Image created by DALL-E 3 based in a prompt by Bob Buzzard Introduction I've been testing out Salesforce's Einstein Copilot assistant for a few weeks now, but typically I've been tacking a single custom action onto the end of one or more standard actions, and usually a Prompt Template where I can easily ground it with some data from a specific record.  Something that hasn't been overly clear to me is how I can link a couple of custom actions and pass information other than record ids between them. The kind of information that would be shown to the user if it was a single action, or the ..read more

Image created by DALL-E 3 based on a prompt by Bob Buzzard Introduction One of the key features of Einstein Copilot from Salesforce is its extensibility - while there are a bunch of standard actions, and many more coming, there will always be something more you want to give your users. Custom actions allow you to create an AI assistant that targets your specific business challenges, adding capabilities to your copilot that generate real value for your users. Scenario In my last post, I introduced the Sales Coach - a custom Lightning Web Component that you add to an Opportunity record page. Wh ..read more

Image by DALL-E 3 based on a prompt from Bob Buzzard Introduction Thus far in my journey with Generative AI in Salesforce I've been focused on using prompt templates out of the box - sales emails, field generation, or in custom copilot actions. Salesforce isn't the boss of me though, so I'm also keen to figure out how to include prompts into my own applications. The Use Case I want a way for sales reps to get advice on what they should do with an opportunity - is it worth proceeding with, what does it make sense to do next, that kind of thing. I don't want this happening every time I load the ..read more

Image generated by DALL-E 3 based on a prompt from Bob Buzzard Introduction Copilot from Salesforce entered beta at the end of Feb '24, without too much of a build-up I think it's fair to say. Given how quiet the likes of Marc Benioff were on the socials, I was half-expecting it to be delayed until nearer to the Summer release. I'm very pleased that wasn't the case, but not as pleased as I was to get access to it. Setup Much like Prompt Builder, enabling copilot is pretty simple : Go to Setup -> Einstein Generative AI -> Einstein Setup and toggle it on The go to Setup -> Einste ..read more

Image generated by DALL-E 3 based on a prompt created by Bob Buzzard Introduction Unless you've been living under a rock, you'll have seen some big news from Salesforce in the Generative AI space this week (29th Feb 2024, for future readers) - Prompt Builder is Generally Available and Copilot is in Beta.  I've been lucky enough to get my hands on both of these new features and have an initial dig around, so continue reading to find out how I got on with Prompt Builder. Like it's General Availability, my hands on experience with Copilot is coming soon! Setup Setting up Prompt Builder is v ..read more

Image generated by DALL-E 3, based on a prompt by Bob Buzzard Introduction The Spring '24 release of Salesforce had some great new features and improvements, but for me some of the Beta/Developer Preview features were more interesting - for example the scratch org snapshots beta that I wrote about a few weeks ago. I've been developing on the Salesforce platform for close to 16 years now, and I've lost count of the number of different approaches that I've taken to handle zip files. Sometimes on the server, sometimes on the client in JavaScript, but always using custom solutions that didn ..read more

Image generated by DALL-E 3 based on about 10 prompts by Bob Buzzard Introduction The Spring 24 release of Salesforce bring a new operator to Apex - the null coalescing operator. It makes me very happy when these kinds of operators make their way to Apex, as it feels like we're a real programming language! The null coalescing operator consists of an operand, two question marks, and another operand: operand1 ?? operand2 When the expressions is evaluated, if operand 1 is not null that will be the result, otherwise operand2 will be the result. Note that this isn't a mechanism for avoiding a ..read more

Note: This feature is in beta in Spring '24. Like all other betas, this functionality may never go GA and may disappear at any time. Caveat emptor. Image generated by DALL-E 3 based on a prompt by Bob Buzzard Introduction The Spring '24 release of Salesforce moves the scratch org snapshot functionality into beta. I've been waiting to get my hands on this and so far it hasn't disappointed. Whenever we get new features of this nature, I like to reflect on how far we've come in Salesforce land. In this case I was testing with the codebase of our BrightMEDIA accelerator, and when we started build ..read more

Image generated by DALL-E 3 from a prompt by Bob Buzzard Introduction In my last blog post (A Tale of Two Contains Methods) I mentioned that I'd spent quite a bit of December taking part in Advent of Code.  Each day there were two challenges - a (relatively) straightforward one, that could potentially be brute forced, and an extended version where brute forcing would take days so using the a more thoughtful approach was required. As I was tackling these challenges using Apex, brute forcing wasn't really an option, so my solution typically involved building structures of complex objects ..read more

Image generated by DALL-E 3 from a prompt by Bob Buzzard  Introduction Eagle-eyed regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I dropped away during the build up to Christmas this year, and there was a good reason for this. I was taking part in Advent of Code, having been introduced to it by our Credera brethren. A challenge a day for 25 days - two a day in fact, as if/when you solve the first, it gets tweaked to make it harder.  I opted to use Apex to take on the challenges, which ensured that I couldn't brute force any solutions, and that I typically had to switch to ..read more