Zoe Beard: ⁓ well, welcome to a new format of DevOps Quick Bytes. ⁓ this is the podcast for Salesforce leaders who want to keep their finger on the pulse of what's happening in the ecosystem. I am Zoe. I'm your host. And in the time it takes you to finish your morning coffee, we'll be bringing you bite-sized insights from leaders across the industry. And it only felt right to have our first guest be the king of podcasting himself, host of our sister podcast, DevOps Diaries. and developer advocate at Gearset, Jack McCurdy. So welcome to the podcast.
Jack McCurdy: That was a very, very nice intro. I appreciate that a lot. What a pleasure it is to be invited to be the first of this renewed series. Thank you so much.
Zoe Beard: Bye. Yeah, I mean, I've been practicing that intro in my bathroom mirror for the last couple of weeks.
Jack McCurdy: Yeah, welcome. Welcome to podcasting. It never gets any easier. You just kind of say the same thing over and over again. It's my comfort blanket, my little intro that I do. So you'll get there too.
Zoe Beard: Yeah, very excited to have you on the podcast as our very first guest. So it's a huge honor. I can go on your LinkedIn profile an achievement. ⁓ you know, ⁓ I mentioned, this is a very kind of bite sized ⁓ looking at, some of the ⁓ trends, industry events and things like that. And, you know, I three letters for you, TDX. We're heading to TDX next month and you're attending, you're a TDX veteran. ⁓
Jack McCurdy: Yeah.
Zoe Beard: So really keen to hear from you that we can share with our listeners around what you think are going to be some of the biggest trends that we're going to see at the event.
Jack McCurdy: Yeah, I'm excited. TDX is always fantastic. I find TDX to really provide some solid, not just aspirational things that people can push towards, a real depth of understanding. It gives people a depth of understanding about how their orgs operate and the potential that their org can operate to. So really, we had towards the actual practitioners on Salesforce, the admins, the developers and the architects out there. And ultimately those are the people doing the work and doing the jobs in their hours to make sure that Salesforce is working for their business. So really always great energy, great vibes. As for what I think is going to happen, this is my fifth year at TDX. So you kind of get the little bit of the formula, but it does change. It does change every year in terms of key topics. But one thing that I've noticed from the last couple of dream forces, TDX in itself and It's still going to be Agent Force. You're still going to hear a lot about Agent Force. And I think from what I've observed out in the ecosystem as well, there are more people with hands-on with the platform now, some more real experiences and real stories about how people have made Agent Force work for them. You may not necessarily hear that specifically in the sessions themselves, but this is one of the great things about any Salesforce conference, whether it be put on by Salesforce or the community themselves. It's the conversations that you have around the venue. It's the conversations that you have at the Happy Hour. It's the conversations that you have. There's like three Starbucks's within a five minute walk of Moscone. It's the conversations that you have in the line at Starbucks that really provide a whole lot of value outside of the sessions. So it'll be really interesting to hear some of those stories and see how Salesforce customers are leading the charge if they are stepping into that agentic journey.
Zoe Beard: Thank you.
Jack McCurdy: The other thing that I've predicted the last couple of times and we've seen a little bit more of and I expect more of this time is Slack as the interface for Salesforce as the CRM. So I think my hunch is that the vision for Salesforce is to lean on Slack and the integrations between Slack and Salesforce become tighter, become better and Slack really has become the chat interface that we would expect when working with Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, whatever. whatever flavor of Gen.ai that people are using. So Slack is that interface and more in that vein I would definitely expect to. The Slack team are awesome. I'm grateful to know a bunch of them and I think we'll be hearing a lot from them this time around too.
Zoe Beard: Yeah, I mean, of course, AI, you know, the agent again to prize us a bit of topic that's dominating not just our industry, but you know, across the tech industry and just the you what we're seeing in the news. I think one thing maybe I've seen is that especially within, you know, kind of our ecosystem has been perhaps some Maybe cautiousness around AI ⁓ and people's approach to AI. And obviously we work in the software industry and software is all about kind of our lives easier, helping people become more efficient so they can focus on more of the higher value work. ⁓ From your perspective and when you've spoken to the community. ⁓ Why do you think there is perhaps a little bit more kind of cautiousness around AI compared to some of the other innovations we've seen in tech in recent years?
