Salesforce Admins Podcast

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Alexis Kingma, Senior Certification Developer at Salesforce.
Join us as we chat about the newly updated Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder exam and the best way to prepare for certifications.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Alexis Kingma.
The Salesforce Platform App Builder Certification gets a refresh
The Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder exam has been updated, and the process is more complicated than you might think. This week, I'm talking to Alexis Kingma from the Salesforce Certification team to find out what's changed, why it matters, and how to best prepare for an exam.
Whenever Alexis and her team are doing a refresh for an exam, they start by interviewing a range of subject matter experts working in the real world. For the Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder exam, they're trying to answer a simple question: "What is the industry saying is most important if somebody's looking to hire an app builder?"
Alexis encourages you to think of a certification exam as a validation of your knowledge. In other words, it's proof that you have the expertise to build cutting-edge apps and implement them in your organization.
Shifting the focus to Flow and Agentforce
So what's changed? The focus is on automations with Flow and Agentforce.
As Alexis explains, if you're looking to hire an app builder, you're looking for someone with a deep understanding of Flow. Do you know which flows are best for which situations? Can you troubleshoot them? Can you maintain and monitor them? They want to make sure that anyone who passes the certification exam has the Flow expertise they need to hit the ground running.
The other change is including Agentforce as an automation tool for app building. While you don't need to be a power user (there's another certification for that), Alexis and her team want to make sure that you have it as an option in your toolkit.
How to prepare for Salesforce certification exams
According to Alexis, every Salesforce certification serves as a gauge for your practical, on-the-job skills. This means if you are currently building applications for your company, you are already ahead of the curve. To support the recent updates, her team has curated a specialized Trailhead trail that features interactive badges, allowing you to practice directly within a sandbox environment.
Alexis also highly recommends taking a close look at the exam guide for any certification you're going for. They're written very intentionally, she explains, to give you a very specific idea of what level of understanding they're asking for on each topic. Words like "create" or "configure" are asking for much more in-depth knowledge than "describe" or "understand."
Finally, if you're attending Dreamforce, Alexis wants to remind you to schedule your free certification exam. Make sure to listen to the full episode for more about the Salesforce Platform App Builder certification exam. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.
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Full show transcript
Mike:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I'm talking with Alexis Kingma from the Salesforce certification team about the newly-refreshed Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder exam. We're going to get into exactly what changed, why Flow now has a bigger role on the exam, and where Agentforce fits into the app builder skillset. So whether the Platform App Builder is your next certification or you just want a better sense of where admin skills are headed, this episode is worth a listen. Now, before we get into it, be sure to subscribe and share it with any other admin who's thinking about their next certification. So with that, let's get Alexis on the podcast.
So, Alexis, welcome to the podcast.
Alexis Kingma:
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Mike:
Well, I am a huge fan of our exams and certifications. And you can take one, you don't have to have the other, and I like to have both. But I love that we have a lot of exams and we redo them, we update them, we refresh them, at least we try to. I feel the product now is changing super quick. But before we get into all of that, Alexis, tell us a little bit about your history and how you came to Salesforce and what you do at Salesforce.
Alexis Kingma:
Absolutely. So I am on the Salesforce certification team. We are a team of Salesforce employees who are solely dedicated to creating and updating the whole suite of Salesforce exams. So, historically, I come from a certification industry background. I've done software certification my entire career. And I came to Salesforce about two, two and a half years ago and just hit the ground running. I joined the team updating and creating new Salesforce certifications. So I actually started with the Tableau certifications and have since moved over into my latest, which is refreshing the Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder exam.
Mike:
Ooh, yes, app builder, that's something all of us admins are near and dear to our hearts on. And that's cool. I mean, I guess there's enough tech out there in the world that there's enough people that need to write certification exams for all of it. Wow. This is one of those ideas of, I bet 20 years ago, that job maybe didn't exist, but it exists now.
Alexis Kingma:
It's funny, certification is such a rich industry, it's one of those jobs that I feel like nobody knows it exists until you have that job. Nobody grows up saying, "I want to write tests," but now it's all of our favorite things to do.
Mike:
No, I mean, you're exactly right, nobody sits down and, "What do you want to do when you grow up?" And it's, "I want to sit down and write really hard software questions for people about a cloud-based platform that they can configure declaratively."
Alexis Kingma:
Right.
Mike:
I think if you would've answered that, your teacher would've been, "And you're an astronaut today."
Alexis Kingma:
But it is interesting, the same principles that we use to write Salesforce software certifications are the same principles that are used for the medical boards, for firefighting certifications, for airline certifications. And so when we come together at certification industry events, it's a whole gamut of industries coming together to talk about the same certification principles. So you get to meet a lot of interesting folks.
Mike:
I mean, you don't ever think of that, but that is really... Wow, I bet that's really interesting to sit across the table from people that write certifications to be a rocket scientist.
Alexis Kingma:
Absolutely. Yes. A lot of these certifications, like for a professional roofer, that's a high-stakes certification, or an architect. So it's interesting to hear how all these different industries approach the same problems.
Mike:
Yeah. Well, we're still high stakes too.
Alexis Kingma:
Absolutely.
Mike:
So you mentioned Platform App Builder exam. It got a refresh, which it's probably needed, I mean, every few months, right? But I think before we get into that, what does it mean to refresh an exam?
Alexis Kingma:
So the Platform App Builder exam has been around for over 10 years. It predates me at Salesforce by far. We're actually in our 11th year this year, which is awesome. And so it's been around for so long and the role changes and evolves so much in that time. And so it's important for us to look at the role, look at the requirements in the industry, what are admins doing, what are app builders doing, what are architects doing, what is the most important knowledge that those roles need, and how does our exam align to that? And making sure that the things that we're testing out on the exam are actually things that are the most important for these roles in the real world.
Mike:
Yeah. I mean, that was always one of the hard parts, I remember, when I first got one of my certifications. At the time, we didn't use a lot of Service Cloud, Agentforce for Service, I think now, but I had to go out and learn it because it was part of the certification. And I thought, "Oh, why should I have to learn that?" And I thought, "Well, just because you don't use it or your company doesn't use it, doesn't mean it shouldn't be part of that certification as well or that exam."
Alexis Kingma:
Absolutely. And so when we approach doing a refresh like we did with app builder, we try to include subject matter experts from a whole range, internal Salesforce employees, external Salesforce users, a wide breadth of roles, admins, people who are solely app builders, architects, to try to say, "Okay, Salesforce might say these topics are most important, but what is the industry saying is most important?" If somebody's looking to hire an app builder, what does that person expect the app builder brings to the table and what knowledge should they already have when they start the job? And so we rely on our subject matter experts to say, "What are those most important concepts, and how do we make sure that they're reflected on the exam?"
Mike:
Makes sense. I mean, that's the part of getting dialed in, to me, that I think is the most important is, one thing for Salesforce to think this is important, but where does that fall in terms of your responsibilities and what you're seeing day to day? Well, let's talk about this new exam, because Platform App Builder, I believe if you said it was been around for 10 years, then I've been at Salesforce when it was launched. What did it originally... Not originally, back in the day have, but what were you refreshing from and really refreshing to?
Alexis Kingma:
I'll say the biggest change between the previous version of the exam, which had been refreshed maybe one or two years ago, to this new version of the exam is really increasing the emphasis on Flow on the new version of the exam. In talking to our group of subject matter experts, hearing from the community, we just continue to hear Flow is such an important piece of being an app builder and being able to do that role, that it needs to be tested. And we actually added it to the exam with quite some depth, not only testing can you create flows, can you choose which flow for which situation, but also can you troubleshoot flows? Can you maintain and monitor them? Really asking the app builder to get deep into flows and making the assertion that flows are a key piece of being an app builder at Salesforce.
Mike:
I mean, that makes a lot of sense. It's funny, I'll ask you later, but I'll be curious to see your answer on it. I mean, when I think of app building, it's a collection of stuff and then there's that automation piece. But also, really diving into Flow like you did really helps set the admin up for being an agent builder as well, right?
Alexis Kingma:
Absolutely. And that's another change we made to the exam is adding Agentforce, specifically how you can use Agentforce as an automation tool on the exam. So I don't want to say you must be an Agentforce superuser to be able to take that exam. That's absolutely not the intention. We have an Agentforce specialist exam for that. But really just more about knowing that Agentforce is a tool in your tool belt that's available, and when might it make sense to reach for that tool.
Mike:
So I'll come to that question now that I get asked, and you can decide if you want to answer it or not. But I was asked last week, do admins still build apps?
Alexis Kingma:
Yes. I'll say, from what I've heard, yes. We, as part of this refresh, go through the roles that this exam most aligns to, and Salesforce admin was the number one. So when we got our group of subject matter experts together and asked, "Who is taking this exam? Who should be taking this exam?" Salesforce admins was the number one thing that people said.
Mike:
Yeah. No, I agree. I think it's interesting to live in the time we do now where, I mean, I had somebody send me a link the other day of a dashboard that an agent had coded for them. And it was kind of temporary. It wasn't meant to be any kind of source of truth. But when you think about it, sometimes the permanency of the app, I think that's where that question was going. And I still very much believe that it's the agent that jumps in and adds the additional layer that perhaps goes across apps.
Alexis Kingma:
Agree. I hear from our community over and over that knowing how to get in there and actually build the flows and customize and all the checkboxes, and what they do and what they mean and what they cause is so important and continues to be important even with the new agentic world that we live in.
Mike:
Right. And you mentioned part of the refresh process is also gathering a lot of feedback from not just admins, but customers and employers that hire admins. What were some of the things that they pointed out as admins still need to understand these things? You refreshed it for Flow and Agentforce, but that's not the whole exam, right?
Alexis Kingma:
Correct. And you'll see, it's funny, we still kept Salesforce fundamentals and we still kept user interface. And the funny part is that I was actually looking at much older versions of this exam through this refresh process, and those are the same topic areas that have been around, I don't want to say since the first version, but that have been around since the beginning. And it's because they continue to still be important. Every refresh, we pressure test and say, "Okay, do you still need to know object record and field access? Do you still need to know reports and dashboards?" And the answer continues to be yes. And so those will continue to live and be tested on this exam because they continue to be important.
Mike:
Yeah. Now, from your advice, if a Salesforce admin's listening, maybe they don't have a certification yet or they haven't taken any of the exams, what would you advise in terms of preparation to get ready for this exam? Can they come out of the gate and take it or is there kind of understood prerequisites to this?
Alexis Kingma:
All Salesforce exams are designed to test your hands-on experience. And so they're designed so that, yes, you can read documentation, but they're testing that you have some hands-on experience going into the exam. But, that said, that's where Trailhead becomes a huge asset if you may not have had access to actually get into a sandbox and play around with all these different topics. So exciting for this refresh, we created a brand new exam prep trail. We had existing prep trail badges before, but those have been retired in favor of this new exam prep trail. And what's most exciting is it does prioritize the hands-on badges available on Trailhead. So there's opportunity within each section to get in there, spin up an org, and actually play around with the types of topics that are being tested on the exam. So if you don't have the opportunity to get hands-on experience with every single thing tested, this trail is an excellent opportunity to still be able to prepare for the exam and take the exam regardless.
Mike:
That makes sense. I mean, I think that's always the biggest question I get asked when I'm at user groups or at an event is, "What should I do to prepare for this?" And it's one part just learning. You don't want to study for the test, as they say. You want to study to learn it and understand it. I think that's why the practical hands-on part of it, really what can they build is important.
Alexis Kingma:
And I'll say too, a tip that all of us on the Salesforce exam development team share when we can, is every exam, this one included, has the exam guide, and there's really a lot of information and clues within that exam guide. We list all of the exam objectives, what we call them, all the different content areas tested on the exam. And they're really written very intentionally and with a lot of detail in mind. So thinking about if an objective says, "Create and configure flows," we're not just asking you to describe them or have a high-level understanding of what they are or when to use them. We're really asking, can you get in there, get your hands dirty, create and configure them? And so that's kind of a clue, "Hey, I should be getting in there. I should be clicking around. I should know what each of these buttons, each of these checkboxes does," because that's the kind of question that's going to be asked on the exam.
Whereas something like describe or understand, maybe that is more of a high-level just, "Hey, can you explain or describe, but maybe not necessarily get in there and do?" So I think paying attention to that can help direct how you study for each of these objectives.
Mike:
One thing I thought of, and this was back when I was getting my admin certifications, was describing the value of it to my manager and to my users. And I won't tell you my answer because I want to hear your answer first, but if you were to put yourself in the seat of a Salesforce admin listening to this podcast that's like, "I really want to go and take that exam. I really want to get that certification." How do I justify that or how do I make that case to my employer and to my users that this is worthwhile and worth my time?
Alexis Kingma:
It's such an important question, right? Because that's the big question is how can I get buy-in to study for this, to get support to take this? I think the biggest one is that a certification at its core is a validation of knowledge. A certification is a statement that you possess the knowledge and have the skills and abilities that are tested on this exam. And so for Platform App Builder, these are the knowledge, skills and abilities that not only Salesforce, but the industry in the group of subject matter experts that helped develop this, this is what the industry is saying is most important for an app builder to know and be able to do in the market right now.
And so by earning the certification and saying, "Hey, I have the knowledge, skills, and abilities that are most important for an app builder," you're bringing a lot of value to your team. You're bringing a lot of the learning that you gained through studying. You're bringing a lot of expertise to your team to be able to bring back and show what's the latest and greatest that Salesforce is doing now, and actually be able to implement it.
Mike:
No, spot on. I would also just add one word, confidence.
Alexis Kingma:
Yes.
Mike:
I walked on water the day after I passed my admin certification, because I finally felt like everything that I thought I knew, was verified. I don't know what the right word is. Verified comes to mind, but it's probably not the right word. And I was like, "Yes, that feels right to me." We talked about the prep trail, which I think is important because, boy, for a while there, preparing for a certification was reading some sample questions and hoping you kind of had your bases covered. I think that prep trail is really, really good to help get you hands on. Now, I'll say this because I think I know the answer, but I want to make sure. Even if I complete that prep trail, that doesn't mean I'm going to pass the certification exam, right?
Alexis Kingma:
I'm so glad you asked.
Mike:
Yeah.
Alexis Kingma:
The prep trail is one piece, but I think there's no guarantee, to be honest. There's no way to say with 100% certainty, "I will pass this exam." I think the prep trail is one piece. Like I mentioned, the hands-on component or experience is really important. And so, in addition to the prep trail, I think the best way to assess your level of readiness really is to go through that exam guide and those objectives on it, and just kind of do it a little self test, "Hey, let me read this objective. Is this something I'm familiar with? Do I feel like I can explain what this means and explain how I do this in my day to day? Or is this something I need to take a second and read some help documentation and get a little bit deeper on?"
So I think those two things combined, the prep trail and the exam guide are your best bet to make sure that you're ready, but it is definitely not a one for one. And no Salesforce certifications are finish the prep trail, pass the exam. We want to add a little extra rigor.
Mike:
Yeah. Well, and that makes sense because I feel when you complete the Trailhead module that the exam should test on, okay, so you knew the answers. Did you know why those are the right answers? And I always felt like the exams pushed that limit for me because it was one thing to know what to do, I think it's another thing to know why to do it.
Alexis Kingma:
Absolutely.
Mike:
We'll talk about one thing in general, and then we have Dreamforce coming up. In general, I'm a Salesforce admin, I listen to this podcast and like, "You know what? I got the green light, I'm going to go get my app builder exam." What should I bring? What do I bring to the... Do I go to a testing center? Can I take it at home? How should I do that outside of just the regular preparation part?
Alexis Kingma:
We offer a lot of flexibility in this process, so it's totally up to you if you prefer to go to a testing center or if you prefer to test at home. I know for me, right now, looking at my desk, there's six drinks and about a million Post-it notes. And looking around my office, I'm embarrassed at the state. So for me, I typically go to a testing center, because when you take the exam at home, you are asked to make sure that your workspace is clean, your cat's not walking in, like mine just did. All the things.
So you have the choice to take it at home or in a testing center. If you do take it at home, I just encourage everybody to run through the system checks that are part of the Pearson exam process. That will just make sure that your computer is able to take the exam. Some work computers or VPNs can need to be shut down first. So run those system checks, read the information that Salesforce has on taking an exam. Or if you go to a testing center, you'll show up to the testing center, bring your ID. Salesforce has documentation on both that will make sure that you're ready and have exactly what you need either way. But we offer our exams almost any time, any day. So you can, when you go to register, obviously, testing centers have hours, but there's a whole breadth of days and times available for you to choose to take your exam. So you can sneak it in before Dreamforce.
Mike:
There you go. I mean, I really admire the people that take it at home. And I know some people just have to logistics wise. For me, I can get into the mindset of I'm here to take this exam if I have to go somewhere. I think it's the whole process of getting up, getting outside, having to go to a location, it feels very purposeful. And then, I guess because of that, it keeps me focused, right? I don't feel like, "Okay, well, it's 2:15. I guess I'll take the exam now." It's like, nope, my appointment's at this time. I got to leave early, I got to put my shoes on.
Alexis Kingma:
I agree with you, but I'll say the other side of that coin is that the stress of, okay, now I have to fight through traffic or I have to wait on transit, and then I have to show up and hope that the check... So I think offering both is a huge benefit because it totally depends on each individual person.
Mike:
Yeah, no, absolutely. So I asked that because I also wanted to kind of sneakily, if that's a word, sneakily, work in the fact that you can get your certification at Dreamforce if you attend, correct?
Alexis Kingma:
Correct. We are very excited, Salesforce certification will be onsite at Dreamforce. And really exciting, not everybody, I think, realizes who attends Dreamforce, but everybody who attends Dreamforce gets one complimentary certification exam while they're at Dreamforce. So a huge opportunity there in having a free exam that you can take onsite and actually earn a certification while you're at Dreamforce.
Mike:
Wow. And that's not just limited to app builder, it's any of our certifications.
Alexis Kingma:
It is any of our certifications, including the architect certifications, which is exciting.
Mike:
Wow.
Alexis Kingma:
And I will say, just a shameless plug for everybody listening too, if you're interested in taking an exam at Dreamforce, I highly recommend adding that exam session to your agenda. That way, that secures your space to take an exam at Dreamforce. Otherwise, if you don't have it added to your agenda, you'll have to show up in the standby line, which we ask that you join an hour before the exam.
Mike:
[inaudible 00:25:49].
Alexis Kingma:
Yes. We get very crowded, so it saves a lot of time to add the exam session that you'd like to attend to your agenda, we have them Monday through Thursday, to make sure that you're prepared and you have a spot to take your exam.
Mike:
I mean, why you would leave Dreamforce without one more certification is beyond me.
Alexis Kingma:
Especially when it's free.
Mike:
I mean, it's part of your ticket. I also get, you know what, you could fail. I will say this, there has been exams that I've studied for and went in and failed, and that's okay. I mean, it just helped me really understand what I had digested and understood, and the parts that I think I had glossed over or maybe felt I had understood, and that the exam brought that out and told me that. No harm, no foul if you go to take an exam and you don't pass. The expectation isn't that you'll pass or fail, it's that it tests your knowledge. And I think for me, leaving and having that understanding of, "Okay, I passed, great, but did I feel good about how I passed or should I really keep going to build on that knowledge?" Or maybe I didn't pass, and you know what? Now I have an inventory of where I can pay attention to and gaps in my learning.
Alexis Kingma:
One of the certification developers on our team, Melanie, always says, "We don't use the word fail, we use the word learn. You didn't fail, you learned." And I think that's absolutely how we approach it. Failing is not a failure. It doesn't mean you don't know Salesforce, you don't know your job. It's a learning opportunity. And we tell you the areas to work on in the exam results, and it's just one more opportunity to learn and dig in and try again.
Mike:
Yeah. That's a very positive note. I want to ask your advice. I mean, as somebody that has been writing software exams and helping people understand, what is, in your opinion, one method or one tip that you give people in terms of how they should approach preparation for this and preparation for other exams?
Alexis Kingma:
The biggest one is what I was alluding to earlier about really paying attention to the level of knowledge or skill that the exam is asking for. Is it asking for you to be able to do that thing? Is it asking for you to be able to troubleshoot that thing? Or is it just asking you to know and have awareness and be able to explain it? Because when we're writing exam questions, that's what we're looking at to write our questions, is do these questions need to be to the depth of somebody who's actually configuring and troubleshooting or is this just more let's test on the awareness? So that's always my biggest tip.
And then I will share my own personal tip when I take an exam, is I sit down and I take three deep breaths before I get started, and that's always helped me. So that's my more practical logistical tip.
Mike:
Yep. Calm and center yourself.
Alexis Kingma:
Yes.
Mike:
Be present where you're at. I'll be honest, sometimes that's the best part about going somewhere is it's always nice and quiet and it's very easy to just stay focused because of it.
Alexis Kingma:
Absolutely.
Mike:
Alexis, I think we covered a lot. I'm excited for the refresh. I know our admins will be and our architects and developers. I mean, app builder is applicable to a lot of people in our ecosystem, not just Salesforce admins. But I love that it got refreshed and really reflects what the product can do and where the product is, and also what admins and app builders should think about. So thanks for coming on the podcast and sharing that with us.
Alexis Kingma:
I'm happy to be here. I am so excited. Like you said, this exam is applicable to so many people in so many roles. I heard so many times throughout working on this exam from folks saying, "This is my favorite exam because it's just so relevant and applicable across the board." So it was such a blast to be able to work on it, and I'm super excited to hear the feedback, hear from folks who take it and pass it. I hope to hear from everybody on LinkedIn after they pass. So super excited to have this out in the world.
Mike:
I want to thank Alexis again for joining us and giving us a look into what's changed with the Platform App Builder exam. I think this is a big takeaway for admins as certification is more than just knowing the features, it's about validating that you can apply those skills in the real world. So from Flow and configuration, to understanding when tools like Agentforce make sense. Take a look at the exam guide, get hands on, and use those objectives to figure out when you're ready and where you can learn more. And, of course, if this episode helped you, be sure to subscribe, share it with another Salesforce admin. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Khushwant Singh, SVP of Product Management for the AI Application Development Platform at Salesforce.
Join us as we chat about how rethinking the Salesforce stack for AI with Headless 360 will change the way admins set up complex systems.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Khushwant Singh.
Opening Salesforce to AI agents
AI is changing more than how we find information or generate content. It could also change how Salesforce Admins configure the platform itself. I sat down with Khushwant "Khush" Singh, to learn about Headless 360 and the work happening behind the scenes to make Salesforce accessible to both humans and AI agents.
"Headless 360 is about bringing Salesforce to wherever you need it," Khush says. In a headless platform, he explains, the frontend is separated from the backend. So you can use Salesforce data and visualizations on your website without changing the design, or change records in Slack without having to open an extra tab.
But Salesforce Headless 360 is about more than portability. Khush and his team are translating the entire platform into a set of model context protocols (MCPs), skills, and metadata that can interface directly with AI agents. And that opens a world of possibilities for what admins can do with conversational tools.
What if setting up Salesforce became a conversation?
"For the last 27 years, layers that make up the Salesforce platform have been put in place for a human," Khush says, "so we're trying to open this up for both a human and an agent, so the agent can do that work on behalf of the admin."
Setup with Agentforce, which streamlines configuration for admins with the help of an AI assistant, is a great example of what Khush is talking about. You can use natural language prompts to create objects, Lightning pages, and flows; manage users and user access; and troubleshoot formulas.
Headless 360 lays the groundwork for a future where setting up Salesforce becomes a conversation about your business goals and processes. No coding required.
Admins still stay in control
None of this removes the admin from the process. Khush is quick to point out that the goal is for agents and admins to work together, with humans still initiating actions, validating results, and providing governance.
His advice for admins right now is simple: try Setup with Agentforce and start getting familiar with what this new way of working feels like. Because the biggest shift may not be AI helping you use Salesforce faster—it may be AI changing how you build Salesforce in the first place.
Listen to the full episode for more from Khush about Salesforce Headless 360 and how AI could change the way we set up our orgs. 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
Salesforce 360 Blog Post: Introducing Salesforce Headless 360. No Browser Required.

Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Solving Sharing Mysteries with Setup with Agentforce

Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Setup with Agentforce Makes Salesforce Admin Tasks Easier

Salesforce Help Article: Setup with Agentforce (Beta)

Salesforce Admins Blog Post: Setup with Agentforce Is Now Generally Available: Built With Admin Feedback at the Center

Salesforce Admins Blog Post: What Is MCP? A Simple Guide to Model Context Protocol for Salesforce Admins

Trailhead: Salesforce Headless 360: Quick Look

Admin Trailblazers Group
Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social
Khush on LinkedIn

Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn

Salesforce Admins on X

Mike on Bluesky social

Mike on Threads

Mike on X

Full show transcript
 
Mike Gerholdt:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I'm joined by Khushwant Singh to talk about what happens when Salesforce stops just being a destination and starts becoming part of every system your business already relies on. That's right, from Headless 360 to Setup with Agentforce, Khush breaks down how admins are moving beyond configuring features and into orchestrating how data, AI agents, automation and people work together across the business.
Now, we're going to dig into what Headless actually means for admins, why governance and trust matter more than ever in an AI first world, and how Salesforce is building toward a future where setting up complex systems really becomes more of a conversation than a checklist. This episode is really about systems thinking, how admins can connect experiences without forcing teams to rebuild everything from scratch. So if you've been trying to figure out where AI fits into your role or how your role is evolving alongside it, I promise you this episode gives you a practical look at what's already happening and what's coming next. So be sure to hit that subscribe button. Share this episode with your favorite architect or admin friend, and let's get Khush on the podcast.
So Khush, welcome back to the podcast.
 
Khushwant Singh:
Thank you for having me back, Mike.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
I say that because I had to look and it was 2022 back in the day you were talking Experience Cloud when we last had you on. You've since moved on, moved up, had your hands in a lot of things, did an admin keynote with me. So let's start there and let's kind of catch everybody up on some of the products you've been working on, and then we're going to talk about the newest one that we launched at TDX this year.
 
