The Salesforce Career Show

AI & The Future of Salesforce Admins

• Josh Matthews and Josh LeQuire • Season 3 • Episode 67

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The AI revolution isn’t coming—it’s already here. And for Salesforce administrators, this means big changes. 

AI-powered tools like Einstein and AgentForce are now handling 40-50% of manual tasks, automating processes such as user permissions, report generation, and workflow creation. With AI evolving at an unprecedented speed, the role of the Salesforce admin is shifting from configurator to strategic orchestrator.

In this episode of the Salesforce Career Show, hosts Josh Matthews and Josh LeQuire welcome David Forder, founder of Sentia AI, a leading company in AI-powered Salesforce automation. They dive deep into what these changes mean for current and aspiring admins, including what skills will be essential to stay competitive and thrive in an AI-driven ecosystem.

Beyond just automation, the panel explores how AI governance, DevOps practices, and business analysis will shape the next generation of Salesforce careers. Whether you’re a seasoned admin or just breaking into the ecosystem, this episode provides the critical insights and strategies you need to future-proof your career.


Key Topics Include:

  • How AI is transforming the Salesforce admin role (and what’s next).
  • Why Einstein GPT and AgentForce will redefine Salesforce workflows.
  • The new skillset admins must develop to stay competitive.
  • The rise of AI governance and its impact on Salesforce professionals.
  • How DevOps and automation are becoming essential skills for admins.
  • The 30% drop-off prediction: Why admins must adapt or risk being left behind.
  • How AI can increase admin salaries by up to 22%—if leveraged correctly.
  • What companies expect from admins in 2025 and beyond.

This episode is brought to you by Josh Matthews: thesalesforcerecruiter.com

For more terrific content, join our social network and get connected to our Salesforce community.


Chapters:

00:00 - Welcome and Introduction to AI’s Impact on Admins
 00:07 - The AI Revolution: Why It’s Changing the Salesforce Ecosystem Now
 00:25 - Einstein GPT, AgentForce, and the Future of Automation
 00:54 - The Admin Role Shift: From Configurator to Strategic Orchestrator
 01:17 - The Salesforce Career Show’s New Name & Format Announcement
 01:41 - Introduction to Guest: David Forder, Founder of Sentia AI
 02:28 - How Sentia AI is Innovating AI-Powered Salesforce Workflows
 03:09 - What AI Means for Admins: Opportunities & Risks
 05:30 - How AI Will Automate 50% of Current Admin Responsibilities
 06:41 - Admin Survival Guide: The Skills You Must Learn Now
 09:35 - Why DevOps is Becoming Essential for Salesforce Admins
 12:44 - AI Governance: What Admins Need to Know About Data & Ethics
 14:09 - The 30% Reduction in Admin Jobs: Who Will Be Left Behind?
 17:54 - How Admins Can Become AI Experts (And Secure a 22% Pay Raise)
 22:37 - The Business Impact of AI: How to Align with Company Needs
 25:45 - The Role of AI in Business Analysis and Stakeholder Engagement
 31:05 - What Hiring Managers Now Expect from Salesforce Admins
 36:28 - Actionable Career Advice: How to Stay Relevant in

Josh Matthews:

Okay, we are. Live everybody, and welcome to the Salesforce Career Show. Salesforce professionals, the AI revolution isn't just coming, it's already here and it's changing the game faster than anyone expected. If you're a Salesforce administrator, ai isn't just a cool feature. It's your new co-worker and it's taking over 40 to 50% of the manual tasks you once owned. By 2028, tools like Einstein and AgentForce will handle user permissions, report generation, workflow creation and much, much more. So where does that leave you? Well, the role of the admin is evolving from configurator to strategic orchestrator, where success depends on how well you manage, optimize and innovate alongside AI. Today, we're breaking it all down with David Forter from Sentia AI. That's S-E-N-T-I-Ainfo if you want to check it out. This is a company at the forefront of AI-powered Salesforce automation. We'll explore what's changing, what skills you'll need to stay ahead and how to future-proof your career in this new AI-driven world. And now it's the Salesforce Career Show.

Josh Matthews:

Okay, guys, before we get started, I wanted to announce something very big about the Salesforce Career Show. It's not just that I'm having a bad hair day, it's a really big announcement. The Salesforce Career Show is evolving and, after tons of feedback and seeing where the industry is headed, we're making some big changes. We're going to have a new name. It's going to be called the Salesforce Hiring Edge. We're going to have a new focus helping hiring managers, consulting firms and businesses stay ahead with Salesforce hiring, recruiting, consulting and AI. We'll also have a new format. It's going to be shorter, punchier and dropping every week instead of bi-weekly. Same energy, same insights, just more of it and more tailored to you. The first episode of the new format drops late April and, trust me, you don't want to miss it. Hit the subscribe button and let's keep building. Today I'm joined by co-host Josh LaQuire. Let's get a hello from you, mr Josh.

Josh LeQuire:

Hey, josh, good to see you. Good to see you as well, david.

Josh Matthews:

All right, and we've got David Forter. So today we have an incredible guest with deep expertise in sales leadership and AI innovation David Forter, founder and CEO of Sencha. He has led businesses to over one billion dollars in revenue, pioneered AI powered CRM solutions and is revolutionizing workplace efficiency. Welcome, David.

David Forder:

Yeah, Hi Josh, Welcome David. Yeah, Hi Josh. Hi Josh, Great to be on board.

Josh Matthews:

Well, it's great to have you and if you guys or anyone who's watching live, you're probably going. What is that dude doing with that microphone? Doesn't he have a regular mic stand? And up until about 10 minutes ago I did until it crapped out on me, so I'm using a handheld mic, like an MC or something like that. I'm really excited about today's episode. Let's get right down to it. All right, david, what is Sencha?

David Forder:

Well, our business. Firstly, for the Salesforce community, I've been a Salesforce user slash admin since about 2003. So there's not much I haven't seen. I was co-founder of what grew to be a large staffing business. We invested in Salesforcecom, ended up having 1,500 seats. From that point forward, the die was set. My life since that so 2003-4, has been driving improvements in Salesforcecom. In 2014, I established, I founded, Centure, which is a Salesforce partner firm, and just kind of built on that earlier experience. So I've seen it all. We began our kind of AI journey in about 2017, 18, when it wasn't so extensively available and did lots of machine learning, and then, obviously, in the last couple of years, our focus has been providing access to LLMs within the Salesforce ecosystem and especially now with Einstein GPT going crazy, we're right amongst it and love to chat about that.

