Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Joshua Birk, Senior Director of Admin Evangelism, and Kate Lessard, Lead Admin Evangelist at Salesforce.
Join us as we chat about what caught our attention at Dreamforce, what surprised us, and what’s worth spending time on.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Joshua Birk and Kate Lessard.
Probably the most exciting announcement from the keynote is Builder Central. It’s a low and no-code workspace to enable admins to build fast and accurately, without compromising on security.
From React sites to flows to agents, you can get an idea off the ground with plain language prompts. But just because you move fast doesn’t mean you need to break things, thanks to automated testing, safety checks, and built-in controls.
“We can take what we as admins already know about data models and our org structure and really, truly define what we’re building,” Kate says. You can upload requirements documents and information about your organization’s business processes to make sure everything that you build works from the get-go.
The other thing that was touched on in the keynote was Headless 360 and the Headless Experience Layer. You can bring Salesforce to Slack, Claude, and anywhere else your users need to interact with your data.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by how many different ways there are for users to interact with your Salesforce data, know that you’re not alone. But at the end of the day, these are experiences that you’re designing for your users to make their lives easier where they’re already working.
Finally, the biggest takeaway from Dreamforce this year is that governance and trust are more important than ever. Hackers use AI too, and the threat landscape is constantly evolving.
Now more than ever, the role of the Salesforce Admin has shifted into governance. That means data cleanup and strict permissions controls to make sure that your agents are working as intended. And that also means getting a better handle on how your data is moving across platforms and who might have access to it.
Trust is a core principle at Salesforce, and so we’re rolling out new tools like Security Center Essentials and the Transaction Security Policy Accelerator to help you take control of what’s going on in your org.
There’s so much more great stuff in our September Monthly Retro recap of Dreamforce, so make sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us in your feed every Thursday.
Mike Gerholdt:
Before we jump into today’s conversation, I want to give you a quick heads up about what’s coming on the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Starting in October, we’re moving to two episodes a month with a little bonus episode to kick things off. So October 1st, we’re talking about how do I decide if a new Salesforce feature belongs in my org? Because Salesforce just released it and we should turn it on, are two very different things. Then on October 15th, Jennifer Lee joins me for a special video and audio episode, Winter ’27, What Admins Should Check Before Their Org Updates. We’ll help you figure out what deserves your attention, what you should test, and what you need to be ready for before the release hits your org. And then on October 29th, we’re asking the question, what does an admin certification prove in the Agentforce era? We’ll look at what certification tells employers and admins today and where hands-on experience and judgment fit into that picture.
So after October, you can expect two episodes a month focused on helping you understand what matters, why it matters to your work, and what you can actually do with it when you get back to your organization. And that brings us to today’s episode. So I’m joined by Kate Lessard and Josh Birk for a post Dreamforce conversation about what caught our attention, what surprised us, and more importantly, what’s actually worth an admin spending time on. We’re going to talk about Builder Central and what it could change about how admins build, new ways Salesforce can show up in tools like Slack and Claude, and why that data permissions and security in your org are even more important.
We’ll also get into Security Center Essentials, transaction security policy accelerators, Agentforce vibes, and some of the new tools that can help admins understand and work with their org faster. But there’s a bigger thread running through all of it. AI can help you build, investigate, and move faster, but it doesn’t replace knowing your business or knowing when something is actually right for your org. Josh calls it trust but verify. And I think that’s a pretty good way to head into this conversation. So let’s get Kate and Josh on the podcast. So Josh and Kate, welcome to the podcast.
Joshua Birk:
Thanks for having us, Mike.
Kate Lessard:
Thanks.
Mike Gerholdt:
We all have a little post Dreamforce voice in our step because it’s been a long few days, but I wanted to get something together with all of us really fresh right after we landed. Some of us landed sooner rather than later leaving San Francisco and talk about what we saw, what really stuck out to us, maybe some of the demos we got to work on and things that surprised us. So Kate, you are in the keynote and keynotes always get top billing, so we’re going to start with you.
Kate Lessard:
Woo, I love it.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. Talk to me about some of the stuff that you guys showed in the keynote for people that missed it and what you’re excited for.