Khushwant Singh:
Yeah, happy to. And again, great to be back. I think back in the day, started obviously with Experience Cloud. Experience Cloud really was building a product that is external-facing and again, it's built on the same platform. And again, as we looked at the product portfolio, it just made sense to start to bring things together. So we've actually sort of rolled and morphed into the application development platform, obviously within the platform organization, everything pro-code, low-code, desktop, mobile. And so there've been quite a few products leading up to here, anything from our delivery on mobile, mobile offline, the Salesforce mobile app, all the way to Agentforce Vibes, the Agentforce Experience layer, obviously a fair amount of work on the Headless side of things. So yeah, it's been quite a journey to this particular point, Mike.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. I mean, it's actually hard to point out things that aren't admin-friendly that you've had your hands on because you've always kind of championed everybody being able to build on our platform.
So let's talk about TDX this year because we launched Headless 360.
 
Khushwant Singh:
Oh yeah, we did.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
By the way, in case you forgot.
 
Khushwant Singh:
Yeah, it was a massive announcement. I think, look, as you think about what's happening in the market right now, you've got customers engaging through many different surface areas. We've got customers on ChatGPT, on Claude, on Gemini, Teams. At the same time, you've got developers also using a variety of different tools, different IDEs, different coding agents. And so I think Headless 360 really is a testament to acknowledging this change in the market in the industry and trying to meet the customer where they are. The customer being an end user or the customer being a developer and admin, just meeting them where they are in whichever tool, whichever interface they might be.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. I mean, do you recall ever a time in technology when it was, I hate to use the euphemism, but like the Wild West where I feel like there's so many choices for what you can do just in regards to AI?
 
Khushwant Singh:
There is. And there is obviously a good side to it. There's also a downside to it. The good side is really your [inaudible 00:04:31] for choice. There is innovation that is helping you drive productivity day in, day out.
The downside of this is you just have to be really careful about quality, about trust, about governance. And you have to ensure that while you're going fast, you're not sort of compromising on that trust aspect of things. And that's what we're trying to do here at Salesforce and just trying to be a little bit more thoughtful in our approach over here.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. So my developer friend, Josh Burke, who comes on the podcast, usually has to explain things to me every now and then. I think developers are very familiar with the term headless.
 
Khushwant Singh:
Yes.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
I'm not sure outside of Headless flows, which I know what those mean, I'm not sure admins could understand or could confidently buzz in on a game show and answer what is Headless 360. So can you help them kind of understand what is Headless 360 if they had to tell their manager?
 
Khushwant Singh:
Yeah, sure. So one way to think about it is, let's say you're a customer and you've got your own website, it's built out of React, it's not built on the Salesforce platform, but there is so much of your goodness and investment that you have within the Salesforce platform that you want to be able to easily reuse in the context of this other website that you have, portal that you have, mobile application that you have. All of that may not be built on the Salesforce platform. You want to be able to reuse your investment seamlessly.
And so Headless 360 really is about how do we empower you, the customer, to be able to easily use those assets, those investments within the Salesforce platform in that surface area that you've got that may not be on the Salesforce platform. So it's really about giving them that flexibility so that they can easily reuse their investments in all of these various surface areas and just meet their customers wherever they are versus bring their customers into Salesforce.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, I think it makes sense. I mean, I was a customer way back in '06 when I remember it was like transfer and move to Salesforce, and everything was "have it on the platform, have it on the platform." And then shortly thereafter it was kind of like almost the realization that we had was, "Well, it's a lot of friction to constantly move platforms. What if companies just integrate and we become that connector to everything?" And I feel the same way with this.
 
Khushwant Singh:
100%. And you know what? Look, I think the one example is if you go into the Williams Sonoma website, right? Williams Sonoma website, it's not built in Salesforce, but if you use their sous chef AI, I think... I'm not sure what they call it, but-
 
Mike Gerholdt:
I'm sure it's something really, really snappy and small.
 
Khushwant Singh:
Olive. Olive. There you go.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
Olive. Yeah. See?
 
Khushwant Singh:
A snappy name right there. That agent is an Agentforce agent, right? So that's on example where Salesforce is being used in whichever head that you'd like us to be in. And so in this particular case, the Salesforce agent is in the Williams Sonoma website. So that's just one example where we are trying to make it easier for this integration to happen through the Headless 360 platform.
Now that's one view. And that's the view, I would say, an easy way to try to understand what it means for Headless 360.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, because then as an admin, as a developer, you're not having to sit down and say, "Okay, well, if we move to the Salesforce platform, we have to deprecate everything that we just spent the last two years building on our site." Marketing's like, "No, no, we just got the site pixel perfect the way we want it. Now we can integrate best of everything that we want."
For admins who aren't thinking of maybe websites, how does Headless 360 play into other integrations that they may talk to IT or internal stakeholders about?
 
Khushwant Singh:
Yeah. So for example, when admins are chatting with their other internal team, they may have a custom application that they already have in place and they want to be able to have Salesforce data, Salesforce visualizations surface in whichever application they may have already, right? That's one example. So again, it is about bringing Salesforce to wherever they may already have.
So for example, an admin may have a business application that already runs within ChatGPT. So ChatGPT, for example, it allows companies to create bespoke applications. And if you want to be able to integrate Salesforce into that application, that's doable as well. It doesn't have to be in ChatGPT. It could be in any other existing non-agentic application as well. But it's about that, look, you don't have to rebuild everything. Wherever you are, you've got an existing application, we'll find a way through Headless 360 to be able to bring Salesforce to it.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. No, it totally makes sense. I mean, in that way we can really think about how are we making sure that the departments have the software and the tech that they want, but also access to all of the information that they need to do their jobs the best.
 
Khushwant Singh:
Mm-hmm.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
So Headless 360 is a big thing we talked about. I also know I saw you in some True to the Core and True to the Core Deep Dive stuff. Was there some features you were talking about in that that possibly play into what admins are going to be working on for the rest of this year?
 
Khushwant Singh:
Well, yeah. I mean, a few aspects as we think about Headless 360 that would be of interest to admins. So first and foremost, you've all seen the stack diagram of the Salesforce platform. You've got those four layers. You've got your layers of engagement, you have layers of context, you've got the sort of our data foundation, et cetera. So you've got those layers that make up the Salesforce platform. For the last 27 years, those layers have been put in place for a human, right? And now what the product teams and the engineering teams are doing are going back and saying, "How do we now open this up both for a human and an agent so the agent can do that work on behalf of the admin when the admin sort of wants a task to be done for that particular reason?" And so what that means is that we're translating our entire platform into a set of MCPs, a set of skills, a set of metadata that is grounded so that these agents can do the work on behalf of the admins.
So one good example is the setup with Agentforce, which is so far so good. We've gotten great feedback on it. Now behind the scenes is a set of skills, a set of MCPs that are firing off to be able to get their tasks done. And so that's one thing that I think our admins can look to benefit from.
The other piece is I know we have some admins who are familiar with some of these IDEs that we have out there. They use Cloud Code quite a bit. They use Vibes quite a bit. It may not be the entire admin audience, but for those audiences, again, the ability to be able to use all of these MCP skills in these development environments is another thing that our admins can really look forward towards.
Now the other thing that we've also worked on is, over the last few months, the foundation for these skills, these MCPs, this Headless 360 foundation has been very sort of focused on how do we unblock these pro-code use cases, whether that's in Cloud Code, whether that's in Vibes, et cetera. But this is the same foundation upon which as we speak in safe harbor, I share that we are building what we call our no code offering as well.
So how do you go about in an unintimidating sort of type of interface, have this conversation with an agent, which behind the scenes is interacting with that same Headless 360 layer to help you build out your agents, your applications, to help you augment your existing agents and applications, help you set up provision, configure Salesforce from a zero to one point of view, because we all know how setting it all up is quite a taxing task for our admins? So that's the potential I see for Headless 360 for our admin personas.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. I mean, to go back on some of the stuff that you were mentioning, I remember the first time I thought, "Hey, I could have ChatGPT rewrite ChatGPT's instructions." And I remember thinking like, "I'm so far ahead of the curve, man. I'm making AI rebuild AI." And then it was only a few weeks later that Cheryl was demoing Setup with Agentforce and I thought, "Oh, that makes so much more sense because all of the things that you were having that setup agent do are things that not necessarily admins don't like doing. It's like paper cuts." It's the little things that take 20, 30 minutes out of your day when you really wanted that solid hour to build that application kind of start to finish.
 
Khushwant Singh:
Indeed. Indeed. So we really viewed Headless 360 as the foundation upon which agents can work on behalf of the admins. And again, look, this is agents and admins working together because again, we've got to have the human presence to be able to validate, to be able to interrupt, to be able to initiate any actions that are performed by the agents. And if these agents can help drive greater productivity, then it's a win-win while at the same time having governance by humans over it.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
Right. Absolutely. Do you envision us being at a point where all of setting up Salesforce could just be a conversation with an agent based on the business and what they're trying to accomplish?
 
Khushwant Singh:
We are trying to do that. We are trying to do that. Now, I'll give you a view into our approach over here. We're taking a steel thread approach here where just trying to, for example, set up a customer service agent. That cuts across Service Cloud, cuts across platform, cuts across Agentforce, cuts across Data Cloud. So we've got to take a system view, an end-to-end view versus a feature view because that's what our admins go through. That's what a practitioner goes through. They look at it from a steel thread point of view, and that's what we as product teams have to do.
And so as we think about using agents to go ahead and help provision, set up, get Salesforce up and running really quickly, that's the new strategy that we are taking over here, a steel thread view so that we can look across the board and say, "Look, which MCPs are missing? Which skills are missing? Which APIs are missing? Which metadata needs to be grounded? How do we ensure that across entire steel thread, quality is being ensured, governance is being woven into?"
So we are starting that way and we want to scale that way as well. So my hope is that come Dreamforce this year, we'll be able to at least have a sizable number of steel threads that we feel really, really confident about on Agentforce really helping and agents helping in this particular side of things. So yeah, that's the approach we're taking, Mike.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
Wow, that's going to be amazing. Every time you think, "Oh, we've probably invented everything," technology just comes along and pulls the rug out from underneath of you and says, "Haha! There's new stuff. You got to figure this out now."
I'd be curious, you're so ingrained in a lot of things that admins do on the platform, a lot of things developers do on the platform and then also having to keep up with AI. What is a piece of advice you could give people for how you personally keep up with the newest news and innovation on what's going on with AI?
 
Khushwant Singh:
Wow, that's a good question. I think first and foremost, I spend a lot of time just looking at reading publications like what's on TechCrunch, what's on Techmeme, trying to just understand how are technology providers adapting, how are companies using AI. That's one.
The second one is actually you learn a lot via speaking with others in the community, right?
 
Mike Gerholdt:
Mm-hmm.
 
Khushwant Singh:
You talk to customers, you talk to other admins, you talk to other developers and you get to understand there are use cases that they're working through and some of the very many innovative workarounds or users of AI that they're applying. And then you're thinking about this that, "Wow. There's a trend here, there's something that we should be backing up and maybe providing out of the box within the product."
And so I think that community piece speaking with other customers, with your peers, your colleagues from different companies, that sort of brings a very practitioners and practical view to things. So I think if you combine it with some of these ... So if you take a combination of both, what's being published out in the internet, what sort of bleeding edge and all of these various publications and then you sort of marry that and juxtapose that with the practical aspects on how it's implemented in all of these various by your peers in different companies, that's kind of how I ... That's at least the approach that I've taken. And I've seen it help even with some of my teammates who use a similar approach as well, Mike.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, I would agree. I mean, coming fresh off of being at a conference, just even talking with people, you find more resources than you think you could find and it exposes you to different levels of thought.
As we kind of close things out, I'd love to know I'm always big, especially when I'm coaching people for events, for TDX, for keynotes, because I've been in keynote with you. I feel like when people are done listening to something, I always want to give them something very actionable that they should do when they get done listening to a session or they get done listening to a podcast like this. So if you are a Salesforce admin listening to this podcast, what is one thing you think you should do right after you listen to this podcast?
 
Khushwant Singh:
Good one. It's a tricky question. I would say that, look, I would encourage everyone to go ahead and use and try and give Setup with Agentforce a run, right? Take it out for a spin. It's available in an open beta. And I would encourage all of you all to give it a try, please. We've gotten so much great feedback. We are a stone's throw away before we make it generally available. And this is our first approach to using Agentforce, using AI to help improve the productivity and quality of life of our admins. It's not our last, but it is definitely our best foot forward right now. And we'd love to get your feedback. Like I said, we are in the final mile and your feedback is much appreciated, so try it out.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
I love it. Khush, you've always been a fan of admins. And I am so grateful to have you back on the podcast and even more thankful that you are constantly helping Salesforce innovate for everybody in the tech industry to be successful. So I appreciate you spending a little time with us today.
 
