Journey Through Developer Relations: From Engineering to Advocacy

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Kurtis Kemple, Senior Director of Developer Relations at Slack. Join us as we chat about what’s possible when you combine Slack, Salesforce, and AI agents.

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

Starting at square one in tech

Kurtis’s path to his career in tech is truly inspiring. Not only is he a completely self-taught programmer, but he learned those skills while incarcerated. It was hard to get any sort of job when he got out, let alone convince someone to take a chance on him as a software engineer.

Today, Kurtis is the Senior Director of Developer Relations for Slack. His role is primarily focused on advocacy, with a focus on improving the developer experience through thoughtful product design and community input. So he’s the perfect person to talk to about what’s possible with Slack, Salesforce, and AI agents.

Slack is the OS for work

When it comes to collaborating with your team, Kurtis sees Slack as the OS for work. It’s a space to bring together everything you need—your communications, your documents, your data—all in one place so you can start getting things done.

Switching contexts can be a productivity killer. That’s why Slack’s integration with Salesforce is so powerful, because it allows you to have everything right at your fingertips without needing to go back and forth between windows.

Whether you’re looking at Salesforce data in Slack to have a conversation with a co-worker about an opportunity, or updating your team on what you’re building in Salesforce, seamless authentication means you can do everything from wherever you happen to be working without having to switch back and forth.

Agents and automation inside Slack

The possibilities are even more exciting when you throw Agentforce into the mix. As Kurtis points out, Slack actions are part of the list of standard actions. That means you can build custom agents that use data from either platform to launch workflows, run a quick analysis, and much more.

Kurtis also gets into how you can customize Agentforce by plugging in various LLM libraries, or connecting it with external services or authentication providers. As he explains, prompt templates are powerful tools for controlling your agents’ responses so that they fit into your business processes.

This episode is a deep dive into everything you can do with Agentforce and Slack, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

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Learn more

• Blog: Getting Started With Slack and Agentforce Integration
• Trailhead: Connect Your Agentforce Org with Slack
• Trailhead: Learn How Agentforce and Slack Work Together
• Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: What Can Salesforce Admins Do with Slack Integrations?

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Social

• Kurtis on LinkedIn
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• Salesforce Admins on X
• Mike on Bluesky social
• Mike on Threads
• Mike on X

Full show transcript

Josh Birk:
Hello, Salesforce admins, your guest host Josh Birk here. Today on the show, we’re going to welcome Kurtis Kemple, who’s overrunning developer advocacy at Slack. We’re going to talk about Slack, we’re going to talk about AI, we’re going to talk about Kurt’s beginnings, and this was a great interview. Very happy we got it on tape. And so, let’s go right over to Kurt. All right. Today on the show we welcome Kurtis Kemple of Salesforce Developer Advocacy. Kurt, welcome to the show.

Kurtis Kemple:
It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Josh Birk:
So let’s start, I usually start talking about people’s early years. And you have a very, let’s not say unique, but a very interesting early days of getting into computing. You’re self-taught in web development and you learn that in prison. Correct?

Kurtis Kemple:
Yeah, that’s correct. I prefer to think of it more as self-guided. I’d like to take all the credit, but I was still reading books, watching YouTube videos, paying for courses. So you’re still creating a learning environment more so than just I had… Well, in prison I did have nothing, but then I just opened a laptop and just essentially went at code with nothing. I don’t want to essentially leave out all the people who I wouldn’t be here without them.

Josh Birk:
Did you have an interest in computers beforehand or was it just sort of a, “Here’s this moment in my life and I want to make changes, and I want to learn something new”?

Kurtis Kemple:
Well, it was definitely that second one, but not related to code. So it was pure happenstance. Prior to incarceration, I had very limited experience in technology. I had a pager once when I was 18, cell phones were coming out, and I would download music off LimeWire. That was it. I had to type with two fingers, like pecking at the keyboard.

Josh Birk:
Did the looking over the keys with the finger on either side of it? Yeah.

Kurtis Kemple:
Oh my gosh, absolutely. Absolutely.

Josh Birk:
I also love doing interviews like this because we always accidentally date ourselves.

Kurtis Kemple:
Oh, my lord. Yeah.

Josh Birk:
In some wonderful way.

