Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Marianna Torres, Associate Salesforce Labs Evangelist at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about the Salesforce Labs AI Library and how it can get you started with implementing AI agents in your org.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Marianna Torres.
Growing up, Marianna was always interested in more creative pursuits and had never considered a career in tech. That all changed during the COVID-19 lockdown when she enrolled in a workforce development program called Year Up United and landed an internship with Salesforce.
Today, Marianna works on the Salesforce Labs team, curating the Salesforce employee-built apps, components, and flows that are available for free on AppExchange. Now with the release of Agentforce, the team has put together the Salesforce Labs AI Library as a resource to help you get started with AI.
If you’ve been keeping up with the pod, you know that prompt engineering can be tricky business. But what if you could copy all the best, most useful prompts from Salesforce product experts?
That’s what the Salesforce Labs AI Library is all about. It gives you everything you need to get AI agents up and running. When she’s going through submissions, Marianna asks three simple questions:
If the answer is yes, it gets included in the library, ready to help you implement Agentforce AI in your org.
If you don’t know where to start, Marianna recommends going through the Salesforce Labs Basics on Trailhead. You can also listen to the full episode, where she walks Josh through the process of looking something up in the Salesforce Labs AI Library.
That’s it for this episode, so be sure to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast and we’ll catch you next week.
Josh Birk:
Hey, gang, Josh Birk, your guest host here for today. Today we’re going to talk to Marianna Torres about a project that I am very, very excited about. It’s live now, it’s called the Salesforce Labs AI Library. I’m really not sure if I’m getting that name right, but I will ask Mariana here in a second.
All right. Today on the show, we welcome Marianna Torres to talk about the Salesforce AI Labs library. Do I have that title right or is there are more official one?
Marianna Torres:
The Salesforce Labs AI Library is the official title. But yeah, you did a good job. Yeah.
Josh Birk:
Okay. Welcome to the show. First, I want to talk a little bit about your early years. Was computers and software engineering, software in general something you always wanted to get into?
Marianna Torres:
Honestly, no. I’m actually surprised about how I ended up here at Salesforce. But yeah, so growing up and stuff, I was always more of a creative person, so I was drawing, singing, doing all that. Basically anything that’s creative, I was doing.
So as I got older, it kind of got to the point where it’s like you kind of realize that, okay, it’s like I can go to school, I could pursue this, I could potentially do something. But at the same time, I had graduated and it was shortly before COVID.
Josh Birk:
Oh.
Marianna Torres:
Yeah, so instead of going the traditional route, I had just joined a workforce development program. The program was called Year Up. Yeah, so through that I did the six-month corporate training. They had transitioned it to virtual and everything. So yeah, I actually started my internship here at Salesforce in 2020, so peak COVID. And from there one thing led to another, I was a contractor for a couple years, and then I got full time.
Josh Birk:
Nice, nice. What was the connection to get into the AI labs job itself? Other than the fact that we get paid a nickel every time we say the word AI.
Marianna Torres:
Yeah. So yeah, the team that I’m with now, it’s the exact same team that I had joined five years ago as an intern, and that is the Salesforce Labs team. So primarily, our job is to provide our customers with some free employee-built apps, components, and flows on AppExchange. Then this past whole year, AI became huge, and then we had to pivot and we’re like, “Okay, the customers want AI, what can we give them?” Seeing as how AI wasn’t packageable yet, so-
Josh Birk:
Right.
Marianna Torres:
Yeah, we actually just launched Actions, I believe. So Agent Actions are now packageable, prompt templates are not though, neither are full-on agents. So that’s what this library serves as, it’s a little resource for our customers to go in and grab some pre-made prompts, just click that copy button and then import it directly into Agent Builder. So too long [inaudible 00:03:17].
Josh Birk:
Right. It’s a kind of deploying, I guess.
Marianna Torres:
Yeah. It’s a quick little resource just for everyone to get started fast with Agentforce, with Agent Builder, all that.
Josh Birk:
Gotcha. What’s your relationship with AI? Were you getting into it as you were in the intern? Have you picked it up with your job? Do you use it day to day? Et cetera, et cetera?
