Well, thank you for having me. Hopefully, it's the first time, but hopefully not the last time. I've really enjoyed chatting with you, Mike, and if anybody is at the session and shows up at Dreamforce, stop by and say hello. I'd love to meet you. And I'm on LinkedIn, and if you want to engage with that way, share any feedback about the Labs program, I'm happy to engage. Mike: So a big thanks to Sharon for joining us and sharing some behind-the-scenes look at the Salesforce Labs. I don't know about you, but I'm ready to fire up a sandbox and test drive some :abs apps. That was always the most fun part for me as an admin. But remember, not in production, just in a sandbox or not in production. But hey, if you're heading to Dreamforce, don't miss her session on the seven, plus she says a few bonus free sessions to fuel your AI strategy. And remember, best part about Salesforce Labs apps is they're free and open, and they're built with you, the community, the Salesforce admins, developers, architects in mind. So with that, until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.
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Making Data Cloud Understandable for Admins
10/02/2025
Making Data Cloud Understandable for Admins
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Abhishek Saxena, Technical Architect at Copado. Join us as we chat about how he learned Data Cloud and why understanding context is the key to making Agentforce shine. You should for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Abhishek Saxena. Overcoming the complexity of Data Cloud As a developer and architect, Abhishek isn’t lacking for technical knowledge about the Salesforce platform. But even he found it hard to get his head around what Data Cloud was and what it could do. Abhishek attended community events, scoured LinkedIn posts, studied videos, and even read a book about Data Cloud. But there were so many new terms being thrown around, and he still couldn’t explain the difference between a data lake object, a data model object, and a data source object. “Even though there was a lot of buzz around Data Cloud and how it is such an amazing, innovative solution,” Abhishek says, “I was not able to grasp what it does in an easy fashion.” Luckily, he had an ah-ha moment that helped him see the big picture, and so he’s giving a presentation at Dreamforce to share what he’s learned. What Data Cloud actually does Abhishek’s talk, “A Beginner’s Guide to Data Cloud,” will get you up to speed in 20 minutes or less. As he explains, the main thing to understand is that Data Cloud is about data unification. If you have your data in a bunch of different places, you used to have to dedicate significant developer time to maintaining APIs that allowed Salesforce to share information with your other platforms. With Data Cloud, you have everything on one record, with Salesforce and Slack as the front door. You have a complete 360 view of your customer, regardless of where the information is. Why Data Cloud is crucial for Agentforce Getting a complete picture of your customers is doubly important when it comes to Agentforce. AI agents are extremely context-dependent: they do a much better job when you “ground” them with extra parameters. As Abhishek says, “If you give agents good data, your responses are going to be much more personalized and better.” Data Cloud allows you to give your AI agents a much more specific picture of your customers, opening the door for better and more effective automations. If you’re coming to Dreamforce, make sure to come to Abhishek’s presentation so you can be a Data Cloud pro. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode. Podcast swag Learn more Salesforce Admins Blog: Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike: So have you ever tried to figure out what a data lake is and then ended up wondering where the lifeguard's at? Ditto. Today on the Salesforce Admins podcast, we're talking with Abhishek Saxena, a Salesforce consultant with a developer's mindset and a teacher's heart. Abhishek's going to take us through his journey of learning Data Cloud and how it went from something buzzworthy to something he could really explain to a five-year-old. So if you've ever felt overwhelmed by new tech or just really weren't sure where to begin this episode's for you. Plus Abhishek gives us a sneak peek at his Dreamforce session and why understanding context is key in making AI tools like Agentforce shine. So with that, let's get Abhishek on the podcast. So Abhishek, welcome to the podcast. Abhishek: Thank you so much for having me, Mike. Mike: I'm excited to talk about this because of all the things going on at Salesforce, we've got a big event coming up in just a few weeks from when this is going to air, and you're doing a presentation there, but before we talk about that, let's find out a little bit about you. How did you get started doing stuff in the Salesforce ecosystem and want to present at Dreamforce? Abhishek: Certainly. So I have been working in the Salesforce ecosystem for about 10 years now, it'll be 10 years later in November. I started off immediately after my college where I was studying computer science engineering. I always had an affinity to computers and how they work, so it was an easy choice to what to study. But getting into Salesforce, that was a happy coincidence. My hometown, where I'm originally from, it's called Jaipur, it's in India, and that's where I did my engineering from as well, Jaipur is traditionally not touted as a tech hub, but for some divine reasons there were several Salesforce consultancies that were trying to make it big in that area when I was just graduating, I got an offer to work for one of them as a Salesforce consultant after a series of intense grueling interviews. But yeah, that's how I got started, and I have never looked back since then. Mike: Fresh out of college. And let's see, people heard this in the past, I've recently had somebody point out to me that my Salesforce experience is old enough it could graduate from high school. So your Salesforce experience is somewhere in middle school, I guess, at this point. Abhishek: Yeah, sounds about right. I'm eager to get to high school and get to be the cool kid. Mike: Well, right now it's getting its first iPhone and being popular. I don't know what ten-year-old kids do nowadays, I don't have kids, so we'll just move on. Eventually my experience will be in college and that'll scare me. Abhishek: Yeah, I hope I can get the certified technical architect or MVP or one of those cool badges to show around everyone. Mike: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, being in the ecosystem is just fun enough too. It's not going down the road with all those biker patches or like a race suit. It's not, what was that game? Pokemon? You don't have to collect them all. But you're talking Data Cloud, so tell me from your experience, what's so interesting about Data Cloud that admins need to know about it? Abhishek: So as I mentioned, I've been in the ecosystem for a long time and got decent exposure on Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Experience Cloud, so yeah, just the core platform in general. But over the last few years, Data Cloud has been one of those top things, and most talked about things from Salesforce at events everywhere. So even though there was a lot of buzz around Data Cloud about how it is such an amazing innovative solution, it could replace some of the other tools that an organization might be using, I was not able to grasp what it does in an easy fashion. Especially around two years back, 2023 Dreamforce when it was relaunched after being renamed from Genie, I was trying to understand what it does, what could be its use cases, maybe look at some Trailhead modules, but at that point in time, there wasn't a lot that was available. So Trailhead modules weren't baked out completely. There weren't any demo environments that I could get hands on, and it just felt a little bit overwhelming. I knew my friends who were doing Marketing Cloud, Einstein, CDP, that sort of stuff, knew what was going on, but us commoners who were just working on the core clouds. Mike: Us commoners. Abhishek: Yeah, we weren't privy to that information as much as they were. So I started to get down on this journey to learn a little bit myself because yes, seems like everyone was talking about it. So I started by attending different community events in the States and Canada, trying to attend the Data Cloud specific sessions, read people's LinkedIn posts, watch some videos. I even read a book on Data Cloud- Mike: Wow. Abhishek: ... that one of our friends in the community had put out, but even then it was just so overwhelming trying to think about it logically. I am an engineer, I like to think about things in a logical analytical manner that, okay, I'll first learn the alphabets, then I'll start to learn words, sentences, so on and so forth. So I wasn't able to get that topography down in my mind that way to get started with Data Cloud. There was these few workshops or actually Salesforce Data Cloud trainings that Salesforce teams were doing several times a month. I had to attend that one training probably four times until it finally clicked to me that, okay, now it feels that I have the basics down of what's going on with Data Cloud, and if someone comes up to me and asks me about it, I'll probably be able to give at least a satisfactory answer on what exactly is Data Cloud. But at this point, now I had several months of experience trying to learn Data Cloud, I thought that, okay, let me go ahead and do the Data Cloud certification as well just to quiz myself if I know enough. I did that and I passed. So that was the validation I was seeking that, okay, now I am somewhat of a Data Cloud consultant. But I wanted to share this journey with everyone else because I consider myself fairly technical with a consultant and a developer background, and if it took me a lot of time to get through, then I would not blame anyone else in the ecosystem who's not as technical to not completely understand that, Hey, why Data Cloud? What is Data Cloud? Why is this important? So that's why I thought that yes, I need to share my knowledge with everyone else. Mike: No, I get that. And what's so relevant about all that is when companies roll out features, and I'm not just speaking for Salesforce, but anybody, there's often a lot of thought and process that has gone into it, and just because you don't get it right away within a sentence or two or 10 seconds into somebody's presentation, that's not on you. That's just speaking to the complexity of perhaps the situation, where you're at in your learning journey, and then also just the complexity of the product that you're trying to understand. I think it's a lot for you to say, it took me a few months to kind of wrap my head around this. It doesn't just happen right away. And I think some people get really frustrated in themselves when they're like, well, I just don't get it. Abhishek: No, absolutely. I agree with you. And yeah, I have been very lucky that I like what I do. So even after work, I'm not afraid to put in some hours to just sharpen my skills. But everyone's situation is not the same, you've got a life outside work as well, you've got so many things going on that sometimes you're just not able to put in those 10,000 hours to get perfect on something. And that's why I feel that if you attend my session on A Beginner's Guide to Data Cloud, at least in those 20 minutes that we are together, I could give you a good framework about, okay, after you leave it that I understand what is Data Cloud. I know what are some key use cases and why everyone says that it's needed for Agentforce. So that's what I'm trying to get out in those 20 minutes for everyone who has not yet had the opportunity and the luxury to actually focus on going through the Data Cloud trail certification modules or just having the training on the job of their own organization adopting Data Cloud yet. Mike: Yeah. What was it for you, as you were investigating looking into and learning about Data Cloud, what was the first kind of piece of it that started to click for you that really was like, oh, I think I'm starting to understand it? Abhishek: Yeah, great question. So when I was learning about it, and as I said, Data Cloud is a slightly different beast than the regular core clouds like Sales, Service, Experience, it's something called as a near core cloud. So it's not directly built on Salesforce, it's Salesforce adjusting, you can say. So some of the concepts that were being introduced, they were not getting my other knowledge that I had gained through learning Sales, Service and Experience Cloud. There were concepts called as Data Lakes, there were some activations, segmentations, things that I had never really learned in the other clouds while working on it. So even though it was somewhat difficult to get the vocabulary for Data Cloud to get started, once I was able to work through those first few basic things, the biggest aha moment for me was when I saw that Data Cloud can help you consolidate a lot of different records. So I'll try to explain this and I go into much more detail in my session as well. If anyone in our listeners is in the attendance, I would love to have you in my session. But just to give you a recap or a quick preview of what I'm going to talk about is that let's say your company uses Salesforce, your company also uses SAP for something else. Your company maybe uses Trello for tracking some stuff as well. So you have