Kate Lessard:
Yeah, the keynote this year was really fun to work on the demos because there’s just some really exciting new technology out there for admins to leverage. I think that there are just a lot of exciting new features that are specifically for admins that are really designed to improve our building experience. And if you are able to catch any of the sneak peaks or any roadmap sessions, you know that there are even more coming. But if you did join us for the keynote or if you plan to go watch it later, a really great example is Builder Central. And this is an amazing AI builder that is specifically designed for low-code and no-code builders. So not only can we use it to build fast and accurately, but we can also use it to edit directly in the Explorer, which is I think my favorite feature.
And we can really visualize everything that we build and that spans from things like react sites to flows to agents, and then even all the way over to data model and permissions, which is super cool as an admin. And I want to say that I think that the most important thing to note though as an admin is that using tools like this, my expertise and my strong foundational skills that I’ve developed are still really necessary. With Builder Central, we have the ability to add things like requirements, documents, or information about the different business processes from our organization so that we can take what we as admins already know about data model and our org structure and really truly define what we’re building. And so I think to me, the message and the excitement here is that as admins, we still need to understand the business and the technology to be successful and that doesn’t go away, but using a fantastic product like Builder Central, we’re more important than ever and we get to create these exceptional experiences and that really has lit me up this Dreamforce.
Mike Gerholdt:
I’m going to pause you there because I know you’ve got more to talk about.
Kate Lessard:
Oh, yeah.
Mike Gerholdt:
I’m so glad you brought up Builder Central first. I was floored. So I had seen, obviously we work on stuff prior to seeing it at Dreamforce and I’d seen demos and I think maybe it just kind of skipped off the surface for me as, “Oh, it’s another AI thing and it can do this.” And it kind of looked like a little bit of setup with Agentforce or Agentforce for setup. And I gave it some credibility, but I didn’t really understand what I was looking at. And then I got on the show floor and this was Thursday and Daivat, who works for Tiaan, who was in the keynote, pulled me aside and said, “Mike, you got to come to our demo booth.” And I’m like, “Okay.”
And he showed me a customer that came up and was really into Star Trek and this is why I’m like, “Okay,” took a screenshot of a Star Trek set, kind of like those glittery panels that 70s, 60s tech ad. And he said, I think I want to make a dashboard for my executives because they’re really into Star Trek. And they gave Builder Central that screenshot and the data it should pull and it created a dashboard, I kid you not, that looked just like Gene Roddenberry had created it for the 1960s Star Trek episodes.
Kate Lessard:
Oh, very cool. I love to hear stuff like that.
Mike Gerholdt:
I was like, “Seriously?”
Joshua Birk:
Right.
Mike Gerholdt:
Now I have no idea. This is where my limited information comes in because Josh, it’s a React site or it’s a React page or I don’t know what to do with it after that, but I was just like, “Oh, I could make my whole instance look awesome.”
Joshua Birk:
Yeah. And well, we’re moving towards this realm of you can use Lightning, you can use React, and you have a lot of flexibility in the technology that’s driving this. And that’s, I think lending to that your dashboards don’t have to look like what you think your classic dashboards are like. And it goes back to not that there’s anything wrong with the Salesforce UI, but it’s like, as was said during the main keynote, was the UI really ever our main driver? Was that what made us distinct? And I don’t think that’s the answer. I think the answer is the platform, it’s the APIs, it’s the features. And if you can update your UI to be like Star Trek, which is freaking awesome, all the better for everybody.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. I think that’s a demo video somebody should do.
Kate Lessard:
Yeah. It really takes that concept of storytelling with data to a whole new level and making it really impactful for the people that are digesting that information.
Mike Gerholdt:
I mean, if that’s what your company wants, then that’s what people… If you want people to look at dashboards or whatever, then put it into something they’re at. So, Kate, I share with you the same concern. Am I right to worry that it’s almost like when we first get the calculator in algebra class and everybody just uses the calculator and assumes it’s right for admins in terms of Builder Central? Because my worry is I see that and I’m like, “Okay, but wait a minute, how do I know if that number’s right?” And I know how to pull that dashboard. Should we do something else besides build that Sparkle dashboard in Builder Central?
Kate Lessard:
Yeah. And I think the really important thing to know as you start working with Builder Central is you have to have a strong admin foundation. Everything that you know is important because you are sharing that information about your data model and what you need in that either prompt area, that box where you’re entering in your prompt, or through your requirements’ information where you add in a file. And so I think that it’s actually incredibly important to have your strong admin foundation to be able to create these exceptional experiences.
