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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Full show transcript

Mike:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re joined by Chris Emmett, consultant, data enthusiast and Salesforce evangelist accidentally. Well, Chris is passionate about data, and he takes us on a journey from legacy systems and those DOS screens to databases and AI-powered actions, all while sharing practical advice on how to clean up your data without making it feel like you’re boiling the ocean. So if you ever wondered how to prepare your org for Agentforce or why data without context is basically useless, this one is for you. So listen in, share it with somebody who maybe is swimming in a sea of records. So let’s have Chris swim his life raft over and let’s get him on the podcast.
So Chris, welcome to the podcast.

Chris Emmett:
Thanks for having me.

Mike:
Yeah. Well, it’s good to be here. I got a note from Jennifer Lee. She saw the session that you and Jonathan did at TDX London about cleaning data and cleaning metadata, and last week, we talked with Jonathan about cleaning metadata, so this week, of course, we’re going to clean our data because who doesn’t have clean data? But let’s start off first with a little bit about you, Chris. How did you get into Salesforce and why are you so passionate about clean data?

Chris Emmett:
Yeah. Before I start that, you said who doesn’t have clean data? It really should be the other way around.

Mike:
I know. It was a rhetorical question to get people to listen and be like, oh, but there could be that one person that tunes into the podcast, like I don’t need to listen to this. My data is sparkling.

Chris Emmett:
You know what? If there is a company out there with five people who just opened up last week, their data is going to be impeccable, and they do want to listen to this podcast. They can tune out.

Mike:
Right.

Chris Emmett:
I started in the ecosystem in a weird and wonderful way because a lot of … you’ve obviously got your accidental admins that find a weird and wonderful way into Salesforce. I was an accidental consultant. So I started out fresh from university as a desktop support engineer, just fixing Windows and fixing printers and fixing Office, and it was great, fun. Then I did a bit of work as a developer, cutting my teeth on Visual Basic 6.0 and .NET all the way back in 2008. But that entire team was made redundant to make way for an off-the-shelf manufacturing system. And as an SME, as an expert in how that old system worked, I was brought in, and then the project manager on that project quit, and I became a project manager, and I was a project manager for 10 years.

And then about 10 years later, around 2016, I was working for a company and we were really interested in changing how we managed products. We wanted a brand new system to manage our projects, and one of the products that we looked at was Salesforce. And my word, I was blown away. Literally within one day of using Salesforce, I was creating formula fields and workflow rules as they were back then, and I just fell in love. And this is coming from a person who had spent the best part of a decade dealing with systems where if you needed to add a field, it would take two, three months to get through, and I was dealing with a system where I could start a sentence, explaining to someone what Salesforce was, and by the time I’ve finished that sentence, I could have created a field. I could have expanded that data model, and I fell in love with it.

The company I was working for did not fall in love with it, and that pilot failed. It fell by the wayside, but I was hooked. I was like, man, I need to change my career. So I start looking for project management jobs within the Salesforce space. I had never project managed software before. I had project managed big old factory systems that were very waterfall in their approach. I had never done agile before, so I was applying and applying and applying, getting nowhere. I was probably applying for about eight months, and then this small company in Cambridge were like, dude, you are not great for a project manager but you seem really enthusiastic. Had you considered being a consultant? And I went, but yeah, because it’s not managing the projects that I love. It’s the system that I love. Salesforce is a platform that I love. I want to be able to empower other companies to improve themselves through Salesforce.

So I got a job there as a consultant, and that was 2017, and I have just been building up and flourishing, and since then, I’ve got 600 odd badges on Trailhead and I think 23 certs now. So I’ve just gone all in and built my career up.

Mike:
Wow. Holy cow. That’s a lot. I feel such a kinship with you because I joined … when I started doing Salesforce stuff, I worked at a publishing company, and we had this Apple-based CRM. I can’t even remember what it was called, but there was one guy in the office that still knew how to use it, and he would create views or lenses, and that was basically the only way we got things done. All of the salespeople, I was one of them, had to go to him and be like, please, Mr. Jay, would you create a view of … because none of us knew how to use it. It was incredibly complex.
And then we tried to go to this other, this was 2004, we tried to go to this other web-based CRM thing. It was called absoluteBUSY. And if you wanted a field created, you had to log a ticket, and then the person that created the CRM in Sweden would crea