your record your identity as, since my name is Abhishek, all these systems have my identity there in SAP or ServiceNow, Abhishek can do certain things, maybe that has my personal email for some reason, or maybe a different phone number. And then the Abhishek on the Salesforce ecosystem, that record, that contact or user, has slightly different details. Maybe the address I put in is different. Maybe the phone number I put in is my work phone, and in the other one I put in my personal phone. So what Data Cloud ends up doing is that from these different identities of Abhishek that exist in these separate platforms that are not linked, it allows you to create one record where all of your identities are linked. So in case I want to get Abhishek's email in SAP, I can just call out to Data Cloud and Data Cloud will give that to me instead of myself having to write three or four different APIs trying to de-duplicate records, trying to find some common way or how it's called an external key of linking that, okay, this Abhishek in Salesforce and that Abhishek in SAP are the same person. Data Cloud takes all of that complexity out of this and just tells you that, okay, Abhishek's record exists in five systems, here are the values of different things in those five systems. And I could just get that. So once I understood this, I was like, wow, this unified data that Data Cloud is giving you could have so many ramifications. And that's again, one of those things that I explored in that presentation that how agents that need this sort of information can benefit from Data Cloud. Mike: You were so close. I was about to say, wow, you just described Data Cloud and you didn't talk about agents. But no, what's crazy is thinking back in my umpteen hundred years of Salesforce experience, there's been different waves of where's your data? For a while it was, well, Salesforce is CRM, and then they had Service and then that takes care of that. But there's another system for this and there's another system for that, another system for that. And the world just kind of operated that way. It was like just understood, people had multiple systems to log into. And I remember for a long time when I was a Salesforce administrator, the big question was, well, such and such system, does X, can't Salesforce do that? And there was a big push for admins and developers to kind of rebuild all of this functionality into Salesforce. And so you would have these really robust time management or project management apps and the platform could more than easily handle it. And you didn't have to be a coder, you could build a project management app with a few objects and a couple dozen fields and some relationships, and there you're ready to go. And then it kind of became like, well, wait a minute, why are we spending all this time building on this platform when we can just connect things? But there was no sense of unification there. And I think in your description, what I heard is finally now you can have an entire enterprise where the front door is Salesforce or Slack and it can access all of that data and you're getting a complete view of a customer regardless of where the system information is, and that allows other applications and other things to run and do their job just well, but you still get that unified pull back in, and then you don't have the burden of a developer maintaining 200 APIs on the back end. Abhishek: 100%, Mike, you got a spot on. Mike: See, you're a good teacher. Look at what you just taught me. Abhishek: Well, you are not a bad student either. Mike: Well, I think a lot of people have had Data Cloud explained to them in terms of agents and Agentforce, and there's power there, but there's also the first step out the front door, which is, yeah, but what if your customer service people or your salespeople sit down and actually get that full view that we've been talking about regardless of where the system of that information lives? Abhishek: Certainly, and that reminds me actually, so the terminology that Data Cloud uses is that you get the customer 360 view. Meaning that, okay, your organization uses Salesforce for CRM, you are using Azure to actually log into different systems, single sign on, maybe Excel and other Azure products. You're using Workday for HR related things. You're using Asana for project tracking. And like I said, you have different identities in these different systems, different values for maybe same fields, similar fields like email address, regular address, phone number, et cetera. But with Data Cloud, you are able to unify all of these different identities of a single user and then present that within your Salesforce systems as the customer 360 where you can access all these different details and take much more intelligent decisions. So hopefully now our listeners are able to get that, okay, why is it so important for Agentforce and why is it so important in general. Mike: Yeah. So then that's my next question. Why is it so important for Agentforce? Abhishek: So agents, like any AI, and I'm sure our listeners must have used some sort of AI at this point, ChatGPT, Gemini or anything. When do agents do their best work? They do their best work when they have good context to go on and a good prompt that the user asks. Now, what is context? Context means that if you ask it to write me a sales email, if that's your prompt, it's going to give you a very generic answer, a generic response that, okay, Dear ABC, are you interested in our sales services? Are you interested in buying our product? But that's going to be it. It's going to imagine a few things, it's going to skip out some important details. So basically the answer is going to be generic and not as helpful for your particular organization's scenarios. Now, if you provide the agent with good context that whenever agent responds, it knows that I'm working for Coral Cloud Resorts, I am responsible for handling bookings, I can refund things, I can access customer details and which objects to look at, where to get the information from. If your agent has these informations, or again, a simpler example that if you are in ChatGPT and tell it that, okay, I want to write a sales email as a customer service agent for Coral Clouds, my name is Abhishek Saxena, when you start your email, start with the salutation. This is intended to be for the guests who are staying at the resort. And if I give all of these details and then hit enter, the response I'm going to get is going to be a lot more personalized. And that's how you can automate it to send to any user that is using your agent. That's what I mean by why context is so important for any AI to work. And with Data Cloud, as we have discussed in the podcast so far, it gives you that unified profile. It gives you the customer 360 so that your agents have all the information about your particular user who is asking the question or to wherever you're trying to use it. Because good data, if you give it good data, your responses are going to be much more personalized and better. Mike: And that's a lot of what we do in the Agentforce Now workshops like the one I do, the intro one where we talk about just prompts and even just writing a better, more descriptive prompt. If you think about it, I kind of reference it in the same way of it's like learning to cook with one cookbook or learning to cook with a library of cookbooks. If you have...
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How Do Admins Use Business Analysis Skills Effectively?
09/25/2025
How Do Admins Use Business Analysis Skills Effectively?
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Denise Carbone, Director of Delivery at ImagineCRM. Join us as we chat about her journey from business analyst to external consultant admin and why AI makes BA skills even more valuable. You should for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Denise Carbone. Why business analyst skills are so important for AI Denise was working as a business analyst when she was first handed the keys to a Salesforce org. She remembers getting a plaque in the mail for being one of the first 500 people to become Salesforce certified. Obviously we’ve come a long way since then, but the skills needed to understand a business problem and map out the requirements for a solution haven’t changed. As Denise explains, you have to be “process first, technology second.” I sat down with her for this episode to find out how these BA skills are even more important with Agentforce. The power of asking why In order to really do your job well, an admin needs to be more than just an order taker. But if you’re spending your time running through a list of requests without having conversations with users and really understanding the business process, well, that’s a tough row to hoe. Instead, you need to ask why. That’s where your business analyst skills come into play. You need to have a full understanding of how things currently work, where they could be improved, and who cares about it the most. Admins in the age of AI Another key business analyst skill is change management. You may have built the coolest solution in the world, but how do you get folks to actually use it? As Denise explains, if you want your solution to be adopted, you need to make it adaptive. As you’re building, you need to keep going back to your users for input. If they feel like their feedback is a part of the process, they’ll have ownership over the results. While Agentforce has greatly expanded what the platform can do, it’s still just technology you’re using to help solve a business problem. As long as you understand the why behind a request, you can build solutions that transform your organization. Be sure to listen to the full episode for more from Denise on business analyst best practices and the importance of establishing AI governance policies. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday. Podcast swag Learn more Salesforce Admins Blog: Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, I'm joined by Denise Carbone, longtime admin, Salesforce MVP, and all-around champion of business analysis. We unpack her journey from BA to external admin through the power of asking why, and why AI makes those foundational skills more valuable than ever. So, whether you're like me and you've just figured out dependent picklists, or you're leading delivery teams, I promise Denise's insight on governance, process and career growth is a must-listen. So with that, let's get Denise on the podcast. So Denise, welcome to the podcast. Denise Carbone: Awesome. Thanks, Mike. I'm really happy to be here. Mike: I know, I've been to a whole bunch of Chicago user groups, I can't believe I haven't had you on the podcast. So, I've tipped the scale a little bit in your favor, but tell us how you got into the ecosystem and what you do in Chicago. Denise Carbone: Yeah. No, thank you. Thank you. Yes, longtime listener of the podcast so happy to be here. So, I actually started in the ecosystem in 2004. I was a BA turned external admin. I was working for a technology company in Chicago, and I was bestowed the ownership of our Salesforce platform. I was a BA operations kind of girl. I've done work in CRM systems like Goldmine and Act!, so really old system. So, when Salesforce was presented to me I wasn't totally intimidated. I knew it was a CRM platform, I just didn't know much about it. I will be honest, I did not fall immediately in love with it. Later on I found out why. It was not because of the platform or the technology, it was because of lack of governance and processes. So, when I was doing reporting and operational metrics and things weren't being presented, as the CEO was saying, as they wanted to see them, it turned out just a lack of the governance and the processes is what really caused those issues. So, I put my BA hat back on and went back to the team, and explained some of these points we had to clean up and just do better with some guidance, and some structure and rigor around using the tool in the platform me. And that was in 2004, so in 2006 I attended my first Chicago user group meeting. Completely intimidated. I had major imposter syndrome because I really didn't know much about the platform. Do I even belong here? But I needed to learn, I had that desire and curiosity to really build out my skill set. So, I got a little bit more comfortable in this ecosystem. And then, in 2008 I was presented an opportunity to help co-lead the group. The user group leader was moving on and actually going to work for Salesforce at that time, and left a vacancy in Chicago. So I said, "Yes, sure." At the time I agreed to helping co-lead the Metro Chicago area, so just anything in the city limits. And that same year I actually took the certification exam. So, in October of 2008 I was certified as an admin. So that solidified, put to rest slightly the imposter syndrome that I was carrying along, but felt really confident and good about that. And a few months later I received a plaque in the mail, I was one of the first 500 people globally to become Salesforce certified. Mike: Welcome to the club. Denise Carbone: Thank you. It was a really cool designation at the time, but yet looking back how many years later, I'm like, "Oh my God." And today with the number of certified professionals out there and all the different types of certifications available, it's a pretty cool little fun fact. So, I like to share that. And going into my career, and again, I was on the client side for the past, starting my career from 2004 on the client side, learning the platform, being that