Marianna Torres:
Oh, yeah, so that’s a great question. Okay, so I know that AI’s definitely been something that’s… It’s been mainly the back burner of my mind until maybe the past year or so. So in 2023, okay, I had went back to school to go and finish my degree, and it was, I think ChatGPT had just exploded, and everyone was using ChatGPT and stuff.
So in school, obviously it was very strict. You can’t be using ChatGPT to write your essays. But I was using it to review it, so please fix any grammar errors and stuff. So with that, I kind of got a hand on of it, but it was here at work that I got to fine tune it. So at school, I was kind of experimenting with it, but then here I got to, okay, it’s like look at this blog post I wrote and just expand on it. So I kind of got the hands-on skills here mainly, so it’s like I had more freedom here than what I did at school. So I was using ChatGPT and then fine-tuning everything, all that kind of stuff.
And then, yeah, at the time, I was also doing a lot of promotions and stuff for Labs, so YouTube videos, just promotional videos, all that. And AI just kind of opened a whole new door for us. So before all the videos that I would make, they were silent. It’s like I wasn’t confident to have my voice out there and stuff. But then what’s it called? ElevenLabs comes out and it’s like, oh, you can have AI generated voices for your videos, and I’m like, “What?”
Josh Birk:
Oh, wow. Okay. Okay.
Marianna Torres:
Yeah. So yeah, it’s like I’ve definitely been… It first came out, I was kind of like, “Okay, yeah, whatever. It doesn’t impact me directly,” until it actually did impact me directly. And just here at Salesforce, I got to actually be able to experiment with it, see more of the capabilities with it and work with it. I think that’s the best part.
Josh Birk:
Gotcha. When you are out talking to people, do you have stories about how people are using the AI library, like how they’re implementing it in their own uses?
Marianna Torres:
Yes. So the AI library was actually just launched at Dreamforce, so that was September of last year. And just our customers were blown away by it. It was okay, it’s like you’re met with this new technology. Okay, you’re kind of prompt engineering, I think it’s what they officially call it, but creating those prompts and stuff. Where do you even start if you’ve never worked with AI before?
So the resource itself has gotten a lot of great feedback. It’s like everyone’s been very excited about it. And I want to say that right now, it’s like the Salesforce Labs team is a very small team, so our main goal is to evangelize it. So I want to say that not as many people know about it as we would like to yet. But whenever we’ve presented it to them, it was always like this just people have had such a great reaction to it and just they’re very eager to explore it and engage with it.
Josh Birk:
Yeah. Well, let me give the AI library some credit here because it’s… So first of all, I have a kind of peeve about the term prompt engineering, because I kind of feel like it turns it into… Sounds like a scientific approach or something like that.
Marianna Torres:
Exactly.
Josh Birk:
But the point is valid. What is a good prompt? There’s some resources out there, but if you’ve never actually sat down, it’s kind of like the blank paper writer problem, like how do you write your first great novel? Your prompts are amazing. They’re really, really good. I look at them and I’m like, “Oh gosh, I have to up my game now because they’re really good.”
So it’s kind of a two part question. First of all, what’s the process of writing and reviewing these? Because they’re very, very good examples. And then also just kind of, I guess the flip side of that. What’s the process for, if I submit a prompt to you, what’s the process for potentially putting that in the library?
Marianna Torres:
Yeah, so, okay, Salesforce Labs is an internal program. So basically, all the prompts that are on that site were written by experts within Salesforce. So we work with employees from all over the organization, and just some of them have gotten… It’s like they gotten a really good understanding and really good experience with Agentforce and with their own respective experience within the company and stuff. So those prompts, they were created some pretty top-notch people, you know?
Josh Birk:
We’re talking like the actual Stanford genius people.
Marianna Torres:
Yeah, I was looking at them, I was like, “You know what? I don’t think I could have craft this myself.” But no, yeah. So in short, they were all built and created by Salesforce experts within their own fields and stuff.
Josh Birk:
Got it.
Marianna Torres:
So internally, we do have a process within Slack. We basically allow every single employee who is interested in submitting a prompt to just fill out that workflow. Then we look at it, we review it. First, we see if it’ll provide value to customers. But then we also check to see is, okay, is there a prompt on here that’s already kind of the same thing? And if yes, we’re not going to move forward.