Jack McCurdy: That's a phenomenal question. And I think there's two angles to this. The first primarily is if you look at any of the generative AI tools that folks have been using on day-to-day basis. I mentioned some previously, but Cloud, Gemini, ChatGPT, et cetera. The varying degrees of success that folks have had for whatever reason is that they're using it. Some may be using it for document generation, pull request descriptions, things like that. Folks have had varying degrees of success with those things at the time that a new model has been released or when they have looked to stretch the boundaries of what AI is capable of. And I think for the most part, the ambition and the vision is there to use these tools. look at engineering teams, engineering teams for the most part are seeing a lot of success using cloud code, for examples. but the number one bit of feedback that I'm getting for those that are really finding it valuable is how constrained they are in their use of it. So I think the Salesforce community and practitioners in this space, there's a balance, right? So people are expecting maybe too much of the platforms because they're not scoping the work. maybe correctly to get the best results out of it. There are teams that have seen a huge amount of success using AI to generate code and generate features and functionality. I've a Salesforce application myself, which I've never done before, but found a good degree of success just knowing the problem space that I was trying to build the app for and being able to give it really specific instructions and generate those things. And it was able to do that for me. So I think that's where the community is on that learning curve. those that have bitten off more than they can chew have bounced off and seen a little and are slightly more skeptical, but those have been more constrained in their use of AI and application of AI for these tasks are successful. And that will start to become the norm when that message spreads out to the ecosystem and people maybe return to using these tools that they might not have previously or bounced off previously. The other side of the...
Zoe Beard: return to using this.
Jack McCurdy: The argument that I think is really interesting and something that I think about a lot when I think about the human side of technology is maybe people are a little bit scared or a little bit fearful because AI has given them significant efficiency gains and maybe it's not being talked about, maybe it's not as public yet, but people saying what they're doing with their time now that they have got these efficiency savings or folks questioning what they should be doing with their time with the time that is now freed up because they have been successfully using AI and it's been giving them time. Number one thing is it's totally okay to save yourself some time, give yourself some brain space and go and have a coffee, right? Like I am all for that, take an extended lunch. We need to give ourselves that freedom we are humans, we need that kind of time to regenerate and recharge. So maybe people are fearful. for admitting that that is one of the benefits they get, but that should be totally okay. The other thing is, if they have that time, how do we apply that time? And from the Salesforce engineering leaders that I've spoken to, from software engineers that I've spoken to, the best place that I can advise folks to focus on is the harder, more strategic things that aren't gonna go away that AI isn't gonna take away from us. The scrutiny that you need to architect good solutions. integrations from platforms and the processes themselves that software is supporting and that Salesforce is supporting. That's where we now have time to dedicate the energy to. And for some that might be a muscle that hasn't necessarily been flexed before. So diving into like the jobs to be done of what folks need from a Salesforce system and those kind of skills, the human skills, the communication, the... working more with stakeholders is going to become really, really valuable and definitely an area that I would encourage folks to do more of, to understand more of the business and then be able to use your technical cloud to use AI, to use cloud or whatever else it is to help you build those solutions. Once you have super solid context, once you have a bigger picture view of everything that goes on in organizations. So I think it's those two things. It's flexing professional muscles that might not have been flexed before, which is causing some of that hesitance. and maybe they're hesitant because people are now taking, maybe taking that time to have their coffee, their extended lunches and actually give themselves a rest, which is definitely needed from the human perspective too.
Zoe Beard: Yeah, I think I agree with you on that one because definitely, you know, I use AI in my day-to-day role and I think you almost have to reframe your brain in terms of, what is my role day-to-day looking like? Because it helps free my time on admin, which is great because I dislike a lot of admin tasks because I find them a bit mundane and repetitive, but...
Jack McCurdy: You and everybody else.
Zoe Beard: So it's like, okay, how do I, why do I, can I have that time to dedicate my brain space to more of that? thinking and the brainstorming, which is really valuable because you can kind of take new approaches to things and kind of find new ways and like even just learning, having a bit more time to learn about your industry. But you touched on something that I was going to ask you about is you've been a big advocate for ⁓ approaching AI with curiosity rather than fear. And I think something you just mentioned was around like you were vibe coding. I think it was a golf app within Salesforce to kind of get timings. Yeah.
Jack McCurdy: It was, yeah. Good experience.