admin, external admin, utilizing my business analyst skills, always asking the questions of why. In 2013, I actually joined the MVP program, so super, again, imposter syndrome, why am I here? Appreciate all the peer support, love being there, but also completely intimidated. I wasn't sure if I belong, but it was a really cool opportunity for me to learn and grow, get to meet amazing people like yourself, Mike. Mike: Oh, thank you. Denise Carbone: And Steve Moe, actually, I was a huge fan of Steve's. Met him through the MVP program, became friends to date. The MVP program just helped me solidify my career and just learning journeys I think is where it helped me the most. In 2015 I took the leap over to the partner side, so I needed the opportunity to really stretch my skillset. Working on the client side, you really are focused on industry specific workflows and processes, your growth opportunities on the industry side, at least for me at that time, were a little bit limited. So, going over to the partner side was really an opportunity for me to stretch my skillsets in both BA and admin, working with clients, getting to know why they're building something and less about the how. So, one of my mantras I use all the time is it should always be process first and then technology second. I've seen situations where people love the shiny things and, "Oh, we can automate this and turn this on, and doesn't this look great?" And the design of the layout is, it's not intuitive, it's hard to follow. It doesn't make sense. It's over-automated, over-architected, over-engineered, so I always like to peel it back and ask the questions why, and get to learn more about the users, more about what we're trying to solve for. I love that journey, and when I joined the partner side I had the opportunity to really upskill myself in both BA, administration, and then just focused on delivery. So on the partner side today, I am a director of delivery. I stepped into a leadership role in the past 10 years. So, I started as a director of delivery in 2015 with a team of one. I was able to build a team of 14 people, which means I manage a team of consultants, and I am accountable for all of our project success. Today I'm in the same industry, work for a smaller SI. We are focused in the philanthropy space and also nonprofits. Again, I support a team of consultants and I am very client-facing. I work day-to-day with our teams, I meet with our clients, and I'm accountable for the overall project success. So, one of the things I really love about the job I do today is the coaching and the mentoring for learning and upskilling. In this space in the day and age that we're in today, things change fast. I remember last summer seeing a preview of the Dreamforce keynote where they're talking about agents, and being presented to us, and what do we think about this, and how does this work? I will say Salesforce has done an amazing job at providing enablement so that we can all start this learning journey, and you have to stay up to date with it because it changes, as you know, as the ecosystem knows, almost weekly. So, it's been fantastic. But today, again, I focus on project delivery with my teams, and upskilling, and supporting, and mentoring folks. Mike: Wow, you said a lot in all of that answer. So, I want to dig into what you're presenting at Dreamforce, but there was a theme in your answer that's come through on quite a few podcasts, which is imposter syndrome. Do you feel that a lot of admins get into their role because they weren't pursuing something in tech and they fell into it? Is that where you were feeling your imposter syndrome? And to be fair, I also want you to clarify, when you say BA you mean business analyst, right? Denise Carbone: Correct, yes. Business analyst. Mike: Okay. So I mean, you had a background in business analyst skills. That's not a skill to scoff at. What do you think was giving you the imposter syndrome? Denise Carbone: That's a great question. I think it was learning the technology and learning the platforms, I felt at the time when I fell into it, anything technology related you would be categorized as a developer, and it was very tech heavy. We used technology, we used business tools, but it was just a tool. I didn't have to learn the behind the scenes. So, I felt a little intimidated that we're learning the system, and I think the power of the platform, which really helped solidify my career and I think a lot of people's career back at that time was the clicks not code focus and everything that you're able to do declaratively. That was a huge lift for people's career. Obviously when I started back in 2004 I wasn't seeking out a role in the Salesforce ecosystem, and I'm using my air quotes here, because it wasn't really a thing. We didn't call it out at that time. It was a business tool, and it took you through a whole wave and phase of a career path. And today in this space, I think it was even maybe eight years ago when people were really talking about career transitions, and they wanted to get into the Salesforce ecosystem and they wanted to learn Salesforce, and it was definitely a shift in that learning and it became a career back in 2004. And I don't know about even yourself and folks, was that something people aim for? I think it started becoming a career path more towards maybe 2008, 9, 10, when certifications become more prevalent. Mike: I mean, I ask because I'm the similar path. I was hired to do something else, and along the way of improving business process Salesforce became vital. And so it was, "Well, I have to learn this because it's really at the crux of improving our business process." There's only so much I can do to suggest sales stages and stuff, but without the technology supporting it. And so yeah, I mean, I accidentally fell into it, and within easily a couple years I was like, "This is my full-time job." Denise Carbone: It does become full-time job, for sure. I think my skillset in being a business analyst, my superpower, if I'm getting asked that today what's my superpower, is being able to break down complexity and talk in layman terms. That is a huge, again, superpower, because I have this ability to hear and kind of visualize in my head a process flow chart. Like, "Okay, we start here." I always ask people if we're trying to elicit requirements and gather requirements, understand a day in the life of the X persona, "Walk me through your day," and they walk through stuff. And you start getting a visual and how you can build it, but outside of the technology is really getting to know their process and building out. Because sometimes people say, "Oh, this is so different. You've probably never seen this before." Well, some cases maybe because maybe really broken, or sometimes it's just they never took time to step a few steps back and optimize, make things more efficient. So, I love efficiencies, I love optimization, I love the ability to break down complexities, I love the ability to speak in layman terms. I think that's a learning that I've taken wholeheartedly through my journey because I can speak business speak, I don't want to speak Salesforce speak if the recipient on the other end doesn't speak Salesforce. So, I want to speak in a language that's going to be comfortable for them, and then break down the complexity and really help and work to build systems that are going to bring the client along for the journey. Mike: I feel like we've gotten a hell of a preview of your Dreamforce presentation. Because I don't know if admins always think, "Well, I'm doing business analysis," how do you look at business analysis maybe different than somebody that's never been formally trained? Denise Carbone: That's a great question, and this will definitely be part of my session, is I always ask why. There's been a mantra back in the admin world- Mike: Forever. Denise Carbone: Yeah, we're not order takers. We should ask the question on why. I've heard people say, "You should say no," but I would challenge that and say, "Well, ask why," because that is the root of what a business analyst is doing is they have this curiosity mindset where they are just like, "Well, why? Why do you do this? Have you ever considered this?" Just not saying no per se. I like to say, "Yes, and," but you give the options. Because you can do it, this, this or this, but what are the impacts of your decision if you go that route? So, I believe that admins inherently have some BA, business analyst built into their skills, it's just maybe they don't realize it yet, it's unrealized. But they actually do in a way, if they're asking what somebody wants, and they should also follow up with why. I think that should be the starting question honestly, and then go forward and then do the build if applicable. But it's definitely a learned skill. The other flip side to that is, I think there was, I've heard it before and it's so not true, that business analysts are not just note takers. They should never be a note taker. I mean, they can do documentation, but they're not glorified note takers. It's definitely a skillset where you talk about a user story, or a requirement, or use cases. Those are all three very separate things. And the reason why you do some of this documentation upfront is to make sure that what we're building as admins meet the technical requirements for the end user. Mike: What is your best advice for an admin to not be a note taker? Because I think when I first started, I knew improvements that needed to be done because I was in sales and I was working on sales. And so, very easily out of the box I was like, "Well, I know we need this. I know we need to track that." And then it quickly became my user seeing the change and offering for, "Well, can you add this? Can you add this? Can you add that?" And I think what I realized early on was I really wanted to appease my users right away. Like, "Oh yeah, absolutely I can do this." Or I remember the time, this is going to sound silly, I remember I figured out how to do dependent picklists, and let me tell you, I was like, "I can code the internet, because I can make a picklist where if you pick hot dogs it can say 'Red Hots,' and if you pick hamburgers it can say, 'Rare, medium, well.'" And I just thought I was the cat's pajamas. Denise Carbone: [inaudible 00:16:51] it was very powerful. Mike: Yeah. And then your users are like, "Well, can you make it do this?" I was like, "Yes, I can. Ha-ha. That's a dependent picklist." For a while all I wanted to build was dependent picklists. But how do you move from that to like, "No, I need to set a vision. I need to understand more of what's going on"? How do you make that your approach versus piling up a bunch of tickets? Denise Carbone: That's a great question. So, you want to make sure that it's going to be adopted, that we always talk about adoption in the space, and adapted, being adaptable to things and change. So, there's a whole change management aspect of what we do. I do believe that through the journey and empowering the admins, it's making sure, so partnering with the end user. I think it's on the consulting side we always say, "We're a partner," so we partner with our clients. It is a partnership because we can do the work but we need their input, and we want feedback. So, it's like a continuous feedback loop. So, we have a hybrid methodology in how we do things today, but it's definitely we will gather requirements, and get approval of these requirements, and do some build, and we build that. We break it up in sprints, maybe theme it out by certain features and functionality and present it back to the end user and get their feedback. "Does this work? Does this look good? Are we missing anything? Is there any key step that we did not capture?" It's really getting that buy-in as you're doing the build so that it can easily be adopted, and you're getting the feedback in the time where it's more real time. So, if it's features and functionalities that are, like you said, the bells and whistles of dependent picklists were amazing, but after a while it could become stale and they're not using it. The goal is, I always say less is more. You don't want to overkill something that's not going to be used. Even today I was talking to somebody earlier about utilizing a tool to be able to scan all the metadata and see all the unused fields that were created at one point in time that are just sitting out there and untouched for a long time. So, we have to get rid of that technical debt. So, my approach and my recommendation or suggestion is for people to really partner with who they're building it for so that they can get the buy-in, get feedback. "Does it work? What would you like to see? Does the user interface still, is that intuitive?" I feel like with the new Lightning design pages, Mike, we grew up on Classic, remember that? Mike: Oh, I know. We've called it a few other things too, like Aloha. But yeah, Classic. I remember describing to my users, Salesforce is like the Amazon interface because at the time Amazon had those tabs. The world has gotten away from tabs on websites now. Denise Carbone: They have. Mike: We're too fancy for that. Denise Carbone: When I log into something I'm like, "Wait, where do I go?" So, the intuitiveness of some of these apps and the design is escaping the newer, what's being published today. But it's really, you want to make sure whatever you're building is going to be usable, it's intuitive. All the things like practical foundational serum, best practices should always be applied, and I feel like it's really partnering with who you're...