Josh Matthews:

Yeah, fantastic. Look, guys, I got to tell you I've done a lot of deep research over the last month or so about how AI is impacting the Salesforce ecosystem beyond just agent force. It is, after all, a career show and oftentimes people are tuning in to figure out what should they be paying attention to, what should they be studying, what cert comes next versus what AI should they study, and how can they stay relevant? Some of the information that that admins, developers, analysts, even project managers will be doing, this idea of going from configurator to strategic orchestrator I'm interested in both your perspectives. Josh and David that's actually my name, joshua, david Matthews. Josh and David. I'm interested in both your perspectives on this, with a focus on what the impact is going to be like for the administrators out there.

David Forder:

Yeah, and Josh, do you want it laid off or do you want me to wait in?

Josh LeQuire:

Yeah, no, I can tell you already that it's probably a lot of tools off the Salesforce platform right now. They're going to have a huge impact for administrators. So as you work with your internal clientele you've heard me say this on the show before if you are an administrator or developer in-house for a company, your client is the business. So as you go to talk to the business, analyze requirements and do things like standardize how you capture requirements, documentation and then need a good co-pilot or co-architect to help you figure out what the right Salesforce solutions are, I anticipate those types of tools today would be helpful.

Josh LeQuire:

Josh, you'd mentioned a few things that are in the pipeline starting to come out Salesforce itself. You'll be able to prompt it it sounds like in the next release or two from setup to go and actually create metadata and start to create things. I know you can create flows, I believe in the latest release and you're just going to be able to create a whole lot more so you can see where the platform is going. It's going to a point to where you can prompt it to create a data management things you used to have to do by hand. I had a chance, david, to preview Sentia with you and your perspective is probably a little different. Since you are an OEM ISV partner with Salesforce and since you're actually deploying an application for users, I'm kind of curious to hear your perspective not just for your end users and clients, but internally, as you're developing your product as an ISV.

Josh LeQuire:

how does that change your perspective, seeing some of the tools and technologies available today?

David Forder:

I think and thank you for that I think what I've found is obviously Salesforce is doubling down on ChatGPT sorry, einstein GPT. It's their number one focus. It's pushed throughout the whole ecosystem and, as Josh, as you mentioned, I think subsequent releases are going to be, it's going to become, I wouldn't say simpler to have the system build prompts for you, but that's definitely the direction they're headed in and the challenge I think for Salesforce admins is a really steep one. Salesforce is in the media. Mark Benioff's out there pushing Einstein GPT. He's saying they're becoming a digital labor force.

David Forder:

So in all of the Salesforce customer firms out there, the Salesforce admin is going to have to be right across all these changes with Einstein GPT, because management's going to come to them and look to them as to be the experts and that's going to require a lot of work, it's going to require a lot of trailhead time, it's going to have to require a lot of research. The Einstein GPT initiative within Salesforce is literally changing weekly at the moment and it's evolving and it's getting better and better and I think it's important for Salesforce admins to realize that the days of doing your admin cert and knowing how, to you know, modify page layouts and build a flow or two is pretty much gone now. It's going to have to be an active learning role for Einstein GPT so that when the company comes to you you'll know exactly what you should be advising them to do. Because the questions are going to come and it's so dynamic that Einstein GPT product right now You'll need to ride that. You'll need to actually be on top of it all all the time.

Josh LeQuire:

David, I'm just going to echo that point for a second and kind of fire off for our audience some awareness there.

Josh LeQuire:

You're right, the landscape is changing and, to amend my previous comment, there are actually co-pilots for developers. So I would say admins are going to have to get a little bit more comfortable with IDEs, get a little bit more comfortable with SFDX, get a little bit more comfortable with development workflows, because now with generative AI, you don't necessarily have to know an Apex or how to write Lightning Web Components, but you're going to have to know how that fits into the metadata and how those pieces talk to each other. So I would encourage anybody listening developer admin, get up to speed on the latest DevOps practices. Get up to speed on SFDX, if you're not already on the latest DevOps practices. Get up to speed on SFDX, if you're not already. To your point, david, we're going from the basics of here's a field and a layout to okay, now I need a complete working application with agents embedded into it to help my users ask questions and get results that they're expecting from the system. Yeah, and I think I'm going to jump in real quick, david.

Josh Matthews:

Josh, you bring up a really good point. Adopting DevOps methodologies is going to be definitely critical and, I'll be honest, I don't know that. I know a ton of admins where that's their jam right, whether it's release management, collaboration and communication, version control and testing. It's really going to be, I think, one of the three pillars of the admins that succeed. David, quick question for you.

Josh Matthews:

There are a number of people who are attempting to break into the Salesforce ecosystem and the typical path is go, get your admin right. I know some people are now going in and doing their first certs with AI, which is fine, however you want to do it. But they're going the normal path and we've noticed over the last two years, ever since the big layoff at the end of 23, right, we've noticed that it's just taking longer and a lot of these folks are getting discouraged, right? What do you think they should do? And I'll tell you real quick what I've been saying to people. I've been saying hey look, maybe go all in on Salesforce if you just absolutely love it, you've got connections. There's something about it that you're already. You've got your hooks in into the ecosystem. But if you're not, maybe you peel back a little bit and examine other opportunities that are really focused on AI. What do you think?

