The creators of an AI agent which can seamlessly organize employee meet-ups outside the workplace won this year’s Agentforce NYC Hackathon.
Dominick DeFazio, Douglas Lo, David Wong, Dickson Lo, and Scott Stafford were the five members of Team 4DS who used Salesforce’s flagship AI Agentforce to create the winning product, earning the team a $20,000 prize.
Introducing “Peopleforce”
The team created “Peopleforce” – an agent which can recommend dining, plan outings, and manage expenses for faster employee engagement – during a grueling 36-hour challenge at New York’s Javits Convention Center.
More than 10,000 trailblazers gathered for the Agentforce World Tour in New York last week, featuring a two-day “Hackathon”, which saw 45 teams competing to build the best agents possible with Agentforce.
Working in teams of up to five, 123 Salesforce professionals (admins, architects, consultants, IT managers, and business analysts) competed for the $20,000 top prize.
Dominick DeFazio, CEO and Founder of AI company SalesCraft, spoke to Salesforce Ben about the 36-hour ordeal – and how he and the team came to be there in the first place.
“I’m going to be honest with you and I want to give you the details because I think that it’s fun… I started watching an anime called Trillion Game. The anime is about two kids in Japan starting a business. They win a Hackathon and it really jumpstarts their business.” Dominick DeFazio, CEO & Founder, SalesCraft
Dominick, 28, thought he could do the same thing, believing in his technical skills and developers, so started thinking about what his team at SalesCraft could build roughly one week before the event started.
“We Barely Slept”
One of the developers suggested something which could “get lunch quicker” – an idea Dominick liked.
He said: “Originally we called it ‘Asianforce’ to get Asian food for your lunch company, it gave me the idea of building a food delivery service in Salesforce.”
But Dominick worried that delivery APIs would be quite complicated, causing him a great deal of stress as he walked over to the Javits Convention Center on Friday.
His squad discussed different ideas as they got a table inside the convention when a total stranger – Scott Stafford, a popular LinkedIn personality with 11,000 followers – approached them out of the blue and asked to join their team.
Dominick told Salesforce Ben: “I mean, I thought about it for a second, right? Because we were there early. We probably looked intimidating. We had all our computers out. We were already being like, ‘We’re going to win this Hackathon.’
“I think Scott saw that and was like, ‘That’s a team that I need to be a part of.’
“So I considered it and slowly thought, I could tell this man was social media, and that he was really, really talkative and high energy and wanted to make a lot of friends and have fun.”
Dominick believed that Scott’s energy would be a great asset for his team during the 36-hour ordeal, and agreed to let him join, but there was a catch: If they won, Scott wouldn’t get any of the prize money.
Scott replied, “Whatever, $4,000, no big deal”, according to Dominick.
This affected their team name, which had already gone through several iterations. At first, they were 4D, as in four-dimension, “because it’s cool”, Dominick says. Then they were 4Ds, as in four Ds, referring to their names: Dominick, Dickson, David, and Douglas. Then Scott joined the team, capitalizing the “s”, which now stood for “Scott”, finally making them Team 4DS.
But even though it meant another change of name, Dominick said his decision to include Scott was “completely right”, with the influencer’s positive energy radiating through the team.
He attributed Team 4DS’s success to their decision to use agents to create something simple, but with a decent amount of features, rather than trying to make something far too complex in a 36-hour window.
By 11pm, the team was exhausted. They went to bed to get a few hours of sleep, before getting back to the Hackathon first thing in the morning to work for 12 hours straight.
David and Douglas, the team’s main developers, were each given a user story – one built around expense management, and another around human resources.
Dominick himself focused on adding more advanced API features and planning the demonstration, taking multiple small naps throughout the grueling day.
Scott, who was on marketing duty, was filming videos of the team and cracking up the devs with his jokes.
When 5pm came, Dominick started worrying about what kind of demonstration they would make, eventually deciding to use screen recording software Loom to show off all the features they had built using Agentforce.
He sat in a corner of the Javits Center for three hours, recording all he could with the deadline fast approaching, and the team filled out the proper forms and submitted their work just two minutes before the 8pm deadline.
“I immediately left and went to a crazy rock concert,” said Dominick. He went to see New York act Telescreens, and got pretty banged up in the mosh pits!
“Build More Agents”
After getting the good news, Dominick and his team accepted their giant $20,000 novelty check from Salesforce Co-Founder and Slack CTO, Parker Harris.
When asked what they would do with the money, Dominick said: “Build more agents.”
“I wasn’t joking. I’m going to use that money to build more, hopefully on Agentforce now, because I really enjoyed that process of being able to build with their UI and their tool.”
Dominick has been working on his own product, Crainium.ai, as a package for Salesforce.
Crainium can update records, send emails, and let users create new functions through a simple object structure.
“My goal was to make it so an admin can create a new custom object record called a GPT function and then plug and play that in Salesforce and get new functionality out of it,” Dominick said.
He told us that his experience with Agentforce was “eye-opening” because Salesforce has built a “really powerful” UI with ease of use and quality of life improvements, and he loved how quick it was to be able to spin up a “powerful” agent to achieve given functionality.
Speaking about the recent news that Salesforce is releasing an Agentforce testing center, he said it was “exactly the last piece” needed to have a truly functioning AI builder.
From Minecraft to SalesCraft: Dominick’s Story
Dominick told Salesforce Ben how he was just 10 years old when his father gave him his first gaming laptop – which turned out to be a pivotal moment in his life.
He was an avid player of Minecraft – a sandbox-style video game that lets gamers create their own worlds – throughout his middle-school years.
Dominick said: “I’m a big builder in Minecraft. I love building structures and houses and I’m a perfectionist about it.
“So now I wanted to build a company that had that same ethos when it came to building Salesforce applications, and so it’s a little bit of a hidden meaning, especially because a lot of my clientele isn’t necessarily the age group that plays Minecraft, so I don’t really advertise that, but my employees know.”
But while Dominick’s creativity was fostered through his childhood years, he says he became bogged down with a tedious sales job for a startup after college, which left him bereft of joy.
“I had been so frustrated with their setup in Salesforce. They were on Classic and it was taking me three minutes to log a case. They were doing cases after every call for some reason. And I literally despised having to fill out that case form every single call. And I’m like, ‘What can I do to make my life better here?’”
Dominick downloaded a program that records mouse clicks and would use a macro to click through all his tabs and fill out “silly” required fields which he had to complete the same way each time.
He said he showed his manager what he did, and was immediately given admin access. Dominick said he would go on to tidy up the company’s processes, and enjoyed the work far more than sales.
He took his first certifications, launching his Salesforce career, going on to found his own company in 2019.
What Next?
Dominick says the opportunity he has been given by winning the Hackathon has been “a real dream” for him, and the last thing he wants is to squander it.
He said: “I think that my team has been crowned the best at building Agentforce agents. So, I want to get that message out and build more agents for people.
“I want to keep learning AI tools because I think that we’re in the first stages of what AI can do for businesses. It’s just like when Salesforce first started and companies were switching to business technology on the cloud. And the truth is that we’re very, very early on in terms of the technology.”
Dominick says he wants to build a team of agents that can deliver true value for companies.
“They automate it and allow you to focus in on creative, helpful solutions that actually fix things in the world, rather than having to fill out forms and data.”
Final Thoughts
There’s a lot to digest from Dominick’s story, with a few life lessons in there about perseverance, creativity, and planning.
His thoughts on what makes Agentforce a great product have echoes of what he attributes his own Hackathon success to: keeping it simple and user-friendly, and not overcomplicating things.