Behind every Salesforce organization, there is the mighty Salesforce Admin who successfully juggles business conversations, security, new feature testing, customization, enablement, troubleshooting, and more. With Agentforce evolving at full speed to bring a seamless experience in front of internal and external users, it’s about time there was something tailored for Salesforce Admins as well.
In this post, we’ll explore the benefits, considerations, and what’s coming next for the new Agent for Setup.
A Great Time to be a Salesforce Admin
Over the last few releases, Salesforce has made significant improvements across the overall platform, especially when it comes to empowering Salesforce Admins in their day-to-day.
From the new Object Access tab within Object Manager, the “View Summary” button for individual users, Permission Sets, Permission Set Groups to Dynamic Forms, Dynamic Actions, and the enhanced Report Types pages, admins can do much more today in fewer clicks and with a better user interface.
Between all the insightful Agentforce sessions at TrailblazerDX tailored for Salesforce Admins, a new addition to their toolkit was introduced as part of the three-pronged approach to fix and enhance Setup.
This will alleviate the burden of navigating Setup and the Salesforce documentation to find what they need and give back time that could be better spent elsewhere: Agent for Setup.
Agentforce for Setup
Following feedback from the community regarding the Setup experience, Salesforce focused on addressing the most common challenges sooner rather than later. The aim is to bring everything in one place rather than having Salesforce Admins take additional time-consuming steps to find what they need.
With a whopping 1257 Salesforce Setup pages to account for, having the ability to ask about a feature, receive the instructions, and have the source documentation at hand could fully transform how Admins work within the platform – that’s exactly where Agent for Setup comes in!
In this context, what exactly will Agent for Setup be able to help with? As a conversational agent, it first relies on the Salesforce Admin to ask a question in natural language. As its similar to other Agentforce agents you may have already seen in action, the Atlas reasoning engine will determine the most suitable topic and action.
Agent for Setup is all about efficiency, as the initial actions made available in this first iteration can be significant time-savers for admins who need the Setup experience to be a breeze. At this time, Salesforce announced the availability of four types of actions:
- Help: Allows admins to ask about any Salesforce product or feature, and will be presented with information, as well as the sources from help.salesforce.com
- Report Types: Saves precious admin time by having Agent for Setup create a Custom Report Type based on the instructions provided.
- Connected Apps: Ensures that admins can quickly understand a Connected App’s OAuth configuration by providing a summary, but there is also the possibility to use Agent for Setup to migrate an already existing Connected App to an External Client App using the same name and configuration.
- Permissions: Empowers admins to understand a lightning speed a user’s permissions, or what permissions are needed to perform a certain task in Salesforce. Additionally, Agent for Setup can also be asked to compare user permissions and provide simple breakdowns.
A prerequisite to start using Agent for Setup is, of course, Agentforce, and as soon as that’s done, it takes a couple of clicks from the Agents Setup page to get it up and running for your org. This is not a separate SKU that you have to purchase, and in order to manage the agent, a user needs to be assigned either the dedicated Agentforce Default Admin permission set or Customize Application.
Also, make sure to keep an eye out on the consumption in Digital Wallet if you will be creating the agent and starting to use it in your org.
See the Agent in Action
By being available on every Setup page once activated, Agent for Setup can be alongside the Salesforce Admin wherever they are in their flow of work, including Object Manager.
While it’s nice to know about what it can do, let’s put Agent for Setup to the test with a few questions and tasks. Keep in mind that you can also make the agent your own by adding other topics and actions to extend the functionality.
Help
Although this habit may be harder to change than others, Agent for Setup could remove the need to use Google or go to Salesforce Help to find what you need to know about Salesforce features and considerations.
Let’s start with something simple, like creating a user in Salesforce.
Answering with documentation is the action assigned to the Agent for Setup Fallback topic, and in case none of the other topics match your question or request, this is what the Agent will defer to.