David Forder:

I think the approach that Salesforce is taking with their whole AI initiative, einstein, gpt and all the various pieces that that entails, I think that's making it a far. The hurdles to enter the Salesforce admin space from this point forward are very, very substantial. Like to jump over those hurdles and suddenly arrive at a corporate as a new Salesforce admin. Just interviewing Josh you know there's just being interviewed for that role is going to require you to know at least the basics of R&S Longevity. It's not a simple thing. So me and my team we built some of those agents and we've seen the process to do it and it's definitely an advanced admin task. It's probably close to what a developer would be putting some serious thought into doing before they did it. The prompt engineering behind Einstein GPT agents is significant. Like you really need to think about all of the tasks that that agent may be confronted with. So for a Salesforce admin looking to enter the industry, josh, as you mentioned, they need to start, they need to up their skills significantly other than just a standard admin serve, because I think, as recruiters are looking to hire people, it's going to be a given. I saw I think I jokingly mentioned to you guys last week I saw an ad with someone for a developer and they were requiring 10 years Chachapati experience and it was a genuine ad. It's probably the ad where it was written by AI, which doesn't help, but it's going to get to the point where Salesforce admins are going to need going to get to the point where a Salesforce admin is going to need that to get a role, and it's not an easy thing. It's not as simple as spinning up a trailhead and spinning up a training org and doing the one of the modules. You're going to have to do them and repeat them until they're second nature to you because there's a lot of complexity in that.

David Forder:

So I can see if I today I mean, I've got an 18-year-old son. If he said to me I want to be a Salesforce administrator, I would say, well, okay, you've got a lot of work to do if you want to be really successful in that role, because it's evolving into something that's a lot more complex than it ever was. Having said that, it's a huge opportunity because you're going to. At the moment I'm not sure, josh, maybe you know how many Salesforce admins there are out there, but there's a lot. Yeah, there are a lot, and you can stand out if you put the time into this thing and actually develop some expertise in Einstein GPT, because it's going to be in great demand. Your company, every company, needs a trusted advisor and if you put the time into it as Salesforce admin, you can be that trusted advisor for AI.

Josh Matthews:

It's a really great point. I think you're spot on. It's not you know, hey, I'll get to it. It's get to it now the way I talk about what's happening in the world as it relates to AI, and particularly in the Salesforce ecosystem or in technology. We are at the top of the roller coaster and we're just about to cruise to maximum speed. We're not there yet, but we're not chugging up the hill anymore. We are there, right, and maybe I'll eat these words someday. That would be fine, like go for it, right, but it's, it's going fast.

Josh Matthews:

Now, I mean, when a guy like me can build a website with chat in five minutes that works, that looks good, that reads well, you know, that has functionality, and I can do that in five minutes. I mean, come on, you know I am a big tech dummy If those who listen to the show, if yet if I haven't told you already I am. But I'm getting pretty darn good at the prompting and I absolutely think, as a first step, it's critical that people get comfortable with advanced prompt engineering, developing custom GPTs, just simple things. It's just. I mean, you can do magical things with this, but you've got to get it's baby steps right Before you get your hands on a big old sandbox and you're overwhelmed. You've just got to get your arms around it. What do you think, josh?

Josh LeQuire:

Yeah, I think yeah. There's more than that. You have to understand how Salesforce as a platform works. You have to understand how business applications talk to each other. You have to understand integrations, architecture. You can't just be good at prompting and expect any AI to generate good output. David, one of the things that really struck me when I got a chance to preview Cintia with you last week, and with David Brown as well, was you've rethought the user experience for interacting with AI. So if you look at Sentia as an application, it's not your standard Salesforce UI, or at least the main. Remind me, david, what's the main landing page called?

David Forder:

again, I'm on what we do with our application and I'm not going to try and do a big sell job, but what we do Sell, david, sell, come on, tell us, I mean, there's something to this it is relevant to what we're talking about.

David Forder:

So our flagship product, sentia, installs on Salesforce and lives in a tab of its own and then generates a card-based UI for users, telling them what to do every day. It's actually behind my head here on the screen, so it sits within Salesforce, but it delivers a card-based user interface full of actionable insights. Now, in our case, we use AI to drive those actionable insights to set priorities, to calculate sentiment analysis on meetings, calls and emails. We do it to automatically do data entry pieces on Salesforce. So you give it a center, a first name, last name, and it'll add the person and learn all about them and lots more.

David Forder:

We refer to that as functional AI and it sits alongside Einstein GPT really well. It's Einstein's agentic AI. We've got the AI in center on Salesforce, does all the work for users, so it makes their life simpler and you know anyone that wants to take a look at it. Obviously, I'm happy to provide a demo because for Salesforce admins there's a lot of. Even if you didn't end up buying our product, there's a lot of takeaways from how we're delivering that information to users on Salesforce. That makes it, that makes using it delightful like users.

Josh LeQuire:

Well, that that's the point. Right, like you can't just be good at prompting and generate an app like you have to understand. The reason I like your card experience is I work a lot with sales teams who tell me I just want my like tab where I go in and it tells me what calls I need to make today. And this kind of reminds me one of my first jobs out of college was at a company called Blackbot here in Charleston. We use a system called sales logics and I'll never forget it was like a hundred calls and we were just checking them off. Like our job every day was just to check that list down, burn it down. You've kind of taken that into your application, that idea that, hey, I don't need to like. Have that idea that, hey, I don't need to have to figure out where all my stuff I just want to go somewhere and do my work, right?

Josh Matthews:

Yeah, and I think the general sales guy right. I mean, I was a sales guy back in 1999 using Salesforce. A lot of people don't know that.

Josh Matthews:

I was actually one of the first people to get my hands on it. I hated it because I was on a 56K DSL dial up and it was so slow. But as a salesperson, or as someone who's driven sales teams, large sales teams and corporations at times anything that can help you not have to add information, not have to populate records, anything that's going to get you on the phone or messaging or whatever it is today with the right people, you want that because your skillset probably is not varied. You're probably not really awesome at detail orientation and data input. Oh, and, by the way, you're a top tier glass trophy winner for your sales efforts. Right, I mean, it just doesn't.

Josh Matthews:

I mean sometimes it happens, but it's just not common. I'm going to just take a quick moment. I love the way this conversation is going. I just want to take a quick moment and market a couple opportunities for people that just came through my door at the salesforcerecruitercom. Not all of these jobs are posted. That's okay. If you hear about this and you think it's interesting, dm me on LinkedIn. You can email me, joshatthesalesforcerecruitercom, or you can apply on my website if they're open, or go to the Salesforce Recruiter LinkedIn page.

