As admins, you hold the keys to success for your users and companies to get the most out of Salesforce. You have the unique opportunity to build and manage trusted solutions that drive productivity and innovation through five core admin responsibilities: security, user management, data management, analytics, and a new core responsibility: product management.
The admin core responsibilities are built on all of the skills you develop through your work as a Salesforce Admin. With advancing technology like artificial intelligence (AI) and Agentforce, the admin role is rapidly evolving, making it more important than ever to prioritize these core responsibilities.
Low-code Salesforce tooling has expanded significantly over the past decade to include generative AI and Data Cloud, empowering admins as tech leaders. As the Salesforce ecosystem continues to grow, so does your role as a Salesforce Admin. Agentforce automates tasks, boosts efficiency, and supports workflows, all while working within existing security protocols.
You can tailor Agentforce abilities through custom actions, ranging from text-to-speech conversions to integrations with third-party systems. By staying informed about AI and emerging technologies, you’ll better support your organization and stay ahead of the curve.
Let’s review the core responsibilities and the ways you can build a firm foundation in each of them by leveraging Agentforce.
User management involves configuring access, measuring adoption, and observing and communicating with users.
When you approach a new technology such as AI or Agentforce, consider how a feature or tool can save you time. As best practice, think about creating a User Feedback app to manage all of your user interactions and feedback. And consider how Agentforce can help you summarize that feedback. Using AI in the flow of work helps you prepare for that next meeting or summarize user sentiment.
Another way to use Agentforce as an admin is to create an agent to help you onboard new users to your organization. Watch this video for a demonstration of how Agentforce puts the power in your hands to build agents that support your admin responsibilities.
By consistently applying these best practices, you build trust with users and stakeholders, streamline business processes, and improve overall user adoption.
In the age of AI and Agentforce, clean data is paramount for achieving optimal outcomes. Agentforce relies heavily on accurate data to effectively automate tasks and provide insightful responses.
Bad data—such as duplicate, inaccurate, incomplete, stale, or hoarded information—can significantly hinder Agentforce performance and lead to inaccurate results. For instance, if Agentforce attempts to summarize a customer record riddled with inconsistencies or missing fields, the generated output is unreliable, potentially leading to poor decision-making and frustrated users. Maintaining clean data is essential for unlocking the full potential of Agentforce and ensuring the success of AI-driven initiatives within Salesforce.
In the words of Salesforce Admin Lizz Hellinga, “If your data isn’t ready for generative AI, your business isn’t ready.” Clean data is no longer optional. To hear more from Lizz, tune into the Salesforce Admins Podcast episode, Agentforce’s Best Friend: Clean, Reliable Data.
Salesforce product management is all about managing Salesforce as a valuable product within your individual organization. It’s not just about maintaining the system—it’s about ensuring Salesforce delivers maximum value and return on investment (ROI) to your business.
This involves a multifaceted approach that includes strategic planning, a deep understanding of business needs, solution design, staying current with Salesforce updates, implementing governance, and continuously improving your Salesforce implementation.
This also includes managing any new Salesforce products or applications installed from AppExchange. As Salesforce adds new technologies such as Agentforce, it’s your responsibility to research the technology, work with stakeholders to whiteboard use cases within your organization, and successfully launch and implement it for users and customers.
As with any new Salesforce product release, admins should work with both IT and stakeholders to gather different perspectives, ensure a successful rollout, and gain buy-in. If your organization has a governance committee in place, that’s an excellent starting point!
Agentforce (or any AI product) can feel a little overwhelming to stakeholders who don’t have hands on the technology. A great way to secure this support is to demo Agentforce functionality to your stakeholders to set the stage for a collaborative discussion on how the technology can successfully go to work in your organization.
Show a quick demo that captures the power of Agentforce as a jumping-off point for your brainstorming. Rather than spending tons of time creating an organization- or industry-specific demo, focus on showing stakeholders how the technology works and give a more general demo of the features. Then, you can brainstorm ways this can affect your custom business use cases. This gives you tangible takeaways to build your company’s first agent based on your mission and priorities. It also gives your stakeholders something to be excited about. They can be your advocates when you launch Agentforce, so that you’re set up for success on user adoption.
You’re responsible for safeguarding sensitive data within the Salesforce environment. This includes understanding and implementing security measures like multi-factor authentication (MFA), IP restrictions, login hours, and permission sets to protect against unauthorized access and data breaches.
When you’re well-versed in security best practices, you help maintain the trust and integrity of the platform by ensuring users have the minimum level of access necessary to do their jobs. And by minding security, you also contribute to increased user productivity by providing streamlined access to the resources your teams need.
You also play a vital role in managing agents and ensuring responsible AI practices. From a security perspective, it’s important to make sure your users aren’t exposing Salesforce data to large language models (LLMs) that are outside of the trust layer. This could include downloading or exporting reports and uploading that data to an external AI client that’s not on the Salesforce Platform.
Admins can give users access to autonomous agents through Agentforce to assist with common Salesforce tasks. Note that the Einstein Copilot permission respects standard Salesforce access controls, like licenses and permissions, ensuring secure user actions.
You have a unique opportunity to harness emerging technologies to drive data-driven decision-making and implement analytics best practices across your organization.
Use Data Cloud to unify customer data—whether it’s within Salesforce or from external systems—into a single, real-time source of truth. With this comprehensive customer profile, you can use Salesforce Flow, now integrated with Data Cloud objects, to build more intelligent data workflows. Think calculated insights, identity resolution, segmentation, and activations—all automated and tailored to your business-specific needs through Flow capabilities. This opens the door to more dynamic, precise, and powerful analytics.
The right tools can amplify this impact. Tableau offers robust visual analytics to help you create insightful dashboards and reports that reveal key trends like user behavior and adoption patterns. Pulse for Salesforce complements this by bringing AI-powered insights directly into Salesforce CRM, offering out-of-the-box metrics and AI-generated trend summaries—all without users needing to navigate away.
Embedding insights right where work happens keeps everyone in the loop and ready to act. And with AI, like Einstein, woven into analytics tools such as Pulse and Data Cloud, you can use generative AI to automatically surface analytics, create plain-language explanations, and alert stakeholders to performance changes. The result? A more intuitive and accessible analytics experience for everyone, making data more actionable and impactful for all users.
You can also use these tools to better understand user behavior, which helps you improve your organization’s Salesforce instance. Customizing your Salesforce instance, including the integration of AI-powered tools like Agentforce to address business problems, and then using analytics to measure the success of these changes, is a key part of your role.
Emerging tech isn’t just about new tools for admins—it’s about making Salesforce more meaningful and actionable for everyone involved: stakeholders, users, and customers. As admins, we’re the Salesforce champions of our organizations. We understand the Salesforce Platform and know the data points inside and out that make AI initiatives successful, which positions us at the front of the AI charge for our organizations.
To learn more about the admin core responsibilities, complete this Trailhead module.
In a flash, Dreamforce 2023 has come to a close, leaving us with a clear vision of how #AwesomeAdmins are empowered to shape the future of business. Whether you joined us in person or streamed content on Salesforce+, this year’s Dreamforce illuminated a path to a 
bright future for admins, driven by the latest technology […]
If you’ve tuned into any podcast or blog post on data recently, chances are you’ve heard data referred to in lofty terms. “The oil of the 21st century” and “the lifeblood of any business” are some that come to mind for me. What is definitely true, in the context of your Salesforce environment, is that […]
Twenty years ago, while managing systems for the IT team at a small software company, I was encouraged by our CEO to think of myself as a business person first and an IT person second. He knew of my love for working with systems and data, and suggested that employing those talents to optimize processes […]
