Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Naveen Gabrani, Founder and CEO of Astrea IT Services. Join us as we chat about why Salesforce Foundations is a game-changer for admins.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Naveen Gabrani.

Why Salesforce Foundations is a big deal

This year at Dreamforce, Naveen is giving a presentation about something that Enterprise users already have access to that’s criminally underrated. “Salesforce Foundations is one of those lesser-known features,” he says, “but it is extremely important.”

Announced last year, Salesforce Foundations brings the most useful basic features from Agentforce Sales, Agentforce Service, Agentforce Marketing, Agentforce Commerce, Data 360, and Agentforce to your org. It has a modern UI that consolidates the most important features you use every day into an updated homepage.

And the best part? It’s free—you simply have to enable it in Setup.

Take Agentforce for a test drive

Naveen gives some examples to highlight how important Salesforce Foundations truly is. If you have Agentforce Sales, you can borrow Agentforce Service features like Knowledge and macros to give your customers some technical support. Or you could build a customer journey with Agentforce Marketing’s flow-based interface that feeds into a Agentforce Commerce  storefront.

With so many businesses pushing to integrate AI features, Salesforce Foundations gives you the opportunity to try before you buy. You can configure Agentforce and Data 360 to get everything integrated with your org and then make the decision to expand functionality. It’s much easier to convince stakeholders when you have something concrete to show them.

Tips from a Dreamforce veteran

Naveen is a Dreamforce veteran, so I wanted to know what keeps bringing him back, year after year. “The biggest thing for me is to make sure that I get time to meet my customers, meet my friends in the ecosystem, meet my partners,” he says. “Those networking aspects of the conference have helped us a lot as a company in the long term.”

Each year, Naveen makes a point of writing a blog post to summarize his takeaways on what’s happening with the platform. Make sure to check it out, and make sure to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

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Learn more

• Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: How Can Salesforce Admins Leverage Foundations to Prepare for Agentforce?


• Dreamforce Session: Get More from You Org with Salesforce Foundations

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Full show transcript

Mike:

This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, we’re joined by Naveen Gabrani, founder of Astrea IT Services and longtime Salesforce ecosystem veteran. Now Naveen sat down with us just a little bit before Dreamforce to share why Salesforce Foundations is a game changer for admins; offering multi-cloud access, a sleek, modern UI, and best of all, it’s free with Enterprise or higher licenses. Now if you’ve been curious about how to do more with what you already have, this episode’s for you. Now stay tuned and don’t miss Naveen’s tips, use cases and insights from 30 years in tech and what he does after Dreamforce. So with that, let’s get Naveen on the podcast.

So Naveen, welcome to the podcast.

Naveen Gabrani:

Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Mike:

Yeah. Well, you are a string of presenters that we’ve had on the podcast over the last month, and today, when this episode comes out, it’s the Thursday of Dreamforce. So I bet a lot of people probably listening to this on the plane flying home. But let’s get started with a little bit about yourself, kind of how you got in Salesforce, how you got in the ecosystem, and then I want to talk to you more about what you’re presenting at Dreamforce.

Naveen Gabrani:

Great. So my name is Naveen Gabrani. I ran a Salesforce partner company called Astrea IT Services. We are based in a place called Noida in India. So I have been running this company Astrea for about 15 years, so it’s been a long time. It’s been a fun journey. Before this, I used to work as a program manager with a large MNC, and so my total experience is more than 30 years.

Mike:

Wow, that’s a long time. I was going to say your company is a teenager.

Naveen Gabrani:

Yeah.

Mike:

That’s been around for a while. Now at Dreamforce this year, which is today. Whee. Or it could have been a few days ago, depending on when you’re listening to this. You talked about Salesforce Foundation, get more from your org with Salesforce Foundations. Why was it so important for you to have admins understand how to get more from their org with Salesforce Foundations?

Naveen Gabrani:

So Salesforce Foundations is one of the features that is less known, but it is extremely important feature. This was announced in last year 2024 Dreamforce, and it’s about one year now, but still it is not so well known. So I wanted to work towards making it more popular in the ecosystem.

Mike:

Yeah. What have you done with Salesforce Foundations? What made you so passionate about it?

Naveen Gabrani:

Sure. So let me talk a little bit more about what is Salesforce Foundations, and why is it so important? So I would classify Salesforce Foundation has two different parts. One is a modern user interface, which is fun to use, and second is the access to multi-cloud. So let me talk about the user interface part first, then let me get into the multi-cloud functionality. But before that, let me just talk who has access to Salesforce Foundation. So any customer that is using Enterprise Cloud or higher of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud or Industry Cloud, has access to Salesforce Foundation out of the box. The great thing about this is that it is completely free. You just need to enable it in your setup and then you’re ready to go. Okay? So that is one of the wonderful things about Salesforce Foundation is that there is no cost involved in using it.

Coming back to the user interface part, there are a few different things that are provided in the Salesforce Foundation user interface. One is all the apps are accessible on the left nav bar in a very modern UI. And also for setup for admins, the most important features are available through a dropdown. So for example, managing users, you can just go to the top right and then access the most important features that you use every day. The third important feature of the new Salesforce Foundation user interface is access to a more modern homepage that will give you everything that you need the moment you’ll land on the homepage. So that is the UI aspects of the Salesforce Foundation.

The second part of Salesforce Foundation is the access to multi-cloud, which is more important a