Zoe Beard: Yeah, yeah. And I think, yeah, I mean, would love to like learn how to do something like that. But I think what something I'm seen around AI is the idea of people. approaching AI by doing something with AI that is probably like lower stakes. So something that's not going to break your entire organization to, you know, when you kind of implement it and then kind of building up so you can build that trust in it. So I'm guessing from your perspective, when you're starting out with AI, don't kind of go in with all these big massive projects that, you know, can cause a lot of disruption if they go wrong. Start with something small, ⁓ comfortable with it and start building that trust with AI. ⁓
Jack McCurdy: Yeah, absolutely. think that the thing that, the thing that I did is like Salesforce gives you developer environments for free that you can play with and you can do something with. And if you look at new folks into the ecosystem. I've worked in the Salesforce space since 2019, which at that time there was a lot, a lot of new people coming into the ecosystem. A lot of people aspiring to be Salesforce admins or Salesforce developers, maybe from other technical fields, but maybe career changes and what have you. was a lot of folks around that time that I entered the ecosystem. To some extent, I'm not sure on that level of new entrants, but my observation is it's probably slightly less than it was back in 2019 or around the COVID years. Those developer environments are such a good way to... Tinker with any technology or any part of the Salesforce platform if you want to get more familiar with Lightning Web Components with Flows, whatever it is. If you want to try out Gearset, for example, developer environments are a good way to build that muscle and your understanding of how these tools work. And I found exactly the same thing when I was building that golf app. I took Salesforce. I know enough about Salesforce to be fairly dangerous, but I definitely wouldn't feel comfortable going and working in a production environment for any Salesforce customer. Absolutely not. And I took something that I know a fair bit about in golf, like play golf nearly every day in the mornings before work, which I also recommend active movement in the morning. Great. ⁓ So I knew the space, I knew the idea of the solution that I wanted to build. I knew how things worked. I knew what would be important. And the more context that you have. So if I come back to my previous answer when... what should we be doing in that time with AI? And the more context that you have around a business, a specific vertical, a specific problem space, then the better use of AI you're gonna be able to get. But because I had that knowledge and it has absolutely no bearing on anything, right? I built this thing for fun. built it. Maybe I'll put it out to my golf society and say, hey, we could use this for tournaments and like track our scores as a society or what have you. But there was no consequence to the things I was doing. I was just tinkering. but with that context and that knowledge in an area that I'm comfortable with. And I would definitely encourage more folks to take that approach and just see the art of the possible. We know Salesforce well enough to go, actually that's not, AI hasn't quite given us the right answer based on these things. For example, when I was doing a deployment or the AI was suggesting deployment steps for me, I was like, no, that's not how Salesforce deployments work. You've already deployed the tabs, but these components fields. And I was just like, no, if you feel this.
Zoe Beard: me.
Jack McCurdy: Salesforce deployment than the whole deployment field. So we need to those components too. And the more you work with these things, you get to understand how it works and it picks up on that tribal knowledge or that knowledge that you've built up over the ecosystem. So just tinker is my advice. Tinker, play with things and pick a space that you're confident that you know a lot about and an area that you're passionate about as well. Sometimes that's going to be in your professional life. Sometimes that's going to be in your personal life. I think building that personal connection into tinkering with these toys, they're probably going to give you more confidence to step into the personal world, or into the professional world, and ⁓ make use of these tools in the best way.
Zoe Beard: Yeah, think it's sometimes we forget to almost rediscover our inner child there and just have fun with these things. And if we kind of think about, how am going to bring this into my work and bring it into these projects? Just maybe try something fun with it, experiment and just get to grips with it that way. Because I think that's the best way to learn is by having fun with something.
Jack McCurdy: Yeah, absolutely. Fun pretty much trumps everything on a learning journey. find if I'm having fun with something or learning things about my personal interests, like I've gone over the last two years, I've got disastrously into ice hockey and the more that I learn about ice hockey, the more it fuels that passion. you can find that, apply that passion from personal lives into professional lives really quite easily. think if you think about the way that I go and... research like ice hockey teams or players or what happens in X year and why this season was important to a team's trajectory for example. You can then apply that into how you think professionally. Why do we do things in this organisation that particular way? What's the history behind that business process? What's the history behind that particular bit of tech? Or why is this being architected in this particular way? The more that you learn, you can apply those personal life learnings and the method that you go about it. into your professional setting and I think that's really powerful.