Joshua Birk:
Yeah. And say it with me everybody, always do it in your sandbox first, press but verify. And these are the same skills and the same habits that we’ve been forming all along is even if you were working with a developer team, you wouldn’t necessarily assume everything that was coming out was 100% accurate. And the same’s going to be true with Builder Central and these other tools.
Mike Gerholdt:
Continuing on, Kate, after that Builder Central, I think that was the first chapter in the keynote, right?
Kate Lessard:
Yeah, that was our chapter one, building trusted AI.
Mike Gerholdt:
What did we talk about for chapter two?
Kate Lessard:
Chapter two was all about delivering trusted AI everywhere. So I think that admins go to Dreamforce. I know that when I was an admin, I would go to Dreamforce and I would feel a little bit of overwhelm because there’s just so much to take in. And I think that maybe that was something that I was hearing from admins this year that they’re feeling a little bit overwhelmed because everything that they do is actually now expanding to all of these different interfaces as well. So we saw examples of Salesforce and Slack, we saw examples of Salesforce and Claude, and this is going to continue across other interfaces. So I think that the big takeaway here and what I’m continuing to watch is how admins can deliver to new and more interfaces without changing that true foundational work that we’ve done in Salesforce. And that’s super exciting.
And that was really what our second chapter in the keynote was about. I think the example we used was a really good one. In the keynote, we showed exposing and running a flow directly in Claude. And that example was super simple. It was just a really easy auto launch flow to escalate a case. But that business implication is huge because as admins, I feel like one of our superpowers that moving forward is really meeting users where they are working and providing that same exceptional experience, whether they’re in lightning or in a different interface. So I think that that is really cool and something I’m really excited to see how it progresses because we’re only going to more interfaces.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, I agree. Was that the chapter where, maybe I’m confusing my keynotes, where you could preview what the Salesforce, I’ll call it a card, would look like in Claude or Slack or ChatGPT?
Kate Lessard:
Yeah, we did show HXL, the headless experience layer. We did show an HXL component in Slack as well. And HXL is really a way to be able to take that component, that experience, and exactly display it in Slack, display it in Claude. So that’s really cool. And admins can get hands on with the HXL playground if they want to try that out. It’s been one of my favorite places to spend time lately.
Mike Gerholdt:
I mean, to me, and I said in the architect and developer keynotes too, it only served to almost refocus me more as an admin to think of, I have the Salesforce core as my foundation and everybody’s going to be coming to use it. I have to make sure that my data and my security are the utmost because once somebody uses that headless layer or AI force to ask Salesforce a question in Claude, if my data’s not right, then their answers aren’t right. And I was thinking of that as that’s the home base for me. And it almost just reaffirmed it that we weren’t interface engineers because now the interface is everywhere. We’re really data and security.
Joshua Birk:
Yeah. And I mean, this is the promise of headless, is that it’s the client that you need, not necessarily the client that we are going to enforce on you. And I think there’s a lot of interesting variations of using Claude and using Slackbot and using Coworker and things like that, but you’re not wrong. It’s like the core responsibilities are still going to be the same and that’s what’s going to drive, and context is king and you can’t have good contacts without good data and you can’t have good data without good security. So a lot of the foundations, they’re just still there and they’re going to help you through whatever agentic route that you’re going to be going through. But as Kate was saying, the importance of those core responsibilities is never going to go away.
Mike Gerholdt:
You brought up Coworker. Josh, did you make it to any coworker sessions?
Joshua Birk:
I did not, but I have been poking around with Coworker and I think Coworker’s a really interesting feature. What’s interesting to me is that we are now seeing these tools that are very similar but different. We have Coworker, we have employee agents, we have Slackbot, and they all kind of overlap each other in various ways. Coworker, I think the big strength at Coworker is that it’s basically you turn it on, you connect it to your sources and then you let it go. Whereas an employee agent is something that you are involved in highly customizing.
And then Slackbot is kind of its own tool and obviously it’s something that’s very important if you’re actually using Slack. And I think the nice thing is we don’t have to put all our eggs in one basket. You can utilize the client, the agent, the AI that is best for you, whether that’s Coworker or Claude or Claudeforce, it’s whatever’s going to be best suited and they all have their little distinctions for using it. I’m a big Coworker fan because it puts a lot of feature and functionality and information right at your fingertips, but it doesn’t have the customization that say an employee agent does.
