The Salesforce Admins Podcast

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Sri Srinivasan, Senior Director of Information Security at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about what admins need to know about Agentforce and how to build secure AI experiences. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Sri Srinivasan. A quick heads-up before we get started: This episode may include forward-looking statements—things we’re excited about, but not yet available. So please make any purchasing decisions based only on products and features that are currently available. For all the legal details, visit salesforce.com. The hidden job of AI security: admins build the brakes Sri gave a great TDX presentation about AI security and the crucial role admins play in the future of Agentforce. “Admins are key to everything that we do,” he emphasizes, “they understand everything that’s happening within their environment. They know which actions, what permissions, what they do, and agents are just another avenue to expose and interact with this crux of it.” As Sri puts it, Agentforce is like a sports car in terms of what it can do with your data. But how fast would you drive a sports car with no brakes? That’s why admins are so important in the age of AI. We can build the brakes for Agentforce to make sure our agents are behaving correctly. Five questions to ask when building secure Agentforce experiences Security conversations can get very scary very quickly, but Sri boils it down to five questions admins should ask when they’re building with Agentforce: What is the agent’s role and scope? What data will the agent have access to? Which actions should be public and which should be private? Do you need to build any extra guardrails? Which channels will the agent use? The key here is practicing the principle of least privilege. And for admins, that comes down to managing permissions and profiles in Salesforce and following security best practices. Every agent runs as a user—and that user needs to be tightly scoped. Test before you trust: scaling with the Agentforce Testing Center Going back to the idea of brakes, Sri cautions that just because you built an agent fast doesn’t mean that it’s ready. Luckily, his team has been hard at work on new tools to help you make sure your agents are working as intended. The new Agentforce Testing Center helps simulate and validate agent behavior at scale—without needing a QA army. You’re also able to peek under the hood to understand why an agent made a certain choice—turning debugging into decision-making clarity. Be sure to listen to the full episode for more on what admins need to know about Agentforce. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss out. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Sri at TDX: 5 Easy Steps for Secure Agentforce Implementation More from TDX: Security Best Practices with Agentforce Trailhead: Trusted Agentic AI Blog: Best Practices for Building Secure Agentforce Service Agents Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Sri on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Bluesky social Mike on Threads Mike on X Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re talking with Sri Srinivasan about secure, reliable AI experiences with Agentforce. Now, Sri is a leader on the security compliance customer trust team at Salesforce, where he helps customers understand and implement security best practices. Of course, before we get into this episode, be sure to follow the Salesforce Admins Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. That way you get a new episode every Thursday delivered right to your phone or your mobile device. So with that, let’s get into our conversation with Sri. So Sri, welcome to the podcast. Sri Srinivasan: Thanks for having me here, Mike. Super excited for it. Mike Gerholdt: Well, I love the presentation that you gave at TDX, and I’m sure more people would love to hear about it too, which is why I wanted to have you come back on, because everything now is Agentforce and security is always top of mind. I’ve always preached security ever since I started at Salesforce. I’ve had, I think, Laura Pelkey on quite a few times. But that was the compass of what you talked about at TDX. But I’m jumping ahead. Let’s talk about you a little bit. Tell me kind of where you got started and how you got to Salesforce. Sri Srinivasan: Let me try to make it very sweet and sharp. So I have always been in security. I have a master’s in information management specializing in security. I worked for big four accounting firms, but not doing accounting. I did security for them, data security and data privacy. Then I ended up working for a little gaming company where I really got involved in security, due diligence. Was a small company based out of Reno, but they were not really small. They did almost all gaming systems, all gaming interactions, lottery, all across the world. So that got me exposed to different systems and more specifically around fraud and how systems can be hacked to do things that they shouldn’t be doing. That’s where I got more interested in understanding the lay of the land of security. I spent about five, six years there. Then I got an opportunity to work for one of the biggest tax preparers in the United States. I ran their cyber fraud operations group for two years down there, and then my business teams, product teams came over to me and said, “Sri, you’ve been on the other side yelling at us to do a better job. Why don’t you come on this side and do that?” So I spent a couple of years on the product side as well. Then during COVID, I was looking back at my life when we had lots of time at home, and I realized I’ve done a lot of the security functions in total audit, GRC, red teaming, blue teaming, security operations center, fraud operations. One thing that I thought I did not have was that customer-facing experience, and this great opportunity came about at Salesforce, and my role currently in Salesforce is to interact with customers. My team, security compliance customer trust, is the front-facing team for all customer-facing security inquiries around security, compliance, and trust. So that’s how I got here, and I’ve been here for about five years or so, almost five. It feels like I just started yesterday, and it’s amazing. Every time I meet a customer, I just feel excited. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I mean, if I had to go back in time and pick a career in tech, I feel like security is one that you’re always going to have a job because if there’s a lock out there, I promise you there’s probably somebody trying to break it. Sri Srinivasan: Yep. I hear you. And the frustrating part about is that it’s oftentime not people trying to break the lock. It’s just people forgetting to lock their locks, and then figuring out like, “Hey, how did somebody get in?” Well, you didn’t lock it at the first place. Mike Gerholdt: Yep. Oh, man. Speaking the truth. So it feels like there’s kind of two eras. Well, I mean, we talk about different waves at Salesforce, but to me there’s the pre-AI era and then there’s the post-AI era. And for a long time, up until I saw your presentation, I kind of didn’t think about security with AI, because most of everything that we do on the platform is just so secure, but let’s talk about what your presentation at TDX was. So kind of in a nutshell, bring us into that presentation and what you talked about. Sri Srinivasan: Sure. I think what the intent was, AI is the hype word right now. So everybody’s talking about LLMs, everyone’s talking about how to protect those LLMs, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much more when it comes to implementing AI right. Salesforce provides you with a very secure platform, but is only as secure as you implement it. So that was kind of the crux of the presentation where we actually articulated the shared responsibility model in terms of what is expected is you as a customer, you as an admins, what are the few five or 10 things that you want to question anybody in your organization that is wanting to come up with an AI solution? And we wanted to break it down from a business case perspective, in a sense, if you look at all of our top tracks around Agentforce, we break it down into role, data, actions, guardrails, and channels. Those are the things that your business users are very familiar with. If we can build security into those aspects, by nature of it, we’re building security into the product itself, rather than coming at the end and saying, “Now I’m going to do a security review and I’m going to add security on top of it.” So that’s what we were focusing on during the presentation. Things around being very cognizant on what is the role of the agent, what is the scope of the agent, what will it do? What will it not do? What data it will have access to, and where is that data coming from? Do we need to bring that data into the Salesforce system? Do we need the agent to have access to that? Other critical things, such as least privilege, access controls, designing your actions securely. Those are the things that we spoke about during our presentation, most of which, if you just took it out of context and put it in a paper, none of this should be new words. All of this is standard security practices, but the way it’s applied, the lens through which you look at it, is a little different when it comes to Agentforce. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I think it’s always interesting as we delve into new tech when you think of security as really telling the agent what it should and shouldn’t do. Wow. Because most people, I think, probably encapsulate security into permissions and profiles and data access, but also what it should and shouldn’t do is also security, right? One of the things you mentioned in your answers was guardrails. And I’m wondering, can you give us some examples of what could go wrong if guardrails aren’t set properly? Sri Srinivasan: Yeah. So I’m trying to give a better example here because I don’t want it to be something that is future-looking, but rather what’s in the product today. So when you give your agent guardrails, a simple one could be your agent instructions. Under no circumstances should I ask for your email address or customer name or your order number because I have all that information. If I can validate Mike, I have all that information. I shouldn’t be asking you to give me that information and assume that is right. So that’s a very simple guardrail that you can throw into your system, right? Another set of guardrails could be you shall not perform these actions without having the user verified. You need to know who the user is before you can go and reset his password, or you need to have their second factor. You need to do a step-up authentication before you can trigger these actions, things of that sort. And what agent does with our Agent Builder, you can start providing these as natural language instructions. And the system would know. Mike Gerholdt: One thing I was thinking of, so I’m going to ask a silly question, because when we talk security, I feel like I’m the person that has to ask the silly questions. So I’m going to do that. You mentioned one thing of, well, I’m going to set the guardrail if it shouldn’t have access, or it shouldn’t ask for the order number because the person looking at the screen has the order number. Why is that important if we’re not passing an order number to an agent? Why would we withhold data to an agent? Sri Srinivasan: So we’re not actually withholding the data to an agent. The reason why we don’t want to explicitly ask the user for certain information is not just to ask, but we can ask, but we shouldn’t trust that information. It’s the innate concept of trust but verify. I can ask you for this information, but that’s not a great user experience because I already know your account number, your order number. I have all that information. But rather, what I don’t have is I don’t know who’s on the other side of the system. So that’s more important for me when I say that you shall not ask for it. The reason why I explicitly state that is because I don’t need this information from you. I already have it. What I need from you is to validate who you are. Once I know you’re Mike and this is the associated user ID, I have all the other information. Are you able to connect those dots? Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, no, I totally get it now. I mean, guardrails, I guess I was envisioning guardrails as like those bumpers that you put up when you go bowling and you’re not very good at it so you roll a strike every time. And it’s kind of that, but it’s also kind of that to make sure that the conversation and the agent is flowing in a natural manner so that you’re actually being productive is the way I hear it. So that totally makes sense. Sri Srinivasan: 100%. And what we have, it’s currently in pilot, is we have instruction adherence. So this is basically our systems, our Atlas Reasoning Engine has supervisory elements that are constantly looking at those conversations and getting metrics around key aspects such as instruction adherence, coherence, how factual it is, how grounded it is. These are then used to decide how the user experience should be. For example, if there is an instruction that says you shall not ask for the password through the portal, and if the system has to ask for the password, then the instruction adherence will be low and it will be ungrounded because it’s going to do something that is not grounded in its instructions. So then we can set the system to say, “Block those transactions, don’t do it.” So the agent would say, “Hey, sorry, I cannot help you here.” Whereas on the other cases, maybe we can say, “We don’t have enough information,” so then we can build the system in a way that it starts asking for more information so it has all the information that it needs to help you. So these are some things that are coming out. These are our guardrails that are happening when the system’s executing. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, no, it makes sense. I mean, you wouldn’t have to teach somebody the history of math, algebra, geometry, and trigonometry if all you were going to ask them is what is two plus two? And that totally makes sense to me now. Like I’m rethinking guardrails in a completely different way now. I just learned something on my own podcast. Light bulb moment. Let’s talk about that. You mentioned you’re talking with a lot of customers. Tell me about, you don’t have to be specific, but what were some of the aha moments that stood out when you were working with admins or customers and they finally, I don’t want to say finally, but there’s always that moment where you finally make a really good egg and you’re like, “Oh my God, I know how to fry eggs now,” using that as an example because I’m cooking eggs, but can you kind of give me that, because I feel like I get to see it a lot with some of the workshops, but it’s probably a little bit different for everybody. Sri Srinivasan: So off-lead, one of the biggest aha moments that I have experienced with admins is I do run these AI workshops at these world tours, and it is really eye-opening for them to look at the Agent Builder in the middle section. When they start looking at the reasoning, they now know why an agent does something that it did. So what are the biggest reasons why this whole agents are a little complicated and different is under the hood, agents use LLMs, right? And we all know what LLM is famous for, right? They’re non-deterministic. What do I mean by being non-deterministic? By non-deterministic, I mean that the same input can give you different outputs at different times. And earlier, like I think about a year and a half ago, one of the bigger problems with LLMs were they hallucinate. It’s still a problem, but we have figured out how to solve it. We provide it with more data, we ground it with more truth, so that it is then working within this construct. We have RAG, we have a lot of other things that we have actually provided to solve that problem. But the other problem of being non-deterministic is still there, right? And that is why when you start looking at the Agent Builder and you can start looking at the reasoning sections, our Atlas Reasoning Engine is basically telling you there which topic did I choose, what was the utterance that was provided. By utterance, I mean what the user typed. What topic did I choose based on the utterance. And once I chose the topic, what action I chose and I executed the action. But before I execute the action, I did a plan of executing the action. If I did execute the actions, here are the guardrails, here are the runtime guardrails that I would have triggered or I would’ve violated. And hence, I chose not to provide this answer, or hence I chose to go on to the next step. So when admins look at it, it instantly clicks in their mind. “Okay, this is how the agent worked.” And that also allows them to understand, “Oh, if I were to tweak this one word, maybe the agent would react a different way.” And then they go in and they try that and they’re like, “Whoa, wow. Now I’ve actually cracked the code of agents.” That has personally been one of the biggest aha moments for me. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I mean, for me, it was always, I love when I help admins and myself build a prompt, and especially when we do grounding, and then we’ll bind it to a field on a page, that’s always very simple, and they press this, I call it the sparkle button, and they get a response back and it’s like, “Wow.” And it’s consistent enough, but it’s not like a chatbot, right? It’s not like an email template. It’s a little bit different every time. But that feeling of AI isn’t scary and it’s not hard to do, you can see it sort of start to melt away. Sri Srinivasan: Right. 100%. And in those same scenarios, I’ve seen admins go really crazy when they do the dropdown in the prompt builder and they say, “Oh, so Sri, I can actually bring in data from an Apex class?” I’m like, “Yeah, you can.” And now they’re able to relate AI to the things that it’s dear and near to them, actions, flows, and Apex classes. Admins, that’s their bread and butter, they know that in and out. So now when they’re able to look at that and they’re like, “Oh, it’s as simple as using this in the AI world,” I feel they get very empowered and they’re like, “Okay, let me go play with it more now.” Mike Gerholdt: Yep. Let’s touch on permissions for a little bit because I know you covered that in your presentation… Words. What are some common pitfalls? Because I know that I’ve gotten questions at the Agentforce NOW Tour about setting up permissions and giving people access to Agentforce, but what are some things that are just real easy things that most people trip over? Sri Srinivasan: So one thing to understand when it comes to permissions is every time you create a service agent, those agents are running as their own designated user. We are going to be releasing employee agents pretty soon. Again, forward-looking statement supply. Employee agents actually run as the underlying user that are executing it. So if you are in your CRM panel, the right-hand side, Einstein Copilot panel we used to call it, that, now you can start interacting with it, those are kind of like the employee agents where it runs as Mike. Whereas if I create a service agent and you’re interacting it through any of the different channels through WhatsApp or through an Experience Cloud, you have to designate a running user. And oftentimes, folks will create a brand new user. And good thing is that this user comes with no permissions, which is good, but the downside of it is it will not be able to do anything. So similar to your standard profiles, licenses, permissions, object and record level, all of those needs to be assigned to this user. And sometimes what folks forget, admins forget, is you have organization-wide defaults and role hierarchy that could overwrite this. And over time, these roles, these permissions, because they’re like, “Oh, this doesn’t work. Maybe add this, maybe add this.” And over time, that role could end up having excess permission. So it’s always important to review the access to this agent user periodically to make sure it’s appropriate and make sure that only the right folks have access to even edit the permissions for these agent users. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I always think of, especially when you’re getting started, who are you going to roll it out to? Because you don’t need to just turn it on and let everybody just ask Agentforce whatever question it feels because you’re not set up for that. And that’s probably not the business case, and that’s a lot of the prep, is sitting down and saying, “So we have this really powerful tool, we have this really fast car. Where are we going to drive it?” It’s not like you necessarily have to drive the really fast car everywhere you go, and not everybody needs to have keys to it. So let’s end on kind of a, this not forward-looking statement, but I want to get your opinion on this. What do you think the role of admins will be in terms of shaping the future of AI at Salesforce? Sri Srinivasan: That’s a very interesting question. Admins are key to everything that we do. And admins, literally, they understand the Salesforce ecosystem. From my vantage point, I look at admins as the know-it-all people because they understand everything that’s happening within their environment. They know which actions, what permissions, what they do, and agents should be considered as just another avenue to expose and interact with this crux of it. So admins should take it on themselves to make sure that we are interacting with these agents in the right way. There are right guardrails in place. And I think one thing I want to just quickly peel back, you brought in the example of a sports car, right? So let me ask you, what makes the car go fast? Mike Gerholdt: Could be a number of things, but usually it’s the motor. Sri Srinivasan: Yes, I would say it’s the brake. If I gave you a Bugatti and I told you I took the brakes off, would you drive it at a hundred miles an hour? Mike Gerholdt: Well, you’re asking the wrong person. Sri Srinivasan: So that’s where I feel the admins come in. They have to put the brakes to make sure that agents are doing the right things, agents are responsible, agents are ethical, agents are doing the right things that they’re supposed to do. Yes, Salesforce does provide a lot of these out of the box, but you also need to provide. If the underlying data is biased, then the response will also be biased. So admins play a very important role, maybe not in developing all these things, but being the trusted advisors to their implementation teams to ask them the right questions. Mike Gerholdt: I love your example, because fast is only relative if you understand slow. And fast only matters if you can stop. Great way to frame security. See why I have smart people like you on the podcast because you got to educate us more. Sri Srinivasan: I’m happy to be here and thanks for this opportunity. And I think one thing I also want to emphasize is, just like everything, protecting data is a partnership. Salesforce provides you with the tools, the foundations, out-of-the-box topics, the guardrails. When we spoke about guardrails, we have runtime guardrails, detective guardrails, and then corrective ones too, so that we can actually look at things and make changes to the system. So we have all those things, self-improving guardrails, all of those things, we’re providing that as a platform, but it’s on you as the customer and admins to understand and use them. One of the biggest things that we just released was the Agentforce Testing Center. That’s something that’s very different, because like I said, how do you test non-deterministic outputs? Yes, I can put 20 people in front of the agent and have them test for 10 hours a day or for a month, and we would be able to cover a lot of use cases. But think about it, you’ve built your own agent, right, Mike? Mike Gerholdt: Oh, yeah. Quite a few times. Sri Srinivasan: How long does it take for you to build your first agent? Mike Gerholdt: So that’s a trick question. It doesn’t take long to turn it on, but I wouldn’t consider it built in that time. Sri Srinivasan: So if we have Salesforce enabled folks to quickly churn out agents we would not be able to reap that benefit if we’re going to tell the organizations, “Well, I’ve churned out 50 agents in a matter of three days. Now go ahead and spend 50 days per agent to test it.” It doesn’t scale. So that’s where Agentforce Testing Center comes in. It allows you to use AI to now start generating test cases and to evaluate your agents. So that’s a great addition. And as admins, we should be aware of that, and we should be leveraging that in order to make sure that our agents are secure and does what it says it does. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. No, I agree. I mean, does it take long to spin it up and do some configuration? No, probably faster than most. But is it ready for prime time? You can think of all the car builders. They can build cars really fast, but then they got to test them. And just because it’s built doesn’t mean it’s ready for people to use it. So it’s a great analogy. Sri Srinivasan: Yeah, and we’re bringing in things. One of the other things that I spoke about during my presentation was your need to bring in the user context. You need to do user validations and verifications. We are coming with newer features that we’re going to enable agent variables. These are secure session-scoped variables that capture and store data, and it can only be set by action outputs. So therefore, this is something that you can start using to improve your trust of your agents as well. The other things you can do is that you can have filtering rules now with your agents. So basically you say that only certain topics can be unlocked if you did some other activity. For example, you can only start handling refund when the user is verified. So those are some things that are coming out very shortly. We call them the agent variables, the action bindings, and then filtering rules. These are keywords. I’m just prompting it out so that you can go in after hearing this podcast, go in, search for it. You should be able to find more details in our help articles. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, and our coming up events. I’m sure there’ll be more stuff about that at Dreamforce. Yeah, I mean, so people ask me why this or why that? And you have to think of when you’re building an agent, you’re building something at an enterprise level, and it’s almost like the difference between commercial grade and household grade. When you buy a mower, there’s like for the homeowner that’s going to maybe mow a couple times a month, and then there’s mowers that are made for people that own businesses that are going to run the mower eight hours a day, five days a week, 200 hours a month, and really put it through its paces. And that’s the difference between some of the stuff that we build and some of the low lift, other stuff that’s out there. So I appreciate that perspective. Sri Srinivasan: Yep. I think if we’re still at time, the only other thing that I want to let folks know is we just started pilot with our Interaction Explorer, and I think as admins, this is something that we all like to do. How many times have we gone in, looked into our history or logs and we love that part, right? So Interaction Explorer takes the hard work out. It gives you all the information, one pane of observability across all your Agentforce interactions. How many users, how many sessions, what is the quality score, how many interactions per moment, what are the top ranking topics? What are the top ranking tags? By tags, what we have done is we have taken all these interactions using AI, and we’ve generated tags and we have grouped them together. So what that allows you to do is that now you can trace in cluster sessions with granular log data, and then now you can click down on it and inspect configurations at each and every level so that you can optimize your agents. I can actually go down to a specific conversation you had with an agent at this time, and then look at that specific interaction, that message that you typed, look in the background and say, “How long did the agent take? Where did it spend its time on? How much time did it take on utterances? How much time did it take on doing trust-related activities? How much time did it take to execute another action?” All that information is available for you so that you can take a much more smart decision on your agent enablement and also on how your agent is being consumed. Mike Gerholdt: No, I like it. Thanks for coming on the podcast, Sri. I mean, I feel like we went through all levels and I bet if I had a two-hour podcast, you and I could talk all day. Sri Srinivasan: I would love to. Mike Gerholdt: There’s always something to talk about, right? Sri Srinivasan: Yes, there’s definitely a lot. Again, folks know our security blogs coming out, our security sessions that happen at these world tours and other events. If you ever run into me, feel free to stop by and talk to me. I love to talk to customers. I love to talk to fellow admins. Mike Gerholdt: Okay, I don’t know about you, but my brain’s doing cartwheels in probably the best possible way. Just a huge thanks to Sri for coming on the podcast. I know he worked really hard on his TDX presentation, and security and AI is always a very difficult thing to wrap your head around. But hey, showed up and nailed the seatbelt on your self-driving car and came loaded with car analogies. So I thought it was fun. And if this episode made you go, “Ooh, that’s what guardrails do,” do me a favor, send it to your favorite admin friend out in the community. And to do that, just tap those three dots and boom, share away. You can put it on social, you can put it on the Trailblazer Community, you can text it to a friend. And if you’re hungry for more Salesforce Admins Podcast, be sure to go to admin.salesforce.com. That’s where you’ll find any of the links to resources that Sri shares with us, including other podcasts and a full transcript on this entire episode. So that’s always good. I appreciate that. But one last thing. If you’re looking to bounce knowledge off, ask questions, communicate, interact with other Salesforce admins, you can go to the Admin Trailblazer group that is in the Trailblazer Community and pop over there. There’s a lot of good stuff going on. But hey, until next time, you keep those agents in line and we’ll see you in the cloud. The post Why Secure AI Starts With You: What Admins Must Know About Agentforce appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

In this discussion, Dana Walton, Senior Manager of Credential Programs at Salesforce, shares her insights on the evolving certification landscape. With certifications transitioning to Trailhead Academy, the focus is on smarter personalization and accessibility. Dana highlights the importance of aligning certifications with new skill development over traditional roles. They also address how the certification process is becoming user-friendly, integrating community support and interactive assessments to help professionals enhance their careers in an AI-driven world.

In this engaging chat, Melissa Hansen, a Salesforce MVP and principal architect at HiFi Consulting Group, shares her journey from troubleshooting tech issues at a nonprofit to becoming a developer. She reveals the thrill of coding a scheduling agent at the TDX Hackathon in just 16 hours, highlighting the excitement of using Agentforce for the first time. Melissa also discusses empowering women in tech through RAD Women and the importance of collaboration between developers and admins. Expect insights on innovative scheduling solutions and the evolving landscape of programming!