Zoe Beard: Yeah, yeah. So I think we can, we've both agreed that, you know, AI, Agent Force are going to be some of the biggest topics at TDX. Obviously you're attending TDX on behalf of Gearset and, know, we can both give everyone a million reasons about why to come see the Gearset team at TDX. But what are you most excited to talk to the community about at TDX?
Jack McCurdy: I think for me it's all about change. I've spent seven years talking about change management processes, DevOps processes, how customers are delivering change or how teams are delivering change for their organizations. And that is always kind of my North Star when I'm at any of these events is what is changing, what is happening and how do you feel about those changes or how... how do you see your role shifting or what things have you done to adapt to these new things? I think the last 18 months has taught us anything. People are changing at a pretty unprecedented rate, even if you compare it to like the dot-com boom or anything like that. That's really interesting and trying to keep my finger on the pulse of all the changes that are happening in organizations, how people are thinking and how... how teams are making the most out of technologies or not, or if they're not using these technologies, why aren't they using these technologies? are some of the drawbacks? So that's always really interesting. Always keen to learn about what people are doing. Just reconnecting with people, seven years gives you lot of personal connections in this kind of space, so it's always good to catch up with friends. But yeah, that's what I'm most excited about talking to the community about. This is also going to be my first time presenting at TDX. So I presented at pretty much every Salesforce conference under the sun apart from TDX. So I'll be speaking at TDX this year and I'm really excited for that and a little bit nervous. So more nervous than I usually am because I'm always nervous, but more nervous than I usually am for sure.
Zoe Beard: Yes. Yes, great. Yeah, I mean, yeah, super excited for you to be speaking at TDX and we'll be sure to share more details about your session once everything is finalized. But before we go, for anyone who is attending TDX for the first time or any veterans that are kind of looking for a new way to improve their TDX experience, what is your top tip for people heading to San Francisco next month?
Jack McCurdy: Yeah, so as for, and you can apply this to Dreamforce, but it applies to TDX as well, or any conferences. Don't over-commit yourself to sessions. Pick the sessions and prioritize pretty ruthlessly about what you're interested in and what you think is going to be most applicable to your near and medium term goals, maybe for the rest of 2026, for example. So pick those sessions. Leave yourself plenty of time between those sessions. Number one, to get to them. And number two, because some of the best conversations happen outside of the sessions as well. So keep yourself time to have the conversations in the corridor and go and see maybe the vendors that you're interested in. Obviously come and see Gearset. You're gonna do a shameless plug. But go to the specific Salesforce product area booths, which they will tell you about the product areas that you're interested in. And it doesn't have to be Agent Force. Go and find out what's happening with the Apex team or the Lightning Web Component team or any of those areas or... ⁓ Agent Force for Sales or you know those specific verticals that you think are really going to help you. The other thing on sessions specifically is if you really enjoyed the session and you have more questions, speakers absolutely love it if you have questions after the session and are more than happy to continue those conversations and will help you apply whatever their learnings are to your specific use cases or your business case. So I think that's a really powerful thing and something that I encourage everybody to do is connect with those speakers right after the session. And if they're not available right then, they've got a runoff or what have you, they're usually always very happy to talk to you at another time over the two days. But yeah, comfy shoes. Everyone always says comfy shoes, but it really does make a difference too.
Zoe Beard: lip balm as well because the a we have a of air con in these convention centres and your lips can dry out so no one wants to be talking to someone who's constantly licking the lips.
Jack McCurdy: For sure. Absolutely. And the other thing is, is the community cove or the community area or whatever they end up calling it this year, the area where different user groups meet up or different teams from Salesforce or parts of the community team are, go and talk to the community cove. Because if somebody is at the community cove, it usually means that they're open to a chat and it can be about anything or maybe just experiences and story swapping. So that is another area that I would definitely encourage folks to make time for. regardless of your role, you can be a CEO or a VP or an admin with six months experience, six weeks experience, it doesn't matter. The Salesforce community has always been incredibly supportive and incredibly uplifting. And that's a great area that you can go to for that little bit of extra pep in your step.
Zoe Beard: Yeah, awesome. Thank you so much, Jack. Really great chat as always. And yes, looking forward to hearing more about your talk at TDX and hope you have a great time out in San Francisco next month.
