Get Certified as an Agentforce Specialist

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Most readers of this post will be too late to take the exam for free . . . which is why I am writing it.

I’ve been following the Salesforce Quests for years now. I first became aware of them when I would receive emails that they were ending with a week or less to finish them when they were always monthly and unique each month. When I had free time, I would jump in and finish them. Sometimes I would receive some merch several weeks later. Then I received a certification voucher when I only had one cert, and I tracked down the URL where the Quests are announced and set a monthly reminder to check for new ones. The Agentforce Specialist is my sixth certification, and I only paid for the first (technically, not even that one, as I talked my employer into allowing me to expense the exam). The rest I won vouchers for, with the exception of this one, which was free to everyone until the end of 2025.

Wall of Swag

I discovered the fact it was free while working through the Agentblazer series of badges. The final badge, Legend, requires certification and that is when I discovered it was free. The certification was free for quite some time, but my employer at the time did not get many Salesforce projects and I had missed the news. I discovered that it was free on October 10, and became determined to pass this one, too.

Even though I don’t get to work in the Salesforce ecosystem as much as I would like to, those monthly reminders to check out the latest Quests keep me involved in keeping up with the changes. So when I started on the Agentblazer series of badges, I already had some trails and modules under my belt, and quickly advanced to the Legend level where I learned of the free certification. Even so, I can honestly say that the Agentblazer Legend quest has been the most difficult I have worked through (disclaimer: at the time of this writing I have not completed the quest, but I will within a day or two . . . check my profile to keep me honest!) in almost a decade of questing.

But, truly, my core skill is digressing, and I have from the topic of getting certified, so back to it . . .
First, definitely earn the Agentblazer badges as a foundation. The path to earning them will prepare you for what comes next.

Which is, as I have always recommended for certification preparation, buy a pack of practice exams with as many quality questions as you can find and work your way through them. For this particular certification exam I used a Udemy course, Salesforce Certified Agentforce Specialist – Practice Exam (currently on sale for $9.99). One of my other blogs is “Cheap, Lazy Investor”, and to the cheap part, I did not buy any other practice exams because this one did the trick. It has 365 questions (not all unique) and they covered 95% of the concepts I found on the actual exam, so no complaints and some kudos.

Passing the exam requires a combination of rote knowledge and conceptual knowledge. Of the two, conceptual knowledge will bring the higher score. You can’t get by with just one. Rote knowledge is necessary for questions where there is clearly only one right answer. Conceptual knowledge is necessary to answer those questions where more than one answer is correct, because one answer is more correct than the other. The “more correct” is driven by understanding what is key to Salesforce and Agentforce. Concepts such as security, flexibility, and that the standard option is the best option if it meets all of the requirements. Use the practice exam to get examples.

Interestingly, while the value of LLMs is their ability to manage probabilistic responses, if one answer leans towards probabilistic and the other leans towards deterministic, the deterministic answer is most likely the correct one. Getting the most likely answer when your own knowledge isn’t helping is where conceptual knowledge is key.

The deployment lifecycle section of the exam focuses on what is specific to Agentforce. I had a really hard time getting NotebookLM to stick to that scope. After two failed attempts where it produced very detailed preparation around the full Salesforce Application Lifecycle Management, I finally created a new notebook, ran deep research specifically on deployment lifecycle processes and pitfalls related to Agentforce, then added my own missed questions and had it generate a note, which I then added as a source and ran the audio prompt again: “Focus only on making the contents of ‘Missed Practice Exam – Deployment Lifecycle.md’ thorough and memorable to the listener to ensure the reader can correctly answer all questions regarding the Agentforce deployment lifecycle questions in the Salesforce Agentforce Specialist certification exam. Avoid the use of emphatic expressions and emphatic modifiers. This is important.”

One important thing about practice exams: They are not the exam you will be taking. The value of reviewing the questions you missed is in identifying the concepts that are not solid in your thinking. This is one of the reasons why it isn’t too bothersome that NotebookLM goes outside the boundaries of provided content when generating the podcast audio. And don’t rely on NotebookLM to catch it all, either. If you miss the same question three times on a practice test, go read the material, re-do the Trailhead module, and create some Bionic notes on the topic. Sound like overkill? There is almost always some questions on the exam on topics not covered by the practice exams, so be fully prepared for those you can expect to answer will offset any score impact of topics that you never heard of until the exam.

