Agentforce has taken the Salesforce ecosystem by storm, and innovation in Salesforce seems to keep coming. The brand-new Service Agent is now generally available, and the Sales Agent is scheduled for release next month. With so many changes and new offerings, one question remains on everybody’s mind: how will existing tools hold up in this new world?
In this post, we’ll deep dive into the importance of Prompt Builder (which has been generally available since February 2024), and how it can be used to supercharge your Agentforce implementation and strengthen your Salesforce knowledge in this new era of generative AI.
New to Prompt Builder?
Similar to other admin-friendly tools, Prompt Builder represents the gateway towards infusing AI within your users’ flow of work, all while using your very own CRM data. It became available at the beginning of this year and is already used by thousands of Salesforce customers globally, with millions of invocations per month.
Any answer provided by AI through a Large Language Model (LLM) is based on a set of questions or instructions, known as prompts. Building your very own mechanism from scratch to facilitate this process while managing all prompts and instructions is a significant investment in time and resources.
Salesforce made this possible to allow space for you to create your own prompts and use them across Salesforce while also leveraging Salesforce data, knowing that all your information is fully protected by the Einstein Trust Layer.
Essentially, Prompt Builder is the interface that makes all of this possible for Salesforce professionals. It empowers them to present users with accurate AI-generated responses in their flow of work using customized prompt templates, without jeopardizing data security while interacting with LLMs.
While Salesforce has taken a lot of the pre-work out of the equation, creating accurate prompts is still your responsibility; the response will be only as good as the instructions you create!

Prompt Builder itself has a familiar look and feel, but the canvas itself presents a few bespoke sections specific to this tool. Building the template itself – regardless of the type you choose – will imply writing clear natural language instructions, adding any relevant resources (which could be object fields, related lists, Flows, or Apex), and describing the actual structure of the desired response.
After building, the next step is to test your prompt template, which you can do directly in the canvas! You can select the record (or records) and deep dive into both the resolution as well as the actual generated response to test for accuracy.
Also, you can use the Configuration panel to test the prompt against different models and choose the one that best suits your needs.

Shift to the Agent Mindset
Before Agentforce, there was Einstein Copilot – a conversational assistant that knows all of the information you need and can support internal users by retrieving information or completing day-to-day tasks more efficiently.
These features are great; but why shouldn’t external users have this kind of experience too?
Powered by the Atlas Reasoning Engine, Agentforce is your very own team of autonomous agents that can offer a human-like experience and tailored interactions, but only within the guardrails they are allowed to operate in or, more specifically, the jobs that they are meant to do.
With this in mind, if your organization has already invested in using Prompt Builder and even Model Builder for that matter, the journey to building agents will be vastly accelerated.
Prompt Templates will serve as a way of letting the agent know which data is needed from the interlocutor and which data can be accessed from Salesforce or other sources, all while utilizing the model of your choice to produce the expected AI-generated response in the context of the input parameters.
Supercharge Agents With Prompt Templates
After seeing what Prompt Builder can do, it should come as no surprise that its capabilities are foundational in obtaining the desired agent behavior and gaining accurate responses.
Since the instructions provided within the Prompt Workspace Template will determine exactly how the agent response will sound like and what data will be displayed – be it internal or external – it is the Salesforce Admin’s responsibility to ensure that all Prompt Templates which are to be used respect company policy and protect any sensitive information from being publicly exposed.
Prompt Templates, alongside Flow and Apex, can be assigned as Actions within an agent’s topics. Remember that Actions represent the way agents get things done and how they complete a certain request, while Topics are groupings of Actions to help the agent better navigate what it has to do.
As long as you ensure that the topic-level instructions are clear so that the agent can correctly identify when to properly use it, the Prompt Template will only come into play exactly when warranted.

