Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Alexandra Iyer, Director of Marketing Strategy and AI Transformation, and Global EVP of Abilityforce at Salesforce.
Join us as we chat about the Agentforce for Good Hackathon at TDX and what happens when technology, accessibility, and community come together to solve real-world problems.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Alexandra Laxmi Iyer.
This year, we added a new twist to the types of problems you could solve for at the TDX Hackathon. We called it Agentforce for Good, and it offered participants a way to work on some big problems: food insecurity, nonprofit volunteer coordination, disaster relief, and more.
That’s why I’m so excited to bring Alexandra “X” Iyer on the pod. She’s the Global EVP of Abilityforce, Salesforce’s internal business unit for people with disabilities and their allies. They’ve been running an internal accessibility hackathon for years, and Agentforce for Good grew out of a desire to open it up to the community and broaden its scope.
“Builders who probably never thought of themselves as social impact developers shipped working Agentforce solutions for all sorts of big problems,” X says, and 62% of this year’s Hackathon entries were solving for Agentforce for Good.
“When we are challenged with designing for the edge, you make the center better,” X says. Finding challenges that force you to push tools like Tableau, Slack, and Agentforce in new ways helps you uncover capabilities that you might not have otherwise thought about. As X likes to put it, “Good design is just good design, full stop.”
Going forward, X and her team are looking for ways to expand Agentforce for Good beyond TDX. Consider this a call for participation, and she encourages you to get in touch to volunteer or bring Agentforce for Good to a community event near you.
“One of the main things I would love for people to take away from our conversation is that your lived experience is a credential,” X says. “It’s not a distraction.” After all, designing around new challenges is how we come up with innovative solutions that nobody else would have thought of. Your unique perspective is valuable.
Make sure to listen to the full episode for more insights from X. Next week, we’ll hear from the winner of the TDX Hackathon, so make sure you’re subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast.
Mike:
This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, we’re talking about what happens when technology, accessibility, and community come together to solve real world problems. I’m joined by X or X, who is the director of marketing, strategy and AI transformation at Salesforce and Vice President of Abilityforce to discuss the Agentforce for Good Hackathon that happened at TDX. Now we’re going to find out that it started as an employee-led accessibility initiative.
And has grown into a community movement bringing together admins, developers, partners, and customers to build solutions that address challenges like food insecurity, disaster relief, and volunteer coordination. We’re going to talk about why designing for inclusion leads to better outcomes, how AI can help scale impact, and why your lived experience might be one of the most valuable design credentials you have.
So if you’re thinking about how data automation, AI agents work together to create meaningful change not just inside your organization, but in the world around it, I promise you this episode is for you. So let’s get Alexandra on the podcast. So Alexandra, welcome to the podcast.
Alexandra:
Thank you for having me, Mike.
Mike:
I think it’s going to be a fun conversation because we’re talking about Agentforce for Good today. So let’s get started to learn a little bit about you and your path to Salesforce and your path to the Agentforce for Good Hackathon.
Alexandra:
Absolutely. Thank you for asking. And by the way, I go by X for short, so feel free to call me X.
Mike:
Perfect.
X:
I’m the director of marketing strategy and AI transformation for our customer success and partner marketing team here at Salesforce. And I’m also the vice president for Abilityforce, our employee resource group for people with disabilities and their allies. And when we’re talking about the Agentforce for Good Hackathon, this is really a moment where these two worlds actually collided. Normally, they wouldn’t collide, but the hackathon is genuinely where they did.
I come from 20 years of go to-market experience. I’m not a builder by background. I actually got curious in a marketing role about the products that I was marketing and how they worked. So that curiosity pulled me into the platform, into development, into force certifications that I did not see coming. And then, I went from talking about technology to building on it and that changed everything. I believe that the AI era is only worth building if it’s built for everyone.