I did not use Bionic notes this time. I still think it is a valuable technique.

If you’ve read my other certification articles, you will know that I use notes formatted as Bionic Reading® to review my notes on missed questions and key concepts. And that I sometimes use my own version, where I bold keywords rather than parts of words to get the concepts to stick. I stand behind this approach, but didn’t do much with it this time.

This time I used NotebookLM. I used advanced search to find links to content, plus links from the Trailhead content, and my own study notes exported as markdown from UpNote to create source content. Then I incrementally created generated AI audio content that I posted on YouTube and listened to continuously to drill the concepts into my head.

At the end of the day (or almost the end of the year), I passed the exam.

I also highly recommend the Salesforce Ben page for prep (and the site in general).

Good luck!

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© Scott S. Nelson

Is Your Team Focused or Fragmented?

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I usually will write something as a blog post first, but this started as a short LinkedIn post, which received two likes in less than 10 minutes after posting, so I decided to re-post it here.

Here are some thoughts fueled by listening to an enlightening podcast with a neuroscientist host (Andrew Huberman) and a choreographer guest (Twyla Tharp)🧠&🩰:

A fully supported software initiative includes people focused on coding, UI/UX, and testing. In high-performing teams, these specialists interact frequently.

Great solution teams understand that skilled “creatives” have deep grounding in data about human behavior and regularly test their work with users and refactor based on feedback and practicality 🎨 ; “testers” need to understand the limits of the technology, imagine behaviors that are not expected, and analyze the likelihood of something happening versus the impact of it happening 🧪 ; and developers who don’t test as they go, or don’t apply creative thinking to meeting business requirements may produce a lot of code but aren’t really productive 🤠 .

Yet, many organizations keep these experts apart outside of occasional “sync” meetings that don’t result in anything being synchronized but do tend to reduce productivity.

Other organizations recognize that there is overlap in thinking across these specialties and try to cut costs or speed output by removing the specialists and increasing the load of the remaining experts. 🪨

People that have chosen a focus and developed the skills to be good at what they do are happiest and most productive when they are supported and challenged by people with overlapping thought processes and differing skills. 👀 These similarities in thought processes and differences in discipline are the basis of highly productive teams that thrive when leadership aligns them on a shared direction. 🛣️

(Leaving out managers and architects is a peril, too, but including them here would require a much longer post).

 

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© Scott S. Nelson

How to Foster AI Adoption from the Bottom Up

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There is a lot of commentary about how AI initiatives are “failing”. Some measure it as ROI, which is a fair yardstick. Others point at the lack of adoption, which every technology goes through. The blame for these “failures” is often placed on leadership, which is fair given the meaning of the term. Speaking of terms, derivatives of “fail” have been in quotes so far for a reason: if you think of these things as a fail, then you are either sitting on the sidelines or throwing in the towel on the opportunities that AI offers. The only way to fail with AI is to give up on discovering how it will help your business. That will likely be followed by another type of fail.

Like everything else, failure is also a continuum. A prompt that returns an irrelevant result can technically be considered a fail, again challenged by the assumption that one can truly fail if they take the result as a lesson and do something else. At the other end of the spectrum is an agent that Deletes Company’s Entire Database, which is as close to a true fail one can get. There is no getting away from the fact that some people, teams, even companies, are just not very good at what they do, and capitalistic Darwinism will deal with them regardless of whether they are adopting AI or not (though AI will speed up the process).

Those true fails are a very small percentage of the world. The rest is a result of a type of hubris that (probably not coincidently) has seen a lot of attention in the business- and pop-psychology mediums lately, the Dunning-Kruger effect. Well, actually, just similar. The Dunning-Kruger effect is mostly about those that think they are doing better than they really are. The precursor to the failures that occur from attempting to follow early adopters doesn’t really have a term. However, think of this analogy: a person shows up to open mike night at a comedy club and sees a few folks pull off really good sets. They sign up to give it a try and find out the hard way that there is a lot more to getting an audience to laugh than just telling jokes.