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Slack Is Redefining the Salesforce Admin Role
09/18/2025
Slack Is Redefining the Salesforce Admin Role
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Nicole Pomponio, Director of Delivery Management and Operations at SaltClick. Join us as we chat about how admins can unlock the full potential of Slack in Salesforce. You should for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Nicole Pomponio. Why Slack is changing what it means to be an admin If you’re planning on coming to Dreamforce this year (or catching it at home), you’re probably going to hear a lot about new ways of combining Agentforce and Slack. That’s why I’m excited I got a chance to sit down with Nicole for this episode and have a conversation about her Dreamforce presentation. Nicole is the Director of Delivery Management and Operations at SaltClick, a consultancy for Salesforce and Slack, so she’s eager to find new ways to get the most out of both platforms. The ever-deepening integration between Salesforce and Slack means there are all sorts of new ways to connect users with data. As Nicole explains, all this means that the entire idea of what an admin can do is becoming more and more expansive. Getting organizational buy-in for Slack If your organization isn’t using Slack, how do you get the buy-in you need to overcome inertia? And if you are using Slack, how do you get the most out of it? Nicole is an admin, but she’s also a decision-maker at SaltClick, and when she puts on her leadership hat, she wants to hear about business problems and possible solutions. So the key to getting buy-in is to reposition Slack from something that sends messages to something that can solve real business problems. “I think the magic of Slack is that when you're using it and when you're using it right, it's easily adopted,” Nicole says, “you don’t have to sell it because when you use it, you showcase it.” For example, identify how many meetings can be eliminated with a dedicated channel on Slack, or show how much you can simplify your team’s workflow with the Jira integration. Tips, tricks, and best practices for Slack As Nicole explains, it’s helpful to establish some rules of the road for how your organization will use Slack. Here are a few tips to get started: Have consistent naming conventions for channels. SaltClick uses prefixes to keep things organized: #ext for external channels, #int for internal channels, and #salt for fun stuff like #salt-babies. Let your users know how to organize things for themselves, especially how to leave or mute a channel that they don’t need to use every day. Make a channel for dedicated Slack support, so you can quickly help folks who get stuck. Establish guidelines for what Slack etiquette means at your organization and any emojis you’re using. Make space for fun, but mostly on a different channel from work. Make sure to check out Nicole’s Dreamforce presentation, in-person or online. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode. Podcast swag Learn more Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Salesforce Admins Blog: Salesforce Admins Blog: Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike: Slack-first doesn't have to mean Slack-only. And today's guest, Nicole Pomponio, tells us why. Nicole is the delivery and operations manager at SaltClick, and she's going to tell us, Salesforce admins, how we can unlock the full potential of Slack and Salesforce. In addition, Nicole shares her journey from accidental admin to leadership, and she gives us some insight into building intentional channel structure, integrating external platforms, like Jira, and reshaping the admin role in this new very connected era. So whether you're Slack-curious or already swimming in salty channels, you're going to walk away with some ideas you can use. And with that, let's get Nicole on the podcast. So Nicole, welcome to the podcast. Nicole Pomponio: Thank you so much for having me, Mike. Super excited to be here. Mike: I'm excited for everything that's coming up for Dreamforce. Last week we got done talking about navigating flow errors as an administrator, and the irony is I had to do a workshop and navigate my own flow error. So it's fortuitous the way things happen sometimes when you report a podcast. Nicole Pomponio: It was meant to be. It was meant to be. Mike: But Slack is a thing, and Slack's been a thing for a while, and you're going to present about Salesforce channels inside Slack. Before we talk about that, let's learn a little bit about you, Nicole. Tell us what you do in your everyday life and how you got into the Salesforce ecosystem. Nicole Pomponio: Absolutely. I have been in the Salesforce ecosystem for about 14 plus years. I stopped counting because it makes me feel old. Got started reporting, and it grew from there. I was lucky enough to become a solo accidental admin, and then the opportunities just spun up from there. My day-to-day life right now, I manage delivery and operations over at SaltClick. We're a consultancy for Salesforce and Slack, so I get to work with very bright people building out super fun solutions for customers and ourselves, and that's Salesforce and Slack together, which also gets me very excited. Mike: I reached the same kind of milestone where my Salesforce experience, somebody said, oh, it's old enough that it could have graduated from high school. Nicole Pomponio: Oh, ouch. Mike: Yeah, burn. Yours at least has a learner's permit. Nicole Pomponio: I'm almost driving, yeah. Mike: Right, almost driving. Nicole Pomponio: I'm almost driving. Mike: There's no segue to talk about Slack and driving. Things you shouldn't do while driving. Nicole Pomponio: There you go. Mike: Have your phone and use Slack. Why do admins need to discover channels in Slack? Nicole Pomponio: It's such a great timely question, Mike. For me, there's no better time because Slack is being positioned in front of Salesforce, and I know we just aged ourselves a little bit, but it's really the first time that I've seen that happen and seen it done in a really meaningful way. So from my perspective, we're starting to see a really close merge of Slack, this communication powerhouse, with Salesforce and having the ability to understand and navigate both right now is going to be such an amazing opportunity, and I think it starts to rewrite the narrative of what an admin is. Mike: Oh, how so? Nicole Pomponio: An admin, I think it's been changing over the years. If we look at what a Salesforce admin historically was, we're creating workflows, we're navigating some fields, some page layouts, and then we're growing from there. We're working with flows, and we're starting to dip our toe into becoming developers maybe, if we want to take that path. And now it's merging more with other platforms. As a Salesforce admin, I need to also understand connected platforms, how to maybe connect to different systems. So over the course of, I think rapidly the past three years, what an admin has been I think is no longer just those foundational Salesforce elements. It's really starting to evolve. So I see that happening too with Slack, so bridging the gap a little bit, expanding out to other systems. So I do think it's shifting, and Slack has helped shaping that. Mike: I mean, I always look at how many meetings are people in. And I remember when Salesforce required Slack. Of course, we had a lot of collaboration tools, and organizations have a lot of collaboration tools. With channels, does the collaboration tool become the channel, or how does it really narrowly define what some of the users are looking for in terms of supplemental data outside of what's on the record? Nicole Pomponio: That Slack channel, now merging with Salesforce, of course, we've got Salesforce channels, really is that collaboration. It's a point where teams are coming together. They're not having to wait for that weekly meeting. I'm not having to wait for my monthly meeting, my weekly meeting. I can work async in Slack, but all of that information is being condensed and surfaced in that Slack channel, so it's easier for us to find what we're looking for. Everything stays together. If we're using threads like we should, all of those answers are within one thread. We're seeing associated files. And now with Salesforce channels, we're seeing that Salesforce data as well in details tabs and related lists. Everything's right there surfaced and condensed for us, so it really creates an efficiency that I don't think we've seen before. Mike: Do you feel in terms of broadening the reach and looking at other platforms, I mean at Salesforce we look at Slack and Salesforce is really just the platform, how have you navigated working with others in your organization to integrate platforms into Salesforce? Nicole Pomponio: It's one of my favorite questions. Mike: Ooh. Nicole Pomponio: I love to bring things into Slack. I really want to, and this is a little bit selfish of me, I just want to be in Slack. I'm biased heavily here. So the more that I can bring in, I think the better it's going to be for me. But also our teams. We talk about Slack being our work operating system and wanting to do more in the flow of work, all these buzzwords and phrases we hear. What does that really mean? It's bringing those systems in, whether it's just the data or it's actually actions and connecting out too. So I think the example that is top of mind for me, because I'm in it constantly, is Jira. So I want to connect with Jira through Slack so that I can create issues, I can update issues. I just get things done faster with pulling in those external systems, the data, but now the actions too, right? Mike: Right. Nicole Pomponio: Which that gets me really excited because if we're talking about our agentic era, then if I start to think about the data that's available to me and the actions I could potentially do, I think natural next step is can I get an agent to do them for me? Which, if we're talking about efficiency, frees up my time for the higher level things. I love to spend my time with people. So I know that was a long way from connecting systems and bringing things in, but it becomes my favorite question because we can start to do so much when we connect systems that we're using every day and when we're actioning in those systems too. Mike: Well I, just for clarity's sake, I prefer the long scenic route of the answer, not the short, short route. Nicole Pomponio: Oh, good. Oh, good. Yeah, mine are long. Mike: Drive around the block, got to see everything, take the long way. Sunday afternoon cruise in the convertible. Nicole Pomponio: Perfect. Mike: So one question I have, and this goes back to maybe I was an admin in a different era, it sounds like your organization is bought in and your leadership is bought in to let's make Slack the interface for a lot of our work. Is that true? Nicole Pomponio: Yeah, we are Slack-first. Mike: Okay. Did you sell that vision or was that a consensus that came down from leadership that you embraced and get to work towards? Nicole Pomponio: I mean, Mike, I would love to take all of the credit for this. Sometimes I do. Just kidding. I don't. It's a top-down, bottom-up type of approach. I think the magic of Slack is that when you're using it and when you're using it right, it's easily adopted, and I don't have to sell it, if you will, because I use it, I showcase it, and then everyone sees the power of that. My favorite thing is the light bulb moments. So the more that we can do that, the easier that story becomes. But I will say when I started at SaltClick, it was almost three years ago, time flies, it was already heavily being used, and one of my predecessors was really starting to push on what is Slack, how can we use it? And I really gravitated toward that, so I just started to pick that up, training sessions for folks, really empowering people and pushing them to Slack's help articles because they're amazing. So it just became a natural conversation for us. And now it's people coming to me saying, hey, can we do this with Slack? I just posted something about Gearset and getting notifications and then linking out to pull requests to understand what's being validated, what's failing. That wasn't my idea. Shout out to Jacob on my team because he knows that we can use Slack for many different things, and he wants to make his own life easier. So it's become a natural conversation for us. What can we do in Slack, and how can we do it? People come to me with half-baked ideas. I love it, and then I just help get it to the finish line. I might have an idea I reach out to somebody about, but it is really all hands in on Slack. Mike: Okay, you win. You got the fun leadership. So let's play the opposite side of that coin. The admin's bought in, you, and you see the vision, you see the potential, but perhaps leadership, they're busy. They don't pay attention 24/7, like you do, to the innovation that's coming out of Salesforce and Slack. But you know your users and you know the pains and the gaps within the organization. What would your advice be for an admin that's maybe going to go to Dreamforce or maybe watched a YouTube video online about Slack or just knows that their organization has Slack, but it's like, to me it's like Slack's like a Ferrari and you use it to go to the store and buy a gallon of milk every week and you don't use it to its full potential. What would your advice be for those admins to get the organization to flip to where you are at? Nicole Pomponio: I think that's such a great question. And just to be fair for the previous question, I am on our leadership team, so that was- Mike: So you have sway there too. Nicole Pomponio: ...it's an unfair advantage for me. But if I put my leadership hat on, what I'm looking for is not just the problem but the solution. So for folks that are trying to navigate, well, how do I really showcase this, it's really difficult sometimes to get enough data to show ROI. But if you go to leaders in your organization, you say, hey, I see this problem. I think that Slack can solve this for us, can fill this gap, here's how we could do it, I don't know many leaders that would just say, hard pass. I don't want to even look at that. I think taking that initiative would really show that you're invested and showing the solution to that problem I think would be phenomenal. I think as leaders we tend to see problems and we have potential solutions, but we really want input and buy-in from the people that are using the tools, right? Mike: Right. Nicole Pomponio: It shouldn't just be the Nicole show. I want to definitely understand that it's going to add value for folks. So if you are one of those people that are really trying to showcase what Slack can do, I would suggest going to Slack sessions at Dreamforce. I would suggest joining the Slack community and making some friends in there. I'll definitely say hi to you, but really poke around at here's a problem I'm trying to solve, what's a way I could do it With Slack? I know I would be willing to help folks, but anyone in the community would be willing to help too. And I bet you, in some of the sessions that you're going to, you're going to see a lot of use cases and a lot of ways to solve those problems. So that's what comes to mind for me when I think, how do I reposition this tool that might just be seen as a way to send messages to something that can actually solve some business problems for us. Mike: I mean, I've felt that way. So you opened up a whole other can of questions when you said you're on leadership. I think that's incredibly awesome that you're a Salesforce admin and you're in leadership. For admins that aren't in leadership, was this just the way that your organization operates, the admin is part of leadership, or how did you get that seat at the table? Nicole Pomponio: Such a great question. Many of your questions are great questions. Mike: I try really hard. I'm thinking of hosting a podcast where I ask questions. What do you think? Nicole Pomponio: I think this would be a great journey for you [inaudible 00:14:58]. Mike: Okay, we'll see how it works out. Nicole Pomponio: I think in our organization I have the flexibility and opportunity to be the Slack owner as well as participate in being that Salesforce admin as well. It's a shared responsibility, so it's not just me doing it. But because of the experiences I've had, not only being a Salesforce admin, being a Salesforce BA, being the doer and the navigator in different business units in my past life, I've been able to take that with me wherever I go. So it is a gift that I'm able to bring at SaltClick to be able to do multiple things, but I really enjoy coaching others on that too. So for me in leadership, it's been very powerful because I can understand how we can use our systems to really solve our business needs. And again, SaltClick gives me the opportunity to continue to do the things that bring me joy. Mike: That's a really good, really good answer. See good questions, good answers. On the subject of Slack, because I'd love to know, how often do you communicate with your users broadly? Do you have a dedicated Slack channel? Do you run help through Slack? Is there a place for them to ask questions? How do you run user engagement on your end? Nicole Pomponio: So from the SaltClick lens, we have fun channels. We have learning channels, training channels. We have chit-chat channels. We all have some salty channels as well because we like to have fun. We have Salty Babies and Salty Pets. I'm a jokester, and I can't help but bring corny jokes into every aspect of my life. And then as a Slack community group leader, I have a channel in our Slack workspace as well. So from the Slack community lens, the engagement there is really answering questions that come in. Sometimes you're going to get a meme. Sometimes you'll get some help articles and some directions and a path forward. And it's really posting consistently there to help people understand that you're there for them, that you can bring them information in the flow of their lives that's going to help them. On the SaltClick side, it really is about trying to organize because I did some kind of research pretty recently to understand how many channels are we in, how many messages and files and all kinds of stuff are we sending around. It's a lot. I think on average people are in 100 or 200 channels, so the noise can become pretty robust. You want to try and organize that and make it meaningful. So really helping navigate with channel descriptions. What are we even doing in this channel, what's our goal, what can you expect? Letting people know that they don't have to be in a channel. They can exit it. They can leave. They can set their own notifications. I really like to advocate for not only the way that we have our channels set up, but the way that they can help themselves in that experience as well. But we have all kinds of fun. I think my favorite is probably the Salty Babies one. Mike: I won't dig into that because who knows where that goes. I would like to know because, and we have this a little bit at Salesforce, did you enforce or did you... Enforce sounds bad. I don't have a different word for it. Parameter, I don't know, fence. Did you put out guidelines? That feels the best. Nicole Pomponio: Guidelines feels right. Mike: You put out guidelines. Guidepost, yeah. Because people can name channels whatever they want, did you put out a naming thing so that people know... You mentioned salty channels and chit-chat channels, and boy, say that one five times fast. Nicole Pomponio: I can't. I can't. Mike: I will. I'll just get myself kicked off the air. And work channels, and we have that at Salesforce too, did you...