Jack McCurdy: Well, thank you so much, Zoe, and like I said, pleasure to be invited as the first guest on the renewed DevOps Quick Bytes. You're welcome. Bye now.
Zoe Beard: the guest of honor. Thank you so much. Thank you. Bye bye.
Jack McCurdy: That was a very, very nice intro. I appreciate that a lot. What a pleasure it is to be invited to be the first of this renewed series. Thank you so much.
Zoe Beard: Bye. Yeah, I mean, I've been practicing that intro in my bathroom mirror for the last couple of weeks.
Jack McCurdy: Yeah, welcome. Welcome to podcasting. It never gets any easier. You just kind of say the same thing over and over again. It's my comfort blanket, my little intro that I do. So you'll get there too.
Zoe Beard: Yeah, very excited to have you on the podcast as our very first guest. So it's a huge honor. I can go on your LinkedIn profile an achievement. ⁓ you know, ⁓ I mentioned, this is a very kind of bite sized ⁓ looking at, some of the ⁓ trends, industry events and things like that. And, you know, I three letters for you, TDX. We're heading to TDX next month and you're attending, you're a TDX veteran. ⁓
Jack McCurdy: Yeah.
Zoe Beard: So really keen to hear from you that we can share with our listeners around what you think are going to be some of the biggest trends that we're going to see at the event.
Jack McCurdy: Yeah, I'm excited. TDX is always fantastic. I find TDX to really provide some solid, not just aspirational things that people can push towards, a real depth of understanding. It gives people a depth of understanding about how their orgs operate and the potential that their org can operate to. So really, we had towards the actual practitioners on Salesforce, the admins, the developers and the architects out there. And ultimately those are the people doing the work and doing the jobs in their hours to make sure that Salesforce is working for their business. So really always great energy, great vibes. As for what I think is going to happen, this is my fifth year at TDX. So you kind of get the little bit of the formula, but it does change. It does change every year in terms of key topics. But one thing that I've noticed from the last couple of dream forces, TDX in itself and It's still going to be Agent Force. You're still going to hear a lot about Agent Force. And I think from what I've observed out in the ecosystem as well, there are more people with hands-on with the platform now, some more real experiences and real stories about how people have made Agent Force work for them. You may not necessarily hear that specifically in the sessions themselves, but this is one of the great things about any Salesforce conference, whether it be put on by Salesforce or the community themselves. It's the conversations that you have around the venue. It's the conversations that you have at the Happy Hour. It's the conversations that you have. There's like three Starbucks's within a five minute walk of Moscone. It's the conversations that you have in the line at Starbucks that really provide a whole lot of value outside of the sessions. So it'll be really interesting to hear some of those stories and see how Salesforce customers are leading the charge if they are stepping into that agentic journey.
Zoe Beard: Thank you.
Jack McCurdy: The other thing that I've predicted the last couple of times and we've seen a little bit more of and I expect more of this time is Slack as the interface for Salesforce as the CRM. So I think my hunch is that the vision for Salesforce is to lean on Slack and the integrations between Slack and Salesforce become tighter, become better and Slack really has become the chat interface that we would expect when working with Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, whatever. whatever flavor of Gen.ai that people are using. So Slack is that interface and more in that vein I would definitely expect to. The Slack team are awesome. I'm grateful to know a bunch of them and I think we'll be hearing a lot from them this time around too.
Zoe Beard: Yeah, I mean, of course, AI, you know, the agent again to prize us a bit of topic that's dominating not just our industry, but you know, across the tech industry and just the you what we're seeing in the news. I think one thing maybe I've seen is that especially within, you know, kind of our ecosystem has been perhaps some Maybe cautiousness around AI ⁓ and people's approach to AI. And obviously we work in the software industry and software is all about kind of our lives easier, helping people become more efficient so they can focus on more of the higher value work. ⁓ From your perspective and when you've spoken to the community. ⁓ Why do you think there is perhaps a little bit more kind of cautiousness around AI compared to some of the other innovations we've seen in tech in recent years?