That’s not a tagline for me. It’s a design requirement. And I truly feel that admins have always known that. Admins are the ones closest to the humans using the platform, the problems, the friction, the gaps. And I also believe they’re the closest to the solution. So I think it’s not a support function, it’s a superpower and I’m really happy to be here.
Mike:
Yeah. Well, I agree with everything you had to say, X. I do agree that admins are very superpower. I also think just in general, when we think about technology, it’s not how do we roll it out for some people? It’s how do we roll it out for everyone? And I remember this is a long time ago, but when I first joined a company that did workplace assessments, I remember they said, “Well, when creating the test, we have to assume the person doesn’t know how to use a mouse.”
And I remember thinking to myself, this is … closed-minded is the wrong word, but I just was unaware. And I was like, “Well, who doesn’t know how to use a mouse?” And they’re like, “Well, you don’t understand.” And I was like, “Oh, that is a huge challenge.” And sometimes until you get someone else’s perspective, do you really understand like, it’s not that you’ve been living under a rock, it’s just too often sometimes people assume their world is just like everyone else’s world and it’s not.
So there’s a Mike side of I had to remember that not everybody knows how to use a mouse sometimes.
X:
Well, Mike, frankly, I consider that the main dish. I don’t think it’s a Mike side. I think that if you’re designing for the default user, it’s not really good technology and that when you optimize for the average, you’re excluding by design. So I think it’s the main dish and it’s part of the reason why the Agentforce for Good Hackathon even exists. So to give you a little context, three years ago, the Agentforce for Good Hackathon was an internal-only, employee-only hackathon led by Abilityforce.
I mentioned earlier Salesforce’s business resource group for people with disabilities and their allies. And then, last year we said, “Why does it have to be about accessibility only and why does it only have to be for employees?” So then we opened it up to the community. We had partners and customers and employees all building on the platform, really stretching the platform, bringing us to TDX this year, where builders who really probably never even thought of themselves as social impact developers shipped working Agentforce Solutions for food insecurity, for nonprofit volunteer coordination, you name it.
So when we all come together to threshold platform for everybody, not the default user, we’re really shipping great technology and boy, did the admin community really show up for this.
Mike:
Yeah, no kidding. And just as kind of a teaser, next week on the podcast we have the winner of the hackathon to talk through their application. So that was a fun conversation, but let’s dive into what some of the things that you did around the hackathon, some of the stuff that you saw and what some of the participants tried to tackle.
X:
Absolutely, so we had … so a little fun fact for you is that of all of the submissions for the TDX Hackathon, over 62% of them self-selected to say, “I want to solve for the Agentforce for Good.” It wasn’t required. And then, 50% of the Agentforce for Good projects were participants could submit in multiple categories, but 50% of those 62% of the projects were only for Agentforce for Good. They solved things from disaster relief to supporting teams post-addiction to food rescue, truly really pushing the boundaries of the Salesforce platform.
Mike:
Yeah, absolutely. And I always think sometimes that we’re trying to solve problems with technology where it’s just how do you layer in the technology? But I do feel … and I was there when they gave the awards, I do really feel that the integral solution for a lot of these works the technology along with the process that is also needed. There’s just things you can’t do without the technology that when you layer that in, wow, it unlocks a different world.
X:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that when we are challenged with designing for the edge, you make the center better. And so I’m sure that some of these solutions that put together Tableau and Slack and Agentforce have uncovered some capabilities that maybe we might not have thought about, whether it’s for a good cause or not. So I do think it also allows very special kinds of developers and admins to come to the surface as well.
Mike:
Absolutely. So in your work with the community and around the community, what are some of the events that you go to? What are some of the presentations and content that you put out there that people find valuable and useful?
X:
Well, I mean, I’m only starting to get into the conference circuit or the community circuit, to be honest with you. I’ve been kind of-
Mike:
I like that we call it a circuit.
X:
Yeah.
Mike:
Get around the circuit.
