Building Secure AI Agents with Salesforce Agentforce

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Sri Srinivasan, Senior Director of Information Security at Salesforce.

 

Join us as we chat about his recent presentation at TDX and how to build secure, reliable AI experiences with Agentforce.

 

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Sri Srinivasan.

 

Quick heads up before we dive in: This episode may include forward-looking statements—aka things we're excited about that may not be here just yet. So, as always, make your purchasing decisions based only on what's currently available. For the full legal scoop, check out salesforce.com.

Five questions to ask when you’re building with Agentforce

I caught up with Sri fresh off his TDX presentation about secure Agentforce implementation to pick his brain on how admins should think about security and AI.

For Sri, there are five things to think about in order to build secure AI agents:

1. What is the agent’s role and scope?

2. What data will the agent have access to?

3. Which actions should be public and which should be private?

4. Do you need to build any extra guardrails?

5. Which channels will the agent use?

As always with security, the key concept here is the principle of least privilege. Running through Sri’s questions helps you build an agent that can’t do something you don’t want it to do.

What’s coming next for security in Agentforce

Sri also gives us a sneak peek at the new tools his team is piloting to help admins build secure AI agents. You’ll be able to look at metrics like instruction adherence, coherence, how factual the responses are, and how grounded the agent is.

They’re also trying to simplify how user permissions work with AI agents in order to make it easier to keep things limited and secure. It’s easy to turn things on and off when you’re trying to get something to work, but you need to revisit your permissions from time to time and apply the principle of least privilege.

The role of admins in the future of Agentforce

Finally, I asked Sri about how admins fit into the future of AI on Salesforce. “Admins are key to everything that we do,” he says, “they understand everything that's happening within their environment. They know which actions, what permissions, what they do, and agents are just another avenue to expose and interact with this crux of it.”

How fast would you drive a car with no brakes? Sure, Agentforce is a sports car in terms of everything it can do. But it’s up to admins to build the brakes and make sure that AI agents are only doing the things you want them to do. And that starts by understanding the systems and data behind them and then asking the right questions.

There’s a lot more great stuff in my conversation with Sri, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

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