Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Nochum Klein, Director of Information Security at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about how Agentforce can make customer interactions and interacting with your organization’s documentation much, much easier.

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

A rabbi, a mainframe programmer, and a data security expert…

Nochum might have one of the most interesting paths to the Salesforce ecosystem of any guest we’ve had on the pod. Before he ended up as Director of Information Security at Salesforce, he originally trained as a rabbi. However, after he graduated, he realized that it wasn’t for him.

Instead, Nochum wanted to get into computers. By day, he was a coupon broker, buying and selling frequent flyer miles. By night, he went to school to learn mainframe programming in COBOL. Eventually, he got into mainframe integration and parlayed that into a career at Salesforce.

How Agentforce can help you manage your documentation

Salesforce is SOC 2 compliant, which means that Nochum’s team gets audited twice a year. As a part of the process, they have to prepare pages and pages of PDF documentation about their security measures. And while this information is also handy for fielding customer questions, it’s not exactly the most user friendly way to keep track of everything.

What the Security team used to do is take the information in their PDF documentation and compile a response database. Essentially, it’s a list of questions and their answers. But that means you needed someone to update the answers every time something changes, and things at Salesforce change fast.

With Agentforce, they’ve been able to take their documentation PDFs and break them down into a vector database, making it legible for AI. That means they can chat with an agent to get the most complete, up-to-date answer to a customer’s question in moments. For Nochum, it means he can spend less time digging through PDFs to make sure his language is correct and more time making sure his customers have the answers they’re looking for. 

Building AI agents you can rely on

None of this would be possible without the confidence that the agent they’ve built is only pulling from the correct information. That comes from thorough testing, and thinking about edge cases where you might be able to get it to give you the wrong answer. For Nochum, building an agent isn’t just about what you want it to do, it’s about being explicit about what don’t want it to do. 

There’s so much more great information in our conversation with Nochum about building agents and how to think about security with Agentforce, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss out.

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Full show transcript

Josh Birk:

Greetings, admins. It’s your guest host, Josh Birk here today. Today, I’m gonna bring Nochum Klein to the mic. He’s the director of security here at Salesforce and he has found a transformative experience with agents, shall we say. Uh, we’re gonna talk about use cases, we’re gonna talk about building agents, we’re gonna talk about, uh, security around agents and, um, I hope you have a lot of fun listening to that. So let’s go to the tape.

All right, today on the show, we welcome Nochum Klein. Um, am I saying your name correctly?

Nochum Klein:

Yes, you are. That’s perfect.

Josh Birk:

Alright. Uh, we are gonna be talking about agents and building agents and maybe even a little bit about security around agents, but first of all, Nochum, welcome to the show.

Nochum Klein:

Thank you. I’m really excited to be here.

Josh Birk:

Let’s, uh, let’s talk a little bit about your early years. Uh, what did you go to college for?

Nochum Klein:

I became a rabbi.

Josh Birk:

Ah. (laughs)

Nochum Klein:

So I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household, and so throughout my years of school, I never went to public school, I went to the Jewish religious school system, which prepares you for one thing and one thing only.

Josh Birk:

(laughs)

Nochum Klein:

(laughs) So I finished and, uh, I did my thing and became a rabbi and I said, “No.”

Josh Birk:

(laughs)

Nochum Klein:

“I don’t wanna do this.”

Josh Birk:

(laughs) So, so you’re saying that, uh, you didn’t have access to a lot of computer labs right out of the gate?

Nochum Klein:

No, uh, i- it’s funny you say that, because as a child, we were really poor.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

Uh, so, yeah, I had no access to that. And we had, I remember as a kid, and I’m gonna age myself-

Josh Birk:

(laughs)

Nochum Klein:

For those who can’t see me, I’ve got kind of salt and pepper beard with more salt than pepper at this point. Uh, so as a kid, I would walk past the Radio Shack and Radio Shack had just come out with a PC, uh, and …

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

… in those days, th