X:
I mean, for me, it’s something that I’ve always been … and this might be a little too raw, but I am an open book, Mike, so hear me out here. I have never, ever had the … what’s the word I’m looking for? It’s kind of like, I guess confidence is the right word. I’ve never been raising my hand to say, “Oh, I should submit and speak,” or, “I should fight to attend this event because this really matters to me.” And it’s only recently where I’ve started to get my legs a little bit more to do that.
I’ve published a couple of articles on LinkedIn, building with Cloud Code, using Slack, Slackbot, all these things. And so, I’m just starting to get out there and really getting exposed to the possibilities of our platform. I actually don’t know how to answer that question, except for I’d love invites, I’d love to know what the community finds interesting and I’d love to facilitate doing good in the world, doing as much good as we are solving business problems.
Mike:
Yeah. I think … I mean, you’re also just taking the first step. Some people … I’ll just go, but I’ll never present. And I always encourage people, even … you don’t have to go to a big conference or you don’t have to present at Dreamforce, but even getting up and sharing things at your local user group, the thing I’m reminded of, somebody needs to see somebody like you presenting.
X:
Well, thanks for saying that. I’m actually presenting at Connections this week. Yeah. It’s my first real speaking session and we’re talking about how we’ve used Slack and Slackbot to scale top level support to our incredible partners. We have over 13,000 partners in the Slack community and we have a lot of different skills that we’re using to help our partners go to market faster in a more customized personalized way. And so, we’ll be talking about that. But back to the hackathon, the one thing I did want to underscore is that Salesforce has a total of 16 equality groups from Abilityforce, to Neuroforce, to Asiapacforce, to Outforce, BOLDforce.
And we all came together for this hackathon and we’re going to continue to do that. So likely, you’ll see us at Dreamforce and at TDX again. So I would love to have the community just continue to support this and participate and start the platform. I’ll say that our community is proving that intersectional volunteer-led initiatives drives higher engagement and faster product adoption than traditional top-down motions. And so, I just want to have a call to participation.
If your community or your listeners want to participate, we’re definitely open to having more volunteers support and would love to see these at our community events as well.
Mike:
Yeah. I’ve already been to a community event MidAtlantic Dreamin’, this year in Philadelphia. And I love going to those events because it is all community presenting and really showing their perspective on giving different solutions and tackling different challenges. And it ranges from technical through just giving presentations to your executives and having the confidence to walk into a boardroom and really working through that, not all the presentations are exactly technical.
And so, you can learn different skills that way, but I appreciate you bringing that up. That’s always very good and good for you getting up on stage. It’s okay. I do think sometimes … I’ve spoke on a lot of different stages. Sometimes it’s the smallest ones that are the hardest because once you get up on a big stage, there’s just so many people that your brain can’t absorb it. It’s crazy.
X:
Yeah. Well, I guess my little theater session at Connections will have to do, but-
Mike:
You never know, there could be 200 people there and do a little theater session.
X:
I know, I know. My goodness. Yeah. What I’m curious about, Mike, from your perspective is why do you think … Here I am, I’m asking you a question.
Mike:
Please.
X:
Why do you think we had such incredible participation? Because it really was humbling the amount of community support we got from folks joining the Agentforce for Good Hackathon.
Mike:
I thought about that too and I think it’s maybe a couple of things. One, I’ve been a part of either on the team where people around me are planning the hackathon. I’ve been in the judging room sometimes for a few of the events and going through, watching the submissions and watching the integration of how did they use Agentforce and what was the solution they were trying to solve. I feel like the opportunity for solving things that really provide, I’ll call it exponential value to the community, is so great.
And it also kind of, in some respects, opens up the creativity because depending on how long you’ve been a Salesforce admin, how long you’ve been a Salesforce developer, you might not have all of that kind of exposure into different businesses and different processes. I know for a long time, a lot of hackathon people were tackling things in the medical world and I won’t give away … Well, I can give away the winner because we all know it.
