Salesforce Admins Podcast

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Tiaan Kruger, Senior Director of Product Management at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about Agentforce Vibes and what it really means to build with AI on the Salesforce platform. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Tiaan Kruger. Agentforce Vibes is evolving If you caught the Admin Keynote at Dreamforce '25, you might recognize Tiaan from his Setup with Agentforce and Slackbot demos. Right now, he's looking at new ways to help admins expand their toolkits with Agentforce Vibes. As Tiaan explains, Agentforce Vibes is developing so rapidly that it often surprises the people who build it. When one of his team members was building a React demo that featured a dashboard, they realized it would look pretty boring without some sample data. They asked the Vibes Agent to spin something up, and it delivered (after a few tries). "These agents surprise even us," Tiaan says, "we're still discovering where its power lies and where its potentials are." And that's why it's a good time to look ahead at how Vibes will change the game for admins. AI as a tool for reducing technical debt "When I was a customer developer, we always had a two-year backlog," Tiaan says. Even with a big team, there's always too much to do and you're constantly accumulating technical debt. This kind of grunt work is where he sees Agentforce Vibes making a big difference, which gives you more space to look at the bigger picture. Tiaan points to Code Analyzer as an example. You can use it to quickly scan your org and identify where there are performance or security issues that you should take a closer look at. An admin might not be able to fix it themselves, but they can hand it off to a developer team and speed up the process. There are also some exciting things coming with React and Agentforce, which will allow you to create compelling, high-quality UIs for your apps. It's all about giving you more tools to get the ball rolling and build apps faster than ever before. How to help Agentforce Vibes help you In order to get the most out of these new features, you need to make it easy for agents to understand what's going on in your org. "If you don't have good descriptions on everything in your org," Tiaan says, "please, for the love of donuts, fill those fields in." Having good metadata will help you get the most out of everything Agentforce has to offer. The future is bright, so Salesforce Admins need to get ready. Make sure to listen to the full episode for more from Tiaan about how Agentforce Vibes will help admins. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Dreamforce '25 Admin Keynote: Admins Power the Agentic Enterprise Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Exploring Agentforce Vibes Through Real-World Admin Use Cases Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Tiaan 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: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast. So today, I'm joined by Tiaan Kruger and we're talking about something that's showing up literally everywhere right now. And that is Agentforce Vibe coding and what it really means to build with AI on the Salesforce platform. We get into how admins can use agents to move faster without losing best practices, and why oh why understanding your org still matters more than ever. And one of the things we tackle is where this whole thing is headed sooner or later than you think. So if you've ever been curious about Agentforce Vibes and not sure where it fits into your day-to-day admin life, I promise you this episode is for you. So with that, let's get Tiaan on the podcast. So Tiaan, welcome to the podcast. Tiaan Kruger: Thank you, Mike. Thank you for having me. Mike Gerholdt: Well, it was not that long ago that we had Cheryl Feldman on. And Cheryl's circle of influence outside and inside Salesforce is a gravitational pull. And of course, we all know that set up with Agentforce is going to be huge at TDX and it's huge right now. So we wanted to talk to more people that were making admins lives wonderful. And she suggested you. Plus you were in the admin keynote. And I feel like I have to have admin keynoters on the podcast too. So there's the really long intro for... But let's talk about you. How did you get started at Salesforce and what's the cool thing you're working on that we're going to talk about? Tiaan Kruger: Yeah. So I've actually been at Salesforce, I guess coming up on seven years, which is absolutely mind-boggling. I was a customer for 10 years. Spent a lot of time as an admin and Apex developer. I wrote Visualforce. Some of you may have heard of that before. But I work as part of a large team at an enterprise company trying to make Salesforce make a huge difference for our customers. And in the process, learned an incredible amount of Salesforce and got an opportunity to come over here and try to make products better for our admins and developers out there. And I grabbed the opportunity and I've loved every minute of it. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Well, we've talked to you about some cool stuff. Plus you did a really cool demo in the admin keynote at Dreamforce too. Tiaan Kruger: Yeah. Yeah. We got to do some really amazing things at the admin keynote, showing some of the things that the Agent for Setup is going to be able to do. We got to show some amazing insights into Slackbot. And we got to foreshadow a little bit the work I'm currently working on, which is focused on how we actually build with AI. So I'm working very deeply with the Vibes team to make sure that the metadata that gets created is better and great quality, not just for vibing individual pieces of metadata, but vibing entire solutions. I'm getting to work with our internal teams to figure out how we bring that same power to our admins. So yeah, absolutely. So the work that we showed on stage continues at the same pace internally. And we're just trying to figure out how do we bring AI to everybody, make sure that everybody can feel the lift of this incredible technology. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. So I did a podcast with Daryl Moon, which I'm sure you've listened to. Daryl is fantastic. He's down in Australia. The only reason he listens to the podcast, it's a half hour between his house and the dock, so he can listen to it to go fishing. But he tried out Agentforce Vibes and was thoroughly impressed. And he literally threw the kitchen sink at it. And I think what he loved about it was it got him so much farther into the application building than what he anticipated. Tiaan Kruger: Yeah, absolutely. Vibes is quite incredible, specifically the agent that's in there. It's a very wide open agent. It's very good at problem solving. One of my favorite stories at the booth that we told at Dreamforce is one of our product managers was actually vibing a React app. We're not bearing the lead. We actually talked about this at Dreamforce. React's coming to the platform, incredibly exciting, creating pixel perfect UIs, reusing a lot of the things that's out there. And so he was actually experimenting and vibing this application. And he realized that a dashboard with no data is really boring. It's just not very interesting to look at. And so he thought, "Maybe I should ask Vibes if it can produce me some sample data." Not knowing if it could or not. And so he asked it to do it and it went off and turns out it generated an anonymous Apex file that actually tried it to load all the records with data. And it tried it, failed, found a bug, fixed it, did it again, found a bug, fixed it, and then successfully inserted a bunch of data. And that's just one of the stories of how these agents surprise even us. We have this technology, we've put it in these tools and we see the incredible things it can do. But even with all that, we're still discovering where its power lays and where its potentials are. And so that's really where I'm focused right now is like, how do I make sure that, more often than not, you actually get a good result out of it, right? Make it so it has to retry less or debug less. And so that's a big focus for us right now. Mike Gerholdt: So let me ask you a question. With Vibes and vibe coding... By the way, I'm still getting my head wrapped around you talk about, "He was kind of vibing." Like I'm just old enough to remember what the 70s were. I feel like you need to vibe code in bell bottoms and stuff. How long until anybody just tells an agent to build something and it won't matter if you have knowledge of development and coding or knowledge of best practices for enterprise architecture? Tiaan Kruger: If you asked me this question six months ago or nine months ago, if we've given you a different answer than I would give you today. Based on what we're seeing, the rate of innovation and change, I don't think it's going to be very long at all. We're going to have to adjust how we build and how we deploy a little bit because agents are already getting very, very good at producing targeted applications. And what I mean by that is, there's still limits when you are trying to vibe inside of a massive enterprise org with thousands of objects and a lot of complexity that somebody that's got a ton of experience would need to come into for months to understand. There's still limits there, right? You still have only so much you can actually provide the agent at a time. But if you are focused, you are looking at problem solving around a particular application or a particular business case, it is actually getting extraordinarily good at producing not just a good backend and a good data model, but also producing incredibly compelling UI, which is actually why we are bringing React to the platform. If you are an admin and you're like, "What's React? I haven't heard about React. What is this thing?" It's just a way to build WebUI, but it turns out, because there's so much examples of it, so many examples of them on the web, the agents are incredibly good at producing incredibly high quality UI with that. So to answer your question more succinctly, I don't think that future's all that far away because it's already starting to show up. And there's consumer applications and mobile applications that's out there where, for the end user, they can start vibing the mobile app that they want just with AI, just having conversations. There's incredible tools out there that's starting to emerge. And that exact same wave needs to come to the enterprise. We need to unlock that incredible innovation of the fact that you don't have necessarily software created for you that kind of meets you where you're at, but really, truly have agents create software for you that is absolutely what you need locally to solve your problems. So we're getting closer to it every single day. And I think the closer we get to it, the faster it's accelerating. Mike Gerholdt: So one of the questions that came up, this feels like a hundred years ago when we launched Process Builder, was it was so easy to create processes that people without technical knowledge could just overprocess and build way too many processes in an org when... The example would be of best practices, just write a really good trigger or deploy some Apex code and take care of it that way. With AI doing so much building, how do we know it's following and architecting best practices or building good code coverage? Tiaan Kruger: That's a great question, and actually one of the biggest challenges that we are spending a lot of energy on. We know that when we put a tool in the hands of our admins, they have very high expectations. They expect it to create best practices style orgs and configuration and really follow the practices that we want our admins to follow. And so there's a couple things we're doing to help with that. I can give you some insights into some of them. We are internally working on ways to... And this is, again, we're working in Vibes at the moment, so it's a little bit more pro code focused. But just listen to this and imagine how this is going to come forward to admins, right? All the work I'm doing right now is more for pro code, but we are going to start exposing it later this year for admins. As the system is producing configuration software, we are taking it through a specification phase, a plan phase. And in that plan phase, we're feeding it all kinds of rules and guidelines in terms of how we wanted to build an architect for you when it's constructing the experience, right? Not just the UI, but also the backend. How you want fields named, et cetera. So there's ways that you can feed rules into the system. So that's how we're starting to help it architect from the get go. That's one way. Second way is, as part of those experts or rules that we're providing, we can actually also guide its hand when it's creating solutions. So if you're creating a lightning app or you are creating a flow, we can actually guide the agent's hand a little bit and say like, "This is the right way to build it or the best way to build it." But even with all that, if you generate an application or you generate a capability, you still need on the flip side to actually test it. And so that's the other areas where we are looking at, starting to develop more tools and actually add more tools to the pipeline, which is what we call validation. Once you've actually produced... Let's use the example of a web app, right? I produced a web app that created custom UI for me. How do I know that that is accessible and it is secure and it is performant? These are all things that you can measure and test, right? And so that is absolutely parts of the tools that we are looking at building and we're developing a number of those that's going to help people not just build random things, but actually guide the agent's hand to build good quality, best practices style material. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I mean, one of the analogies that always comes up, and I was just doing a podcast with Josh, is, we were talking about GPS and maps. Because I feel like there is a portion probably of my listeners that are old enough, myself included, to remember stopping at gas stations when you got into a new state and buying a map for that state because it was always more detailed, and being able to read the map. And now, virtually every car you get into has some sort of GPS either built into it or it's on your phone. The funny thing is, the other day... Well, this is a few months ago. I was driving back from a bigger city in Iowa, one that's just big enough that I don't know it, even though I've lived here forever. And the GPS actually took me down a road. It was a highway and I was like, "Okay, cool. I know this highway connects to the next highway that gets me back home." But in two miles, it had me get off on an exit and get back on the interstate. Tiaan Kruger: Interesting. Mike Gerholdt: And I had presence of mind to be like, "Okay, well, I know this road continues. There's no roadblock or anything." So I just went straight and let the GPS figure out. But I bring that back to my knowledge and ability to still understand and read maps is what helped me not blindly navigate that problem. And I feel like still having that understanding of, well, reporting structures are going to need this for object setup or relationships and making sure to almost double check your math is what I was getting at for how an AI should work. So long explanation longer. If you were heading into an organization as an admin, developer, architect, what would you focus a lot of your learning on? Tiaan Kruger: Wow. By the way, I'm a big fan of maps. I'm old enough as well to have used maps to navigate. Mike Gerholdt: You probably remember printing off MapQuest directions. Tiaan Kruger: Oh, now that I'd rather forget. I'm a bigger fan of following a paper map. Famously, we were traveling in Boston on the train and I forgot the maps on the seat. And when we got back, the maps were gone. You can imagine that feeling, right? So navigation became a little bit more of a challenge. It was like 11 o'clock at night. Mike Gerholdt: Oh. Tiaan Kruger: Yeah. Yeah. So yes, maps are very valuable. So I actually love that analogy, right? So agents are a lot like... I think they're in that MapQuest stage. They're not quite... They're getting closer to the GPSs we have today. The odds of the GPS turning you into a lake these days, I feel like it's a lot lower than it used to be. Mike Gerholdt: Right. Right. Tiaan Kruger: There's still the occasional person driving into a lake, but it's a lot lower risk than it used to be. Agents are still very much at that state of the human still ultimately needs to guide it, check it, see what it's doing, right? It's an accelerator, not a replacement. And if I were going into a company now in my old role, my role would be changing. My role is no longer just about cranking out that trigger to work perfectly. It's about understanding the bigger picture. It's about understanding what my customer is actually trying to accomplish. And hopefully being able to get more of it done because I become more... I'll actually give you a different analogy, I think, as you brought up driving. I'm a big fan of full self-driving capabilities being added to vehicles. And I've had some different features on the cars that I've owned, and some of them more beta than others. And you have to do the supervising thing, right? The car will do the right thing nine out of 10 times, but that 10th time is really scary. You better be ready to grab your steering wheel. It's that kind of behavior. You're getting somewhere a lot more rested because you're not doing as much of the grunt work, but it frees up some of your mind to focus on some of the bigger picture. And so that's really what I'm looking and hoping that we're going to see. I'm seeing it happen already to developers here internally. I'm hoping that's going to happen for our customers as well. So as we put more of these tools in their hands, that is going to do some of that grunt work, like building a trigger that is very well set up to do batching, for instance. And I'm sorry, it's a developer analogy. I get it. But there's a particular way you build triggers. And if you don't do it right, it's going to cause you performance issues or it limits. That's just going to start being natural. You don't have to think about that. So now that frees up some of your focus to say, "Okay, how can I build this better for my customer? How can I focus on actually producing more value for them?" When I was a customer developer, we always had a two-year backlog. And business, we turned business requests away all the time because we could not get to everything. And we had giant teams doing this stuff. So the benefits of learning the platform, understanding the details, understanding if the agent is trying to turn you onto a lake, that doesn't go away. That continues to be there. Understanding the deep, complex context of what your business needs. The agent's not there yet. So that transformation, that translation layer is more important than ever to make sure that, again, the grunt work can be done by the agent, but that understanding, that comprehension, the translation, I think, is more and more important than ever for our admins and for our developers out there in the community. