Data-Driven Innovation: The Future of Salesforce

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Marisa Hambleton, Chief Delivery Officer and Founder of MH2X, and a member of the Salesforce MVP Hall of Fame. Join us as we chat about her experience in the TDX Agentforce Hackathon as a member of team MH4 and why clean data is essential for AI.

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

The intense Tetris of conference scheduling

Marisa is a co-leader of the Phoenix Developer Group and the lead organizer for Cactusforce, a community conference for Salesforce Developers and Architects. In other words, she knows how much work goes into scheduling speaker tracks and getting everything organized.

Juggling speaker availability and placing them in the correct conference rooms without double-booking anyone takes up hours of time behind the scenes. “It’s an intense game of Tetris,” Marisa says, “and that’s a gross understatement.” So she was thrilled when Melissa Hill Dees asked her to join team MH4 and build a conference scheduling agent for the TDX Agentforce Hackathon.

Why data hygiene is foundational for Agentforce

With only 16 hours to build a working agent, the team had to split up responsibilities so they could hit the ground running. Marisa’s focus was on the data, which they brought in from Cactusforce and Midwest Dreamin’.

Marisa’s biggest takeaway from her first time building an agent is that data quality is foundational for any work you do with AI. That needs to be the starting point. Even though they were working with a relatively small data set, they had a lot of cleanup work to do if they wanted their agent to work right.

How to get your org ready for advancements in AI

If you’re looking to implement Agentforce in your org, Marisa recommends starting with the Salesforce Well-Architected Framework. We’re only scratching the surface of what will be possible with AI, but you need to do everything you can right now to make your data easy to work with.

There’s a lot more great stuff from Marisa Hambleton about data hygiene and what’s next for Agentforce, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you can catch us every Thursday.

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Learn more

• Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: When Collaboration Meets Agentforce: The MH4 Hackathon Story
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Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt:

Welcome to the Salesforce Admin’s podcast. Today, we’re chatting with Marisa Hambleton, Chief Delivery Officer at MH2X, and a longtime leader in the Salesforce ecosystem. Now, this is part two of the MH to the Power of Four episodes where we talked to the team that participated in the TDX Hackathon about the agent that they built. Boy, I got to tell you, if you ever organized a community conference or just wrestled with a gnarly spreadsheet, Marisa’s insights into scheduling and automation using Agentforce technology we’re really going to hit home. I love that she’s going to walk us through how she and the Hackathon team built the agent from her perspective and what she did. Plus, she shares why clean data and a well-architected mindset are must haves for any admin looking to build for the future. Make sure to follow the podcast so you don’t miss out on more great conversations like this one. With that, let’s get Marisa on the podcast. Marisa, welcome to the podcast.

Marisa Hambleton:

I’m glad to be here.

Mike Gerholdt:

You are the second MH of the MH, I believe it’s MH quad, right? Isn’t that what Melissa Hill Dees told me? It is MH to the Power of Four.

Marisa Hambleton:

MH to the Power of Four.

Mike Gerholdt:

Power of Four.

Marisa Hambleton:

Yes, or MH four. You can just read it MH Four, but MH to the Power of Four, to the Fourth …

Mike Gerholdt:

I know, but I like the Power of Four. It sounds a little more strong.

Marisa Hambleton:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt:

We talked with Melissa Hill Dees on the last episode about the TDX Hackathon and the agent that you built, but just per chance, if somebody didn’t listen to that episode, can you tell us a little bit about, well, first, who you are and what you do, and then a brief overview of that project that you built at the Hackathon.

Marisa Hambleton:

Sure. Marisa Hambleton, I am the Chief Delivery Officer of MH2X. That is my consulting firm. I’ve been in the ecosystem over 15 years. I’m a Salesforce MVP Hall of Fame, and I am also the Phoenix developer, one of the leaders. I am the lead organizer of Cactus Force, a community conference for Salesforce developers and architects. My role in Cactus force is one of the things that led me and Melissa to connect around this agent that we built for the Hackathon.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, so tell me a little bit about that agent.