Josh Matthews:

Some of these opportunities include senior project manager who's actually pretty good with strategy as well, ideally with a background in nonprofit work and some background working for a consulting company. We're also looking for the same organization someone who's skilled with it. Doesn't matter if it's NPSP or nonprofit cloud either of those, but you're sharp. Psp or nonprofit cloud, either of those, but you're sharp, you're great at client engagement, you know how to build, you know how to run a decent sized project and if you're the kind of person that other people come to looking for advice, this job's for you, I assure you. Great, family oriented company. I've been working with them for many years. I think we've placed about a third of their employees. Maybe you could be next it's quite possible Additionally project manager, junior project manager role. It's for a fully remote Salesforce implementation firm partner. They're sort of based out of New York, so central time and East Coast time is preferred. This is probably going to pay right around 90 to 100K. If you are good with client interface skills and you know a bit about Jira and a bit about Salesforce, this opportunity could also be for you. And then finally a couple on excuse me, non-remote positions, which is rare for us, but we have a Salesforce admin role working for one of the best places to work in Tampa. They've received a number of awards, their employees have voted and the results are in. They're one of the top places in the Tampa area to work for it is on site.

Josh Matthews:

If you don't live in Tampa, don't apply, people. Come on, I'm looking at 500 of your applications and wondering what you're doing in Texas with your family thinking that you're going to work for an onsite job. Don't do that, people. This is just some friendly advice. Don't do that. It drives us crazy. Read the descriptions, okay, make sure that you have the core qualifications and then apply. And guess what? If you do, we're going to get to you. We're going to get to you fast, we're going to talk, we're going to have a friendly conversation and advance your career. So a little bit of a plug on some of the jobs that we've got going on right now.

David Forder:

And now back to the discussion your resume into a private GPT on, say, chatgpt. Dump the ad in and say how would you approach this? It will probably come back and say do you live in Tampa?

Josh Matthews:

Yeah right, it's very, very smart. In fact, I don't think I've mentioned this on the show yet, but since we're talking about AI, don't worry people, we're going to stick with you, with you admins, many of you whom have joined us today live. We appreciate you. Thank you for coming to the live show and, by the way, your input's important to us. You are more than welcome to drop some comments and we're going to see them. If it's a good comment, we'll post it. We'll show it on the show right now, and this episode is going to be released on Spotify and Apple and about 15 other platforms next week. So if you can't stay to the end, that's okay. You'll get to listen to it. Make sure that you like and subscribe to the show, like this episode, and stay tuned through April, where some of our programming is going to change a little bit. A quick note on that, by the way we will be continuing to have some live episodes. It's just not going to be the core of the program, but I'm not forgetting about all of the people out there who have been followers for years.

Josh Matthews:

I got a message from Anthony Rodriguez. Anthony, thank you for the beautiful text. Anthony thanked us for all of the help that we gave him several years ago. He just received a new opportunity. He's going to have a great increase in responsibility and an increase in his income as well, to support his many children, many beautiful young children here in the state of Florida. So thank you for that kind note, anthony. We appreciate you. Now I forgot what we were talking about.

David Forder:

I know I was talking about CENTURE and we won't necessarily go back there, but I think with Einstein GPT on Salesforce, there are pieces of what we've done in Centure that admins can do. I was thinking about quick wins as a Salesforce admin. If you want to put your toe in the water with our application, for instance, we're doing some interesting things with AI that can be modularised so you could pick one or two pieces of what's in our application on Salesforce, set them up for your company and obviously sort of cement your future as an admin. There's lots of little tasks you can do rather than switching the whole business onto agents and digital labour through Einstein GPT as well, and I'm happy to talk to anyone about what what sort of little wins they can make on fast force with AI.

Josh LeQuire:

Yeah.

Josh Matthews:

Can I ask you something, josh? I'm kind of curious about your thoughts on emergence of AI governance responsibilities, cause we can talk about Einstein for an hour or two or three hours, but there's there's a lot more going on than just those layers, right? And have you given much thought or much consideration? I know that you're implementing a lot of agents into your own business and achieving a massive amount of success, and it's allowing your organization ccurrentscom that's the letter C, and then currentscom. It's allowing a lot of your clients to receive the benefits of faster results as an SI, as an SI owner. But at some point, right, I mean, we've got to make sure that AI does it, because it does hallucinate, right, and it forgets things. I ran some prompting the other day and three times in the conversation I had to remind it of the same thing over and over and over again Right paying attention to, in order to own that space and elevate their ability to be attractive to employers who are going to have a growing demand for this skill set.

Josh LeQuire:

Yeah, I think a lot of other sort of analogous governance principles do apply to AI as well. So, for instance, when you look at data governance, you think about who can access data, who can change data, what data might be subject to compliance. How do we handle that data? How do we make sure we don't retain it or destroy it if we don't need it, or make sure it's residing in the right place? I think AI is a little different because right now we're seeing it take on the work of a person. In some associate it's one or both. I think you go through the ethics piece of that, which kind of ties into governance a little bit. How do you, as an AI, where it's appropriate to use, what kind of checks and controls you put into place? I imagine there's some burgeoning, you know good policy work out there. If you wanted to get some templates and sort of consider how to tailor that for your own company, your own business.

Josh LeQuire:

We, as we're working with our clients, we're seeing good pilots, good use cases, good implementation points of how these agents can do their work and what we're finding a lot in. That is exactly what David said a minute ago One really understanding the task and responsibilities we assign to these agents. But within that, what can these agents access and do? And I think there's a little bit of a governance layer there. You want to think about good principles of putting just as you would with a targeted piece of automation or a targeted piece of logic or code have it do one thing very specifically and no more than that. Have it access only what it needs access to do a shop. So principles are emerging. I would say that we're still kind of treading into a new space there. David, I'd be super curious you know, with your own company internally as well as with your clients, what you're seeing. I'd imagine you've probably seen quite a few different variations or answers to this.