Khushwant Singh:
No, of course it's my pleasure. Admins are the lifeblood of Salesforce. You're out there, you're representing our products, you're using our products, you're championing our products, you're giving us tough love. And we can't be more appreciative. And so this is an honor to be here on this podcast to speak with you, Mike, and to speak with all of our admins.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
And a big thanks to Khushwant Singh for joining me and sharing how Headless 360 and Agentforce are reshaping the way admins build and manage systems across the business.
My big takeaway? Well, the future admin isn't just configuring Salesforce. They're designing trusted systems where automation, data, agents, and people all work together for better outcomes. And as Khush said, trust and governance will still sit right at the center of all that work. So if you haven't already, take Setup with Agentforce for a spin and start exploring what human plus agent collaboration can look like in your org.
And of course, be sure to subscribe, leave a review. And as always, I would love it if you share this episode with your friends. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Skye Tyler, Principal Solution Consultant at Beyond the Horizon Technology.
Join us as we chat about why clean metadata is crucial for getting the most out of AI.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Skye Tyler.
Why metadata is your training manual for AI
You've done it, I've done it. Sales wants a name changed on a report, so you just change the field label rather than create something new and mess with the integrations. Or maybe you have four different dates, but your marketing team knows which one they're actually looking for. What's the big deal?
The problem is that while humans can get by on institutional knowledge, AI agents need a bit more help from your metadata. As my guest this week, Skye Tyler, explains, you should think of AI like an overenthusiastic intern with short-term memory problems. It really wants to answer your question, so if it sees four different dates, it's going to take a guess.
Think of metadata like an onboarding manual for AI. With clear field descriptions and help texts, you can point your agents in the right direction and prevent hallucinations.
How to get started with metadata cleanup
Obviously, cleaning up your org's metadata is easier said than done. However, Skye has some great tips for how to get started.
If your business has busy periods and slow periods, you might be able to schedule time specifically to work on your metadata. But for the rest of us, Skye recommends a clean-as-you-go approach. Any time you update an object, set aside some time to review all of the related metadata and update the description.
Similarly, any time your organization is building a new business process that includes AI, you need to clean up any metadata an agent could interact with. As Skye points out, while you don't necessarily have time to deep clean your house every week, a little spot cleaning can go a long way.
Skye's Salesforce journey and the value of sharing what you know
We also took some time to talk about Skye's career path from nonprofit arts and what advice she has for folks who are new to the Salesforce ecosystem. AI is changing things fast, and that means there are more opportunities. "With all of these newer technologies and tools, anybody who's looking to come into the space today is learning the same things that I'm learning, having been in the space for a decade," she says.
The Salesforce community is incredibly supportive, and Skye recommends putting yourself out there. You never know who you'll meet at an event, and where those connections could take you. "No matter where you are in your journey, you know something that other people don't," she says, "put yourself out there, and I guarantee you someone's going to appreciate it."
Listen to my full conversation with Skye for more on how to clean up your metadata and stop AI hallucinations. And make sure you're subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.
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Full show transcript
Mike:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I'm talking with Skye Tyler about the part of AI readiness that, well, it's easy to overlook. That's your metadata. We all know that clean data matters, but agents also need clear field descriptions, documentation, permissions, and context to understand what your business actually means. Skye explains why metadata acts like onboarding for an enthusiastic new employee and why a confident answer isn't always a correct one.
We'll also talk about practical ways admins can improve metadata without trying to clean the entire org overnight. So give this episode a listen, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and of course share it with an admin who maybe has prepared their platform for Agentforce. And with that, let's get Skye on the podcast.
So Skye, welcome to the podcast.
Skye Tyler:
Hi, thanks for having me back.
Mike:
I'm excited. Going through everything that we're doing to prepare for Dreamforce and admins are preparing for the agentic future, which is coming faster than eve, I stumbled across your session. And I thought, hey, before we get into Dreamforce, maybe we can dive into all of the stuff that you might not be able to cover in your 40-minute breakout session. So we'll talk about that because it's data related and data related is agent related. But before we get started, can you just refresh everybody on how you got started with Salesforce and what you do in the ecosystem?
Skye Tyler:
Oh, I'd love to. So I've been fortunate enough to be working in the Salesforce space with the nonprofit industry for a little over a decade now, and started off doing implementation work with nonprofit arts organizations, doing ticketing and donation. And then I've moved in and through the consulting space. Again, focusing primarily on nonprofits with a little bit of dipping into education along the way. And over the course of that decade, I've been fortunate enough to meet some amazing folks, yourself included, that has given me an opportunity to have the chance to share not just my journey, but my experiences, my struggles, successes, failures. And some of those avenues have included things like coaching and mentoring with super moms and the Salesforce military program, and then also just being really honored to be able to speak at community dream and events and events like Dreamforce and Trailblazer DX.
Mike:
I mean, that's a great answer. You know what's funny is so many people ask me, "How do I get started in the community," or, "What should I do?" And I feel like now I'm just going to point back to your answer because what you said was just perfect. Well, don't be afraid to share what you've learned, or what you're learning, or how you've learned it, or things you're working on because that's what people love to see. They love to see how you're doing it so that they can get an idea for how to do it. So thanks for answering a question I didn't have.
Skye Tyler:
Yeah, absolutely. I also just want to throw in, and I say this at many of my live sessions, that no matter where you are in your journey, you know something that other people don't. And everybody learns more when folks show up, and are vulnerable, and are willing to share those things. So definitely just give it a try. Put yourself out there and I guarantee you someone's going to appreciate it.
Mike:
Yeah, absolutely. Plus the thing I add to that is there's probably somebody out there like you that really needs to see somebody like you on stage.
Skye Tyler:
Yes, absolutely.
Mike:
So we talk a lot about data with agents and cleaning data, making sure your data's up-to-date, making sure your data's fresh, which every time I use the word fresh, I always think of how that plastic comes off an iPhone. I don't know why, but that's where my brain goes, because agents and AI and LLMs do a really good job of consuming a vast amount of information and giving it back to you in what you asked for. I think one of the things that we talk less about and that I want to talk to you about is your metadata, because I'll be honest, I pay attention to my metadata for five seconds when I'm creating the field.
Skye Tyler:
I'd say that's four seconds more than most people.
Mike:
Right, because all you got to do is click outside the box and it fills in the developer name, so I'm good. And description, ah, fill it in later.
Skye Tyler:
Yeah. And for the longest time, that's been really standard. And again, working across several consultancies and with lots of different works, people assume, well, we know what this field means. You give it a field name, the team knows what this means. I don't need to fill in description. I don't need to fill in help text. It's fine.
And again, for the longest time, that institutional knowledge was enough of a stopgap that it was fine. Nothing was going to break or go horribly wrong if you left the description field empty. But all of that changes when you start introducing agents. And an example I may reference a couple times on this podcast is, I don't know if you've ever heard this, but the idea of thinking about your agent as a really enthusiastic intern with short-term memory problems.
Mike:
Like memory of a goldfish.
Skye Tyler:
Yes, exactly. So if you've got a new intern and they don't have deep industry experience, or they don't have longer term institutional memory within your organization, and they come on site, they're excited to be there, they're energized, they're probably young and enthusiastic, and they're going to sound really confident. You're going to ask them a question. They're like, "Yeah, absolutely. I can absolutely do that."
But there's a difference between sounding confident and actually knowing the answer. And where AI gets really tricky is not only does it sound confident, it usually has a certain level of fluency to it with the amazing jumps in natural language processing over the past few years, it sounds both confident and right because it's just a well-structured sentence. And there's a huge gap between the structure of the sentence and the actual understanding of the data behind it.
Mike:
Right. It reads to us as so confident in its own answer that we would be silly to think it's wrong.
Skye Tyler:
Oh, absolutely. It would be a waste of time to go back and check it because look at how confident it is.
Mike:
Yeah. And look at all the part that I always think of is look at all the information it gave me. I asked it two sentences and it gave me four paragraphs of an answer. It must be right.
Skye Tyler:
Yes. And of course, don't forget that at the beginning, it also flattered you and said, "Oh, Mike, that's a great question. Let's dig into that."
Mike:
Yeah. You sound just like my AI.
Skye Tyler:
Exactly.
Mike:
"Of course it's a great idea, Mike. You should totally do that. Everything's a great idea." So when we think about that though, why is it making those mistakes? Because if we're paying attention, and I mean, I was even working on some content today that's like, got to keep your stuff fresh. If you're going to do call notes or have a summary agent, then make sure your salespeople are doing call notes and keeping it up to date or keeping the data up to date. Then why is it so confidently giving us, I don't want to say the wrong answer, but confidently providing us with information that it thinks is correct, but isn't?
Skye Tyler:
Yeah. So a big part of this comes down to the difference between how humans think and form answers and how the large language models do it. And one of the real risks around this false fluency framework is that you pose a question, you ask a question, and first there's the basic understanding that the agent, whichever model or system you're using, their goal is to accomplish the thing that you asked.
So the first thing is getting really careful about how you ask your questions so that you're not sort of setting it up to just affirm the thing that you have asked. But then beyond that, the way that these LLMs, these large language models work, is it's basically a really complex pattern completing process. And so you mentioned peeling that plastic off of your new iPhone. How many times are you typing a text message on your iPhone and it has that auto recommend that comes up right above your keyboard?
Mike:
Yeah.
Skye Tyler:
So that's a good example of a simple version of this. So depending on how often you type in "Oh my," and then it's going to recommend a couple of different things that often come after "Oh my" in the training data. When we're thinking about this in the context of asking an agent something in Salesforce, the way that it identifies what to propose for an answer is not looking at just the data in the field, it first has to go look and see what information is available and that's when it dips into the metadata. So if you've got four different fields that have very similar field names, but have no metadata to tell the agent field one means this, field two means that, field three means this, and field four means this completely other thing, it's just going to guess.
Mike:
So if you had four dates on a record that were, I don't know, draft dates because it ties to a contract or something, and it's draft one, draft two, draft three, draft four, and you know as the user, those are the dates that you completed those drafts, but your metadata just shows four draft dates and there's no explanation for the agent. So the agent's like, "Here's when all the drafts were completed."
Skye Tyler:
Right, it's going to guess. And because it's non-deterministic, it might guess right the first time you ask it a question. It might guess right the second, third, fourth, fifth, 20th time, and then the 21st time, it guesses wrong.
Mike:
But confidently.
Skye Tyler:
But confidently wrong.
Mike:
Confidently. Right.
Skye Tyler:
Right. And so when we're thinking about how to support our agents, if we go back to that analogy of the over-enthusiastic summer intern, the metadata is effectively the onboarding process for that new intern or a new employee. It's the manual about what your data means, and it's the context that the agent can use to give you more consistently reliable, correct answers.
Mike:
Love it. So I remember, I think it was TDX two years ago, we were talking kind of on this subject. And whenever we roll out a new feature, it's here's the things you need to do to prepare. And I remember getting up and talking with a lot of people of like, "Hey, it's more than just the data that's got to be cleaned because there's a lot of data cleaning services and hopefully you have a lot of validation rules and stuff in place, but also your metadata needs to be cleaned as well."
And I looked over in the audience, I felt this guy just shrug his shoulders and just kind of turn a lighter shade of pale, I'll say. And I walked up to him afterward and I asked him, I was like, "Are you okay?" And he's like, "Yeah, your words just hit me really hard. I was thinking of all the metadata I have to clean up." So obviously it would be awesome if every day people woke up and you cleaned your whole house. But let's be honest, you don't have to wake up every day just to live in your house to clean your whole house. What is the approach that an admin should think of in terms of getting their metadata to that next level and to prepare for an agent force implementation?
Skye Tyler:
Yeah, I love the analogy of cleaning your house every day because I'll tell you, I do not wipe my baseboards every day.
Mike:
oh, man. I would pay somebody to come once a week to do my baseboards. It would be awesome.
Skye Tyler:
Yeah. So there's a couple of ways that you can look at this. The first one is figuring out within your workflows, your day-to-day and annual workflows, where you can build metadata maintenance into your process. And so what this might look like for admins is the next time someone on your team asks for an update on an object, whether it's a page layout, or some new fields or what have you, taking and building some extra time into however long you budget or allocate for that task to include reviewing related metadata. Every time you need to update a flow because the business process has changed and you say save as new version, as soon as you click save as new version, update the description of the flow.
That's the first thing that agents are looking at to be able to figure out what automations do I call, what automations are related to a process, et cetera. So building it into the workflow of what you already do is one avenue to consider. If you have an amazing organization that lets you do proactive maintenance, working that into your project plan and saying, "Hey, this is a usually kind of quiet time of the year for new admin requests. Let's go ahead and block two weeks or three weeks and do a more thorough or a deeper dive into updating the metadata." If you work at one of those organizations, let me know, because I've heard they exist. I haven't encountered one in the wild.