Jack McCurdy: That's a phenomenal question. And I think there's two angles to this. The first primarily is if you look at any of the generative AI tools that folks have been using on day-to-day basis. I mentioned some previously, but Cloud, Gemini, ChatGPT, et cetera. The varying degrees of success that folks have had for whatever reason is that they're using it. Some may be using it for document generation, pull request descriptions, things like that. Folks have had varying degrees of success with those things at the time that a new model has been released or when they have looked to stretch the boundaries of what AI is capable of. And I think for the most part, the ambition and the vision is there to use these tools. look at engineering teams, engineering teams for the most part are seeing a lot of success using cloud code, for examples. but the number one bit of feedback that I'm getting for those that are really finding it valuable is how constrained they are in their use of it. So I think the Salesforce community and practitioners in this space, there's a balance, right? So people are expecting maybe too much of the platforms because they're not scoping the work. maybe correctly to get the best results out of it. There are teams that have seen a huge amount of success using AI to generate code and generate features and functionality. I've a Salesforce application myself, which I've never done before, but found a good degree of success just knowing the problem space that I was trying to build the app for and being able to give it really specific instructions and generate those things. And it was able to do that for me. So I think that's where the community is on that learning curve. those that have bitten off more than they can chew have bounced off and seen a little and are slightly more skeptical, but those have been more constrained in their use of AI and application of AI for these tasks are successful. And that will start to become the norm when that message spreads out to the ecosystem and people maybe return to using these tools that they might not have previously or bounced off previously. The other side of the...
Zoe Beard: return to using this.
Jack McCurdy: The argument that I think is really interesting and something that I think about a lot when I think about the human side of technology is maybe people are a little bit scared or a little bit fearful because AI has given them significant efficiency gains and maybe it's not being talked about, maybe it's not as public yet, but people saying what they're doing with their time now that they have got these efficiency savings or folks questioning what they should be doing with their time with the time that is now freed up because they have been successfully using AI and it's been giving them time. Number one thing is it's totally okay to save yourself some time, give yourself some brain space and go and have a coffee, right? Like I am all for that, take an extended lunch. We need to give ourselves that freedom we are humans, we need that kind of time to regenerate and recharge. So maybe people are fearful. for admitting that that is one of the benefits they get, but that should be totally okay. The other thing is, if they have that time, how do we apply that time? And from the Salesforce engineering leaders that I've spoken to, from software engineers that I've spoken to, the best place that I can advise folks to focus on is the harder, more strategic things that aren't gonna go away that AI isn't gonna take away from us. The scrutiny that you need to architect good solutions. integrations from platforms and the processes themselves that software is supporting and that Salesforce is supporting. That's where we now have time to dedicate the energy to. And for some that might be a muscle that hasn't necessarily been flexed before. So diving into like the jobs to be done of what folks need from a Salesforce system and those kind of skills, the human skills, the communication, the... working more with stakeholders is going to become really, really valuable and definitely an area that I would encourage folks to do more of, to understand more of the business and then be able to use your technical cloud to use AI, to use cloud or whatever else it is to help you build those solutions. Once you have super solid context, once you have a bigger picture view of everything that goes on in organizations. So I think it's those two things. It's flexing professional muscles that might not have been flexed before, which is causing some of that hesitance. and maybe they're hesitant because people are now taking, maybe taking that time to have their coffee, their extended lunches and actually give themselves a rest, which is definitely needed from the human perspective too.
Zoe Beard: Yeah, I think I agree with you on that one because definitely, you know, I use AI in my day-to-day role and I think you almost have to reframe your brain in terms of, what is my role day-to-day looking like? Because it helps free my time on admin, which is great because I dislike a lot of admin tasks because I find them a bit mundane and repetitive, but...
Jack McCurdy: You and everybody else.
Zoe Beard: So it's like, okay, how do I, why do I, can I have that time to dedicate my brain space to more of that? thinking and the brainstorming, which is really valuable because you can kind of take new approaches to things and kind of find new ways and like even just learning, having a bit more time to learn about your industry. But you touched on something that I was going to ask you about is you've been a big advocate for ⁓ approaching AI with curiosity rather than fear. And I think something you just mentioned was around like you were vibe coding. I think it was a golf app within Salesforce to kind of get timings. Yeah.
Jack McCurdy: It was, yeah. Good experience.