Mike Gerholdt:
Right.
Kate Lessard:
Yeah. And I want to hop in and specify, we’re talking Agentforce Coworker here. And I think the really cool thing for admins to know here is… that you can turn this on in under five minutes and have it set up and ready to go and supporting your users and providing them with the information they need, which is, I mean, talk about just a really quick win for us to be able to deliver these awesome AI experiences to our users.
Mike Gerholdt:
So would you do that first, Kate, instead of building out an employee specific agent?
Kate Lessard:
I think it depends on the situation and what you need the agent to do. I think that Agentforce Coworker is going to allow users to help themselves quite a bit, and it’s going to be a really straightforward, quick win that you can get them moving in the right direction. If you need your employee agent to do kind of other things and have a lot of different connected data sources, I think that maybe you would go in that direction, but I think it always comes down to that what is the use case?
Joshua Birk:
Yeah. And to throw a little bit in favor of an Agentforce employee agent is you can enforce a certain level of determinism using flow, right? So you have a lot of control over what that employee agent can do, whereas Coworker is just sort of out of the box.
Kate Lessard:
Absolutely.
Mike Gerholdt:
I will say this. So the architect keynote finally, because there are things that Mike can read five and six times and it still doesn’t make sense to him, the architect keynote finally described to me the difference between probabilistic and deterministic. I think I’m saying both those right.
Kate Lessard:
That’s a mouthful. Yeah.
Mike Gerholdt:
It is. I know. It feels like when you go… But that word-
Kate Lessard:
Oh, look what we did to you. Oh, no.
Joshua Birk:
Yeah, you tricked your brain into you didn’t know how to pronounce it.
Mike Gerholdt:
There’s only so many times you can say that word before the fuse breaks and I already said it. I already broke the fuse. But that is the AI saying, “Oh, well to win the deal, you need 18%.” And then deterministic is the AI using its reasoning, but also being grounded in saying, “Well, 18% would win the deal, but our max is 15%.” And I was like, “Oh.”
Joshua Birk:
That’s a good way of putting it.
Mike Gerholdt:
Maybe it was a developer keynote. Again, they kind of all smeared together for me. But I remember seeing that slide and I thought, “Now it makes sense to me.” I had a light bulb moment.
Joshua Birk:
Nice.
Mike Gerholdt:
Just didn’t appear as normal. And then of course I’ve already blown the fuse on terministic and probabilistic times I can say that. It’s like exclamation points. Do you ever have an English teacher that told you only had five exclamation points you could use the rest of your life?
Joshua Birk:
No, but that’s not bad advice.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. So hey, we got that going for us. Kate, I think chapter three of the admin keynote was around security.
Kate Lessard:
Yeah, exactly. It was all about governing trusted AI. And I think that security had a really big presence at Dreamforce in general. With the rise of agentic AI, we’re seeing new security threats. Everyone listening has heard us say it a million times before, but I really do think that we mean it when we say that at Salesforce, trust is our number one value. And we really do firmly believe in a shared responsibility model that helps protect customer orgs and data. So with all of these new security threats that we’re seeing, Salesforce is really proactively rolling out new and enhanced features for admins to monitor as well as to improve their security posture. So I think that that’s one of the things I would actually really be coming out of this Dreamforce, feeling really proactive about security and what I can do as an admin to protect my organization.
And in the keynote, we showed a couple different examples of both security as well as data privacy. We showed compliance agents. We gave a sneak peek of the enhanced DSAR policies that are going to be rolling out in the future. We shared transaction security policy accelerators, which are just a fantastic new addition for anyone that’s leveraging Shields, event monitoring, using transaction security policies. And then we also showed Security Center Essentials, which is I think something really cool to call out because it is something that is free and available to all admins regardless of your org, your industry, what type of data you have going on, that’s something that you can leverage to really be more proactive about your security. And I’ll also add that it was really nice to see an increased amount of sessions focused on security this year. I was looking at everything in the Admin Meadow and we had tons of security sessions. It was fantastic.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. What was the thing that you demoed in the keynote? Because I felt like you had a hot minute of talking, you were scrolling through something. What was that?