But then lastly, when you have any new agent related process, it should be considered mandatory as part of that project to do a metadata review of every aspect of metadata that that agentic process is going to interact with. Because one of the big challenges that organizations have been seeing is they're putting a lot of time and resources and money into creating agentic solutions, but the research and the data is just not showing the level of return on investment or the level of success that people are expecting. And one of several underlying factors is you're not setting your agents up for success.
You've got this new employee, this new agent employee, but you didn't onboard them. You didn't provide them with adequate institutional knowledge and training. You gave them some direction. But if you think about it, Mike, when you've got a new employee that comes on and they go to that podcast or that blog record for the first time and they see your four review dates and they don't know, they stop and ask someone. They ping you on Slack and be like, "Mike, can you explain these four review dates to me?" Your agent can't do that. So set them up for success with that onboarding through the metadata updates.
Mike:
And I think that also, I mean, I really like how you approach that. I think that's also a funnel or a pathway that you could flip. So you don't have to think of, I have to tackle everything and clean all my metadata first, as opposed to, well, if we're going to roll out an agent and it's going to touch these three objects and these 15 fields, then that's where you start.
Skye Tyler:
Absolutely.
Mike:
Because then that will help you set up a plan for here's how we're going to tackle this part of it. And then as the agent responsibilities or you build additional sub-agents expands, then you can tackle two or three more objects that maybe that sub-agent has to talk to as opposed to, okay, we're going to wake up at 3:00 AM, clean the whole house just to live in it, which is a good idea. I think sometimes readiness to the extreme can feel overwhelming.
Skye Tyler:
Right. And if it's overwhelming to the point where you don't make any progress on it, then it's not useful either. So definitely thinking about what's within scope. Where I would challenge that a little bit though is unless you have put very firm guardrails on your agent, there's always the possibility that it's going to get creative. So you might intend for that agent to only look at these four fields, or these 15 fields, or these two objects, but if you don't actually instantiate that guardrail or that limit into how you build the agent, it could start to be like, huh, I wonder if this related record might impact me being able to answer Mike's question better. Let me just go take a look at that.
And that's where we could get into some of the more deeper technical things, but the idea that authentication is not the same as permission. And so making sure that each of your agents has very clearly defined, and that ties in with the metadata too, because all of those settings in Agentforce and Agentforce builder are set up, the sub-agent descriptions, the scope, all of those things are metadata around your agents.
Mike:
And I think there's downstream effects to this that are also positive too. I'm thinking of all of the reports that you're dealing with that will suddenly get better because I know you're always building reports, sometimes not off of the report label. So help me through this. You've got an implementation and you have an integration with another system and you change metadata descriptions or field names. How do you need to approach that? Because obviously you need to identify that early in your discovery.
Skye Tyler:
Yeah. This is a little bit of a catch-22. Let's just say that we've got five fields on, I'm going to just call it the case object, that are updated through some form of integration. Maybe it's a form submission, maybe it's an external data source, whatever. But there's five fields that are tracked and interact outside of Salesforce, and you're going to set up an agent that does something that impacts those five fields. When you set up the previous integration, if you didn't put in the description somewhere on those five fields that this field is part of X integration or this field is populated via X external data source, one, past you did future you no favors by not putting that in there.
Mike:
Man, when the DeLorean gets out of the shop, I'm going to go back and really tell myself.
Skye Tyler:
Exactly. So again, going back to that idea of you've got a new project, you've got a new request, you've got a new thing that you're building. Taking the time to do that slew thing and to really investigate what are all of the things that touch this piece of data or this particular metadata. The simplest sort of way to address that is whatever else you're changing, don't change the API name.
Mike:
Smart.
Skye Tyler:
Now where that kind of gets, I've seen more orgs than I can count where the field label is something completely different from the API name because it had some kind of external connection or integration, and if you try to change it would break it. So they just changed what referenced to the human. That's going to be a problem for your agent. If you are expecting interaction around review date one and the API name is something completely unrelated and there's no description to give the agent more context, they may not even look at that field. They might not even recognize it.
Mike:
Oh man, I am so guilty as charged.
Skye Tyler:
We've all done it. We've all done it.
Mike:
I mean, businesses change process and I was like, I can just change the field label. If it says this on the screen, are you happy with that? Mostly because I didn't want to ... It always happened where I didn't want to have to create a new field, move the data over just because they wanted a different name.
Skye Tyler:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and if you are an admin that does not do Apex, which most admins don't, right?
Mike:
Not me. Nope.
Skye Tyler:
They're differentiated roles for a reason, and you have Apex that's running against those custom fields, you can't just go in and change the API name. You are going to break things. And so this is where that cascading effect can come into play and you say, okay, well maybe this one quick fix that the marketing team was asking for isn't actually a quick fix because we do want to get the org as ready as possible for future agentic improvements.
Mike:
I love how you set me up for my next question there because I was just going to ask you. So I could see somebody's listening to this and hopefully they got this far and they're like, "That was a fun podcast, but we're not really getting ready to deploy Agentforce, so why should I care about my metadata?"
Skye Tyler:
Yeah, this is one of those things, and I'll admit early in my consulting career, this wasn't as emphasized. It was all about the user's experience. Does the page layout make sense? Can the user click through and do the things they need to do? And the stuff that's behind the scenes, the admins can cope with that or the consultants can deal with that, and it just wasn't as important. But even things like as flow gets more complex and now, I mean, we're talking about moving to this whole headless experience, the system itself has just matured to a point where if your top or only priority is the UI, the user experience and the user interface, you are limiting the capacity of what your organization can do on Salesforce.
Mike:
Very true. Very true. I feel like as an admin that did focus very much on the UI, would bounce back and forth on trying to make Salesforce the one-stop shop for everybody. I remember way back in the day, do you remember when we used to be able to build web tabs?
Skye Tyler:
Oh, yes. Oh, those days.
Mike:
And so I remember we had a travel system, and I put it in a web tab because I need my users not only to sign in, but sign in and update their opportunities and update the accounts and stuff. And so I asked the salespeople back then, "What is the number one thing you check almost every day?" And they're like, "Our travel thing," because they're traveling and they need to book things and stuff like that. And I said, "Cool. I can do that." And so I put it in as a tab, but it was like a simple I-frame. It's just there.
And I had one user, when I showed it to them, they were like, "Oh, this is amazing, but I booked my travel and it didn't sync with my calendar." And I was like, right, because it's literally a pane of glass that I'm giving you into another system. But your whole conversation about this made me think back to when I would try to bring all of my users together in Salesforce, and then when I would try to make it so that they didn't have to pay attention to the UI in Salesforce. And I feel like I tried to make both, because you brought up headless. And headless in theory is you use a tool and then you just at Salesforce or something, you can bring all of that knowledge in.
Skye Tyler:
Well, I mean, you and I have both been in the space long enough that we remember the days when the mantra was, if it's not in Salesforce, it doesn't exist.
Mike:
Oh, yeah. I mean, I still say that.
Skye Tyler:
Right. But the reality of the world now is there's a lot of data and there are a lot of processes that don't exist in Salesforce. They can be surfaced there or they can be represented there, but they live somewhere else. And that's where, going back to my previous comment that the platform, the system itself has just matured beyond that. You have to log into Salesforce, you have to create a record or update a field in Salesforce for it to count. And that's not the case anymore. And even things like using experience cloud sites to be able to allow external partners or site guest users to be able to get information into Salesforce, all of those connections, all of those disparate data points are potentially accessible by agents, and then if you move into a headless environment from a headless perspective.
And so taking whatever time and resources you have at this moment and making whatever improvements or whatever cleanups you can make is just going to help future you, future admins who manage the system, be more successful in doing that. And I know right now in the nonprofit space, there's lots of conversations for folks who are considering moving from the nonprofit success pack to Agentforce Nonprofit. And when I talk to folks who are considering the move, one of the things, even before Agentforce Nonprofit, moving from a different data system into Salesforce, really doing an audit.
And we were talking about cleaning houses. I have this great story from one of the times we moved when I was a kid and my mom was real stressed out, she ended up packing the trash can full of trash. And by the time we got around to unpacking that box, you can imagine how pleasant that was. So when you're packing up your house, when you're packing up your data house or your data system and you're planning to move, don't pack your trash. Go through and do a data audit. Go through and update your metadata. Make sure that you're moving into your clean new house with just the things that you want, and they're going to be easier to access and more effective. And then your over-enthusiastic summer intern of an agent is going to be much more likely to give you a coherent, fluent, and accurate response, not just a confidently wrong one.
Mike:
I like that. Packed your trash. It is odd when you move because there's stuff that lives in the world that when you move, you have to figure out what to do with it.
Skye Tyler:
See, I can't relate. Having been associated with the military for a decade, I can now fit my entire house in a U-Haul. Every time I move, it's a purging process.
Mike:
Sure. Yeah, I can understand that. I'd love to end on that, but I have one other thought, which is, this doesn't just apply for Salesforce. When we're working with our IT colleagues or people in the organization that own other platforms, a lot of the power comes not only from Agentforce being able to bring in Salesforce information, but to be able to consume other information. And I have to believe that we have to sit down and do the same kind of audit when we're looking to integrate with another platform.
Skye Tyler:
Oh, absolutely. And this is where, I mean, the kind of highest level way to think about this is it's the context. You have to have some mechanism in Salesforce, it's primarily metadata, but you have to have some mechanism for the agent to understand and to have the context of what you're actually asking them to do. So these large language models have been trained on the entirety of human knowledge that has been encoded into the internet. Well, that's not helpful for your specific question or your specific query.
So having systems in place, whether it's knowledge articles, whether it's Jira tickets, whether it's Confluence folder structures, having mechanisms that give the agents the proper level of context for them to be able to support you in solving the problem, designing the solution, answering the question, whatever your purpose is, this is transferable across any touchpoint of agentic work.
Mike:
Yeah, totally makes sense. I always push the speakers that I work with for Dreamforce, or TDX, or any event to think about what happens when the person stands up after your presentation is over. And so I'll ask you the same thing. So what happens when somebody presses stop on the podcast and goes about their day? What's the one thing they should do after they listen to this?
Skye Tyler:
Well, obviously keep listening to the other podcast episodes.
Mike:
Right. Just continue on to the next episode.
Skye Tyler:
I think the takeaway that's sort of bigger than just data or metadata or even agentic work, is keep learning. All of these systems and all of these tools are evolving so quickly. And while that can be a challenge and can be maybe intimidating, it's also potentially very democratizing. And when we think about your comment earlier about people trying to get into the ecosystem, for a while it got very hard. There was the age of the accidental admin when Salesforce was young enough that just if you were good at fixing the printer, you became a Salesforce admin.
And then we moved into a period of time where it had matured enough that organizations wanted people with deep experience. With all of these newer technologies and tools, anybody who's looking to come into the space today is learning the same things that I'm learning having been in the space for a decade. So my call to action for anyone listening to this podcast would be find other avenues of learning. And then if it's in your wheelhouse or your interest, offer what you've learned to other people and share that experience.
Mike:
I think that's great. I mean, that ties right in with the podcast I did with Gene Velonis, which was open up a Trailhead org and just start playing around and-
Skye Tyler:
Just try it out.
Mike:
... don't be afraid to break things. I think there was a point in time when I would work with a lot of community members and they were always afraid, "But what if it doesn't work?" And I'm like, "Cool." And then we know we have to go back and get to tinker with something.
Skye Tyler:
Yeah.
Mike:
That to me is half the fun.
Skye Tyler:
If it works the first time, then it means you weren't trying something hard enough.
Mike:
I know. Yeah. Yeah. That or I'm worried when it's going to stop working, because if it worked the first time, then I didn't get to troubleshoot stuff.
Skye Tyler:
This is true. This is true.
Mike:
Skye, it's always a pleasure to have you on the podcast. And in the ever-changing world of AI, and metadata, and data, and everything else, it's good to have you kind of keeping us honest and keeping us on our toes.
Skye Tyler:
Well, I don't know if I want to bear that responsibility, but I'm happy to try.
Mike:
You're one of many people.
Skye Tyler:
Great. Thank you so much, Mike.
Mike:
Big thanks to Skye for joining us and making metadata feel practical, useful, and well, a lot less overwhelming. My key takeaway was for admins, it's really simple. Agents can only act reliably when Salesforce clearly reflects what the business means. So build metadata review into the work you're already doing. Maybe pick one active process and document the fields and the automation it depends on, and give the future you and the future agents the context they need.
Now, of course, you should subscribe to the Salesforce Admins podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to keep learning and trying something new in your org. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Michelle Wolfe, Platform Engineer.
Join us as we chat about how she built a Flow-powered user management system to handle requests, approvals, user creation, permissions, communications, and even onboarding.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Michelle Wolfe.
Streamlining change requests with screen flows
It's a good thing when your organization is growing, right? For Salesforce Admins, however, new hires need new accounts, and that means approvals, permissions, and onboarding. My guest this week, Michelle Wolfe, found herself in exactly this situation. She turned to Flow to build an automated user management system with no code, and she's here to tell us all about it.
Michelle's company was bringing in 80+ people per new hire class, but the account creation request process was a mess. Managers would email a random member of the three-person admin team, and then they would manually create the account. So the first step was to wrangle the business process with a screen flow to get the correct information into Salesforce and create a case.