Marisa Hambleton, Chief Delivery Officer at MH2X and Salesforce MVP Hall of Fame member, shares her insights on conference organizing challenges. She explains the intense 'Tetris' of scheduling speakers and rooms, revealing the significant behind-the-scenes effort required. Marisa emphasizes the critical importance of clean data for AI projects during her team's hackathon experience, highlighting how foundational data hygiene is for effective innovation. With a passionate focus on community and collaboration, she offers valuable perspectives on transforming event logistics.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Melissa Hill Dees, nonprofit Salesforce consultant and Salesforce MVP. Join us as we chat about how her TDX Hackathon team built a conference scheduling agent from scratch in 16 hours. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Melissa Hill Dees. How to help nonprofits define goals for Salesforce Melissa majored in computer science back when you still programmed with punched cards. However, she didn’t really start her career in tech until 2008, when the nonprofit she was working for started using Salesforce. She was hooked on how she could help these organizations use technology to do more with less, and quickly pursued an MBA in digital entrepreneurship. One thing that came up in our conversation was the difference between how nonprofits and businesses approach Salesforce. In particular, Melissa emphasizes the importance of defining measurable goals for any tech project so you have common ground when prioritizing requests. As the capabilities of Salesforce continue to grow with Agentforce, admins need to help their organizations maintain focus. Building an agent in 16 hours at the TDX Agentforce Hackathon Melissa is fresh from the TDX Agentforce Hackathon, where she put together an all-women team of Salesforce MVPs called MH4. Why the name? Because everyone on the team has the same initials: Melissa Hill Dees, Michelle Hansen, Marisa Hambleton, and Melissa Hansen. Together, they had 16 hours to make a working agent, but Melissa was the only person on the team who had built one before. However, from their experience as Dreamin’ event volunteers, they had a pretty good idea for a problem they could solve: scheduling a conference. Finding the right-sized room for each talk when there are several concurrent speaker tracks gets complicated, especially when people are presenting more than once. It’s a problem that everyone on the team could rally around. As Melissa explains, building the agent wasn’t the hard part. It was setting up the backend to make sure it had the right information and permissions to accomplish its goal. Why admins should get the Strategy Designer Certification If you’re looking to learn more, Melissa highly recommends getting the Strategy Designer Certification. You can learn tons of valuable tactics, like consequence scanning, that help you align a group of people around an idea and allow everybody to feel like they have input. Finally, Melissa emphasizes how crucial it is for admins to start learning Agentforce now, even if your organization is hesitant. “Admins have to see the big picture,” she says, “so start learning it now so you don’t have to play catch-up when everybody comes around and wants to use AI.” Be sure to listen to the full episode for more from my conversation with Melissa, and don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you can catch us every Thursday. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Certification: Strategy Designer MH4’s presentation at the TDX Hackathon Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Melissa on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Bluesky social Mike on Threads Mike on X Full show transcript Mike: You’ve got a dream team when everyone’s name starts with MH, and you’re building a functioning AI agent in 16 hours while laughing and having fun at it. This week we’ve got Melissa Hill Dees on the pod, and the vibe is totally Agentforce, nonprofit tech, and I even talk about the future of Salesforce admins in the era of AI. And we also talk about the little thing that she built at the hackathon. It’s just a scheduling tool that is really cool for all the dream and events. But let me tell you this, if you’ve ever said, “I’m not a developer, but …”, you’re going to feel right at home. So with that, let’s get Melissa Hill Dees on the podcast. So Melissa, welcome to the podcast. Melissa Hill Dees: Thank you, Mike. I’m so glad to be here. Mike: Well, I’m glad to have you on, and we’re going to kick off … I’m going to call it a few weeks of MH4s. Melissa Hill Dees: I love that Mike: All of the MH4s because you guys were such a cool little group that got together for the hackathon at TDX, which we’re going to talk about. But before we get into that, Melissa, which spells out some of the MH4, tell us a little bit about yourself. Melissa Hill Dees: Oh goodness. So a little bit about myself. I found Salesforce in 2008 after becoming a stay-at-home mom for a little while and not knowing what to do with myself and trying to help small businesses improve what they were doing from a customer relationship management side. I didn’t really get very deep into Salesforce then but a couple of years later, I went to work for a nonprofit and they had Salesforce and I became the classic accidental admin. Which was ironic considering that back in the dark ages when dinosaurs still roamed the earth I had majored in computer science. Mike: That’s back when they were inventing dirt, because I was also back in that era too. Melissa Hill Dees: They were literally inventing the internet. When I went to university, we still had punch cards. You remember punch cards? Mike: Uh-huh. Melissa Hill Dees: So I felt like I had come full circle. But I really loved what Salesforce was doing with nonprofits and giving them the opportunity to use the best technology that was out there to make a more impact, to improve their mission. And so the more I worked in nonprofits, the more I saw that they thought differently. They didn’t think like a business, they thought like a nonprofit, and they didn’t always use Salesforce like a business, they used it like they thought a nonprofit would. So it was really interesting. I studied. I did a lot of research and went back and got my master’s in digital entrepreneurship because I really wanted to understand the best ways to help nonprofits leverage technology because they have to. That’s the only way they can do more with less. So that’s really become my passion. How do we make it simple, easy, welcome even. Everybody fusses about technology, but it can do so much that we don’t have to do, so we have time to do the things that we really want to do. Mike: Well, that’s a great intro. Holy cow. Could you ever have imagined back in 2008 that you would be at a hackathon building an agent? Melissa Hill Dees: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Again, once upon a time, I could write a little Cobol or a little Fortran, but I’m sure I can’t even do that anymore. And certainly not a developer by any stretch of the imagination. And you say hackathon, I immediately think developers. Mike: I know. Melissa Hill Dees: That who goes to hackathons, right. But I had learned early on from attending the nonprofit community sprints that you didn’t have to be a developer. You didn’t have to even be a hardline admin. If you wanted to help in a sprint, you had input and you could help in so many different ways. So it made the hackathon a little less intimidating. Mike: Absolutely. So let’s get into that. First of all, I need you to explain the MH4s. What’s the MH4s? Am I saying it correctly? Melissa Hill Dees: Well, I say MH to the fourth. Mike: Oh, okay. Sorry. MH to the fourth. Melissa Hill Dees: Yeah. Because we’re exponentially awesome. And ironically, a couple of things were going on with that. One thing, ever since I’ve been involved in the ecosystem, I’ve been involved with the women in tech groups and WITness Success and all the different groups working with women in minorities. And especially when it comes to AI, I am just adamant, everywhere I speak, I tell everybody they need to get in there and help train the AI. And so I wanted almost as a social experiment to have an all female team for the hackathon. And I started thinking about what we would need on that team. And I knew we’d need a good developer. And so Michelle Hansen is who immediately came to mind. I knew we would need somebody who could write flows at the drop of a hat, do the adminning, and of course Michelle … Michelle Hansen. I’m going to get confused here. Michelle Hansen is obviously that person. She’s so good at those sorts of things. We also needed someone that was more of an architect view. And Marisa Hambleton runs Cactusforce and does that work and so I invited her. And then I was the only one of the group that had actually built an agent before we got to hackathon. Mike: Oh, wow. Melissa Hill Dees: So it was a really exciting opportunity. And it was funny that I didn’t consciously think we need everybody named MH, initials MH. But it worked out that way. And in fact, I was going to ask Maham Hassan to be on our team as well, and she couldn’t because of the rules and regulations about folks out of the country. Mike: Okay. Melissa Hill Dees: We would’ve been MH to the fifth power. And five was all you could have. But I’m so glad I did that. It was everything I dreamed it would be. The collaboration between us. None of us have ever worked together. We’ve never been even employed by the same company, let alone in the same room to sit down together and have 16 hours to go from zero to a working agent. And I loved it. We talked and we talked and we talked. We got all the consequence scanning done and the road mapping done and everything done because we just talked and talked and talked and talked. And we didn’t have to go back and do that after we built the product. That was built into the way we thought and building the product and building the agent. So both Melissa and Marisa and even Michelle did a little bit. We’re all like, “Oh, I don’t know if I want to go to a hackathon. I’ll have to take two days out of my work.” And I really twisted their arm a little bit and I said, “We could do something really awesome.” All of us are involved in community driven events, and we talked about could we do scheduling? What could we do? And then when we got there, of course actually, that’s what we built, was a scheduler for presentations based on the rooms that they would be in based on what we had available. And literally took what … Marisa said took her and Steve about 40 hours combined to do, and the agent does it in seconds. Mike: Oh, wow. So tell me … You’ve teased it out. Tell me a little bit about what you built at the hackathon. Melissa Hill Dees: Yeah. It was great. So we started thinking about what … All of our driven events we’re all volunteers. Nobody gets paid to do those. And so it was a situation of what can an agent do for us that will save us time? And that’s one of the huge tasks. After you actually go through all the submissions for presentations and you decide which ones you want, then how in the world do you schedule them in these different rooms? The tracks are running at the same time. You’ve probably got four or five different tracks running at the same time. Somebody may be presenting more than once. You don’t want them to overlap. The rooms, depending on how big they are and what else they’re being used for. So it just seemed like a really great idea for an agent. And we decided to build it. After we were done we thought we probably could have done this with a flow, but because we had that 16 hour time constraint, Melissa Hanson whipped out a … She said, “I can do this with code.” We’re like, “Okay. Do it. Because we want a product when we leave here and we can update it later.” So literally … And the demo that we had to make to submit for the hackathon is on my LinkedIn page and shows you how quickly it goes to, you’ve already got all that data in your Salesforce instance, you’ve got the speaker, the session, the titles the rooms, and you hit that agent and it creates a schedule for you. Mike: Yeah. No. I believe me more can relate to what you’re asking that agent to do as somebody that’s involved with a lot of the events and stuff that Salesforce does. Melissa Hill Dees: And the best thing, I think for us about the hackathon, and it was ironic because the very next day I was invited to an executive listening session. And I said, “I would’ve come to TDX just for the hackathon.” I learned so much. And I’m a very kinetic learner. I need to do it. I don’t need you just to show it to me or tell me about it. I need to do it myself. And because I had already built some, that’s why I knew that the hard part was not building the agent, the hard part was writing the code if you needed something invocable there or getting the permissions correct on the back end for the agent itself and applying all of that. So deep dive into that agent. We were learning from each other and with all of our different skill sets, we’re all MVPs, but each of us has such different skill sets. And then we could really actually create something that would work in the real world, say in less than 16 hours. To me that’s amazing. Mike: Oh, absolutely. You’ve done so much to encapsulate that weekend, and I’ll point people to that video on your LinkedIn page. I’m wondering if you could bottle up one moment from that weekend and share it with the world, what would it be? Melissa Hill Dees: Oh, goodness. The word that comes to my mind again and again and again is the collaboration with those women. And there was not arguments. And there could have been, and that would’ve been fine because it’s okay to disagree. But we didn’t. We really aligned on what we were trying to accomplish and we knew what we wanted to do. And that level of collaboration was just like I say, everything I ever imagined something like that would be, Mike: Yeah. Let’s transition out of that because you’ve been in the community since we’ve invented the cloud. I say that because I’ve been around since 06 so we’ve been there a while. And I started, the first question was, could you imagine an AI agent now? How do you see the Salesforce admin role evolving in an AI forward world? Melissa Hill Dees: Ooh, that’s very interesting. I am fascinated by AI and how we can leverage it to do things. I think I really believe even now, admins need to at least learn how to use the agent and how to build an agent. Because right now it’s relatively simple to do, but I think about 2008, Mike, what was there of Salesforce? It was one product. It was one thing. I could learn it then. There were times when I could tell you that I felt like I knew everything you need to know about Salesforce. Now, no way. With all the product acquisitions and the different clouds and the different architectures and the different information, there’s just no way possible that I can be an expert at Field Service and at Marketing Cloud and at Slack and at all those things. So I always think of admins like architects. They have to see the big picture. And with the AI I think that’s important. Start learning it now. Don’t wait. Even if your company says, “Absolutely not. We’re not going to use AI. We don’t trust it, we don’t like it, but start learning it now so you’re not trying to play catch up when everybody comes around and is using AI.” Mike: Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. And to your point, I remember as an admin trying to pass my certifications and thinking, oh, but my company doesn’t use Service Cloud. I don’t know Service Cloud. And the certifications … Forced is a bad word to say, but required that I learn it. And I remember thinking to myself, but it’s good that I know it now so that when the company’s thinking about it, I’ll be ready. Or at least I’ll have a base foundation. And a lot of that is realizing where you sit between technology and strategy within an organization. So my question to you is, what’s something you wish more people understood about the intersection of being a Salesforce admin and strategy? Melissa Hill Dees: I think that Salesforce admins probably have the best view of what the strategy might be like. I think it’s important. I love the strategy designer certification. Mike: Tell me about that. Melissa Hill Dees: Yeah. If you’re an admin and you haven’t looked at that, you should because it’s less technical and more people management. And one of the things that I learned studying for that and from the design team from Adam Doti’s team was consequent scanning. I’d never done that before. And it was so fantastic to do that and be able to align a group of people around an idea. It wasn’t a threatening way. It wasn’t, I’m the boss and we have to do this. It wasn’t that I’m the admin and we have to do this. It was an opportunity for everybody to have that input. And I think that’s so important for admins. They have so many jobs and they’re not just the technical side of things. They’re the ones that get the complaints because the button didn’t work or it’s not where it would be easy to use or whatever, the report’s not pulling correctly. And it’s just