But so far, yeah, the submissions have been people who’ve built with us, people who don’t just understand the program on a general level, but on a very technical level. So this is the prompts that they’re creating, it’s like the real world problems that they’ve heard from customers. And just with their knowledge of the platform, with their knowledge of Agentforce, they’re able to kind of craft these templates to just kind of support in that way.
Josh Birk:
Got it. So if you’re a solution engineer out there and you’re listening to this and you just saved somebody’s bacon because you got a really good prompt template for a very specific use case, then they should go to your workflow, right?
Marianna Torres:
Exactly, yes. And we are always taking submissions. So this is PSA for any Salesforce employee, any SC, any developer, whatever you are, if you have a prompt that you’re proud of, and if you want to share it with customers, come to us at Salesforce Labs and we will add it to the library.
Josh Birk:
Now, I will say I’ve actually gotten a little bit of fame for testing out Prompt Builder by showing people how good it is at writing poetry in Haiku. How would that go through your review process?
Marianna Torres:
I’m sorry, Prompt Builder for a haiku. Yeah.
Josh Birk:
Yeah. Okay, fair. Fair. I cede the point. I concede the point.
Marianna Torres:
No, that is awesome. But as of right now, yeah, the library is only to host those prompts that support.
Josh Birk:
Got it. Got it. Okay, well, walk me through, give… It’s a little harder on a podcast, but kind of walk me through the navigation of the library. So not haiku, not poetry, but what are some of your categories and audiences?
Marianna Torres:
Yeah. Okay, so once you log into the Salesforce Labs AI Library, the main menu basically shows you a sub-menu of the Salesforce products. So you’ll have sales, service, marketing, industries. If you click on any of those, you’ll basically be redirected to a respective collection of prompts for that product.
Josh Birk:
Got it.
Marianna Torres:
So if we go down to, let’s say the service icon, you’re going to go ahead and click that, and then here, you already have a few prompts that can help you inside of your day-to-day service ops. So we have case classification, complaint attribute generation, that kind of thing. You would basically click into one of those tiles, and then from there you’ll get access to the prompt.
So on the left side, you’ll get a little overview of the prompt. You also get the category, template type, whether it’s a flex or not, basically all that general stuff.
Then on the righthand side of the page, you’ll see the actual prompt highlighted inside of blue. And here, we have you are a highly skilled agent support working at organization name, assign a case reason to the case owner based on their subject and their description. So there’s a lot more to this prompt than what I just read, but we have this very handy copy text button that you can just click that and now the entire thing is copied to your clipboard, and it’s pretty self-explanatory. You head to Agent Builder and just drop that in there.
Josh Birk:
Fill in the blanks.
Marianna Torres:
Exactly.
Josh Birk:
It’s deployment by Mad Libs. I like it. I like it. So the other thing I want to shout out to this is because not only are the prompts very well written, and I kind of want to dig one layer deeper into that in a second here, but it’s also like if you’re listening to this and maybe you’re an admin and you’ve been struggling with that, why Agentforce? Right? Why would I bring this into my company?
These are very solid use cases that are going to apply to a lot of people, and it might help answer that question like, “Oh, Agentforce could do that for me. Why don’t I build a prompt to get that done?” So huge kudos for that.
So going back to the prompt engineering bit, when you see a prompt, what makes you think this is a good prompt?
Marianna Torres:
So right off the bat, I want to say it’s the first, it kind of goes back to what I said earlier, but is this going to help the customer? And I want to say that my understanding is also very… Comes from a lot of just looking at these Salesforce Labs apps that our employees contribute every year.
Another big thing is does this simplify something that historically takes a lot of time to get information from? [inaudible 00:13:30] the actual technical aspects, myself, I’m not super technical, but it’s like right away I’m like, “Okay, which objects does this reference?” Is it something that the customer has to build out themselves, or is it just right there that it just grabs and goes? That kind of thing.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Marianna Torres:
I want to say that those are my top three for reviewing a prompt and seeing which ones would be most valuable to our customers.