Kate Lessard:
Absolutely. So those were the Transaction Security Policy Accelerator, which is a Salesforce Labs app that’s available right now in the Agent Exchange. And I think this is really important because if you have used transaction security policies in the past, you were writing these security policies from scratch and you were doing that either with complex Apex code or you were creating these kind of multistep configuration steps and set up. And it was really challenging. And with Transaction Security Policy Accelerator, we actually took a list of all of the most requested security policies and made them into pre-built templates that you can just really easily deploy in your org. So that is just a huge game changer for any of our Shield customers that are leveraging event monitoring.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, I was going to say that when I saw that, I though I’d known stuff about security. And to be fair, back when it was a little different, the amount that we could do for enforcement, but to see you scroll through that and the amount of policies that were there, the documentation that was behind it, not just the part that everybody saw, and I think you deployed actually one of them, which was, it was pretty, I’d call it mild configuration. The part that got me floored was the documentation because I was horrible at documenting stuff. I knew where things were because I was the only admin. And when it came to working with IT and making sure security stuff synced up, documentation was always something I was constantly working on. The configuration would be right. It’s the documentation that I needed to constantly report in on. And I saw that in that and I thought, “Man, that would’ve put me miles ahead. I wouldn’t have had to buy my IT department so many donuts.”
Kate Lessard:
Yeah. And I do think that when you deploy these, and if you go back and watch the keynote, you can see a little bit of it. There is the documentation and there’s also the information that’s like the description of what’s happening, the why it’s important, which I love to see, as well as the triggering event. So it’s definitely above and beyond. And then you can kind of review those prefilled settings and fine tune them for your org.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, absolutely. And we had Kylie on to talk about Security Center Essentials on the podcast, so I’ll link to that episode too.
Kate Lessard:
Awesome. Yeah. I think it’s just such a great thing for everyone to have access to.
Mike Gerholdt:
I mean, that was easily my number two of Dreamforce walking away. So Josh, I think you did a session on, it sounds like I didn’t do any research for this, but I have a whole list of things, but you did a session that was similar to one that we’d given at TDX that you partnered up with somebody new. Was that on AI Force? No.
Joshua Birk:
On Agentforce Vibes. They partnered with-
Mike Gerholdt:
Agentforce Vibes. Oh, that little thing.
Joshua Birk:
That little thing.
Mike Gerholdt:
Remember that thing that we launched back in March?
Joshua Birk:
Yeah. Yeah. I partnered with the great Lay Durafé, who I think inherited the presentation from another TN, and I’m blanking on his last name, but it was a presentation that they had presented at TDX, but it was more of a walkthrough of five coding tools. And we focused heavily on Agentforce Vibes itself when it comes to admins using it. Kate really hit a lot of the good highlights when it comes to where I think we’re heading, but I think we’re heading into this age of, for lack of a better term, and until I come up with a better term, it’s the best one I’ve got, but vibe admining, which is basically the ability to use these AI tools. And this was a very interesting session to me because for one thing, I have slow walk talking about Agentforce Vibes to admins because it’s basically Visual Studio Code in the cloud and that’s a developer environment.
And so there’s some things that if you’re using it as a developer environment, would not be particularly admin friendly. But what we’ve evolved to is this scenario where the Agentforce Vibes panel is actually very user-friendly in general, and you can do a lot of work within the panel itself. And then the rest of VS Code really just kind of turns into a preview state. So you don’t have to try to code Apex within VS Code or anything like that. And so that was one thing that I think the tool is friendlier. The other thing is that the models have just gotten so much better. And so Kate was talking about the example of being able to do an auto launch flow two years earlier, maybe even a year earlier, there’s no way I would recommend admins trying to create an auto launch Flow within any of these tools because they simply weren’t very good at it.
And there’s technical reasons for that. Flow is kind of our own creation, whereas things like Apex and WC have a lot more information out there for the models to consume. But the models have become much friendlier and much more powerful. And what I would invite people to do is if you can find it in the Salesforce events, Lay created this prompt builder library, or I’m sorry, prompt library. And it shows just the breadth and the width of the things that these tools can do. And we used Vibes as our example in part because it’s built right there in the org, it’s a Salesforce product, et cetera, et cetera. But as I was saying before, many of these other clients, many of these other agentic things can still do very similar things.
