What’s the Best Way To Teach AI to Salesforce Users?

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 we can teach AI effectively to admins and the easiest way to learn Agentforce.

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

The shift from knowledge to value

As the Content Portfolio Lead for AI in Product Education at Salesforce, Amit is the perfect person to talk to about where admins should get started with learning Agentforce. After all, his job is all about planning the courses that are offered globally about Agentforce and Data Cloud.

What Amit emphasizes is that past knowledge matters less than what learners do in the next 12 months. Agentforce’s capabilities are growing with every release, so he recommends focusing on understanding the core concepts of how AI works and building from there.

Malik’s agent framework for admins

When you’re building with AI, the first step is aligning on why an agent is needed in the first place. From there, he recommends asking five questions to guide your process:

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.

It’s important to understand that Agentforce is the final layer of the org, the interface. An agent is really an aggregation of the topics you build it to solve. Those topics comprise the specific actions you enable your agent to perform, and those topics, in turn, are possible based on the data you’ve integrated into Data Cloud.

Adopting a learner’s mindset

For Amit, the most important thing you can do if you want to learn Agentforce is to adopt a learner’s mindset. “The art of learning is to become curious,” he explains, “education is not about the instructor, it’s more about the learner.”

Where many businesses go wrong is viewing AI as a solution in search of a problem. But once you start to get curious about the specifics of your business processes, you’ll start to find all sorts of new ways that AI agents can help. And building around these specific, real-world use cases is the easiest way to get started mastering Agentforce.

Amit has a lot to share about learning, teaching, and working with Agentforce, so be sure to tune in for the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch a new episode every Thursday.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more

• Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Architect Courses for Admins with Amit Malik
• Trailhead: Discover Agentforce
• Trailhead: Review Agentforce and Data Library

Admin Trailblazers Group

• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

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

Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt:

This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re welcoming back, Amit Malik to talk about a topic that’s very top of mind for every Salesforce admin right now, which is how do we teach AI effectively? Amit’s going to share with us some insights from over a decade of Salesforce instruction diving into why teaching AI is a little bit different now, and how admins can use his five question agent framework to put to better use. Now, whether you’re just getting started with Agent Force or you’re already experimenting with Data Cloud, this conversation’s packed with practical ways to bring clarity to your learning and to your users. So with that, let’s get Amit on the podcast.

All right, Amit, so welcome to the podcast.

Amit Malik:

Thank you.

Mike Gerholdt:

I know a few years back you were on to talk about the architect mindset, so I’ll be sure to link to that episode, but now we’re talking everything Agentforce and Data Cloud and Metadata and Customer 360. But for people that haven’t been around listening to the podcast for three years, and there’s a few of them, could you reacquaint the audience with what you do at Salesforce and your journey to Salesforce?

Amit Malik:

Sure. I joined Salesforce in 2013 and I have been lucky to teach audiences across the globe on Salesforce technologies every year, and I’ve trained on different topics about Salesforce, like whether it’s about teaching administrators or developers or consultants, architects. So I’ve been fortunate to talk about Salesforce aspects to different audiences. In my current role, I’m working on as a cloud content portfolio lead where I’m specializing in Agentforce and Data Cloud. So my role is to plan what kind of courses should we offer to our customers globally so that we can enable our ecosystem on Agentforce and Data Cloud.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot to learn. I started using the platform back in 2006 and even trying to keep up is a lot, and so I can imagine learning constantly, there’s so much.

Amit Malik:

It’s easy. I would say nobody cares what we know in the past. What matters is what we are working today and for next 12 months.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, there you go.

Amit Malik:

So I’ve always retrained my mind that what I have done in the past does not matter today. What matter is what I will do in next 12 months.

Mike Gerholdt:

So let’s talk about what we’re going to do in the next 12 months. I would love to know, this is going to be my first hard question, they’re all hard, I think, not to scare you. I don’t think it’s hard. But I am curious because you’re on a different side of the fence than I’m at. What is different about teaching AI than teaching other technologies?

Amit Malik:

I would say the interesting part here is there is knowledge explosion in the current times. And when a learner is learning, he has multiple channels to learn from and there is no direction what is the right way to spend your time. So what we need is knowledge distillation. We need to tell our learners, if you only have 10 hours, what should you learn in your first 10 hours. Or if you’re not time-bound, what are the first 10 words should you know to do your project better in next three months. That my suggestion, that we should stop the noise and try to develop our attention span in these current time of knowledge explosion.

Mike Gerholdt:

I really like that because there is a sense of needing clarity when there is this much noise out in the world. Do you find when individuals come to your classes that they have a preconceived idea of AI that you might have to work past?

Amit Malik:

Yes, because the interesting part is that, for example, let’s take a word AI agent. If someone is learning about AI agent from Google’s perspective or OpenAI perspective or how Claude thinks about it, how we think about it at Salesforce, we may have different explanations, but at the core, AI agent is an AI system. So once we start getting a clarity of thought that where are we heading, we are trying to suggest how do you build a digital labor who will work along with the human at present. Once you know the goal, I think then it does not matter what is your understanding. You just need to understand why are we learning AI agents. Just because people are saying about it? Or do you really believe in the spirit of, “Oh yeah, it makes sense. If I can get my job done autonomously by a AI system, I can be more productive than I am.” I think that’s where, the why has to start first before you start doing what is what.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Yeah, I often think a lot of times solutions come before people see problems and so they make up problems for the solution when