David Forder:

I think all these things. Obviously, companies need to comply, so you've got to manage your compliance and protect data where it's relevant, and it depends a lot on the industry you're in as to how critical that is, but it needs to be top of mind. It depends a lot on the industry you're in as to how critical that is, but it needs to be top of mind. What I find with our clients is that there tends to be a balance. Different groups have a different risk profile, so they're more willing to share data through APIs to AIs than others, and so we work with them to uncover well, what are they comfortable with? We've got applications century applications where we'll establish a private LLM for their use only on a private server and connect Salesforce to that and use that as the engine behind all the functions in Centure.

David Forder:

Other guys aren't so concerned, so they're happy for us to spin up a model in a cloud that's for them. We tend to give clients private LLMs. Spin up a model in a cloud that's for them. We tend to give clients private LLMs, and so it's a mixed bag and it is case by case, but as a responsible vendor, it's kind of the first conversation we have. What is your risk profile? What does concern you? What doesn't concern you? I'm asked about DeepSync, for instance, and it's the Chinese origin. Some companies want to steer away from that, even though it's hosted now by Microsoft and Oracle here.

Josh Matthews:

We have that conversation. The complexity just dropped them, in fact.

David Forder:

Yeah it's just as I said at the start.

David Forder:

We're riding this tidal wave as a vendor. But for anyone in this ecosystem, you really need to be on the news every week and have good quality sources of what's happening in enterprise software with AI, especially Salesforce, but everything else, because it is a shifting feast every week and you will be looked at as being the expert in the company and what we're also seeing in larger corporates. We're seeing a lot of concern at board level that they may be left behind in AI because their team will be reluctant to wait in, and I think that's probably sensible. But the board will be saying, well, look, we can't be left out, like we can't be at a competitive disadvantage by not embracing AI, so we need to do it. So there's often conflict in the clients we speak to, where senior management is saying, well, we have to do something with AI or we're going to miss out on that opportunity. And then the guys in that AI space are saying, well, it's too early and it's too much risk involved and you're going to have to get a happy medium between the two.

Josh Matthews:

Yeah, the risk right now is to not get involved now, I think.

Josh Matthews:

But you can get death by a thousand subscriptions and you can get death by a thousand subscriptions and you can get, you know, like death by a thousand different products coming at you. In many ways I'm going to date myself. Right now it can feel like it's the VHS beta wars right From back in the day, times a thousand and being positioned as a business owner doing what I do. I mean the world is rife with brand new ai. I mean everyone's creating something and everybody's trying to get on the bandwagon really, really fast. I think the best way to look at what's happening right now is it's the gold rush right, and you've got to figure out are you going to go mine for gold? Are you going to become sears or levi's? Are you going to supply the tools that help you know?

Josh LeQuire:

or you take a very risk focused approach to implementation, meaning bite off a small piece, pilot it, contain it, make sure it's very isolated and not impacting anything of great impact to business continuity, revenue or other types of cycles that the business is running. So you can pilot things, you can try things, and you probably should, but you should do those in places you know it's safe. You don't want an agent running the most important operational process in your business, but you might want to try it on some areas where you're doing some research and development. It's a good point.

David Forder:

Just literally last week I was asked by a potential client of ours can we use Sentra AI to automatically generate customized emails for email campaigns with marketing clients? So can we use our AI product to spit out emails for each person and customize it for that person and blast out a few thousand every day? And I said to them, yes, but I won't do it because the danger is one of those emails and Einstein, gpt has great protections for that sort of piece, but without those, the danger is one of their clients or their customers or their leads is going to get some crazy email because there hasn't been a human look over that. So the tech's not quite there yet. It can do it, but I wouldn't sleep at night if I knew software we produced was spitting out thousands of AI-generated emails to their customer base.

Josh Matthews:

David, do you mean the AI isn't there yet for Accenture? Because people are having experiences?

David Forder:

Yeah, there's other companies that will do it.

Josh Matthews:

They're having experiences where they're receiving messages and it's very tailored to them. But it's definitely a lot more product-focused. Yes, you know, it's more like using Data Cloud and just being able to kind of synthesize what this person's profile is and then make suggestions in a pre-formatted way, versus like this, like purely custom email for this person, based on every.

David Forder:

This was a little different. If you're using, say, einstein, gpt to produce custom campaigns, where they have a customer file, they know what the customer's product choices have been in their purchases and you want to suggest some sales, that's a different piece to what this was. They wanted to do a full-blown cold outbound email campaign. So one of the pieces in Senture in our AI is when we add a person to Salesforce, senture goes and learns about that person from LinkedIn. So it pulls in their history, their work, employment history, education, posts, followers, groups and learns all about them. So we can generate a summary about that person and what might build rapport, what they might be interested in. And this client of ours wanted to send out a blast of emails out to everybody, cold emails to leads, and it's only going to take one. That's an embarrassing email that went wrong, or 3,000. Like, who knows, it happens all the time, gets grabbed by the media and all of a sudden Brand X has done some embarrassing email. I know your Bud Light, yeah, I know you're Bud Light, yeah, guys.

Josh Matthews:

I want to bring this focus right back to the careers of admins, if we can for just a moment, and also do a little bit of a mid-show update. Many people are listening to this live right now and may have missed the first couple of minutes where we have a really big announcement. In fact, the Salesforce career show is evolving. After tons of feedback and seeing where the industry is going, we're making some very big changes. We're going to have a new name, the Salesforce Hiring Edge, a new focus helping hiring managers, consulting firms and businesses stay ahead of the Salesforce hiring, recruiting and AI and consulting as well. It's a new format. Josh and I are going to be recording, not live shows. We'll do those now and then, but we're going to be recording and releasing 30-minute episodes. They're going to be shorter, punchier, dropping every single week, so perfect commuter length. If you're one of those weird people who work in Salesforce and actually drives to work, then you'll be good to go. But same energy, same insights, just more of it and tailored for you. First episode is likely to drop late April and you're not going to want to miss it. So that you don't miss it, please go ahead, hit that subscribe button and, if you aren't yet follow David Ford on LinkedIn. You can follow Josh. If you're watching on LinkedIn, our links are right there. You can follow Josh LaQuire and you can follow me as well, josh Matthews, and I thank everybody for being here. Let's keep the ball rolling a little bit.