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Navigating Flow Errors as a New Salesforce Admin
09/11/2025
Navigating Flow Errors as a New Salesforce Admin
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to David Simpson, Salesforce Admin at the 1916 Company. Join us as we chat about his process for troubleshooting Flow errors and his unexpected path into the Salesforce ecosystem. You should for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with David Simpson. Why can Flow errors be so intimidating? If you’ve ever received an emergency ticket from a user because they’ve encountered a Flow error, you know just how cryptic they can be. It’s not always clear at first glance what’s going on, or what your user can do to fix it. What’s more, if you’re hearing about an error from a user, that means it’s made it to production. So now you need to start worrying about your testing and anything else that might pop up. And oh yeah, you need to fix the dang thing, too. That’s why I was so excited to sit down this week with David Simpson. He’s doing a Dreamforce presentation about how to better navigate Flow errors and how to prevent them from happening in the first place. Five steps to resolve a Flow error David breaks down the process of fixing a Flow error into five steps: Gather information about the Flow error. What’s in the error notification? Is it specific to a particular user or record? Try to replicate the error in a sandbox environment. Find the fix. Test the fix in your sandbox, and test for any similar scenarios. Push your fix to production. David emphasizes the importance of communicating with stakeholders at every stage of your solve. You don’t need to share every single detail, but you want to make sure your user knows that you’ve identified the error, how long it will take to fix it, and if there are any workarounds in the meantime. Reach out to the community We also discuss David’s path from finance into the Salesforce ecosystem. He started out as a staff accountant, but when he was asked to take over some of the Salesforce administration duties, he realized he loved working with the platform far more than burying his head in spreadsheets. Finally, I ask David about his top tips for getting better at solving Flow errors. He points to the Trailblazer community and Salesforce help articles as two of his best resources. However, he also suggests getting hands-on in a sandbox by trying to build things that might break. It’s a low-risk way to flex your problem-solving skills and will give you valuable experience for when a real error ends up in production. Make sure to listen to our full conversation for more from David about how to solve Flow errors. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode. Podcast swag Learn more Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike: Ever had a flow error throw your day off track? You're not alone. This week on the podcast, we welcome David Simpson, Salesforce Admin at the 1916 Company who's bringing his session from Dreamforce navigating flow errors as a new admin right into your old earbuds. David's going to walk us through his process for troubleshooting errors, he shares tips for smarter flow testing, and we even talk about his unexpected path from finance into the Salesforce ecosystem. Now, if you've ever stared down an Apex exception email and wondered what is this trying to tell me? I promise you this episode is for you. So with that, let's get David on the podcast. So David, welcome to the podcast. David Simpson: Thank you for having me. Mike: Let's get started with what you do in the Salesforce ecosystem and the topic you're going to talk about at Dreamforce this year. David Simpson: Sounds good. My name is David Simpson. I am a Salesforce Administrator at the 1916 Company. I have been an admin for a little over eight years now and a flownatic for over five years now, and my session is Navigating Flow Errors as a New Salesforce Administrator. Mike: Okay, do you have a robe? David Simpson: I had a cape from being an awesome admin back at Dreamforce 2018, but that has been lost in multiple moves. Mike: Okay, well I'll say this publicly. I have an extra one in my basement and I'm going to get it after this podcast. You getting the cape back. David Simpson: Sounds good to me. Mike: So there we got that solved and all 35 people who are listening are like, cool, David's getting a cape, what else can I learn? But I saw your session. So navigating flow errors as a new administrator. I think for me, I've built demos for Flow. I am nowhere near Jennifer Lee level, Jennifer Lee's admin evangelist on my team. I think she knows more about Flow than Flow knows about itself. But I've always, I'll run into that error and be like, cool. I don't know Jennifer, what do I do? And for those people that don't have Jennifers, why are flow errors daunting? David Simpson: Flow errors can be daunting first off because the error message itself can be very vague. You're dealing with developer query language and it might not be incredibly clear on first glance what the error is. So you have this issue where your end user or your stakeholder is stopped in doing their job, and they get some cryptic error that they don't know how they can fix it and they are now looking to you and now you have to decipher this cryptic error message. So it can be pretty daunting even when you have experience in the Salesforce ecosystem to know exactly where to go and what to do to solve that error. Mike: So when do you find... New administrators, even experienced administrators get flow errors. Are you focused on when users get the flow error or when the admin is building a flow and testing it? David Simpson: So it's actually both. My session is planning on covering what happens when you encounter an error, more specifically once it's live in your production environment and maybe somebody has encountered it and maybe your testing didn't cover that aspect. How you can handle that, how you can troubleshoot it and get to the bottom of it. But then also how you can do some more comprehensive testing when building your flows. So if you get those errors, you can adjust them immediately or you can read those errors and understand what you have to do without going through a bunch of help documents online and figuring out what that code means. Mike: Yeah. So let's take us through David's thought process when you get a flow error. What happens? David Simpson: So the first thing I do is I go see how I was notified of the flow error. If it is an Apex exception email, I'll read through the Apex exception email and try and see, okay, who caused this? What's the record? What step in the process did it fail? And just all of that information that's in those emails. Alternatively, if it happened to have been triggered via a Flows fault path, I will then investigate that notification. But then what I try to do is I first see what the error message is, if it's something that I'm familiar with, if it seems like it might be related to a validation rule or permissions or just general access, I'll see if I can address that quickly. But if it's something a little bit more convoluted or harder to decipher, normally what I like to do is to take that same flow and we have sandboxes, so I'll go into the sandbox and I'll just try to replicate those steps. I will perhaps use the flow debug and run it as the user who encountered the issue. Maybe I'll try and recreate the record if it feels like a particularly daunting error and then just run through the flow and see where it fails. Those are normally my processes and through that I will eventually encounter the cause of the error. And then at that point it's just going through the process of fixing the error in the flow, performing more tests to make sure that I've covered that as well as any other potential unexpected issues that might arise from the change and then getting that pushed out, all the while communicating to whoever encountered the issue that this is being taken care of, this is the ETA, and if possible, any workarounds for that fix and error. Mike: Wow, you're better than the local mechanic that works on your car. Here's my car, it's making a noise. Three weeks later, you find anything out? David Simpson: Yeah. With Salesforce, it's really nice because there is so much information that it can almost seem a little bit overwhelming, but that information can be used to get to the problem a lot faster. We're not getting just some generic error that says, oh, an issue occurred, good luck. We're getting a more specific error that is pointing us where we need to go. We just need to be able to translate that into human readable language in order to solve it. Mike: Yeah, so I'm thinking of this. You've mentioned you've been an admin for eight years now, that's a decent time in the seat. How has working with Flow changed over time for you? David Simpson: It has gotten so much better, so much easier, but also more complicated. I remember just a few years ago having to perform a process builder that triggers an auto-launched flow that might have some issues accessing certain records or a collection of records. And throughout the years with all of these releases and updates, it's just gotten a lot easier and more intuitive. A great example would be just the introduction of an auto-layout in a flow. Being able to see that clear process and order of operations to the flows, it's really helped. But also with all of these features, it does get a little bit more complex. What is the best element to put on your flow in order for this to not only run but run efficiently? Is it multiple update records? Is it doing a loop and an assignment and then an update? Is it using Transform? There's so many options and there's no particular right way to do a lot of stuff, which is really freeing. You can get super creative with these solutions and I think that that's been an awesome thing. And not to mention testing, going back to the flow errors. The recent introduction of an enhanced flow debug has really made my life a lot easier. I can see so much more detail in what's going on in my flows than what I just built. I can see the technical specs behind it, and that's really helped me narrow down what exactly needs to be done or what needs to be fixed in my flows when I do encounter an issue. Mike: I'm going to say this respectfully. You sound like you have a lot of technical knowledge coming into the role of Salesforce Admin. David Simpson: Oh, well thank you. Mike: What was your history before being a Salesforce Admin? David Simpson: Before I was a Salesforce Admin, I actually worked in accounting and finance. I was a staff accountant. Mike: Oh, detail. Hello? David Simpson: Yeah. Very process-oriented, very consistent in my day to day, and I at one point made a transition from being a staff accountant to a financial analyst, which was just essentially more spreadsheets. But during that time, my supervisor said, "Hey, I administer our Salesforce instance here. I think you'd be good at it. I need some help. Our professional services team, they put their opportunities in and we need to clean up their financials at the end of each month, but you should probably know the system in which they're putting this in." So he gave me an admin license and told me go on Trailhead, start learning some of the beginner stuff, and I just instantly fell in love with it. I love the problem solving aspect. I love the ability that there's so much you can do and build, that Salesforce is just a canvas of process creativity that I said, you know what? I don't think I want to do finance related work anymore. I want to do Salesforce full time. Mike: Wow. Okay. So that's another podcast I'm going to have you on because I want to talk about career path. I think that'd be really cool, but I can see now the structured way that Flows work really could appeal to an accounting mindset. Is that the first feature that you really gravitated to? David Simpson: Interesting that you asked that. It did take me a few years to get into the flow space and the automation space. When I became an admin, the first automations I touched were Workflow and a little bit of Process Builder, but I was really moreso focused on user access and just general custom object setup. It wasn't until a few years into being an admin that my manager, I had switched jobs, he said, "I need you to build this automation and it's not going to work in Process Builder. It's not going to work in Workflow. You'll have to do Flow." And I was very intimidated at the point. But I had a mentor who walked me through flows that they had built and it just clicked. It was so logical and just made so much sense while still being flexible that it was, I didn't go back to Workflows and Process Builders unless I absolutely needed to. Mike: Yeah. David Simpson: So yeah, it took a few years, but once I was on the flow train, I could not stop. Mike: Yeah, no, I get you. I remember seeing Flow in its early early days back in 2012 when you used to have to actually download software to use it and the various iterations that it went through. But it's very useful now I think because of the visual aspect of it. David Simpson: Yes. Mike: I'm a very visual person and I've always, that's the