So, lots of companies piled on to the AI bandwagon after having seen others succeeding with what looks from the outside as little or no effort. From the inside, these front runners have been playing with AI for years before ChatGPT woke the world up to the value of LLMs and Generative AI. They already had goals in mind of what they would do with the next evolution of the technology and they applied the latest and greatest with the same rigor they had been working with the latest but-maybe-not-the-greatest capabilities previously. The Lesson: Have a goal, make a plan, and be flexible moving from current state to target.

Back to the leadership blame. Again, some leadership is just not that great. The rest become great by engaging the company as a whole to define goals, make plans, and support the flexibility needed in achieving those goals when following a roadmap that traverses new territory. With AI, that leadership could start with a survey about “What tasks do you perform that are tedious?”

It’s especially important for leadership to ask this of the company as a whole because they are generally insulated from the types of mundane work that takes away from the ability to be productive. Some common areas are time and expense reporting. Most time reporting systems have a way to simplify this for recurring entries, but for those with varying tasks it would boost productivity and morale to have an agent that parses emails, IMs, and calendars to draft the weekly time submission and remind the person to review and submit. Or expense reports drafted by uploading receipts and the driving meeting invite or email. The ROI of such agents will vary greatly between enterprises, from a few dollars per person to a few million per year.

By polling the entire company for input on where AI can free people up from repetitive, simple, and necessary tasks that reduce the time, energy, and interest they could spend on work that is more fulfilling and more profitable, an enterprise can rapidly create a backlog of ROI-driven AI initiatives. The initial ROI may be small and sometimes difficult to measure. There are two key differences these initiatives would have over the 95% that “fail”:

  1. ROI-Driven Goal: The initiative would have an ROI-driven goal from the start, avoiding the trap of, “We’re doing this because everyone is doing it.”
  2. Built-in Adoption: Adoption is built in, because the goal was defined by the very people who will benefit directly and immediately from the results.

Once business success is demonstrated, more ideas will flow. At which point, it’s a good thing you defined some governance first. You did, right? Well, that’s another article.

As an addendum to this post, I asked Google Gemini for some better questions to solicit ideas for AI initiatives. Here is what it responded with:

That is a good starting point, but the question “What tasks do you perform that are tedious?” is limited because it only focuses on negative experience (tedium) and ignores major areas where AI offers massive value.

Here are five better questions to ask when identifying opportunities for AI, along with the reasoning behind why they are more effective:

5 Better Questions for Identifying AI Opportunities

1. “What tasks do you currently perform that involve interpreting or synthesizing a large volume of unstructured data?“

Why It’s Better:

  • This targets the core strength of modern AI, especially Large Language Models (LLMs) and computer vision. AI excels at processing and making sense of data humans find overwhelming:

    • Examples: Summarizing thousands of customer feedback emails, extracting key terms from legal contracts, or analyzing unstructured notes from sales calls.

    • This question moves beyond “tedious” (which a human might not mind doing) and identifies tasks where AI provides superhuman efficiency and insight by handling data volume and complexity.

2. “Where in your process are decisions made based on historical patterns, forecasts, or complex optimization?“

Why It’s Better:

  • This targets Predictive and Prescriptive AI. These systems go beyond automation; they actively optimize the business for better outcomes.

  • Examples: Optimizing logistics routes (a complex math problem), predicting equipment failure (preventative maintenance), or determining the best pricing strategy based on market conditions.

  • This question focuses on driving direct business value (cost savings, revenue growth, risk reduction), which is a stronger justification for AI investment than simply reducing tedium.

3. “What tasks are currently handled by a person that involve repetitive, rules-based digital actions?“

Why It’s Better:

  • This clearly identifies opportunities for Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which is often the lowest-hanging fruit for AI implementation.

  • Examples: Copying data between two systems, generating routine reports, or verifying customer identity against a checklist of rules.

  • The benefit here is accuracy and speed. While these might be “tedious,” they are more importantly tasks where humans introduce errors, meaning AI delivers improved quality and compliance.

