How to use Salesforce AI: Salesforce Radio
Hawk-eye editor with a passion for trailblazing Salesforce experiences
Welcome to Salesforce Radio, your destination for insights, news, and connections within the dynamic Salesforce ecosystem. In episode 2 of Salesforce Radio, Ben Miller sits down with Joseph Kubon and Andy Forbes, co-authors of the trailblazing book ChatGPT for Accelerating Salesforce Development.
Since the 1950s, we’ve been learning to speak the language of computers. We are about to enter a world where computers learn to speak our language! In the past, we could touch, feel, and see the information shaping our lives but today everything is in the cloud! We have no idea where any hardware or operating system is located. The languages have libraries, they are interpreted and completely abstracted. Salesforce itself is abstracted! It has become increasingly obvious that the next level of abstraction is Generative AI!
What does this new era hold for us and how will the AI revolution shape the future of Salesforce?
About the Salesforce Radio Guests
Joseph Kubon III is a Salesforce MVP and a 40Xs Salesforce-Slack-MuleSoft Certified Application & System Architect. He is also Einstein & CRM Analytics COE.
Andy Forbes is Salesforce CTO at Capgemini Americas and is passionate about how Generative AI can fast-track Salesforce projects.
If you want to learn more about how ChatGPT can simplify difficult and complex Salesforce implementations then hold onto your seats and check out the astounding highlights from this conversation below:
Ben: I would love to hear about your personal journeys into the Salesforce ecosystem.
Joseph: I was a business analyst at IHeartRadio, where Bob Pittman was at the helm, you probably know him from creating MTV and America Online. He asked us for a report on our largest advertisers. We would have to export spreadsheets to figure out how players like Coca-Cola and Home Depot were spending with us. At the time, he gave us about 30 days to work this out. We ended up taking 3 months and introducing Salesforce to the organization.
From there it was a skyrocket for me! I had been a Business Analyst for 20 years and not a coder. I got interested in fringe cases and building different scenarios. I knew I would be an architect when I was in a meeting with my team and the project manager said “Joseph, your laptop is blocking the projector.” The room was a little bit taken aback and I closed my laptop and said to the room “Why does everyone see only one solution?”
So at that time, I knew I would be an architect and it was a matter of getting the right pieces into place. I was mentored by a great Architect Technician at Salesforce and the Vice President of Development at IHeart taught me about coding. And it was just Sky Rocket from there! Ultimately, over 14 years my certifications have accumulated based on project requirements. For example, this is why I learned OmniStudio.
A Technician’s knowledge is a mile deep and an inch wide while an Architect’s knowledge is the inverse, it is much broader. And this is something I am discussing in all the blogs around our new book. That’s the journey from a BA to an Admin, to a Developer, to a Product Owner, to an Architect, to running a global practice on how architecture should be done.
Andy has a more interesting journey! He has been around since before there were computers, or at least before there was a Cloud!
Andy: Not quite that early Joseph! Yeah, I’m old enough to collect Social Security, so I have been doing this for a while! In a nutshell, my career started programming IBM mainframes with punch cards. This has gone from mainframes to mini-computers to network PCs, interior architectures, the internet, and the Cloud through mobile, and now to AI. I first got into Salesforce in 2002. I was working in a team raising money for a Robotics Turnaround. A VP came to me and asked “How much money would it take to implement SAP to implement my Salespeople” and I replied, “More money than we raised to turn this around”. I suggested we find an inexpensive CRM and that’s why we got Salesforce.
To this day if you ask me “Andy, what is the coolest thing about Salesforce?” I will say, “ When I started you couldn’t edit a page by clicking on a link on the page, you actually had to go into Setup and navigate to the place on the admin screen to edit it. But now, you can look at a page and click edit! This is amazingly powerful for someone who used to carry around boxes of punch cards!
Joseph: People are Googling punch cards now!
Ben: This is an amazing journey. When you think of Salesforce, it was revolutionary! Today the idea of the Cloud is easy to explain to someone, but at the beginning, this was such a hard aspect of Salesforce to pitch. It is an amazing revolution that has taken place in a little over 2 decades. When did the idea of interacting with the Cloud and Cloud storage become more normal in this space?
Joseph: My first experience was actually in May 2006. I was invited to a meeting at 2 o’clock in the afternoon with glass walls. They sat us down and everyone had an NDA they had to sign before the meeting commenced. The meeting was attended by IHeart and Apple executives and we were told we were going to build the iPod Nano and that it was going to be able to stream music and pictures of albums. Customers would have the ability to buy music from iTunes and all this would take place in the cloud! We built the technology behind this. Enriching data for the Cloud, bringing together the unified profile of a person in the Cloud. This was my introduction almost 25 years ago.