The ability to ground Prompt Templates with all kinds of Salesforce data through various mechanisms means that before assigning the Prompt within an Agent Action, you should make sure that it is thoroughly tested for both accuracy and safety.
Following the assignment, it’s always a good idea to continue testing within Agent Builder’s Conversation Preview to confirm the answers are still accurate, consistent, and in line with the instructions from both the Prompt Template and agent topic.
As the session progresses, you will be able to review in real time the selected Action’s input and output, as well as the reasoning and the final response. This of course doesn’t only apply to Prompt Template actions, but to all of them, offering you great insight into how the agent responds to various scenarios.

Infusing your agents with generative capabilities through these Prompt Templates will make them more intelligent in their interactions, and better equipped to treat customer inquiries.
Keep in mind though that as your business needs or the agent’s instructions evolve, you can always go back and make changes to the Prompt Template as well – be it the instructions, the data it connects to, or even the model.
Empower Your Users With Embedded Apps
Even if your organization is just getting started with the generative AI features and Agentforce, bringing templates in front of your users has never been easier!
Prompt Templates are headless and highly extensible, but exposing the out-of-the-box Einstein Summary component from the start ensures your users have access to turnkey functionality before you move on to complex implementations.

While setting up the component on a Record Page, you can determine its properties in a similar fashion to other components you’re already familiar with. But the immediate value stems from the ability to add one or more Prompt Templates that users can benefit from.
You also don’t necessarily have to build the templates from scratch – out-of-the-box templates can be quickly edited to match the desired context and data, saving time for both users and admins.
When selecting a template in Prompt Builder, keep in mind that templates will only be available for selection if they meet two criteria:
- Active Status: The template must be marked as active in order to appear as an option.
- Record Relevance: The template must be designed to accept inputs from the record where the component will be used.
If either of these conditions isn’t met, the template won’t be selectable for your use case.

By having the predefined embedded app, users can leverage it while going through their daily taskst without navigating back and forth to gather information. The Prompt Template can be collated and exposed to them in just a few seconds after choosing the template and clicking the button!

Extend Your Flows With Prompts
There will be times when rather than creating multiple agent actions, it will make more sense to combine them, especially when it comes to Salesforce Flow and Prompt Templates.
While artificial intelligence is non-deterministic, you can add an extra layer of intelligence and control by invoking Prompt Templates that understand your desired business logic by using the Action element in Salesforce Flow. This way, you can combine both the action as well the generative AI capabilities and outputs into one process. Any Prompt Template you save and activate automatically becomes an invocable action, which can be easily used within a Salesforce Flow.
After selecting the Prompt Template, you will have to input the parameters you want to use in the Prompt Template (in this case, generating a structured summary). The Prompt Response resulting from the action should be stored as a variable and made available for output for it to become available in the next step.
For the prompt-generated summary to be used by the agent as a result of the Flow Action, make sure to properly configure this new output as well, and adapt the Action and Topic instructions as needed in order to obtain the desired result. Additionally, don’t forget to tick the ‘Show in conversation’ box!

If Salesforce Flow doesn’t fit the complexity of your requirements, keep in mind that Prompt Templates can be invoked through Apex – as well as REST API. Regardless of the route your team will opt for when it comes to the implementation, new or existing Prompt Templates can be included in the process as well.
Get Certified
Once you’re comfortable with Prompt Builder, it would be a great idea to take Salesforce upon their free certifications offer! Prompt Builder is currently the highest weighted section of the AI Specialist certification exam at a whopping 32%. By learning about this particular tool, you have already covered a big part of the exam curriculum.
With learning materials, free instructor led-courses, and the first exam attempt covered, there’s nothing stopping you from proving your knowledge by getting certified!

Final Thoughts
There’s no denying that in the new Salesforce Agentforce world, leveraging Prompt Builder to infuse AI capabilities into autonomous agents will become the norm – either while tailoring the out-of-the-box standard actions or creating your very own custom actions.
With Prompt Templates being extensible and invocable via Apex, API, Flow, and of course Agent Actions, you can make use of them regardless of the processes used in your existing or new implementations. By having the option to quickly build and easily ground your prompts in Salesforce structured and unstructured data, your agents are sure to fully transform the customer experience across all channels.
Have you already built your first Agent Action using a Prompt Template? Let us know in the comments below!