Kurtis Kemple:
I know people are going like, “What’s a pager?” They’re like, “Oh, I’ve seen those on TV.”

Josh Birk:
I know, right? “Did they beep or something like that? They had numbers on them?” Yeah. Actually, I didn’t get a cell phone for a long time because my dad’s a doctor and he had a pager, and I remember hating the fact that he would be taken away from the dinner table because his pager is on his belt. I’m like, “Oh, I don’t want to have constant access to people always being able to call me.” And now, of course, I’m the dude that my wife slaps my wrist because I’m picking up the cell phone during dinner with friends.

Kurtis Kemple:
Absolutely.

Josh Birk:
Just as addicted as everybody else. So tell me a little bit, ’cause tech is not the easiest to break into, and there’s ageism, there’s sexism, there’s racism, there’s the old white guy syndrome, all this kind of stuff. With a record of a conviction, what challenges were you facing there?

Kurtis Kemple:
Sheesh know, I’d say that-

Josh Birk:
How many hours do we have?

Kurtis Kemple:
Honestly, honestly. Look, this is for all you PMs out there, I’m going to throw in a little product analogy, but there’s a ton of upfront friction. It’s like they would never let me get through to the other side to realize the value. So it’s like having that record, it’s immediately, oh, that’s like, “I don’t want to mess with that.” They had no idea that on the flip side of that, I was willing to work so hard to prove myself. So hard.

And so, I think there’s two sides to every coin, but it was a big blocker. It’s just immediate nos. You have conversations with people and they’re like, “Oh, that’s interesting.” And then they find out about the record, or back then you had to check a box, “Have you been convicted of a felony in the last seven years or since you’ve got out?” And it’s like, “Yeah. Yeah, I have. But I thought the whole point of going through half a decade of incarceration was that I did that. I paid my dues.” But no, you’re doing time for forever after you get out in the US, honestly.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. Well, I am very glad that you have managed to break your way into tech and join us. Tell me a little bit about your current job.

Kurtis Kemple:
Yeah, so from there all the way learning and coding, I went through an entire career in software engineering, and then I ended up making a switch to DevRel about eight years ago. And then I went from IC up in DevRel, really, up to leadership. And so now, I’m senior director of developer relations here at Salesforce, and I focus on Slack, Slack platform.

Josh Birk:
And tell me a few of those highlights, because you’ve worked for companies like, if I’m remembering your CV correctly, like Amazon. Correct?

Kurtis Kemple:
Yeah, I’ve worked for a ton of pretty big companies, some that might not be as well known, but you’d know them in certain verticals. So I worked at Integral Ad Science, which is actually, if you’ve ever seen an ad, they’re the analytics platform behind the analytics platforms. So it was a really big one.

And then from there, a bunch of places that culminated with my last job as a full-time engineer. I was the tech lead of the UI team at Major League Soccer. And so we built-

Josh Birk:
Cool.

Kurtis Kemple:
Yeah, it was a really fun one. So we built all the interfaces that fans interface with, like user interface, literally, chatbots, Roku, Fire TV, websites, mobile apps. You name it, we built it.

Josh Birk:
Nice. Very, very nice. Now, this is kind of a personal question for myself because it’s one I get frequently, and I apparently struggle to answer it correctly because I still have people in my life who have no idea what I do. What is developer evangelism or advocacy? Which of the labels or do you land ,on evangelist or advocate?

Kurtis Kemple:
So, I think at any point, you might be doing a bit of both in reality in these days, but if we wanted to put a label on it, you could say evangelism is more outbound-driven. Advocacy, ideally you’re doing a lot of inbound. We’re advocating, both internally and externally, we’re providing feedback. I would say I lean heavily, I’m a very product-driven person, so lean on the advocacy. I want to unlock better developer experience through improvements to the product.

Josh Birk:
Got it.

Kurtis Kemple:
That’s my main thing. But also, I love getting out there and just talking [inaudible 00:06:54] and engaging with people, interestingly enough, because I am introverted, but I love it. I absolutely love it.

Josh Birk:
It’s such an interesting trend in advocacy and evangelism. I remember having a beer with a former evangelist actually, and I’m like, “Well, you know I’m a closet introvert. Right?” He’s like, “No, you’re not.” I’m like, “No, dude.”