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. And you don't have to apologize. There'll be vibe coding sessions in the admin track for TDX. I know because I've seen you and your team submit some stuff and customers have done it as well. It's going to be a very useful product. I can see the future for it. Do you anticipate... So a lot of what you've talked about for vibe coding in Agentforce Vibes is like the creation. And I think we're always talking about the creation. But one thing you brought up in your answer was tech backlog and technical debt. That's always a big thing that comes up. As we're struggling to create more and more and more and more, there's also more and more and more technical debt. Would you envision a time when maybe Agentforce Vibes or another product could say, "Whoa, stop. We need to reevaluate this first and fix the foundation before we go building seven more stories on top of this house?" Tiaan Kruger: Yeah. So there's a couple of different pieces to that puzzle. There are already tools coming out today, and that's available today in the spirit of Code Analyzer, for instance. It's a tool you can run in your org that'll tell you where you have performance issues or security issues you should take a look at. We are expanding that concept to look for things like accessibility issues, et cetera. And AI, the agents we have is already able to go and potentially help you resolve some of those. You can go in Vibes today and say, "Hey, can you help me convert this Aura component to an LWC component? Or can you help me put better accessibility on this component or these pages?" And it's actually doing a fair job with that already. Make this React app work for mobile is something else you can do. So there's already some tech debt you can actually tackle with agents very successfully. They tend to be a little bit more focused right now in the sense that it's a single page or a single component or a single code file or a couple of code files. I don't even have to say maybe. The answer is, absolutely that capability is going to continue to go further and further. The more the agent is able to understand what's going on in your org, the more the agent is able to grasp and understand what your org does. And this is a call-out for you. If you don't have good descriptions on everything in your org, please, please, for the love of donuts, fill those fields in. And I know we all love to put description and description. But if you actually go put in good quality descriptions in these things, you can actually get so much better help from the agent actually understanding what your org means. When you just have four fields named contract number, it's really difficult for the agent to know which one to use. But if you label them more carefully, you put it in the help and the metadata, you're going to help agents help you. So tech debt is going to get easier to resolve. No question. It's already happening. It's only going to get better. It's the worst it's ever going to be right now. I could truly say this because I'm seeing it happen. And I think we're eventually going to get to a place... Again, I'll give you an internal example. We have a lot of Aura components. I know I probably shouldn't say that out loud, but we do. And we are working at fever pace to actually convert them to Lightning Web Components to LWCs. Again, developer specific terms, but just the different component frameworks that we're moving to more of an open standard. And we used to have to do it by hand. This is huge tech debt for us. And AI is literally having one team do hundreds of components in a month where they used to be able to do a handful. This is real tech debt help, right? So that is absolutely going to come and it's going to show up for admins as Cheryl. You talked about Cheryl in the beginning, right? She's a superhero of mine. I absolutely love working with her. I love watching how she works with the community. I'm always learning something from her. She recently actually helped me with the use cases. If any of the people listening got to talk to her, thank you for giving her some information. She's just fantastic. And so as the setup agent becomes more and more capable, it is absolutely going to help you identify tech debt, first of all, but second of all, actually help you resolve that tech debt in faster and easier ways that you've ever been able to do. Mike Gerholdt: Well, that's very promising, very exciting. Tiaan, I should have scheduled five more podcasts with you because I feel like we just scratched the surface on everything. But when you're not vibing at Salesforce or making Vibes, can you vibe Vibes? Oh, that's like the buffalo buffalo buffalo sentence, isn't it? Tiaan Kruger: Start off all the way down. Mike Gerholdt: What is Tiaan like to do outside of Salesforce? Tiaan Kruger: So my side hobbies, I drive my wife nuts because I try to learn a new thing every couple of years. And I do anything from fabricating and welding and soldering and doing electronics and building things. But I would say probably the most practical application of all of those things that I just mentioned that I do as a hobby that's consistent is I work with a FIRST Robotics team. And my son got me into it. He was the robotics captain at the team for two years. They managed to take him to worlds both years. And I absolutely love that. I love the fact that I get to be in there with the kids, help them every year try to solve whatever the year's challenges and problems are. And they hand build a robot that's 150 pounds that can drive way faster than it should. And it's fascinating to work with these kids and see them learn. And now AI and agents are coming in for these kids, right? And they're trying to figure out, "Where do I use it? When is it cheating? When is it actually allowed in helping me?" So that's been a fascinating twist to that. But you know what? There's still something really satisfying about building things with your hands. We have some people that speed in my neighborhood. Sorry to call them out, but they do. Mike Gerholdt: I'm sure they listen to the podcast. Tiaan Kruger: I'm sure they do. I'm sure. They feel worse now. Mike Gerholdt: Well, I'll send in stickers. Tiaan Kruger: I wanted to build a little sign. When we were in Germany this year, I saw those brilliant little speed limit signs that when you go over the speed limit, they turn orange and then frown at you. So they literally just scowl at you when you're speeding. And it makes you feel bad. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Tiaan Kruger: And I thought, "You know what? This would be really amazing to build." And so I actually took some of my robotics experience that I use for the kids. I do a lot of things with LEDs and Arduinos. And I actually bought a little radar board. I built a sign that could do this. And I promise it's related. I got to use AI to code this thing. And I've done the same kind of coding for years before. Mike, I coded this thing in about 15, 20 minutes to get this working for the first time. Mike Gerholdt: Is it solar-powered? Tiaan Kruger: It can be. It's USB. It's very light on power. Mike Gerholdt: Okay. Tiaan Kruger: But it's amazing. Mike Gerholdt: Wow. Tiaan Kruger: I was just able to tell the agent, "Hey, here's the board that I'm using. Here's the LED panel I'm using. Here's the radar." By the way, it's a Chinese made radar board, so the documentation is hard to understand and limited. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Tiaan Kruger: And of course, AI had no problem with it. It coded it up like it was nothing. And so it's transformative. Even in your hobbies, the stuff is transforming how we're doing it. Right? Mike Gerholdt: Wow. Tiaan Kruger: So yeah. So that's what I do. I build stuff because I build software for a living. I like to build stuff with my hands when I'm not at the computer. Mike Gerholdt: It doesn't surprise me. Everybody I ask that question to that's in software development always has something very tactical that they like to do as a hobby. Because a lot of what we do, you can't touch and feel. Tiaan Kruger: Exactly. Mike Gerholdt: Very cool. Tiaan, thank you for coming on the podcast. And I look forward to seeing some of the stuff you're going to present at TDX this year. Tiaan Kruger: Awesome, Mike. I will see you there. And keep watching. This is a field that's going to continue to blossom. Mike Gerholdt: So thanks, Tiaan, for that conversation. I feel like I literally could do four more episodes and still not run out of things to talk about. He is one inspirational person and doing a lot more with AI than sometimes I think. So it's good to know that someone still needs to know where the road actually goes when the GPS is about to drive you into the lake. If this episode sparked a few ideas or questions for you, do me a favor, share it with your fellow Salesforce admin. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

Josh Birk, Senior Director of Admin Evangelism at Salesforce, explains why humans must stay in the loop for AI agents. He discusses guardrails, narrowing agent scope, and treating agents like software with thorough planning and testing. They cover instruction layers, ethical risks like memory bleed, and when to intervene to keep AI reliable and user-friendly.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Cheryl Feldman, Senior Director of Product Management at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about how Agentforce will make Setup smarter, faster, and way more helpful. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Cheryl Feldman. Setup made simple Cheryl Feldman is on a quest to make Setup easier for admins, and she's the perfect person to get it done. She's been a Salesforce customer, an admin, and an architect, so she knows how difficult it can be to answer seemingly simple questions, like, "How do I get a list of users that can modify all data?" Right now, you need to run a SOQL query for that. That's about to change with Setup with Agentforce. You'll be able to use a conversational interface to manage users and user access, troubleshoot formulas, and much more. And Cheryl's just getting started. How you can make Setup with Agentforce even better Setup with Agentforce is available now in open beta. You can access it in production, a sandbox, or a developer org. Right now, it covers the most common use cases in Setup. For other questions, the agent can give you an answer from Salesforce's help and training documentation and help you navigate to the correct Setup page. While these features are already game-changing, Cheryl wants your help to make Setup with Agentforce even better. "We want to hear from admins," she says, "Does it help you? And what do you want us to solve next?" Help shape the future of Setup Cheryl and her team are already building a framework to expand Setup with Agentforce beyond the most common use cases. They're looking at multi-step orchestration, which will enable you to seamlessly create objects or fields, manage access to them, and add them to dynamic forms, all in one place. So please, give Setup with Agentforce a try. Your feedback will help shape a smarter, simpler future for admins everywhere. Make sure to listen to the full episode for more from my conversation with Cheryl Feldman. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Trailblazer Community Group: Setup With Agentforce (Beta) Salesforce Admins Blog: Introducing Setup with Agentforce (Beta): Your New Admin Superpower Dreamforce '25 on Salesforce+: The Future of Setup Powered by Agentforce Dreamforce '25 on Salesforce+: Setup Now with Agentforce: Simplifying the Complex Dreamforce '25 on Salesforce+: Setup with Agentforce: New Superpower for Salesforce Admins Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Cheryl 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 welcoming back Cheryl Feldman, Product Management Senior Director here at Salesforce. Well, to talk about something that's changing the game for admins, namely Agentforce for Setup. Cheryl's going to give us a behind the scenes look at how this conversational tool is making setups smarter, faster, and way more helpful. So from formulas to user access to cloning users, it's all about to get easier and way more admin friendly. Not to mention, Cheryl's also going to share with us how her own journey from admin to product manager helps her shape what gets built. So I can't wait. With that, let's get Cheryl on the podcast. So Cheryl, welcome to the podcast. Cheryl Feldman: Thanks so much, Mike. I'm excited to be back. Mike Gerholdt : I'm excited to have you back. You were a rockstar at Dreamforce this year, and you're probably going to be a rockstar this whole year. I know in the admin keynote, we demoed Agentforce for Setup. I think I'm using that term right, right? Cheryl Feldman: Setup with Agentforce, but thank you. Yes. Mike Gerholdt : Okay. See, I'm always backwards. Cheryl Feldman: Yes. I was so excited to see that work in the keynote and to see the exciting admin response and excited that we went to beta today. Mike Gerholdt : Oh my God. I feel like I feel as much joy for this as I do when we could customize the homepage. Cheryl Feldman: Yes. Mike Gerholdt : It sounds so small. We're getting in super knee-deep. Let's zoom out for a second because I'm sure there's a lot of new admins that are like, "What are they talking about?" Cheryl, for people that haven't met you and heard you in some of the True to the Core, and some of the Q&A sessions where I feel like Parker just calls on you constantly, could you do a little bit of an introduction of what you do and the fun stuff you get to work on at Salesforce? Cheryl Feldman: Sure. My name is Cheryl Feldman, and I'm a Product Manager in platform. Been at Salesforce about four and a half years now. Prior to joining Salesforce, I was actually a customer for just over 18 years in, starting out as an admin, moved into more leadership and management roles, was running a COE at a very large bank before I joined Salesforce. And when I joined Salesforce, I started in the user access area, specifically managing the authorization side of things, and then started to really advocate that we improve admin experiences. That led me to my role now where I act as the product domain lead for Setup with Agentforce, and improving experiences for admins and really addressing a lot of the issues that admins have in setup because speaking of True to the Core, setup has come up pretty much every True to the Core has ever existed. And that's what I do here at Salesforce. Mike Gerholdt : Which is a lot to say the least. I will fan out a little bit because I remember when Cheryl, you were a customer, you always had questions I couldn't answer, which challenged me. And now to see you on the inside, I mean, it's one thing to hang an identity and say admin developer architect, but that kind of core identity that people have that you made your name on of configuring one of the most complex CRMs to meet business needs without deploying code is just so empowering. And I just, for me, on behalf of all the people like me, I'm just so appreciative to have you inside the PM org championing for people that want to be in tech that don't understand or know how to write code. I had to say that early just because- Cheryl Feldman: Thank you. Thank you for saying that. Mike Gerholdt : ... I don't get to talk to you a whole lot. You're a busy person, especially with the new setup stuff. I mean, I remember demoing permission sets and permission set groups and feeling like, "Holy cow, Cheryl just moved a mountain." But you're like, "Yeah, I can move mountains, but what about planets?" And now you're tackling setup. Where did this come from? Cheryl Feldman: This came from back, I think it was June 1st, 2022, one of our incredible Trailblazers, Andrew Russo, hope he doesn't mind me shouting him out, stood up at True to the Core and said, "When are you actually fixing setup? When are you doing anything, something?" And I had been pushing internally that we needed to do something. And I said, "Well, if not me, then who?" And so I started looking at the usage of setup, and something that it didn't necessarily surprise me, but it validated a lot of things that I believe that the areas and user access were the most used areas and setup, which was the area that I was managing at that point from a product standpoint. And I said, "Well, what are the big issues that we need to sell for admins?" And a lot of it was around troubleshooting. So we introduced the user access summaries, and we did a lot of great work in user access, but we didn't really expand beyond that. And so we said, "What would it take to actually fix all of setup?" And trying to actually do that is... Actually, I'll be honest, it would be an impossible task given the state and that there's no framework behind setup. So when Agentforce started to come about, we said, "Well, what if we looked at Agentforce, and what if we could help admins and rethink setup using Agentforce, and revamp things and revamp the experience that way?" And so that's how everything came about. We started with, let's improve some of the pages to then let's see if we can tackle a larger part of setup, and that's what we've been doing. And Agentforce has helped unlock that for us because I'll be honest, the way we were going previously, we probably would've been here for 20 years because there were over almost 1,300 pages in setup, there's a lot. Mike Gerholdt : Wow. Well, and as I come to find out, I mean, there was no real governance of setup. Cheryl Feldman: That's true. That is very true. Mike Gerholdt : And so everybody, when they created a new product would just add it to the setup menu. Cheryl Feldman: Yeah. Mike Gerholdt : Wow. And I happened to think that the solution actually in 2022 maybe was, it had been invented. I'm sure somebody will call me out on when AI was birthed, but it wasn't in our nomenclature for another year or so. Cheryl Feldman: Yep. Mike Gerholdt : And that was actually the solution because I remember thinking, I was at a world tour in Boston and somebody came up and said, "With the innovations coming out around AI, why can't I just send screenshots of my problems or my formulas to AI to fix it?" And I thought, well, you should just solve that on the platform. Cheryl Feldman: Exactly. And we actually do, and so one of the things that Setup with Agentforce can help you with is to troubleshoot your formulas. It doesn't just troubleshoot user access, because that's one of the things we started looking at, what are customers asking in the Trailblazer community? And a lot of it is, I