Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Alexandra Iyer, Director of Marketing Strategy and AI Transformation, and Global EVP of Abilityforce at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about the Agentforce for Good Hackathon at TDX and what happens when technology, accessibility, and community come together to solve real-world problems.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Alexandra Laxmi Iyer.

Agentforce for Good expands AI beyond business problems

This year, we added a new twist to the types of problems you could solve for at the TDX Hackathon. We called it Agentforce for Good, and it offered participants a way to work on some big problems: food insecurity, nonprofit volunteer coordination, disaster relief, and more.

That's why I'm so excited to bring Alexandra "X" Iyer on the pod. She's the Global EVP of Abilityforce, Salesforce's internal business unit for people with disabilities and their allies. They've been running an internal accessibility hackathon for years, and Agentforce for Good grew out of a desire to open it up to the community and broaden its scope.

"Builders who probably never thought of themselves as social impact developers shipped working Agentforce solutions for all sorts of big problems," X says, and 62% of this year's Hackathon entries were solving for Agentforce for Good.

Inclusive design creates better technology for everyone

"When we are challenged with designing for the edge, you make the center better," X says. Finding challenges that force you to push tools like Tableau, Slack, and Agentforce in new ways helps you uncover capabilities that you might not have otherwise thought about. As X likes to put it, "Good design is just good design, full stop."

Going forward, X and her team are looking for ways to expand Agentforce for Good beyond TDX. Consider this a call for participation, and she encourages you to get in touch to volunteer or bring Agentforce for Good to a community event near you.

Lived experience is a valuable design credential

"One of the main things I would love for people to take away from our conversation is that your lived experience is a credential," X says. "It's not a distraction." After all, designing around new challenges is how we come up with innovative solutions that nobody else would have thought of. Your unique perspective is valuable.

Make sure to listen to the full episode for more insights from X. Next week, we'll hear from the winner of the TDX Hackathon, so make sure you're subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

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Full show transcript

Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, we're talking about what happens when technology, accessibility, and community come together to solve real world problems. I'm joined by X or X, who is the director of marketing, strategy and AI transformation at Salesforce and Vice President of Abilityforce to discuss the Agentforce for Good Hackathon that happened at TDX. Now we're going to find out that it started as an employee-led accessibility initiative. And has grown into a community movement bringing together admins, developers, partners, and customers to build solutions that address challenges like food insecurity, disaster relief, and volunteer coordination. We're going to talk about why designing for inclusion leads to better outcomes, how AI can help scale impact, and why your lived experience might be one of the most valuable design credentials you have. So if you're thinking about how data automation, AI agents work together to create meaningful change not just inside your organization, but in the world around it, I promise you this episode is for you. So let's get Alexandra on the podcast. So Alexandra, welcome to the podcast.

Alexandra: Thank you for having me, Mike.

Mike: I think it's going to be a fun conversation because we're talking about Agentforce for Good today. So let's get started to learn a little bit about you and your path to Salesforce and your path to the Agentforce for Good Hackathon.

Alexandra: Absolutely. Thank you for asking. And by the way, I go by X for short, so feel free to call me X.

Mike: Perfect.

X: I'm the director of marketing strategy and AI transformation for our customer success and partner marketing team here at Salesforce. And I'm also the vice president for Abilityforce, our employee resource group for people with disabilities and their allies. And when we're talking about the Agentforce for Good Hackathon, this is really a moment where these two worlds actually collided. Normally, they wouldn't collide, but the hackathon is genuinely where they did. I come from 20 years of go to-market experience. I'm not a builder by background. I actually got curious in a marketing role about the products that I was marketing and how they worked. So that curiosity pulled me into the platform, into development, into force certifications that I did not see coming. And then, I went from talking about technology to building on it and that changed everything. I believe that the AI era is only worth building if it's built for everyone. That's not a tagline for me. It's a design requirement. And I truly feel that admins have always known that. Admins are the ones closest to the humans using the platform, the problems, the friction, the gaps. And I also believe they're the closest to the solution. So I think it's not a support function, it's a superpower and I'm really happy to be here.

Mike: Yeah. Well, I agree with everything you had to say, X. I do agree that admins are very superpower. I also think just in general, when we think about technology, it's not how do we roll it out for some people? It's how do we roll it out for everyone? And I remember this is a long time ago, but when I first joined a company that did workplace assessments, I remember they said, "Well, when creating the test, we have to assume the person doesn't know how to use a mouse." And I remember thinking to myself, this is ... closed-minded is the wrong word, but I just was unaware. And I was like, "Well, who doesn't know how to use a mouse?" And they're like, "Well, you don't understand." And I was like, "Oh, that is a huge challenge." And sometimes until you get someone else's perspective, do you really understand like, it's not that you've been living under a rock, it's just too often sometimes people assume their world is just like everyone else's world and it's not. So there's a Mike side of I had to remember that not everybody knows how to use a mouse sometimes.

X: Well, Mike, frankly, I consider that the main dish. I don't think it's a Mike side. I think that if you're designing for the default user, it's not really good technology and that when you optimize for the average, you're excluding by design. So I think it's the main dish and it's part of the reason why the Agentforce for Good Hackathon even exists. So to give you a little context, three years ago, the Agentforce for Good Hackathon was an internal-only, employee-only hackathon led by Abilityforce. I mentioned earlier Salesforce's business resource group for people with disabilities and their allies. And then, last year we said, "Why does it have to be about accessibility only and why does it only have to be for employees?" So then we opened it up to the community. We had partners and customers and employees all building on the platform, really stretching the platform, bringing us to TDX this year, where builders who really probably never even thought of themselves as social impact developers shipped working Agentforce Solutions for food insecurity, for nonprofit volunteer coordination, you name it. So when we all come together to threshold platform for everybody, not the default user, we're really...