Kurtis Kemple:
Yeah, they have no idea.

Josh Birk:
“You have no idea.” One of the first things I told my therapist is, “I have raging social anxiety, and so I decided to go into public speaking.” Don’t ask me why. Don’t ask me why.

Kurtis Kemple:
“I wanted to live my worst fear daily.”

Josh Birk:
Right, exactly. Exactly. Oh, yeah. Okay. So our focus is admins, and what I’m kind of curious is, because first of all, I’m a huge Slack fan. And it’s one of the purchases that I’m like, “Oh, I get this one.” Sometimes Mark buys a company, I’m like, “I don’t know who they are. I don’t know why we would use them.”

First of all, I’m very glad we purchased Slack because it finally answered an age-old question of which IM service should we use to talk to our teammates? And yeah, finally have a-

Kurtis Kemple:
Really?

Josh Birk:
Oh, it was horrible. It was G-Chat and it was Top This, and then there’s Chatter, and to have everybody agree was great. But how do you see, in the Salesforce ecosystem, what is Slack’s role as a product?

Kurtis Kemple:
Yeah. And this is so great ’cause this ties right into administration as well. It is the operating system, without a doubt, that is, I don’t know, I think of a computer, extrapolating out a bit higher level. It is aggregating all of the useful tools, access to information, communication channels, but that is very broad, very general. It’s covering it for everything.

Slack narrows in onto one particular aspect of your life, work. Or actually, I won’t even say work, but I will say collaborative organization and communication, ’cause we have millions of communities on Slack as well. And yeah, I think that it’s about that. Honestly, it’s that. It’s an operating system to help you organize and be productive and get things done. And especially now when you put the lens of work on it, it becomes even more valuable. That starts turning into dollars. And it’s tangible, tracks billions of dollars.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. Yeah. And I really love positioning it as it’s kernel, is kind of the… Oh gosh, I just made an OS pun when I didn’t mean to. Kernel is sort of that collaborative tool, but then there’s all these other layers to it to help people be more productive and be more collaborative. And over the years, we’ve had tighter integrations with Slack and Salesforce. What are some of the key integrations that come to mind when I’m using Slack, but I’m also trying to interface with Salesforce?

Kurtis Kemple:
Salesforce channels. Without a doubt, if those are not set up, oh my Lord, it is a game changer. So quick links at the top, taking action within Salesforce. Again, for me, it’s like the work operating system, I don’t want to switch context. I don’t care if it’s to switch a window for three seconds to click a button, or I have to go out there and do a bunch of other things, it breaks the flow of work.

And to me, what I’m actually most excited about is when you look at a Salesforce channel, you’ve got your conversation. Let’s say it’s related to whatever, like an account, there might be your opportunities, or the health score or recent notes, and all this stuff is right there in the team channel as soon as you drop in. And I’m sure that we use Slack more than most people use Slack ’cause we are Slack and Salesforce.

But if you are starting to take advantage of those tools, I’ve got all my documents related to the DevRel team, in our Dev Rel channel. It’s just so convenient. But when you integrate other systems in that, like Salesforce, and now I just have a canvas, but it’s real time updates and back and forth collaboration.

Okay, my job keeps me mostly in Salesforce platform. A, it’s day to day business as usual, but if I spend most of my time in Slack, I’m no longer breaking the flow of work, even if it is just a few times, that can really have an effect, compounded. So I would say definitely that. And now, the counterpart to that is we’ve got the Slack channels in Salesforce.

Josh Birk:
That’s so cool. That’s so cool. Is that GA? How do people turn that on? Or is it just there?

Kurtis Kemple:
It is GA. How do the people turn it on? I think it’s just there if you already have things connected. So if you set up a Salesforce channel connection, it will show up for you in the Slack, in the Slack UI with the Slack way of doing things. And if you’re in Salesforce, then you get the Slack channel, messaging still available, everyone conversation one place, but you have your Salesforce UI that you’ve custom designed and built around you so that you can do your work more efficiently. I’m sorry, I swear I’ll let you talk right after this, but you hit on something so key, I swear to God.

Josh Birk:
No, go, go, go.