Andy: You are making me feel so old guys, because in 1977, I was taking a programming class in high school, I was connecting from my high school to the local University, from there to the local Air Force Base, to Los Alamos, and on to Stanford where there was a text game called Adventure. I spent all my time playing this game instead of doing my coding course.
Joseph: How can this be? When did Al Gore invent the internet?
Andy: In the late 60’s they started connecting the computers. In New Mexico, we were close to UNM. No one then had Norton or Firewalls. Back in the day, very few people had access to ARPANET (the first public packet-switched computer network) and I am not sure I was supposed to. Now that I have named some of the places I went through, I suppose I should expect a phone call!
Ben: They have finally found you!
Andy: Yeah so it was in ’77 the world became a different place. Summers I worked construction and this contrasted with being able to connect and play games in California.
Joseph: When I was younger, I didn’t necessarily see myself in technology. It was initially a way to pay the bills…I was on my way to see Bruce Springsteen in April 2006 and traveling to New Orleans when my Head Hunter called and said Clear Channel wanted to interview me. I had to turn around to attend the interview and then return to the festival. I don’t know at what moment it became predestined for me to be heavily involved in technology.
Andy: Same with me but a different path. Summer of 85, my roommate bought an external hard drive for 1000 USD. This was a lot of money in 1985 and it was a 1 megabyte external hard drive. He was the man! And deeper into ARPANET, I was the third Bell Atlantic customer for dedicated internet in 1995. It wasn’t really something I planned but any time there was a chance to do something interesting I would take the chance! I got lucky and backed into Salesforce! Thank you Marc Benioff!
Ben: Absolutely, thank you, Marc! So when did you two guys get connected? How long has this partnership been going?
Joseph: 4 years. Andy ended up at Capgemini when I ended up at Capgemini.
I guess thinking about a vision…I think Trailblazer should have a vision based on their value system. If I don’t have a personal vision, how can I consult with others or advise a company on their direction? I do think knowing where you want to go and how you will get there is important.
Andy: I got nothing. I worked there, we got to work together and then we wrote the book together!
Ben: Before we get to the book, were there any “Aha” moments on projects or was this a daily occurrence?
Joseph: So the daily fun Andy and I had, was that a company (that shall not be named) would send us certification data and they registered with personal emails. Andy and I would have to connect Capgemini employees and their certifications to these personal emails. At the time, the whole idea of a unified person in Salesforce data wasn’t totally transparent. Now the Trailblazer ID connects this profile for example my MVP profile with my community group profile, and with my personal Trailblazer web assessor profile. But in 2020, this wasn’t always the case. We would have conversations thinking this has to be easier. Reconciling data! Certifications mattered! But it wasn’t easy to connect the dots!
Ben: How do you think people could be impacted by your book and what can they learn from it? This is ChatGPT for Accelerating Salesforce Development.
Joseph: The book was brewing in the fall of 2023 last year. Andy is the mastermind that brought the team together! At Dreamforce in September 2023 I did a panel with Andy Bergman, VP of Trailhead Content talking about how all of the roles would change. Not just Developers, not just Admins, not just Sales and Service users. But every role! From there we began to ideate and conceptualize as a team. I don’t think we knew what the title would be when we started. We just knew we needed to cover this from every aspect.
Andy structured us into writing a book that covered Business Analysts and Product Owners and Testers, and how organizational change management happens on a project. There is a chapter in this book for every single role in the development lifecycle! If you are a hands-on Developer there is a section on Apex and Lightning Web Components, if you are an Admin who loves Flow there is a chapter on this. It’s meant for any one person to find value in any one chapter. If you can bring a team together to read the book and find out how to write different prompts together, then it’s incredibly powerful. Andy is the architect at the foundation point. Our publisher Packt – we owe a great deal of gratitude to them. Our first meeting about the book was on October 16th and the book was published in December, this is lightning-fast speed. They had multiple people reading this book. We had 4 authors writing different chapters and we needed a consistency in tone and message.
Andy: Keep in mind I first touched a computer in 77, and I was learning machine code…the journey we have been on since the ’60s and ’70s is abstracting us from what’s going on. For example, with machine code, you know what is going on at the hardware level. Higher-level languages and modern coding languages have become more abstracted. As we moved to the Cloud this all changed even more, I spent years going into a data center and setting systems up but I haven’t been in a data center in 15 years, because there is no need. So we really don’t know what’s going on. An off-the-wall example is that one of the IBM/360’s I used to work on, some of the core memory had rusted so you had to program around that part of core memory. Today it is all in the Cloud! The languages are abstracted, including in Salesforce!
