AI Takeover - Will Your Salesforce Career Survive?

In the final live episode of the Salesforce Career Show, hosts Josh Matthews and Josh LaQuire are joined by a powerhouse panel including Vanessa Grant, Mike Mikula, and Anthony Rodriguez to discuss the question everyone in the ecosystem is asking: How will AI reshape our careers?

This extended finale delivers a deep, honest, and highly detailed breakdown of how artificial intelligence is already impacting Salesforce roles—from project managers and admins to developers, BAs, and architects. Drawing on a research-backed report of 56+ sources, the hosts provide concrete statistics, real-world examples, and industry predictions that range from exciting to alarming.

But this episode isn’t just about disruption—it’s also about opportunity. From leveraging AI for documentation, delivery, and development, to building human-centric skills like communication and emotional intelligence, this episode offers a roadmap for anyone who wants to adapt, lead, and thrive in the AI era.

Listeners also get a behind-the-scenes look at the rebrand to “Salesforce Hiring Edge,” what’s changing, what’s coming next, and a heartfelt tribute to a fallen friend whose legacy inspired the show’s evolution.

Key Topics Include:

• The real stats: 30–65% of some Salesforce roles may be disrupted by AI
• Which skills are future-proof—and which ones need urgent development
• How DevOps, prompt engineering, and ethical AI expertise will define new roles
• What hiring managers now expect from candidates and consultants alike
• The future of live shows, Clubhouse nostalgia, and what’s next for the podcast
• A powerful tribute to Tom Graber and a message about embracing your authentic self

Whether you're an admin, consultant, developer, or PM, this episode will change how you view your career—and help you make smarter, faster, and more human-centered moves going forward.

This episode is brought to you by Josh Matthews: thesalesforcerecruiter.com

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Chapters

00:00 - Opening Introductions and Show Format Updates
06:57 - Show Rebrand: From Salesforce Career Show to Hiring Edge
14:20 - The Role of AI in the Salesforce Ecosystem
20:08 - Deep Dive: AI’s Impact on Business Analysts (BAs)
23:57 - Developer Perspective: Building With and Beyond AI
30:44 - Real-World AI Stats and Predictions Across Salesforce Roles
42:08 - High-Impact Skills and Certifications for AI-Era Salesforce Pros
53:33 - Government, Compliance, and AI: Security Concerns and Limits
1:01:52 - Can AI Fully Automate Salesforce Implementations?
1:12:11 - PMs and AI: Will AI Replace Project Managers?
1:23:55 - Final Reflections: How to Future-Proof Your Career With AI

Chapters

• 0:00 Show Introduction and Guest Welcome
• 4:21 Show Updates and Rebranding Announcement
• 11:59 AI's Impact on Salesforce Careers
• 26:40 Specific AI Effects on Different Roles
• 40:40 AI Limitations in Government and Security
• 54:54 Specialized AI Skills in High Demand
• 1:10:12 Emotional Intelligence in an AI World
• 1:38:13 Final Thoughts and Show Conclusion

Transcript

Josh LeQuire: 0:00

And now it's the Salesforce Career Show.

Josh Matthews: 0:04

Okay, it's showtime. Welcome to the Salesforce Career Show. I'm here with my co-host, josh LaQuire. We have some amazing guests today, including Vanessa Grant. Yay, everybody loves Vanessa. We'll give you a quick sneak peek of her Say hi there, vanessa. All right, we also have our friend and longtime listener and a huge help to the show over these last three, four years, mr Anthony Rodriguez. What's up, dude? Great to see you, buddy. We'll be bringing them both back in just a little bit, real quick. Hello, mr Josh LaQuire. How are you today?

Josh LeQuire: 0:39

Doing well. Mr Josh Matthews, how are you?

Josh Matthews: 0:42

Doing great bud. Now you're traveling right.

Josh LeQuire: 0:43

You're up in Philly. I'm in Philadelphia at the finest Tide House Hotel in the King of Prussia, next to a very fine mall that has a lot of the finest shops.

Josh Matthews: 0:51

That's what I've heard. I think my son, ollie, got to go there recently on a little trip. Well, we've got a lot of updates to share today with our live viewing audience. And then an absolutely incredible topic, which is what's going on with AI and your Salesforce career. We're going to talk about that in depth today. Now, if you have been listening to the show for a little bit, or even four weeks ago, we released well, we had a live show is what we had and then we released it about a week later a podcast dedicated to just exploring what's going on with admins, salesforce admins, and how AI is impacting admins around the globe and what that will do over the next few years. So, if you're really interested in a deep dive just on Salesforce administrators, absolutely encourage you to go ahead and check out that episode. You can find it on Apple Podcasts, spotify and about 15 or 20 other platforms.