Kurtis Kemple:
It took us a while to get here. Look at this. We’re like three, four years into this thing. More, more. But when you look at how to thoughtfully integrate something like Slack and Salesforce, there’s going to be some trial and error.

And I know people wanted it faster and I wish we gave it to them, but I’m actually just happy that the things we’re building now are so much in the flow of work. There’s some things coming up that I don’t know if I can talk about. I should have ran through the list, but I cannot wait. Cannot wait for folks to see ’cause bridging Salesforce and Slack in ways that are just amazing, and are really going to close the gap for ease of use and just being able to stay where you’re meant to be and do your job.

Josh Birk:
Nice, nice. I want to touch on that a little bit, but I also want to kind of applaud the engineering team over there, because the demos I’ve done, and I’m old, I’ve done integrations. My first application was a CGI, getting things to work, but integrating systems sometimes isn’t easy.
The seamless OAuth between Slack and Salesforce is pretty cool. The idea that you have this mirror user and then you just tell Salesforce, “This is my user over here, go be Slack.” And then I’m like, “What do you mean there’s no OAuth window? What do you mean I don’t have to worry on tokens?”

Kurtis Kemple:
You’re already you. You’re already you.

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Kurtis Kemple:
Yeah.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. Did you have a follow up there, or?

Kurtis Kemple:
I do. I do, I do, I do, I do. Yeah. So Seamless OAuth I think is foundational. As a matter of fact, I see this as foundational to the entire Salesforce ecosystem. And so now that’s seamless, all right, so here’s the deal. Imagine now it’s like, oh, click of a button, I deploy a Slack workspace for my Salesforce org. That’s awesome. But now, it’s like I want to also extend my operating system, my Slack org, so I want to start building and deploying apps.

Well, what if that user was also seamless off to Heroku and you could just deploy your apps immediately to Heroku? And what if you wanted to use MuleSoft APIs to further extend it? But guess what? You’re the same user there, too. So now, it’s like you can immediately spin up these really ridonkulous, enterprise-grade-ready, all seamlessly authenticated systems and just go to town.

Josh Birk:
Right. Well, and that really starts to put the cap on the concept of it being an operating system.

Kurtis Kemple:
Bingo.

Josh Birk:
It’s Slack, it’s Salesforce, it’s MuleSoft, it’s Heroku, it’s whatever in our ecosystem that you have to touch. And I’m going to be very honest, when canvases really became a thing, I was kind of like, “Okay, I’ve got docs, I’ve got this kind of stuff.”

And then our team recently tasked me with trying to track some pilot features, and I was struggling with, “Well, where should this live?” Because of course, this is not going to surprise you, my first instinct was, “Custom object, throw it in the enterprise org that we all collaborate on, keep them as records, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

Kurtis Kemple:
Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Birk:
And then-

Kurtis Kemple:
Permissions, groups, we’re all good to go. Right?

Josh Birk:
Right. And then I thought about exactly what you were talking about before, how many touch points is that for somebody to go and read something that they’re not… This is something people are intended to scan.

Kurtis Kemple:
That’s it.

Josh Birk:
This isn’t a research doc. It’s a “Here are some things to think about in front of Dreamforce.” And I’m like, “That’s why I put it into a canvas.”

Kurtis Kemple:
That’s it.

Josh Birk:
It’s right there and you can just click that button and go. Now, speaking of OSs and conversational UIs, because I think this touches a little bit on what you just said about deploying workspaces and things like that, because we now have Slack actions in Agentforce as standard actions. Can you tell me a little bit about those?

Kurtis Kemple:
Yes, I absolutely can. So, you want to be able to take action in Slack from Agentforce. It’s like if that is the work operating system and agents are truly supposed to be doing work on my behalf, I want those reports summarized and put into a canvas and added to my channel. I want to set up DMs maybe with somebody from customer success and sales, or IT and wherever.

I think as we see Agentforce start to grow more in maturity, we’re going to need to see a lot more Slack actions. And fun fact, like little shout out to the DevRel team over here. If you want to extend beyond the Slack actions that exist, we’ve already got the docs all set up for you for building custom Slack actions for Agentforce.

So you can literally just, world is your oyster with Slack. And technically, they work for any service. We’re not doing anything particularly bespoke. But it’s nice, because you can set up a Slack app which gives you all the proper authentication to either be you or a bot, depending on how you want to set all that up.

