5 Important Lessons for Admins Building in Agentforce

In my role as Lead Admin Evangelist on the Admin Relations team, I have been dedicating my time to not only learning Agentforce but also building agents and creating demos for Awesome Admins to adopt Agentforce at their organizations. Through the process of building, testing, and refining, I’ve gained some valuable insights that all admins should consider when building their own agents.

Lesson 1: Follow a setup checklist

There’s nothing more frustrating than searching for agents in Setup and finding they aren’t available, or going to Agent Builder and discovering you don’t have the ability to create a Service Agent. 

Agentforce Setup involves more than just assigning the Permission Set license. If you’re starting from scratch and have just had Agentforce turned on in your Salesforce instance, there are several steps you need to take before you can dive in.

This Salesforce Help article is a go-to for setup and enablement so that you can enable Einstein Copilot for Salesforce settings, give users access, and manage agent settings in Agent Builder.

If you learn by doing, check out this Trailhead module to Configure an Agentforce Service Agent. You’ll find step-by-step instructions to enable agents in Einstein Setup and add a permission set to the agent users’ profile.

Lesson 2: Create a journey map before building

Many organizations implement artificial intelligence (AI) agents without a clear understanding of their intended purpose. Without upfront planning, you open your organization up to creating technical debt rather than driving efficiency for your users and customers. 

By collaborating with your stakeholders and users prior to implementing Agentforce, you can identify which tasks will save time for both users and customers, and what types of questions they will ask. This helps you plan ahead and save time when using Agent Builder. If you’re unsure where to start, take a look at this resource with five questions to ask when building your first agent.

This process will also help you determine the types of automation needed and where to implement modular flows for reuse and maintainability, making it easier to manage and enhance automation across your platform. 

For more advice on rethinking your approach from building massive flows to developing smaller, reusable utility flows—what we like to call modular flows—check out this blog post to build smarter automation in Agentforce.

Here’s a checklist to follow.

• Determine outcomes with stakeholders.
• Work with users to create a list of questions they would ask.
• Map out the best resource for custom actions. (Is it a flow? A Prompt Builder template? A Prompt Builder template grounded by a flow? Do you need to add data resources for RAG?)
• Create your resources.
  • Flows
  • Prompt Builder templates
  • Any resources
• Create topics.
• Add standard actions.
• Create and add custom actions using your resources.

Lesson 3: Tests in Agent Builder Preview have REAL ramifications for your data

We all know that testing in a sandbox environment is a best practice. This is especially true for Agentforce testing because using the Agent Builder Preview in your production environment can have real ramifications for your data. If you test in production, you risk updating and creating records in your Salesforce instance, which can lead to technical debt and frustrate your users.

Another excellent option for testing Agentforce is the Agentforce Testing Center, a first-of-its-kind AI agent lifecycle management tool designed for testing autonomous AI agents at scale. With the Testing Center, admins can test Agentforce using synthetically generated data, ensuring accurate responses and actions.

Lesson 4: It’s all in the instructions

As you build in Agentforce, your agent’s performance will be directly influenced by the instructions you add to your topics. Writing good instructions in Agentforce involves crafting clear, actionable, and precise guidance for agents. 

Instructions are simple to add, and by doing so you can often resolve issues directly in Agent Builder without needing a new Prompt Builder template or a custom action. This ensures that agents can effectively assist customers while maintaining the desired brand tone and adhering to company policies.

Some tips for writing effective instructions to enhance Agentforce performance include:

• Use simple, straightforward language: Keep your instructions clear and easy to understand.
• Break down complex processes into smaller, manageable stepsb Simplify tasks to ensure they are easy to follow.
• Avoid jargon: Agentforce understands natural language, so use terms familiar to agents and users.

Lesson 5: Don’t load your agent up with actions

Adding too many actions to each topic can cause performance degradation. When creating your journey map and planning what you would like Agentforce to handle for your users and customers, carefully consider what needs to happen in each custom action you’ll create with flows, Prompt Builder templates, and other forms of automation. 

While it’s easy to plan out many small actions, the best strategy for a performant agent is to be strategic with your actions. After extensive testing, we recommend keeping your agents to a maximum of 15 actions to ensure strong performance. The good news is that you can create multiple agents and map out which actions are most appropriate.

Now you’re ready

While considering these lessons might add additional steps and require extra setup time initially, they will save you time and frustration as you become more familiar with building in Agentforce. By following these guidelines, you can build, test, and deploy effectively, ensuring an exceptional agentic experience for your users and customers.

Resources

• External site: YouTube: Salesforce Admins Agentforce Video Playlist
• Salesforce Admins site: Agentforce Resources for Admins
• Trailhead: Get Ready for Agentforce