When you go to login.salesforce.com, do you consider what happens technically once you’ve logged in? In many ways, you don’t need to because Salesforce thinks about it for you. But if you want to better understand how Salesforce empowers your enterprise applications, there’s no better place to start than its concept of tenancy.
Think of tenancy as the architecture that powers everything you do on Salesforce, from logging in to the system to define new data structures, to creating automations and developing applications. In the age of artificial intelligence (AI), this architecture gives you a powerful platform to start building your Agentforce solution. Let’s discuss how that works.
Before Salesforce, the rise of software as a service (SaaS), and the ubiquity of cloud computing, software was largely a client-server model. Even as web browsers became the popular user interface, they operated against a customized back end running on specific servers.
Consider this like building a house with various rooms to provide functionality depending on what the house guests need. So, a company will have one house with many rooms for many guests.
Cloud computing changed this concept by offering services to many companies at the same time. Gmail, for instance, offers a big house with a few special rooms for many, many people. Expand that to Google Suite and you’ve got a huge house with even more rooms.
Multitenancy with Salesforce is more like a massive apartment building where people can have their own homes, invite their own guests, and, most importantly, customize their unit with changes to layouts and rooms. One tenant might have a cat-friendly home, another might have an impressive kitchen, another might have an indoor garden, and so on.
Now, to say this is an oversimplification would be an understatement. Consider some of the complexities involved in allowing people to customize their own home when there are hundreds of units under the same roof. How do you make sure neighbors can’t hear other neighbors talking about their private lives? What happens when someone’s room requires far more electricity to run than someone else’s?
On one hand, this is where Salesforce Admins shine. Who’s allowed inside? Who should have access to what rooms? How do you revoke access to someone no longer welcome? Who’s responsible for making the room layout as efficient as possible?
On the other hand, Salesforce handles it—from providing security at the front door of the building, to throttling utilities, to providing the tools to help build the best possible environment. There’s a lot of technical wizardry involved in making that happen. If you want a deep explanation of how this works, check out the white paper listed in the Resources section.
In the end, what’s important is that Salesforce provides a lot of what your apartment will need: security, electricity, plumbing, etc. However, if you want a custom room (an application tailored to your users), it can also provide that.
How does this fit in with your company’s AI strategy? Imagine your agents are the personal robotic helpers who can perform tasks between your guests and different rooms. They’re tailored specifically for your house and only available to your guests. You don’t have to leave the house to get the benefits of the robot, and the robot can handle any connections to external vendors you need in order to get jobs done. The fact that the robot is tailored for your home means it already knows the layout of all the rooms and, to push the analogy further, where all the forks are kept.
Consider the opposite: If you wanted a robot to tend to your guests without using Salesforce as your starting point, you’re on the hook for everything—from the land to the foundation to the plumbing and electricity—before you can even put up a front door and doorbell.
Possibly more importantly, all the work you’ve put into customizing your home involves the same skills you can use to tailor your robot to work the way you need. And you can apply these skills to Agentforce.
Want to learn more? Sign up for an Agentforce NOW workshop.
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 […]
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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 […]