And then you can now start taking that even further. You can have agents doing things on your behalf, like responding to messages, or summarizing things and aggregating stuff, updating records in Salesforce, or updating channels and canvases and lists within Slack, kicking off Slack work flows, all kinds of stuff.

But to be honest, that’s all very well and good, except I think until we get agents more deeply integrated into the UI of Slack, into your flow of work, we’re just scratching the surface. And we’re working on some cool stuff now that you’ll see, but right now it’s really just the agents are there, you know what I mean?

We brought them into Slack, but they’re kind of side card, they still have access to all your info, have access to the relevant channel and stuff like that, or channels. And now, you can actually message them in channel, which is a big step forward, but that’s still very much the initial phases. I can’t wait for all this stuff we’ll be able to do. Yeah.

Josh Birk:
Okay. I’m going to free you from the restraints of a forward-looking statement.

Kurtis Kemple:
Let’s do it.

Josh Birk:
And we’re going to walk right into the land of theory. So everybody listening to me right now, this is not a product roadmap, Kurtis is not promising you anything. I am just going to ask what’s your dream version of an agent residing in Slack?

Kurtis Kemple:
All right, so I think it’s twofold. Oh my gosh. Oh man, this is going to get so deep. Here we go.

Josh Birk:
I love it.

Kurtis Kemple:
Number one, I think agents should be able to be preferential. They should learn about you over time, specifically. Not general knowledge, not learning about all of the people in Slack, you specifically. So, I would like to see more of that happen because then you get into generative use cases. It would better understand what actions to take, better understand what things to do because of you and how you specifically have interacted with it. So I think that’s one.

And then two is like, this is going to sound so funny ’cause we’re the conversational interface, but it’s like we’ve already cracked that nut. We’re good there. What if agents were more in flow into literally to the micro flow of work? When I highlight texts, I should be able to kick off agent actions and send that to agents. And then I would love to see more eventually agent orchestration.

So right now, we’ve got a few agents, but let’s assume you’re like X-Corp, 5,000 to 10,000 employees. You open up Agentforce for them, they build one agent per, not everyone would, but realistically, now you’re talking about thousands of agents within your environment. That could be a lot to handle. So I think winning the game there is about making it a lot easier to synthesize and have AI help you manage that.

Josh Birk:
A couple of meetings ago we were joking about whether or not we should consider adding a mental health topic to our Agentforce. And as you’re saying that, I’m like, okay, so one of these days my Slack channel is going to have an agent in it and that agent’s going to be like, “Dude, you’ve got too many meetings this week. Go take a walk.”

Kurtis Kemple:
Exactly. Exactly.

Josh Birk:
I love it. I love it.

Kurtis Kemple:
Or there’s like, Hey, there’s 13 agents in here and going through their topics and descriptions, their classification, these are all doing roughly the same thing or something like that. Or, “Here’s all these agents around your org that are all doing the same thing.”

I think a lot of stuff, I don’t know, I’ve just been digging AI lately in, one, non-conversational use cases, so kicking off from buttons and stuff like that. I think we should get a little bit back to that. And then two, I would like for agents to not just be specific to a topic or an industry, but specific to me.

Josh Birk:
Got it. I love it. I love it. One of the things I preach often is if you are a Salesforce admin, you’re already an AI builder. If you know Flow, you already know how to extend an AI.

Kurtis Kemple:
Absolute.

Josh Birk:
[Inaudible 00:21:56]. And one of the things that I’ve seen some of your use cases, and that’s what I want to dig into next, but it’s interesting how simple Flow can be, but also how much more power it can add to an AI, into an agent, simply because of its ability to integrate with external systems and other things.

What are some uncommon use cases that you’ve tinkered with when it comes to… And we’ll do Flow/Apex because they’re pretty parity when it comes to features these days, so don’t limit yourself to just Flow. But what are some uncommon use cases where maybe somebody’s like, “Oh, I didn’t think an agent would do that”?

Kurtis Kemple:
When we think of Agentforce, we immediately just zoom in on that is our agent, we have the reasoning engine, and then we have the actual agent itself, and that’s the only access to LLMs within Agentforce. And that’s not true.