so much responsibility when you do Salesforce admin and do it really well. That’s why I recommend that to everybody. I don’t even think you have to have your admin cert. I don’t think that’s a prerequisite. But it’s definitely worth doing and learning. At least do the trailhead on it. Mike: Yeah. No. I didn’t even know about now it’s on my list. Thank you. Melissa Hill Dees: Yeah. Mike: So you brought that up because the admins are responsible for a lot and they do often have that first line of reaction or giving some sort of an answer to a user and looking up an issue, whether that was something they found in discovery or not. But I’d love to know, when you think about best practices, is there something underrated that has maybe made a huge impact in one of the organizations that you’ve managed or worked on? Melissa Hill Dees: That’s a great question. There are a lot of things that are underrated. And right now what I’m encouraging … Especially if you’re a sales organization, encouraging folks to do is to use the agent summary function in sales. Working in a implementation partner, you don’t always talk to the customer when they’re in the sales process. You may not even talk to them when they’re in the delivery process, so you really don’t know them that well, but you’re going to write a customer success story. Well, how do you go back and capture three years worth of work or three years worth of interactions? And I’ve seen it done with the agent summary. And to me, that is the most impactful thing from an ROI. Do you want to pay me to spend five or six hours trying to track down information for something or do you want to pay me for writing a customer success story? So if I can get that summary at the click of a button, then I can write the success story, then I can write five success stories, six success stories, whereas I’d only be able to write one in the same timeframe if I were having to do it all manually. That’s just a huge thing, I think. Mike: And you always bring it up. There’s so many underrated things because there’s very powerful things in setup that sometimes get overlooked. Melissa Hill Dees: The design. The user design. There are a lot of ways to improve it significantly, and most people don’t take the time to do that. And you talk about user adoption, we all know that that’s the easy route to user adoption. It doesn’t matter how complicated it is on the backside, I just want to click a button. And we don’t think that way always as an admins, and we are the ones that would do that. Mike: No. Absolutely. You think about keeping up on technology, and you often talk about technology as a tool for social good. I’d love to know how do you keep that front and center when building in Salesforce? Melissa Hill Dees: Well, personally, I love the V2MOM. And you’re probably going to think this is crazy, but I use it with customers to suss out what the important aspects of any project we’re working on are. Something that we can set up a goal, make it a measurable goal, and that makes it so much easier to start fleshing out requirements and user stories and you turn it over to delivery and they’ve got metrics to build against. So thinking about with nonprofits, if you want to double your online donations this year, maybe that’s your goal. Then we build a new donation interface in Salesforce or in an experience and then create the report as well to be able to track that so that we can see did we accomplish that? And I don’t know if you make it purple and they’re like, “No. It needs to be pink.” And you say, “Well, so is Pink going to help increase the number of donations?” And if they say, “Okay. Let’s put that in the parking lot. Let’s go to phase two with that.” But they may say, “Well, it has to be pink because we’re breast cancer, and so pink is our signature color. People won’t even recognize us if you don’t do pink.” Then yes, it probably would help increase the donations. And so that’s worthwhile to include in that. Just helps not get out of scope, but to be able to focus on what they’re really trying to achieve before they get to the end of the project and then go back and say, “Well, was this a successful project? Did we build something good in Salesforce?” Well, who knows? Mike: You said a lot. And you actually answered my next question because I do think a lot of … I was going to ask you about an admin superpower, and I think you brought it up, which is really having that critical eye and being able to look at how easy is it to use the thing that I just built, and does it align with what we’re using it for? Melissa Hill Dees: Right. You have to ask why. Why is my favorite word. And the five whys, that’s part of the strategy certification too. But customers don’t … And I say customers. Whether they’re internal customers, users, or if you’re a partner and working with external customers, they don’t always know what they want it. Like children. You never say to a child, “What do you want to drink?” You say, “Would you like milk or would you like juice?” And so understanding their business and what they’re trying to accomplish I think is critical to being able to help them and then asking why. The best example I have of that, we were in Prague, my husband and my daughter and I. I was speaking at CzechDreamin a couple of years ago, and we’d been there about 24 hours and my daughter came to me and she’s like, “Mom, there’s nothing left to see in Prague.” Mike: Wow. Melissa Hill Dees: I was like, “Why would you say that?” It’s a great old city. There’s tons to see in Prague. She said, “Well, there’s nothing left in walking distance.” I was like, “Okay. So why don’t you take public transportation? You’re a huge one to use public transportation.” She’s like, “Well, I can’t read the language.” And of course know Czech is not even our alphabet. So she was really struggling with that. I said, “Okay. So why don’t you take a Lyft or an Uber?” And she said, “Because I’m out of money.” So that was what she really needed. It wasn’t that there was nothing left to see in Prague, it was that she didn’t have the money to get to the places that she wanted to go to see the things she wanted to see in Prague. But you don’t get that unless you get to the root of what it is they’re trying to accomplish. Mike: Yeah. Wow. It’s like reaching the end of the internet. No you didn’t. You didn’t reach the end of the internet. Boy, we covered a lot. I’d love to go back. Just one thing on agents as we close it out. And this has been lingering with me. I think maybe since I’ve got all the rest of the MH4s coming … MH to the power of four coming up. Maybe I’ll ask him this. If you could build an agent to help every admin do one thing better, what would it be? Melissa Hill Dees: Understand the error messages in Salesforce. Mike: Oh, I like that. Melissa Hill Dees: In fact, a partner and I have been working on this. It’s not an Agentforce agent. We started it before Agentforce came out. But again, because admins speak a different language than developers do, and they both speak different languages than users. And so what we’re working on actually looks at your metadata, tells you what the problem is and speaks to you based on your role. I do. I think that that’s the most time consuming challenge that admins face. You get that error message that says, “If this error persists, contact your Salesforce administrator.” It’s like, I am the administrator. Mike: I love getting that message with the administrator. That’s me. Don’t you know that’s me. Melissa Hill Dees: And it gives you no helpful thoughts at all. And now that there’s an agent in the help, that’s fantastic because used to, I’d be like 57 tabs later and I still didn’t have an answer to fix whatever the problem was that I was getting that error message. So yeah. That’s what I would build and I am building. Mike: Okay. Well look at that. I asked the question that’s already stuff’s in flight. Melissa Hill Dees: Right. Mike: Melissa, this is a wonderful conversation. You need to come on the podcast more often. Talk about nonprofit tech and equitable technology. I feel like that’s a whole other podcast. Melissa Hill Dees: It is. It is. And so important. So, so, so very important. Mike: Yeah. Absolutely. And I’ve done podcasts before, but asking why … I love your example of you didn’t see everything in Czech. You’re just out of money. Melissa Hill Dees: Right. Mike: That was great. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast, Melissa. Melissa Hill Dees: Thank you. Mike: Big thank you to Melissa Hill Dees for joining us and sharing her journey of nonprofit tech advocate and AI hackathon hero. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to share it with a fellow Salesforce admin or a community member, maybe both. For more great resources, of course, head on over to admin.salesforce.com and be sure to check out that trailblazer group and let’s hope Melissa is working on building that decoding error messages agent, because I think I’ll be the first in line when that launches. Anyway, until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud. The post When Collaboration Meets Agentforce: The MH4 Hackathon Story appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Dorian Earl, Salesforce Admin and Founder of Development Consulting Partners, LLC. Join us as we chat about the 5 steps admins can take today to lead the charge in the Agentforce era. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Dorian Earl. Admins are at the center of the Agentforce era I always love having Dorian on the pod because he has an amazing origin story. He started out as a traveling sales rep for medical and dental equipment. He had to keep track of over 100,000 products and 300 clients, all in paper notebooks, until one day he left his Franklin planner on the roof of his car and realized he had to find a better way. That’s when he started looking into a new digital CRM platform called Salesforce.  These days, Dorian helps organizations with digital transformation through Salesforce, and he sees admins as the linchpin for driving organizational change in the Agentforce era. In fact, he flagged me down at a recent event because he was so excited to share his 5-step action plan for how Salesforce Admins can lead the charge on AI. 1. Build awareness beyond the buzz While most people have talked to an LLM by now, Dorian has noticed that most of his clients don’t quite grasp what it could mean for their organization. Admins are in a unique position to translate the buzz into action. Start by educating your teams, surfacing practical use cases, and bringing the conversation into team meetings. This isn’t about replacing people—it’s about making everyone 10-20% smarter, faster, and more capable. 2. Prep your data for Agentforce AI is only as good as the data you give it. And we’re not just talking about client data, though that needs to be in a healthy place. As Dorian points out, consumer-facing agents need to know things like your operating hours, company values, and brand voice. Prepping your data for Agentforce makes it easier to try new features and build something that works. 3. Identify the quick wins Admins don’t need to wait for long-term projects to start making an impact with AI. Agentforce comes with ready-to-use features that drive value today. Dorian points to two in particular: Record Summaries: AI-generated account overviews save time and provide instant context, especially for reps managing hundreds of accounts or taking over a book of business. Quick Reporting: Need to know how many leads are in New York with a certain status? You can just ask. No more report-building marathons—admins and users alike can get insights on demand. These tools aren’t just time-savers—they’re credibility builders. They show stakeholders the value of AI quickly and easily without much heavy lifting. 4. Find internal processes to improve The biggest thing that should be on your radar is how Agentforce can overhaul internal business processes. There are so many places where an internal-facing agent can save clicks and smooth out a workflow. Dorian brings up the example of processing a return. An agent can take care of all the little steps, like creating a case, logging information, and authorizing a refund, instead of that being a multi-person business process. 5. Lead the AI transformation Admins are no longer just behind-the-scenes builders—they’re transformation leaders. You understand the org’s data, its pain points, and its goals. That makes you the ideal person to customize and scale AI across departments. As Dorian puts it, success with Agentforce isn’t just about features—it’s about alignment. Help your teams adopt AI by showing them how it can support their goals, simplify their day-to-day, and elevate their performance. There were so many great tips in my conversation with Dorian for how admins can thrive in the Agentforce era, 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 morning. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Keeping Processes Fresh in Salesforce with Dorian Earl Salesforce Admins on YouTube: Agentforce Decoded Trailhead: Einstein Work Summaries for Service Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Dorian on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Bluesky social Mike on Threads Mike on X Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I’m thrilled to welcome back Dorian Earle, founder and CEO of a thriving consultancy that has over 450 clients and just a massive wealth of Salesforce experience and knowledge. Dorian has been the Salesforce ecosystem for nearly two decades. He started as a sales rep who needed a better way to track his deals and opportunities and really turn that into a career empowering companies to embrace better CRMs and smarter systems. Now in today’s episode, we dive into Dorian’s five steps to prepare for Agentforce and AI. Now, from understanding the buzz around AI to implementing quick wins and long-term strategies, Dorian shares invaluable insights to help you, the Salesforce admin, and/or organizations you work for stay ahead of the curve this year in 2025. Now, of course, before we jump in, I want to make sure that you’re following or subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so that you never miss a great episode like this. New episodes drop every Thursday morning. That way you’ve got them, boom, right on your phone before you head off for your dog walk or your commute to work. So with that, let’s get Dorian on the podcast. Dorian, welcome back to the podcast Dorian Earl: Though this is an absolute pleasure more than you know and good to see you again at all of the events. So good to see you and good to chat with you again. Mike Gerholdt: You’re one of the people that I’m happiest out in the world and we get to run into each other at different events, and you and I are such easy people to miss out in a crowd. Dorian Earl: Well, I don’t know if that’s the case. I’m the tallest person. You have the best beard and the most charismatic smile. Everybody who sees you go, literally. Mike Gerholdt: I don’t know about that. Dorian Earl: Yeah, well, yeah. When you walk past, and for the listeners who don’t hear this, Mike had walked past us at the World Tour and two people at the table said, “I don’t know who he is, but he has to be somebody.” I said, “You don’t know who Mike Gerholdt is?” And so you have a reputation. I’m surprised there’s not three people following you carrying your briefcase and just kind of handling all of it. Mike Gerholdt: There used to be. I say I’m kind of in my late ’80s John Travolta stage of Salesforce celebrityism where I’m doing the really bad B movies and nobody knows who I am. Dorian Earl: But that’s not true. Mike Gerholdt: I’m hoping for the next Pulp Fiction level role to come up and then I’ll be dancing around like a Santa Claus selling Citibank cards and stuff. Dorian Earl: I was going to say, if you just come out with a good costume, which at every event there are people with a really good… And dance moves, I guarantee you, you’ll be more relevant. Mike Gerholdt: And don’t forget, I got to shave my head. Travolta had that whole time where he shaved his head too. Dorian Earl: Ah, that’s true. I would just tell you, you should keep yours. You got good hair. Mike Gerholdt: I think so. Dorian Earl: You got a lot happening. You got a lot happening. Mike Gerholdt: You know what everybody who subscribes to the podcast didn’t want to listen to? Dorian Earl: What’s that? Mike Gerholdt: Was all of that conversation. So let’s talk about something that’ll provide business value to our customers again, and that is getting ready for Agentforce and AI. And when you and I ran into each other, well, to be fair, when you beelined through a hotel restaurant to find me horsing down my chicken fingers at the bar, you had this wonderful thing, you were like, “Mike, we got to talk about this on the podcast. I have these five things that I’m helping companies do to get ready for AI.” And I said, “You’re right.” So Dorian, let’s get into that. But let’s start off just because sometimes people don’t listen to all of the episodes of the podcast. What do you do? How did you come to be in the Salesforce world? Dorian Earl: Yeah, so I started almost 20 years ago as a sales guy. I needed