Making Data Cloud Understandable for Admins

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Abhishek Saxena, Technical Architect at Copado.

Join us as we chat about how he learned Data Cloud and why understanding context is the key to making Agentforce shine.

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

Overcoming the complexity of Data Cloud

As a developer and architect, Abhishek isn’t lacking for technical knowledge about the Salesforce platform. But even he found it hard to get his head around what Data Cloud was and what it could do.

Abhishek attended community events, scoured LinkedIn posts, studied videos, and even read a book about Data Cloud. But there were so many new terms being thrown around, and he still couldn’t explain the difference between a data lake object, a data model object, and a data source object.

“Even though there was a lot of buzz around Data Cloud and how it is such an amazing, innovative solution,” Abhishek says, “I was not able to grasp what it does in an easy fashion.” Luckily, he had an ah-ha moment that helped him see the big picture, and so he’s giving a presentation at Dreamforce to share what he’s learned.

What Data Cloud actually does

Abhishek’s talk, “A Beginner’s Guide to Data Cloud,” will get you up to speed in 20 minutes or less. As he explains, the main thing to understand is that Data Cloud is about data unification.

If you have your data in a bunch of different places, you used to have to dedicate significant developer time to maintaining APIs that allowed Salesforce to share information with your other platforms. With Data Cloud, you have everything on one record, with Salesforce and Slack as the front door. You have a complete 360 view of your customer, regardless of where the information is.

Why Data Cloud is crucial for Agentforce

Getting a complete picture of your customers is doubly important when it comes to Agentforce. AI agents are extremely context-dependent: they do a much better job when you “ground” them with extra parameters.

As Abhishek says, “If you give agents good data, your responses are going to be much more personalized and better.” Data Cloud allows you to give your AI agents a much more specific picture of your customers, opening the door for better and more effective automations.

If you’re coming to Dreamforce, make sure to come to Abhishek’s presentation so you can be a Data Cloud pro. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more

• Salesforce Admins Blog: From Pillars to Lakes: Using Data Cloud As Your Source of Truth

Admin Trailblazers Group

• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

• Abhishek on LinkedIn

• Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn

• Salesforce Admins on X

• Mike on Bluesky social

• Mike on Threads

• Mike on X

Full show transcript

Mike:
So have you ever tried to figure out what a data lake is and then ended up wondering where the lifeguard's at? Ditto. Today on the Salesforce Admins podcast, we're talking with Abhishek Saxena, a Salesforce consultant with a developer's mindset and a teacher's heart. Abhishek's going to take us through his journey of learning Data Cloud and how it went from something bu