So, Salesforce has the LLM Open Connect standard. You can attach any LLM you want to as a foundational model if you have a data cloud. And you can start doing models for all kinds of things like specific actions, like a model per action.

This was kind of blowing people’s minds when I started showing them this. I have actions that can help me summarize text, actions that actually help me review and rewrite text, actions that can help me with code instruction, actions that help me analyze data. I have my Salesforce developer advocate model that helps me learn Apex Lightning web components, policies and setup. I’m becoming an admin myself. I’m starting to get pretty dangerous in there.

Josh Birk:
I love it. Nothing wrong with being a double or a triple threat out there, that’s for sure.

Kurtis Kemple:
Absolutely.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. I love it. I love it.

Kurtis Kemple:
I could dive more into third-party services too though, ’cause I think that’s a big one that we’ve not tapped on.

Josh Birk:
Go for it.

Kurtis Kemple:
Yeah, yeah. So aside from custom LLMs, which again, now you can handle any use case you want, but Salesforce is the most integrated platform probably in a history of platforms. And I think people try to leave a lot of that at the door. And so we’ll get into Flow and Apex next, but those are the gateway for this. Because I can set up external services or auth providers, or like I said, custom models, and then all of those things, prompt templates are great for really controlling the responses in Agentforce.

All these tools become available to you. And so I have an agent, engineering agent that… Actually, this is a cool one. It pulls down my PRs for me that I have, and it will spin up GitHub Codespaces. And I can run the code, review it, and then be like, “This looks good. Please break that down, merge this for me.” And it goes off and does it.

Josh Birk:
I love it. I love it. And for the admin, non-technical group PR pull request, so basically we keep coming back to this theme. We are your engineers working? Well, they’re probably talking to each other in Slack. They’re probably talking about that pull request in Slack. So why get out of Slack once they’ve already approved it in Slack? So why get out of Slack in order to approve it and then add that to the code base?

Kurtis Kemple:
That’s it. I’m in the flow of work. I never left Slack. I sat down and I said, “Oh, you know what? I have a few minutes. Let me”… Okay. Now, here’s the beauty. I said, “Oh, I have a few minutes. Let me see what I can tackle.” If I had had to leave to go to GitHub to do that, I would’ve never happened. I would’ve looked for things I could do a few minutes within Slack.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. Yeah, you know how some people have a swear jar. Right?

Kurtis Kemple:
Mm-hmm.

Josh Birk:
I thought about just putting a jar in the kitchen to put a penny in every time I walk into the kitchen and forgot what I was going to do.

Kurtis Kemple:
Oh my gosh.

Josh Birk:
So yeah, if I have to leave Slack, I’m probably getting a coffee or figuring out why the cats been away or something. Yeah, totally.

Kurtis Kemple:
Literally.

Josh Birk:
Totally. I want to dig a little bit more in the custom models, because that’s actually one thing I have been curious about. I have not played with it much myself. And one of the things that keep kind of, when I’m talking about AI, is kind of breaking down this concept that it’s a rocket science sort of thing. Yes, I’ve seen the math and it made my eyes bleed, basically.

If you want to understand the formulas, you’re probably going to be a Stanford research scientist. If you want to use the technology though, you already have the skills. And one of the things it’s interesting about the concept of a custom model is when we do an API call to OpenAI, OpenAI is intended to know how to cook a rotisserie chicken. Admins don’t need to know, our users don’t need to know how to use a rotisserie chicken when they’re in Slack.

Kurtis Kemple:
Yeah. I don’t need a model that can talk like a pirate. You know what I mean?

Josh Birk:
Exactly. Although, prompts that talk like a pirate are a fun demo to do.

Kurtis Kemple:
They are great.

Josh Birk:
But what is involved in creating a custom agent, like when you say, “I created an agent that understands Apex and LWC”?

Kurtis Kemple:
Yeah. Yeah, so I actually created an action and I just attach that action to the agent. So here’s a cool thing, I’m not training anything. AI has gone from frontier to common product so fast. If we look at the Wardley scale, probably faster than anything else in the history of humankind. And we are now at the stage where AI, you can have access to very specifically trained models to do something very well through a simple API call.