Josh Matthews:

I really want to talk about careers, right? Many people tune into this program right now, in its current state, because they're curious about how to earn more money, right, how to protect their career. I actually did a poll recently. We had over a hundred people respond to the poll and I'll go over those results in a minute. But one of the things I wanted to share is that the estimates for people who have some sort of deep experience or decent experience in AI governance are likely to receive about a 22% increase in their compensation above non-certified peers. So let's talk about compensation with admins here for just a minute, okay?

Josh Matthews:

So the data that I've looked at and look right now so the data that I've looked at and I don't look right now, nobody knows, right? I mean, even analysts who are on uh, you know, finance news channels only get it right about half the time. Most predictions aren't much better than a coin flip, right? So what? What do we do with this information? Well, we try to take an educated guess and at least move the ball forward somehow. I think the point here is that not moving the ball forward, not adopting, not adapting, is what's going to actually hurt you, right, so don't get hurt. Do something. So you studied the wrong platform, so you learned the one thing that's going to be obsolete in nine months. It's okay, right, but just move the ball forward. Educate yourself and learn, and some of the data that I'm seeing right now is right around about a 30% drop off in overall Salesforce administrators by 2028, if and it's an if if they don't adapt and grow their skills in AI.

Josh Matthews:

Not every company is going to use agent force. Not every company is going to be able to afford Einstein GPT for everybody, right? Half the companies in the United States are massive and half of them are small. Like, sorry, I take that back. Half people working at companies work at very large companies and half of everybody you know the other half are working at small businesses. They're going to have very different budgets, different applications, different use cases. Right, figure out where you're at. Figure out what you like to do. Adapt for that size of cases. Right, figure out where you're at, figure out what you like to do, adapt for that size of company, right, but it's going to touch absolutely everybody, so so don't let go of that.

Josh Matthews:

Okay, careers guys, let's talk about careers. I'm I want to just do a quick round Robin here. We're 40 minutes into the show and we're going to be wrapping up in about 20. Thanks everybody for sticking around so long. We really do appreciate you. Uh, okay, quick 30 second, 20 second soundbite david, what is the number one thing, that, the number one piece of advice that you think salesforce admins should be doing today, like they're going to wake up tomorrow and they're going to do something that they're Salesforce admins should be doing today, like they're going to wake up tomorrow and they're going to do something that they're not doing. What should they do? I think?

David Forder:

20 seconds is tough. I think if they've not got their Salesforce admin certs, they need to. I know there's a lot of people out there with practical experience that haven't got the certification. I think the new admin certs give you a lot more exposure to Einstein's Jupiter and then you really need to be doing extensive trails around agetic AI on trailhead and repeat them multiple times so that you we all know you can scoot really quickly through some of those trails and it doesn't necessarily get absorbed, but you will need that practical information. So get certified. If you're not for the admin certification, you can get the advanced one even better and then run through all the trailheads that relate to Einstein, gpt and repeat them multiple times so they become as close to second nature as possible.

Josh Matthews:

I love that, david. Repeat them right. I mean, if you're listening to this show right now and you're not taking notes, you're going to have about a 6% retention and that's maybe all you need. All you really need to know is like oh, I should get better at AI. That's the message. We're going to yap about this for an hour, but that's the message. All right, mr LaQuire what do you think?

Josh LeQuire:

Yes, sir. Well, I think the long-term view as you look at the next 5, 10, 15 years, continue to sharpen your knowledge around business analysis, look broadly at the platform. But I would encourage you, if you have a product, let's say you want to go deep in service cloud or marketing cloud or CPQ or revenue cloud or any of these products. It will, ironically, serve you well. You know you still want to have an understanding of the rest of the platform, but having deep knowledge in an area is actually hugely advantageous. And you know, if you're willing to try, try writing code, it's great. It's not that hard to learn, it just takes practice.

Josh Matthews:

Yeah well, let me, let's jump on that for a second right. So what about all of these apps that are coming out like lovabledev, where you can get in and you can code through prompting, which which I've done? I? I think we talked about it on one of the recent shows. Check out mayonnaisecom. That's M-A-Y-E-R-N-N-N-A-I-S-E, a little app that I created for my son, john Mayer songs and chords and scales. It's coming to Salesforce, right, like it's coming to Salesforce, you know. And all of those people that are kind of these advanced admins who are sort of touching Apex. I mean, what do you think's going to happen? What do you think's going to happen there? I mean, isn't, isn't going to be, isn't it going to be chat based Apex here in like six months, or something like that?

Josh LeQuire:

Arguably it will, but you still have to have your. You, as a human being, are going to have way more context than AI ever will about your client, your company, your business, your code base, your metadata base. I mean, granted, you can use cursor AI right now and it's context, aware of everything and is pretty damn good, but, that being said, you will always need to be the editor. There's always a helpful human layer to have to this and, if anything, the deeper your knowledge is, the more you can use AI to a higher power.

David Forder:

Yeah, I mean just to add to that, josh and Josh, I think we often use some AI tools private AI tools to help us build out our APEX for applications. Where it's particularly valuable, given the audience here, is it can teach you how to code in Apex and it can teach you how to build flows, and it's just a matter of clever prompting so you can ask it to write an Apex trigger for something or an Apex class for something. But what's better is if you say look, I want to learn how to write an Apex class or an Apex trigger to achieve this. This is the name of my objects that are in the fields that I want to use. Can you talk me through writing that trigger or writing that class step by step and explain each step and it'll do it perfectly Like, it'll do it beautifully, and I think that's the real value for Salesforce administrators, rather than just have it churn it out, because often you'll then find you'll upload it and you're into the developer console.

David Forder:

It'll be full of bugs, won't be quite right, you'll end up going backwards and forwards five, six, seven times to the AI to get it right. But using those tools to help you learn how to code is fantastic because it will work at your pace and you don't have to be embarrassed about asking it questions, because it's an AI.

Josh Matthews:

Yeah, it is an AI and it's safe to learn. It truly is. I'm going to jump in on this myself, because both of you have covered really important aspects of adapting to AI to be able to secure your future in the ecosystem. And I want to bring back the voice of my friend, former co-host, vanessa Grant, and she's really big on admins and everyone, ideally aligning Salesforce with the business objectives. Right. By that I mean stakeholder engagement, like being able to build relationships across departments to understand their needs and challenges, you know, to ensure that Salesforce solutions are going to meet broader organizational goals. Business impact analysis right, impact, and what are the metrics around it and how can it change and affect the business outcomes and the revenue growth, the customer satisfaction improvements. And then the strategic uh, the strategic business partnerships too, like positioning yourself just as a trusted advisor, right, like, oh, I'm going to go to Josh If I've got a question.

