Two Generations of Agentforce Account Executives

In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, Artificial Intelligence isn’t just a buzzword – it’s a transformative force reshaping how companies operate and how sales professionals deliver value. At the forefront of this revolution is Agentforce, a groundbreaking solution that’s empowering businesses and creating incredible opportunities for trailblazers who are ready to embrace the future.

To give you an inside look of the Agentforce Account Executive (AE) role, we’re featuring an interview conducted by a unique duo: Kevin Karagitz and his son Cameron Karagitz. You read that right – a father and son at the same company, in the same role (and both are boomerangs!). 

You’ll learn:

• How the Solution Engineer role prepares you for success as an Agentforce Account Executive at Salesforce
• How Agentforce Account Executives are solving customer problems with agents
• Why the Salesforce platform and resources available to Account Executives are ideal for sellers
• How Agentforce Account Executives build demos in minutes instead of hours
• A common objection from customers around Agentforce – and how to respond
• Why Salesforce is the ultimate career move for sellers with Salesforce platform experience

Cameron shares that his father has always been a problem-solver at heart, and passed a love of technology and innovation to him:

“Dad is a technologist through and through; he had a workbench in the basement where he would build computers, his own gaming systems, arcade machines, and things of that nature.

“He was writing his own code and showing me all these interesting ideas and concepts that really stuck with me. Because of that, I grew up around computers, so I’ve always been very computer fluent. It felt natural that both of us wanted careers in tech.”

Kevin began his tech career as a network administrator at Ford Motor Company, where a passion for technology and automation was sparked. He discovered Salesforce while working for a competing company, and after being impressed by the platform’s ease of use, he knew he wanted to join.

He shares: “When I learned about how easy it was to actually build on the Salesforce platform, I was in shock. I couldn’t even believe it. I immediately started immersing myself and learning about Salesforce.” 

Cameron joined his father at Salesforce soon after:

“Hearing about the exciting accounts you were working on and seeing some of the unbelievable demos you were building on the Salesforce platform really got me excited about Salesforce as a whole.”

Kevin, who works with automotive customers, and Cameron, who works with insurance customers, interviewed each other to offer unique perspectives on this exciting role – and what it’s like to work with each other.

Their insights reveal why the Agentforce AE position isn’t just a job, but a career-defining move for Solution Engineers and sellers alike. Explore the conversation below:

From Solution Engineer to Agentforce AE: A natural evolution

The journey to becoming an Agentforce AE is a natural progression from a Solution Engineer (SE) role. Kevin and Cameron both highlight how the SE foundation provides an ideal springboard to success:

Cameron: Dad, you and I both started our Salesforce journeys as Solution Engineers. It’s interesting how those experiences directly translated into this new Agentforce AE role. What was that pivot like for you? What skills from your SE role helped you succeed in this new chapter?

Kevin: A huge portion of the job as an SE is really understanding our customers’ business challenges and problems, and then showing them how they can apply Salesforce technology to solve them. 

And now, as Agentforce AEs, we’re applying those same skills to help customers solve automation problems with agents that were previously impossible or reserved for humans with elite coding skills, which you and I can now do in a few clicks. The transition felt very natural.

Cameron: I think this role is special, it’s truly a blend between a Solution Engineer and an Account Executive. Fundamentally, you develop an AE skill set when you’re executing the Solution Engineer role. You’re conducting discovery sessions, you’re developing compelling stories, and you’re strategizing with the account teams on which products are going to have the most impact or the right fit for that problem. So, having an SE background lets you develop the AE skill set along the way.

A day in the life of an Agentforce Account Executive

What does it truly mean to be an Agentforce AE? It’s a role defined by constant collaboration, rapid innovation, and the impactful application of agents into daily workflows. The Karagitz duo exemplifies this collaborative spirit when they asked each other to recall a time when they worked together to solve a problem. 

Kevin: I remember one example. There are scenarios where my automotive customer has a business process, and there’s steps within that process that require processing of external and unstructured data, which we can now create an agent to process and interpret.

We refer to these as either background or ambient agents.

I was working on a scenario where I wanted to have the customer upload files to the ambient agent, have the agent actually read the files, and then have the agent decide what it should do.

For example, if I had a file of data about dealer performance, I wanted it to read the file and make a recommendation about marketing funds based on the data I gave it. Or, if it was pictures of a showroom on a dealer floor, I wanted it to identify missing signage. So, that was one demo that you really helped me build out and got working.

Cameron: I remember that you came over and you asked for help on that demo and we stayed up way too late trying to get this work sitting side by side at my kitchen counter.

Kevin: I think it was close to 2 a.m. when we finished building it!

Cameron: I call you every other day and I’m asking you for your perspective on different solutions, how I should approach a situation with a certain account, or how I would build a demo. You’re super in tune with a lot of the latest and greatest features in Agentforce.

For my insurance customers, you showed me how to set up multimodality, where you can upload a photo into the insurance portal and use an Agentforce model to describe the damage in the photo, and display those images inside the Agentforce support chat. I’m always asking you, “how did you build that? Can I see it on the back end?”  

We talk about work problems all the time – even during family dinners or just hanging out and watching TV together. We’re constantly talking about different ways to position Agentforce, what we’re encountering with our own accounts, what cool demos could we build next, how we’d solve different problems. 