But the unique solution that they come up with, you have to think of it’s not what is the technology solved for, it’s what was the issue and the challenge that provided the biggest gap that technology proved out to do the most good. And I just think after talking with the winner and seeing that solution, I think a lot of people just genuinely found a lot of really satisfying things to build when it comes to solutioning … I’ll call it solutioning for good, as opposed to solutioning for profit.
X:
Right.
Mike:
Because then you’re like, wow, if we can do this, this and this, because the gaps are always there and they’re always huge because nobody … For lack of a better terms, nobody is maximizing good for profit.
X:
Yeah.
Mike:
And so, the thinking of just different things around animal adoption or adoption shelters or food and food insecurity, there’s always communication gaps there. And the biggest thing that AI we found and Slack, and some of these other tools, but the biggest thing that AI solves is communication. I was on Amazon the other day just not as a tangent, but kind of … and they have this new button now you can click and it generates kind of an AI overview of the product and some of the common answers to the questions that they have.
And I thought to myself, that gap probably didn’t exist, but AI solved it and AI is able to communicate with us. And I think that to me for things that do good and help others, communication is always the key and it’s always the biggest gap because communication at scale never happens.
X:
It’s interesting that you say gap and it’s making me think of something I’d love to share about our employee hackathon. So we are still doing our employee version of the Agentforce for Good Hackathon and this year, we’re adding an AI fluency track. So we have our traditional builder track, and then we have our AI fluency track and you don’t have to be building an agent to build something powerful.
Mike:
Right.
X:
And so, we want to provide an opportunity for admins and marketers and all sorts of folks to be able to confidently collaborate with AI to give our users agency to drive impact at speed and scale. And so, I think admins do a really great job at understanding human like you were saying the Amazon button and clicking that button as an admin, you kind of know why the user might click it or why they might click the wrong one because of maybe where it’s placed or is it accessible or things don’t get filled out correctly and you know how to create some workarounds.
And so, I think the AI fluency track for us is about really bringing more of that human element back into the AI. So I’d be curious if the community would be down with participating in an AI fluency track where it’s like writing … like it’s not about building something. Maybe it’s like the most artful skill, Slackbot skill, or maybe it’s a killer Gemini prompt or something along those lines. But I think you mentioning the gap really made me think about how I want AI for all technology that empowers everybody, but I also don’t want to leave anyone behind.
Mike:
Right. Yeah. I mean along those lines, I was talking today with my manager and we were discussing something and she’s like, “So what do you use?” Because at Salesforce we have a wealth of tools. I think comparative to … I’ve talked with other friends and like, “Wow, you get to use that and that and that?” And I’m like, “Yeah, and there’s probably more that I don’t know about.” And they’re like, “Geez, we don’t even have …” So that part alone was … I was like, “Yay. Well, I’m glad I have a wealth of resources.”
But she asked what I was going to use it for. And I said, “The biggest thing that I try to use AI for in looking at a lot of data on sheets or 10, 15 page documents, what are the blind spots for the stuff that I don’t normally pick up?” And that to me was the greatest prompts that I could use. And back to some of your Agentforce Hackathon stuff, I think actually that’s some of the biggest opportunities that admins have across their org is we always look at, well, how can the agent improve this or that?
Boy, I would just love it if … how could the agent just look at the record somebody created and be like, “Yeah, Jim, that’s not going to cut it.”
X:
Absolutely.
Mike:
“You left a bunch of fields blank and you know what, those fields are there for a reason. Go back and fill them in.” That’s what I would want. I would want a little snarcastic clippy coming up and being like, “I think you can do better.”
X:
Yeah.
Mike:
But it’s also not, how do I make myself perform in a greater capacity or increased speed? Yes, that’s part of it, but also, how do I make myself save myself?
X:
Yeah.
Mike:
So how do I look at this, but tell me what I’m not seeing because I don’t know to look for it.