Josh Matthews:

Like Josh and I, we have our friend Mike Makula, hakuna Makula, and he's great. He's a sharp guy, developer, architect and really at the forefront. He's been on the show, at the forefront of AI and exploring building things. He's inspired me. I know that, josh, you've been catching up with mike as well, right. So like when you're someone like that, when you're someone who can get other people excited about technology, you can communicate the value, you can give them a bit of a roadmap, so it's a soft landing, right, right, so they can like. He's like hey, yeah, let's build this app, josh, but first go in and mess around here, you're just going to have fun.

Josh Matthews:

And I called him, I don't know. It was like nine, 30 at night one night and I'm sitting on my bed with my laptop and I'm just quote unquote coding. I say that with quotes in a big way, because all I'm doing is saying like no, put a dark mode button, move it to the right. I'm just saying this kind of stuff into the little chat. I was like man, I was up till 3 am doing this stuff. It literally is like playing an awesome video game that you get addicted to right.

Josh Matthews:

Plus, there's a pace to it because you got to wait for it to do its thing, so it can be kind of relaxing. You can listen to a show you can put on a podcast. You can listen to this show while you're coding something, so you can just kind of go get addicted to some aspect of AI. But I also think and it's critical you've got to develop those communication skills. Ai can't communicate the way that you do because it doesn't have a voice, fully right, it doesn't have flesh, it doesn't have blood in its system. I'm going to share a quick little plug for our friend, john Klein. John Klein, in the fall, donated $28,000 of leadership training to our listeners and it's absolutely incredible what he did to give that away. We actually have a Salesforce cohort of a dozen people who won in our little contest. And quick plug for John.

Josh Matthews:

I made a phone call today to someone who had applied for a job. I'm talking to her and we kind of get to the end of the conversation. She's a great candidate. I booked her with my client for next week. She's a great candidate and she said hey, I just want to say, um, you know, I heard about this job by listening to your show and I also was one of the winners of the contest with the people first method. I was like, oh my God, you're kidding, like what an amazing story. Like I just happened to call this this who has some incredible skills and she's in the cohort I'm on that Slack, by the way. I look at it almost every day. I had no idea I didn't put two and two together, but she said, oh my God, it's amazing, like I am learning so much.

Josh Matthews:

So a little plug for John Klein and People First Method. People First Method helps teach people communication skills for leadership or just for being a badass BA or a badass Salesforce admin. You can check it out at peoplefirstmethodcom. They've adjusted some of the programs so that you can join in a little bit more of a digestible chunk, and they've also made it really affordable for you. So that's all I wanted to say there. We've got 10 minutes to go. David, what are some of the more important things that you think we haven't covered yet on this show About the world in general?

David Forder:

So I think and one comment I'll make about something you said, josh, about it was addictive. You were in your hotel on the laptop doing this stuff and you were having a great time and all of a sudden it was three in the morning. I know that the first Dreamforce I went to was 2007 and I remember what was obvious is that the Salesforce admins who went along, whether they were certified or not, loved it. It was like a superpower being able to customise things on Salesforce for people who maybe had never done coding or worked in software before and they were their company's go-to. So that was addictive. So I guess what you said, josh, resonated with me.

David Forder:

When you're learning these new skills with einstein gpt, there's going to be a lot of work required. It's not I noticed one of the comments from reed on linkedin said that a dream force. You know ipso facto, two minutes later you have an agent operating. It's not quite that simple, right? So it's going to require a lot of work, which means you get embrace it and it will become addictive because once you pop out your first couple of agents doing what you wanted them to do, you'll be hooked. The same way most Salesforce admins initially get hooked when they learn how to customize page layouts or add an object or add some fields or even maybe write a trigger or two. So it will become addictive. But you've got to do the work to the point where you get some output.

David Forder:

When I learned coding it was a long, long, long time ago, um, and before I actually had worked, I was at college and the the the sort of initial uh um adrenaline hit you got was when you could just make a you know hello world prompt flash on the screen.

David Forder:

But at that point you're addicted because it's like I made that happen and it I'm. So gpt learning has to. You have to embrace that same feeling like I'm going to have to put lots of work into this and then. But there's going to be outcomes and it's going to be rewarding and I'm going to get more money in my role. I'm going to be embraced by my company. I'll have all these skills that are going to stand me in good stead for the next 10, 15 years. Uh, because even though it is in the salesforce community, the prompt engineering skills that they'll give you translate to pretty much any ai role. Really, you're still learning basic skills about how to direct ai to do what you want it to do you know, I, I want to talk about that for a minute.

Josh Matthews:

This, this idea of it getting addicted to something, right, you know whether it's we're just talking dopamines guys, dopamines organs, right, you get a hit, okay. And certain things take time, right, someone who picks up the piano decides to well, maybe they don't pick it up, it'll hurt their back, but they sit down at a piano for the first time and they learn to play chopsticks, right. Or they learn two chords, because you know, that's almost all rap songs is two chords, right, maybe three. So they learn two or three chords. They recognize oh, I know that song, now I can play that song and there's kind of this quick hit. But then there are certain, certain things that we it takes time to get addicted to, right, I mean, I got a quick hit doing this little development stuff. I'll use an example.

Josh Matthews:

My favorite book is War and Peace. I just think it's the best freaking book in the whole world. I love it, but a lot of people don't read it nowadays because it takes a long time to just understand the language that they're using, the devices that they're using, the style of sentence structure, and I'll admit, it starts in the middle of some weird party and you don't know what the hell is going on. For 100 pages and everyone's named Andre, like everyone's named Andre. It's very confusing.