Zoe Beard: Yeah, yeah. And I think, yeah, I mean, would love to like learn how to do something like that. But I think what something I'm seen around AI is the idea of people. approaching AI by doing something with AI that is probably like lower stakes. So something that's not going to break your entire organization to, you know, when you kind of implement it and then kind of building up so you can build that trust in it. So I'm guessing from your perspective, when you're starting out with AI, don't kind of go in with all these big massive projects that, you know, can cause a lot of disruption if they go wrong. Start with something small, ⁓ comfortable with it and start building that trust with AI. ⁓
Jack McCurdy: Yeah, absolutely. think that the thing that, the thing that I did is like Salesforce gives you developer environments for free that you can play with and you can do something with. And if you look at new folks into the ecosystem. I've worked in the Salesforce space since 2019, which at that time there was a lot, a lot of new people coming into the ecosystem. A lot of people aspiring to be Salesforce admins or Salesforce developers, maybe from other technical fields, but maybe career changes and what have you. was a lot of folks around that time that I entered the ecosystem. To some extent, I'm not sure on that level of new entrants, but my observation is it's probably slightly less than it was back in 2019 or around the COVID years. Those developer environments are such a good way to... Tinker with any technology or any part of the Salesforce platform if you want to get more familiar with Lightning Web Components with Flows, whatever it is. If you want to try out Gearset, for example, developer environments are a good way to build that muscle and your understanding of how these tools work. And I found exactly the same thing when I was building that golf app. I took Salesforce. I know enough about Salesforce to be fairly dangerous, but I definitely wouldn't feel comfortable going and working in a production environment for any Salesforce customer. Absolutely not. And I took something that I know a fair bit about in golf, like play golf nearly every day in the mornings before work, which I also recommend active movement in the morning. Great. ⁓ So I knew the space, I knew the idea of the solution that I wanted to build. I knew how things worked. I knew what would be important. And the more context that you have. So if I come back to my previous answer when... what should we be doing in that time with AI? And the more context that you have around a business, a specific vertical, a specific problem space, then the better use of AI you're gonna be able to get. But because I had that knowledge and it has absolutely no bearing on anything, right? I built this thing for fun. built it. Maybe I'll put it out to my golf society and say, hey, we could use this for tournaments and like track our scores as a society or what have you. But there was no consequence to the things I was doing. I was just tinkering. but with that context and that knowledge in an area that I'm comfortable with. And I would definitely encourage more folks to take that approach and just see the art of the possible. We know Salesforce well enough to go, actually that's not, AI hasn't quite given us the right answer based on these things. For example, when I was doing a deployment or the AI was suggesting deployment steps for me, I was like, no, that's not how Salesforce deployments work. You've already deployed the tabs, but these components fields. And I was just like, no, if you feel this.
Zoe Beard: me.
Jack McCurdy: Salesforce deployment than the whole deployment field. So we need to those components too. And the more you work with these things, you get to understand how it works and it picks up on that tribal knowledge or that knowledge that you've built up over the ecosystem. So just tinker is my advice. Tinker, play with things and pick a space that you're confident that you know a lot about and an area that you're passionate about as well. Sometimes that's going to be in your professional life. Sometimes that's going to be in your personal life. I think building that personal connection into tinkering with these toys, they're probably going to give you more confidence to step into the personal world, or into the professional world, and ⁓ make use of these tools in the best way.
Zoe Beard: Yeah, think it's sometimes we forget to almost rediscover our inner child there and just have fun with these things. And if we kind of think about, how am going to bring this into my work and bring it into these projects? Just maybe try something fun with it, experiment and just get to grips with it that way. Because I think that's the best way to learn is by having fun with something.
Jack McCurdy: Yeah, absolutely. Fun pretty much trumps everything on a learning journey. find if I'm having fun with something or learning things about my personal interests, like I've gone over the last two years, I've got disastrously into ice hockey and the more that I learn about ice hockey, the more it fuels that passion. you can find that, apply that passion from personal lives into professional lives really quite easily. think if you think about the way that I go and... research like ice hockey teams or players or what happens in X year and why this season was important to a team's trajectory for example. You can then apply that into how you think professionally. Why do we do things in this organisation that particular way? What's the history behind that business process? What's the history behind that particular bit of tech? Or why is this being architected in this particular way? The more that you learn, you can apply those personal life learnings and the method that you go about it. into your professional setting and I think that's really powerful.
Zoe Beard: Yeah, yeah. So I think we can, we've both agreed that, you know, AI, Agent Force are going to be some of the biggest topics at TDX. Obviously you're attending TDX on behalf of Gearset and, know, we can both give everyone a million reasons about why to come see the Gearset team at TDX. But what are you most excited to talk to the community about at TDX?