I’m sorry, I shouldn’t say simple, because even API calls can be complex for those unfamiliar. My point being, is that you don’t have to train your own models. You don’t have to be an AI or ML engineer. You don’t even have to be a developer. If you can open up Postman and figure out how to use a couple API endpoints, that’s all you need to become very active with AI. And then it’s just a matter of identifying which models are best for which job. And trust me, there is no shortage of that information online.

Josh Birk:
Where are some of your favorite places to find custom models?

Kurtis Kemple:
I definitely lean heavily into Hugging Face. So it’s basically like the GitHub for models and data sets and stuff like that.
I like it because it’s the platform I found that opens the most transparency. So a lot of them can even record the carbon footprint of what it costs to train their models. And they have little cards right there on Hugging Face. Yeah.

Josh Birk:
Oh, very cool.

Kurtis Kemple:
Yeah, it is. It’s cool. You can also see the data sets for a lot of them, what they’re trained on, but they also have access to all your big, what I call the 100 million club models. You need $100 million or more to train. They’ve got access to all those as well. So, I like it because then I use one API, the Hugging Face API, and then I just switch the model as one property and I can completely change the response. Absolutely.

Josh Birk:
Oh, that’s very cool. That’s very, very cool. So let’s broaden a little bit outside of the world of Slack and Salesforce, because I know you’ve also talked in general about the importance of democratizing artificial intelligence. Give me a little bit of a pitch on that.

Kurtis Kemple:
All right. So, it goes back to incarceration. And this is also why I said self-guided, not self-taught. The only reason I was able to succeed is because enough people had come before me in tech and been willing to share what they had learned. That is not common. Go Google how to become a doctor. There’s not doctors out there writing blog posts on how to become a doctor. There’s not electricians doing it, accountants, bankers, I can go down the list.

Now, there are some, don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to talk negatively about any industry. Trust me, there are people out there, but there’s not the wealth of information that there is for learning tech, for especially coding. Look, even in a Salesforce ecosystem. So I look at Trailhead, I am so blown away by what I call the opportunity funnel of something like Trailhead in the Salesforce community.

Say what you want, but nothing is a career creator vacuum for people who have non-traditional or resource-deficient backgrounds and have a viable career. So sorry, circling back. Imagine if I had had a small un-internet connected device with a model, trained specifically on code instruction to help me along in there, instead of one textbook and my teacher being willing to print out some pages on JavaScript MouseEvents.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. And I think a lot of that, I think there’s a harmonious cycle there, because I think a lot of it is also how, especially techie people, whether they’re an admin or a developer or an architect or whatever, I feel like we learn once we do it sort of thing. We can read it, we can see it, but the best… This statement alone is probably why I’m in computers. Back when I was in school and we got to play around with Apple IIs, I think they were Apple IIes, and our teacher said, “Do whatever you want in this class. You are not going to break the computer by typing code into it.”

And it was all of a sudden just like, it’s like, “Okay, I’m going to go do go-to lines for 1,000. Let’s just to see what happens.” And it was so freeing, so freeing just to be able to be like… And JavaScript, and anytime somebody asks me, “How should I start?” I’m like, “Start with JavaScript.” It’s free. You can do it in a browser. You can instantly see the results when typing into it. It’s great. And back to your point, my father was a doctor and I asked my dad how to become a doctor, and his advice was, “Don’t.”

Kurtis Kemple:
There you go. Right?

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Kurtis Kemple:
Yeah. And I just think even for becoming a doctor, I think AI changes the technology landscape, the learning curve, the accessibility. The accessibility. So I think another piece of this too, and about democratizing AI, again circling back to the $100 million club, is that a lot of information is available through AI, but you know what’s not available through AI right now, honestly? Expertise.

Josh Birk:
Oh yeah.

Kurtis Kemple:
Right?

Josh Birk:
Yeah. Yeah. I feel like we’re still in that phase where we’re the experts and AI is trying to catch up to us in a lot of ways. I’ve used ChatGPT just to write a simple Apex class, and sometimes it not only nails it, I’m like, “Okay, that’s prettier code than I would’ve written.” And then sometimes it’s like, “You dumb bot.”