a way to track my deals and opportunities, and if anybody’s around in the mid, I’m not going to give my age, in the mid 40s, we all used Franklin portfolio, Franklin Company Planners, and I would leave them at my client’s office and set them on top of my car and drive off and there goes my pipeline and all of my stuff and I couldn’t do that. So kind of being a forward-thinking salesperson, I said I need to have a way that I wouldn’t lose my notes, my deals, my opportunities, everything I had worked hard to build. Then I went to purchase programs and databases and lo and behold, I found a web-based CRM called Salesforce. That was 20 years ago. That was really became my secret sauce, Mike. I was an average salesperson and getting good, but really my secret sauce was organization and to be able to stay on top of deals. And in my line of work as a salesperson at that time, we had over 100,000 products to keep track of. So what kind of promotion was going on? Who needed what? What was going on? I was a sales rep in the medical dental supply space. So we had a lot of manufacturers and four or five different manufacturers for each line. Like gloves, we had five or six brands of gloves and masks. So who had the promotion? Which one did my customer like? Oh, my doctor liked the left-handed glove from Crosstechs or from MedTech or from all those kind of companies. And I had to keep all those things straight because I had 300 plus clients. The doctor would like one and their front desk would like another and the assistant, that kind of… And so all those things became really difficult for me to keep track of and I needed a better way to do that. And so lo and behold, I purchased Salesforce for myself, started to get some success. The down economy hit and I was of the few people that I could actually forecast my sales to my boss. I can go in and say, “This client mentioned this to me earlier on in the year. I think we can close them if we do these things.” I was one of the few people at our branch that could do that. Long and short of it, that grew to me going independent, started my own firm and then working with other companies, help bring in their sales or their product in the market. It was always, “Hey, I can help you lead your sales team, but you need to have a database or CRM.” Again, 15 years ago, it was, “I have this in some spreadsheet or somebody in our office has this in a spreadsheet.” And I said, “You need to have one, a better way to track your sales and deals.” And I would tell them, “You need to go out and buy the Salesforce thing.” And so I worked in tech startup helping companies take the product in the market. One of those products was acquired by Google. And so I became a contract sales manager for Google for a while and Apple for a little bit, and that’s part of my story. And six years ago, a company actually just reached out and said, “Can you help us with the CRM and sales thing?” And then my career helping companies from the inside out versus the outside in kind of worked. And so now, I’m the founder and CEO of a company with 450 plus clients and about 20 plus team members and things are really fun. So that’s the long story short, right? Mike Gerholdt: Right, right. It’s interesting because we’ve known each other for a while and we’ve both been the ecosystem for a while and we’ve CRM and Salesforce change and add new features to the time. I think what we’re seeing now with AI everywhere, what is your level of, let’s start off with your five things, what is your level of awareness that you’re seeing with your clients on being AI ready or even having thoughts of how they would use that? Dorian Earl: Everybody knows about it. As I said, I see articles at my desk. My team is using this. There are everyday products that they are seeing now that are becoming more intelligent or adding AI. You can’t turn on a TV today every… If you’re watching football and there’s a break, one commercial will say, “This is the product with AI now.” So there’s a lot of buzz and really awareness, and now it’s starting to really be embedded into other products. What I’m finding out with our clients is they don’t understand the real impact of what this means for their business yet. They know it’s out there, but they just don’t know how to leverage that, how LMMs work, which ones to use, use cases, but they are seeing AI being embedded into their everyday tools. They are seeing email plugins, they are seeing these things and they’re starting to encounter it. So our role is really just to say, “Look, let 2025 be the year of intelligence at your company. Let’s make everybody 10% smarter. Let’s make everybody roll in your work, let’s make everybody 10, 15, 20% smarter this quarter, this six months this year.” And they’re really getting excited with that. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. It’s kind of like the early 1900s with cars. I mean, there’s how many people making an AI product right now? And I guess we’ll find out how many survive and don’t because the early 1900s, there was over 300 car manufacturers and now there’s what? 5, 10 arguably? Dorian Earl: Right. Maybe. Right, yeah, maybe. Right. Mike Gerholdt: I’m sure more, but you know. So in the five things admins can do to get ready for Agentforce and AI, you list number one is awareness. So I feel like maybe last year that was like, “Oh, we kind of need to wake up.” And most people, I don’t want to say most people, most people I know became AI aware at the consumer grade level. I think it’s another to think of AI at the enterprise level, which is where Salesforce operates because we’re an enterprise CRM. We’re operating immediately with millions of rows of records and sometimes even data lakes or multiple organizations. So I’m sure that you probably run into a few that are aware. Let’s go on to number two, which is the preparedness. Where do people fall there? Dorian Earl: They are not because one, if they are aware, and I think you hit it on the head, and I don’t want to bury what you just said. Mike Gerholdt: Sure. Dorian Earl: Really, most technology comes out as a consumer facing application to catch what’s called a user adoption, right? And I remember when I was in college and Google first launched and literally people going out and say, “You can ask Google anything and it would just come back with an answer.” Or as Amazon, you can go put in any book you want. Well, it took a few years for people to understand the business implication of having all the data on the internet to ask a question. It even took Google really by storm or Amazon if you would’ve asked them when they started what their business would look like. They didn’t know. So we are in early days, but the people that are understanding, okay, there is an entity or there is a program out there that can ingest data and then come back to you with patterns, use cases, ideas, analysis, and that could have some ramification for us as a company. So how do we get prepared to use this? And so when we start telling our clients about this, they said, “Wow, this could be really exciting. What do we do then to prepare to really turn these features on?” And so I’m going to mention this. I’m going to kind of go backward and start to go forward. This analogy I start to tell is I think it’s maybe going to ring true. So I was a previous athlete, and if I was going to ask you, Mike, “Hey Mike, my knee is swollen and it’s a little sore.” You would probably tell me rest it, elevate it, ice it. These are common things that… this is generalized intelligence, right? If my three-year-old son falls and scrapes his hand and it’s bleeding, you’re going to go wash it, you’re going to go let it air, obviously you’re going to put some things on it, you’re going to wrap it up in a Band-Aid. That’s generalized intelligence. Now, if I told you as a 40-year-old male that’s 50 pounds overweight, that played basketball at a very high level for many years, that over exercises in my yard and my knee swells probably once a month. And you would say, “Given that relative information about you, you should probably go see a doctor. You may have a micro tear, you may have tendonitis, you may have some other things. All I did was I just gave you further background and relevant information versus general. And that’s exactly how AI works. Most people are just going asking it generalized questions and getting generalized answers. But the more relevant information you can give AI, just in general, through prompting, then it can come back and say, “Based on information you told me and the background and the person and this issue, I’m going to recommend these things.” And really AI in general is as good as the data you give it. And so one of the things we are telling our clients is to prepare to use lists. In order for this to work at an enterprise level, where are all of your company data? Are you giving AI all the background you can on your company? Where would it find it? Do you have it in PDF? The origin story on your company, the history, the industry, how you service, the founders. So all of those things, the company data, the user. Tell us about the sales reps, their roles, their unique skills, the images on them. Products and services, where does that data set and how do we adequately get it into a place where AI can read it? One, if it’s not, obviously of course, on the internet, then we should put it there. But two, it should be in a place that’s up-to-date so AI can go in and read those things and answer questions. And so we just want to give it as much relative information as you can. That way, it doesn’t give general answers or general information, which of course could be issues. So we want to prepare our clients and say, “If you don’t have this, let’s start to gather it. If you need help gathering it, we’re going to help you put it in a way that AI can read it. Your company data, the user data, your products and services, your customers, and any systems you would like AI to have access to.” The good part of it is a lot of this should be in their CRM. It should already be in Salesforce. What most people don’t know is you can go into the user records and pretty much put in these custom fields about roles and background and info. And obviously, you can fill out information on the company. This is actually the good part, what a lot of people don’t really know. Your company data is stored in Salesforce, your NAP, your name, address, phone, number of the business, the website, the social. We can start enriching Salesforce with your company data. Images, logos, all of those things. And so if we do that, we are really preparing AI, we’re really just teaching it. So what can we teach it and how much can we get AI to know about your company? And then this is what I call that preparedness stage, Mike. It may take people weeks to do this. They may say, “Wow, how much data should we give AI?” As much as you want given the relevant tasks. So sometimes it takes our clients weeks to do this. Sometimes we’re putting together an entire process on what do we want AI to have access to and learn on. So that’s kind of step two. Mike Gerholdt: No, I like that. I’m thinking of all of the use cases my team puts together. When we put out the Agentforce Decoded series, a lot of it is thinking from the sales or service perspective of, hey, how do you summarize this account or summarize this case. One part that you brought up that’s very salient that I think is, not to look ahead, but is like a good quick win is also what is your company about? What is your brand voice? Dorian Earl: Yes. Mike Gerholdt: What are your, kind of if you had a front door, what are your window information? What’s your address? What’s your mailing address? What’s your hours? I say that because if you’re thinking of creating an agent to help your salespeople write better emails, well, it needs to be grounded in some information that it knows what it is and it knows what company you are and how to sound, right? I think it’s always important that brands have a voice, and even the admin relations, we have a brand voice. That they’re constructing that so it’s sounding cohesive. And that can just be a simple PDF or a knowledge article that an agent could reference. Dorian Earl: Absolutely. Mike Gerholdt: A lot of things, including data cleanup is important, but it’s also where do we go to get repositories of this information that’s just kind of the basic window sticker of your company? So that’s really good. Dorian Earl: Well, and that’s that preparedness phase. Because if you do this well, now again, I’ve thought this through because as every company you work for, you start with, “Let me give you background on the company.” Mike Gerholdt: Right. Dorian Earl: And then, “Let me tell you what we do.” And, “Let me tell you who we service and who our ideal customers are. And then let me tell you about the task you’re going to be doing.” AI is almost no different. “Let me tell you about the company that you’re going to do this work for. Let me tell you about our background. Let me tell you about our products and services.” So if this data is not in a place where Agentforce or an agent can read it, then the challenge is it’s going to make it up. It’s going to make up the answer or it’s going to say, “I’m sorry, I don’t know.” And both of those items you don’t want. And so exactly to your point on brand voice, imagine a sales rep says, “I want to craft an email.” And you don’t tell the AI what the brand voice is, so then you have to prompt it. So if you can pre-ground Salesforce or your AI in this data already, then it’s that much further ahead, which is really kind of the secret sauce of this though. Yeah. Mike Gerholdt: Thinking ahead, moving on step three because we’re in a five-step program, got to get through our steps. But rightfully so, and even my team tries to do this, we try to come up with super complex use cases and stuff and really show the breadth of what some of these tools and features can do. But we all live in the real world. And in the real world when you’re a project manager, it’s what are the quick wins? What is the low effort, high result stuff that we can return? I think implementing Agentforce, we’re looking, as an admin you’d be looking for that too. So when you talk through quick wins and usage, what do you talk through as examples with some of your clients? Dorian Earl: Yeah, so this was really the thing that kind of got me excited about this because as I look at all new pieces of tech, I said, okay, who can use it and what’s the level of effort does it take to really get something out of it? And so when I turned on Agentforce and trails, one of the first trails, one of the first examples I saw were record summaries. And my mind immediately went back to, “Wow, as a sales rep, I wish I had this.” And those that haven’t seen this yet, you can literally, inside of Salesforce, pull up a record and prompt and say, “Summarize this record.” And it will read the record and it will read the related records and then give you a summary of what that record is. Now, I’m going to go back to my previous example. I was a sales rep with 300 clients. Some days my boss would say, “This is a new client, go visit them.” I wish I could click and summarize what the previous rep was doing with them in the last three, six, nine months. How do you do that? And so if you are a sales rep, this is great. If you’re a sales manager and somebody says, “You need to do an account plan for this client.” And you haven’t seen them, or a classic, the client is upset, “I want to talk to your manager.” They talk to the sales manager or service manager. And of course, we’ve all made that phone call of, we’re calling in and they say, “Please hold. I need to look at the notes.” Record summaries save us… I know you’re laughing, but even when I’m happy, I called in and I said, “Hey, I have a question.” “Hold on please, sir, I’m going to pull up your account. Let me read the notes.” Mike Gerholdt: Let me get up to speed really quick here. Dorian Earl: Exactly, exactly. Let me get up to speed. And that person skims through as quick as they can to try to answer, “Oh, I see you called in on January 6th and you were asked about this issue. Was it ever resolved?” Do you have an open case about… ” Well, you have the data sitting right in front of you. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Dorian Earl: So record summaries are the quick wins, I think at every company you can use. And as an admin, it’s great because it comes out of the box. As a user, these things are huge because if you’re working with a mass amount of records, any individual record, or again, a large amount of related records to a parent record. Cases, tasks, notes, all of those things, and related to an account, opportunities, the record summaries are huge. It’s actually one of my favorite features if I could say. That would be one of the very first quick wins. The second one, I would say quick reporting. I know it’s a little bit lower on my list, but I found this out just by accident. You can just query, you can ask AI to say, “How many accounts do I have in New York?” And it could come back based on the state that’s on the account. It will say, “You have 967 accounts in New York, you have 300 in Illinois.” Now imagine if you are the Salesforce admin, and I used to get this question, “Can you pull a list of leads in this city for me? I’m just curious.” I would get those questions all the time from an executive or from a manager or somebody. Mike Gerholdt: Oh, yeah. Dorian Earl: Now, you don’t have to ask your admin. You don’t have to go in and learn how to build a report. You can just ask, “How many of certain record do I have?” And AI can answer that question, which is pretty cool. How many leads do I have in nurture? How many leads do I have in New York? That’s in the working status? These are huge things when it comes to quick reporting. Marketing should be able to do this, sales should be able to do this. I mean, just a sales rep, “How big is my pipeline based on this product?” It could answer that question for you. So really cool. Those are just two of the quick ones I would say, which are huge. Mike Gerholdt: I think sometimes people confuse like, “Well, that should just be a list view.” Yeah, it could be a list view, unless it’s the one time you need that data or you also need that data plus something else. Because everything you were asking for, I could create as a list view. Why have AI do it? Well, because it can probably do it faster and I can also just add a quick filter to it. And it’s a one-off use case that’s just faster than creating a list view in your example. Dorian Earl: Well, yes, yes. And one of the things our clients always ask is, should I build a report for this or should I build a list view for this? Again, if you’re just doing analysis, just build the report. You may say, “Okay, there’s 900 accounts in New York.” You say, “Okay, based on that, I can assign those accounts to a person to do certain action.” To call, to follow up, to send a postcard, to do certain things, invite to an event, start targeting for this. Then you would create a list view then to take action against that. However, before you get to the action stage, you still need to do some analysis. Not every report is going to turn into a list view, something to take action on. Mike Gerholdt: And I’m sure you’re finding too that a lot of the quick wins are, the examples you gave, somebody could be listening like, “Well, that’s not going to work for me.” Right, the quick wins, I anticipate for what you bringing up are department specific and/or company specific. So as an admin, I may go to a department and show them record summary, and they’re like, “Well, but that’s not going to work for us.” Great. Well, here’s three other things that we can do as quick wins. That might not work. So record summary may be a quick win for a customer service team or a salesperson, but might be completely different for somebody else that has to do deal ops or a deal desk kind of thing. Dorian Earl: Well, you know what? I’m going to challenge your users because I’m going to ask them, send me a message on LinkedIn and tell me when a record summary would not work, would not be relevant. Mike Gerholdt: Okay, good. Please do. Dorian Earl: Because I’ve never pulled up a record of Salesforce and said, “I don’t want a summary of everything happening here.” I’ve never had it happen. I’ve never pulled up a record in Salesforce and said, “I don’t want to see everything related to it and really have that knowledge.” Now, not every single time, but I can foresee anybody that’s ever used Salesforce, you want to pull up a record and you want to know as much as you can about that record. Now, you don’t have to know everything and to take action, but I can see every user in Salesforce can take advantage of the record summary feature. That’s really my point there. Mike Gerholdt: No, it’s good. Dorian Earl: And so somebody could say, “You know what? I’m using Salesforce. I would never want a summary of a record.” I’m like, intriguing because I’ve never worked with anybody in Salesforce that would never find that feature useful. Mike Gerholdt: I don’t know. We’re going to find out. I’ve got some edge case listeners, man. There’s dark corners of the internet. Dorian Earl: Yes, please find me on LinkedIn. Now, if somebody is like a lawyer doing auditing, “Yes, I never get in there and do it.” Okay, okay, I got it. But again, I am really, really curious who would not use or who does not find that feature useful. Mike Gerholdt: So I guess my point was quick wins could be different wherever you go. I’m betting number four is the thing you probably run into a lot, which you have down as internal process improvement. Dorian Earl: Yes. And so this is what really gets people to start moving. They’re really not adopting technology for record summaries, even though it is important. I would say internal process improvement is the first place AI will show up. It’s what everybody’s talking about in articles. We are becoming so much more efficient. We don’t need to hire that many people to do this now because internal process improvement would mean you could cut tasks down from eight or nine clicks down to two. You can have AI augment the workflow or work that is being done because it is doing things on the background that would cost you time, energy, effort, all of that. This is where the big ROI is coming in AI that a lot of people do not understand. You could say, “Please create a case. Please schedule an appointment. Please create a record. Please send a sample. Please issue a return for this record.” And just speaking of the last one, chargebacks, returns. Those usually take multiple records being opened up, some analysis being done, five or six clicks, related optics, and then emails going out, approvals. AI can handle that stuff, which is really cool because they could say, “Great, this is all done for you.” As opposed to, “Okay, give me one second, let me see which order this is from. Let me see what product this was. Let me find this view. Okay, how did you pay? Would you like a return on your card?” You could say, “AI, please go in, issue a return for this item and credit it back to their credit card.” Okay, done. And so instead of eight or nine clicks, five or six minutes of downtime on a call, all those things. And in some companies I worked with, they just was one person that just issued returns, which is crazy. Now AI can do those things or create a case. So now you’re talking about imagine one person having the benefit of saying, “I can do my job and a quarter of another job.” If you have five people doing that, you really have five people working, getting the benefit of six. That’s huge. Mike Gerholdt: Wow, I wasn’t thinking about that. But your point five. So expand on this. External tasks outsourced to AI. Dorian Earl: Yeah, so what I mentioned for number four, this is where a lot of companies are a little scared to say, “I would not have AI talking to my clients.” Okay, I got it. But if you have internal process, if AI is handling, if an agent, and we’ll mention the Agentforce in this case because it has all the relevant context on your company, all the relevant context on your products and services, the people using it and your clients. You can enable it to do narrow tasks such as, “Hey, here are a list of leads.” So imagine this workflow, Mike, and then I’ll get the external case in. You would say, “Pull up a lead, summarize the record, draft an email based on the record summary and their needs for this lead.” Okay, email draft. “Okay, put the email and send it out for me please.” So that could be five or six clicks. Pull up the record, click summarize the record, click draft an email, click send the email, right? Mike Gerholdt: Uh-huh. Dorian Earl: And then move along. Or you could just say, I will have an agent. I will program an agent or ask an agent in Salesforce to do that for all of my 30 leads in the New York area. Pull up, summarize, create an email, send off. Now, if it’s watching you do it for the next year, it would’ve learned what you’ve liked, what you don’t like, what the replies are like, information to add in because it gets smarter. This is the thing a lot of people aren’t realizing with AI is that it becomes smarter over time. And so you can allow it to do these narrow tasks. “Hey, follow up with these 30 leads that were nurturing in New York and do this for me.” Those are external facing AI agents that are taking action on your behalf. And then you can say, I will have an agent for those that are interested that reply back. I have a second agent that’s just a scheduling agent. So the Salesforce Scheduler, which allows people, external people in your email to look in, look at your calendar, look at your availability, schedule blocks of time based on their availability. All you do is really send the email with the link in there. They schedule. Now, do you have to send an email, Mike, or can you have an AI agent send the email? Okay, great. Now that’s a narrow task, but that’s an external client facing that you don’t have to be involved. They can schedule. So now we have two agents. We have one that’s doing the nurturing, we have one doing the scheduling. Okay, great. Now imagine previous to this appointment scheduling, you can say, “Summarize the record. Give me some bullet points. I want to do an account review.” Maybe that’s not a lead, maybe it’s an account in this case. Let’s do an account review of what they previously ordered or most likely to order, our recent comms, open tickets, open cases, anything that’s going on with them and give me three things that could be beneficial for us to mention. Maybe have an AI to summarize the record, come up with those things, pop that data into a field for you. So now we have the third agent that somebody nurtured, somebody followed up, somebody scheduled, somebody summarized records, prepped in account plan for you. We have three external facing agents just in the sales motion or maybe account planning motion. Those are external facing AIs because they’re dealing directly with your clients or your accounts. And just in the sales motion, those are three. Now you can have one agent to do all three. You can have three different ones. So imagine having an external facing AI that just does those three things. That’s huge, right? Mike Gerholdt: Absolutely. Dorian Earl: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, again, I’m talking about just sales motion, but there’s a whole nother workflow in there. The marketing motion, there’s a whole nother workflow and the service motion. But those are just really, really cool things though. Either way. Mike Gerholdt: Well, going back to point three, it’s always looking for the quick wins. How do you make sure you go through each department and get them up and running and then come back? Because that’s what I always like to do as opposed to spend too long in one department and they’re fully vested, and another department is like, “Well, where’s our love?” Dorian Earl: Well, true, true. And this is where if we can step back, I know this is kind being prepared for Agentforce. To my understanding, there is not an agent that can prepare a client for Agentforce. It would be great if it could, but it’s not. But there is one. It’s called the Salesforce Admin or the Salesforce product order, or whoever is in charge or forward looking for the client and saying, “Hey, in 2025, what are we going to do with our technology stack center it around Salesforce to grow our business, make us more efficient?” This is where some intelligence, some wisdom, some understanding some business analyst skills, some requirements gathering skills. This is what our team is doing with our clients. Actually maybe this new era of really intelligence, this is where Salesforce is really excited for all of us working in the ecosystem because they are saying, we now have a tool that you can make yourself more efficient. And we are all kind of shepherding them into this new era of really intelligence. So this is really fun. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s why you work in tech, right? Every day is a little bit something different. I never would’ve predicted this, but I remember back when it was social and mobile and it’s like, where are we going? And we’re talking about connected toothbrushes, and now I don’t know. Now the toothbrush maybe is going to start giving me advice. Dorian Earl: Well, it could. I mean, with all the things that are happening, obviously I used to work in the medical dental space. I give you a lot of thoughts and advice there, but I cannot wait to see in the next year as we enable customer facing agents that have been trained. There is something to that. Now, I wouldn’t put a customer facing agent out there without training. I wouldn’t put regular people out there without training. But in the next year or two, with every company that I deal with becoming smarter, the places I order pizza from, they say, “Hello, how can I help you?” I’m like, “You don’t know what I previously ordered?” “No.” That’s a lack of intelligence, right? Mike Gerholdt: Right. Dorian Earl: And so how many places that we go to and solicit, and they’re not as intelligent, that an agent can help the person on the other end do their job better, which is really cool. So I am super excited. I wish every company that we worked with, big and small, would adopt technology like this. And trust me, I’ve been singing the song to everybody going, “Hey, hey, I don’t know what systems you have internally, but let me help you.” And everything from athletics, to restaurant, to food, to the travel, to all of those things. So I’m looking forward to it. Mike Gerholdt: It’s going to be good. Dorian, thanks for coming by and helping admins out again. You’re always in our corner giving us advice and setting us on the right path. So I appreciate it and can’t wait to connect with you again later this year at all of our events. Dorian Earl: Yeah. Well, and I’ll let you know how this goes because as we shepherd clients into this new era of intelligence, I’ll tell you which ones on step two, step three, and step four. And Salesforce is really doing a good job of telling the story of what people are doing with agents and AI, which is really cool. I cannot wait. This is really, really fun. But thanks for all you do with helping us in the ecosystem. I think I mentioned to you, when I started with Salesforce 2017, I was listening. I went back and listened to all of your previous podcasts and just to get caught up, and I listened to one a day, one every other day and listened to them on one and a half or two speed. And so it was a really, really, really cool thing. One, you’ve got a great obviously voice, and you know- Mike Gerholdt: Even at two speed, I do? Dorian Earl: Even at two speed, you’d be surprised what Mike sounded like at two speed. Yep, yep, yep. Mike Gerholdt: I sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks.  Dorian Earl: Mike, and Gillian at one and a half or two speed was something, right? And so yeah, that was really good. But still having a place where people can stay up to date and knowledgeable. On behalf of me and everybody else, we thank you for having a place that where we can learn and obviously stay up to date here. This is really cool.  Mike Gerholdt: I appreciate it. Thanks so much. Dorian Earl: Yep. Yeah, thank you. Mike Gerholdt: Well, that was another fun discussion with Dorian. I always love running into him at events. And if you’ve ever checked out his breakout sessions, they’re one for the books. He is an incredibly powerful and passionate presenter and knowledgeable, huge fan of Salesforce Admins. I really loved his five-step approach for preparing for Agentforce. I think it gave us some actionable insights for us to think about and look forward to bringing more intelligence and efficiency to our organizations. Now, have you found this episode helpful? Hey, do me a favor, share it with somebody. Put it out on social. I’m on Bluesky. Everybody’s on Bluesky. And if you’re on Apple Podcasts, all you have to do is tap the three dots to click share episode, and it’ll take care of posting the rest. Now, don’t forget all the links, everything that we mentioned on the episode, including a transcript, is available at admin.salesforce.com. You can find everything there, including a lot of blog posts. Tons of information. Now, as always, if you’d love to join in the conversation, and I’d love to be there with you, jump over to the Admin Trailblazer Group. That is in the Trailblazer community. You know where the link is. It’s in the show notes, which is at admin.salesforce.com. Look at that. It’s like, “Toot, toot, toot, here we go.” Anyway, thanks again for tuning in and we’ll see you next Thursday in the cloud. The post Level Up: The Admin’s Action Plan for Thriving in the Agentforce Era appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Mehmet Orun, SVP, GM, and Data Strategist at PeerNova, delves into the transformative power of Data Cloud in creating trustworthy AI experiences. He discusses how to prevent AI agents from fabricating information and sharing sensitive data. Mehmet emphasizes the evolving data management practices, noting that old rules don't fit in the AI-driven world. He highlights the significance of personalized engagement through Agentforce and the integration of unstructured data, ultimately enhancing user experience and organizational productivity.