Marisa Hambleton:

Yes, so one of the difficulties in organizing a conference is scheduling, and most of our conferences we have different volunteers and we’re part of a team of organizers who come together to put these conferences on for the community, the trailblazer community. Once we get all our submissions, we go through our speaker selection, we’ve got all these speakers, and we have all of the space, the conference space, and we’ve got to put the two together. It’s calling it a intense game of Tetris would be a gross understatement because there’s always somebody that maybe if they’re flying in from across the country or if they have some other commitment, or for whatever reason, they cannot go into the slot that you put them in. We plan out our agendas and the program.

It is very time-consuming. I can’t remember exactly the number we came up with, but we had written out on our submission at the Hackathon how many hours, because we all got together as organizers of conferences and ask, okay, us individually, the time we spend on the scheduling is quite extensive and we hadn’t even really accounted for then our co-organizers, who then also spend time and we go through as a team for each of the conferences, how much time we spend on scheduling.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, no, I hear you, schedule. Oh, man. The intense game of Tetris because you think you have everything put together and then a speaker comes back and says, “Oh, by the way, I’m flying in on such and such date,” and you’re like, “Ah, I just had everything figured out.”

Marisa Hambleton:

Yes, yes. You have room size limitations or all of a sudden you’re coming into the event and you need a bigger room or just all the different things of scheduling a session. We thought that this was a fantastic idea for the agent. The other, my partners in this effort, this Hackathon, Melissa Hanson, she’s one of the RAD Women founders, and the scheduling that she does for RAD Women is at a whole other level because we are Michelle Hanson, Melissa Hill Dees and myself. We’re scheduling speakers and rooms. Melissa Hanson is scheduling coaches with the cohort members and time zones and time slots across many weeks. That’s a whole other, it’s just highly complex.

Our solution, our agent that we wanted to build really was able to handle all, at least at a minimum, let’s try to get one set in because that is very time-consuming for the RAD Women team. That was how we came up with the idea. Melissa Hill Dees has a wonderful heart for nonprofits and the community and helping organizations, and we all agreed that this was a well-worth effort to spend our Hackathon time on.

Mike Gerholdt:

No, I can. Tell me about that process of creating all of the things that you needed to get done to build that agent. I’d love to know, was there any happy accidents you’d repeat again?

Marisa Hambleton:

Gosh, I can’t think of happy accidents. There was this fast and furious effort on all our parts. There was little things that I feel like they were very Hackathon specific. The org setup, right, where everybody had a job. Melissa Hansen was our Apex Rock star. Melissa Hill Dees, the visionary. She built the agent before and then Michelle Hansen and I were primarily the data part of it. There were some of the org settings that we were like, “Oh, wait a minute. We’re trying to use this object and it’s not turned on in the org.” I had gone in and was doing some of the initial configuration. I spun up the org and was just doing that initial setup, adding the rest of the team as users and making sure everybody had all the correct permissions, doing some of the admin admin things for the project.

We’d be chugging along, getting things taken care of and all of a sudden, you hit a roadblock or Melissa’s like, “Oh my gosh, I’m getting this error.” Okay, let’s all get it, jump in and troubleshoot. I feel like I didn’t have time to really think of, I guess the reflection for me was more of the experience and not the technical part. I feel like the technical part, especially with something like Agentforce is, it’s still new and I’m very much in the exploring like, oh, what else can it do, versus like, oh, okay, I’ll know better not to do this next time. I was more on the support side. I would ask Melissa Hansen those questions because she definitely had things that she’s like, “Okay, now I know.”

Mike Gerholdt:

You talk about the experience. I’d love to know, what did you learn about agent design based on that Hackathon experience?

Marisa Hambleton:

The data modeling, the data and the data modeling really are, you have to have that first. That has to be foundational. One of the things that comes to mind is the well-architected, the Salesforce well-architected. Cactus Force is very much, we work really hard as an organization. Our organizers work really hard to always be at the forefront of what Salesforce is doing so that we can prepare content to share with our attendees and with a Salesforce well-architected, that’s really become foundational to our conference, but those principles for Agentforce, for this Hackathon and really having that mindset of an architect of like, “Okay, you’re starting from the ground up and you’re building that theoretically you’re modeling out what do we want the data to do? What kind of results are we looking for,” before we ever start building anything. That would be the thing that played a biggest part of the design for me outside of the mechanics of it.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, no, it’s good. You mentioned you were in the admin role on this team and support. Let’s talk about just giving Salesforce admins some general wisdom and your thoughts on innovation. What do you see as an admin best practice that you think gets overlooked but has a really big impact on an organization?