But Michelle was just getting started. Now that everything was in Salesforce, she knew that she could use Flow to automate the rest of the process.
New account creation with autolaunched flows
Once the new user's information was approved by their manager, Michelle set up an autolaunched flow to spin up the account. This took care of data validation, configuring the correct permissions, and creating a username.
Finally, a second autolaunched flow would close out the case and send two email actions: one to confirm the request, and one to welcome the new user. With help from Flow and Einstein Copilot, Michelle transformed a complicated manual business process into something streamlined, simple, and scalable.
Partner with your training team for a fresh perspective on your org
Michelle credits her success with how closely she works with her training team on enhancements. "Because they interact with new employees, they see things differently than someone who's been here for years and knows how we use our Salesforce," she explains. That fresh perspective helps her identify improvements she might otherwise miss.
Listen to my full conversation with Michelle for more on how she used Flow to automate user management—we really get into the weeds. And make sure you're subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.
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Full show transcript
Mike:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I'm joined by Michelle Wolf to talk about what happens when user onboarding stops being a string of emails and becomes a real platform process.
So Michelle built a Flow-powered system that handles requests, approvals, user creation, permissions, communications, and even offboarding, while keeping the admin team in control.
We're going to talk about the automation behind it, but also the process decisions that make it accurate, secure, and useful for her business.
Now, because when admins design access and onboarding well, they're not just saving time. They're protecting trust and helping people get productive faster.
So listen in, subscribe, share this episode with an admin who has one too many user requests sitting in their inbox.
I'll tell you who doesn't have too many user in requests sitting in their inbox, and that's Michelle.
So let's get Michelle on the podcast.
So Michelle, welcome to the podcast.
Michelle Wolf:
Thank you for having me, Mike.
Mike:
I think this is exciting because I can't recall the number of times I've had people on about onboarding users. And I think it's because whatever cool tool we have come out, it's the second thing people do. They're like, "Oh, I could do this, and I need to figure out how to do X, Y, and Z when I onboard people."
Because it was like that with Flow. There was stuff with Chatter when that came out, "How do I onboard people and add them to groups?"
And Jennifer Lee was at your session at Midwest Dreaming, and she thought it was just phenomenal. So I had to have you on the podcast to talk about it.
But before we get into that, tell me a little bit about yourself, how you got started with Salesforce and what you do.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah. So my journey started as a lot of ours as an accidental admin.
I was working for a small family-run business who had Salesforce, and they were paying a consultant to basically be their full-time admin.
And one day my manager walked into my office and said, "I don't want to pay them anymore. I need you to learn this."
And I was like, "Okay."
Mike:
"I suppose."
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah. Why not? So yeah, that's what started my journey. And I skilled up on Trailhead and I was on it two, three hours a day trying to figure out how to be an admin in Salesforce. And this was back at the initial transition from Classic to Lightning.
Mike:
Ooh, fun.
Michelle Wolf:
So half of my early batches are on Classic. There just wasn't a ton of Lightning stuff out there yet.
So I would build a lot in Classic and then flip it over to Lightning to see what it looked like because they did like the Lightning interface, which was great.
So that started my journey. And then when I decided to part ways with that company, I took a different position and paused my admin career.
And then about five years ago or so, I had an opportunity to be a product SME for Salesforce. And I was like, "Yes, I miss this product. I miss doing this. I miss being able to make things better with just the click of the button. So let's go do this."
And I jumped in both feet and never looked back. And so I've been an active admin for a little over five years now.
And I'm a Flownatic. Anything I can automate, I am doing it.
Mike:
I love it. Active admin as opposed to passive.
Michelle Wolf:
Exactly.
Mike:
I don't know. So I love when you started because I remember those times and the reason there wasn't enough Lightning things is we were all writing it as fast as we could.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah, I know it.
Mike:
It's kind of like learning to drive with a manual. And then they're like, "Oh, well, here's an automatic." And you're like, "Oh, I already know how to drive with a manual." I mean, if you knew how to do things in Classic, then doing stuff in Lightning was just that much easier, in my opinion anyway.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah. I agree. I agree.
And the user experience was better for my users. They liked the layout and the feel. It jived with their personalities better instead of that very formal grid-looking everything.
Mike:
I mean, that was the internet at a certain period in time. And then it grew up and it was like your eyes don't have to squint with white space.
Michelle Wolf:
Right.
Mike:
Every field just went from tight polyester pants to sweatpants. And it was like, "Yay."
Michelle Wolf:
Exactly.
Mike:
Let's talk about being a Flownatic because I've talked with Jen. I know Jen said she was in your session.
I really think, I mean, outside of just it's so incredibly powerful, the amount of things that you can do on the Salesforce platform without writing a single line of code. Flow is one of those.
And I remember it was 100 years ago that I saw Flow for the first time at Dreamforce when I was a customer. And I think they called it Business Process Management or something. And it was an app you had to download, and then you had to upload schemas to it.
It's since graduated into a much more robust tool. But the nice thing is once you know that, I mean, caveat emptor because AI runs off of all the flows. I mean, if you're good at Flow, there's very few things you can't make Agentforce do.
So tell me a little bit about why you built onboarding with Flow.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah. The company I was with found themselves in a really big period of growth, which was really amazing.
But the new hire classes were like 80 people. And I just could not bring myself to want to spend a week of my life just filling in these boxes to make new users.
It was really so time-consuming. And one typo here, one missed field here. My validation rules didn't check out. It was just a pain. It's just very mind-numbing.
And I was like, "There has to be a better way."
And I went through the different variations of the Add Multiple Users. It's an out-of-the-box function, except I couldn't put my custom fields on there, which means I couldn't save my users because we had validation rules in place.
And then I experimented with a bulk upload, but it was such a pain because if I would typo a field, I would mess up my entire formula.
Mike:
Yeah.
Michelle Wolf:
And I was like, "There has to be a better way. There just has to be a better way." And-
Mike:
Plus then all you're doing is just creating the user.
Michelle Wolf:
Exactly.
Mike:
With Flow, you can do so much more.
Michelle Wolf:
Exactly. So by converting it to a Flow, I had a screen. I used my screen flows, and I leveraged the fact that the onboarding team is already putting that information into an email or something. Well, just go here and put it in a case for me. Just hit this button, pull out the fields. Now I don't have to do this.
And then I used that screen flow to make a case so I can track my productivity, when the requests are coming in, when the requests are due by, who's doing the request.
We started with just managing cases manually and making the users off the cases. And we had built in the approval process to make sure that someone else was double checking the inputs. Did they spell their name right? Did they put in the email right?
Because I don't know these people. They're not going to be reporting to me. I'm not part of the onboarding team. I'm just making a user.
So we had the managers do the approvals and make sure all that information's correct, make sure they're requesting the right... We use a field called Team Name that we made custom to make sure they're getting put on the right team, the customer service team or senior customer service team, whatever.
So someone else is double checking it and then approving it.
And I was like, "From here, I have to be able to automate something because the information's already in Salesforce."
And that's when I got into utilizing that approval flow to trigger an autolaunched flow to actually make my user and create the alias and create the username and update the profile based off of what was entered on the request form in my screen flow, and just physically make my user.
Mike:
Wow. We spent a lot of time talking about the tech part of it. I want to dive in because I feel like you conquered a lot, but you probably had to sell it. Maybe you didn't.
Tell me about all the non-tech stuff that you had to sell. Who did you have to go to, and what were the people you met with in order to say, "Here's how I'm going to onboard users moving forward"?
Michelle Wolf:
So the onboarding process had already been moved to our team. And it was just that it was coming to us in a very casual way. We're getting an email request.
So it was part of the struggle was they started emailing us individually. We were a team of three, and they would just pick which admin they wanted to work with.
Well, if I'm out of office or I have to leave unexpectedly and forget to put my out of office on, then their stuff's getting delayed.
And so that was the first big conversation of how do we take out that portion? How do we get them to just put it in so we can decide who does the work?
Because if I'm heads down on a project, I don't have five minutes to go make a user. I need to be heads down on my project.
Mike:
Right.
Michelle Wolf:
So this allowed us to divvy up work more easily and really even just check our own productivity of handling these types of requests and making sure it's not one person that always gets stuck with the work because they're the one that's always being emailed.
So that was the first thing.
And so the three of us, we were a really tight-knit group, and we're all very aligned with not wanting to be the only human that was pinged or emailed.
And so it was like, let's just get it to a centralized place.
And so we just went to our manager and said, "We're going to build this. We need this to be more productive."
And they were like, "Yeah, makes sense. Do what you need to do."
Mike:
I mean, that's awesome.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah.
Mike:
Sometimes when I was an admin would happen and sometimes it wouldn't. But I do think some change has to happen that way of, "No, here's how I'm going to be more productive, and here's what I want to set up."
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah.
Mike:
So then were there... I guess what I'm getting at is, for admins that hear this and like, "Oh man, this is me," were there other checks that were already in place that you didn't have to deal with?
There was already a check with HR or the person in payroll in terms of onboarding these people. You didn't have to go and say, "Can you..."
Because I was the same way, to be honest with you. I would find out when I was an admin, "Oh, so-and-so needs a Salesforce license," two days after they started when HR sent out the announcement of the new hires.
And I was like, "Hey, there has to be some process that you onboard these people to the company. Can I be part of that?"
And I kind of had to unwind HR and figure that out because they didn't know that Salesforce was a part of this department and they didn't know that people need to be onboarded for it.
You sound like you didn't have to deal with any of that.
Michelle Wolf:
We did not. That onboarding process was already handled by a team.
And so when the hiring manager said, "Yes, we're going to offer," and they accept, they already knew what systems, what equipment they need, what systems they need access to, and then what types of permissions they would need to ask for from Salesforce.
So like what team they were going to, so that that request could be put in. All that hard legwork was already done.
So to those who might not have that, I think the biggest selling point could be onboarding experience.
A lot of companies are focusing on what that hiring process, what that onboarding experience is. And as someone's starting a new job, I want to prove myself early on. I want to say, "I'm here, I'm ready to work."
And if I can't access my systems, even though it's fully out of my control, I still feel like I'm not doing my best as an employee, as a new employee.
So you can leverage just even the onboarding experience that they have, the equipment they need, they have the logins that they need on day one, on the day that they need it.
Mike:
Yeah. And you don't have to go into detail, but what are the key, I guess I'll call them, milestones in your onboarding flow that the new people get sent?
Do you have training materials, or do you have a video that's Michelle being like, "Hi, I'm your Salesforce administrator"?
Michelle Wolf:
If only.
Mike:
I know. I always say that and everybody's like, "Oh, that'd be a great idea."
Michelle Wolf:
It would be. It would be.
Mike:
"It's just 4,792 on my list of things to do."
Michelle Wolf:
Exactly. When I have that free minute, I will absolutely get to that next.
Mike:
Yeah. And also my other two admins, because it can't just be me.
Michelle Wolf:
Right. "Here's your Salesforce team. We're here to support you."
Mike:
Yep.
Michelle Wolf:
So what we built into our process was, in my Flow automation, there was actually a second autolaunched flow that would close out the case.
And this did a couple of things. One, it closed out the case so they had a complete close of the loop and updated the reason as completed by automation because a human didn't have to touch any part of this request.
Mike:
Ooh, that's cool.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah.
Mike:
I like that.
Michelle Wolf:
Clean reporting. Who doesn't like that?
Mike:
I mean, for a while, I remember doing approvals or something and somebody asked me, "Well, did you actually do this or did Salesforce, the Flow do it?" And I was like, "Well, the Flow did, but the Flow ran as me." Then it marks that. But I like that you added that completed with automation.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah. But we also added two email actions.
And one was to the requester. So the individual that opened the case through the screen flow, it sent them an email telling them that the request had been completed.
And then the second thing was, when the user record was created, it then updated the Requested For field, which was just a custom field we made on the case for a user lookup with the new user that we'd made.
And we sent a welcome email to them and said, "Welcome to Salesforce. Welcome to our company. Here's how you access our org."
And it had the link for the SSO. Yeah.
Mike:
Because at the point that the person's creating the case for you to create the user, they've already had an email assigned to them.
Michelle Wolf:
Correct.
Mike:
I like it. That's pretty sweet.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah. It was just a nice clean way to close multiple loops that ended up getting started.
Mike:
So then, not to dig into it, and this is where I wish I should have seen your presentation, do you also have a process for adding them to... I don't know if you guys have Slack or different things like that.
How, outside of maybe that user emailing you, do they have not necessarily an open loop, but at least a channel to ping back the admins and say, "Oh, hey, I got everything except this doesn't work, or, "I'm not seeing X," or, "How do I upload a profile picture?"?
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah, absolutely. So for our new hires, basically all of that was handled in their new hire training, a lot of that initial setup support.
However, in our screen flow, we actually made it a full-service utility where when you went to launch the screen flow, you could say, "I need help with Salesforce. Something's broken." Or, "I need a new user."
So it was this full access path to us where they could put in multiple requests depending on what they needed.
Mike:
I like that. And I'm assuming it's not Michelle, but you have people in the organization that do training. How much do you have to keep them updated in terms of, "Here's what the new user experience is like for Salesforce"?