4. “What tasks do you perform where the output quality is inconsistent or highly dependent on individual human experience?“

Why It’s Better:

  • This targets AI’s ability to drive standardization and quality. Humans, no matter how skilled, have variability. AI provides consistent output.

  • Examples: Writing personalized yet standardized responses to common customer service inquiries, determining the quality of manufactured parts (visual inspection), or classifying documents.

  • This question focuses on the goal of scaling expertise—making the output of your best employee available to everyone, consistently.

5. “What are the most frequent points of friction or delay in your customer or employee experience?”

Why It’s Better:

  • This focuses on impact and user experience, rather than just internal tasks. AI is a powerful tool for improving interactions.

  • Examples: Implementing a chatbot to answer 80% of routine questions instantly (reducing wait times), automatically tagging inbound customer support tickets (speeding up routing), or providing real-time personalized recommendations.

  • This shifts the focus to strategic business improvement and reveals problems that can be solved with AI-powered interfaces, not just back-office automation.

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© Scott S. Nelson

SOLVED: Unable to find “Get Celebration Details” for Service Agent Customization with Prompt Builder module

Scott S NelsonLeave a comment

This one was really frustrating for me, because support kept saying “you have the wrong org”, even after getting a new one with the link they provided four times. Finally, a support rep helped me find a solution (thank you, Kiran Kumar!).

First instead of going to Flows through Setup, they had me go to Flows through the Apps navigation:

Next, change the view from the default to All Flows:

And then search for Get Celebration Details (and you will):

However, when this all started for me, I apparently had a corrupt org, so it still wasn’t there. Support insisted that I sign up for a new org 3 times, and the flow was not seen in all three. Once they pointed me to the App solution, I did find it in one of those orgs. Rather than start the whole module over, I exported the flow from the org where it was and imported it into the org where I had completed the rest of the module.

And, for those who don’t want to go through all of that, you can download the flow metadata directly from

https://github.com/ssnsolutionist/ssnsolutionist/blob/main/Get_Celebration_Details.flow-meta.xml 

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© Scott S. Nelson

How to Pass the AWS CLF-C02 Cloud Practitioner Exam the First Time

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People say the Cloud Practitioner exam is easy. Easy to say if you have used all of the AWS products as an administrator. For me, it took some work. Here’s how I did it.

Updates?

For the record, this is for the CLF-C02 exam, based on having passed it on September 12, 2025. If you’re reading this in the future, check that the exam details haven’t shifted. The process to prepare and pass will be the same, but the details may vary over time.

Despite the name, Cloud Practitioner isn’t all that magical. Though I think one of the most important aspects of this certification is understanding how to manage your AWS account cost effectively, which some may see as magical.

The Formula

As my seventh article on how I have passed certification exams I have prepared for, I have come to a formula that works for me. I still continue to refine it, and added something new this time (yes, of course it is AI-related).

The current formula is this:

  1. Start with a quality exam prep course.
  2. Find a set of practice exams that has at least 5 times as many questions (total) as the actual exam.
  3. Repeat the practice exams until you consistently score over 90%. (trust me on this one)
  4. (New!) Use NotebookLM to generate a podcast of the material you are weakest on and listen to it repeatedly for a few days before the exam.
  5. Schedule the exam for a time of day when you generally find it easiest to concentrate.

Optional Bio hack

There is one additional ingredient I use, which may not be for everyone. I take focus supplements, sometimes called nootropics, and wash them down with a Starbucks Double Shot. This is the third time I have gone the bio hack route. The first two times, I had missed that step of scheduling at a time of day when I am my sharpest, because work schedules were in the way. Both of those times I felt that I really got a concentration boost. This last time, my schedule was more flexible and I don’t think the combo really helped all that much.

A Scout is Always Prepared

This time around, there was another formula side-step in that I did not find the prep course I took to be of particularly good quality. As such, I’m not going to share it, as I usually do with those I liked. This time around, I was very budget conscious and used a course I had access to for free. It did help by giving me exposure to topics I had not had to deal with as part of my regular work, but I credit my long experience in technology for being able to extract value from the content rather than the quality of the content. There were several topics where I used Perplexity to fill in the blanks that I picked up on during the course.