Marisa Hambleton:

I would stick with data. I think that data really having, again, thinking in a well-architected mindset, but as an admin, really thinking about your data. Before we started recording, we were chatting about Michelle Hansen and I being organizers with her, with Midwest Dreamin and myself with Cactus Force. We needed a data set to work through this project and make sure that we had some, we could make up fake data, but we decided we’re going to go and use the real data because it’s already public, it’s our speakers and our sessions and we did a lot of data work. It is looking through our data and really asking ourselves, “How clean is this data? How reliable is this data?”

It really forced us to see something that we as organizers probably wouldn’t have looked at just a regular scenario, but building an agent that relies on this data, well, we have to make sure that that data is, it’s clean, it’s correct. Even though, again, we were working with a very small data set, which was our speakers and sessions and rooms that are available for the conferences and we did. We made up some fake rooms to mirror that, okay, your conference and my conference, we have different spaces.

Mike Gerholdt:

Sure. Sure.

Marisa Hambleton:

It did. It came down to the quality of the data that we were feeding it that the agent could then work with and give us back something that was usable of, here’s our space, here’s our list of speakers, and feed it all that information. I think as an admin, I think an admin really has the ability to be at the forefront of that conversation in the business.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, a lot of it, people get hung up on what the tool can do, but you forget data is what powers everything, all of the responses and how good those responses are. You kicked off, when we started the podcast, you talked about the years that you’ve been in the ecosystem and how you’re in consulting. I would love for you to give admin some advice on how you help balance innovation with maintainability when you’re building on the Salesforce platform.

Marisa Hambleton:

I love that question. I am a big look to the far future person.

Mike Gerholdt:

Okay.

Marisa Hambleton:

I always think, is this something, if my team is working on a solution, is this solution going to be part of this organization for the next 10 years, 15, 20 years? I think really far out there to challenge. It’s fun to be innovative and it’s fun to use all the new, coolest, latest technology, all the newest features, but what is it going to look like in 10 years? Is it still going to look the same? Is it still going to be needed? Is the company still going to be around? I think it challenges me. It challenges my team to really think ahead that far so that you’re not just looking at an immediate, oh, I need this field. It’s like, okay, why? I think that is typical, I think, with admins, especially their experience they’ve been in the ecosystem is to question and maybe put a BA hat on and question that and then be innovative within that vision.

I think with Agentforce, it is revolutionary and I believe that it will revolutionize a lot of business. I believe Salesforce believes that as well, but it’s also allowing people to do more of the work that matters. Back to our community solution for scheduling, as organizers, these are passion projects. We’re volunteers. If we used to spend 10 to 20 hours on scheduling and now we can spend 10 minutes on it, it’ll give us more time to spend on our conference, on more valuable activities, giving our sponsors more attention, giving our attendees more attention, and just being able to be present with the people that are there and letting the agent take care of the busy work that we would prefer not to do. I think that that also comes back to the innovation and for myself, I guess a principle of innovation is create a solution that’s again, not only innovative, but lasts a long time and is maintainable and flexible and well-architected, using those buzzwords.

Mike Gerholdt:

No, I mean, that’s exactly the whole … I love what you said, think about the solution being there for the next five or 10 or even 15 years out. I think we’ve seen in tech a lot of features and innovations come and go. I don’t know that what we’re seeing with AI is a short-lived thing. I really think we’re on the early days of it and it’s only going to continue to grow, mostly because it’s only got everywhere to go in terms of what it can use and how it can help us. I would love for you, thinking big picture, can you give an elevator pitch that you would provide to a business leader on why every admin needs to understand Agentforce?

Marisa Hambleton:

Build for the future. Yeah. Building for the future.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah.

Marisa Hambleton:

I know.

Mike Gerholdt:

Your elevators are really fast, by the way.

Marisa Hambleton:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt:

Built for future, and we’re there already.

Marisa Hambleton:

Build for the … Yes. Build for the future.

Mike Gerholdt:

Holy cow. We don’t have to worry about Keanu Reeves coming to save you or anything. Nope, we’re done.