thing that I loved about Process Builder was it looked like a process flow that you would diagram, and I'm glad that Flow has caught back up to that now. David Simpson: Yeah. Mike: Where do you stand on, so new admins, building flows, I've seen all kinds of flows. What's your process on how complicated you get a flow and testing it as you get more complicated? David Simpson: Well, the complexity of a flow, I try to start by being simple first and only using some basic decision elements and update or create records elements, something that is really just a simple if/then statement and then add the complexities as the business requirements change. But with every single change that is made, I just test. That debug button is right there on the flow and is so easy to use. You just click it, pick a record or put your inputs in and let it run and just make sure that you're seeing everything that should be happening with each step. It's like cooking. You should be tasting as you go to make sure that nothing unexpected is happening. And you can do the same with the flow. You add a new element, you click the debug and you test it. You add a couple of decisions or a loop, click that debug and test it. So it can get as complicated or as complex as you need it to be. But you can also just start very simple and you can test along the way and it will come out fine, just provided that you're being proactive in your testing. Mike: Yeah, no, sometimes I just dive in, I just want to build the whole thing and then it throws a million errors and I'm like, I should have built this more step-by-step. What was I thinking? It's the reason when they build houses, they home inspectors come at every stage. There's a reason for that. Let's talk about screen flows. I'm sure you touch on them in your session. I personally think they're really cool. I'm from, I was a Salesforce admin back in '06, and I remember thinking if only I could do a screen pop that walked people through filling out an account page or something, and now I could right? My fear if somebody turned me loose as an admin or I would do screen flows for everything. What is your decisioning on should I make this screen flow or not? David Simpson: I am incredibly pro screen flow, much like yourself. In our company, we use screen flows for almost everything that requires end user interaction. The idea is to provide our users only what they need to interact with or change or take action on, and nothing beyond that for both an efficiency sake and also to make sure that there's no confusion or there's potential bad data. So we utilize opportunities to process our sales. We actually use Salesforce as our main point of sale, and when they go to close out their sales, they click a button which triggers a screen flow that says "Have you gotten all of your tasks in order for this opportunity? Do you have the opportunity products added? Are they available for sale? Have you synced this opportunity to our external system?" And then all they have to do is just fill out a few fields, probably less than a dozen throughout the entire screen flow, and then it completes the sale for them. Similarly, when they want to create a brand new sale, they click a button on the account that creates a screen flow instead of the new opportunity standard action. Because it has many less fields on it, they only need to fill out, okay, who the customer is, what's the deal name, and then some just basic additional info that our customer experience team likes to have. So it's a very streamlined process and we find that it not only saves them clicks, but it saves them time and gets them back to helping out their clients a lot faster. So I'm very much screen flow. I just gave an example about opportunities, but we use it throughout the entire Salesforce org. Mike: Yeah, no, I'm with you. Pop a flow for everything. That'd be what I would do. So you're going to present this at Dreamforce next month. For people going, they'll see the presentation, not everybody goes and they listen. For people not going, but still really want to dig into what are things I should understand or how should I navigate flow errors as an administrator, what are some resources that helped you learn how to read through those error messages and understand them as a Salesforce administrator? David Simpson: So the first thing I would suggest is the Trailblazer community. There are so many helpful people on those forums, and if you encounter an issue, you can post a question and in a matter of minutes you'll get a response. But they're also just generally friendly people and they just want to see you succeed and they will help you out. So that is an incredible resource. Just the community that is built up around Salesforce and administrators is so great, and I highly recommend that if you ever run into an issue that you check out the Trailblazer community. Additionally, the Salesforce help articles have been super helpful for me. They're a little bit more technical. They're more about the steps that a process or a system can do, but those are also great for getting a foundational knowledge. And then the third and final resource that I would say is just build and break in a sandbox. Just try to make things that don't work and see what happens, and then try to fix them. Because it's a sandbox and it's not real data you're not at risk of causing any issues. But I learned the most by making mistakes, by building a flow and maybe not testing it thoroughly enough or forgetting a field or forgetting a step where I get a certain record and then seeing what that error is and then adjusting that. That generally happens to all of us eventually, but try and do it deliberately and see what error results you get back. You'll be surprised to find that they're the same errors that you get when you're not trying to make mistakes. So a great way to learn is just by simply doing. Mike: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I'm from the days when you used to get a little help box and you just hit this most frustrating error and try it again, try it again, try it again. It goes back to that was it Thomas Edison, he didn't find one way to invent the light bulb, he found 99 ways to not invent the light bulb or something like that. I feel like we're all that way. I've found 99 different ways to make a flow not work out of trial and error. And sometimes that's all it takes. But you can only read so much and then you have to actually go do and try things out and poke around in the org. So last thing that's on my mind, and I wonder. AI in the last few years has just...
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How Can Admins Use Slack to Manage AI Agents More Easily?
09/04/2025
How Can Admins Use Slack to Manage AI Agents More Easily?
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jim Ray, Director of Developer Relations and Advocacy at Slack. Join us as we chat about enhancements to Workflow Builder, the Slack features everyone should be using, and the future of AI and Slack. You should for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jim Ray. Usability upgrades to core Slack features Jim and his team have been improving the core Slack experience. “We’ve really been focusing on those little paper cuts, the smaller features that just never quite made it into the next release,” he says. So essentially, Slack is a little better everywhere. One area they’ve focused on is Workflow Builder. In particular, they’ve added new branching functionality—allowing admins to create conditional paths like “if/then” logic. They’ve also been hard at work upgrading canvases and lists. With new data like AI-generated meeting notes, canvases provide a central place for all the relevant information. Jim also urges you to check out lists as a sort of “semi-database” for data you want handy in Slack. Slack’s AI vision centralizes agent interactions For Jim, Slack is one of the best tools to interact with and fully take advantage of the AI agents you build with Agentforce. It’s already the place your team communicates with each other, so why not be able to loop in AI teammates? “In the same way that Slack is the single place where every person in your organization is communicating, now it's the place where you're all working with those agents,” Jim says. And so his team is looking at how Slack can bring together every AI agent your team uses, whether they’re built in Agentforce or another third-party platform. Dreamforce 2025 will spotlight Salesforce-Slack integration I asked Jim for a sneak preview of what he has in store for Dreamforce 2025, and he did not disappoint. We’ve come a long way with tools like Salesforce channels and the ability to deploy an Agentforce agent directly to Slack. Now his team is working on ways to deepen the integration. So look for improvements to search and embedded Salesforce data in the coming year. There are so many more great insights into how you can get the most out of Slack in the Agentforce era, so be sure to listen to our full conversation with Jim. And be sure to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode. Podcast swag Learn more Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast. This week we're catching up with Jim Ray from Slack because it's very conversational. He's going to walk us through what's new in Slack from major releases that you may or may not have been paying attention to on Workflow Builder, Lists, and Canvases to, of course, all of the latest around AI and Agentforce. Plus, we're going to talk about what's coming at Dreamforce this year and how admins and developers like yourself can get the most out of Slack. So whether you're all in on automation or just exploring Slack's potential, I promise you there's something here for you. So you've already got those earbuds in? Let's get Jim on the podcast. So Jim, welcome back to the podcast. Jim Ray: Mike, thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be back. I'm excited to talk to admins and maybe we'll talk a little bit about what's coming at Dreamforce. Mike: I mean all the things, because it's not that I didn't want you back sooner. It's just a really big platform and there's so many things to talk about. Jim Ray: Of course. Mike: But we use Slack every day at Salesforce and a lot of our customers do too. So it's been a while since we've chatted, but what's some of the big stuff that Slack has come out with this year that admins should be excited for if they haven't been paying attention? Jim Ray: Oh, that's such a great question, and obviously we use Slack every day as well, and nobody uses Slack quite like Slack uses Slack. Mike: Oh. Jim Ray: And I think that's probably true for Salesforce in some ways too. But we've been really excited to talk to some of our admins. We're continuing to learn more about the Salesforce developers in particular, and so always excited to hear about the use cases there. A few exciting things that have come out recently that I think will be pretty interesting. So our Workflow Builder product, so this is our no-code automation product that's built right into Slack, I think that's probably something that a lot of Salesforce admins and Slack admins are using. I like to think of Workflow Builder as the front door to the platform. And it's certainly adjacent to the platform in a lot of ways. So we've had some really great development happening in Workflow Builder. Something I'm actually really proud of is we've been really focusing on the core user experience of Workflow Builder. We've got a whole team that's working on something that internally we call Back to Basics, which is really just all about focusing on those little paper cuts or the smaller features that just never quite made it into the next release. So they've been building that out. So hopefully just the experience of using Workflow Builder is a little bit nicer, which is something that we always aim for. Mike: I never found it bad. Jim Ray: It's not that it's been bad, it's just that as the- Mike: To be fair. Jim Ray: Yeah, it's a great point. As the surface area of Workflow Builder has grown, we've added lots of new functionality and we've just needed to go back and polish here and spit-shine there. Mike: Sure. I mean, for me as an admin, it was the most intuitive thing that I could immediately jump into and kind of feel like I made a difference when we got Slack and when we started setting up channels. Because I think you probably hear this a lot, but to me the fallacy of, well, Slack is just where we communicate. No, you can actually guide the communication, and we do that with our team to help get the right information to the right spots. Because there's data and then there's contextual data, which is the conversation, and that's where we use a lot of workflows. And I was almost overwhelmed by the number of options that I had on ways and things I could do with the conversation or the input, like we use it, like an input form. I was like, "Wow." Jim Ray: Right, exactly. Mike: "Oh my God, now I got to go back and rethink this." It wasn't something where I was diving into it and thinking, "Okay, well, I'll just figure out what I got and just work with what I had." It was showing up to the grocery store and being like, "Oh, so you guys really do have