Practice Makes…More Likely to Pass

The practice exams, however were great. I used AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Practice Exams CLF-C02 at Udemy. It had 6 full sets of exam questions. Each set felt tougher, possibly because newer questions crept in. My scores reflected that. I think this is better than most practice exams where each set has the topics evenly distributed. Of course, it could’ve just been coincidence that my weaknesses aligned with the sequence.

Another thing I really appreciated in the practice exams is that they didn’t stop at just the correct answers for the test review, it also provided detailed explanations. Other practice sets I have used sometimes only gave a link to the vendor documentation. While the links are more in line with how the vendors would like you to study, I have yet to take one of these exams as a way to learn the material, and the ones where I already (thought) I knew the material, this level of preparation wasn’t necessary.

Practice Level 1

Another feature of these practice exams I really liked was labeled as a “beta option,” though I seem to recall this has been available on Udemy long enough to not be considered “beta.” That feature is to get the answer after each question, rather than only at the end of the exam. I did this for the first pass through of the practice exams.

Almost for Real

The second pass I did it “exam style,” getting the answers after the total score. There were improvements, but no enough. This time, I copied the questions and correct answers into a text file, then converted them to Bionic Reading® notes (if you aren’t familiar with Bionic Reading® notes, they make reviewing notes much easier, and I have included mine at the end for reference) and imported the resulting markdown into UpNote for studying.

One More Time with Feeling

After the third pass, I was almost satisfied with my scores:

Progression in Practice Exam Results
Progression in Practice Exam Results

But, my experience with certification exams is that there are always questions in the actual exam that were not covered in my preparation. For this reason, I really prefer to have the practice exams at 100% (which I fell short of this time).

Not Not Necessary (this time)

The practice exams had a few “not” questions which I generally got wrong the first pass and still missed some the second time around. I recently watched an Otherwords video about Why A.I. Struggles with Negative Words, and I still don’t feel better about missing those questions. However, maybe I’m not alone, because there were no such questions in the actual exam I took.

New addition to my standard approach NotebookLM podcast

To help improve my memory of the ones I had missed I went back to the questions I got wrong on the second pass through and noted the reference links to AWS documentation. I then fed those links to NotebookLM and had it generate a podcast, selecting the longest format and prompting that it should target an audience preparing to take the CLF-C02 certification exam. The results were incredibly good. But don’t take my word for it, I have posted the podcast here: AWC CFL C02 Exam Prep Podcast.

Recommended Reading

While I did not use it extensively, I found AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Study Guide With 500 Practice Test Questions: Foundational (CLF-C02) Exam (Sybex Study Guide) to be a very good resource. I think if I had not been in a rush to get this cert out of the way, I would have started with this and had a better score for it.

If you are studying for this certification, or have already taken it, please share your experience, thoughts, and suggestions in the comments.

My Bionics

Here are the bionic notes I used. Your weak spots may vary, so consider creating your own at https://10015.io/tools/bionic-reading-converter.

Q: What is the benefit of Amazon EBS volumes being automatically replicated within the same availability zone?

A: Durability

Q: Which AWS service can be used to route end users to the nearest AWS Region to reduce latency?

A: Amazon Route 53

Q: What is the main benefit of attaching security groups to an Amazon RDS instance?

A: Controls what IP address ranges can connect to your database instance

Q: What is the recommended storage option when hosting an **often-**changing database on an Amazon EC2 instance?

A: Amazon EBS

Q: What kind of reports does AWS Cost Explorer provide by default?

A: Utilization

Q: What does the term ?Economies of scale? mean?

A: It means that AWS will continuously lower costs as it grows

Q: Which AWS team assists customers in achieving their desired business outcomes?

A: AWS Professional Services

Q: Which of the below options is true of Amazon Cloud Directory?

A: Amazon Cloud Directory allows the organization of hierarchies of data across multiple dimensions

Q: An organization has a legacy application designed using monolithic-based architecture. Which AWS Service can be used to decouple the components of the application?

A: SQS (SNS, and EventBridge)

Q: A company is planning to use Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront to distribute its video courses globally. What tool can the company use to estimate the costs of these services?