And it’s like the most popular use case that I think I’m seeing is like, “Hey, go tell me this thing that I’m very concerned about in my org,” or, “Hey, I’m a day one admin and I need to know what’s going on in my org. So can you generate a markdown file that gives me a report of all the flows that are in my org, which ones might be redundant, which ones might be old, that kind of thing. And these tools can just really generate that kind of thing in a fraction of a time that it would take a human to go through and go file by file by file and actually try to consume the information that’s in your org and then try to compile it into something that you could hand off to another human being.
Kate Lessard:
Yeah, that’s one of my favorite use cases for Vibes actually, is to just ask questions that I need to know about my org and my metadata. It’s been incredibly helpful and powerful for that.
Mike Gerholdt:
I happen to, because I’ve owned Track long enough, look back 10 years ago in 2015 in the wayback machine. The top performing sessions were by Salesforce MVPs talking about I just inherited an org, now what do I do? And documenting an org. And it’s interesting because now we’re still talking about that, but we’re talking about it through the lens of how can AI help me do this and move on to the stuff I really need to get done.
Joshua Birk:
Yep, exactly.
Mike Gerholdt:
I mean, it’s the same problems. It’s just we’re using more advanced tools to solve it faster.
Joshua Birk:
Yeah. The other thing that I thought, I did not know we were going to announce at Dreamforce because there’s-
Mike Gerholdt:
Because there’s things that even we don’t know.
Joshua Birk:
Even we don’t know. And the big one for me was COA. So COA is a model that Salesforce has created in partnership with NVIDIA. And COA is what’s called a post-train model, which means basically you take an empty bucket and you fill it with your own information. And the information we have filled it with is years of what’s called synthetic data. So we’re not using customer data, we’re using artificial data we’ve created that looks like customer data. And the few interesting things about COA is, first of all, it’s running on our own iron.
So it should be cheaper and faster for us to run, but also it should be more efficient because it doesn’t have to know what the sourdough bread recipe is that your grandma… it’s only trying to answer solutions from about CRM, right? It’s very, very specific and very fine-tuned. And it should be available, I want to say now, I’d have to probably check the press release, but when you go to your dropdown of the models that you can select for Prompt Builder and Agentforce 5s, et cetera, it should be available under those. And I highly recommend, people. I’m dying to try it myself just to see what kind of distinctions I can see.
Mike Gerholdt:
I mean, that’s interesting that COA is also was the name of Mark’s dog when Salesforce was founded.
Joshua Birk:
Yes.
Mike Gerholdt:
We tend to do that. Tend to keep things interesting. Well, we’re getting about to the point where most of my listeners are either getting ready to hop off a train or complete their dog walk. I know because I survey them. I’d love to think of, we’re headed back to work on Monday after Dreamforce. What is the one thing that you would do or what is the one thing that you would dive into or two things, but stack rank them. And I started with Kate, so I’ll start with Josh this time.
Joshua Birk:
Well, not to repeat myself, but like I said, I want to tinker with COA. I want to see if it has the tangible results that I do from a technical point of view, really believe it will. And then also just Lay gave me this whole library of prompts. And I mean, it was an interesting session to prepare for because these things have been moving so quickly that I really honestly wasn’t sure what Vibes would be capable and what wasn’t. And so one of the things I want to do is just take a turn and just start putting Vibes really through its faces, really push it to its limits and see exactly where it is. So keep an eye out. We’ve got a blog coming out about skills in general, and skills are the things that allow tools like Vibes to be quick and efficient because they’re little micro instructions of how to do things like create a soccer query, create a custom object, update a custom object, create a dashboard. But then I think we’re going to have some blog posts coming up that’s going to take that one step further.
Mike Gerholdt:
Kate, how about you? You flew in.
Kate Lessard:
Yeah.
Mike Gerholdt:
Back to reality. There’s nine or 10 users that need password resets, that’s a given.
Kate Lessard:
Oh my gosh. Absolutely. Yeah, I’ve got them all set up with MFA. My baggage finally got here. Yeah, a couple things. And I think it goes back to when we were talking about the keynote, you’ll hear some reiterated themes from me as well. I would start with security and I would start with that security essential front, security… Wow.
Mike Gerholdt:
Your fuse broke too.
Kate Lessard:
There’s my fuse. Yeah, the Security Center Essentials and really those free things that I could present to my stakeholders, my leadership team as ways that we can really get more proactive about our security and then maybe evaluate some of the other enhanceable features that were discussed depending on what I have available in my org.
