Boost Your AI Strategy With the Salesforce Labs AI Library

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Marianna Torres, Associate Salesforce Labs Evangelist at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about the Salesforce Labs AI Library and how it can get you started with implementing AI agents in your org.

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

What is Salesforce Labs?

Growing up, Marianna was always interested in more creative pursuits and had never considered a career in tech. That all changed during the COVID-19 lockdown when she enrolled in a workforce development program called Year Up United and landed an internship with Salesforce.

Today, Marianna works on the Salesforce Labs team, curating the Salesforce employee-built apps, components, and flows that are available for free on AppExchange. Now with the release of Agentforce, the team has put together the Salesforce Labs AI Library as a resource to help you get started with AI.

How the Salesforce Labs AI Library helps you get started with Agentforce

If you’ve been keeping up with the pod, you know that prompt engineering can be tricky business. But what if you could copy all the best, most useful prompts from Salesforce product experts?

That’s what the Salesforce Labs AI Library is all about. It gives you everything you need to get AI agents up and running. When she’s going through submissions, Marianna asks three simple questions:

1. Will this help the customer?
2. Does this simplify something that historically takes a lot of time?
3. Is it easy to use?

If the answer is yes, it gets included in the library, ready to help you implement Agentforce AI in your org.

More resources for Salesforce Labs

If you don’t know where to start, Marianna recommends going through the Salesforce Labs Basics on Trailhead. You can also listen to the full episode, where she walks Josh through the process of looking something up in the Salesforce Labs AI Library.

That’s it for this episode, so be sure to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast and we’ll catch you next week.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more

• The Salesforce Labs AI Library
• Trailhead: Salesforce Labs Basics
• AppExchange: Salesforce Labs
• Year Up United

Admin Trailblazers Group

• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

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

Full show transcript

Josh Birk:
Hey, gang, Josh Birk, your guest host here for today. Today we’re going to talk to Marianna Torres about a project that I am very, very excited about. It’s live now, it’s called the Salesforce Labs AI Library. I’m really not sure if I’m getting that name right, but I will ask Mariana here in a second.

All right. Today on the show, we welcome Marianna Torres to talk about the Salesforce AI Labs library. Do I have that title right or is there are more official one?

Marianna Torres:
The Salesforce Labs AI Library is the official title. But yeah, you did a good job. Yeah.

Josh Birk:
Okay. Welcome to the show. First, I want to talk a little bit about your early years. Was computers and software engineering, software in general something you always wanted to get into?

Marianna Torres:
Honestly, no. I’m actually surprised about how I ended up here at Salesforce. But yeah, so growing up and stuff, I was always more of a creative person, so I was drawing, singing, doing all that. Basically anything that’s creative, I was doing.

So as I got older, it kind of got to the point where it’s like you kind of realize that, okay, it’s like I can go to school, I could pursue this, I could potentially do something. But at the same time, I had graduated and it was shortly before COVID.

Josh Birk:
Oh.

Marianna Torres:
Yeah, so instead of going the traditional route, I had just joined a workforce development program. The program was called Year Up. Yeah, so through that I did the six-month corporate training. They had transitioned it to virtual and everything. So yeah, I actually started my internship here at Salesforce in 2020, so peak COVID. And from there one thing led to another, I was a contractor for a couple years, and then I got full time.

Josh Birk:
Nice, nice. What was the connection to get into the AI labs job itself? Other than the fact that we get paid a nickel every time we say the word AI.

Marianna Torres:
Yeah. So yeah, the team that I’m with now, it’s the exact same team that I had joined five years ago as an intern, and that is the Salesforce Labs team. So primarily, our job is to provide our customers with some free employee-built apps, components, and flows on AppExchange. Then this past whole year, AI became huge, and then we had to pivot and we’re like, “Okay, the customers want AI, what can we give them?” Seeing as how AI wasn’t packageable yet, so-

Josh Birk:
Right.

Marianna Torres:
Yeah, we actually just launched Actions, I believe. So Agent Actions are now packageable, prompt templates are not though, neither are full-on agents. So that’s what this library serves as, it’s a little resource for our customers to go in and grab some pre-made prompts, just click that copy button and then import it directly into Agent Builder. So too long [inaudible 00:03:17].

Josh Birk:
Right. It’s a kind of deploying, I guess.

Marianna Torres:
Yeah. It’s a quick little resource just for everyone to get started fast with Agentforce, with Agent Builder, all that.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha. What’s your relationship with AI? Were you getting into it as you were in the intern? Have you picked it up with your job? Do you use it day to day? Et cetera, et cetera?

Marianna Torres:
Oh, yeah, so that’s a great question. Okay, so I know that AI’s definitely been something that’s… It’s been mainly the back burner of my mind until maybe the past year or so. So in 2023, okay, I had went back to school to go and finish my degree, and it was, I think ChatGPT had just exploded, and everyone was using ChatGPT and stuff.

So in school, obviously it was very strict. You can’t be using ChatGPT to write your essays. But I was using it to review it, so please fix any grammar errors and stuff. So with that, I kind of got a hand on of it, but it was here at work that I got to fine tune it. So at school, I was kind of experimenting with it, but then here I got to, okay, it’s like look at this blog post I wrote and just expand on it. So I kind of got the hands-on skills here mainly, so it’s like I had more freedom here than what I did at school. So I was using ChatGPT and then fine-tuning everything, all that kind of stuff.

And then, yeah, at the time, I was also doing a lot of promotions and stuff for Labs, so YouTube videos, just promotional videos, all that. And AI just kind of opened a whole new door for us. So before all the videos that I would make, they were silent. It’s like I wasn’t confident to have my voice out there and stuff. But then what’s it called? ElevenLabs comes out and it’s like, oh, you can have AI generated voices for your videos, and I’m like, “What?”

Josh Birk:
Oh, wow. Okay. Okay.

Marianna Torres:
Yeah. So yeah, it’s like I’ve definitely been… It first came out, I was kind of like, “Okay, yeah, whatever. It doesn’t impact me directly,” until it actually did impact me directly. And just here at Salesforce, I got to actually be able to experiment with it, see more of the capabilities with it and work with it. I think that’s the best part.

Josh Birk:
Gotcha. When you are out talking to people, do you have stories about how people are using the AI library, like how they’re implementing it in their own uses?

Marianna Torres:
Yes. So the AI library was actually just launched at Dreamforce, so that was September of last year. And just our customers were blown away by it. It was okay, it’s like you’re met with this new technology. Okay, you’re kind of prompt engineering, I think it’s what they officially call it, but creating those prompts and stuff. Where do you even start if you’ve never worked with AI before?

So the resource itself has gotten a lot of great feedback. It’s like everyone’s been very excited about it. And I want to say that right now, it’s like the Salesforce Labs team is a very small team, so our main goal is to evangelize it. So I want to say that not as many people know about it as we would like to yet. But whenever we’ve presented it to them, it was always like this just people have had such a gre