A: AWS Pricing Calculator

Q: What is the connectivity option that uses Internet Protocol Security (IPSec) to establish encrypted connectivity between an on-premises network and the AWS Cloud?

A: AWS **Site-**to-Site VPN

Q: Both AWS and traditional IT distributors provide a wide range of virtual servers to meet their customers? requirements. What is the name of these virtual servers in AWS?

A: Amazon EC2 Instances

Q: A company uses multiple business cloud applications and wants to simplify its employees? access to these applications. Which AWS service uses SAML **2.**0 to enable single sign-on to multiple applications through a central user portal?

A: AWS IAM Identity Center

Q: A small retail business with multiple physical locations is planning to transfer sensor data and store security camera footage in the cloud for further analysis. The total amount of data is around 8 terabytes, and the business’s internet connection is too slow to transfer such a large amount directly to AWS in a reasonable time. Which AWS service would be the most cost-effective to transfer the data to AWS?

A: AWS Snowcone

Q: Which AWS Service is used to manage user permissions?

A: AWS IAM

Q: A company has hundreds of VPCs in multiple AWS Regions worldwide. What service does AWS offer to simplify the connection management among the VPCs?

A: AWS Transit Gateway

Q: Which statement best describes the operational excellence pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework?

A: The ability to monitor systems and improve supporting processes and procedures

Q: A company is migrating its on-premises database to Amazon RDS. What should the company do to ensure Amazon RDS costs are kept to a minimum?

A: Right-size before and after migration

Q: A company is planning to host an educational website on AWS. Their video courses will be streamed all around the world. Which of the following AWS services will help achieve high transfer speeds?

A: Amazon CloudFront

Q: What does AWS Health provide? (Choose TWO)

A: 1) Detailed troubleshooting guidance to address AWSD events impacting your resources

2) Personalized view of AWS service health

Q: Which of the following services allows customers to manage their agreements with AWS?

A: AWS Artifact

Q: You have set up consolidated billing for several AWS accounts. One of the accounts has purchased a number of reserved instances for 3 years. Which of the following is true regarding this scenario?

A: All accounts can receive the hourly cost benefit of the Reserved Instances

Q: A company is deploying a new **two-**tier web application in AWS. Where should the most frequently accessed data be stored so that the application?s response time is optimal?

A: Amazon ElastiCache

Q: If you want to register a new domain name, which AWS service should you use?

A: Route 53

Q: If you want to visualize your spending on your AWS account for the past month, which tool can help you?

A: AWS Cost Explorer

Q: If you go for consolidated billing for multiple AWS accounts under three master accounts, what benefit do you get?

A: Combined usage for discounts

Q: For which support plan do you also have AWS support Concierge Service?

A: Enterprise

Q: Which storage option should you use if you are hosting a frequently-changing database on an Amazon EC2 instance?

A: EBS

Q: To get a high throughput to multiple compute nodes, which storage service would you use to host an application on your EC2 instance?

A: EFS

Q: If you want to upload data to S3 at very high speeds, which AWS service takes advantage of the edge locations?

A: S3 Transfer Acceleration

Q: Which one of these can you NOT assign to a user?

A: IAM identity. You cannot directly assign an “IAM identity” to a user because “IAM identity” is a generalized term referring to any entity in IAM (such as users, groups, or roles).

Q: You have been asked to contact AWS support using the chat feature to seek guidance on an ongoing issue. However, when you log in to the AWS support page, you do not see the chat options. What should you do?

A: Live chat support is only available with Business, or Enterprise Support plans

Q: If you want to launch and manage a virtual private server in AWS, which service is the easiest?

A: Lightsail. Lightsail provides pre-configured virtual server instances

Q: What is AWS Athena?

A: AWS Athena is a serverless, interactive query service that enables you to analyze data directly in Amazon S3 using standard SQL

Q: Choose from the options below to filter your incoming traffic request to your EC2 instance.

A: NACLs and Security Groups

Q: Protect from dDOS attacks?

A: NACLs and Security Groups

Q: Where can you find your historical billing information in the AWS console?

A: Billing and Cost Management console

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© Scott S. Nelson