Curiosity Is the Key to Learning Agentforce

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Amit Malik, the Content Portfolio Lead for AI within Product Education at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about how admins should approach learning Agentforce and bringing AI to their organizations.

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

Learning AI starts with filtering out the noise

We often get asked where admins should get started with learning Agentforce, so I brought Amit on the pod to get the inside scoop. In his role as a Content Portfolio Lead for AI in Product Education at Salesforce, he’s in charge of planning the courses that are offered globally about Agentforce and Data Cloud.

For Amit, the challenge with teaching AI is what he calls the “knowledge explosion.” There are so many different things that Agentforce can do, and that list is growing daily, so it’s hard to know where to get started. What’s needed is “knowledge distillation.” So the key to learning Agentforce is to focus on the core concepts of how AI works before getting into the specifics.

A framework for building with Agentforce

Amit goes through five questions you should ask when you’re thinking of building a solution with Agentforce:

1. Is an AI agent the best way to solve this problem? Would it be easier to build a flow? Just because you can solve something with Agentforce doesn’t mean you should.

2. What agent type do you need? Salesforce has several pre-built agent templates for specific use cases, like Service Agent, Employee Agent, or Guided Shopping Agents. Consider those options before trying to build something more complicated.

3. What topics do you want to assign to this agent? Define the set of business problems you want your agent to solve. There are standard pre-built topics like FAQ or escalation, but you can make a custom topic if needed.

4. How will you provide data to your agent? AI is only as good as the data you provide it, so you need to make sure you have everything you need in Data Cloud and set up access with the Agentforce Data Library.

5. What actions do you want the agent to perform? “This is where the magic happens,” Amit says. There are four types of actions: Flow, Apex, API, and Prompt Template.

Learning Agentforce is about understanding the layers you’re working with. As Amit explains, an agent is really an aggregation of the topics you decide it can solve. Those topics can be broken down into the specific actions your agent can perform, which it does based on the data you give it access to via Data Cloud.

The art of learning is to become curious

With twelve years of experience as a Salesforce instructor, Amit’s biggest piece of advice for admins trying to learn Agentforce is to cultivate curiosity. Where many people go wrong is that they approach AI as a solution in search of a problem. That can be like trying to jam a square peg in a round hole.

Once you start getting curious about the business problems you’re trying to solve, you’ll find use cases all over the place for AI. But that comes from understanding, specifically, how an AI agent can improve the experience for your users. This makes learning Agentforce simple because you know what you’re trying to do with it.

There’s a lot more great stuff about learning, teach