Michelle Wolf:
As far as?
Mike:
Just anything. Anything that would change or anything that they may encounter, new features.
Michelle Wolf:
Oh, yeah. So anytime we would build any type of enhancement, we worked very closely with our training department.
We knew if we're going to help make starter material for an announcement for the call center for X, Y, Z enhancement, training's also going to need that material and probably a deep dive hands-on demo so that they can incorporate it into their training materials.
So any new builds like that, our training department was really involved even from early-on stages of the development because they interact with new employees, and they see that interaction differently than someone who's been here for five, 10, 12 years and knows how we use our Salesforce.
Even just how we design and where we put things on the Lightning page, they would often give us input from a new hire perspective to ensure that we're building good things.
Mike:
Now, just because we're nerdy here, did you have a way of capturing that? Was that a case as well?
Michelle Wolf:
That was just conversations.
Mike:
Oh, okay.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah. It was, "Hey, we have this thing. We want a demo for you. Give us feedback," type of stuff.
Mike:
I didn't know if you were capturing that in terms of tech debt or things we need to build, things we'd like to build, and things we need more money to build.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah, depending on what it was. It was just good old-fashioned scope creep.
Mike:
Okay. Yeah, that usually happens, unfortunately.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah.
Mike:
I've talked about Flow and AgentForce. I've been around now. I remember from 2006 when we finally had drag-and-drop WYSIWYG page editors to now we have... Well, I've seen agents build apps now. So I feel like I'm coming full circle.
If you haven't already, if you were to bake some AI into your Flow, are there things that you would change or things you'd want to change and do different?
Michelle Wolf:
I don't know yet because I spent so much time getting it to do what I wanted it to do with all my magic formulas in that Flow. I don't even know if AI could have helped. Now, AI did help me make those formulas. But I don't know how I might leverage AI to improve this process even more.
Mike:
Yeah. No, that's fair. I mean, I have friends, and they always razz me a little bit because I work for a tech company, and they're like, "What'd you put AI into today?"
And I think that's a call that admins need to make is, "Where do I need to add it?" Not just for the sake of adding it.
I think we always talk about internally when we're creating content, "Well, don't AI wash everything." You don't have to include AI in it if it doesn't make sense because for yourself and your other two admins, that's one more thing you have to update or keep track of.
And if it doesn't need it and you could do it somewhere else more effectively, then you should.
Which sounds crazy, but it should be in the right places for the right interfaces, as opposed to, "Well, I included it because I could include it everywhere."
It's like putting frosting on everything. The bacon cheeseburger doesn't need frosting just because you're a frosting company.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah, exactly. And I think maybe the next iteration that could include AI would just be on the initial request, especially for individuals wanting help with Salesforce. Maybe leveraging an FAQ-type of document for the things we do get commonly asked questions about. But for the user management, I'd really have to sit down and think of how that could apply.
Mike:
Yeah. Or even an agent to serve up, "Here are three questions everybody asks and here's links. Do you have any other questions besides that?" And be a little proactive in terms of FAQs and stuff like that.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah.
Mike:
So outside of email and stuff, does that seem to work okay? Or are you more leaning towards if we had Slack or anything different, we can maybe change things?
I always worried when execs were like, "And then I want it to email me." I'm like, "You do know you have 10 salespeople. And if they have to close four deals a day, that's 40 emails on top of the eight billion you already get."
You didn't have any executives with concerns on email velocity when you're onboarding 80 people?
Michelle Wolf:
Oh, no, because of the 80 people, the emails from the requesters were really going back to the onboarding team.
And so it was a way for them to check off the list that that system is done.
So just like they would do it for other systems or other access for Jira or their Microsoft Teams access and all that stuff. It's just closing that loop with the onboarder.
We did have one concern when one of the managers was new, and so 20 of the new hires was theirs.
Mike:
Oh.
Michelle Wolf:
But that's not the norm. You know what I mean? It's not necessarily that all the time you're going to be hit with all of the approvals, but it did happen.
"You're new, you're getting a full class of newbies. Good luck."
Mike:
"Congratulations. You now have 20 more emails."
Michelle Wolf:
Exactly.
Mike:
When you presented this, I'm curious, fresh eyes, sometimes you can sit in silence and between you and your other admins, you're like, "This is boss. I can't wait to show people."
And then you show people, and they have a lot of questions.
Is there questions that people had that maybe caught you off guard or you didn't think they would ask you about?
Michelle Wolf:
I don't think any questions really caught me off guard, but the types of questions that came up were, "How did you come up with your approval process?"
I was lucky that my approval process was already established within my organization. You get a new hire, it's the direct manager that approves it.
Other organizations, it's the system admin that approves that this position and title in human deserves and needs access to do their job function.
So it just depends on how your organization slices that cake, but someone should be approving access to an org.
Mike:
And you know what's funny is, I probably asked you at the beginning of the podcast, but those are always the questions that I try to get out of people because especially when me and my team are building demos, the process behind what we're building, we just don't even think about.
It's like, here's how the tech would do it. But the tech is only there to support the process.
And nine times out of 10, everybody in the audience watches your presentation like, "Got it. Now I know how to build it. It's going to take me three months to get this process ironed out because either there's a lack of one or there's a shared understanding of how people think things work."
And those are the questions to really ask. Are there questions that they came up with that your company hadn't figured out yet?
Michelle Wolf:
No, of course not. I had all the answers.
Mike:
Perfect.
Michelle Wolf:
No, I don't think so. Because my solution covered 80% or more of the situations.
Even in the event of your admins, say your admins are responsible for giving an individual an access to the org, but then they're also responsible for giving them access to some connected program that integrates with your org, but your admins are responsible for providing that access.
My Flow included that if a manual comment is added or if a checkbox is selected that they need this access, it adds a comment to the case using the case comments and then leaves the case in an open status, like in progress, so that your admins can go in and finish that process.
Mike:
Oh, cool.
Michelle Wolf:
And then when they close the case, it just still does the rest of that email magic to tell everybody that it's all done. So we left openings for those situations where manual changes would be necessary to complete the full onboarding from our team.
Mike:
That opened up a host of questions in my head. So can you create a user without going through your case and Flow?
Michelle Wolf:
Manually. Yeah. None of that's turned off, but we do prefer them to use the Flow.
Mike:
Right. I didn't know if you flagged it as, "This went outside the Flow," or something.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah. The only situation where it wouldn't... No. No, we stopped making users manually because the user would still get created. It would just leave the case open. So no, it's physically possible. We do not make users manually.
Mike:
Nice.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah.
Mike:
That warms my heart to know that. Well, it's always, you build the coolest solution and then the process goes around. And I remember having a manager tell me that. He's like, "Nobody's going to use Salesforce as long as they can put orders in on spreadsheets."
Michelle Wolf:
That's fair.
Mike:
Yeah, that was the truth.
So the opposite of that, do you have an offboarding process? Is it like a similar Flow where if an employee decides to leave, does somebody create a case and that triggers your team to shut down the license?
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah. We actually built in a deactivate. We called it remove because our business calls it remove users, but it deactivates the user. When you choose that option in the flow, you get to use the lookup to deactivate the user. And then we also had a freeze, and I call it thaw instead of unfreeze. So we had a freeze and thaw process.
Mike:
I like that. That's awesome.
Michelle Wolf:
So yeah, we did a freeze and thaw process and we also had an update permission. So if somebody was changing teams, so somebody got promoted from customer service to sales, you can just put in the change request and once it's approved, off it goes.
Mike:
See, that's what differentiates what you built from everything else, because nine times out of 10, an admin will, "Okay, I'm going to build an onboarding thing."
You're building a user management system, and you have the organization bought into it. "This is how we do this for this system."
And it keeps a chain of custody, and it keeps a nice record for you as well. Especially the permissions update stuff, that's got to be handy.
Are you ever asked to report out people whose permissions have changed or, for whatever reason?
Michelle Wolf:
I don't know that we were ever asked to report that. And the company that I built this for actually had an Apex that did all of the permission and groups assignments. It was built out with metadata and permissions because when they built that out, user access policies didn't exist.
Mike:
Gotcha.
Michelle Wolf:
So when I built it for my demo, I'm not a developer, I'm not going to build out that Apex solution, but I used the user access policies for providing those permissions and assignments for that portion of the automation and access.
Mike:
Yeah. I have a million more questions. I think one that people would ask. Usernames. So I don't need to know usernames, but did you put in a way to make sure that the person submitting the case doesn't have to think about the username and it's still for-
Michelle Wolf:
Yes.
Mike:
Okay.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah. So I use a [inaudible 00:32:21].
Mike:
So you knew the answer.
Michelle Wolf:
I did.
Mike:
It took me longer to put the question together and you're like, "I already know the answer, Mike. Spit it out."
Michelle Wolf:
So they only gave us their first and last name, their email address, and then the identifier that we used for our SSO or Federation ID, and then what team they belonged to.
So we knew what permissions and then who their manager was so we could get the right approval.
Everything else was done through the formulas. And that's the tricky part. That is one of the ways in which the automation can fail.
And it's the unique username and the unique alias. Because when you're on the new user record, Salesforce does all that magic for you. They do all the hardlifting to figure it out.
And so instead of a one in four, because it uses the first initial, the first name, and the first four of the last names, so instead of a one in four, I made it a two and four for the alias to increase my chances of not having a duplicate.
Mike:
Right, because there could be a lot of Susan Smiths out there.
Michelle Wolf:
Exactly.
Mike:
Yeah.
Michelle Wolf:
And so what I did was I also built in on a fault path, essentially a loop. So if it failed, I would add a digit to the end and then have it try again.
Mike:
Oh. Would it incremental the digit?
Michelle Wolf:
Yes. Yeah.
Mike:
Well, that's smart.
Michelle Wolf:
And that way I could... I'd still have a chance that it's going to not work.
Mike:
I mean, if that poor guy hired 20 John Smiths, we're going to work that formula.
Michelle Wolf:
To the bone, for sure. I used Flow. I used the power of Flow to really be as hands-off as possible with it, up to and including, we wanted to keep a minimum of 10 licenses available.
We always wanted 10 emergency licenses available. So before I create a user, I have it go get my org data to make sure I have 10 Salesforce licenses at least available.
And if I don't, then it won't make the user. It just leaves a note on the case and leaves the case open.
Mike:
Saying, "You're at your minimum of 10."
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah. So we built in some of those custom safeguards that were special to us. We wanted that. So we put that customization in there.
Mike:
I like that. That's really cool.
Michelle, you've enlightened me. I'm excited. I want to go build a Flow and onboard people and make perm sets a thing. I don't know. I feel like you probably have some solid time with an AI writing a lot of formulas.
Michelle Wolf:
Yes. Copilot and I got real buddy-buddy.
Mike:
Yeah. I mean, AI is really good at writing formulas, so thank goodness for that, right?
Michelle Wolf:
Yes, yes. I can do them, but those complex ones were a little on the edge of my capability.
Mike:
Oh, yeah. I can do with validation rules and stuff, and it requires parens. Once we get past one set of parens, I'm done. I'm cooked.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah.
Mike:
That's it. Nope. I bow out early. I can't swim in the deep end of that pool. And I've seen people work with 15 nested statements. I'm like, "I'm exhausted reading this. How do you even know what it's doing?"
Michelle Wolf:
Right.
Mike:
Well, thanks so much for coming on the podcast and telling us about this.
I think it's really cool. I hope you have an opportunity to share that onboarding Flow with more people and present it at more user groups.
Michelle Wolf:
I had a suggestion to make it a hands-on training.
Mike:
Yeah, it sounds cool.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah.
Mike:
That sounds really cool. Maybe you should suggest it for TDX next year.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah.
Mike:
Because that's a very technical, hands-on... People would love that.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah. Well, they didn't pick it up this year, but I'm not sure I sold it very well. So we'll try next year.
Mike:
I mean, it's all in how you sell it sometimes.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah.
Mike:
And also whether or not places have space for stuff like that. Not every track gets certain kinds of... It's a thing. That's a whole other rabbit hole within a rabbit hole that we could go to. I could do a whole series of podcasts on it, and nobody would listen to it, but I would think it would be interesting. And five people who write submissions would.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah.
Mike:
Awesome. Well, thanks so much for being on the podcast.
Michelle Wolf:
Thank you so much, Mike. It was a pleasure.
Mike:
A big thank you to Michelle Wolf for sharing how she turned user onboarding into a thoughtful, scalable Salesforce process.
My takeaway for admins is simple. Flow can automate the clicks, but your understanding of approvals, access, permissions, and business context is what makes the process work.
Now be sure to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast and share this episode with somebody who is ready to get their user management out of their inbox and into Salesforce.
Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Nikita Kothari, Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Salesforce. 
Join us as we chat about using Setup with Agentforce to understand and manage record access.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Nikita Kothari.
Setup with Agentforce simplifies sharing
Why can't I see this record? It's a simple question but, as any admin knows, finding an answer can get complicated quickly. If you've ever found yourself digging through Setup pages and running SOQL queries to troubleshoot permissions and record access issues, this episode is for you.
This week, I'm talking to Nikita Kothari, a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Salesforce. She's here to tell us how Setup with Agentforce can help solve sharing mysteries. Using natural language questions, admins can trace access across org-wide defaults, role hierarchies, sharing rules, groups, and manual shares to figure out what's really going on.
