With the latest version of Salesforce’s Agentforce out in the world, it is clear that the era of agentic AI is firmly here and will not be disappearing anytime soon.
However, AI agents can’t make or run themselves – they still need people to make them and tell them what to do, despite what anyone else might be telling you. As their capabilities become more prolific and complex, knowing how to build a successful agent becomes even more important.
In the world of Salesforce, where “anyone can build an agent”, how true is that sentiment in this current market? Do Salesforce Admins – the proverbial backbone of most Salesforce orgs – currently have the skills to make a good agent? Or is there still work to be done?
The Salesforce Skills Gap
The concept of the Salesforce skills gap is not inherently new. In fact, as the Salesforce platform and its functionality have continued to evolve and become more complex, the larger the gap seems to have grown.
Salesforce’s broad range of products and features makes for an incredibly well-rounded business offering, but for the professionals who are experts in those very products, they have been tasked with learning more – understanding more features, knowing their best practices, and discerning which business use cases would be suitable for each tool/feature.
Add Agentforce – as well as the rest of Salesforce’s rapidly developing AI product suite – and suddenly, an admin’s knowledge base needs to be pretty vast.
Admins are already feeling the pressure, too. Results from our latest administrator survey indicated that early two-thirds (64.7%) of admins agree that Salesforce is becoming increasingly complex, and that aspects like new clouds, retiring features, and a fast-paced release cycle are making the platform more demanding.
Additionally, the knowledge gap is becoming more apparent, with nearly 90% of admins feeling strongest in problem-solving, while feeling the least confident in areas such as Revenue Cloud, DevOps Center, and Salesforce AI features.
What Does It Take to Build An Agent?
To build an agent is one thing – to build a successful agent is something else, according to Ian Gotts, the founder and CEO of Elements.cloud.
“Building an agent isn’t difficult – building a reliable agent is,” he told SalesforceBen.
“Agents aren’t magic. Salesforce has always said, ‘anybody can build an agent.’ Yes, you can, but I think it’s more that you need to design an agent.”
It’s when you start thinking like that do you begin to understand the kind of skills needed to actually build a successful agent. Skills like:
- Business analysis: To understand what you want the agent to do and what it can help the company with.
- Agent design: To know how to map out an agent’s prospective paths to understand how it will complete tasks accordingly.
- Problem solving: To know how to fix or tweak an agent when there’s a problem.
- Prompt engineering: To know how to be specific with the instructions you give an agent.
- Data management: To know which data to ground the agent in and whether that data is secure, healthy, and governed.
- Design Instruction: To know how to map out an agent’s prospective paths to understand how it will complete tasks accordingly.
When asked whether he thought that Salesforce Admins currently have the necessary skills to build successful AI agents, Ian’s answer was clear: “The short answer is yes. However, they do need to enhance them.”
“I don’t think they have 100% of the skills, but they have a solid foundation. If you think about the skills that an admin’s got. They understand their org. They know how to build flows, which is an automation. They probably know someone who knows something about Apex.”
He explained that a lot of admins probably already benefit from having some business analysis skills, understanding how their business operates, as well as where important data is, and how to collect it. They’re likely just missing out on some of the more AI-specific skills.
The Demands of the Admin Job
Salesforce have made it crystal clear that the future of Salesforce – and likely the tech sector as a whole – is agentic, but how does that actually translate into future work for Salesforce Admins?
At present, there seems to be two different futures that could play out: one involves the complete erosion of the Salesforce Admin role (or at least the entry-level Salesforce Admin role), as companies realize that AI agents are able to perform those tasks more efficiently.
The other future involves the Salesforce Admin taking on much more responsibility, ensuring agents are properly trained and tested, and issues are quickly fixed. Ultimately, it is likely that the actual future will be an intriguing mix of the two.
A Reddit thread from the r/salesforce subreddit recently highlighted some admins’ thoughts on this possible future, with the original poster speculating what the admin role could become as AI becomes powerful.
“How soon before someone trains an AI to take control of your computer and Salesforce instance for configuration?” they wrote. “I feel there will be an onboarding process for the agent, along with a human to collect business requirements. Am I reaching?”
Another poster replied, saying that they have personally seen the tools that are being built to do this, and that in the hands of someone capable, these tools will “displace basic admins.”
“What can we expect?” they wrote. “Any job that is 100% tied to a specific computer-based technology is much more at risk than any other job in terms of AI displacement.”
Another thread detailed their initial struggles with Salesforce’s latest AI updates and how long it takes to complete certain tasks.
“It’s insanely easy to set up once you understand how the prompt and flow actions interact with the agent layer,” one person wrote. “The difficulty is the testing and scaling. I can add 10+ functional use cases in a day, but it takes us and the client 3-5 days to test and repair the functionality of those actions. Even more to get near 100% repeatable use cases.”
However AI develops, including Salesforce’s AI, the admin role will be affected. Whether it means that existing admins have to take on an additional load or that the role will be gradually phased out, one thing is for certain: admins will need to reframe their skill set to put them in a favorable position.
How Do Admins Stay Ahead?
To ensure that admins stay ahead, they will need to consider developing the skills that are going to make them invaluable in the future, and unsurprisingly, a lot of them are indeed AI skills or skills that can be transferred to working with AI.
This is especially important now as many organizations are still working out Salesforce’s AI suite and how it can benefit them, making mistakes, trudging through trial and error, and considering ROI at every step.
“We want agents that are able to elevate the skills of our teams,” Ian said. “Therefore, we need them to behave and operate reliably.”
“The reason they’re not reliable is because you haven’t architected and designed it properly, and you haven’t thought about the accuracy of the instructions.”
This is why those aforementioned skills – namely, business analysis, design instruction, and prompt engineering – will be so critical. Admins will not only need to understand how to build agents but also how to make them specific, accurate, and something that they don’t need to keep coming back to fix.
There is no other way around it; learning AI is a must, especially if you’re a Salesforce Admin. Salesforce has extended numerous resources to get stuck in, and if you’re an existing admin, a lot of this learning will just serve as an extra layer to the foundational knowledge you already have.
After all, over 71% of Salesforce Admins are already using AI tools, with 62.3% reporting increased productivity – the movement has already started.
Summary
So, do Salesforce Admins actually have the right skills to build AI agents? Not yet, but it is only really a matter of time.
Salesforce Admins are already positioned with essential knowledge of the orgs that they work in, and understand what makes it run smoothly day-to-day. Building upon that knowledge to create AI tools that will make both their lives and their users’ lives easier will come almost naturally with the right training, and there has really been no better time than now to start – even if your org hasn’t adopted AI functionality yet.