always see Steve Mo and I always say, "We need to help our agent think like Steve Mo helping out all those new admins with their formulas." Mike Gerholdt : Yeah. I think one important thing, and we don't have to get into the details of it, but one important thing is for you, this was, yes, a really cool thing to come out with, but you also dug into, "Well, but how does this help on the back end? How does this help our customer service? How does this help our admins?" And you don't have to share it, but you really found what the percentage of cases and the reason some of the admins were calling into our customer support line. Cheryl Feldman: Yes. This is probably not a shock to a lot of admins out there, but it was very hard if you are not familiar with SOQL to answer the question, "Why can't my user do a thing or why can't my user edit this record?" That was very complicated to figure out. So unless you had a developer working with you who could run SOQL for you, you ended up contacting support. And so we started looking at how could we help admins help themselves in an experience through natural language. And so that is one of the first use cases that we took what setup with the Agentforce was around that troubleshooting. Mike Gerholdt : Wow. That's amazing. So fast-forward, it's January 2026. I almost said '25. I don't know why. It's like the brain didn't move ahead a year. How are we doing? Where are we at with our agentifying setup? Cheryl Feldman: The exciting announcement as of today, or you'll be listening to us in a couple of weeks. It'll be out for a couple of weeks already, but we are now an open beta. We were, announced our pilot at Dreamforce, so we're now in open beta, so customers can go enable this and try it out. We solve use cases and we handle use cases across user access, formulas, data model, flow, a lot of the most common areas and setup. Now, I don't want to say we handle everything, but we do handle a lot, but we want customer feedback. We want to hear from admins is, does it help you and what do you want us to solve next? And so that's where we are right now. Mike Gerholdt : Okay. And just to clarify, because sometimes I know for a long time as an admin, I wasn't able to do some of the things. Pilot was totally, you had to sign up, and Cheryl had to interview you, and you had to shake hands and there was a vetting process, right? Cheryl Feldman: Yeah. Mike Gerholdt : Open beta for an admin sitting there listening to the podcast means they can access it in their sandbox or? Cheryl Feldman: They can access it in production, or a sandbox, or in a developer org. It just has to be for developer org. It has to be the specific developer org that has access to Agentforce and Data Cloud. Mike Gerholdt : Okay. Cheryl Feldman: And then they can enable it. And so they'll see, if their org has Agentforce and Data Cloud, they'll see a banner at the top of setup that will redirect them to enable this. Mike Gerholdt : Awesome. You're super close to the product. If you were an admin now, what would be the first thing you would suggest an admin should do when they try this out? Cheryl Feldman: I would say think about an issue that you had, whether it was an issue writing a formula or an issue trying to figure out what a user of access was, and ask that question to Setup with Agentforce and see where you get. One of the things that I think is really cool that I would've loved this when I was a customer, because I had to answer this question all the time. You could actually ask the agent, "Show me a list of users that have access to customized application or modify all data or manage users or managing public list fees," and it'll show you a list. There is no great way in the platform to actually figure that out without running a SOQL query. Mike Gerholdt : Right. Cheryl Feldman: And so that is something I'm actually really, really, really excited about. That's where I would start is start thinking about some of the questions that you have. One of the other features that we have is we actually have and help a navigation action. If we don't actually have actions that actually help you do something or analyze something, it will actually take our help in training documentation and generate an answer for you and also help you navigate to the right setup page. Let's say you ask the agent, "How do I setup Agentforce for sales?" Instead of having to go out to the help and training site or out to Google to figure that out, you could ask that right and setup and this will help generate an answer. And then if there's something where you need to redirect to a setup page, it'll give you a link that'll just navigate you to the right setup page. Mike Gerholdt : Wow, okay. I mean, this takes setup from an area where I'm navigating a million little dropdown carets to a whole experience where I can actually query. I remember a while back, it was like we used to say you could talk to your data. Now, you can talk to your setup menu. Cheryl Feldman: Yes. Now you can talk to setup. Mike Gerholdt : In the lifespan of Salesforce products, you said it went from pilot to now open beta. I'm not going to hit you up for timelines, but what is the next step? Cheryl Feldman: The next step is we want to start enabling some more use cases and handling more of setup. We can, I'm sure, share a link to a presentation we did at Dreamforce called the Feature of Setup. We talked about introducing essentially another framework that essentially runs Setup with Agentforce. We're working towards that. And so we handle, we actually started with, we looked at the most used areas in setup and we started with that, but that essentially the most used areas in setup are essentially sit within 40 pages within setup. I mentioned there are 1,300. The next step is how do we expand this beyond these most used common use cases to everything in setup? And that is the framework that we're building. The other thing that we're working towards is how do we handle what we call multistep orchestration and being able to do multiple steps as far as setups. So think about when you create objects or fields, being able to grant access, adding it to layouts or dynamic forms, those are all multiple steps and being able to do those together. That's essentially what we're working towards from the framework. I can't give out exact timelines yet, but those- Mike Gerholdt : No, I don't expect you to. Cheryl Feldman: ... that we're working towards right now to handle more of setup. And so that's what you're going to see start coming as we move throughout the year. Mike Gerholdt : So you envision a world where on Monday an admin could sit, take some requirements, vet out a process, maybe start talking to... I say talking, hello? Typing. Typing to Agentforce for setup and start building an app and then maybe on Wednesday or Thursday, continue building it and possibly even deploy it on Friday and doing it all conversationally. Cheryl Feldman: I think eventually, yes, we will get there. We're handling right now. We consider that. We're starting to think about our building use cases, and I'm actually working, I think you've met my colleague, Tian, and he's working towards the building use cases. And so he would actually be a great person to have on this podcast. Mike Gerholdt : I know. He's been in the admin keynote. Cheryl Feldman: Yes. And so I think we're looking at, I would say overall, yes, but we're not handling those type of use cases yet as far as building an end-to-end app. I would say we're looking at more of the everyday configuration use cases and setup use cases right now, but we're starting to think about right now. So I would say Tian would be a great person to have on this podcast. Mike Gerholdt : Yeah, absolutely. Talk the building part. One thing that I've thought of, and it's come up in other AI conversations is Josh made a mention of it in a previous podcast too of AI almost feels like that first time you get to use a calculator in math class. And I remember my math teacher saying, "Well, the calculator's answer shouldn't be a surprise. You should know what its output is expecting." Two years, one year, I don't know the timeline down the line, it's feasible that an admin could sit down and just conversationally build an app. What are the thought process behind also adding to that so that if they didn't use Agentforce for setup to build that app, that they would know how to jump into the configuration of it? Cheryl Feldman: That's a good question that I'm not sure I have an answer for right now, but I do see that we probably want to do something like that where, because I don't necessarily see a day where setup is going to completely go away. I think it'll still be there. And I think it's important for admins to understand what the agent is helping them do and why. Something we've talked about long-term, and this is further out, is something that I like to call architect in a box. Mike Gerholdt : Ooh. Cheryl Feldman: And I think there's a very big bridge between an admin and an architect. And this is not to downplay the role of an architect, super important role, but I think if you talk, and I played an architect role before I joined Salesforce, so I think it's very much how do we help admins think more like architects on their day-to-day tasks. And so how do we explain to them if they say, "Okay, let me update. If they tell an agent or even go into setup, let me update my sharing model." Doing that on Tuesday at three o'clock is probably not a great idea, right? And helping you think through the changes, what is the impact of the change that you're making and that's where we want to go directionally. Mike Gerholdt : Oh, I like that. I mean, that's being context aware of, you asked me this, but it's say January 29th and our quarter closes in three days, refactoring a sharing model or refactoring permissions might leave salespeople unable to update an important opportunity. What if we do this on February 1 and then have that delayed reaction or that delayed action in a queue or something? Cheryl Feldman: Yep. Or thinking about if you're making a change, is that going to impact you negatively from a security perspective? Those are some things that we're starting to think about on how we help admins make really good decisions. Mike Gerholdt : Right. Cheryl Feldman: It's not that admins don't make good decisions today. I think sometimes we make it really hard for admins to make good decisions because sometimes the tools to make those decisions are either sitting in where you have to run queries to the dev console, which not everybody is comfortable with, or you have to have read all of our documentation and have essentially what I like to call the PhD in Salesforce, which is either one of the big architect certifications or to actually be a CTA. And I think we need to bridge that gap. Mike Gerholdt : Yeah. No, that was always something along those lines that came up a hundred years ago when Process Builder was around was it's so easy to build processes and an admin or anybody could just theoretically sit down and load up an org with processes that would essentially be really more efficient as just one trigger and what's the trade-off and pros and cons there. That's a really good way of thinking of it. I mean, the other thing, future-looking, would be to have the setup agent or whatever we call them, they should have a name. Cheryl Feldman: Setup with Agentforce, yeah. Mike Gerholdt : Yeah, I know. Cheryl Feldman: But our actual agent is called Enhanced Agent for Setup. Mike Gerholdt : Okay. But I mean a nice name like Claude or I don't know. I can't think of another name. I know that's another AI, I just meant it as a human name. But to be like, "Hey, Cheryl, you just asked me this question, but I'm also chatting with your peer admin who's in New Jersey and Robin just asked me a similar thing," because there's also the idea that there's many admins working in an org to solve issues. Cheryl Feldman: Yeah, I don't think we've actually figured out how to do something like that yet, but that's an interesting use case. Mike Gerholdt : No, I mean, I'm not poking holes. Sometimes it's fun to think about what the future is once this gets out of the box. Cheryl Feldman: Yeah. And I think one thing for admins is I want to hear feedback as admins are listening to, what would you want us to solve? I want to hear from admins, especially as they're trying this out what they want us to sell. Mike Gerholdt : Yeah, absolutely. We'll put a link in the post so people can do that because I was just thinking, are there already agentic setup ideas coming in to the idea exchange about this? But I mean, obviously I think you want to filter them all into one location, right? Cheryl Feldman: I would love ideas. I actually haven't seen any ideas come in yet, but that is- Mike Gerholdt : Oh, somebody's got to put one out there. Cheryl Feldman: Somebody's got to [inaudible 00:23:12]. Mike Gerholdt : Help Cheryl retire some points. Cheryl Feldman: Yeah. But there's definitely with Setup with Agentforce, we are retiring a lot of idea exchange points. And so one of the things customers have wanted us to solve for a long time is the ability to clone and use it. We're able to Setup with Agentforce to do that. Some of the troubleshooting things are things that customers have been asking from us forever, and so those are some really good things that we're able to do. And we also took that lens when we were looking at the initial launch, how can we solve some of these longtime admin requests that we just have not been able to solve because either it requires us to build this really, really complicated UI, or there's technical issues. How can we actually solve some of these things that admins have been asking for for a long time? Mike Gerholdt : Yeah. So you may have said this, but it just popped in my mind. It helps you with formulas, right? Cheryl Feldman: Yes. Mike Gerholdt : Okay. Well, there goes a Dreamforce session. For those of us that have been in the community for a while, Daniel Hooks used to do best practices on formulas and validation rules session at Dreamforce. Packed to the walls every time. Now we have setup for Agentforce. Look at that. Efficiency. Cheryl Feldman: And I think we've actually proposed a session for TDX. Hint, hint. Mike Gerholdt : For the admin track, maybe? Cheryl Feldman: Yes. Mike Gerholdt : Would you like it in the admin track? Cheryl Feldman: Yes. Mike Gerholdt : I'll have to talk to that guy, he's a real stickler. Cheryl Feldman: And so I've actually started putting together a document of a number of sessions we would love that I think admins would love to see how Setup with Agentforce works live for some of their most common use cases. Mike Gerholdt : Oh yeah, that would be a fun thing. Almost like, this'll date me, like a Total Request Live. Cheryl Feldman: Yes. Mike Gerholdt : Remember when MTV used to do that? Cheryl Feldman: Yes. Mike Gerholdt : Just show up and shout out your requests and DJ Cheryl will make Agentforce solve your problems. Cheryl Feldman: Yes. Mike Gerholdt : I like that. Cheryl Feldman: Now there's going to be somebody listening who's going to be like, "What's TRL?" Mike Gerholdt : I know. That's okay. I say a lot of things that date me, so that's definitely not the first one, but you can Google it, it's out there. Ask an AI about what TRL is and then you'll slowly find out. Cheryl, I appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule. I know you're in more meetings than one should have on their calendar about this, but I truly do mean the stuff that you're working on is just so impactful for people in their careers who are making a name for themselves inside of organizations and building their skill. Technology is such a fun ecosystem to work in and it's so empowering when it works the way you want it to. And I feel like you work on the stuff that you're making it work the way we all think it should work, so thank you. Cheryl Feldman: Thank you so much, Mike. And to all the admins out there, thank you for your support, so many of you give me great feedback. And also, I'm willing to take the hard feedback. I also really like when admins tell me, and I know you're all not shy, tell me if there's something we should be doing better. And I know we still have a ways to go, but I do want all of your feedback and I do value all of your feedback. And that's why True to the Core, even as an employee, is still my favorite session at Dreamforce and TDX because we get the hard truths that we need to look at, and that's something that's always near and dear to my heart. I know we can't do everything, but I do absolutely love hearing all of the feedback from the admin community. Mike Gerholdt : Absolutely. Thank you, Cheryl. That's a wrap on our chat with Cheryl. If you've ever wrestled with setup, you'll want to give Agentforce for Setup a try, especially now that it's an open beta. Cheryl's deep admin roots and product insights are helping shape a smarter, simpler future for all of us. And if you want to help build it, your feedback is gold, don't keep it to yourself. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Laura Pelkey, Director of Customer Security Communications & Engagement, and Kylie McKlveen, Director of Product Marketing at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about how admins can level up the security of their orgs using a simple framework for understanding security in Salesforce. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Laura Pelkey and Kylie McKlveen. The three key areas of Salesforce security Security can feel complicated and unapproachable, especially at the pace at which the Salesforce platform is evolving and changing. How can admins keep up and make sure that their org's data is protected? Luckily, Laura and Kylie are here to help. It starts with a practical framework for understanding Salesforce security. They break it down into three key areas: Invisibles: What Salesforce is already doing to protect your org. Examples include network-level security, infrastructure, application-level security, and a global 24/7 threat response and monitoring team. Configurables: What you can do as a Salesforce Admin to improve your Salesforce security. Think security settings, controls, and layering permission sets to follow the principle of least privilege. Enhanceables: Extra steps you can take to protect sensitive data or meet industry-specific regulations. These are tools you can add to your org, like Salesforce Shield, Security Center, and Salesforce Backup and Recover. Put it all together, and you have a clear plan of action for how you can level up the security of your org. How Agentforce will bring agentic security to your org "There's a lot of amazing AI technology out there now," Laura says, "but unfortunately, the attackers, the hackers, the bad guys, whatever you want to call them, are also leveraging this technology, and they're doing so in ways that make it harder to spot when malware is happening." In the Dreamforce Security Keynote, they demonstrated this by doing a live deepfake of a Salesforce executive. It's getting easier for attackers to use AI for social engineering or even just a better-worded phishing attack. Luckily, Salesforce is fighting back with two new features coming soon. With Agentforce in Security Center, you will be able to detect, investigate, and remediate threats to your org with a simple conversation. Agentforce in Privacy Center will help automate some of the hard work around complying with constantly evolving regulations. These new agentic features will make security and compliance faster, easier, and more accessible. Walking through the security steps you can take right now For now, Laura and Kylie's advice to improve your Salesforce security is to dive into the configurables. The "Trusted Enterprise Security" video series is a handy guide to walk you through all of the steps you can take to drastically improve the security of your org. Check out the Dreamforce Security Keynote on Salesforce+ to learn more about what threats are out there and how you can fight back. And remember to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Security Keynote: Protecting the Agentic Enterprise The 360 Blog: Laura on security The 360 Blog: Reduce Manual Security Tasks With Agentforce in Security Center The 360 Blog: Automate Manual Compliance Processes with Agentforce in Privacy Center YouTube series: Trusted Enterprise Security: Built on Salesforce Meet the Long-Lost Fourth Member of Snap, Crackle and Pop Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Laura on LinkedIn Kylie 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 diving into some security framework that you've either seen online or at Dreamforce, specifically wrapping your head around invisibles, configurables, and enhanceables. So this week I am joined by longtime podcaster and security champion Laura Pelkey and new voice and new to the Salesforce Trusted Services Team, Kylie McCleven. They are both here to help us unpack how we can think about the security layers baked into the platform, the settings they control, and the tools available for us to go even further. Plus we also jump into a little bit about what AI means for keeping your org secure. This is a fun podcast, and we also bring in a little bit of pop culture. I won't ruin it, but Sylvester Stallone does make an appearance in this episode. So with that, let's get Laura and Kylie on the podcast. So Kylie and Laura, welcome to the podcast. Laura Pelkey: Hey, Mike. Kylie McKlveen: Hey, thanks for having us. Mike Gerholdt: I know. This is going to be fun, even though... Well Laura's a long time podcaster, so she makes security fun, but Kylie's a new voice. So Laura, let's start with you. Refresh everybody, what you've been up to at Salesforce since we've last chatted. Laura Pelkey: Yeah, I know it's been a little while. I'm very happy to be back on the pod. Thank you for having me. So I'm actually coming up on my nine-year anniversary at Salesforce, which is crazy. Can't believe it's been that long. And lately I've been at Dreamforce speaking, writing a lot of blogs about security, and still just trying to get the word out there to our customers about how to be secure with their Salesforce data. Mike Gerholdt: Yep, absolutely. And Kylie, you're a new voice to the podcast, so welcome. Tell us a little bit about how you got started at Salesforce and what you do. Kylie McKlveen: Thanks, yeah, what do they say, long time listener, first time caller? So yeah, I work on our product marketing team for our trusted services products. I've actually just joined this team within the last year when Salesforce acquired Own or formerly Own Backups. So loving my new role and really excited to work with Laura and yourself working with customers on helping them with their security. Mike Gerholdt: Now, trusted services sounds big and massive and like a lot of stuff. What are some of the products that maybe Salesforce admins are familiar with that fall under that umbrella? Kylie McKlveen: Yeah, that's a great question. So Shield, Salesforce Shield, which consists of event monitoring, data detect, platform encryption, and field audit trail. It's also security center. And then with the acquisition of Own, we also added backup and recover, archive, data mask and seed, so that was enhanced with seeding capabilities. We also have privacy center. So those are some of the products admins would be familiar with. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, no, I think we saw a few of those in the admin keynote. So Laura, you're still on the mission and I'm with you on security-minded admins. Laura Pelkey: Yes. Mike Gerholdt: Let's talk about what being a security-minded admin is to get us in that security mode. Laura Pelkey: Yeah. You know Mike, I was actually just thinking about this. I think we did a podcast with that name, and I think two months after I started at Salesforce, we did a podcast together, which is- Mike Gerholdt: I mean, we don't mess around. Laura was like, "We're doing a podcast right away." Laura Pelkey: Yeah, yeah, the security-minded admins, love that topic. So a security-minded admin is just someone who understands that securing their data in Salesforce and their organization's data in Salesforce is an admin's responsibility. Admins have many responsibilities. There's really not enough time in the day to do all of the stuff that an admin needs to do. But security is one of the most important ones. And it's often one of the most overlooked ones. So yeah, really, really passionate about that topic, and I feel my role is to help admins focus on the top things that they can do. Because there's a lot of stuff that can be kind of confusing, but really if you're doing a handful of things, best practices, using the right controls, you're doing most of what you can to protect your organization. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Now I know Laura, at Dreamforce, you gave a presentation that took that security-minded admin up a notch because, I mean, pre-AI, we were just talking about making sure people didn't put sticky notes on monitors and strong passwords. Oh, we got MFA. Remember, MFA was like... That was going to save the world. And now we have AI, which I saw your presentation in Dreamforce. What is security like now in the world of AI? Laura Pelkey: And first of all, MFA is still very important, so definitely still do that. Mike Gerholdt: Right, absolutely. It still saves the world, it just there's more to it. Laura Pelkey: Still saves the world. There's just more more things now. Yeah, we're seeing a huge rise in adoption of AI. I mean, look at how many people listening to this call use LLMs like ChatGPT on a regular basis. I mean, I know I do. Of course, Agentforce, we all love Agentforce. There's a lot of amazing AI technology out there now. But unfortunately what we're seeing is the attackers or hackers, bad guys, whatever you want to call them, are also leveraging this technology, and they're doing so in ways that make it harder to spot when malware is happening. They might be creating a deepfake, that's kind of advanced, but it's actually... It's pretty easy to do nowadays, in order to get your user credentials and to take over your user account. It could even just be maybe a really well phrased phishing text message. I think we all probably get those too nowadays, it's super common. And before it would be kind of easy to spot them. There might be some spelling errors or just language related errors that would be easy to guess that maybe this isn't really from somebody that I know, but nowadays with AI, it's actually... The AI can craft these messages that sound much more realistic and believable. So that's had an effect on how successful bad actors are when they're trying to take over a user account or get user credentials or get sensitive information and data. Mike Gerholdt: I mean, the good news is a lot of people have access to AI, and unfortunately sometimes the people you want access to shouldn't. It also burst my bubble, so it means you're telling me that Bob Ross video of him wrestling Mr. Rogers wasn't real that I just watched the other day? Laura Pelkey: Yeah, yeah, probably not. Mike Gerholdt: Because it was awesome. Laura Pelkey: Probably not. Just logistically, I think that would be pretty difficult. But we are seeing... If anyone watched the security keynote, we shared a really interesting video, it's on Salesforce+ now, of one of our executives, we said, "Hey, can we have a professional ethical hacker demonstrate how easy it is to hack somebody at your level? Can we do this live?" And he was like, "Yeah." So there's actually a really cool video of that in the security keynote. Mike Gerholdt: Ooh, I'll put a link to that in the show notes so you can watch that. Laura Pelkey: Oh, thank you, we would love that. Kylie and I would really appreciate that. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, and speaking of videos, Kylie, I think you worked with Laura. You put out a whole series of videos around security, talking about invisibles, configurables, and what was the third one? It's always the third. It's like Snap, Crackle... Who's that third one? Pop. Laura Pelkey: The third child, I forget as well. Mike Gerholdt: I heard there was actually four at one time. You should Google that. The Snap, Crackle, Pop, there was four. Totally not on topic of talking security, but you know... So Kylie, let's talk about that. I mean, it's an interesting concept to think about. There's invisible things that Salesforce does, there's configurable things, and then there's things that I guess we can put frosting on, right? Kylie McKlveen: Yeah, the pop. I think this framework is just a really easy way to understand the security that's available to you. The invisibles are the things that we do, that Salesforce does kind of invisible to you, hence the name. The configurables things customers can do to make their org more secure, but it's up to them to configure them. And then the enhanceables, so things they can go above and beyond what's provided to them to really enhance their security. So the names are a bit obvious by design. Mike Gerholdt: So tell me a little bit about some of the invisible stuff that goes on behind the scenes that helps admins sleep at night. Kylie McKlveen: Yeah, I hope admins are familiar with things like network level security, our secure infrastructure, application level security, things like that. Those are really table stakes for SaaS platforms. But there's a lot of really cool things that our cybersecurity operations center does proactively protecting our customers. And I'm actually going to throw it over to Laura to give some of those examples. I know we've had multiple conversations about some of the examples of the things they do and it's really cool. Laura Pelkey: Yeah, so our team, our cybersecurity operations center team, they are incredible. Actually, when I started working in cybersecurity, which I've always worked in cybersecurity, my very first job, which I won't say how many years ago that was anymore- Mike Gerholdt: Well two, because you're 27, right? Laura Pelkey: Exactly, exactly, correct. But when I first started working in security, I was learning about all of the really cool things that my company at the time, we had a social engineering team, and the things that other companies would hire us to do, and they would literally go into companies and attempt to hack them by physically gaining access to a structure, their networks in their building. And this was part of something that our clients would pay for. It was so cool to me. And basically it would just reveal where the holes were in their security so that the client could then fix those. So things like that, that's called social engineering. So at Salesforce we do things like that, we're constantly hunting for vulnerabilities in the platform, in our networks, we call that threat hunting. We have a global team that is working 24 7, literally just scanning all the networks for anomalies we call them, anomalous events. Does something look weird in one of our networks? Does something look weird in one of our customer's networks? And then we have a massive team of people who, as soon as they spot something, they jump on it. And if it's a customer issue, they'll contact the customer right away and actually work with them to resolve it. I don't know, it reminded me when I was first learning about this many years ago, it just was very cool work and it's always behind the scenes and you don't know that it's going on, but it actually does so much to shore up the security of your organization. So we do stuff like that. Mike Gerholdt: No, that sounds really cool. When you were mentioning that, I was thinking of... I think it's like an early 2000s B-level Sylvester Stallone movie where he's like a guy that gets paid to break out a prisons to find their vulnerability. Laura Pelkey: Yes, it's exactly like that, yes. Mike Gerholdt: That's what I was thinking of. So that's how I envision your whole team is. Laura Pelkey: I would actually love to do that kind of work. No one has asked me to, but if anyone at Salesforce is listening, I'm open to doing that, that sounds fun. Mike Gerholdt: Okay, all right, look at that. Laura, while we have you, can we... I mean the invisible stuff's really cool, but it's behind the scenes. Admins love to get their hands on stuff. Let's talk about what we can configure. Laura Pelkey: So as Kylie was saying, the second piece or second pillar of this are the configurables. And the configurables are... The easiest way to think of it is the things that are within the customer's control. So this is security settings, controls, and features that actually need to be set up properly by the customer. And Salesforce is a very robust platform, and we do provide a level of flexibility to make sure that our customer's needs are being met, but it's also part of our shared responsibility model where when a customer has control over these things, that they really spend the time to properly configure them to best protect their data. A couple of examples. The principle of least privilege. It's not a setting, but it's a principle that in cyber security is the defining principle for when you're talking about user permissions. So admins set up users all the time. Every day, maybe. So when an admin is setting up a user, it's really important that they're paying attention to the permission sets and the level of permissions that they're granting to this user. So we still say layering permission sets and permission set groups on top of profiles is the best practice, and when you are setting up a user, make sure that the permissions you're granting them are only what's necessary for them to do their job. So that's that that least privilege part. And by limiting them to only what's necessary, it actually helps limit the exposure if in... Hopefully this doesn't happen, but in the chance that a user account is compromised. And especially when we're looking at people who have admin level permissions, and what are those, Mike? Modify all data, view all data. Mike Gerholdt: Everything's scary. Laura Pelkey: Yes. So those are incredibly powerful permissions, and admins know they can do everything in their Salesforce org. But would you give, for example, okay, say like a Salesforce admin is the owner of a house. Let's just create that metaphor. Would you give all of your keys to your mail carrier? Why would they need access to the inside of your house? Maybe they need access to the gate for the pathway that walks to your front door, so you leave that unlocked for them, but they don't need to get inside your house. It's kind of like the same thing when you're setting up users. You don't want all of your users to be able to do every single thing in your Salesforce org. And again, it's because users make mistakes so they could accidentally and unintentionally do something that could cause a security issue. That happens all the time, or in the off chance that a user is compromised, you don't want the bad actor that has compromised and taken over that user account to be able to do all the things that an admin does. So yes, very long spiel about principle of least privilege and why it's important, but basically the configurable part of this is setting up users and making sure that they only have the level of permissions that they need. Mike Gerholdt: And to run with your metaphor, Laura, I think even the delivery companies now, I have a code from my garage door and you can drop a package off in my garage door. So in theory, you're only getting into my garage unless I forget to lock the door to my house from my garage. Now you have access to the whole house. And that plays into the same... They should only have access to the things they should have access to. Laura Pelkey: Yeah, exactly. Mike Gerholdt: Laura, I think this falls into maybe a product that you oversee, which is Security Center. Laura Pelkey: I don't oversee it, I wish I did. Mike Gerholdt: Or Kylie, sorry. Laura Pelkey: It's an amazing... Yes, Kylie's team does that. And you can actually, with Security Center, see the number of people exactly who in your organization has admin-level permissions? Kylie, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think in Security Center you can actually change those permissions within Security Center itself or apply policies across all of your orgs within Security Center to limit that, is that correct? Kylie McKlveen: That's correct. Absolutely, you can apply policies. And I think especially for admins who have multiple orgs that they're managing, being able to view their security posture across and then have a sense of consistency and control, Security Center is a great product for that. Laura Pelkey: Yeah, we love that product. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, and we saw a lot of this in the admin keynote where Kate and Lisa did a demo of Lisa just needing additional permissions to edit a field, not the entire object. And I think what was nice is we saw Agentforce double-checking with the admin to say, "I've set this up, but is this correct?" Which is a huge step, the human in the loop for a lot of security and AI things that we work on. Laura Pelkey: Yes, it's so important that you're working with... And now that Security Center is enhanced with Agentforce, it's like admins have kind of a partner, but still the admin's responsibility to validate everything and to oversee everything. But it's now easier to do that, which is great. Mike Gerholdt: Great. Especially when it goes GA. I think admins will be excited for the new setup. Kylie, Laura set you up perfectly. She mentioned enhanceables. Let's talk about some of those security enhanceables that admins can get their hands on or help set up that take security even farther. Kylie McKlveen: As we talked about earlier, we have Shield and Security Center. These are the products that fall within the trusted services portfolio. Is that what you were asking, Mike? Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, just I would love to learn more about what we consider enhanceables. Kylie McKlveen: Yeah, so these are the products that go above and beyond to help you enhance your security. And when we talk about enhancing our security, there's really many reasons why customers are choosing to enhance their security. A couple of years ago, when we were talking to customers, it was really those in regulated industries that had specific requirements that they needed to meet in platform encryption or things like that. But now there's a variety of reasons, so some of these customers who are in high threat industries and need an additional layer of protection. Or scale, we talk about scale a lot. So whether you're resource constraint because you're an admin of one, but you need the security power, or if your company is growing and you need something to help you scale with that. These products can really help with that. And then another thing I'll mention is if you have a lot of sensitive data in your org, I think there's a lot of important data in Salesforce that customers need to protect in different ways, but sensitive data, if you really need to add additional layers or prevent people from seeing certain data, we have products within this portfolio to help with those specific scenarios. Mike Gerholdt: I think one thing that's interesting to me in the discussions I've had with Laura and Lynn over the few years that we've worked together is security isn't only just keeping the bad actors out, it's also making sure the right people have the right access at the right time. I would love to know, because in my mind, backing up data, and you came from own backup, how is backing up data really part of a security posture? Kylie McKlveen: This is really about continuity. So being able to ensure that if you were talking about bad actors or malicious intent, but there's human error. If one of your users accidentally made a mistake and corrupted the data or deleted the data, being able to have a backup that you can quickly and easily restore that data in your environment is really important. That data is there and needs to be restored. So you need a tool to help you quickly respond to that. And that's how backup is part of that. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, no, I never really thought of that. It's one thing to have the data, make sure the right people have the right access to it, but it's also having the history of the data and making sure... I guess it would be a paper trail of what's happened to it and when it's happened. Kylie McKlveen: We do have products. Field Audit Trail is great for understanding how your data has changed over time. But there are some cool things about backup where you can look back into the past and see how the data has changed. You can actually look up in backup to look at the signals to see if the data might've been corrupted. So it's a really cool product. Mike Gerholdt: Now, the idea of invisibles, configurables and enhanceables isn't something we just thought up one day. It's actually a series of videos that I believe are out on YouTube, if I'm not correct... And this is for you, Kylie or Laura, whoever was the most involved, what are some of the things that we're going to see in those videos, because I'll definitely link to those videos in the show notes. Laura Pelkey: I could take that one. So this is something actually our Chief Trust Officer came up with. He's so smart, his brain is just constantly working. He just explained it one day, "Invisibles, configurables, and enhanceables," and we were like, "That is brilliant." And really what these videos are talking about, and they're also available on security.salesforce.com as well as YouTube, but basically he and our SMEs who are on the video series as well go into these layers. So invisibles is the bottom layer, and you can think of it's the strong foundation. Salesforce handles this for you. We're always working to keep our networks and our products secure and our infrastructure secure, and customers don't need to do anything to take advantage of this. I mean Hyperforce is an example of how we are creating secure infrastructure for our customers. So we talk about the invisibles. And then we talk about the configurables. Rachel Beard, who is featured in this video series, she's amazing, she's one of our security architects at Salesforce, she talks about specific things that customers can do, and these are like... If you watch these videos and just do everything she says, that's going to be hugely impactful to the security of your Salesforce org. One of the things she goes over is login IP ranges, which is when a Salesforce admin restricts the login IP ranges so that only people within the company's network can actually access your Salesforce org. And that's really one of the best things. So things like that. She talks about principle of least privilege as well. And then there's the enhanceables where, as Kylie said, we have a suite of amazing security and privacy products that are really designed to help our customers grow and scale. Like Kylie mentioned, a lot of admins might be struggling to keep up with their growth at their company, and these products can help you do that. And then there's actually a really cool... The last video in this series is our Chief Trust Officer speaking with a CEO and a CISO from one of our friend companies. And you just get the... From folks at that level, from these executives who think about cybersecurity all the time. You get to hear their perspective on what's next in the cybersecurity industry. So it's a really awesome video series. I would definitely encourage people to watch it. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, as we wrap up, Kylie, we're fresh off of Dreamforce. What was some of the exciting things that you're getting ready to work on heading into the coming year? Kylie McKlveen: Yeah, we had two really big announcements, multiple big announcements in the security keynote, but two that I just want to call out I'm so excited about. We talked at the beginning of this podcast about how AI is changing everything, but now we're seeing AI in our security and compliance products, which is really cool. So AI is actually helping you be more secure. So we have Agentforce in Security Center, which can detect threats, and you can conversationally investigate the threats and remediate them. It will give you suggestions on how to quickly resolve those issues. And then we have Agentforce in Privacy Center too. So automating some of that hard work around complying with these constantly evolving regulations. You can tell it what's applicable to your business and it will give you suggestions around some risks you may have, some gaps, and it can suggest policies that you may want to deploy in your org. So really just making security and compliance a lot more accessible and a lot more easier, faster. It's just really cool how AI is actually helping us with security in this scenario. Mike Gerholdt: And with a lot of those centers, I mean, there's a lot of data and to have AI comprehensively look at all of that, it might find things that you just didn't know to look for. Kylie McKlveen: Oh, definitely. I think that's the struggle. Sometimes you're looking at this data and you don't even know what you're looking for, and AI can really just take the pain out of that. It can look across multiple data points and tell you what's out of the ordinary. So saving a ton of time. Mike Gerholdt: Laura, similar question. We're fresh off Dreamforce. As you help admins in the coming year become more secure, more AI proficient, what would your advice be for admins for the upcoming year? Laura Pelkey: Well, definitely the couple things that I mentioned when we're looking at configuring, I think just broadly, look at your security configuration in your Salesforce org. That's the broad thing I want all admins doing right now. And then within that the things that I think are the most important for admins to be focusing on are that setting up login IP ranges, that's super important. Following the principle of least privilege when setting up users. And that also means doing an audit of the permissions that your users already have, that's super important, and taking away unnecessary permissions. Admins should also be talking to their Salesforce users about things like phishing, like the security threats that are out there. They should be educating their users about that and setting them up for success so that if they ever get into a situation where they might be targeted, then they know at least to stop, think, and then disengage. So those three things are super important. And then MFA, as we said, saving the world. That's already required for all user logins in Salesforce, but I would also encourage everyone to set up MFA for their personal accounts. If you watch the hacking video in the security keynote, you can actually see that if you reuse your passwords across multiple user accounts, which everyone does, that's just natural, we all have a lot of credentials to keep track of, they can possibly be leveraged... Something from your personal account can possibly be leveraged to gain access to another personal account or even a business account. So you want to make sure you're using MFA on every account. And then if you can do this, if it's available to you, add a security contact in your Salesforce org so that in the event that Salesforce needs to contact you about something, like I was talking about our amazing CISOC team at the beginning of this podcast, how they're working 24/7, they never sleep, they're just staring at a computer looking for security things. If they need to get in touch with you, they will reach out to your security contact that's listed in Salesforce. So it's important that that's up to date. So that's my advice to admins. Mike Gerholdt: That's good advice. I would also add, watch the 2013 movie Escape Plan. That's what that movie's called. Where Sylvester Stallone, AKA Laura, breaks out of prison. Well, Kylie, Laura, thanks for coming on and talking security. I mean, you know as well as I have since the moment I started at Salesforce, I think it's the most important thing because we're protecting our company's data. So what else you got better to do besides make the data better and more secure, in my opinion. So thanks for coming on. I look forward to seeing some of the new stuff that we have coming out from your area, Kylie, and the advice that you continue to give, Laura. Laura Pelkey: Yeah, we've got a lot in store, so this will not be the last you hear from Kylie and I, I promise. Kylie McKlveen: I love it. Mike Gerholdt: Well, we're going to hold you to that, though. Laura Pelkey: No pressure, Kylie. Mike Gerholdt: We'll be back. Laura Pelkey: We'll be back. Mike Gerholdt: Big thanks to Laura and Kylie for walking us through the security stack that every Salesforce admin should know. Now whether it's understanding what Salesforce has your back on, tightening up your permission sets, or leveling up with tools like Shield and Security Center, there is something here for all of us. Make sure to check out the full video series on security.Salesforce.com. Don't worry, I'll link to that in the show notes. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

Daryl Moon, Founder of CertifyCRM.com, shares his journey from IT generalist to accidental Salesforce admin. He discusses how a skeptical view of AI shifted to practical gains after using it to enhance his fishing trips. Daryl explains his hands-on experiences with Agentforce Vibes, tackling real-world challenges like building a recruitment app and navigating token limits. He emphasizes experimenting in sandbox environments and offers valuable advice for new admins to learn through familiar projects. Fishing tales and community engagement round out this insightful conversation!

Join Rebecca Sherrill, a VP leading user research at Salesforce, and Shelly Erceg, a product leader focused on workflow automation, as they dive into the exciting updates on IdeaExchange. Discover how RoadmapExchange bridges ideas with product roadmaps, enhancing transparency and community collaboration. They explain why quality submissions matter and share insights on staying engaged with product decisions. Plus, learn how Salesforce plans to innovate based on admin feedback at upcoming events!

Join Josh Birk, a member of the Salesforce Admin Evangelist team focused on Agentforce, Jennifer Lee, specializing in automation and flows, and Kate Lessard, an expert in security and governance. They explore the evolution of Admin roles in 2026, discussing practical strategies to enhance agent adoption and AI integration. Josh highlights the journey towards easier agent building, while Jennifer shares insights on simplifying complex processes. Kate emphasizes the importance of proactive governance for trusted AI implementations, making security a key topic.

In this heartwarming holiday fable, Riley the Admin embodies problem-solving skills, swiftly addressing issues before they arise. Faced with seasonal stress, the organization feels overwhelmed, prompting Riley to gift clarity. By cleaning up old fields and fixing troublesome automation, they restore order and enhance communication. This invisible work leads to clearer workflows and renewed confidence among teams, highlighting the significant impact of an Admin's efforts. Ultimately, the fable celebrates the unsung heroes who make work life smoother.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Joshua Birk, Senior Director of Admin Evangelism at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about how Agentforce Vibes can help admins debug code, create documentation, and so much more. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Joshua Birk. What is vibe coding? Josh has been getting a vibe lately, and it's not just him. More and more programmers have been adapting their workflows to incorporate AI and give themselves a helping hand. Vibe coding is here to stay, and it's coming to Salesforce with the release of Agentforce Vibes. Pair programming, also known as someone looking over your shoulder while you code, is a classic way to get unstuck. Whether you're missing a semicolon or calling the wrong function, having another set of eyes on your code can make all the difference. Vibe coding is the same concept, but you're using AI for that external perspective. With an AI assistant, admins can quickly troubleshoot a wall of code to spot errors or comb through pages of documentation for a key piece of information. And now, that functionality has been built into Salesforce development environments with Agentforce Vibes. How to get started with Agentforce Vibes If you're already a user of VS Code or Code Builder, you already have access to Agentforce Vibes. If you're running a trial org or developer edition, you may need to download and install the extension. Like any AI tool, the things you can do with Agentforce Vibes are too many to list. Josh gives the example of product requirements documentation. PRDs are the encyclopedia of everything going on with a project: requirements, challenges, blockers, key metrics, etc. It's an essential document for any project, but it's difficult to create and dense to parse. Agentforce Vibes can help you with PRDs on both fronts. You can spin up a PRD for a project and get a running start, or go through an existing PRD for whatever information you need. In short, it helps you do more, faster. AI is a skillset amplifier "There's always a question of what skills are admins not going to need in the future of AI," Josh says. "I don't know if that's the right question, because I think it's all about your skills leveraging AI—not AI taking over your skill set." Agentforce Vibes isn't going to replace a development team, but it can give admins a starting point to collaborate more effectively with them. If you have coding skills, it can help you debug and document. If you've built a ton of flows and are worried some might be redundant, it can help you find those. AI tools like Vibes won't replace admin skills—they'll amplify them. Like a calculator in math class, Vibes helps you move faster but still requires foundational knowledge. The key is knowing what to ask, validating results, and using AI as a supportive peer, not a replacement. Make sure to listen to the full episode for more details about Agentforce Vibes from Josh, and don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday. Until next time! Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Get started: Agentforce Vibes True to the Core Deep Dive: What's New in Lightning Experience Performance and Agentforce Vibes Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Josh on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Bluesky social Mike on Threads Mike on X Love our podcasts? Subscribe today or review us on iTunes! Full show transcript Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, we're joined by Josh Birk, Senior Director Admin Evangelism, and really just all around great explainer of complicated things. Coming off of Dreamforce, there's a lot of people talking about vibe coding, what it is, where it came from, and why it matters for Salesforce admins. So we're going to dive into that, along with Agentforce Vibes and how it can change the way that Salesforce admins approach requirements, automation, and even documentation. So you want to give this one a listen to and share it with a few Salesforce admins who maybe are curious about coding in the age of AI. So with that, let's get Josh on the podcast. So Josh, welcome back to the podcast. Josh Birk: Thanks, Mike. Good to be here. Mike: We have so much to talk about. We're coming off of Dreamforce this year. I feel like we're heading into one of the busiest Decembers as a Salesforce admin I can remember, because we're still releasing, upgrading products in this age of AI. But one thing that left Dreamforce that I wanted to talk to you about is I heard a lot about vibe coding. Josh Birk: Yeah. Mike: And so I want to start there, before we talk about the Salesforce product, and just kind of level set. Because you're a developer, you've built code. Josh Birk: I have. I have. Mike: I haven't. I've shown you how to add a icon to an application. Josh Birk: Famously so, yes. Mike: That was my one win in my life. I'll take that. But this whole idea of vibe coding seems to be taking over tech. Let's talk about that. Josh Birk: Yeah, it is definitely taking over tech. And if you want to think about how blindly fast we're going right now, I think I first heard the term vibe coding somewhere during this summer. Mike: Oh. Josh Birk: This time last year, not even a speckle on somebody's eye. And now it's really all the rage. So it's moving. Yeah. Yeah. And the first time I heard it too, my first response was of course, "Well, what are you talking about? What is vibe code?" Mike: To be fair, it sounds awesome. Because I totally love tie-dye shirts, I love the 1970s, and I'm sitting around thinking like, "Yeah brother. I am going to get myself a tie-dye t-shirt and we're going to vibe." Josh Birk: Yeah. Actually, my first response was closer in that vein. I actually thought they meant flow development. Like not flows as in admin development, but when you get into your flow zone kind of thing. Mike: Oh yeah. Yeah. Josh Birk: I thought, "Oh, is there some cool new way to get into my vibe?" Mike: Hey, it's like that social media movie. That's what my friends always call it. Josh Birk: Yeah. Mike: We're like, "You can't interrupt him. He's plugged in." Josh Birk: Exactly. Mike: He's plugged in. Josh Birk: It is. And this is a good note for working with your developers. If they have their headphones on, they are probably not willing to talk to you. Just as a reminder out there for feeding and nurturing your developers. So yeah, no. So vibe coding is, as kind of an old school developer, there's a really interesting paradigm to describe it, which is peer programming. And peer programming was this thing that was kind of... I don't want to say it was kind of a fad, but the idea was get a fellow programmer to basically look over your shoulder and assist you while you're coding kind of thing. Mike: Okay. Josh Birk: And back at one of my earlier jobs, we used to do it usually when we were like we're stuck, right? And it's like we get stuck in something, "Hey Craig, can you come over and peer program with me for a little bit?" And there's this kind of myth in coding that sometimes all you literally need is another pair of eyeballs staring at your screen and your code will magically work better. But it was more of an idea of like, "Oh, you missed that semicolon." Catching little things along the way. Vibe coding, similar concept except you're using an AI assistant. The conversation you're having is with an AI who can sit there and create things for you, read files for you, analyze things for you. And so you just sort of have at your fingertips this assistant that's going to help you do tasks faster and easier. Mike: Okay. So yeah. I also totally you get that like when you're proofreading stuff. I'll be going through whatever and I'll be like, "I can't not find this word anymore because I've been looking at it forever." Josh Birk: Right, right. And old school English major, never turn in your paper until somebody else has read it, right? Mike: Uh-huh. Josh Birk: Always get another pair of eyeballs because you're too close to your source material to know what you said that sounds wrong to somebody like that. And yeah, vibes can be like that too. It can be your other pair of eyes. Mike: So Salesforce has Agentforce Vibes. Josh Birk: Yes. Mike: And we saw it at Dreamforce and the developer keynote, and you've had a chance to get hands-on with it. Josh Birk: Yeah. Mike: Let's talk about what Agentforce Vibe means for admin. Josh Birk: So let's talk software. Let's talk about, specifically when we say Agentforce Vibes, what we're talking about. And what we're talking about is an extension into Visual Studio Code. Now Visual Studio Code is the basis of Code Builder, also by the way now renamed Agentforce Vibes IDE for those who haven't seen that change yet. And that's Visual Studio Code in a browser. And the cool thing about Agentforce Vibes IDE is that it's not like a HTML representation of a development environment. It's actually running... You know when you can't log into your computer and somebody from IT logs in for you and they're like, "I'm going to take over your mouse and do a whole bunch of stuff." Mike: Mm-hmm. Josh Birk: It's like that technology, but you get to use Visual Studio Code remotely, basically. So the extension comes pre-installed, and so the nice thing about it all being in your browser is that you don't have to install anything. You just basically go to a click, pull up a window and let it start doing all of its things to initialize, and then you're pretty much good to go. And it's even had, I don't know when this improvement happened, but it used to be you had to go through this kind of awkward logging into your own org kind of thing. And that actually has been skipped, so it actually knows your org itself. Mike: Oh. Josh Birk: And then what you're going to see in the IDE is a pane off to the left side, and it's a client... And now we got to get a little nerdy here. That client logs into the Salesforce MCP server. And I don't know when the last time we've had a chance to use the term MCP, but that's model context protocol, which basically is a protocol that says, "This is how an AI client can perform actions on a Salesforce server." And so Vibes sits within VS Code and it knows kind of your org shape, and then it can go through the MCP server and be like, "Hey, can you download all the metadata for my custom objects?" And things like that. Now if you're an instance that's like a trial org or a developer edition, you may have to actually download Visual Studio Code and then install the Salesforce extension, which will include the CLI and Vibes and a whole bunch of other stuff. Nice thing is that's very simple to do. And also because of the way Agentforce Vibes ID works, it's feature parity, right? You're basically doing the same thing, you're just doing it locally on your desktop as opposed to in the cloud. Mike: So it's meant to help you build faster? Josh Birk: That is one of the things it can help you do. Yeah. Mike: Okay. Josh Birk: So let's see. A few of my favorite use cases. Mike: Yes. Josh Birk: Because this is one of the big problems with AI in general, right? Because I tell people and somebody talks, I'm like, "Look, if you haven't played with any of these, just go talk to them." Because part of it is like how a conversational UI works doesn't really click for people, I think, until they actually start using it. And then I'm like, "Ask it to tell you a dad joke. Ask it to play 20 questions. Stuff like that." Don't ask Vibes to do a dad joke. You can, I think it probably will respond. But one of the first examples I tried to do was I'm creating out this demo for a fictional company, and so I gave it basically the overview of what the company does. And then I asked it, "What kind of custom data would you recommend?" Sort of thing. It's like, "Oh, okay." And so it can recommend that, it can create those custom objects for you, it can create those custom fields for you. And then you can also take that to another step and be like, "Okay. Based on what you know about this fictional company, what you know about the data structure, what flows would you recommend? What kind of automation would you recommend?" And so it's kind of like having not just a developer in your back pocket, it's kind of like having an architect in your back pocket too. So you can kind of help solve some of these puzzle pieces without necessarily having to sit down and have a meeting with an entire development team in order to keep moving forward. Mike: So I saw in some of our presentations, like at Dreamforce and both at New York World Tour, they would talk about a product requirements document. Josh Birk: Okay. Mike: I'm going to go out on a limb and say... It's a pretty sturdy limb because it's holding me. There's probably admins that are inept and it's like second nature to kind of document requirements, especially heading into a big build. Josh Birk: Yeah, yeah. Mike: And then there isn't. And I would say I fell into the, "There isn't." I always tended to document everything after the fact. Josh Birk: Yeah. Mike: But if you've never done like a product requirements doc, which I think helps Agentforce Vibes, just helps in vibe coding, but it to me feels like also a best practice. What should a PRD include, and how should that motion kind of get started for admins? Josh Birk: Yeah. So we were talking earlier, and so I kind of brushed up on what a PRD kind of looks like. And back in my consultancy days, I kind of wish this was more of a trend. Because we didn't have a requirements doc, we had requirement docs. Mike: Oh. Josh Birk: So the designer would come up with layouts, the development team would come out with X, and the business requirements team would come out with Y. And a PRD really tries to consolidate as much of that into one document. So it's kind of a, "Here is the encyclopedia of everything that's going on with your current project." And so that's requirements, it's challenges, it's blockers, key metrics. So it's kind of a one-stop guide into like, "Where are we in the success of this project?" Mike: Mm-hmm. Josh Birk: And I think one of the cool things about a client like Vibes is when you look at something like that, it can be overwhelming, right? It can be a lot. But to Vibes, it's just a big block of text, right? It's not going to get overwhelmed over something like that. And so with a good PRD, Vibes knows where you're trying to go. And so to kind of go back to the example of like, "How should we build out this application?" You're giving it all of the touchpoints that it really needs. And you can also use Vibes to be like, "Hey, can you recommend changes to my PRD?" Kind of thing. So because when I'm looking at this document format, I'm like, "Wow, that is a lot of information we're tracking in one place. Wouldn't it be nice if I had another pair of eyeballs in order to work with this?" And so I think that's where Vibes is kind of a nice little assistant that can sit there next to you and help craft, navigate and organize a document like that. Mike: Yeah. I always try to think of how do you take this from admins who are working with many teams and it's a huge app, to like some of the times... Like I was an admin with a couple hundred users, I would get four or five people together. I didn't have anybody that was a UX or interface designer. I just kind of had to figure it out on my own. Josh Birk: Yeah, yeah. Mike: I think that's part of where Vibes can also help you, right? Josh Birk: It can. And it's kind of one of those things. Like right now I haven't had a lot of great success with Vibes creating like a complicated flow or anything like that, but this is where it's definitely going in the future. And so a use case that I think they actually demoed at the developer keynote Dreamforce was your designer gives you a Figma, you give that Figma to Vibes, and Vibes gives you a lightning web component. I don't think Vibes can do this yet, but I've done that kind of thing with AI just with like an image. Somebody says like, "Oh, this is what I want the component to look like." And I go, "Snap. Claude, hey, create this lightning web component for me." So what that does... And it kind of chills me a little bit, because one of the first talks I ever did about AI was at Forcelandia, and it was all about the convergence of roles, and it was all about how an admin can now have starting points. They're not going to replace a development team, but going back to a PRD, it can help them create the docs that the developers need in order to get their job done. Mike: Mm-hmm. Josh Birk: And some of those docs might even include, "Here's a block of code." And the admin doesn't necessarily need to know exactly how that code works, but something like Vibes can be like, "Oh, this is part of the PRD that we're going to give those developers so that they have that information moving forward." And so if you start kind of thinking about it in terms of documents in, documents out with Vibes in the center, it gives an admin a lot more interconnectivity when it comes to being able to quickly move through those tasks. Still not replacing the human in the loop, right? Mike: Right. Josh Birk: Where nobody's going to say like, "Hey admin, could you just write that apex trigger for me and get that into production as quickly as possible? That'd be great. Thanks." None of those models have changed. Those rules still apply. But we can move into another example. Let's say an admin wakes up, they get a Slack message that's like, "Hey, this flow isn't working correctly." They can pull up Vibes and run tests against that flow and ask vibes like, "Hey, I'm getting this error. Can you help me figure out what's going on in flow with that?" Mike: Very good. I was going to ask, because you said helps start or helps create the foundation. Josh Birk: Yeah. Mike: And I think that's always the thing that we're looking at is, "Oh, so I can just give Vibes this requirements doc and go to lunch, come back, and it's done." Josh Birk: Kind of where we're moving at the very least. And when I say moving, once again, we're talking in terms of AI, so we're talking months, not years. Right? Mike: Yeah. Josh Birk: Again, Vibes didn't exist six months ago. In six months, it's going to be a lot more powerful and a lot more capable. And I think that's one of the visions Salesforce has for it is it's your business analyst's buddy, it is your requirements gathering buddy, but it's also your application building buddy. And once again, creating that minimal viable product that you can just get into a sandbox, and then have people get feedback based on that. Time to delivery on that stuff is going to just start to evaporate, it's going to be so fast. And once again, we're still going to need the expertise. AI is going to get stuff wrong, it's going to go into corners it's going to need to be pulled out of. And so I don't see... There's always a question of like, "Well, what skill is an admin not going to need in the future of AI?" And I don't know if that's the right question, because I think it's all about your skills leveraging AI, not AI taking over your skillset. Mike: And also, I mean you mentioned it, I'm thinking of back to how you started the conversation which is like the peer programming. You would always double check. They're double checking your work and you're double checking their work. Josh Birk: Mm-hmm. Mike: And so I would think at times you could probably get a little over your skis with Vibes if it could create things that you're like, "Oh wow, I'm so glad it created that. I didn't know how." Now the impetus, in my opinion, is still on you to go back and learn. I use the metaphor of the first time you got to use a calculator in math class. Josh Birk: Right. Mike: You're like, "Oh my God, I can get the answer so much faster." Josh Birk: Exactly. Mike: But the math teacher's like, "Right, but you should have already knew the answer. The calculator should have just reinforced it." Josh Birk: Right, right. Mike: And I think with Vibes, you should already know what you're going for. Josh Birk: Mm-hmm. Mike: This just kind of... I don't know. Maybe it's like a microwave meal. It just makes the time from like when you're hungry to when you get to eat the Salisbury steak down to one to two minutes. Josh Birk: Right, right, right. Yeah, because we're of that age when microwaves were magic. Mike: They still are Josh. Josh Birk: They still got a heart. Mike: They're still magic. Josh Birk: I still barely understand how they work. Mike: They make popcorn and they warm up soup. Josh Birk: They're just your friend. Yeah, no. And in AI circles, the calculator analogy rings pretty hard, pretty true. Because we're also of that age when it was the fear of the calculator. Every kid's going to stop learning how to do math because they won't have to learn math anymore. And I point to there are calculators I don't know how to use, and the reason I don't know how to use them is because my math isn't strong enough. There's buttons and stuff on there that I might as well go back and play Pac-Man. I just can't use this thing. And it's the same kind of thing. If you're not skilled up enough, you're not going to be able to leverage AI to get your stuff done faster. It's definitely a loop where the smarter the human is, the smarter the AI is going to be. Mike: So let's talk about, because I try to cover all the bases and it's impossible, but admins that work with developers and admins that want to use Vibes. If you and I were building something and I'm your admin, which first of all, lucky you. I meant that sarcastically. Josh Birk: I know. I would be honored if you were my admin. Mike: Because that could sound awfully, awfully boastful. What would you expect me to do in Vibes that maybe you wouldn't do? I don't know if that makes sense. But if we're working together on a project and I'm like, "I'm going to use vibes for X, Y, and Z." As a developer, what are you like, "Cool. I feel good you doing that, because I'm going to do A, B, and C." Josh Birk: And I think this is an interesting dynamic in Salesforce development and app building in general. What I would want from an admin or a business analyst is okay, you have your PRD, right? You have your North Star, you know where you're trying to go. And as a developer, can you help... We need to have a conversation to identify the technical gaps that are outside limitations, or for other architectural reasons we need code in order to accomplish that. And what I think is interesting is some of that reduces every year. Because for instance, take dynamic page layouts, right? Mike: Mm-hmm. Josh Birk: And when I first saw us as a sort of admin and developer's clothing, or developer and admin's clothing, I'm not sure the right analogy there, when I first saw that feature I'm like, "Why is everybody so excited about this?" Because I'm like, "It's an if-then statement basically." But then I saw working in layouts with logic to it and I'm like, "Oh, that used to be a lightning web component." You used to have to have a lightning web component to do that. And it's kind of like when we rolled out Process Builder and it's like, "Well, you used to have to have an apex trigger for that." And those corners are slowly kind of getting moved around. But that's where I think Admin Vibes, PRD or Business Docs or whatever, when you look at that you're like, "I can't cover that. I need to highlight this and get it to my dev team." Now my favorite party trick from Vibes is one of the things you can tell Vibes is to create a file in a specific format. And so if you use Slack and you're communicating with the team in a Slack channel, you can take these documents and you can ask Vibe, "Hey Vibes, can I have that as a markdown file?" And then you can pull that markdown file, copy and paste it, put it into a Slack canvas and at mention your developer and Bob's your uncle. Mike: That's nice. Josh Birk: What's nice about it is it's very clean. And the question is, are you communicating within Vibes? Well, probably not. If you've got a Slack channel, that's probably where your team is actually organizing things. But Vibes can be the pipeline into that. Which, we should also mention, something I haven't had a lot of chance to play with... But the other advantage of Vibes, because it is an MCP client, it is not stuck with just talking to the Salesforce MCP server. So if you work with Jira, you work with Slack, you work with Atlassian, you work with these other third party integrations, you