What Can Salesforce Admins Do with Slack and Agents?

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Kurtis Kemple, Senior Director of Developer Relations at Slack. Join us as we chat about what’s possible when you combine Slack, Salesforce, and AI agents. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Kurtis Kemple. Starting at square one in tech Kurtis’s path to his career in tech is truly inspiring. Not only is he a completely self-taught programmer, but he learned those skills while incarcerated. It was hard to get any sort of job when he got out, let alone convince someone to take a chance on him as a software engineer. Today, Kurtis is the Senior Director of Developer Relations for Slack. His role is primarily focused on advocacy, with a focus on improving the developer experience through thoughtful product design and community input. So he’s the perfect person to talk to about what’s possible with Slack, Salesforce, and AI agents. Slack is the OS for work When it comes to collaborating with your team, Kurtis sees Slack as the OS for work. It’s a space to bring together everything you need—your communications, your documents, your data—all in one place so you can start getting things done. Switching contexts can be a productivity killer. That’s why Slack’s integration with Salesforce is so powerful, because it allows you to have everything right at your fingertips without needing to go back and forth between windows. Whether you’re looking at Salesforce data in Slack to have a conversation with a co-worker about an opportunity, or updating your team on what you’re building in Salesforce, seamless authentication means you can do everything from wherever you happen to be working without having to switch back and forth. Agents and automation inside Slack The possibilities are even more exciting when you throw Agentforce into the mix. As Kurtis points out, Slack actions are part of the list of standard actions. That means you can build custom agents that use data from either platform to launch workflows, run a quick analysis, and much more. Kurtis also gets into how you can customize Agentforce by plugging in various LLM libraries, or connecting it with external services or authentication providers. As he explains, prompt templates are powerful tools for controlling your agents’ responses so that they fit into your business processes. This episode is a deep dive into everything you can do with Agentforce and Slack, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Blog: Getting Started With Slack and Agentforce Integration Trailhead: Connect Your Agentforce Org with Slack Trailhead: Learn How Agentforce and Slack Work Together Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: What Can Salesforce Admins Do with Slack Integrations? Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Kurtis on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Bluesky social Mike on Threads Mike on Tiktok Mike on X Full Transcript Josh Birk: Hello, Salesforce admins, your guest host Josh Birk here. Today on the show, we're going to welcome Kurtis Kemple, who's overrunning developer advocacy at Slack. We're going to talk about Slack, we're going to talk about AI, we're going to talk about Kurt's beginnings, and this was a great interview. Very happy we got it on tape. And so, let's go right over to Kurt. All right. Today on the show we welcome Kurtis Kemple of Salesforce Developer Advocacy. Kurt, welcome to the show. Kurtis Kemple: It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Josh Birk: So let's start, I usually start talking about people's early years. And you have a very, let's not say unique, but a very interesting early days of getting into computing. You're self-taught in web development and you learn that in prison. Correct? Kurtis Kemple: Yeah, that's correct. I prefer to think of it more as self-guided. I'd like to take all the credit, but I was still reading books, watching YouTube videos, paying for courses. So you're still creating a learning environment more so than just I had... Well, in prison I did have nothing, but then I just opened a laptop and just essentially went at code with nothing. I don't want to essentially leave out all the people who I wouldn't be here without them. Josh Birk: Did you have an interest in computers beforehand or was it just sort of a, "Here's this moment in my life and I want to make changes, and I want to learn something new"? Kurtis Kemple: Well, it was definitely that second one, but not related to code. So it was pure happenstance. Prior to incarceration, I had very limited experience in technology. I had a pager once when I was 18, cell phones were coming out, and I would download music off LimeWire. That was it. I had to type with two fingers, like ...