Jack McCurdy: I think for me it's all about change. I've spent seven years talking about change management processes, DevOps processes, how customers are delivering change or how teams are delivering change for their organizations. And that is always kind of my North Star when I'm at any of these events is what is changing, what is happening and how do you feel about those changes or how... how do you see your role shifting or what things have you done to adapt to these new things? I think the last 18 months has taught us anything. People are changing at a pretty unprecedented rate, even if you compare it to like the dot-com boom or anything like that. That's really interesting and trying to keep my finger on the pulse of all the changes that are happening in organizations, how people are thinking and how... how teams are making the most out of technologies or not, or if they're not using these technologies, why aren't they using these technologies? are some of the drawbacks? So that's always really interesting. Always keen to learn about what people are doing. Just reconnecting with people, seven years gives you lot of personal connections in this kind of space, so it's always good to catch up with friends. But yeah, that's what I'm most excited about talking to the community about. This is also going to be my first time presenting at TDX. So I presented at pretty much every Salesforce conference under the sun apart from TDX. So I'll be speaking at TDX this year and I'm really excited for that and a little bit nervous. So more nervous than I usually am because I'm always nervous, but more nervous than I usually am for sure.
Zoe Beard: Yes. Yes, great. Yeah, I mean, yeah, super excited for you to be speaking at TDX and we'll be sure to share more details about your session once everything is finalized. But before we go, for anyone who is attending TDX for the first time or any veterans that are kind of looking for a new way to improve their TDX experience, what is your top tip for people heading to San Francisco next month?
Jack McCurdy: Yeah, so as for, and you can apply this to Dreamforce, but it applies to TDX as well, or any conferences. Don't over-commit yourself to sessions. Pick the sessions and prioritize pretty ruthlessly about what you're interested in and what you think is going to be most applicable to your near and medium term goals, maybe for the rest of 2026, for example. So pick those sessions. Leave yourself plenty of time between those sessions. Number one, to get to them. And number two, because some of the best conversations happen outside of the sessions as well. So keep yourself time to have the conversations in the corridor and go and see maybe the vendors that you're interested in. Obviously come and see Gearset. You're gonna do a shameless plug. But go to the specific Salesforce product area booths, which they will tell you about the product areas that you're interested in. And it doesn't have to be Agent Force. Go and find out what's happening with the Apex team or the Lightning Web Component team or any of those areas or... ⁓ Agent Force for Sales or you know those specific verticals that you think are really going to help you. The other thing on sessions specifically is if you really enjoyed the session and you have more questions, speakers absolutely love it if you have questions after the session and are more than happy to continue those conversations and will help you apply whatever their learnings are to your specific use cases or your business case. So I think that's a really powerful thing and something that I encourage everybody to do is connect with those speakers right after the session. And if they're not available right then, they've got a runoff or what have you, they're usually always very happy to talk to you at another time over the two days. But yeah, comfy shoes. Everyone always says comfy shoes, but it really does make a difference too.
Zoe Beard: lip balm as well because the a we have a of air con in these convention centres and your lips can dry out so no one wants to be talking to someone who's constantly licking the lips.
Jack McCurdy: For sure. Absolutely. And the other thing is, is the community cove or the community area or whatever they end up calling it this year, the area where different user groups meet up or different teams from Salesforce or parts of the community team are, go and talk to the community cove. Because if somebody is at the community cove, it usually means that they're open to a chat and it can be about anything or maybe just experiences and story swapping. So that is another area that I would definitely encourage folks to make time for. regardless of your role, you can be a CEO or a VP or an admin with six months experience, six weeks experience, it doesn't matter. The Salesforce community has always been incredibly supportive and incredibly uplifting. And that's a great area that you can go to for that little bit of extra pep in your step.
Zoe Beard: Yeah, awesome. Thank you so much, Jack. Really great chat as always. And yes, looking forward to hearing more about your talk at TDX and hope you have a great time out in San Francisco next month.
Jack McCurdy: Well, thank you so much, Zoe, and like I said, pleasure to be invited as the first guest on the renewed DevOps Quick Bytes. You're welcome. Bye now.
Zoe Beard: the guest of honor. Thank you so much. Thank you. Bye bye.