everything? All right, cool." Kind of wasn't expecting that. I was expecting three kinds of cheeses and you got a whole cheese counter. Jim Ray: That's really great to hear. And even with the addition of things like Lists and Canvases, which are some features that we're continuing to expand on, we released those a while ago and obviously we use them a ton internally, but we're hearing from our customers that they're putting more and more of their mission-critical data. Canvases are fantastic because it's a really lightweight form of documents. You're not overwhelmed with all the different formatting options, but they're still really quite powerful, still a great way to capture information and add context to your channels. And my team uses them with Notes and with some of the AI generated notes that are happening within huddles and things like that. But I think Lists are another place that we're seeing a ton of value with things like Workflow Builder. So you were saying you've got an input form, but where are you going to put that once somebody has filled out the form? Lists are a perfect place for that. And again, it's not a full-blown database or even as powerful as something like an Excel or a Google Sheet, but if you just need to capture that data and you want it native inside of Slack, something that's searchable inside of Slack, something that you can easily add workflows to, I love Lists. And so they're both really fantastic features. Mike: I haven't used Lists. I can't speak for them yet, but I have used Canvases. Jim Ray: If you don't need something as full-featured as Jira, for instance. Mike: Maybe that's why. Jim Ray: My team, we use Lists a lot to track the projects that we're working on. We don't need a full suite of Jira tools. We're not working [inaudible 00:06:19] and things like that. So it's actually a really great way to do some lightweight project management as well. Mike: Ooh, I like that. You said a magic word, AI. Jim Ray: Yes. Mike: So I feel like Slack's built for AI because AI everywhere is just conversation, and I'm like, "Well, naturally, that's Slack." So talk to me about Agentforce and AI and Slack. Jim Ray: Absolutely. Before I jump to AI, I do want to mention one more Workflow Builder feature- Mike: Oh, yeah. Jim Ray: ... that I want people to check out is this is probably the longest standing request, which is the ability to branch your workflows. Essentially think of them as an if statement or a case statement if you're a programmer. But this was, when we gave people the ability to start doing some automation, the first thing they said is, "Oh, I need to branch my automation." So if they hit this button, do this thing, and if they hit this button, do that thing. We have finally built that into the product. It's a really fantastic way to make your automations even more powerful. If you are a programmer or if you're a developer and you're building on the Slack platform, one thing that I like about the new branching feature is that you can actually handle a lot of the, for lack of a better word, validation that you would normally be doing on the back end. Now, you can do a lot of that on the front end inside of Workflow Builder itself. So quick plug for branches there, another fantastic feature that we rolled out to Workflow Builder. And it's going to make those workflows even more powerful, but now we're ready to talk AI. Mike: Yeah, no, that's good. I do like that. I kind of want to play with that now. Jim Ray: It's really great. So yeah, so with AI, obviously, and Mike, as you implied, Slack is the best place to interface with the agents that are popping up in every single application that we use. And in some ways this is a return to form for Slack and the Slack platform. So when Slack launched in 2014, part of the reason that we were able to be so successful is we were riding this wave of a few trends that were happening in the industry. One of them, I'm sure you remember, DevOps. And DevOps was hugely successful to Slack being successful because a lot of our earliest customers were startups, engineering-focused organizations, media organizations, places that understood kind of the basic premise of DevOps, and we could just plug Slack right into it. So many developers looked at Slack and they were like, "Oh, this will fit right into my GitHub pipeline or my Jenkins pipeline, and then I can just pipe messages right into Slack. I can have all my entire engineering team in a channel and they can all come take a look at this." But as the platform grew and evolved, we added all of these features for interactivity. We added Block Kit, which is our UI composition framework. And now that we have all of these large language model and other generative AI tools, it is kind of this return to form for the platform in many ways. And so 10 years ago, if you wanted to build a Slack app that interacted with you, it was almost like a command line more than anything. It wasn't a natural place to chat. You would kind of send off some commands and then wait for the response. It felt very much like using a terminal or a Unix command line or something like that. But now with all of these LLM tools that are being plugged into all of the various systems of record, Slack is of course the place to bring all of that into the same place where you're working with your colleagues. And that's kind of been the basic pitch of the platform for a long time. Mike: So I do want to touch on that because it's a thing that I've been thinking of a lot. And of course it's the admin podcast, but that doesn't mean that admins don't code. Jim Ray: Sure. Mike: Lots of admins code and they just choose to identify as admins. Some developers only code. I don't want the perception to be, well, Slack is just for admins because they don't have to write code to do anything. But I think as you sit and look at when you're working with your team, whatever, of stakeholders, it's an admin and a developer, especially at a large organization, probably an architect. There's a lot of roles involved. Slack can really interface with a lot of different products that you have across the enterprise. What do we do for admins that had to be like, "No, let me talk to my developer because Slack is very developer friendly"? When we say Slack is very developer friendly, what do we mean by that? Jim Ray: Well, I like to think that our platform, first and foremost, is just one that developers really like to use. Again, that was something that was really critical to the success of the platform pretty early on. It doesn't feel like developing on a piece of enterprise software. And so we would hear from these developers that were used to these massive Java stacks, or they had to use an SDK that they weren't familiar with, or even a programming language that they weren't familiar with. And the premise for the Slack platform from the very beginning, and this is still true today, is that you can bring whatever programming language you want to. We make some first party SDKs available, but you don't have to use those. We have some frameworks that are even a little bit higher level than the SDKs. Those are all available in Python, Java, and JavaScript, but you don't have to use them if you don't want to. We have some amazing community-developed SDKs and frameworks as well. So that's the initial thinking as to what makes developing on the Slack platform great. But then the other part is that you can do things with the Slack platform that really you couldn't do with other forms of communication. They just didn't make sense in the context of email, for example. Even if you wanted to use email as the ultimate endpoint, it kind of didn't make sense because an email inbox is a one-to-one relationship with every person in the organization. Well, there's no really good way to collaborate until you pull people into these channels. And so that was another part of Slack's big success we kind of created, and again, we were pulling from a lot of what was happening in the world at the time, but we pulled a lot of these ideas and we put them into this kind of channel-based interface. And now you bring groups of people together that are working on a similar project, similar feature. And then when you layer on top of that, the platform pieces, that's where it starts to get really powerful. So again, think about your engineering org within your organization. So you've got a team and they get an alert from somebody has pushed some code and the tests fail. Well, now everybody on that team can see why the tests failed. So the engineer who pushed the code, that test probably wouldn't have failed if they knew what the problem was. So another engineer that might have a different bit of context, oh, I just checked in this bit of code, that's probably why your tests are breaking, for example. They can see that. And so now you're maximizing that visibility. And so when we layer on these other tools, to bring us back to this AI, so now every tool that you're using in your organization, they're starting to add these agentic features. And we were talking about, so if you're an admin, well, Slack now becomes the place. Rather than having to administer an agent in every single platform that you use, you bring those agents into Slack, so now you have a single place to work with them. In the same place that Slack is the single place where every person in your organization is communicating, now it's the place where you're all working with those agents. And so we're not there yet. We're still working on it. Obviously Agentforce is the best place to, if you're just getting started with this and you have a ton of data inside of Salesforce, of course Agentforce is the place where you're going to go, maybe try out some of these agents built on top of your data. But as we're seeing many of our partners, many of the other SaaS tools that our customers are using, all of these agent features are being built on top of the systems of record that they manage. And so what we've got, we've made those same AI features available to everybody on the platform. So now anybody can build an agent that works inside of Slack. And if you're an admin, this is fantastic news because now you've just got one place to manage all of these. Mike: And we use agents a lot at Salesforce. It's kind of fun. Sometimes I don't know where to look for my approvals. Jim Ray: Yeah. Mike: One thing to look forward to, bury the lead there, Dreamforce, it's coming now. Jim Ray: Absolutely. Absolutely. Mike: They just announced the band. Are you going to go? Jim Ray: I have never made it. Usually, because I'm so swamped, I've never made it to see the show. Mike: I know. Jim Ray: But we've got two choices this year, I think. Is this the first time that there's going to be two different stages? Mike: I don't know. I feel like they're doing that now because there's a generation of us that are coming up in the years, and then there's a younger generation. I remember a couple Dreamforces ago, I didn't even know one of the opening acts. Jim Ray: Oh, boy. Mike: And I was like, "Oh, I didn't know what my parents feel like now when I was a kid, and be like, "But Mom, of course it's Michael Jackson." Jim Ray: Right, exactly. Mike: "Duh." And that happened. I'm with you though. I have been once to the concert because that year we had the admin keynote the first day and we could go and it was almost like, I don't know, a celebration for us because it's like, "Yay, our keynote's over, we can go." Jim Ray: Oh, nice. Mike: And it was fun because it was Foo Fighters. I don't know if you were around then. I can't remember the year, but it was the one year it felt like it was out in a field or somewhere. Jim Ray: I think that was our first year as an official Salesforce company. Mike: Okay. I went, we got in, it was like, "Okay, I really need something to eat." They had hamburgers and stuff. I had that. And I was like, "Oh, the stage is that way. Let's walk that way." We got to what we thought the stage was, it was a giant TV screen. Jim Ray: Oh, no. Mike: Because they had all these satellite stages. Jim Ray: Yeah, exactly. Mike: And I was like, "Oh, well, this isn't so bad." And it was Foo Fighters, which was awesome. It was one of the years that Dave Grohl broke his foot, and so he was in that really cool throne. But I mean, of all the people that could still put on a show, he put on a show. Jim Ray: Nice. Mike: And I looked over and I was like, "Well, no, it looks like the stage is over there." Long story short, we ended up walking to all three of the satellite stages and never found the main stage because we kept thinking we were. And I was like, "You know what? I think this is the point at which I need to stop going to the concerts because-" Jim Ray: Yeah, there you go. And so this year we have a choice between, and you were talking about that generational divide, so it'll be very obvious. We've got Metallica on one stage and then Benson Boone on the other. Mike: Yes. Yes. Jim Ray: I can definitely remember buying Metallica on cassette tape. Mike: Yeah. Yep. I used to buy Metallica stuff when you could go to the convenience store and...
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What Is True to the Core Deep Dive?
08/28/2025
What Is True to the Core Deep Dive?
