As Salesforce Admins, we’ve dived headfirst into Agentforce. We’re building agents in Trailhead, attending workshops like Agentforce NOW, doing hands-on sessions with our Community Groups and at conferences like TDX, and coming up with ideas of how to put agents to work for our individual business need, even bringing that to fruition through events like the Agentforce Hackathon.
But as the builders of Agentforce solutions, sometimes it feels like we’re living in a vacuum. Until we get our stakeholders engaged and demonstrate the true need of Agentforce for our organizations, all our work is happening behind the scenes.
Let’s change that! In this post, I’ll share three steps to maximize your time and effort and deliver the most productive results to engage stakeholders who can champion Agentforce at your organization—bringing your hard work and vision to reality through demo, trial, and deployment.
As with any new or emerging technology, artificial intelligence (AI) and Agentforce can feel overwhelming to stakeholders who don’t have the experience that admins do. Admins are hands-on with Agentforce, and that’s a huge advantage!
A strong demo is the first step to gain stakeholder buy-in. It’s been my personal experience (both as the person delivering and as the person watching a demo), that the greatest success in getting leadership excited and willing to pursue an implementation starts with a story in motion. Seeing is believing—and a demo helps gain buy-in, build excitement, and guide decision-making. This will help level set and get your stakeholders to that comfort level before you start to have conversations about what your agent needs to do.
As you prepare your demo, think about telling a story to your audience. Set up your formula for success by establishing the problem, the solution, and the outcome. Be sure to answer these questions along the way.
A lot of times, I’ll use these questions like an agenda as I move through my demo. How you answer them will depend on your audience. It’s very important to know who you’re talking to and be able to answer the questions from their perspective. What’s important to an end user might be different than what’s important to your leadership team, yet both can be stakeholders.
Another pro tip when delivering demos is to keep it simple. You don’t need to focus a lot of time and effort on creating the perfect use case for your organization. On the contrary, you can simply show how Agentforce standard actions, such as summarizing a record, work. Something I’ve seen work really well is using the Coral Cloud app in Trailhead. That way, you get the experience, you get the Trailhead badge that goes toward your Agentblazer status, and you can show a really thought-out example of an agent at work without investing huge amounts of time.
When you schedule your demo, make sure to reserve a large amount of time. You aren’t just showing functionality—your demo will generate inspiration. Spend the rest of your time brainstorming together and capturing ideas of what an agent can do for your business.
As you whiteboard together, start to value map your ideas to find quick wins and prioritize your AI strategy in Salesforce. This is something you’ll be able to come back to over and over again as you evaluate what’s next for AI and Agentforce at your organization. You can add and remove ideas and continue to collaborate.
This will give you ideas to go build in Agentforce, and come back with a custom demo that’s designed for your company.
With use cases recorded, we can do what we do best as admins—and probably love most about our jobs—get building! Take the ideas from your brainstorming session and build them out in Agentforce. I recommend starting with the quick wins and then continuing to develop a strategy for agents at your organization.
There are a couple ways you can start to implement the ideas from your brainstorming session. You can build:
So, you have your use case. How can you take the next step to embed your agent in your business? Here are a couple tips to get started before heading over to Agent Builder.
First, make sure you have a clearly defined Agent Role. What are the jobs to be done that need to happen? Keep in mind that you can have multiple agents with different roles; you don’t have to try to make a single agent that does too much.
From there you’ll want to write Clear Instructions and know the actions the agent will take. There are standard out-of-the-box actions that you can leverage, but to extend your agent and truly embed it in your business, Custom Actions are going to be game changers. And this is where you can use your admin superpowers with Flow and Prompt Builder!
For more tips to successfully bring your vision to life, check out this blog on 5 Important Lessons for Admins Building in Agentforce.
After you create your agent, take it to your stakeholders for feedback and go through the iteration cycle. Until you all feel it’s ready for your users or customers, there’s still important work to be done.
Agents can be surfaced in many locations. Where will your agent interact with your users and customers? Some of the places you can embed agents include in a community site, website, mobile, Slack, and Salesforce. You’ll want to make sure you do thorough testing before your deployment and rollout.
The location your agent lives will impact how you train and onboard users. It also gives your stakeholders the chance to build excitement about Agentforce within your organization, whether it’s highlighting time savings, additional resources for users, or a way to provide faster experiences to customers. Having stakeholders build excitement for Agentforce will assist with adoption and encourage more users to embrace AI.
As your users work with agents, you’ll gain valuable insight into how they’re working and will need to iterate over your Agentforce implementation to consistently make the partnership between agents, users, and customers more valuable. Agentforce development is a cycle that admins will continue to refine and evolve.
To learn how to demo Agentforce to stakeholders, host collaborative discussions on how agents and AI can successfully work in your organization, and manage an Agentforce implementation, watch the TDX session on Demo to Deployment: Engaging Stakeholders with Agentforce. The resources below will also help you on the journey from demo to deployment.
Editor’s Note: This post was updated on April 3, 2025, with the latest information and resources. As Salesforce Admins, you’re well-versed in delivering Salesforce features to your users and stakeholders. Salesforce Foundations makes it even easier for you to get the most out of Salesforce by adding cross-department features built into your existing CRM. Salesforce […]
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