Why Small Businesses Benefit from Agentforce Right Now

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Michael Rose, Senior Director of SMB Solution Engineering at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about the ever-evolving role of the Salesforce Admin and why now’s the time to start exploring what AI can do for your org.

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

The parallel between admins and solution engineers

It’s always a pleasure to sit down and talk about Salesforce with Mike Rose. In his new role as Senior Director of SMB Solution Engineering, he has a lot to share with the admin community about what he’s seeing with small to medium-sized businesses coming onto the platform.

Mike points out that admins and his team of solution engineers share a core responsibility: evangelism. For both, your job is to make the case for how Salesforce implementation can help your organization achieve its business goals.

The integration challenges of smaller orgs

As Mike likes to joke, many SMBs are running some version of what Mike jokingly calls POIM (Post-It On Monitor) integration. As in, someone comes over with a sticky note (or Excel file) and asks you to put that info into Salesforce. “That's all integration,” he says, “it is taking that data and putting it somewhere where it can be more valuable.”

These workflows can be hard to change, and that’s because they work well enough to get the job done. As Mike explains, the opportunity cost of things like errors, bottlenecks, and latency doesn’t factor into the equation. It’s hard to envision a world where an entire business process could happen automatically.

For Mike, the next frontier of this conversation is Agentforce. You can develop bespoke, enterprise-grade AI solutions tailored specifically for your business, but that kind of power is hard to wrap your head around when you’re still trying to limit the number of sticky notes circulating around the office.

Why admins are the key to unlocking the power of AI

As AI solutions continue to evolve, Salesforce Admins will play a critical role in bridging the gap between humans and technology. As Mike says, “there is always going to be a border that has customs agents and couriers and envoys working across that human intelligence and machine intelligence boundary.”

Agentforce is evolving so rapidly that even the Solution Engineering team is struggling to keep up to date. So Mike recommends getting your hands dirty as soon as possible, either by spinning up a developer org or turning on Salesforce Foundations.

There’s a lot more great stuff from Mike in this episode, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more

• Salesforce Foundations Setup

• Get Started with Developer Edition with Agentforce and Data Cloud

Admin Trailblazers Group