Sri Srinivasan, Senior Director of Information Security at Salesforce, shares his expertise on securing AI experiences with Agentforce. He outlines five essential questions for admins to consider when building AI agents, focusing on roles, data access, and guardrails. The discussion highlights the principle of least privilege to ensure agents operate safely. Sri also offers a preview of new tools his team is piloting to enhance security in AI. Tune in for insights on balancing innovation and security in Salesforce's AI landscape!

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Joy Shutters-Helbing, Senior Manager of Salesforce Practice at Captech and Salesforce MVP Hall-of-Famer, and Mike Reynolds, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Slack. Join us as we chat about creating community content, navigating conference submissions, and their new podcast, The JAM. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Joy Shutters-Helbing and Mike Reynolds. Catch Mike and Joy (and me) on The JAM Mike and Joy are movers and shakers in the Salesforce community. Joy’s in the Salesforce MVP Hall of Fame, hosts MVP office hours on the first and third Friday of every month, and has spoken at Dreamforce, TDX, and tons of community conferences. Mike has helped create 13 different Salesforce certifications as a Credential Ambassador, and he’s a regular speaker at conferences big and small. Together, Joy and Mike are the dynamic duo behind The JAM, where they talk to folks in the Salesforce ecosystem about everything from hiring to technical talks to highlights from the release notes. In fact, they just had me on the pod to talk about the Salesforce community, so be sure to check that out at the link below. How to come up with ideas for Salesforce presentations and content As veteran speakers and content creators, Joy and Mike want to know that you have what it takes to give a Salesforce presentation. In their experience, most people fall into one of two camps: I don’t feel like anything I have is important enough to share with anyone. I have something to share, but I don’t know where to start. If you’re in camp number one, it’s important to remember that you’re an expert on your own business’s problems, and how you solved them can help someone else facing a similar issue. “When you’ve toiled over a solution and, all of a sudden, it works and you stand up and do some sort of victory dance, that is the thing you should be sharing,” Joy says. If you’re ready to give a Salesforce talk but don’t know where to start If you’re in camp number two, where you think you could share something but you don’t know how to get started, Mike recommends following Salesforce Evangelists and Advocates and event organizers on social media to hear about calls for speakers. I’ve included a few links below for Midwest and Florida Dreamin’, and Mid-Atlantic Dreamin’ is right around the corner. Smaller events like community groups and conferences are a great place to polish your presentation and practice your public speaking skills. And while you might not feel ready for the Dreamforce stage just yet, you can submit topics you’d like to hear more about or even nominate someone to give a talk. There’s a lot more great stuff from Mike and Joy about giving presentations and creating great Salesforce content, 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. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Listen to Mike on The JAM Podcast here Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Unlocking Salesforce Efficiency with Joy Shutters-Helbing How I Solved It: Get Agentforce Ready: Move From Profiles to Permission Sets | How I Solved It with Mike Reynolds Squire Kerschner on the first episode of The JAM Podcast Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Joy on LinkedIn Mike on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Bluesky social Mike on Threads Mike on X Full show transcript Mike Gerholdt: This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re jamming, literally, with Joy Shutters-Helbing and Mike Reynolds about creating community content, navigating conference submissions, and yes, even launching a podcast of their own. It’s called The JAM Pod. I listen to it, do you? Joy is a longtime Salesforce MVP Hall of Famer, community group leader, and admin extraordinaire with over 21 years of experience. Mike is a Salesforce credential ambassador, known for his deep knowledge on permission sets, permissions, and profiles, and now, he works with Slack. Before we get into this episode, be sure to follow the Salesforce Admins Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. That way, you get a fresh episode every Thursday, right on your phone. With that, let’s jump into the conversation with Joy and Mike. Joy and Mike, welcome to the podcast. Joy Shutters-Helbing: Hi. Mike Reynolds: Thank you. Joy Shutters-Helbing: Thank you. Mike Gerholdt: Joy, let’s start with you. You’ve been in the community, you’ve actually been on the Salesforce Admins Podcast before, but for listeners, just finding out who you are and probably missed your wonderful TDX presentation, can you tell us a little bit about what you do in the community and how long you’ve been working with Salesforce? Joy Shutters-Helbing: I have been working with Salesforce for 21 years, and for those of you who haven’t heard me talk about it before, it does run in parallel with the age of my son. I’ve been a Salesforce Admin for the duration. I’m a Chicago Admin Community Group leader, along with Denise and Chris. I am a Salesforce MVP Hall of Fame. I am podcast host with Mike Reynolds, and he will talk about that a little bit more in a second. I also host MVP Office Hours on the first and third Friday of every month, and I’ve spoken at Dreamforce, and TDX, and a host of other community conferences. I think that’s it. Mike Gerholdt: Well, if not, then we’ll definitely be able to find you online. Joy Shutters-Helbing: Yes. Mike Gerholdt: Mike, how about you? Mike Reynolds: Well, I have been Salesforcing for about 10 years, and I’ve been able to do a lot over that time. It’s been a wild ride. I’m a credential ambassador, so I’ve helped create, I want to say, 13 different certifications or updates to them, some Superbadges and Trailhead modules, stuff like that, maintenance modules. I’ve spoken at a lot of conferences, all sorts of different topics. Things that range from DevOps to, I think most people have heard me talk about permissions. It’s been a real big deal for the last couple of years. Spoken at a lot of conferences, it’s super fun. I love connecting, and getting out, and doing all that. Now, I work at Slack. Mike Gerholdt: Oh, yes. That’s right. Very communicative of you to work at Slack. Mike Reynolds: Yeah, because I like the collaboration. Mike Gerholdt: You almost threw me a perfect segue there, which is that you’ve been out and done a lot of presenting. One thing that I’ve seen when I was doing user groups when we were in Chicago, you guys also both host a podcast called The JAM Pod, and depending on when you choose to air my episode, I was on it. Joy Shutters-Helbing: Yay. Mike Gerholdt: [inaudible 00:03:52] I’ll link to that. I might have to go back and link to it depending on when it happens. But one of the things that we see ebb and flow in the community is the amount of contributions that community members, of their own free will, put out, and I know, on your podcast, we talked about speaking at user group events. Where did the idea of, “Hey, let’s sit down and create something that’s not the easiest thing in the world to create, but we want to put it out and the world,” come from? Mike Reynolds: I think that’s Joy’s fault. Joy Shutters-Helbing: It’s always my fault. Everything’s always my fault. It was probably me asking a lot of questions and Mike being like, “Well, we should talk to people that have the answers to that.” I think that’s really where it started. But also, there was a challenge that happened on MVP Office Hours once upon a time from Squire. Squire, I’m sorry. Here we are, just keep talking about you. But it’s really in a good way about how he had opinions about Mike’s presentation on permissions, and I was like, “I can arrange this phone call.” There was some excitement around this throwdown-at-the-flagpole-on-the-playground situation. Mike Gerholdt: Oh my. Joy Shutters-Helbing: Yes. People thought that, well, I’m not going to give it away, but people were very excited to see the fisticuffs that were going to happen around permissions and profiles between Mike Reynolds and Squire Kershner. If you haven’t heard our first episode, you should go back and listen to it, and you can find out how that turns out. But since then, we have spoken with a number of different people in the Salesforce ecosystem about, wow, a host of different things. Everything from hiring, to technical talks, to… The topics are very wide-ranging, including the podcast we recorded with you. Did you have something else to add, Mike Reynolds? I have two mics on this call. This is crazy. Mike Gerholdt: I know. I forgot to mention that Joy’s in not a good situation where she says, “Mike,” and then there are two people go up. Joy Shutters-Helbing: Yeah. I say, “Mike,” and then I roll my eyes. Mike Reynolds: I can tell from the tone who you’re talking to though. We were working together at the [inaudible 00:06:16] group. Joy Shutters-Helbing: A customer? A customer. Mike Reynolds: Yeah. We were at a customer, but Joy and I were working together. This idea came up and I looked into it. It didn’t cost that much to get a really basic, “Here’s what we can do to record a podcast, doesn’t take a ton.” It’s not super sophisticated or anything, but it works, and we have a developer edition of Salesforce that we built out over… Yeah, it was on a Saturday. I think four hours to put together a very basic community site that we host the episodes on, and then that was kind of it. We just didn’t give up, I guess. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Joy Shutters-Helbing: I’m still adding fields in production. Mike Reynolds: That’s true. That’s true. Mike Gerholdt: Joy following all of the best practices that we speak about. Joy Shutters-Helbing: It’s a dev org. Mike Reynolds: All the work has been done in prep. I think that’s the key. Joy Shutters-Helbing: Yeah, all the work. Yeah, yeah. Mike Reynolds: It’s the main takeaway. Mike Gerholdt: Gotcha. Mike Reynolds: But really, it’s funny because the podcast is… It’s been a lot of fun, but when I look back at how we got here, it’s basically the exact same as how we got with all these things, the conversation about permissions. I mean, I’ve given that talk so many times, people reach out, user groups reach out, and they’re like, “Hey, we would love to have you come and get this presentation.” I’m happy to do so, but the presentation came from a work meeting where we were trying to solve the problem. Yeah. I called Joy and I called another colleague, and I was like, “Hey, this is messed up. We have to find a way around this.” We worked on it for about an hour and a half and then iterated over it for maybe a week. There’s our real life business problem and our real life solution, and then we just decided to talk about it, because it’s applicable. It happens to everybody. Everybody’s got permissions, everybody’s got the same challenges. Mike Gerholdt: What do you feel is the biggest barrier from people going from, not necessarily starting, let’s say, a podcast, but creating and contributing community content in the Salesforce ecosystem? Joy Shutters-Helbing: What’s the biggest hurdle, the biggest obstacle of folks creating and sharing their content with the rest of us? I think there’s a lot of things. There’s, where to start? You have two different people. You’ve got people that have stuff and they’re ready to share, they just don’t know where to start, and then there’s the folks that are like, “I don’t know if what I have is important enough to share with anyone.” I think the first hurdle is getting folks to a place where they understand that they are experts in the business problem that they have, that they can share with the community, and they are the experts on how they’ve applied a solution to this problem. Giving these folks the confidence to say, “There is someone out here who is dealing with this similar problem, who will learn, and engage, and benefit from what you’re sharing.” Once we get folks to build that confidence and that what their experience is worth sharing, I think then we can start getting more content from them. Mike Gerholdt: Mike, how about you? Mike Reynolds: I think one of the challenges that a lot of people have is knowing that they can and then knowing when. Maybe you’ve been to a community conference. Do you think, “Oh, I could contribute to this,” but you didn’t think of that three months ago when the call for speakers was open, and so right now is a brilliant time. I mean, I know Midwest Dreamin’s call for speakers is open. Joy Shutters-Helbing: Through the 31st, I think. Mike Reynolds: Yeah. Right after that, Florida Dreamin, their call for speakers will be open. Mid-Atlantic has got to be soon. Joy Shutters-Helbing: Dreamforce is coming up. Mike Reynolds: Yeah, it will. Here before you know it, which is crazy to think about that it sets in, but it will. Joy Shutters-Helbing: Community groups and conferences are the best place to run those through for the big ones. Mike Reynolds: Because I think most people have something that would benefit from someone else. Most of us have done something. If you’re sitting at home going, “Oh, well, I haven’t done anything that’s that cool,” you have. You have, because there’s somebody else who wasn’t able to do it that tried. Anytime you make a flow, somebody else tried that and didn’t get it right. We’ve all got things, and I think it’s that realization that you actually do have