Kurtis Kemple:
That’s it. That’s it. And it’s literal, it’s statistics, it’s probability. And the reason why, is ’cause if it’s trained on the whole internet, chances are there’s as much bad info about it as there is good.

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Kurtis Kemple:
But also, I think about this, even getting deeper than that, ’cause that’s still recognition. Right?

Josh Birk:
Right.

Kurtis Kemple:
But you could tell me every song on a Taylor Swift album as AI, but you can’t tell me why Taylor Swift arranged to the tracks the way she did, what she is listening for, when she knows it’s the right time to make an album, if she even cares at all. And it’s just like all is actually just like, “Woo hoo.” Who knows?

Josh Birk:
Yeah. And I think based on how much Swifties themselves analyze her songs, that by the time AI can tell you what Taylor was thinking when she wrote a song-

Kurtis Kemple:
Too Late

Josh Birk:
… we’re at the singularity.

Kurtis Kemple:
That’s it. That’s it. It’s too late.

Josh Birk:
It’s over guys.

Kurtis Kemple:
Yeah, even borgs and everybody knows why.

Josh Birk:
Exactly. All right, so totally switching gears. I want to give you an opportunity to talk a little bit about Forthright.

Kurtis Kemple:
Oh, okay. So Forthright, actually, I do not run that anymore, the consultancy, but it was fun. It was amazing. So I was doing DevRel consultancy actually before I joined Salesforce and Slack. I had had a number of jobs in developer relations. This is still very awesome and relevant, but I just felt like I was… I don’t like to do things kind of in isolation. I don’t want to make assumptions or not have other information to lean on.

It makes sense when we want to put care into something, we want to ensure we do it. It’s actually how I got into DevRel. When I was at Major League Soccer, we wanted to adopt React Native and GraphQL. They were both being used in production by a lot of places, big companies and stuff, but really nobody was talking about it yet.

Josh Birk:
Interesting.

Kurtis Kemple:
So I selfishly, very selfishly started writing blog posts about them, talking to people from the companies. I started GraphQL NYC Meetup. I started doing talks at the React Native meetup, just to hear how other people were doing things so that I could do a better job at MLS. I was a tech lead. It’s literally my job to understand the tech.

That kind of just stuck with me as a really good and powerful way to learn. So, after having some time in DevRel, like Gatsby, AWS, like you said, Apollo GraphQL, I had my own thoughts about how it should be done, but what I realized is that I don’t have enough information, so clearly I’m missing pictures. And secondly, I’m not going to be able to really provide that type of environment for myself in a full-time job, because it’s one environment and you’re in that ideally for years. Right?

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Kurtis Kemple:
So I did consulting. I worked with startups, scale-ups, enterprise companies, and I just went deep into DevRel. Plus I’m, of course, interested in talking to everybody in the industry. And yeah, it really helped. I really feel like I had such a better understanding at the end of that year and a half.

And so coincidentally enough, there was a bit of a downturn in the market, hot leads started turning into cold leads, and then right when I was like, “This is my least favorite part of the job, do I want to keep doing this?” I actually got the referral, like a reach out about an open position at Slack.

Josh Birk:
I love it. I love it. All right, Kurtis, one final question. What is your favorite non-technical hobby?

Kurtis Kemple:
Oh, I have to pick between two. I’m going to say photography and street photography. It’s very close to that and riding my motorcycle, but-

Josh Birk:
I love it.

Kurtis Kemple:
Yeah, yeah. Both of them serve the same purpose though, which is what we talked about, anxiety and pressures and work and stuff. And with my history, it’s very easy for me to live in the past or the future and not in the present.

And both street photography and my motorcycle forced me to be extremely present. And so I really enjoy those two hobbies because it lets me just be in the moment. I’m not worried about something, whereas I normally am worried about everything.

Josh Birk:
I love it. All right, Kurtis, thank you so much for the great conversation and information. That was a lot of fun.

Kurtis Kemple:
It’s so much fun. I had such a good time.

Josh Birk:
I want to thank you for listening, and I of course want to thank Kurt for all that great information and conversation. It was just a lot of fun. If you want to learn more about this podcast and being an admin, head on over to admin.salesforce.com. And of course, if you want to learn more about Slack and artificial intelligence, head on over to Trailhead. Thanks again everybody, and I will talk to you soon.

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