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to LeeAnne Rimel, Senior Director of Admin and Developer Strategic Content at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about True to the Core Deep Dive and how it will give Salesforce Admins more chances to engage with product leaders, ask questions, and influence the roadmap. You should for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with LeeAnne Rimel. True to the Core with a spin If you’ve been to a Dreamforce or TDX, you’re probably familiar with True to the Core. Typically, it’s a keynote session with Salesforce product leaders where you can get key insights and engage them in a Q&A. However, as LeeAnne points out, we’ve noticed over the years that there isn’t always time to go deep on a particular topic. That’s why we’re launching a special monthly video series, True to the Core Deep Dive. Each month, we’ll focus in on one core Salesforce Platform product area, with product leaders there to answer questions and really get down to the nitty-gritty. First episode focus: Setup and user access management For our first episode, we looked at the most highly voted topic area on IdeaExchange: Setup and user access management. So we sat down with Senior PMs Cheryl Feldman and Elizabeth Martin to walk through recent feature updates and look at what’s on the roadmap. The highlight was definitely the 40-minute question and answer section, which really let us go so much deeper than your average keynote session. Other product owners Larry Tong and Laurent Kubaski were firing away answering even more questions in the chat. If you missed it, be sure to check out the video on LinkedIn or YouTube. We need you to help pick future topics If LeeAnne wants you to take one thing away from this episode, it’s that we need you to help us pick future topics. That’s right, this series is all about transparency and that includes topic selection. So each episode ends with a survey to determine what next month’s episode will be about. “I read every single comment,” LeeAnne says, “we read all of the feedback and it directly informs every episode we’re going to put together.” So tune in next month for the first community-chosen topic, Flow testing and debugging, and help us figure out what to look at next. Be sure to listen to the full episode for more from LeeAnne about what she’s working on for Dreamforce. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us in your feed every Thursday. Podcast swag Learn more Salesforce Admins Blog: LinkedIn: YouTube: Admin Trailblazers Group Social Full show transcript Mike: Welcome to Salesforce Admins Podcast. Today, we're diving into a brand new way that Salesforce is connecting with the community called True to the Core Deep Dive. So LeeAnne Rimel, who's been on the podcast before, is going to join me and talk about this new series that gives you, the Salesforce admin, more chances to engage with product leaders, ask questions, and influence the roadmap based on your feedback. You'll have to hear how the first episode went. I'll have the link in the show notes. We're going to hear a little bit about what's coming next, but more importantly, how you can shape future topics. So if you're as excited as I am, keep walking or riding the train or listening, and let's get LeeAnne on the podcast. So LeeAnne, welcome back to the podcast. LeeAnne Rimel: Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me. Mike: Yeah, it's been exciting. And last I checked, there was live, there some event that just melted my social feeds about True to the Core, so we have to start there. Tell me what's going on. LeeAnne Rimel: Well, we love True to the Core and we love True to the Core so much that we are bringing it to you virtually throughout the year. So if you're not familiar with True to the Core, if you haven't attended True to the Core in the past, it's a program with Salesforce that typically is a keynote setting at TrailblazerDX and at Dreamforce where all of our senior product leadership, senior Salesforce executives get on stage and they talk about Salesforce and the future of Salesforce and they answer questions from the audience. And I think, I should know this, I can't remember exactly when it started, but it's more than 10 years old. So it's a little bit of a fan favorite if you've been in the Salesforce ecosystem for a while because it's such a great opportunity to get transparency into roadmap, to ask very direct questions about things that impact you as a Salesforce professional. However, we got feedback from our community about True to the Core that there wasn't enough of them. We only really do it at Dreamforce and at TrailblazerDX typically. And the product suite has gotten big. There's a lot of features, there's a lot of product in the Salesforce world, as we all know. So it was a little bit like a mile wide, an inch deep, I think is how people were feeling. Like, yes, maybe I got the opportunity to ask a question, but I wanted to spend more time on that question and more time in that area with the product managers. So with that context, that's why we created True to the Core Deep Dive. So that's what we launched in August. August 12th was the first episode. And it's very much directly in response to that community feedback that we heard. We want more opportunities for this feedback loop. We want more transparency into roadmap. We want to ask more questions, we want to dive deeper into specific features that matter to us. So the first episode, which you can find on LinkedIn, was in August. And it was with Cheryl Feldman and Elizabeth Martin, who look after set up and user access. And it was so much fun, Mike. We did like 40 minutes of questions, which is a ton. So it was a lot of- Mike: It's still not enough. It's still not enough. LeeAnne Rimel: Not enough. I know, I hear you. I did see a couple notes- Mike: You could do 400 minutes of questions, still not enough. LeeAnne Rimel: I know. I know. But it's definitely more than we had before. So we did over 40 minutes of questions, ton of live Q&A. We had product owners Larry Tung and Laurent we're in the chat also firing away. It was the meme of doing the keyboard and the keyboard's lighting on fire because we're typing so fast. I felt like they were just answering so many questions in the chat about pilot programs, about roadmap, and then really specific technical questions about things that members of the community are facing. So it was really exciting. I'm really proud of it. I'm really excited that it's so deeply connected to community feedback. I think it's really important. That's basically the north star of True to the Court Deep Dive is community feedback and community voting and community questions. So it was really fun. It was great. Mike: So if they missed that first August 12th episode, we'll link to that. You could still watch, it's still worth watching, right? LeeAnne Rimel: Oh, absolutely. I think there was a ton Cheryl and Elizabeth, like I said, they look after user access and permissions, so they shared some of what's coming. They also shared, Cheryl shared, "Here's things that we're not working on," right? Because we're really active on the idea exchange and they- Mike: Can't work on everything. LeeAnne Rimel: Yeah, and I think that level of transparency is one of the reasons that Cheryl is so well-connected with the community and really listens to the community is like we need to know, as admins, as developers, we need to know what's coming on the roadmap. And also we need to know for planning what's not going to be worked on. If I had my heart set on a particular feature area, I think that transparency is really valuable to have the information to make plans. Mike: So let's talk about the future of this series. Is it series? I think that's fair to [inaudible 00:05:40]- LeeAnne Rimel: It is a special monthly series. Mike: Special monthly series. Oh, boy. I feel like get home from school and you get your carrot sticks and your ranch. LeeAnne Rimel: Exactly. Mike: That's what everybody got as a kid, right? LeeAnne Rimel: Maybe ants on a log. Mike: Oh, ants on a log. I forgot about that. Yeah. Okay. There's always food in the podcast. So first of all, I'm Salesforce admin and I really want to contribute to this series. What are ways that I can participate? LeeAnne Rimel: We need you to contribute to this series, Salesforce admins. The topics for this are entirely chosen by the community. So the very first topic was chosen based on idea exchange trending topics and highly voted topic areas. But all subsequent episodes will be chosen based on the surveys and the voting that we're hosting on each episode. So in episode one, at the end of episode one, we had the episode one survey. And the top topic that came out of that and also happens to be a top trending idea exchange topic is flow, and within that, testing and debugging. So that's our next episode is flow testing and debugging. So we'll link, Mike will link in the show notes the blog announcing this, and within that we'll have both the recordings for the previous episodes, the link to register for the upcoming episode, and also the opportunity to vote on topics that are meaningful to you. So that is very much, that community feedback specifically from that voting mechanism that we will have in every episode is incredibly important for us to ensure that we are putting together episodes and shows that are directly meeting the community with what you need to talk about. And we're going very deep. We're really getting granular with the features. So notice it's not just a flow episode, which is a very popular topic, but there's so much within flow. So we went into the subtopic of what is the most hot, trending, highly voted subtopic within flow? And that was, for this round, was testing and debugging. So I think your feedback and I read every single comment, so if you've filled out a survey, thank you so much, from episode one. And then if you fill out surveys in the future, I want you to know we read every single comment, we read all of the feedback, and it directly informs every episode we're going to put together. Mike: So you got to put Easter eggs in your comments. That's what I hear. LeeAnne Rimel: You can throw a little joke in there. Mike: If I was [inaudible 00:08:32] I got to put something in there. LeeAnne Rimel: I like dad jokes. You can put little dad jokes in there if you want. Mike: Well, but that was actually- LeeAnne Rimel: As long as you pick a topic. Mike: Right, pick a topic. That was actually my question is so I'm glad you're going granular. Is there a world where flow debugging gets two episodes because it just keeps rising to the top? LeeAnne Rimel: Yeah, I think that's a really good question. I think we're going to have to see what the data show us. So I think if we see something that is really persistent in where it is on the priority list, I think we will have to talk about should we have repeat kind of follow-on episodes for that. Maybe there's additional content forms or forms that we should create for that topic area. So I think this is, I think as we face those, we'll see the best way to make sure we're meeting the community where they're asking us for more information. I would anticipate, safe harbor, but I would anticipate over the next year we're probably going to have more than one episode on flow because it is such a prevalent topic and there's so many areas within flow to talk about. And we do really want to be able to have this space to go really deep, really granular on those subtopic areas, if you will, like those feature areas within a larger area. It's a great question and I think, yeah, there's no rules around, well, we spend time on this feature area and we're never going to talk about it again. I think that that's not true to the nature of True to the Core and what we're intending here. And then also I think we'll see what the data show and what's demanded. Mike: Yeah, because I was going to say it could also be kind of frustrating if you suggest a topic. I'll be honest, security is a topic we should cover. It never gets voted up very high. Nobody likes talking about all of the padlocks and security features, but it is important. It's in everything that we do, and so- LeeAnne Rimel: Well, and I think we're going to- Mike: ... it'd be kind of fun to see. LeeAnne Rimel: Yeah, I hear you, right? If something isn't always a number one topic, will we get to it? Mike: Right. LeeAnne Rimel: And I think to that, we'll definitely be kind of moving down the list, if you will. Yeah, so to answer your question more clearly, I think we'll definitely be kind of moving down the list and moving onto the, for the episode in November, we'll be looking at, okay, based on the data that we collected so far, and we just had a flow episode, kind of what's number two? And then we'll be moving down in that way. Mike: Gotcha. So Dreamforce will be a little over a month and a half away when this episode drops. Are there big True to the Core Deep Dive plans for Dreamforce? LeeAnne Rimel: Well, there will be a, that we're anticipating a True to the Core keynote at Dreamforce. So I think that is, if you are newer to Dreamforce or haven't attended True to the Core at Dreamforce in the past, I really recommend, if you're going to be there in person, attending the True to the Core keynote. I think it's a really meaningful part of a Dreamforce experience. And then also, if you're not attending Dreamforce in person, it will, typically, it is on Salesforce+, so you can watch it on VOD afterwards. But I think that will be our big... Dreamforce is in mid-October. That will be the True to the Core for October will be the Dreamforce keynote. We're hoping to share more opportunities to vote, to really increase the feedback that we get on future episodes. So stay tuned for Dreamforce posts and things like that. And we're hoping to share more opportunities for Dreamforce attendees to share what they would like to see more of with True to the Core Deep Dive episodes. And then when we'll be back with our regularly scheduled programming, if you will, [inaudible 00:12:34]. Mike: Right, because Dreamforce interrupts everything. For fans of LeeAnne, because they had the how... You did the Did You Know series. That was what I was thinking of. Are there other things that you're working on that you want to share or is it all forward-looking statement right now? LeeAnne Rimel: Forward-looking statements. I think we're working on, I think for Dreamforce this year, so I'm hard at work on Dreamforce technical content in general, sort of the experiences that you have in the Trailblazer Forest and across our technical tracks. And I think I am really excited to see what all the teams are working on for Dreamforce, specifically for our admin, developer, and architect audiences. I think there's just going to be a lot of great technical learnings. We also, I will share, are going to have more community-led sessions than ever before, so there'll be more information coming out about that. But I think we're going to have a lot of technical sessions, a lot of opportunities for admins and developers and architects and more community-led sessions than... We've always had a lot of community-led sessions, we have even more. So I'm really excited to hear and learn from our community. Mike: Well, thank you LeeAnne, for coming on the podcast. I know one fun fact, if people are hungry at Dreamforce, you always have snacks. LeeAnne Rimel: I do always have snacks, Mike: Always. Not candy, but snacks. So that's always good to have LeeAnne Rimel: Snacks to help sustain you through... I think I have a few blogs floating out about there about my preferred snacks, but- Mike: I'm sure you do. You've always kept the team energized in a healthy way, not in a sugar inducing caffeine coma way, which is great. LeeAnne Rimel: Yeah, if someone's having low blood sugar, I probably have a protein bar for you. You'll probably be- Mike: Yes. Yep. LeeAnne Rimel: Or some sort of like- Mike: A nutritious organic environmental perfect protein bar. LeeAnne Rimel: I do my best. Mike: Thanks for coming on the podcast, LeeAnne. We will tune into the True to the Core sessions and I can't wait to see what you come up with for Dreamforce. LeeAnne Rimel: Awesome. Thanks for having me, Mike. Mike: Big thanks to LeeAnne for coming on the podcast and giving us the scoop on the True to the Core Deep Dive. I have a question for you. What after school snack did you get that wasn't carrot sticks and ranch or ants on a log? Curious minds want to know. I also got Ritz Crackers with peanut butter, chunky peanut butter because chunky peanut butter on Ritz crackers is awesome. So there we go. There's a little nugget. Share that on social, be sure to ping me. I'd be curious. Don't forget now, all these True to the Core Deep Dive episodes are going to be built on your questions and your input, so be sure to jump in, vote, share your thoughts, jump on the lives, ask questions. I don't anticipate these ending for a while. We'll have links in the show notes to the first episode and any other information that I have about it as of when this comes out. So that's it. I'm going to go maybe have some carrot sticks and ranch. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.
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