Josh Birk:
Right. Well, what I love about the style of them is that, like I said, I’m looking at these prompts. I’m like, “Oh gosh, I need to get better at this.” Because not only do they follow a lot of the good rules, like it’s very succinct, but it’s also very instructive. When you’re reading the prompt, you can kind of say to yourself, “Oh, this is what the AI needs to understand.” And it’s like if there’s something that might be a curveball for it, we’ll make sure that that’s an instruction on the prompt. So I feel like reading these prompts actually makes it a little bit clearer as to kind of how a prompt is sort of that component between the user and the AI itself.
Marianna Torres:
Yeah. When you’re running a prompt, just one line isn’t going to do it. So it’s like the more that you give the AI, the better. So as you said, it’s like you have to instruct it, you kind of have to guide it. I think that that’s another thing too, it’s like does this prompt have the necessary guidance it needs in order to provide the information that the user needs?
Josh Birk:
Right. Right. They’re not good at guessing. They just hallucinate when they have to guess.
Marianna Torres:
Exactly.
Josh Birk:
I think the phrase I’ve always gone back to is context is king. You have to tell them something. Sometimes you even have to tell them twice and put it into both or slash slash slash. There’s some weird trick about putting in the apostrophes, and apparently that’s supposed to be like, “Hey, AI, really pay attention to this kind of thing,” so yeah.
Okay, so let’s look forward. Do you have new material that you want to shout out? And do you want to go into the new deployable actions?
Marianna Torres:
Okay, so first off, I just want to call out that the Salesforce Labs AI Library is live. So you can go in there, you can grab the prompts, templates, they’re all there ready for our customers to use.
We also have a new section, for Actions and for Agent Topics. So from my understanding, okay, so Agent Actions are, in fact, packageable now. They were not packageable when we built this out. So if you also want some quick agent actions, we got them in there too. And then some agent topics as well as some pattern templates. So the future of the site is actually, it’s like we are moving very, very fast, but it’s like this site will live as a resource for AI and Salesforce Labs, whatever that looks like in the future.
Josh Birk:
Got it. Marianna, one final question. What is your favorite non-technical hobby?
Marianna Torres:
Does guitar count? I kind of think it-
Josh Birk:
It does.
Marianna Torres:
… kind of counts as technical.
Josh Birk:
Oh, yes.
Marianna Torres:
Yeah.
Josh Birk:
Yes. So I have run into this with this question so many times, and the two topics that people challenge me on, are they really technical? One is gaming, and I’m a video gamer, so I personally think it’s a non-technical hobby because my programming brain turns off whenever I’m playing. And then the other one is music, and the reason is because people think music is technical in that terms of understanding the song, right?
Marianna Torres:
Yeah, it’s like you have to understand it, but also just even when you’re putting together a song, I don’t know, it’s like you really have to think and stop and, okay, if I play this chord, is it going to-
Josh Birk:
Right. Right. You’re-
Marianna Torres:
Does that fit nicely? It’s kind of like a puzzle, I want to say, kind of. Yeah, it’s very-
Josh Birk:
Yeah, no. So yes, I considered a non-technical. I also got challenged on that one by one Kevin Portman, when he asked if I would consider woodworking technical, and that was a tough one to call out, but yeah.
Marianna Torres:
I have no idea how I would’ve answered.
Josh Birk:
Love it. Love it. Well, Marianna, thank you so much for the great time and the conversation and the information. That was a lot of fun.
Marianna Torres:
Of course. Thank you for having me, Joshua. And yes, I also want to do one last call out the Salesforce Labs Basic Trail. Take that to learn more all about Salesforce Labs, who we are, what we do, and the kind of apps that are available to you.
Josh Birk:
Love it.
Marianna Torres:
Thank you so much, Joshua. This was awesome.
Josh Birk:
You’re so welcome. Listen to her people, head off to Trailhead.
I want to once again thank Marianna for the great conversation and information. And as always, I want to thank you for listening. Head on over to admin.salesforce.com for more on the show. You can see the show notes, you can hear old episodes, and, of course, as Marianna noted, go over to Trailhead to see about the great trail, to learn more about the AI library. Thanks again, everybody. I’ll talk to you soon.
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