something of value to share, because you do. Mike Gerholdt: I think we talk a lot like, “Oh, you got to participate, got to do this.” Whenever I’ve done end user training or just technology training, you always got to think about the what’s-in-it-for-me perspective when you are talking with an end user, because you’re generally going from one system to another when you’re switching to Salesforce. I’m going to ask you the same question. For your podcast, The JAM Pod, what’s in it for you? What do you get out of it? Joy Shutters-Helbing: Nothing. Mike Gerholdt: I disagree. I disagree. I think you get something out of it, because there’s a reason people create that content in the community. Joy Shutters-Helbing: What does Joy get out of The JAM Pod podcast? I get to create a connection with folks that I might not have been able to unless I had done this. Being a community group leader, I don’t necessarily get a lot of time to speak with the group of people about content, or I go to a conference and I only get to speak about the content and there’s less time engaging with folks on a different level. One of our listeners said to me recently, they’re like, “Joy, when I listen to The JAM Pod, I just feel like I’m in a room having a conversation with you and Mike.” That was actually the best compliment we could have gotten, I think. You learned a lot, you just felt comfortable with us. What I forget though is that there’s a lot of people that are at these conferences that introduce themselves to me, and they know me better than I know them. It’s interesting for my brain to be like, “Oh, they have been listening to you and they’re watching what’s happening, but Joy, you don’t know these folks yet, so it’s okay.” Mike Gerholdt: Mike, how about you? Mike Reynolds: I mean, I know what I get out of it. I mean, I get to meet with people, and talk about them, and learn about them, and learn how they’ve contributed. For me, very selfishly, The JAM is an excellent way to just get to know some people a little bit better than I already do. I have to suffer through time with Joy, which I actually do like, and I enjoy spending time with Joy. But I think just broadly speaking, this idea of, “Well, why would I want to go stand up on stage and contribute? Why do I want to do anything?” There have been a handful of moments where somebody comes up to you and says, “Hey, you talked about this, and I was able to do it.” Those moments, that feeling is so damn good, to know that you have been able to make somebody a little bit more successful or speed somebody’s path to success, anything, you just helped. Being helpful is such a good feeling. I mean, for me, that’s my why. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. No, I don’t think you can undersell that enough, because you forget how often in life and in your career being helpful feels good, and it can almost get a little bit addictive in terms of wanting to put content out there and getting any kind of that feedback of, “Wow, that was so helpful. I’m so appreciative of your content.” Joy Shutters-Helbing: I was going to say, one of the catalysts for sharing content, to be helpful so that you can get this experience that we’re talking about that can be addictive, when you have toiled over a formula, or you have toiled over the flow, or you have toiled over a solution, and, all of a sudden, it works, and you stand up and you do some sort of victory dance, that is the thing that you should be sharing, the thing that you toiled over, because we know that you did the Google search, we know that you did… You reached out for help and you cobbled together all of these things that helped you with the solution. That victory dance is why you should share your experience so that you can help folks not have to toil over the hours of cobbling together the thing. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I usually run around the neighborhood with an air horn. Joy Shutters-Helbing: That is a different victory dance than mine, but I like it. I like it. Mike Gerholdt: Letting people know what I’ve accomplished feels good, keeps the neighbors awake, keeps them on their toes. All right. Last question for both of you, and you weren’t expecting any of this, but if you were on… Mike, this is kind of interesting for you because you’re on the Salesforce side, but if you were on the Salesforce side of things, how could Salesforce enable more community content creation? Joy Shutters-Helbing: Go ahead, Mike. Mike Reynolds: Wow, okay. Yeah, sure. Joy Shutters-Helbing: I’ll jump in later. Mike Reynolds: I think that the first thing is just awareness. We shout, and we really do. If you are following the evangelists and the people that are the mouthpieces for Salesforce, if you’re following those people on the socials, you will see that they start posting things like, “Hey, it’s time to submit your ideas.” That is, I think, we can do more of that. I feel like we do a lot, but we could do more. I think the other thing is to encourage people to just submit ideas. I think what a lot of people don’t realize is… Let’s take Dreamforce, that’s the next mega event that we have. When you submit to Dreamforce, you don’t have to submit the idea for yourself. You can submit an idea and say, “I really want to hear about this, but I’m not going to be the speaker for it.” Joy Shutters-Helbing: You can nominate other people. Mike Reynolds: Yeah. You could say, “I think this person should talk about it.” I want to hear Mike Gerholdt talk about community. I can submit that as an idea.” That doesn’t mean that you’re going to have to go do it, but it gets the idea in front of the people. I think we could do a better job of making sure that we have the megaphone at the right moments and that we are helping and getting the word out right. Mike Gerholdt: Joy, how about you? Joy Shutters-Helbing: I think that is a solid way to encourage more folks to submit to these sorts of things, whether it’s a community conference, a community group, or our Salesforce conferences. I think something that Salesforce can do, it would be maybe to, wow, this is really off the cuff here, I’m sorry, but encourage the brainstorming sessions, encourage the speaking mentorship situation. I know that there is some very soft and lighthearted speaking mentorship happening. I forget where I saw it and I’m sorry if folks are recognizing themselves. I’m not putting names, and faces, and topic together, but if folks could brainstorm, and feel like they’re being heard, and have these ideas bounced around in a way that they can validate their ideas, I think that would help with more of this content creation that is not seemingly all the same, because I think that what happens is folks see this piece of content somewhere, and then they put their own twist on it or their own flavor to it, and then they try to run with it that way. It’s a formula and it works. If you’ve seen it in a small space and you can make it better, that’s great. But I think that if you want to really build some incredibly interesting content, having a safe space to brainstorm, like a writer’s workshop perhaps, would really help that. Mike Gerholdt: Those are good suggestions. Joy Shutters-Helbing: That just came to me. Mike Gerholdt: Some of the best content happens on the fly. Let me tell you. Joy, Mike, I want to thank you for taking time out and being on my little podcast with all of our five listeners that we have. Hopefully, somebody from your podcast will come over and I’ll have 15 or 20 maybe. Joy Shutters-Helbing: I think there’s going to be some crossover on this. Mike Gerholdt: I think it’s good. Mike Reynolds: I only hope so. Mike Gerholdt: I’m glad you guys are out there creating content in the world. Also, just as a side note, not that you asked for it, I’m glad it’s called The JAM Pod and not The Jelly Pod, because jam is better than jelly, and I, 100%, think you should have a jam chosen for every single podcast. Joy Shutters-Helbing: Like a pairing? Mike Gerholdt: I’m telling you, there is a shop- Joy Shutters-Helbing: A jam pairing? Mike Gerholdt: There is like two or three… Now, it’s spring, so this’ll come out in April, March something. It’s farmers’ market season. Joy Shutters-Helbing: Oh, it is. Mike Gerholdt: I spend an absorbent amount of money on farmers’ market jams, like blueberry jams, apple. In my house, jam does not last that long and there’s a couple shops that we definitely frequent, so I was thinking of… It’d also be a good excuse just to buy jam. Joy Shutters-Helbing: It is, it is. Mike Reynolds: I’m going to admit this to you because I have no shame, I, one time, made a bracket for the best jam for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Mike Gerholdt: I like where this is going. Mike Reynolds: I’m just going to tell you, it took determination, it took grit and staying power, but I have some pretty strong opinions on strawberry, strawberry jam, as being the definitive leader of the field. A lot of honorable mentions available, but a good strawberry jam, so hard to do better. Mike Gerholdt: With peanut butter. Mike Reynolds: With peanut butter for peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Mike Gerholdt: 100%. I can go with that. I can go with blueberry too. I’m indiscriminate. Let me tell you what I prefer with bacon on toast, blueberry, blueberry jam with black pepper bacon. Let me tell you, life changing. Mike Reynolds: This is what I’m doing tomorrow morning. All right. Mike Gerholdt: It’s life… You could put- Joy Shutters-Helbing: Are you telling me I’m making blueberry jam tonight? [inaudible 00:22:34]. Mike Gerholdt: I’m saying, you could put… Now, here’s the thing. I will also eat it with strawberry jam, but there is something about the sweetness of the blueberry and the savoriness of the bacon. Mike Reynolds: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. With a little bit of smokiness in there. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I mean, in America, we smoke our bacon. Mike Reynolds: Do you go on with a sourdough here? Mike Gerholdt: No, just regular old bread, whatever’s at the store. Joy Shutters-Helbing: This was the question, Mike, Mike and Mike. I needed to know the vehicle for the jam, because sourdough is good. Mike Reynolds: Is magical. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Mike Reynolds: Fresh bacon [inaudible 00:23:10]. Mike Gerholdt: No, I enjoy… Here’s the crazy thing, because it’s been a while since I’ve worked food into the podcast, but that’s always in our feedback of, “He works food into the podcast since [inaudible 00:23:20].” Yeah, whatever. Joy Shutters-Helbing: We talked about hamburgers last time. Mike Gerholdt: I saw that. Mike Reynolds: Look, I’m not saying we have to do this, but we can have… Here’s what we’ll do. If you create a podcast, a Salesforce podcast by Dreamforce, I will arrange… I’m saying you, anybody in the ecosystem, you go to Dreamforce, you create a podcast, I will arrange for a… We have a podcast- Joy Shutters-Helbing: Breakfast? Mike Reynolds: We’re going to do… No, not a breakfast. A bracket of jams and jellies under various circumstances, and then we can just create this. Mike Gerholdt: I’m a part of this. [inaudible 00:24:01]. Mike Reynolds: We will make this happen. You only get an invite if you create a podcast, but I will make it happen. [inaudible 00:24:08]. Mike Gerholdt: I feel like we’re going to be a- Joy Shutters-Helbing: You just created a session, Mike. He just created a session. Mike Gerholdt: I feel like we’re going to be in the mezzanine of the Marriott Marquis. It’s like me and you in 30 jars of jam. Mike Reynolds: This sounds ideal. Joy Shutters-Helbing: [inaudible 00:24:22]. Mike Gerholdt: We’re just like, people are walking by, “What are those guys doing? I don’t know, they must be really into jam.” Yes, we are. Just jam all over our face. We’re just jam drunk. Joy Shutters-Helbing: Oh my god, [inaudible 00:24:35]. Mike Gerholdt: What’s going on? Joy Shutters-Helbing: Oh my gosh. Mike Reynolds: So many jars. Mike Gerholdt: Well, that sounds like an emergency room appointment for diabetes so- Mike Reynolds: Appreciate that. Mike Gerholdt: … ought to be awesome. Joy Shutters-Helbing: Thanks, Mike. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, thank you both for coming on the podcast. I do like your idea, and now I’m going to go have some toasted jam for lunch. Mike Reynolds: It’s perfect. Mike Gerholdt: That’s a wrap on our jam-packed episode with Joy and Mike. Whether you’re team strawberry or blueberry, no judgment. We hope you’re walking away inspired to share your own admin wins and fumbles, flow fixes, and really all of your stories. If you like this episode, hey, spread the jam. I mean, the love. Thinking of jam. Tap those three dots, share it with a fellow admin, or shout it from the rooftops, or hey, ooh, I know, a Slack channel. If you’re hungry for more, head over to admin.salesforce.com for everything admin, including a transcript of the show. Oh, don’t forget, you can also join us in the Admin Trailblazers group, the conversation, and I bet the jam bracket planning continues there. Until next time, keep those flows flowing and those toast slices jammed. We’ll see you in the cloud. The post Real Talk for Admins on Content, Conferences, and Agentforce appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Brinkal Janani, Director of Product Management at Salesforce, leads initiatives around Lightning App Builder and AI-generated apps. He discusses the exciting capabilities of the Generative Canvas, allowing admins to create dynamic, no-code layouts tailored for users. Brinkal highlights the shift from static interfaces to responsive designs fueled by AI, enhancing user experiences. He also touches on leveraging public data for dynamic sales strategies, emphasizing the importance of adaptability in tech and how admins can shape insightful interactions.