Marisa Hambleton:

Yes. Well, I love tech. I always have loved tech, and I think that working in technology is always a forward-looking, always looking to the future. A lot of change and AI, Agentforce, that’s part of it. Sometimes it is scary. Skynet, is it possible? Okay, maybe because anything’s possible. Likely, I don’t know. Again, coming back to the data conversation, if you don’t have the data for something and there’s still a lot of humans involved. I think people forget that there’s still a lot of … I mean, it took four of us, four humans to build the solution. There’s still a lot of humans involved. It’s a helper. It’s a helper. It’s like a workmate, a little digital workmate. Yes, build for the future.

Mike Gerholdt:

I like it

Marisa Hambleton:

As a company, if I was in front of my customer, I’m like, “Build for the future.”

Mike Gerholdt:

One of the things that I asked Melissa Hill Dees about, and I stumbled upon the question, and I think now, I have to ask all of you. If you could build an agent to help every admin do one thing, just one thing better, what would it be?

Marisa Hambleton:

Oh, gosh. Well, I’m going to keep coming back to the data thing.

Mike Gerholdt:

Okay.

Marisa Hambleton:

I was having a data hygiene conversation earlier today, and I feel like users in any system, but in Salesforce, you want your sales forecast to be correct. You’ve got to have that data and that hygiene, so a little agent that’s always running in the background, that goes the step beyond your validation rules and any other automation that you might have running. Let’s say you have a very large organization and you have people that are just doing a lot of different things. I think that data hygiene would really go a long way.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. I’m thinking of, did you ever watch The Jetsons as a child growing up?

Marisa Hambleton:

I did. I did.

Mike Gerholdt:

Remember Rosey, the maid that would go around. I’m envisioning every org needs a little Rosey.

Marisa Hambleton:

Yes, yes.

Mike Gerholdt:

It’s got to make those little sounds. Remember, she would just go around and dust. By the way, it was crazy. I don’t even know what year it was, like 2450 or something, but apparently, robots still use feather dusters.

Marisa Hambleton:

Yes, yes. Yeah. I think that’s probably more general. I would say the next thing is building the flow with voice commands and just talking through. This is, again, I’m thinking far into the future.

Mike Gerholdt:

That’s okay. We’re in the future.

Marisa Hambleton:

Yeah. It’s like my plane and I know there’s some AIs that can, it’s like mid-journey. You’re giving it this. You’re like, I have this. I’m looking at data from the last 10 years and I need to build an automation that pulls in quarter by quarter the delta of some of my projections or something big and just talking through the use cases and the scenarios, and here’s what I want to automate. Then, okay, here’s your automation. Here’s the flow. You wanted to write it in flow, and here’s the apex.

Mike Gerholdt:

I like that. I think that would be … I’ve often thought of if I could just click on a record and write a path that I need it to go, that would be really cool. We talk about that now, it’s 2025, and who knows? Somebody’s going to resurrect an old recording of this podcast maybe in five or 10 years and be like, “Wow, that was the future for them.”

Marisa Hambleton:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yes. It’s going to be like us talking about pencil sharpeners.

Marisa Hambleton:

Oh my gosh. I still have an old manual pencil sharpener in my garage that I’ve had forever.

Mike Gerholdt:

I mean, they were commonplace in my school.

Marisa Hambleton:

Yes. Now, I don’t have as many pencils that need sharpening anymore.

Mike Gerholdt:

I was going to say, I couldn’t name a pencil in my house right now. Let’s end on a fun note. What’s one word your teammates would use to describe you?

Marisa Hambleton:

Oh, energetic.

Mike Gerholdt:

Okay. I like that. Marisa, thanks for coming on the podcast. This was insightful and it’s such a neat way to get a view into what a team did and worked together in the Hackathon and the problem they solved, and I really like getting each of your perspectives. This is a fun little series of sitting in and having these conversations. Thanks for coming on and sharing with us.

Marisa Hambleton:

Oh, thank you for having me.

Mike Gerholdt:

Big thanks to Marisa for joining us today. Such a thoughtful perspective on innovation, data and what it really takes to build something that lasts. I love the thinking ahead into the future. If this episode got you thinking, really, I’d like for you to share it with a fellow Salesforce admin or, hey, how about a conference organizer? Bet they could ask you to build their first agent for them. You never know who might be wrestling with their own speaker schedule. Bet it’s somebody. For more tips and tools, head over to admin.salesforce.com. There, you’ll find links and a transcript of this episode, and be sure to connect with us in the Trailblazer community. Until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.

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