can also use Vibes to work with those integrations too. So from a development team point of view, for instance, that means they can do things like interact with GitHub. And so they're not just working within Vibes, but they could be checking in code, they could be pulling down pull requests and they could be deploying it to a sandbox, all with staying within the same environment. Now what that means for admins is something I think we need to kind of poke around a little bit and see what are those third party things. Like what are the other things that's sitting at a Vibes terminal would be making your job faster? Mike: Yeah. Well, that was actually going to be my next question is what's... You go back and look at the transcript of this. I think what's interesting, we've said Vibes the whole time, but I think in the technology ecosphere that we live in it's actually vibe coding. Josh Birk: Yeah. Mike: And coding feels very loaded. It's a developer term. Josh Birk: It is. Mike: We're saying Vibes because it feels very I want to say end user-friendly, a little bit more so than trying to look at code. But if you're thinking, "Okay, this is something I need to pay attention to as a Salesforce admin", but you're like me and coding just doesn't make sense to you, what are some of the skills that they should lean into to kind of prepare for? I'm going to guess that this is kind of the new way of building applications. Josh Birk: It's moving into that. And I kind of want to hang a lantern there, because it's like first of all I completely agree. And it's just kind of one of those... We're definitely stuck with the term vibe coding. It's not going anywhere. Mike: It's like social media. Josh Birk: It's like social media. Well also, I have to say, vibe coding for a change doesn't sound like some random engineer named it. So it's got kind of good marketing behind it. But the coding aspect is definitely like that, that's a loaded phrase. And I know I've talked to admins who really do react to that kind of thing that just sort of like, "Well, a developer edition's not for me because I'm not a developer." And I'm like, "That's cool. I understand you think that. The developer edition is absolutely for you if what you need is a working version of Salesforce where you're kicking the tires of things like Data Cloud, Agentforce Studio and Vibes." So I think we're going to have to start... So for instance, one of the things I want to highlight in this coming year is like the new tools that we have for flow testing. Mike: Oh? Josh Birk: And when I started, I hadn't had a chance to really catch up to it. Our wonderful Jennifer Lee had a demo video for the Admin Meadow and I was reviewing that. And what occurred to me is that this is unit testing for flows. And so once again, we're pulling in these developer terms, right? Unit testing for flow. Now we have to jump into a rabbit hole. "Okay, well what's unit testing?" And unit testing is also an extremely engineering centric term, right? "What do you mean by a unit?" Well, a unit is the one thing you're testing, basically. It's kind of [inaudible 00:26:12]. But the nice thing is, I think if we can get past the terminology, some of this does bring in... So why do you want to use these new flow testing tools? And trust me, I'm getting back to Vibes. But you want to use these new flow testing tools because when you debug your flow, that tells you if your flow is running without errors. What it doesn't do is tell you is your flow running correctly and giving you the outcome that you want, right? Mike: Uh-huh. Because running without errors and running with the result that you want are two different things. Josh Birk: Two different things. Exactly. And the concept of unit testing for like apex, and the reason why Salesforce decided if you're going to go to production you have to have 75% coverage. That means 75% of your code has a unit test related to it somehow. And the reason they wanted to do that, first of all, it kind of forces people to write better code. And second of all, in a complicated environment like ours, the classic example, right? Some developer threw a trigger on account on a Friday, and now nobody can use an account on a Monday because of the- Mike: And the servers melting. Josh Birk: And the servers melting down. Like law of unexpected consequences, right? Properly done, unit testing will keep that from happening because if you run your whole unit test suite before you deploy, and your unit tests are written correctly, then you'll get that [inaudible 00:27:43] checkbox before you're like, "Oh, something broke. I should go fix that before I deploy." And we can assert that same paradigm with flows, which is a good thing since flows occupy the same kind of automation spaces like triggers. So where does this come back to vibe coding? Well, it comes back to I think admins need to kind of start adapting to some of the skills that developers are doing. Now the good thing is I'm not saying, "Go learn Java." I am saying, "It's time to have some of the soft skills that developers employ." Like when's the last time you sat down and did a code review of your flows? Like when's the last time you did kind of an end to end, "Here's our library of flows. And are all our flows working correctly?" And all of those questions are things that Vibes is very good at answering for you. So I think easing into some of this kind of new world of enterprise architecture and some of the new toys and the new tools that are coming out, Vibes is going to be a very good partner. Mike: I mean you just touched on a huge part that I think sometimes when we release new product we forget is we always focus on here's how you can build new, faster, stronger. Josh Birk: Mm-hmm. Mike: But it's also I remember when Flow and Process Builder came out, it was... But admins could clutter up an org with all of these flows. Josh Birk: Mm-hmm. Mike: That's not a best practice that could be handled in one seamless apex trigger or something. Josh Birk: Right. Mike: And it's like, right, but everybody builds to their skill. Josh Birk: Yeah, yeah. Mike: And it's not necessarily wrong, it's just you ask a hundred people and you're going to get a hundred best practices of how to do it better. But I think what I'm getting at with this is, yes, you can build new, but boy, looking at what we look at as the core responsibilities for Salesforce admins, what about going back and just making it better? Josh Birk: Better, yeah. Mike: Because I do think you're focused on building the new all the time. Josh Birk: Mm-hmm. Mike: I mean there's a point at which you got to stop building the house and you got to clean the house. Josh Birk: Yes. Yes. As somebody who just actually had people over as dinner guests that weren't like family since the pandemic, it's an exercise I am very... Well, my wife did most of the work. But anyway, yes, every now and then you just have to get up and spray and clean everything. Mike: So your wife was like Agentforce Vibes? Josh Birk: She was kind of like Agentforce Vibes. Yeah. Which however was also giving me unit testing from time to time. But anyway. Mike: Yeah. That'll be the next version of Agentforce Vibes. It will also request things from you. Josh Birk: Yeah. Yeah. Mike: So instead of you asking it for a joke it'll be, "Before I build this unit, you have to tell me a dad joke." Josh Birk: Tell me a good dad joke. I will write your... Mike: Uh-huh. Josh Birk: Uh-huh. I think I need to clarify something too. It's like, why am I going back to flows and all this kind of stuff? And it's like, even as somebody who has lived in a world of XML, when I look at a flow metadata XML my eyes just bleed. That is some dense, heavily formatted, heavily nested, and sometimes you're just trying to find that one reference to a custom object or something like that. For a human to read that, it's very unfriendly. For Vibes, walk in the park. It knows exactly how to understand that structure. And so that's when we're saying things like, "Hey, could you look at these 10 flows and tell me if any of them are redundant?" That's why it's good at that, is because it can really analyze that XML very quickly. Mike: Hmm, I like that. I want to end on a fun question. Josh Birk: Okay. Mike: For the three people that are still listening. Josh Birk: That haven't fled for fear of unit testing. Yeah, I hear you. Mike: So of course I had AI help me with some of the questions for this. And the one was, "If vibe coding were a band member, what instrument would it play in the process and why?" Josh Birk: Oh, that's a good question. That's a good question. Mike: And you can't say cowbell. Josh Birk: I wasn't going to, but now I really want to. Mike: More cowbell. Josh Birk: So my first response, my first initial instinct was drums, because they kind of keep the beat kind of thing. Mike: Uh-huh. Josh Birk: But in the spirit of going back to where we kind of started like, "What do you think of when you think of vibes?" I think bass guitar. Mike: Oh yeah. Josh Birk: I think that deep kind of keeping you in the flow sort of thing, and every now and taking over when the lead guitarist is done with his solo kind of thing. But not having to be loud and flashy like the lead singer. Yeah, I'm going to go bass guitar. Mike: Yet, yet. Josh Birk: Yet. Mike: Okay. I like that, yeah. Or not triangle. I went with cowbell and triangle. Josh Birk: Triangle. I actually played percussion in high school, so I've actually played a triangle. Mike: Oh, see? Fun fact, you didn't know about Josh Birk until you listened to the 30 some minute mark. Josh Birk: Exactly. Mike: That'll be a trivia question somewhere. Josh Birk: It is a difficult instrument to master, really. Mike: Yeah, sure. Well, that was the hardest thing to segment off of. Josh Birk: There you go. Mike: Josh, thanks for coming on the podcast and helping with Vibes. I think what'll be fun in a year to go back to this podcast and be like, "Aw." [inaudible 00:33:59]. Josh Birk: They were so innocent. Look at those big eyes that they had at the time. Yeah. Mike: Right. Josh Birk: Yeah, exactly. Mike: If they only knew what was coming. Josh Birk: Yeah. I think that's an excellent idea. And I have two predictions. Number one, we will do that and I will sound so wonderfully naive about the capabilities of vibe coding actually went so far beyond what I'm even describing here. Or two, we're going to be talking about some other thing that's whatever vibe coding occurs in the summer, right? The whole new development fad. Mike: But vibe coding, I mean I know we're talking about Agentforce Vibes, but vibe coding in the development world really feels like it's not going anywhere for a while. Josh Birk: I don't think it's going anywhere. Mike: Not with all of the AI tools people have available. Josh Birk: To loop it back to a callback, it would be like throwing out your microwave. Like why? Why don't you want your sandwich repeated up faster? Mike: Right. Hmm. I guess we'll find out. Josh Birk: Guess we'll find out. Mike: All right, Josh. Thanks for coming on the pod. Josh Birk: All right. Thanks for having me, man. It's always a good time. Mike: And a big thanks to Josh for joining us and shedding light on vibe coding, and Agentforce Vibes. I think it's exciting to see how AI is helping admins and developers, and really everybody in the tech ecosystem just build smarter, faster, and with more confidence. If this sparked some ideas or gave you some new tools to explore, please share it with a teammate or a fellow Salesforce admin. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to David Simpson, Salesforce Administrator at the 1916 Company. Join us as we chat about how he got into the ecosystem and what skills transfer well into a Salesforce Admin career. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with David Simpson. Transitioning into a Salesforce Admin career You might recognize David from his Dreamforce presentation about resolving Flow errors, or our episode about it on the podcast. However, one thing that came up was his career pivot from finance to being a Salesforce Admin, and I wanted to bring him back to talk more about it. To make a long story short, David started out as an accountant before eventually becoming a financial systems analyst. That job involves a lot of reporting and, somewhere along the way, he realized that running the reports was the most exciting part of the job for him. David decided to make a career change and focus on Salesforce. But that meant he needed to go on the hunt and figure out how to land his first full-time Salesforce role. What to look for in job descriptions David's comfort with data, spreadsheets, and reconciliation gave him a strong analytical foundation for making the shift. These skills made it easier to understand how reporting, data cleanliness, and business processes translated to what admins build on the platform. However, having the right skills is only part of the story—he still needed to find the right jobs to apply to. "It's not uncommon now for admins to have developer skills or maybe dip their toe into the architect side of things," David says, "but I focused mainly on positions that were only looking for admin-related work." In general, David's advice is to narrow things down for yourself. Look for organizations that are already committed to Salesforce, and job postings that are looking for the admin skillset instead of somebody who can do it all. A problem-solving mindset and curiosity fuel the admin journey For David, the skill that transfers best into a Salesforce Admin career is curiosity. When he was starting out, he was only interested in learning things that would be immediately applicable to the task at hand. Looking back on it now, David realizes he could have learned much faster if he had indulged his curiosity. "I should have given myself the benefit of the doubt," he says, "and taken a little bit more risk in learning new things." Make sure to listen to the full episode for more from David about how he transferred his skills into a Salesforce Admin career. And make sure you're subscribed to the show to catch us every Thursday. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Navigating Flow Errors as a New Salesforce Admin Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social 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, what if spreadsheet skills from your last job could be the secret to launching your Salesforce admin career? In this episode, we welcome back David Simpson, who shares his story from accounting to automation and how his finance background paved the way to becoming a certified Salesforce admin. We dive into the skills that transferred surprisingly well, the learning curves that came with the role, and the mindset shift that helps him grow. So whether you're thinking about making a career move or just mentoring somebody who is, this conversation's packed with insights. So with that, let's get David on the podcast. David Simpson: Thank you for having me back. Mike Gerholdt: It wasn't that long ago that we were talking, it was pre-Dreamforce about 45 days ago or so. I had you on the podcast to talk about the presentation you're giving at Dreamforce, and we've since wrapped up Dreamforce now and people are at home. Well, some people. I think some people stayed and probably went to Napa Valley and did wine tastings, which I wouldn't blame you. There's a lot of great vineyards and stuff out there. But one thing you brought up that I wanted to follow up on was your career trajectory, and we haven't talked about careers a whole lot, but let's just rewind a little bit and give one of those the last time on the Salesforce Admin podcast, because I've watched a lot of streaming things. Let's fill people in on what you do and where your career started and how you became a Salesforce admin. David Simpson: Sure. Previously on Salesforce Admins. Mike Gerholdt: Exactly. David Simpson: So, many years ago, I went to college for accounting, and my first job out of college was a staff accountant at a software company. After a few years of working in spreadsheets and doing the monotonous day-to-day that comes with being a staff accountant, I made a pivot to be a financial analyst, more specifically a financial systems analyst, and after I made that pivot, my supervisor at the time, he informed me that he was the administrator for our company's Salesforce instance, and that a lot of the work that I was doing, which was doing financial analytics for our professional service team, a lot of that data came out of Salesforce. Our professional service team would put opportunities into Salesforce, and we needed to make sure that those financials were clean. So, he suggested that I become another admin with the company, and that I would learn about the general inner workings of Salesforce and be a point of contact for cleaning up that data, for troubleshooting issues and just all the things that come with being a junior level admin. So, he gave me a system administrator license. He recommended that I go into Trailhead to just learn the basics of being a Salesforce admin, the Salesforce ecosystem, custom objects. All those general items that you learn as an admin, and then I just kind of fell in love with it. It was such an interesting pivot from doing spreadsheets and reconciliations. I was able to kind of do problem solving and be an environment that I wasn't too familiar in, but I was also able to see how Salesforce works and how we can get this data to be reportable data. So, the automation behind it or validation rules, just even something simple like setting up a page layout. It was all very interesting and new to me, so I just latched onto it a hundred percent, and then I further got sold on the whole experience after about a year or so, being a Salesforce admin, I went to my first Dreamforce in 2018 and I got my Salesforce administrator certification, and at that point, that kind of signaled to me that this is what I want to do full time. So, from that point on, it's all history. I went and unfortunately, the company I was with didn't have the resources for a full-time admin, so I did go to another company, but since then I have been an awesome admin just doing it every day. Custom objects, flows, you name it, admin work-wise, I do it. Mike Gerholdt: And I think career changes are hard. I went from sales to becoming an admin as well, and I think everybody kind of looks at like, well, what do I have to do? Or where do I have to go? Or what skills are required? And I think you, like me, kind of got fortunate you were with a company that was like, "Hey, we need these skills." And I'm assuming you probably did both jobs for a while, right? David Simpson: Yes. I was doing both jobs up until I left the company. It was essentially 50/50 financial systems analysis and then admin work. Mike Gerholdt: So, it's not like you just all of a sudden jumped in the pilot seat and took over the plane and away you go. David Simpson: Thankfully, that wasn't the case for me. I was able to kind ease myself into the admin role because I still had work to do on the financial side. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. And I think that that works out as an incredibly lucky path. David Simpson: Yeah, definitely. Mike Gerholdt: One thing, so you mentioned they didn't have the budget for a full-time admin, which is the role you wanted to pursue. Did you consider just staying at that current position and kind of dividing your time, or was this something where you were like, "No, I really, this is, I'm going to commit?" David Simpson: It was something that I really wanted to commit on. In the beginning when I had first gotten a system administrator license and started doing basic admin work, I was completely on board with splitting my time between the two. I wasn't super confident in what I was doing as a Salesforce admin. I was still learning the ropes, but after I had gotten my first certification, that kind of sold it to me and locked in that this is what I want to do as a career. So, at that point, I did bring up my interest in being a full-time admin to the company, and they said, "Unfortunately, we just don't have the bandwidth to have a full-time admin whose only job is to be a Salesforce administrator." So, unfortunately, I did have to switch companies to go and find that. Mike Gerholdt: Okay, so let's pause there because that is the point that I think everybody has questions about, which is, so what did interviewing look like? What kind of prep did you do? You're going from career A to career B, and you kind of have some experience. I mean, what was that like? Because I'm assuming you sat in interviews for jobs you didn't get. David Simpson: Yeah, I won't sugarcoat it. It was a little tough. You're going into a new job where, yes, you do have experience, but you don't have a ton of experience. So, what I focused on was first the credential side of things. By the time I decided to make the jump to be a full-time Salesforce administrator, I did have, I believe, three certifications under my belt. I had the Salesforce administrator certification, the platform app builder, and then the CPQ specialist. So, I- Mike Gerholdt: Ooh, CPQ specialist. Wow. David Simpson: Yeah. Yep. I haven't used it in a while, but it was a very challenging and interesting certification to take. I actually took the Salesforce-provided trainings for it, and it was a wealth of knowledge, but so I had these three certifications. I did lean a little bit heavier on that to say, listen, I may not have years of experience, but you can see here that I'm able to answer the tough questions. Additionally, I did focus on what projects and initiatives I was able to complete at my job while I was part-time being a Salesforce admin. So, I had done some work building a custom object for, funnily enough, our accounting team to log their calls to people for collecting payment. So, I made a point to mention that in my interviews. So, I used the certifications. I used actual project and real-world experience, but something else that was a little kind of ace up the sleeve for my interview process was that I did have finance and accounting background. The job that ultimately hired me, while I did not do finance and accounting work for them, I was able to be a point of contact to help bridge the gap between the finance team and the Salesforce team. If they needed to pull financial data from Salesforce, I would be a person that they could go to, and I could confidently answer that because of my background. So, when it comes to jumping from one career to a Salesforce career, I definitely recommend that people do lean into what they've done in the past and show how they can enhance a new job's day-to-day by focusing on those areas of expertise, but just in a Salesforce context. That's what really helped me because yes, I did unfortunately have a handful of interviews where I didn't get the job, and I think that ultimately came down to just pure raw Salesforce experience. But the job that did hire me, it was because I had a great rapport with their CFO, and I was able to talk the talk with finance as well as bridge that gap to the Salesforce side of things. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I mean, you stayed in finance. It's not like you went over to a fish distribution warehouse or something. David Simpson: Yes, exactly. Mike Gerholdt: I tried to pick something that was the opposite of finance, and my brain went blank for a second, and I was like, "Oh, I just watched a show on cooking last night." David Simpson: I mean, those are pretty different. I can't think of a much more different thing, but yeah, I mean because the Salesforce department at that new job also heavily interacted with the finance department, that was a big benefit to me. Mike Gerholdt: I can feel people listening to this podcast right now, and they're like, ask this question, ask this question, ask this question. I got like a million. What were in ... Because we're going to get to your job, I promise you, but we're going to just stay in this middle ground here for a second. In some of the job search that you were looking for in some of the, I don't know even, it sounds so old of me to call it classified ads. I'm sure it was like LinkedIn listings or Indeed job boards or something. What were some of the things that you looked for in terms of the description that you either filtered in or filtered out in terms applying for? David Simpson: Yeah, so some of the things that I looked for in my job search was making sure that the job posting focused purely on admin work. I think nowadays we focus so much on being specialized in a number of different aspects of Salesforce. It's not uncommon now for admins to have developer skills or maybe dip their toe in the architect side of things, and that is fantastic, don't get me wrong, but I focused mainly on positions that were only looking for admin-related work, so building custom objects, administering users, building validation rules, just those general kind of things were the main items I was looking for when I was transitioning to my first full-time Salesforce job. Additionally, I was looking to see what kind of qualifications and credentials they were looking for from an education side of things. If there was nothing about a Salesforce certification, then I erred on the side of caution and didn't apply there. I wanted a company that was fully bought into the Salesforce ecosystem, and that can be illustrated in a job posting by seeing that they're asking for the proper credentials. An extra little bonus, which was much more rare, was seeing your certain Trailhead status, or you have certain super badges. It's very rare for a job to ask for those sorts of things, but that's how you know you're working with a company that knows the Salesforce ecosystem and knows what they want. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. And it's done its homework. David Simpson: Exactly. So, I was looking for those types of companies, just really people who were bought into the ecosystem, people who knew what they were looking for, knew what enhancements and long-term goals they had for their Salesforce org, and also was going to treat it with the level of attention and detail that is needed in a Salesforce org. There's many times where unfortunately, due to resourcing or staffing issues, Salesforce gets a little bit put by the wayside, and instead of having great initiatives and solutions deployed, it's just a bunch of band-aids, and then that comes back to the admin saying, "Oh, we can't deliver on something truly incredible because we're not given the time and the resources for it." So, I was looking for companies that really didn't have that mindset and were looking for true, awesome admins. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. You were fortunate enough that you had worked in an org. Did you, at any one point in time in the interviewing process, think about preparing a developer org or a Trailhead org to showcase some of your skills? David Simpson: When I was first applying for a full-time Salesforce admin, that thought did not cross my mind. That said, this was many years ago in, I think it was 2019. That said, a little over a year ago, I did get a new job at my current position, and during that job search, I did have a Salesforce developer org that I had built out, and I recreated some of my most interesting and complex solutions in that developer org, and then basically in every single job interview I had, I said, "Do you want to see my dev org? I've built some awesome flows." And most of the time they said no. But every once in a while they'd say yes, and then I get to show off my screen flow that I worked really hard on. So, nowadays, yes, I do have my dev org. I'll bring up Trailhead every now and then, or I did back then when I was in the job hunt, but really, I like to showcase the dev org whenever possible because it is something that I'm actively developing in. Even now that I have a job and I'm in a job I love, I still whatever I do at my normal job, if I say, "Oh, that's pretty interesting," I go and I rebuild it in the dev org. But of course, without confidential information. Mike Gerholdt: Right. No. Oh, man. I'm the same way. I was crushed, I want to say a year and a half ago I was prepping for Dreamforce and the dev org that I'd had since 2006. I forgot to log in and it expired. David Simpson: Oh, no. Oh, that's horrible. Mike Gerholdt: And it was just more of like, it was just such an awesome little relic of stuff that I had built and things that I had tried out, and I have another one, but it's not as old and it doesn't have as much. There wasn't anything cool in it, but it was cool because it was stuff that I had built when I was, it had my first workflow in it. David Simpson: It shows a timeline of how you've grown. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I mean, very much so. I'd let nobody in there because they'd be like, "What were you doing?" Well, I was a kid with crayons back then. David Simpson: Yeah, you got to make mistakes in order to get better. Mike Gerholdt: Absolutely. Okay. So, I mean, we could do a whole podcast on interviewing and everybody in the comments will be like, "You should." Let's go to day one of the new job. So, you've transitioned, you're no longer 50/50. The company's bought in. Dave's our new Salesforce admin. Day one, outside of all of the HR paperwork and stuff, what did you do on day one? David Simpson: First, I quietly panicked because I was afraid I was not going to be able to live up to expectations. But after that calmed down, I of course met the team. I was very fortunate to work with a team of several people in the Salesforce space. There was two developers, there was another admin. There were two architects, and of course the Salesforce manager. So, they showed me around the org and they showed me some of the details of what they had built, what they're currently building, how they take in tickets. It was just essentially getting a feel for the Salesforce ecosystem that was there. And then from that point, once I was left my own devices, I just continued to do some more digging. I looked, okay, they're using cases. How are they using cases? Where is the queue that stuff that we get asked to do comes in? What does their account object look like? Because the account object is always one of the busiest objects in the Salesforce ecosystem. How many validation rules do they have? I was really just trying to take the little experience that I had from my previous job and then look at those same areas in this new job. So, essentially just getting a feel for the org. Mike Gerholdt: So, you joined a team of people? David Simpson: Yes. Yes. Mike Gerholdt: What was that like? David Simpson: It was a fantastic experience. I still keep in touch with all of them to this day, despite the fact that I haven't worked with them for a few years now. They were all super friendly and super helpful, and I think that was something that really helped me to continue this admin career path is that I got paired with such great people in this team, and it wasn't just the Salesforce team that was super friendly and helpful. Everybody in the company was, but these people took me in and they knew that I had limited experience, and they said, "It's okay. Let's show you the ropes of what you don't know and make sure that you are as successful as possible." That company was actually where I learned how to build flows. The Salesforce architect there, Nick, he sat down with me one day for two hours and he said, "Okay, we're going to build a screen flow and this needs to be triggered from a button and it needs to grab all these records. Let's see you build it." And then he walked me through it step by step, and it was just such an incredible experience, and I'm super grateful for it because now I use flows every single day in my job and I talk about flows. I talked about it at Dreamforce that just recently ended. I have a YouTube channel where I talk about flows. So, it was just such a good experience and I'm forever grateful for them. Mike Gerholdt: Would you advise newer admins when they're joining an organization to join as part of a team rather than trying to be a solo admin? David Simpson: Yes, most definitely. I think a team is one of the best things that you can have as a Salesforce admin outside of a good clean org, and of course, knowledge [inaudible 00:20:22]- Mike Gerholdt: Oh, a clean org. You mean the first day you get one? David Simpson: Oh, yeah, exactly. But yeah, a team is so important. Not only do you have other people that you can bounce ideas and problems off of, but just being able to work together and help lift each other up is such a good blessing in a Salesforce org. I think it's not only going into a job that has a team, but going into a job that has a team that is friendly, helpful, and inviting. Because I have had experience at a different position where unfortunately the team wasn't as welcoming, and that was really difficult to do good work because I couldn't ask questions. I couldn't troubleshoot certain things properly, and then when I eventually made a mistake, it was coming down on me pretty hard, but this first company here, it was just nothing but super niceness. Mike Gerholdt: So, having worked as part of a team, are you looking at your other team members in terms of where you want to grow your career or your skills and where are those? David Simpson: Yeah, definitely. So, working with a team and working with a team of a variety of skill sets, such as like an architect or a developer, it really does help kind of narrow down what I want to do. The architect route is something that is certainly interesting to me. I feel like it's a slight natural progression from being an advanced administrator and doing all these complex flow work, but I've seen what developers do with Apex, and while I think it's incredibly interesting and incredibly impressive, it's not something that's necessarily for me. So, you do get those different perspectives working in a team of people that you wouldn't get all by yourself because you're just kind of in the silo trying to figure everything out yourself. Mike Gerholdt: Well, and sometimes working in a silo, you have to do all those things. You just don't know that you're doing them, and then what part of it you're doing well. David Simpson: Yeah, exactly. Mike Gerholdt: I mean, I'd like to think I was an architect by drawing diagrams, but then I've seen architectural diagrams and I've realized I was just scribbling. David Simpson: Yeah, you don't know until you see it firsthand. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Well, and sometimes the only exposure, for me, the only exposure was talking with other people at user groups, and that's often limited as opposed to having them as coworkers. David Simpson: Yeah. You really do get the benefit of just day-to-day exposure with working in a team. So, I'm incredibly grateful for that exposure and that opportunity. Mike Gerholdt: So, last question, and maybe it's the hardest, I don't know, but if you had to rewind the clock and do it all over again, what's one thing you would do differently? David Simpson: Great question. I think that if I were to rewind time and do stuff differently, I think back when I was still that part-time admin and I was still just getting my feet wet, I think I probably would've taken a little bit more risk in learning new things because I was just told to handle this one aspect of Salesforce at the very beginning, as I'd mentioned earlier on, I was working with opportunities and our professional service team. I really only focused on that kind of area, but if I could do it all over again, I probably would've asked more questions and said, "Hey, how does this third-party integration work? Can I do some enhancements on it? I might break something, but can I give it a shot?" Or, "Why doesn't this process work the way as intended? Can you let me try this automation?" I eventually got those skill sets over the years, especially with automation, but it took a little bit longer than expected because I was just afraid to take that leap very early on, and I should have given myself the benefit of the doubt that I could have figured it out that early on, and I think that would've made me a stronger admin from the get-go. Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I could see that. The benefit of hindsight is hindsight, right? David Simpson: Yes. Mike Gerholdt: The ability to look back and boy, if I had to do the same thing, I don't know what I would do differently other than probably be less hard on myself. David Simpson: Yeah, that too. You need to be forgiving of yourself because as an admin, especially a newer admin, you will make mistakes. You'll accidentally use the wrong tools or the wrong process. I mean, look to the admin certification where you have to separate between sharing rules and field level security profiles, permission sets. You're going to grab the wrong thing or do the wrong process, and it might not be the end of the world, but you should give yourself some leeway that you will make those mistakes and you'll learn from them. Mike Gerholdt: Yep. Well, I think that's a great way to end this podcast. David, thanks for coming on, and given is probably one of the most comprehensive overviews of switching careers that I think I've talked to in a while, so I appreciate it. David Simpson: Yeah, of course. Thank you so much for having me on again. Mike Gerholdt: David's story is a reminder that the skills you've built in other roles aren't just relevant, they're valuable. Whether you're transitioning into the Salesforce ecosystem or helping someone else find their way, keep leaning into those transferable strengths. And if today's episode sparked ideas or gave you that extra boost of confidence, share it with a friend or a fellow Salesforce admin. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.