Why Salesforce? The unbeatable edge

Choosing a career path as a seller is a big decision. Both Kevin and Cameron became Salesforce alumni, then boomeranged back to the company after some time away. 

When asked why Salesforce is a top career choice in tech sales, Kevin and Cameron provided compelling reasons that extend beyond just the role.

The platform and tools:

Kevin: The Salesforce platform holistically allows us to listen to our customers, understand the business challenges that they have, and to quickly build ideas and show them real working software on how to solve their problems.

That is such a refreshing thing to be able to do – to walk in and actually show someone, “here I just built this yesterday based on what you told me,” and to see people react positively is amazing. At other companies, it would either take an incredibly long time for me to build something, or more often than not, we’re talking about it through showing slides or videos.

Being able to show the customer something really working – that makes a profound difference with them. It’s ultimately a lot easier to sell that way.

Cameron: Beyond creating demos, I’m using our own Salesforce technology to do my job better and faster. I’ll use our internal AI and Agentforce tools to prepare for meetings, generate content, brainstorm on pitch ideas, take notes from customer engagements and then distill it down into a succinct summary. It accelerates my time-to-knowledge accumulation and getting back up to speed.

I’m also using Agentforce consistently for coding. I can build demos so much faster now! When I was a Solution Engineer at Salesforce back in the day, what used to take me 3 days can now take 15 minutes thanks to extensions like Agentforce for Developers. The technology has come such a long way; it’s just a complete game-changer.

Kevin: Just a follow-up question for you, Cameron; what percentage of your work is being offloaded to AI? 

Cameron: I would say at least 40% of my traditional work is now done with AI.

Kevin: It’s about the same for me. AI is literally incorporated into everything I do. I use it for research. I use it to help me develop demos. I even use our agents to help me build more agents; I’ll feed it a set of instructions and our documentation, and then have it draft the instructions and topics and actions for the other agents. It’s incorporated throughout my entire day.

Cameron: I’ve done that as well. And the research point is a great perspective too! Just recently, I was preparing for a big presentation to an insurance company and I didn’t know how many business processes actually happen every year at an insurance company across all the different divisions, so I sent AI on the task: “on average across sales, service, claims, underwriting, etc., how many background business processes do you think happen?” And it went and fetched me a number, it cited all the sources, and I was able to include that into my presentation. It was so helpful.

The people and culture: 

Kevin: I’ve worked at a couple companies in between my times at Salesforce, but first and foremost I came back because of the people. We really have some of the best people I’ve ever worked with in the industry, both at a professional level as well as personally. You really feel you’re part of something and the people here all pitch in and help each other out.

Cameron Karagitz: Yeah, absolutely. Salesforce is also truly a sales and marketing machine. We have an incredible support system from the Solution Engineers you work with to your leadership, and also the product teams themselves. 

Continuous growth and learning: The Salesforce mindset

The tech industry is constantly changing, and the Agentforce AE role demands a mindset of curiosity. When asked what they have learned from both each other and the changes that Salesforce has made since their first bout at the company, they shared the importance of keeping up with the changes – and with each other:  

Cameron: One of the most important lessons I’ve learned from you is the importance of adaptability and curiosity in this constantly changing space. You taught me to question things, understand how they work, and not be afraid to get hands-on and build, because troubleshooting leads to learning.

Kevin: And I have to work harder to keep up with you! We push each other to be better, and that’s the core of the continuous learning mindset here at Salesforce. When it comes to staying on top of the latest information on our products and AI in general, we have some really amazing internal tools.

One of those is Slack, where we come together as a community and we’re able to share information, ideas. So, I get a lot of what I learn from the various internal Slack channels. There’s some amazing talented people that share some great information, including our enablement team. Outside of that, I’ll typically take a look at LinkedIn – I belong to some groups there – and YouTube is a great place to learn as well.

Did you know you can join the Agentblazer Community on Slack to ask questions, collaborate, and connect with fellow technologists?

Cameron: I also think as our products evolve with Agentforce, we’re evolving our skillset to overcome objections during the sales process by helping customers see the benefits of a horizontal AI strategy versus a vertical AI strategy.

What some customers are doing is they’re picking a hyperscaler, like Google or Amazon, they’re developing AI in one place and then trying to distribute it everywhere. I’ll always get asked, “why would we build AI on your platform when we’re already building AI across the board for all of our different platforms?”

And what I tell them is: “as a Salesforce customer, you’ve built different tools, workflows, and interfaces on the platform itself to enable humans to be better at selling, servicing, marketing, etc. Well, those same exact processes that you built for the humans can be extended to the AI agents directly, for both assistive and autonomous use cases. At the end of the day, it’s all about integrating AI into the flow of work where users actually live, whether those are your customers or your employees, and also while reusing your investments and improving your time to value.

Ready to shape the future of AI and sales?

The Agentforce AE role at Salesforce offers an unparalleled opportunity to combine your technical acumen with your sales excellence, all while working at the cutting edge of AI innovation. If you’re a Solution Engineer or seller looking for a role where you can make a tangible impact, collaborate with incredible talent like the Karagitz’s, and continuously grow, this could be your next big move.

Ready to close deals and open doors to more opportunities? Check out open Agentforce AE roles at Salesforce and apply today!