Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Parth Shah, Director of Product Marketing, and Rikke Hovgaard, Director of Product Management for the Agentforce Coworker team at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about Agentforce Coworker and what it means for the way admins help teams get work done.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Parth Shah and Rikke Hovgaard.

Agentforce Coworker brings AI into everyday business work

AI has been a game changer for coding, but integrating it into normal business processes has proved more challenging. That's where Agentforce Coworker comes in. It's an autonomous AI teammate, grounded in your enterprise data from day one.

For this episode, I sat down with with Rikke Hovgaard, Director of Product Management, and Parth Shah, Director of Product Marketing, to find out what Agentforce Coworker is and how it can help admins bring new tools to their team.

Salesforce permissions remain central to trust and access

Trust is central to any conversation about AI. New tools are exciting, but you need to be sure that they won't give people access to data they shouldn't be able to see. Luckily, Agentforce Coworker works around the permissions you've already configured in Salesforce. It's simple for admins, and keeps those guardrails in place.

As far as configuration goes, Rikke and Parth are all about keeping it simple and transparent. While Agentforce Coworker automatically inherits the security and governance settings that are already in your org, you also have special configuration options just for the agent.

Admins can connect more data through Data Cloud and Slack

For Rikke, Agentforce Coworker is especially useful for summarizing her team's Slack conversations. She can quickly understand which team member is working on which issue, and where she might need to lend a helping hand.

At the end of the day, Agentforce Coworker gives you a conversational interface to do more with your Salesforce data. "Coworker does the work in the background so that your team can actually focus on what matters," Parth says.

Listen to the full episode for more from Parth and Rikke about Agentforce Coworker. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

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Full show transcript

Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, we're talking with Parth Shah and Rikke Hovgaard about Agentforce Coworker and what it means for the way admins help teams get work done. Now, this isn't just about turning on another AI feature. It's about bringing trusted business context, permissions, data, and automation together so users can ask better questions and take action faster. Parth and Rikke are going to walk us through how Coworker connects to Salesforce data, how it respects existing permissions, and how it gives admins a simpler path to roll out and governance. So, be sure to listen in, press that subscribe button if you haven't already. And I would always appreciate it if you could share this episode with a fellow Salesforce admin. And with that, let's get Parth and Rikke on the podcast. So, Parth and Rikke, welcome to the podcast.

Rikke Hovgaard: Thank you for having us.

Parth Shah: Thank you.

Mike: Well, I'm glad we could get you both on. This is the first time I've had a product manager and a product marketing major on a podcast. Usually, one of them has something too important to do that they bail out, but I'm bringing people together. It's going to be great. So, we're going to talk about Agentforce Coworker, but first I want to learn a little bit about each of you. Parth, I'm just going to start with you because you were the first one to bug me in my Slack DMs about Agentforce Coworker. So, I'd love to learn just a little bit about how you came to Salesforce and what you currently are working on.

Parth Shah: Yeah, absolutely. Slack makes it really easy to bug my Coworkers, especially my favorite ones. I sent a lot of emojis. So, sorry, Mike.

Mike: Oh, I'm your favorite.

Parth Shah: Yeah. So, a bit about me. I grew up in Ohio, was a chemical engineer in undergrad, which really I love to build things and I love to, I guess, solve complex problems. And then when I graduated, I didn't want to go work in a plant, in a chemical plant. And so, I ended up going into sales within oil and gas. Did that for about three years, really understood how to actually talk to customers and what their pain points are. And then switched over to a really early stage startup in education technology, really passionate about education. Did that for about three years, which is where I learned a lot about product marketing. Then got my MBA and then joined Salesforce. So, been at Salesforce as a product marketer for about coming up to seven years. And what's been kind of interesting is I started off on the MuleSoft side of Salesforce, so all about integrations. I really learned what it means to connect data between different systems and how developers and admins go about doing that. And that's when I switched over. MuleSoft wanted to launch a new product called MuleSoft Composer at that time, which is now Flow. So, the next level of after connecting data is like, how do you actually use that data to automate processes and make it super simple for admins like our viewers out there? So, help launch that and then moved over to our Data 360, previously data cloud business. And here, I focus on everything that is around unstructured data. So, again, the through line here, if you look at data is, now we can start tapping into the unstructured data that's all out there because of AI. But the more important thing is now that AI is coming in, how do we actually bring that data, which is full of richness in audio, video, meeting notes, et cetera? How do we bring it into AI so that AI is really grounded? And so, that's been kind of my journey. Obviously, looking back at it, everything kind of connected. I didn't know at that time, but the through line I think is my curiosity of what's next within tech has kind of propelled me to go and find out and work on the cool next product that's coming up, which is also how I land on a Coworker.

Mike: Wow. I would've had no idea that you started in oil and gas. Also, what's sales like in oil and gas? Hi, do you want any? Yes.

Parth Shah: Cool. Yeah. It's very old. It's a very people oriented business.

Mike: Yeah. All right. Well, I had to get that joke in. Rikke, I know you're letting me say your name that way, but in all fairness, being German, there's names that we just can't pronounce. So, I'd love to hear how you got started at Salesforce and obviously you're working on Coworker now.

Rikke Hovgaard: Yeah. So, originally I'm from Denmark, which is why my name is a little hard to pronounce. Believe it or not, that's actually a pretty common name in Denmark. So, Rikke is fine here, but I started out after university working for a consultation partner. So, I started implementing Salesforce randomly, started out with Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, moved over to Pardot and Marketing Cloud when that was acquired by Salesforce and ended up also doing a little bit of data and analytics there. And then I decided it was time to move on to other things. So, I joined another partner in London and I moved to London and did that for a bit. I was working a lot on analytics at that point and also marketing. And so, it was mostly focused on what we know now as CRM Analytics and I started a blog on it as well. And so, a few years into it, I joined Salesforce in the CIM Analytics product team, helping customers get the most out of CIM analytics, deescalate some of their issues, best pra...