The next level of abstraction that is gonna hit us is AI to take us even further away from what is really going on. Right now we write Apex and Flows, we configure screens… it has started to become obvious that AI is gonna abstract us away from these things just like previous languages had abstracted the need to use machine or assembly language.
Last Summer, Packt asked, “Would you be interested in writing a book about this?” It was interesting but a 200 or 300-page book was a little more work than I wanted to do myself so I thought, “Who in the company can help with this? And we all worked for the same company! Who in the company knows configuration? Joseph came to mind, who knows hard-core programming? Paco came to mind, who knows what documentation and project management things that need to be done? Phillip.” So we stacked up what needed to be done and we built an outline and assigned chapters based on people’s skills. As Joseph said, we turned the book around very quickly, I think the publisher thought the publication date was going to be July this year and they were very surprised when in December of last year we had it done!
Ben: Had either of you ever written a book? Or had you been co-authored or written a book on your own in the past?
Joseph: First time a book! Andy has been a great coach and mentor on how to get a blog generated. He writes for the Forbes Tech Council. But this was my first time with a book.
Andy: And that’s exactly it. This is my first time with a book. LinkedIn, Capgemini I write for their Blog, the Forbes Technology Council I write for them, and I have been podcasting since 2005. It was harder than today doing a Podcast from the tech perspective!
Ben: Tell me how you feel about how all the AI roll-outs and developments like Chat GPT are going to be integrated into the larger Salesforce ecosystem.
Joseph: Imagine there is a big page in front of you with a thousand words you can’t read because we are not responsible for the Salesforce side of things or the Salesforce roadmap. That being said, Salesforce needs to pick up the speed in getting tools out and available to us. In the past week, we have seen the release of Einstein, an automated Salesforce Assistant. We have seen Salesforce introduce its own prompt builder. The Open AI space has been very quick with their GPTs, the custom GPTs they are writing right now. There are some people who have built Salesforce GPTs. I think over the year we are going to see many developments from Salesforce and other companies leveraging these AI tools.
Andy actually believes that there will be an Enterprise GPT or LLM and that people won’t have to build these things from scratch. The last chapter of the book has a chapter on what the future will look like. This follows a character Sarah in 2029 who goes through the day interacting with AI assistants like “Aiden” and “Quora” who essentially update her Salesforce for her. The writing is on the wall around how our daily lives will change. Will this be a Salesforce branded tool on your desktop that will do these tasks for you or Microsoft? Inevitably it will all happen. Right, Andy?
Andy: Right, there is a book you wanna read if you care about this kind of thing, called “Power and Prediction”. And what they say in this book is that new technologies are adopted as point solutions, application solutions, and then system solutions. So we are still in the point solution stage, we are not changing how we use Salesforce delivery. We are using Einstein and other AI tools to write user stories, to write code, to write test classes but we are not fundamentally changing our processes. What Joseph is talking about, and it is coming rapidly, is at the application level. When I have an application that captures my requirements and starts suggesting user stories, and starts asking questions about user stories, start suggesting a prototype to see how things are going to work. In the next couple of years, this is coming. And after that is the world Joseph just talked about at the system level, all parts of the organizations are AI-enhanced.
I do have a somewhat dystopian view of the world, that about the time I retire, someone will be able to lean over to the anthropomorphized AI assistant on their computer and say “Hey, the VP of supply chain just asked if we can incorporate up to date data from the factory and retail outlets into his system, so he can improve his ordering?” The AI will be able to respond “I have already spoken to all the other AIs and we have tested this, do you want it done in the morning or evening?” I am not saying this is going to happen tomorrow but clearly the abstraction from machine language to today…I wrote an article for the Forbes Technology Council saying we are at an inflection point. Since the 1950’s we have been learning to speak the language of computers and we are about to go into a world where computers have learned to speak our language.
Ben Miller: Well, I think we should end it at that! That’s a great way to end the podcast with a Science Fiction version. It is my first time hearing a Salesforce story that isn’t related to a Salesforce project!
I am looking forward to checking out the book. How do we get it?
Joseph: You can reach out to any of the authors, we have a public group going by the name of “ChatGPT for accelerating Salesforce development” on LinkedIn. The group can offer monthly discounts you might not find on Amazon with the QR code. Find us on LinkedIn, and look at the pinned messages on the group!
Andy: We are always happy to talk to people about this. If I knew the future I would already be on my private island, but for now, we want to discuss with people!
*Note: This is an abbreviated and adapted transcription of the Podcast.
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