Using ChatGPT as a Salesforce Admin

0:00 And just like that, ChatGPT instantly created this validation reform. Salesforce, in general, is already low to no code, but this is something that makes it much more inviting to almost anyone to come collaborate. Welcome to The LeanScale Podcast where we talk about everything RevOps. Thank you for listening. I am really excited to be going through this topic. I don't know if excited is the right word, maybe I'm a little terrified to go through it. I still have mixed feelings about ChatGPT, the power of AI. I know a lot of technology leaders in the space have mixed

0:48 feelings about it, but at the same time, it's still absolutely fascinating. And I really love the applications that it has for revenue operations and some of the work that we do. So today, I have one of LeanScale's systems architects, Christopher Martyen, who's going to walk through some ways. He uses ChatGPT in his daily work with Salesforce. Christopher, thank you so much for being here. Yeah, happy to be here. Happy and excited to talk about such a terrifying topic too. I think we can maybe ease people's minds a bit and shed some light on the future of AI and what ChatGPT does

1:30 for me and what it can do for you and everyone. You mentioned a word terrifying. I think that's actually one of the reasons that I started to get into working with AI tools like ChatGPT and some other AI tools. The reason I got into it was because I was a little bit terrified of it. Like many people in the 90s were sort of terrified with computers and emailing. A lot of people sort of said that the computers and emails would take away all of the jobs for writing letters and paper. Paper would be dying. Paper would be dead. The computers and email actually enhanced paper so

2:04 much. People began typing everything out and printing everything in math quantities. And paper companies even shifted to cardboard boxes. If you check your house tonight you'll probably get two or three cardboard boxes from Amazon shipped from all over the world. So it can be terrifying but history tends to not necessarily repeat itself but tends to rhyme. I think I've seen this story a few times. Certainly read about it at least. And it really helps augment people's lives and their jobs and enhance them. So hopefully people aren't too terrified. Especially after today

2:38 you'll see how friendly chat GPT can be in fun. So yeah that's pretty much kind of why I started with it. Yeah and I know you are actually using friendly language with chat GPT just in the off chance there's an AI apocalypse coming our way. At least you were one of the friendly ones to the friendly chat GPT bot. Yeah exactly. We even develop a little bit of relationship you know friendly good morning every now and then you know no tasks required so why not you know. A little kindness goes a long way. Of course of course. So maybe walk us through what was the first time you thought hey

3:14 I have a problem and I think chat GPT might be able to help me with some of the work that I'm doing in Salesforce. Yeah absolutely. Well chat GPT is a very technical tool but it sounds like a human and in the technical job that we do at Salesforce we often partner with other peers and reviewing each other's work. Maybe if somebody has a problem or a question or wants to learn about something we collaborate. But when somebody that I normally reach out to is in a meeting but I wanted to do something pretty quickly I thought you know there's something just a little bit off about what I'm

3:50 doing right now. I have this big formula but I don't know why it's not working. I threw it into chat GPT. Chat GPT analyzed it and gave me exactly what was wrong with it and then I was able to test it out. So instead of relying on someone else waiting for them to be available and then collaborating on that problem chat GPT was that partner and I think chat GPT and other AI tools can be that partner for a lot of people in technical roles and any job in general. That's great. That's great. Well I know you have a couple things you want to share with the listeners and viewers today.

4:22 I'm really interested to go through these and I think it's going to prompt a lot of discussions. I hope people watching this also if you have your own ideas of how you've used chat GPT and this type of work it'd be interesting to add that as well. But Christopher what's one of the problems chat GPT has helped you solve? One of the problems it's helped me solve is working and collaborating with other people. You just mentioned that you wanted to get more information from people that might be watching or listening to this on how they use AI tools and that's exactly what I wanted to do.

4:57 The more people that we can get into collaborating together at work in general but specifically in technical tools opening up a lot of these things like code and formula to people that might not be able to understand it or don't really have the interest in doing that the more people that we can get to collaborate the better the work becomes. So for example I'm going to use chat GPT here up on the screen and I'm going to just tell it some human language really and it's going to do exactly a little bit of what I want. So I'm going to paste a message in there that says hello hope you are having

5:40 a nice day just for a little bit of kindness. I need help with the Salesforce validation rule. People should not be able to move an opportunity to the stage SQL from the stage nurture unless the field type has a value in it. So this is something that I get pretty often in the technical role. People will say hey I want to add this to Salesforce. I want to make this requirement and they'll use plain simple human language like this but they don't know how to do the technical back end. So I'm going to send that to chat GPT. Chat GPT is thinking because hello I'm happy to

6:15 didn't ask about my day but that's okay I forgive him. This is a workhorse. Here's a validation rule that will prevent people from moving an opportunity stage SQL to nurture unless the field type has a value in it. And as you can see here the majority of people don't know how to write this type of formula. They don't know how to use this type of punctuation. They don't know these functions for example is changed is pick val prior value is blank text and all these parentheses. For most people it looks boring. Chat GPT also explains it but with this validation rule I can simply

6:46 click on copy code and I have a test Salesforce validation rule right here. I'm going to throw it in here and as I'm looking at this as a human it of course typed this out faster than I would manually type this entire formula out. I do see that something might be a little off and it says no errors found. What I was thinking is that is blank text type type is actually a pick list value so is blank won't work. That's why it threw text in there. I will tell you that before this demo I did try this and it had is blank type and I told it no that has an error please correct it