Troubleshooting permissions and record access issues
As Nikita explains, permissions and record access issues are so complicated because they are affected by many overlapping configuration settings. Small changes can accumulate over time, especially in a reorg.
Setup with Agentforce was built to help you detangle these issues with simple natural language prompts. You can put your questions about permissions and record access to an agent, instead of having to wade through 1,300 pages of Setup to figure it out on your own.
Once you've got a handle on what the problem is, you can use Setup with Agentforce to help you implement changes and get everything sorted. And it's built with trust in mind: every write action requires your explicit approval, the agent is bounded by your permissions, and every configuration change is captured in the Setup Audit Trail.
Plan permissions for your org
If you're trying to figure out where to get started, Nikita recommends starting small. "It's very difficult to go back and fix something," she says, "so I would highly recommend trying any changes in a sandbox with the minimum set of users to see if it is working as expected or not." 
And because Setup with Agentforce makes looking at permissions and record access so much easier, Nikita recommends taking advantage of it to conduct a monthly permissions review. Again, these issues accumulate over time, so an ounce of prevention is truly worth a pound of cure.
Make sure to listen to my full conversation with Nikita for more on Setup with Agentforce and how to get sharing straightened out in your org. And don't forget to subscribe for more episodes of the Salesforce Admins Podcast.
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Full show transcript
Mike Gerholdt:
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we're talking with Nikita Kothari, Senior Member of the Technical Staff here at Salesforce, about using Setup with Agentforce to understand and manage record access. Sharing can be one of those invisible parts of the platform until someone can see a record they shouldn't or can't see one they need to. Nikita explains how admins can use natural language questions to trace access across org-wide defaults, role hierarchies, sharing, rules, groups, and manual shares. We also discuss why validation, permissions, testing, and human approval remain essential when AI helps make configuration changes. So give this episode a listen, click that subscribe button, maybe share it with another Salesforce admin who's ever asked, "Why can this user see this record?" Let's get Nikita on the podcast.
So Nikita, welcome to the podcast.
Nikita Kothari:
Thank you, Mike. It is amazing to be here. I'm from the engineering team, so you'll get my lot of perspective on how we are building Setup with Agentforce on sharing.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, that's exactly what I wanted to talk about. Let's first get a little acquainted with you. What do you do at Salesforce, and what are some of the things that you've worked on?
Nikita Kothari:
So it's been close to two years I'm working with Salesforce. And currently, I'm working with access control and sharing space. What pulled me in is the realization that sharing is one of those invisible infrastructure layer. When it works, nobody thinks about it, but when it breaks, it actually breaks the customer trust. And you know how customer-centric Salesforce is, its number one priority is trust. So there is lot of critical issues that we are dealing with and we are trying to make the sharing as the best place for the admins. And we love our admins and we are trying to make things better for them.
Mike Gerholdt:
I love our admins too. I used to be one for a while. I'd like to still think I am, but we'll see. Well, let's get into it.
So I read your article and I'll link to that in the show notes. Tell me, I mean, before Setup with Agentforce, what did an admin have to do to answer a question of, why can this user see this opportunity and this user not?
Nikita Kothari:
Oh, good question. So it's the simplest way of dealing with solving the sharing's toughest problems. So just to enable the Agentforce, you don't have to do anything. It comes along with the Agentforce. So go to the setup page, search for the Agentforce agent and enable your Setup with Agentforce, and then you can start writing those questions. You don't have to know anything beforehand, that's the best part of the Agentforce setup.
And sharing is the challenging domain, I won't deny that. It is very, very complex. So answering even the simplest question that you ask, like, "Who this person is having access for this thing," it requires to look into a lot of different domains like OWD, role hierarchy, sharing rules, sharing groups, manual shares, to see which layer actually give that access to that particular user. And looking that information, sometimes it's easier with the UI, but most of the time user has to run lots of SQL queries to get the correct answer. And previously, admin was spending hours of work and sometimes even the afternoons just to deal with that single questions. And with Setup with Agentforce, it just a minute of work. You just give prompt to your chatbots and it'll give you the correct answer within seconds.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. I mean, boy, it used to be a lot of archeological digging. I think you called it that in the article. I know I used to have to feel like I was going through a checkbox, but tell me, I mean, walk us through a real investigation where an admin discovers that a user can see a record, they probably shouldn't. How would they use Setup with Agentforce to trace where that access came from?
Nikita Kothari:
Yeah, great question. So while building these actions, we particularly divide it into two different segments. First segment is the read action and the second segment is the write action. Just to keep it, things untangled, read actions will help you to investigate. When you ask a question like, "Why Nikita has access for these things?" So our agent will go into the background, it will do all kinds of research and it will come up with the best answer. "Okay, Nikita is part of this group, and these groups provide the access to this particular record." And what a write action on the hand will do, it will help you to solve that problem. Now you know Nikita is part of the particular group. You can go ahead and ask your write action, "Can you please remove Nikita from this group?" And your write action will help you to remove that particular user from that group and boom, your problem is solved within a few minutes.
It's reliable, it's fast, and I'm sure admin can save a lot of time with these two things. And you don't need to know which action or which thing you need. You just write the plain natural language and our LLM will be able to guess where to navigate and how to solve that problem.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. No, I hear you. I think you walked us through what a good sharing investigation looks like. But for you, is there a sequence admins should follow so that they don't just jump straight to changing configuration?
Nikita Kothari:
I would say I would highly recommend admin to start playing with the read action. There is no particular sequence, I would say, but mostly how the sharing is defined is like first we have the OWD, which provides the base access to the records and to the objects. And then comes the role hierarchy, then comes sharing rules, then we have public groups and queue and we have the manual shares. So at each level, sharing opens up the door for more access. So if you're going below the hierarchy, sharing will provide more and more access to the user. And if you want to close that access, it's not easier that one sharing rule will open up the access and then you create another sharing rule to close the access. It's not how it works. So in that case, you need to spend a strategic amount of time thinking how you can revoke that access.
And sharing is accumulation of the small, small, small decisions over the time. Sometimes adding someone to the group, for the reorg, you have to do lot of things with the sharing, and every decision gets compound. So I highly recommend our admins to at least spend 30 minutes a month to refresh and reanalyze their sharing configuration to avoid the future problem. So this is basically the flow looks like, but I would say there is any of sequencing which admins should follow. It's pretty much open and admin can ask any question to our agent.
Mike Gerholdt:
No, I think you're right. I mean, Setup with Agentforce can do a lot in terms of explaining the configuration and then help change it. I think you really touched on that last answer of just slowing down for a second, verifying what the answer is to make sure that you're staying in control. My question to you would be, how should an admin validate what the agent tells them?
Nikita Kothari:
Oh, that's a good question. So for the read action, the information, we have mostly the links added to our prompts. We call it as a clickable link. So if investigation is saying that Nikita is part of this group, actually, there is a link of that group. So you can go to that group by clicking on that link, and you can actually see I'm a part of that group if you want to re-verify the stuff. So, that will give you more confidence that you know how admin is investigating the information or if admin is saying, "Nikita is part of the sharing rule and you'll have the link for the sharing rule." So you can actually go and verify whether that sharing rule contains the group or the users where it is providing that access.
And with the write action, I think more critical is the right action. I mean, you don't want somebody, AI is coming to your system and randomly making changes to your system. So to do that, we have the validation layers. The first validation we generally come up with is for every write action, we explicitly ask for the approval, approval from the person who is making the changes. And we also have the permission boundaries, and if particular user doesn't have the permission to edit OWD, the agent won't be able to edit OWD for that person.
And then the last part is the accountability. Every change we are logging into the setup audit trail saying that whether the AI agent did it or actual person did it. And then admin can verify it, whatever changes is made by the AI agent are trustable or not. So we will always advise admin to go and do as much as possible testing on the sandbox before making changes into the production.
And another backup system is the Einstein Trust layer. We always say trust is our number one priority. So, Salesforce has built trust everywhere to make sure that we are not blindly making any changes, and as this is a very, very critical domain to our customers.
Mike Gerholdt:
No, that's great. You talked a lot about sharing, and I always feel like making a change with sharing, you want to make sure that you're doing it right. In your opinion, what is the most important thing an admin should review before making a sharing change?
Nikita Kothari:
So I would say, as I said before, we have some of the steps that I also wrote in my blog, that we have OWD sharing rule, rule hierarchy, and everything opens up the more access. So to close that access, it's very difficult to go back and fix something.
So, I would highly recommend whenever our admins are making the changes, try it out first thing on the sandbox if it is working as expected or not. Or have some verification system or another set of eyes whenever you create some rule hierarchy or you're providing some access to the rule, rather than giving access to all of the user, first try with the minimal set of the user. Try with the one user and see if that user are getting right access to the right record. Because even if you fail to provide a single user a wrong access, that means that you're leaking your data. So having those, another, just starting with a small and then going into the bigger and bigger data, that would really help admin to build the reliable system.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, absolutely. I think it can do a lot and I've seen it do a lot, but what is something that Setup with Agentforce can help with today that maybe admins may not realize?
Nikita Kothari:
I feel like still adoption, it's tricky because people are quite a lot thinking that Setup with Agentforce will replace their job. But I would say rather than replacing, it will provide you a lot of capabilities and it will remove a lot of overhead from your day-to-day work life, rather than going and looking into the SQLs or doing everything by yourself, just give it a try. And then you can see how much opportunity it is opening up for you to save time. And that time you can actually use for building a more structural, and because structure mattered a lot when it comes for sharing. How your roles are getting access or how your groups are getting access. And if you're just blindly following the steps and not thinking much, then you are in a trouble. So you can spend more time and thinking about, how can you better make a structure for your organization? And you can get more time to think about your business. And I feel like most of the troubleshooting cases we have covered into the Setup with Agentforce flow. Yeah.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. You mentioned a lot, admins should get out and use it and try it, and I'm a big proponent of that. So I'll end on this question. What for you is one kind of low risk question that an admin could ask Setup with Agentforce today to better understand their sharing configuration?
Nikita Kothari:
I think my one of the favorite action among all of it is record access, to ask why this person is having access to this record. And you see how much it can do, it will give you the whole list of the OWD configuration for that particular record, or it will look for the sharing role, it will look for the group membership, it will look for the manual shares. And it will do all kind of investigation for you just when you type a one single natural language to your agent.
So you can always think about someone which is having more knowledge about the setup. It's sitting with you and helping you to deal with all of the setup configuration. Because setup, again, we have like 1,300 setup pages, which is lot. And going through all and learning the capabilities of each setup action, it's difficult. So, that's why we built the Setup with Agentforce, which will give you the capability that you don't have to learn everything on the go. And you can start asking question to our bot. If it won't be able to answer, it will guide you in the right direction to help and analyze your queries or your concerns.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. I am so glad that we have Setup with Agentforce. I feel like I could have used it 20 years ago. I know I had a lot of questions and would have to dig through my notes on org-wide and sharing and group sharing and all kinds of that stuff. So, I appreciate it. And I appreciate the article and you taking time out of your day to talk to admins and share your knowledge about sharing and setup and how we can do things better.
Nikita Kothari:
Yeah. I think admins are always on the top of our list. I would love to hear from our admins how they like this Setup with Agentforce, specifically with the sharing, how it is helping them or what they are looking forward to, because I feel like most of our critical projects and best solution came up with the admin feedback. And we really want to make admin life easier. We always have meetings internally, our engineering team, our product is always so much focused about thinking about our admins, thinking about the newer way to introduce some more features to make their lives easier so that they can focus on building a reliable solution. So, it was great talking to you.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, no, I'm glad you could share your knowledge with us today. Thanks so much.
Nikita Kothari:
Yeah, thank you so much. And one more thing, we will be at Dreamforce. Larry Sherrill is our Product Manager. They're having a lot to share at Dreamforce. So, feel free to stop at user access booth. I'll be there too, so come and say hi and share your feedback. We would love to hear back from you. And we keep making a lot of progress on Setup with Agentforce, so stay tuned, follow our blogs, and it will be something will be really helpful in future for you guys. Thank you so much.
Mike Gerholdt:
Thanks again to Nikita for helping us understand how Setup with Agentforce can make sharing investigations faster without taking judgment out of the Salesforce admin's hand. And the takeaway is just really simple, use AI to uncover the source of access, validate what it tells you, and test changes carefully before they reach production.
Now, if you enjoyed this episode, and I bet you did, I hope you did, you should subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Share this episode maybe with your team, fellow team, user group. Oh, I like that, if you'd share it with the user group, that would be awesome. And then, how about this? Start with one low risk question about your own org sharing configuration and ask that to Setup with Agentforce. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.