Cleaning Data for AI Starts With Context, Not Perfection

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Chris Emmett, Salesforce Solution Architect at Capgemini.

Join us as we chat about how to clean up your data to prepare your org for Agentforce, and why data without context is useless.

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

AI requires clean data

I caught up with Chris hot on the heels of his TDX London session, “Prep Like a Pro: Clean Data and Metadata for Agentforce.” He’s an experienced Salesforce consultant who has helped countless organizations of all sizes reboot their business processes.

As Chris explains, unless you have a company of five people that started last week, your org probably needs some data cleanup. And if you want to get started with Agentforce, you need to do the work to make sure the agents you build can understand your data and use it to generate actionable insights. After all, if you can’t derive useful information from your data, then it’s useless.

Why cleaning data can feel like boiling the ocean

When I worked in sales, we used a CRM that was so complicated that only one guy at our company knew how to use it. Talk about a bottleneck!

The truth is, if your business has been around for a little while, you’ve probably inherited all sorts of legacy data. Maybe it’s some random field created by that one guy in the 90s who didn’t document anything, or a legacy system like SAP or MSX that is essential to your day-to-day operations.

Chris has seen it all, and it can often feel like cleaning up all that data is akin to boiling the ocean. It’s a monumental task with no end in sight, let alone getting the organizational buy-in to do it in the first place.

A practical way to start cleaning your data

Chris recommends focusing your data cleanup strategy on the functionality you want to build in Agentforce. For example, if you want an agent to email a customer when their opportunity is five days from the close date and still unsigned, what data do you actually need?

You don't need the 300 fields that might be on the opportunity page, or the 300 fields in that account. You might need the opportunity's name, the stage of the opportunity, the close date, the account, and maybe the primary contact of that account. That’s five pieces of information.

Suddenly, you don’t need to boil the entire ocean—you just need to boil a cup of water. So start small, focus on the functionality your data cleanup project will deliver, and get the ball rolling. Trust that the things you build with Agentforce will speak for themselves, and you’ll be able to generate momentum to clean up your data project by project.

Make sure to listen to our full conversation with Chris to learn more about how to clean up your data and provide context for AI agents. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

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Learn more

• Automate with Agentforce Episode: Using AI To Maximize Sales | Automate with Agentforce

• Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: How Should I Clean Metadata for Salesforce AI Agents?

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