How a Dedicated Community of Innovators Is Shaping the Future of AI

Salesforce’s community of Agentblazers — customers, employees, and partners building agentic AI skills‌ — ‌are actively shaping the future of AI by collaborating, experimenting, and applying the technology to real-world challenges. 

Why it matters: As AI rapidly evolves, the ability to translate advanced AI concepts into practical, user-centric applications is paramount. Salesforce is fostering a community-led approach to AI development, ensuring that its solutions are not only cutting-edge but also directly address real customer needs and challenges. This strategy emphasizes relevance and expertise by tackling audience priorities and leveraging deep product knowledge.

Salesforce is fostering a community-led approach to AI development, ensuring that its solutions are not only cutting-edge but also directly address real customer needs and challenges.

Driving the news: In a recent interview, Agentblazer Melissa Hill Dees highlighted key aspects of this community-driven AI evolution:

• Practical Skill Development: Becoming an Agentblazer involves combining existing Trailblazer skills (experience, community collaboration) with new agentic AI capabilities, particularly focusing on improving user experience.
• Data as AI’s Foundation: Data Cloud is identified as a crucial, often “undersung” component of the agent ecosystem, providing the necessary unified data for AI to function effectively.
• Hands-on Learning and Experimentation: The community thrives on kinetic, practical learning, encouraging users to “just do it” and grow from mistakes rather than being risk-averse.
• Collaborative Problem Solving: Events like hackathons facilitate diverse teams (developers, architects, flow specialists) to collaborate and build working AI agents for practical community needs. Hill Dees and her team at the TDX Hackathon collaborated to build an agent that could schedule speakers autonomously, a very tedious logistical task.
• Simplified User Experience: AI, particularly Agentforce, offers an intuitive, conversational user experience that removes the need for complex training or coding, making AI accessible to a broader audience.

What they’re saying: “Being able to have all the data you need and have it actually together in one place so that you can access it is really the food that AI needs,” said Hill Dees. “To … use AI without having to write the code, I’m learning and scaling up more on the large language models and the external models that you can bring in … Building the agent itself is the really simple, easy part,” she continued.

Between the lines: Salesforce’s emphasis on the Agentblazer community and its practical applications of AI differentiates it from competitors who may focus more on theoretical or highly technical aspects. By highlighting real-world use cases, such as automating nonprofit organizational documentation or simplifying tax donation receipts, Salesforce demonstrates its commitment to delivering tangible benefits and enhancing user lives. This approach further leverages Salesforce’s proprietary platforms like Trailhead and Data Cloud to provide unique expertise and exclusive insights into AI adoption trends specific to the enterprise sector.

What’s next: Salesforce’s Agentblazer initiative is demonstrating how practical, community-driven innovation is critical for AI adoption and optimization, moving beyond theoretical discussions to tangible solutions.

• As the technology evolves, Salesforce, together with the Agentblazer community, will continue to explore and implement AI solutions for everyday automation, aiming to free up human time for more creative and impactful work. 

More information:

• Find out if you’re an Agentblazer, then join the Agentblazer community
• Pursue Salesforce Agentblazer Status to validate your skills
• Reveal how will agentic AI impact your critical thinking skills
• Read about Salesforce’s blueprint for the future collaborative workplace