Josh Matthews:

And so when I picked it up I read it right around the millennium 2000. And I said, okay, this is like a 1200 page book. I'm going to give myself 200 pages, no matter what, I'm just going to plow through. I wanted to put the book down a hundred times, right, but I just plowed through and the book was given to me by my friend Rodney, who's a software engineer, many years ago and I said, man, isn't that that book's kind of long? And he says it's not long enough. And at the end, I know shit, I cried. I cried, just a little tear went down my cheek because it was like I felt like I knew this family like so deeply and I knew there was no sequel, right.

Josh Matthews:

It's not like like I know there's no like this, is it? There is nothing else. There's not going to be fan fiction going on with this, but so when you're approaching some of these things that are more challenging, right, when you're really like you're trying to read music, not just learn three chords, you're trying to really get your arms around Einstein, gpt and governance and some of these other things that are quite complex you might not get a quick hit. Do a little research and figure out how long is it probably going to take to get really good at it and then set a goal for 20% of that time. Don't let yourself quit. People put on their resumes all the time and they say it in an interview oh, I want to challenge, I'm open to a new challenge, and I usually tell them well, okay, challenge means you're going to want to quit and then you don't, right. So just because some of this stuff's going to be a little bit complex, and even if it doesn't just hit your dopamine, you don't get some dopamine flood like right when you're starting it. Don't worry about it, just plug through, keep going, right. I mean, these are barriers to entry. Not everyone's going to get a 22% pay raise because the AI specialists anyone could go out and do that, or AI associate, I don't even remember. You can basically just read a blog and go pass the test. It's like nothing. No wonder it's free. So there's a barrier to entry for success in your careers. Please don't forget that.

Josh Matthews:

And the rewards come when you take a moment, or many moments, and make some serious commitments to what you're going to do in your career. You're listening to this show because you care and are interested in being the best person that you can in the Salesforce ecosystem. You want to feel accomplished, you want to feel happy, you want to feel fulfilled. And you're listening to this because you know it just doesn't get handed out. You have to go take it, and to take it you have to give up something. Generally, that's your time. Generally, that's some of your focus on other things, right? So thanks for letting me rant a little bit about this. I feel like sometimes we just tell people like go do this, go learn this, and then they start down the path and then they're like okay, well, this sucks, like, so what? Embrace the suck, get through it, push through, and the rewards are so much better. Learning Einstein, gpt it could be your war and peace, right, it could be your Rachmaninoff that you can finally play after 10 years of piano lessons, like who knows.

David Forder:

Yeah, yeah, I think that's really good advice, josh. I think the point is that we tend to live in a world where people have a much shorter attention span than they used to, and no one thinks it unreasonable to learn, to spend three or four years learning a trade, or to go to college for three or four years and learn an engineering skill or a software skill. And I think, in the same way that we're all used to now working remotely, largely, except in Tampa, I think we need to embrace online learning and actually put a lot of time into these skills that are going to add to the value to our roles and our careers, and so you will get a payback. Like you said, josh, it's worth putting the time in, but you have to put the time in because what's going to happen is there's going to be less and less roles for Salesforce admins who can't generate agents, gpts. It's just going to happen. They're not going to be needed, they're going to eventually be squeezed out. They're certainly going to be paid less and less. And so if your career is as a Salesforce admin or a developer for that matter, because there's a load of developers who aren't across Einstein and Jupyter yet then now's the time because it's going to take some serious hours to become skilled in those areas and it's worth doing because it'll secure your future in your role, secure more cash for you it will make you feel more competent anyway and give you some job security.

Josh Matthews:

I couldn't agree more. Thank you for that, David. We're coming to the end of our show. Final words, Mr LaQuire.

Josh LeQuire:

Yeah, I think, keep learning, Keep that growth mindset, go try things, break things, spend time. The more time you invest, the quicker you learn. We're living in the golden age now of having great capability at our fingertips to do a whole heck of a lot, and you're not going to learn anything by sitting in your chair staring at the computer. You're going to have to get out and do it. You're going to have to talk to the business. You're going to have to take those needs in hands and go and give it a try.

Josh Matthews:

So you hands and go and give it a try. Uh, so you know, get out, do learn, grow. I love it. Yeah, put down the the youtube shorts um five hours a day. Stop that stuff. Stop the tiktok. Yeah, stop the tiktok.

David Forder:

All right, david, some final words from you yeah, well, we we obviously are heavily in the salesforce ai space. Um, we focus on functional AI et cetera, but what that means is we're riding this tidal wave and I've got a lot of people who rely on us to be that trusted advisor. So you don't necessarily have to buy something from us. If you reach out to me on LinkedIn, david Porter, et cetera you'll find me in the search box. Then I'm more than happy to act as a sounding board or have the odd call from anyone who wants some advice on what to do with AI inside Salesforce.

David Forder:

Maybe it would lead to a sale for us or some services, or not. That's fine too, but you will need to embrace AI. You need to find some trusted advisors to lean on, so that then I mean I would see our role in that area as making you look great in your position. So contact us if you want some help on Salesforce with AI. Contact us if you just want someone to ask questions about what you should be doing, I'm happy to operate in either of those roles. One's free one less so.

Josh Matthews:

Thank you, david. Thank you so much, josh and I will be back two weeks from today, on Wednesday at 2.30 Pacific, 5.30 Eastern, for another live episode of the Salesforce Career Show. It will be our second to last, I think, of the Salesforce Career Show. Before we change the name, it should be on the same channel. You should still be subscribed. If you're not subscribed right now, please go ahead and do it.

Josh Matthews:

I'm always shocked by how many of our listeners aren't subscribed and then they have to go and like find it all the time and they don't know when a new episode is coming out. Like, don't be hard on yourself, just hit the little button. And, by the way, this program really does rely on comments, likes, shares, whether it's on LinkedIn or on the platform of your choice. It really helps us to grow our audience and allows us to help more people. Taking just a moment to do that really helps the algorithm and we really appreciate you doing that. I'm Josh. That's Josh. That's David. We're going to take off right now and wish everybody a very, very AI filledfilled but fun and relaxing couple of weeks. Go, crush it, people. If you haven't started, start now. If you're still going, or if you've already started. Keep going. This is the Salesforce Career Show. Bye for now, bye-bye, bye-bye.

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Josh Matthews

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Vanessa Grant

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