How Salesforce Leverages Heroku

Julián
Hello, hello! Welcome to Code[ish]. My name is Julián Duque, Principal Developer Advocate at Heroku, and your host for the Code[ish] podcast. And today with me, I have Robbie Birbeck. You are like a VP of Digital Enterprise Technology…

Robbie
You got it.

Julián
…department at Salesforce.

Robbie
Perfect.

Julián
I got it right, I got it right. I’m trying to…

Robbie
You’re doing a really good job.

Julián
…to do like the proper titles correctly.

Robbie
Yeah.

Julián
So Robbie, tell me a little bit more about yourself and what you do at Salesforce.

Robbie
Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Julián
Of course, of course.

Robbie
Heroku is one of my favorite topics. We’ve been a customer, an internal customer for a really long time. So my teams, we provide internal technology solutions across different lines of business within Salesforce. Most of the things that we are building are for Salesforce employees like yourself. So the technology shows up inside of our Slack applications, inside of some of the web portals that we build. But really our main goal was to try and help you get back to work, right? To remove some of the friction that comes with different policies and processes, and just make it as smooth and as easy to really focus on your real job, not on some of the other stuff that’s going on.

Julián
Amazing. So, how much of AI is part of what you do and your team is building for Salesforce internally?

Robbie
150%.

Julián
150. Okay.

Robbie
Yeah, I think it’s basically everything we’re doing just now is related to AI in some way. We’ve seen a huge amount of uptake in Agentforce across the different lines of business that we support. We’re delivering agents for employees. We’re delivering agents for back end experiences. We’re integrating not just agents, but AI into a lot of the other business processes that we’re responsible for as well. So yeah, it’s everywhere all the time.

Julián
Awesome. What are like some of those agents that you can talk about like that…

Robbie
Yeah.

Julián
…like an employee like me are using today and I don’t know it’s coming from your team?

Robbie
Yeah. So if you go into Slack today, you can click in the top right hand corner and there’ll be a little drop down of some of the agents that are available. And if you click on the employee agent, that’s something that my team builds, and that allows…

Julián
Nice, yeah I get messages like…

Robbie
Yeah, so…

Julián
…very often about that.

Robbie
Yeah, it’s great. It’s really fun. So, you can go in there and you can ask it questions about like, normal stuff, like IT information, like how do I get a new laptop or I dropped my phone, like I need to get it fixed. You can go there and you can get information about HR policy information or how to book a meeting and conference room. Or if there was, you know, an issue in an office, you can report that. So, it’s like normal kind of employee stuff there. But we’ve also started to extend the Agentforce platform now to integrate with third parties. So when you go to the employee agent, you can ask it and you can say, hey, what meetings did I have last week with, you know, so-and-so, your friend. And like what happened during that meeting? If it was recorded, we have access to all of the transcript information, and we’ll start to deliver that back to you within the employee agent context, which is really cool, because it’s actually, it’s not just a one and done situation there. You can ask it follow up questions too. So we’ve now started to also take all the Gemini notes that are transcribed during our Google Meet conferences. And those are where we… though actually you don’t get this yet because you’re not in our beta, but we can add you. Yeah. You… we’ll deliver those directly into the agent in Slack as a push notification. And then you can ask it follow up questions. And because it’s integrated with Slack, you can take the action items that came up during the call, you can add it to your own reminders or your own list that you’re managing there, so.

Julián
Amazing. And these are pretty much like a whole solution at this scale, because it is an internal product that, like, 70, 80,000 or more people are using. So, lets get a little bit more technical. So, how these solutions looks like at the scale on the back end? So, what are like the different pieces of technology you are using to build these solutions?

Robbie
Yeah, it’s a great question. So, for our Agentforce, our agents that we’re building, we’re building those primarily on Agentforce, you know, so like it’s a lot of Salesforce development technology. There’s a lot of prompt tuning that goes into making the agent work. But at a certain point, there’s a kind of… there’s a jumping off point to where we have to go and extend Agentforce with some custom capabilities that we’re working on. And so that’s where Heroku has been really important to us. We also use Data 360.

Julián
Yes.

Robbie
Formerly known as Data Cloud. So, that’s where we aggregate a lot of our content. And so we’re using the out-of-the-box retrievers and the RAG solution that that provides for us. In the past, before that solution existed, we were actually using pgvector on Heroku for a RAG solution. And some of our custom… we’ve been able to move away from some of that just now. And you rely more on Data 360 to provide that functionality. But when we need to build custom business logic that’s integrated with a third party, like some of those Google services I was just describing, Heroku has been a fantastic option for that for us. Just to scale up to 75,000 employees, like very easily, we don’t really ever… I don’t… it’s funny you asked that question because I don’t really ever worry about it. Like we don’t think about those problems very much. It’s just kind of… we kind of take it for granted that we can turn on auto scaling, and it’s going to take care of it for us.

Julián
That’s… I think that’s the magic behind of what we do at Heroku.

Robbie
Yeah.

Julián
And with our recent launches like AppLink that it’s making now the job of integrating Heroku and Salesforce easily…

Robbie
Yeah.

Julián
…do you have any plans or are you relying on AppLink right now? What’s your take on that?

Robbie
So we’re really excited about AppLink. Ever since I kind of heard you guys talking about it a year or so ago, I was like, yes, this is going to solve real problems for us. We are looking at how do we bring it into our production environment right now. One of my principal developers is really excited about it. He’s working on it probably as we speak. And I think we’ll have solutions in place with AppLink in production this… the by the end of the year, I would imagine. So much of what we’ve done in the past, this kind of stitching Salesforce platform and Heroku together, you know, through custom mechanisms that we’ve built. And we can get it to work. It was a little bit of work to make it happen. But AppLink is going to be, like, really, really powerful for us we think. It will reduce again, just some of that friction and some of that burden and allow us to extend the platform on, you know, scalable, open technologies, without having to think about it.

Julián
That’s amazing that you’re able to stitch up all of these different technologies to build that full solution that is being use every day by this amount of employees here at Salesforce. So far in all of these implementations, like all of these moving pieces that you, that you have, what is your biggest challenge, like in terms of, like, the architecture and the implementation?

Robbie
That’s a great question. I think it always comes down to data. Data is probably the biggest challenge that we consistently have, whether it’s like, having, you know, access to the data that we need in secure ways, like all of the access controls around the data. That’s probably consistently the thing that sort of slows us down the most I would say.

Julián
Well, you have like, Data 360 like to help, like solve all of those data issues. Robbie, it has been amazing. Thank you, thank you very much for everything you and your team do for us at Salesforce and where you put in all of these, like, moving pieces together, this technology to be able to make our lives easier. And as you mentioned initially, like it goes back to work. Focus on the important things so we don’t need to worry about like, the rest.

Robbie
We’ll try… we try our best. Thank you to everybody at Heroku. You make our life so much easier as well. We’ve been using all of the services for many, many years, and I hope we continue to do that for a long time to come.

Julián
Definitely. We will. Thank you so much. I’m looking forward to keep talking to you and see what your team will continue building.

Robbie
Thank you