You will also notice that the agent’s answer includes the link to the documentation in case you would like to take a look at the source directly. That is because the agent is instructed at the topic level to display the action’s output as is, without modifying or rephrasing it.
Going back to the agent’s answer, if you watched the video above, it provided the link and instructions to create a User with SalesforceA, which was retired in 2022. Also, the response to the mandatory information question listed the role as being required when creating a user, which is not exactly right.
Also, If you find the response inaccurate, you can provide feedback by disliking it, which will pop-up a modal to select the reason and include any additional feedback.
The agent’s response, as mentioned above, is grounded in Salesforce documentation. So, depending on the question asked and how specific or broad it is, the answer will contain an explanation as well as one or more references from Salesforce Help.
Sometimes, the Agent won’t have the answer at all, even for simple things such as creating a Permission Set. Instead, it may refer you directly to the Salesforce Help Site, but for others, it will provide the details as expected.
Permissions
By far, the most intriguing task that Agent for Setup can support Salesforce Admins with is related to user access – more specifically, when it comes to asking about or analyzing permissions.
Within the User Access Management topic assigned to the agent, you can take a closer look over the scope as well as the instructions and associated actions, and you will notice that these already account for multiple scenarios when it comes to the question variations that it may get asked as well as when multiple records are returned to prompt the admin to choose the right one for example. Let’s give it a go!
One of the questions Salesforce Admins may have is what permissions are needed for a user to do certain things on the platform. The questions could be related to any object or user permission, such as viewing converted Leads for an operations user who needs to run reports on these records.
Similar to the user creation example above, the answer will contain the link to Salesforce Help too, but also the step by step to grant this permission.
While asking questions without having to navigate to Salesforce Help is useful to a certain extent, the beauty of Agent for Setup is that, as shown in the instructions, it can look up permissions assigned to the users in your org so that you don’t have to.
Moreover, it can be tasked to compare the access between users and, if applicable, explain why a user has certain access and the other doesn’t – troubleshooting access has just got faster!
Report Types
Even though it was announced at TDX that Agent for Setup will be able to help with the creation of custom Report Types in the first iteration, it doesn’t seem to be the case just yet.
When asked to create a Report Type, the only action it’s doing is to search the Salesforce Documentation, irrespective of the ask being more specific or just generally asking it to create a custom Report Type.
However, it is highlighted in the documentation that the Agent for Setup is not part of the release and may be included at a later time, so with it being so new, perhaps this functionality has yet to be shipped.
Try it out Yourself
Even if you do not have Agentforce available in your sandboxes, rest assured that you can still take it for a spin! You can sign up now for the recently launched developer edition, which includes both Agentforce and Data Cloud, to set up and use Agent for Setup for free.
Note: If you created your developer edition prior to TDX ending and enabled Agent for Setup, the User Access Management Topic may not have already been added to the Agent. In this case, you can simply add it from the Asset Library.
What’s Next?
This iteration is only the beginning of how Agentforce will transform the Salesforce administration experience. While a few actions are already available today for you to try out and decide how they could integrate into your day-to-day, there is more to come in the future.
Currently on the roadmap is the ability to ask Agent for Setup to create new Objects and Fields, Formulas, and even Auth Providers. Additionally, the Navigation action on the roadmap will allow the Agent to properly guide Salesforce Admins within Setup so that they won’t have to guess where certain items are located within the over one thousand pages.
Final Thoughts
Agent for Setup promises to become a productivity boost for Salesforce Admins, especially as it is grounded in both the public Salesforce documentation as well as information from your own org.
With the ability to perform tasks on the Admin’s behalf, some now and others in the future, Agent for Setup could pave the way for Salesforce administration to be a tag team effort between the human admin and the digital agent.
As of now, it does seem to perform best for permission-related questions and tasks, but we’ll see how it continues to improve as it’s rolled out and over the next iterations.
Have you already tried out Agent for Setup or are you looking forward to getting started? Let us know in the comments below!