X:
You’ve inspired me to share one of the main things I would love for people to take away from our conversation, which is your lived experience is a credential. It’s not a distraction. So how you experience things, the type of inputs you would want. In the Agentforce for Good Hackathon, we’re asking for accessibility and equity lenses that only people can have through their lived experiences of what’s broken, what’s inaccessible, what might be perceived as unfair in technology.
That is absolutely a credential and not a distraction. And so I am happy to hear that those are the types of thoughts you have and I hope that all of us do that. All of us have the agency to think about those things in our designs.
Mike:
Yeah. I mean, your answer brings me back to long ago publishing days and I remember I used to work selling textbooks and I worked the sales desk set by the editors and the author’s desks and we could all mix and mingle and talk to each other. I remember one of the authors for a book in New York City came over to my desk and said, “Can you read this question and tell me what the answer is?” And the question had, it was like for fifth or sixth grade, if the kid was at his window and wanted to look at the stars, what would he use? A microscope, a telescope, binoculars, or … I forget something else.
And I remember saying, “Oh, well, it’s obviously a telescope.” And they said, “Yeah, but you know that because you know telescopes exist. What if you don’t know that telescopes exist or what if you didn’t know you could see the sky?” And it was because it was based for a book in New York City where I live in the middle of the Midwest, I can go outside and see the sky. I can walk two feet outside my front door, but some people … And I’ve been in parts of New York, you walk outside and the buildings are so tall, you might not ever see the sky.
And I thought, wow, what an interesting perspective. And so, I use that example with a lot of AI bots that I work with to be like, here’s an example of, not a blindness, but something I wasn’t aware of. And can you look for something similar to that in my writing or in this thing that I’m looking at? Because sometimes if you grew up in the Midwest and you could always see the stars in the sky, you might not know that there’s a sky.
X:
Right, right. Okay. So real talk here, did you influence any of these authors? Are there books out there tech book-
Mike:
There was. There was. There were No Child Left Behind Test Prep books, which I think have probably faded into obscurity, but I probably have a few in my closet somewhere that I took before I left the company, but I would like to think so.
X:
I’m sure there is. And that’s such a good story and such a good analogy. I mean, at times I’ve thought to myself, well, what if you grew up every single day thinking blue was red and then somebody told you red was blue and you were wrong. Your perceived lived experience changes very basic things like that.
Mike:
Right. I grew up with Four Seasons because we have all of them in Iowa and some people haven’t. Or the other conversation I had with the author that was working on the New York books was around green grass because the likelihood that a child might not have ever seen green grass in their life is very high in New York City. And I was like, “Wow, actually you’re right.”
X:
Exactly.
Mike:
And you don’t think about those things when your perspective is, I can see green grass outside of my window, why can’t everybody else?
X:
Yep, 100%. Well, at the end of the day, this conversation that we’re having is exactly why the Agentforce for Good Hackathon is so important. One of my taglines in one of my recent articles is that good design is just good design, period. And it truly becomes non-negotiable when the stakes are someone’s health, their safety, or their dignity. And that is what is so exciting about the Agentforce for Good Hackathon.
Mike:
Yep. I think that’s perfect note to end things on. So X thanks for coming by and sharing with us on the podcast. And next week, we get to talk to the listener or to the hackathon winner.
X:
That’s going to be exciting. I can’t wait to tune in and thank you for the opportunity to share more about this hackathon and look forward to the next one.
Mike:
So that was a great conversation with X. I’m glad she could come on. And by the way, I teased it out, but just a reminder, next week on the podcast we have the hackathon winner on, to talk about their solution and what they’re passionate about. It’s a really great episode. One thing that stood out to me is that great solutions don’t start with technology. They start with understanding people, their experiences, and their outcomes that matter most.
As Salesforce admins, we’re often the ones connecting systems, stakeholders, and now AI agents to solve problems at scale. So whether you’re building your business, your community, or a cause you care about, there’s an opportunity to design technology that works for you. Be sure to subscribe so that you never miss an episode. And you know what? If you found this conversation valuable, share it with a fellow Salesforce admin. Until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.
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