Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jagan Nathan, Senior AI Architect at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about how he built a Slack app for Salesforce's "Million Dollar Puzzle" ad, where millions of concurrent users raced to solve riddles by chatting with Slackbots.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jagan Nathan.

The tech behind the "Million Dollar Puzzle" contest

If you were watching the big game, you might have seen Salesforce's "Million Dollar Puzzle". As soon as the ad aired, the race was on for contestants to solve puzzles by chatting with Slackbots to discover the location of a secret vault.

My guest this week, Jagan Nathan, built the Agentforce-powered Slack app that made everything possible. They needed Slackbots that could act as a conversational gateway for millions of concurrent users. And with a million dollars on the line, they needed to be sure it couldn't be tricked into giving away the answer.

Even more incredibly, Jagan pulled all of this off in only six weeks. I sat down with him to find out how he did it and what he learned along the way.

Using AI to build quickly at scale

Just like with any project, the first step was to gather requirements—though it's more fun when your stakeholder is the "Puzzle Master." Jagan and his team needed a thorough understanding of what they were dealing with and how they could translate those gaming mechanics into the application.

The clock was ticking, and AI was pivotal for accelerating the development timeline. Jagan and his team used Salesforce Vibes for quick prototypes and wireframes to help them decide what to build. But the development team still needed to take these ideas the rest of the way. "AI cannot help us solve all of the architecture problems," Jagan explains, "we have to have a human in the loop."

With millions of concurrent users, they needed to do thorough testing—and quickly. Luckily, they could use Salesforce Scale Center to stress-test for performance issues and identify bottlenecks so they could be sure that when the ad ran, the app would work flawlessly.

Designing for security with a million dollars on the line

I know this might be shocking, but when you're holding a contest with a million-dollar prize, some people will try to cheat. So Jagan and his team needed to make sure there were plenty of guardrails in place to make sure someone could win it fair and square.

They needed to start with a security mindset and think through any security vulnerabilities as they designed the application. Einstein Trust Layer was crucial for toxicity detection and monitoring for anything malicious, like prompt injections.

Most importantly, they were very careful with what information the Slackbot knew and what it didn't. It didn't have the solutions to the puzzles, so even if someone managed to crack it, they wouldn't be able to get very far. Instead, puzzle answers were always validated by humans.

There's a lot more from Jagan about building for scale quickly, so make sure to take a listen. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

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Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt:

When you think about building on Salesforce, it's easy to focus on features. But today's admins aren't just implementing features. They're designing systems that have to perform, scale, and hold up under real world pressure.

In today's episode, I'm going to sit down with Jagan, an architect who helped deliver a high stakes, high scale experience serving millions of users through a custom Slack-based AI system. We're going to unpack what it actually takes to compress months of work into weeks and how to design for trust and guardrails from day one, and where human judgment still matters in an AI-driven architecture.

So if you've ever wondered how your role evolves from building flows to orchestrating full systems, this is the conversation because this just isn't about speed. It's about responsibility at scale. Now if you enjoy this episode, hit Subscribe, share it with a fellow admin and let's get Jagan on the podcast.

So Jagan, welcome to the podcast.

Jagan Nathan:

Hi, Mike. Thank you for having me.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Well, I was excited when you sent me the Slack DM about some of the projects that you've worked on here at Salesforce. But for people that don't know you or maybe didn't listen to the episode of the Developer Podcast you were on, could you tell us a little bit about what you do at Salesforce and the fun project you got to work on recently?

Jagan Nathan:

Sure. Hey everyone. I'm Jaganir. I'm architect part of our AA practice team here at Salesforce, building agents for our customers. This is my third podcast on our channel. My previous episodes were focused on event monitoring and threat detection.

Mike Gerholdt:

Wow.

Let's talk about some of the stuff that you got to work on around the big football game that happens in February that Salesforce had an ad on.

Jagan Nathan:

Yeah, sure. Very excited. This is our first ever online puzzle app, which was built entirely on our Salesforce platform.

Mike Gerholdt:

So you got to be a part of that. I'd love to know from a Salesforce admin listening to this, we used the platform for the puzzle. Can you give me a little insight into that?

Jagan Nathan:

Yeah, so let's unpack this. So what we did is we didn't just build a chatbot. We deployed our custom Slackbot, of course, powered by our Agentforce, which acted as a conversation gate for millions of participants grounded in real-time data. So we just collapsed a nine-month roadmap into just six weeks, which is 42 days. Within that, we designed iterator and we went live on day of February 8th.

Mike Gerholdt:

Wow. Nine-month roadmap. Holy cow. That's insane. I mean, can you talk a little bit about the architecture problem solving and how you moved so fast so quickly?

Jagan Nathan:

Yeah, sure. Of course, we are a customer zero company. So we leverage our internal tools and the external tools, what we have developed. So for this entire application, we use our Agentforce Vibes to accelerate the development. We quickly do a lot of wireframes and the prototypes, and then we figure out what sort of user experience and what sort of applications we need to build using the power of Agentforce Vibes that accelerated our development timeframe to start with.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, that's nice. I...