The 5-Step Framework To Help You Navigate Agentforce

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Kate Lessard, Lead Admin Evangelist at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about the new Agentforce Adoption Framework and her new YouTube series, “Kate Clicks Through It.”

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

A flexible, nonlinear learning journey for admins

It’s been a while since we’ve had Kate on the pod, but she’s been cooking up something cool, and I wanted to sit down with her to hear all about it. It’s called the Agentforce Adoption Framework, and it’s your guide for bringing the power of AI into your organization.

Kate and the Evangelist team identified a gap: admins needed a structured path to get up to speed with everything Agentforce has to offer. The framework breaks this down into five areas of focus:

1. Explore what’s possible
2. Get curious
3. Try it out
4. Make it work
5. Use it often

You can check out Kate’s post on the Admin Blog for more details, but the goal is to help you set goals for your organization and get ready for what’s coming next with AI.

Hands-on learning through “Kate Clicks Through It”

Kate’s also started a new YouTube series, “Kate Clicks Through It,” where she walks you through Salesforce processes step by step, with demos so you can click along and try them yourself.

“I personally am someone who learns best by doing,” Kate says, “I need to get hands-on, I need to do something. In many cases, I need to do it over and over again.” The videos are around 10 minutes long, giving you quick tutorials on subjects like how to build an Agentforce data library, or how to use Org Check as an alternative to Optimizer.

A framework for learning just about anything

The Agentforce Adoption Framework was developed through tons of research and feedback from admins, Salesforce MVPs, and folks on the product team. We think it’s pretty spiffy—so keep an eye out for more adoption-focused content at Dreamforce or even an event near you.

As Kate points out, while Agentforce might be the shiny new toy, the adoption framework can be adapted to just about anything you want to implement. She uses the example of Data Cloud to highlight how important it is to have that fundamental level of adoption for both your users and your external customers.

There are so many more great insights from Kate about how to level up your understanding of Agentforce, so be sure to check out the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you can catch us every Thursday.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more

• Admin Blog: Your 5-Step Guide to Successful Agentforce Adoption
• YouTube Series: Kate Clicks Through It

Admin Trailblazers Group

• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

• Kate on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on X
• Mike on Bluesky social
• Mike on Threads
• Mike on X

Full show transcript

Mike:
Welcome to the Salesforce Admin’s podcast. This week, admin evangelist Kate Lessard joins us to dive into the Agentforce adoption journey. From building a foundation AI to launching the new Kate Clicks Through It YouTube series, Kate walks us through how admins can thoughtfully and confidently bring AI into their organizations. We also chat about how feedback shaped the adoption framework and, sneak peek, what you might see at Dreamforce. So if you’ve been wondering where to start or where you are on your AI journey, this episode’s for you. Let’s get Kate on the podcast. So Kate, welcome back to the podcast.

Kate Lessard:
Thanks. It’s been a while.

Mike:
Yeah. January. Was it when we did the kickoff? That was the last time.

Kate Lessard:
Maybe. Or maybe did we do a TDX, prep for TDX call maybe?

Mike:
We might’ve. Other podcasters would remember their episodes, but me, just crank them out.

Kate Lessard:
Yeah, you’re a little busy.

Mike:
It’s okay. So you’ve been busy as well. Let’s talk about Agentforce stuff and YouTube stuff and everything you’ve been working on.

Kate Lessard:
Yeah, absolutely. It has definitely been a busy year. It’s been flying by. And some really exciting stuff that we’ve been working on for admins this year.

Mike:
First up being Agentforce stuff, because Agentforce. I know there’s not too much Agentforce out there. People say that, there’s not. When we’re recording this ChatGPT is coming out with a new model. This is our new norm. It’s like when the iPhone drop, there’s not enough iPhone information out in the world. There’s always iPhone information out in the world. There’s always going to be AI stuff for us to learn.

Kate Lessard:
Yeah, agreed. I think that that’s the really cool thing about Agentforce and the job that we get to do is that we get to play with and learn the new things as they’re coming out because it’s so important for us to share with others and let them learn from our mistakes. So I think that that brings a lot of fun experimentation into our jobs.

Mike:
Right, absolutely. So speaking of that, how do we kind of walk people through the journey to Agentforce?

Kate Lessard:
At TDX last year we, or I guess this year, we announced that we have this Agentforce development life cycle. But then we kind of started asking what comes before that? How do we get into this cycle where we’re iterating through ideation, configuration, testing, deployment, and supervising our agents? How can we get ready to actually go live with agents and Agentforce and using it? And so on the admin relations team, we kind of took a step back and started to think about adoption and how we can set up adoption for admins and get them not only familiar with Agentforce, if they have no idea what it is, where they can get started, how they can start to learn the fundamentals of AI just in general, and then dive into Salesforce and Agentforce and using AI within their CRM. That’s been something we’ve been really focused on, is creating the concept of this adoption framework to help admins get ready to move their organizations towards actually using Agentforce consistently.

Mike:
Yeah, because I think it’s one thing … I mean, it’s a little different than … And I use this a lot when we talk about Flow or some of our other products. Automation within the CRM space has always been there. We didn’t really have to learn it. But with AI, we’re all learning AI on top of our organizations learning AI, on top of us going, “Okay, so now how do we use this? And what’s the best use of this?” And all of that has to transfer into the admin sitting there going, “Oh my, I have a lot to learn. Where am I at?” And I think that’s really one of the goals of coming out with the journey, is helping people understand where are you at, where do you want to go?

Kate Lessard:
Agreed. I think that the development of Agentforce and of course more widely artificial intelligence, it’s fast. It feels like there’s something new to learn every week. I think that can cause a lot of overwhelm because we’re trying to keep up without maybe even having a solid foundation. So this concept of the adoption framework was really designed as a baseline for admins to be able to take stock of where they are in their Agentforce learning journey, overcome that analysis paralysis that I think many of us have been feeling over the past couple years, and then have resources and a guide for exactly where they are now and what is coming next.

Mike:
Yeah. So where is this guide or the adoption journey going to show up for us?

Kate Lessard:
So you will be able to see it, we have a nice blog on the admin’s website right now. It is called Your Five Step Guide to Successful Agentforce Adoption. Just double checking that title, but that is correct. And this kind of introduces that adoption framework, the steps that are included with it, some resources for each step along the way. And then you might see this show up in a couple other places. It might show up in a Dreamforce session or it might show up on our website or any other place that I could maybe tease that it would come out. I think it’s something that you might see here and there. And the nice thing is that it’s ever-changing because we’re constantly having new content and new resources to add to it in each step. So I think it’s something that you’re going to see in multiple places moving forward.

Mike:
And I was a part of you brainstorming this and bringing it to the team, and really it was everybody on the team had something to contribute to this. Where do you feel like admins are progressing through in terms of the journey? Are we starting off? Does everybody start off at the beginning,