From Skeptic to Fan: My First Experience at Salesforce AgentForce World Tour Manila

Attending conferences is my Waterloo! It is not my forte since I find them unintuitive, and I’m a developer. One of my colleagues suggested we go to AgentForce World Tour Manila. I reluctantly said yes since it has no registration fees, and is my first Salesforce event.

Arriving at the Grand Hyatt Manila on the day of the event, I moved up from the lobby to the 2nd floor, where the AgentForce World Tour was happening. Upon entering the door, I was greeted warmly by the organizer staff. Right away I could tell this welcome was something that I am going to like, and I will join other future Salesforce events in Manila.

There are booths on how Agentforce can be utilized in Data Cloud, Slack, Commerce Cloud, Customer 360, Marketing Cloud, etc. Also, there is a designated space where you could try setting up your first Agentforce, as there are free laptops. If you do it within 20 minutes, you will receive a small mascot pin of AgentForce. Yay!

So I went to that section to test it myself, and during this session, I sat down with Kasama President (and my boss) Mark Rubin, who visited us from the United States. So, we do the trailhead module for building our own first AgentForce. While doing the module, I found that setting up an agent is not that easy since it has many instructions you need to follow. You do not know the purpose of this way, or that approach. Still, while doing it, you can get an idea of how it works, and that's a plus for us because not all people read, and some prefer hands-on activities. The only gripe I find with Agentforce is the navigation; you go to different pages just to set up a specific action, like recommending and determining the agent's purpose. But, while doing the agent, I found it interesting how Agentforce integrated with Salesforce products and how agent was able to accommodate some basic questions; it can execute flow, apex, and actions, call external API, place orders on behalf of customers, set up an appointment, and lots more. I completed the module in close to 15 minutes, so I got the pin. So, I am now pursuing the next module for AgentForce to learn how to take advantage of it.

Vladz with Mark Rubin, Kasama Founder

After that session, I moved to the food section and ate my first meal of the day. The food was delicious, as there were a lot of choices. After eating my meal, I joined the next event to discuss how Agentforce is integrated into Salesforce Products. After the session, we returned to the hall, and I decided to visit some booths to see how Agentforce is used.

 I first visited the Marketing Cloud and Guillaume Pinto, Senior Manager, Digital Solution Engineer. He explained how the Marketing Cloud is leveraging AgentForce to generate reports on customer engagement, email, segmentation, and even Tableau.

After the first booth, I moved to  AgentForce booth because the image on the monitor is a Salesforce Flow about "Create Experience Session Booking." That captured my attention because it is one of my activities as a developer. This is where I met Shaun Lin, an expert and Solution Engineer at Salesforce. He demonstrated that Agentforce is flexible and can automate many of your existing CRM processes. Name it. If you have an existing flow about creating a record with the specific business rule, create a new action and call that flow. Agentforce is smart enough to know what parameters you need for the custom flow. You can even configure Agentforce to show the result in conversation. He even showed me how AgentForce uses Data Cloud. It is smart enough to read the data and provide insights by creating a report.

After that booth, I moved to Slack Booth and met Dale Micallef, a product marketing director at Salesforce. He discussed the integration you get if you add AgentForce to your Slack. What fascinates me about AgentForce in Slack is that it can create tickets, accounts, and contacts by asking Agentforce, given that you have an action for it, if it's custom, or if you can use the standard way of creating those records. It can track real-time updates for your ticket if you are using Service Cloud. He also explained that you can have many agents that you want, but if you are IT, you can use an IT agent; if you are HR, you can use a Human Resources Agent; and Executive, you can use a Sales and Marketing Agent, or a Customer Service Agent. For each, you can design your agent.

My overall experience: I already love AgentForce and am looking forward to using it on a real project. But for now, I'll take my certifications and training!