So I think I’d start with security, which I’m sure is not a surprise from anyone listening that knows me at all. And then the second thing, I would get hands on with Builder Central. So it’s available as beta now and you can start building and even better, it’s free. It’s free with reasonable usage limits in every org. So I think that that would be my big exciting hands-on moment and really go experience for myself what I can build for my org and how AI can impact me and help me be both faster and then just continue to build these awesome trusted AI experiences for my users.
Mike Gerholdt:
I couldn’t agree more. I’m of the generation that we used to say if it’s not in Salesforce, it doesn’t count because we got to drive people to log into Salesforce. And I remember I created a dashboard for an executive of logins and records changed to try and figure out, to show them that we’re using the tool. And to them, I always told them, I said, “There’s no dashboard for email at this company.” And he said, “Well, no, because you can’t get business done without email.” And I said, “Well, there’s your answer right there.” I think this Dreamforce for me kind of reiterated the fact that it’s still, if it’s not in Salesforce, it doesn’t matter, but now I need to get ready because the interface that somebody’s going to be using might not be Salesforce.
And I need to think about do I have the foundation right? Have I been putting off all those business process changes, those field cleanups? I just did a blog post on metadata cleanup and I used Vibes for that. And I was scared to death using Vibes because there’s still a whole lot of tabs that I had to ping Josh and be like, “What does this do?” And he’s like, “Stay away from that tab. Fine. Just talk to it and it’s okay. It’s like hell.” But that to me really, I need to make sure home base is set up so that when I sit down and have that next conversation, because I’m with you, Kate, on Builder Central to talk about, so where are we going?
Is there an AI tool that we’re predisposed to rolling out company-wide? And then making that available to grab Salesforce data, but also making sure that when it does it, it doesn’t just return gobbledygook because I have 1300 accounts with phone notes in the phone field because we never cleaned up our data. And so it’s like one part of it is make the foundation so that whatever we decide to build, it’s there. But the other thing is I now have all these tools that can compress time for me and really put… This was an idea I was floating past somebody because we’ve heard the term human in the loop, which was AI returning something, but then giving it to you. And we see that in all the builders too. You need to approve this, you need to do that. Even Slackbot will put together a message, but I was thinking more of admin at the helm.
Joshua Birk:
I like that.
Mike Gerholdt:
Which is you’re in Builder Central and here’s what I need done. I’m going to check what you’re going to do, but you’re going to build this stuff, but I’m going to check it and then we’re still going to fix it and put eyes on it before it goes out the door. And I’m not just going to turn it loose. Even for Coworker, I would really want the five people that I feel are knowledgeable about AI and knowledgeable about our data to ask it questions so that I’m getting it thoroughly tested before I roll it out to Bob in Atlanta, who’s going to ask it to make a list view every Thursday afternoon for his Friday call downs.
Kate Lessard:
Well, and that’s it. The human at the helm, the admin at the helm. Admins are more important than ever, and we really need that strong knowledge that we already have. Everything that we’ve learned has set us up for this moment.
Joshua Birk:
Yeah. I’m trying to think of the phrase that Lay ended with, with his section of the presentation, but it was something along the lines of, do not replace your expertise with AI.
Mike Gerholdt:
That’s good.
Joshua Birk:
Your expertise is still the driving force of making sure this stuff is going to work correctly.
Mike Gerholdt:
That’s good. And it’s still the differentiator for all that AI can create for you. It’s the expertise of you saying, is this right for my org or is this right, right now?
Joshua Birk:
Yeah.
Mike Gerholdt:
Well, this is a fun conversation? Thank you all for joining me after Dreamforce and giving us a little bit to think about. I think the second half of the year is usually heading down and going into the holidays, but we have stuff to build and I’m kind of curious what dashboards are going to look like just given we can give it screenshots. So I think that’s interesting. But Kate and Josh, thanks for coming on the podcast.
Joshua Birk:
Thanks for having us.
Kate Lessard:
Yeah, great to be here.
Mike Gerholdt:
So a big thanks to Kate and Josh for jumping in and recording this while our minds were still fresh off of Dreamforce. As always, I hope there’s something from the conversation you can take back to your organization, your users, or the way that you think about your work as a Salesforce admin. Be sure to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins podcast so you don’t miss an episode because we have some really good ones coming up. And until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.
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