7:28 and it corrected it. So I think maybe it learned from this morning. Wow. So now that it threw that

7:36 formula into there I can choose save and if I were to move an opportunity like this from nurture

7:48 into SQL and Mark is the current stage it will tell me chat GPT says you cannot move forward unless you fill out type. Thank you chat GPT. So then I'll come in here and say great thanks love you and just like that chat GPT instantly created this validation for me. Salesforce in general is already low to no code but this is something that makes it much more inviting to almost anyone to come collaborate. So then now that I'm able to open this up to other people that might not have written this code manually like I was doing mostly in the past they're able to

8:25 create this and I can quickly review it for them. We can collaborate together on how to make this code better or more efficient or add things and just like that it created the validation before me instead of me doing it manually. In reality I would save a lot of time doing that and able to collaborate with others that might not normally do this on their own. Yeah that's I think for most people leveraging AI is either going to help you do something faster or it's going to help you solve something more complex by giving you inspiration of potential solutions. I think this is a this is a great example. Clearly it's pretty quick to just ask a question

9:04 copy paste it in put the human element of making sure it fits the business context of of your problem and then and then off you go. This is an excellent example. What's another way you've used chat GPT? I've used chat GPT in a number of ways. I have another example right here that I wanted to show you. This is from something that I've done a few days ago. Actually for one of our clients and this took about I'd say 15 20 about 20 or 30 minutes with chat GPT and a few prompts and re-prompts to get it to do exactly what I wanted. Just like you would collaborating

9:47 with the team you might have one two or three meetings you might hear review back and forth etc and after I had that it created this formula for me. It's about I don't know 15 20 lines and it was something that I didn't know how to do on my own after I ran into a problem and chat GPT helped me learn about it and then also right now it's translating it. So I then recently just copied and pasted the big formula in here and I said what does this Salesforce formula do and I threw it in here and it explained to me that it says if the term end date is blank it calculates the day by

10:22 adding one year to the closed date field etc etc. Now the problem I was running into and some people might want to double check their calendars their forecasting maybe some of their own formulas is that next year is actually a leap year so if you're using if you're counting days weeks months and February is going to have one last day in it that could throw a little bit of a wrench into some of your plans so what I needed to do was calculate a specific date but I was running into a lot of trouble with the leap year and chat GPT has this for me here and it created if is blank

10:56 populate the record term end date using based on the closed date it'll take whatever the month is and for example you see one comma 31 and three comma 31 that's January and March both have 31 days four being April has 30 and then number two it says two comma if mod year record closed date comma four this is all a bunch of technical jargon that most people don't even care about but chat GPT was able to throw it in and it can explain exactly what it does so that if the year is divisible by four it will know what if it's a leap year or not and then it will calculate

11:31 the date perfectly instead of being off by one day so by asking it what does this formula do that's essentially what it does and it breaks it down here for me for February return 28 or 29 depending on whether the year of the closed date field is divisible by four so that in contrast to to comma if mod year dollar sign record dot closed date most people get snoozefest when they read that line but reading this you can easily see what it does so again kind of circling back to the collaborative effort this tool helps translate things history doesn't necessarily

12:10 repeat but it does rhyme when we got translation tools we're able to collaborate across borders like and no other time in history and now with chat GPT and other AI tools we can translate a lot of this technical details so fast so quickly and people are able to collaborate on it pretty quickly so it helps me create that formula but it also helped me explain that to somebody else without me taking 20 minutes to type up this page explaining it yep they're able to throw it in in a few seconds yeah and see the human language behind it and that makes a lot of sense i mean

12:43 every time we run into an instance of sales force there's usually a complete labyrinth of workflows and validation rules and things that we need to do our own research on to even begin understanding what was implemented before we begin to do our work so you know getting faster solving more complex problems and then doing research on something that already exists and learning excellent use cases for using this chris for this this was really awesome i think um i know you're going to have more uh examples to share in the future and it's only going to get better and better

13:22 over time um anything you're worried about by using chat GPT to do work in sales force i'm really not worried about chat GPT doing work in sales force or other AI tools and technical programs i think the benefits just at this time outweigh the cons and i think for a while they will um again back to the analogy that paper in the 90s a lot of people were terrified that letter writing would be dead with email i think we have some colleagues down in brazil i much prefer to email them today than to write a letter waiting a couple weeks to get a response um just today on the radio

14:01 i was listening on the drive over here and i heard that some analysts from Goldman Sachs predicted that they about 20 to 25 of jobs would be replaced by AI well how many jobs were replaced by email though we gained a lot more jobs um with technology as we grow so i think that if anyone's worried or concerned they have a right to be and that is good but i think the benefits will outweigh the cons in the long run i tend to agree i know i have a slight feeling of terror when i look at it just because it seems so powerful but um i agree i think the future is bright chrisford thank

14:42 you so much i really appreciate it i think we're gonna have to do a refresher of this in the future to see what other tips and tricks you've come up with um and i'm looking forward to it thank you so much at this rate probably next week thank you for having me thank you chrisford thank you for listening to this episode if you like the discussion please like share and subscribe to wherever you listen to podcasts so you never miss a new episode