Josh Matthews: 1:53

Before we launch into our primary topic, I want to just kind of give a quick overview of what we're going to do today. After the AI topic is covered, we're going to talk a little bit about this show, because the big announcement and if you've been paying attention, you're already going to know what's coming, which is that there's a big change to this show. We already had one earlier this winter when this lovely young lady, vanessa hi again, when Vanessa got really busy with her own business and a bunch of other cool stuff life transformational things that Vanessa's got going on and so she had to unfortunately for us deprioritize the podcast. But she's here today and that's what counts, and we have literally like 2,000, almost 2,000 pages of transcripts from the podcast and Vanessa is on almost every single one of those, the vast, vast majority of those. So we're really grateful that you're back today.

Josh Matthews: 2:56

We're going to talk a little bit about the Salesforce Career Show, what it's meant to some people, and maybe hear from Anthony about the impact that the show has had on his own personal career, because we're changing the show. It's not going to be a live show. This is the last live episode as we know it. Okay, so if you are listening right now and you're joining us on the live program, welcome. If it's your first time, like, that's pretty awesome. We have I don't know what it is like a hundred hours of content or something like that, even though we've been running it for four years. We've actually only been um recording it for I think, uh, like just over two, like almost two and a half years, something like that, okay. So there's going to be a ton of content on there, and the reason why we're changing the show is because we've provided you guys with what we believe is a vast amount of very helpful information to help you launch your career, improve your career, how to hire, how to get hired, how to network, how, what to do when you're attending a dreamforce event or a Dreamin event right, we've covered so many topics and there's a huge library for you.

Josh Matthews: 4:11

So we're going to pivot. That's what we're doing, right, we're pivoting and we're rebranding the show to Salesforce Hiring Edge. Isn't that snappy? I kind of like it Salesforce Hiring Edge. And this show is going to be more frequent.

Josh Matthews: 4:27

We're going to release the podcast every single week. The format will be a little bit shorter it's going to be 30 minutes. It's going to be a little bit higher production value, because we do get some degradation when we broadcast live and record from broadcasting live. So you're going to get more episodes 50, 52 a year, something like that. Okay, it's going to be more compact. We're also going to include weekly news updates what's going on in the Salesforce ecosystem. And then we're going to really focus our attention for a while on this program, on how to hire top Salesforce professionals and how to hire top Salesforce SI partners or consulting partners, isvs, pdos the whole gamut. And I think the balance between the two Joshes, me and Mr LaQuire and his bow ties is going to give us some nice insight not only into how you, as leaders, can improve your team, reduce your stress, thrive in the ecosystem, but if you're one of those folks, like the majority of our weekly listeners or monthly listeners, that has attended this show maybe for months, maybe for weeks for many of you it's actually a number of years I don't want you to think that you're going to be left in the dust.

Josh Matthews: 5:49

These are going to be nice little commuter length programs and when we talk about, it's impossible to talk about hiring right, it's impossible to talk about hiring without our audience learning something about how to be a more viable candidate, how to position yourself in the market better. We'll continue to talk about motivation. We'll continue to talk about AI innovation. In fact, we're going to have a little segment each week called the AI Edge, where we're going to share the latest and greatest. We actually have Mr Mike McCoola here today. He's our resident AI, on top of Johnny on the spot guy right here. So Mike's going to get with us in a little bit as we continue to unfold and unravel this mystery of what the crystal ball of what the future holds, Right, and so we're going to be bringing Mike back here in just a little bit. So with that, a couple more announcements and hopefully that's exciting for you, right? It's going to be more frequent content, hopefully extremely relevant to you.

Josh Matthews: 6:52

If you're a newcomer, if you're new to the ecosystem, well, you should be digesting as much as you possibly can. So why not continue to listen to the Salesforce Career Show in its new branded format, salesforce Hiring Edge? Where are you going to find it? You know what are you going to do. Don't worry about that. Okay, we're just taking this show and we're rebranding it.

Josh Matthews: 7:10

So if you're already a subscriber if you are, thank you so much. If you're not a subscriber, I would go ahead and subscribe right now. The logo is going to look a little bit different, but you'll see my mug, you'll see Josh's mug on there, so it shouldn't be too difficult to figure it out. And, by the way, if you just type in Salesforce, blah, blah, blah probably pop up. Okay, thank you, by the way, gabby, appreciate that. And okay, let's dive into some quick additional updates. All right, the Josh Forrest channel is where you can find the video content of every single Salesforce career show that has had video added to it, which is not a ton. Okay, it's not a ton, I think. Vanessa, do you recall when, um, do you recall when we actually started to to create videos for the show?

Vanessa Grant: 8:00

Oh gosh, I would less than a year ago.

Josh Matthews: 8:02

I would say it feels like it maybe a year maybe a year ago Okay, I don't even know if it's that long. But if you want them, you can go at all the thumbnails have been redone. We've added additional navigation. It's a much nicer YouTube channel to visit like subscribe, comment, blah, blah, blah. But actually the reality is why people ask people to do that? It's because there's an algorithm, right. You guys are tech people, you know what that is right. The algorithm allows the platform to share the video with more people. That would benefit from that content and this show has helped hundreds, if not thousands, of people over the years. We just want to help more. We don't advertise. We don't get paid. In fact, we pay to run the show. We don't advertise or anything like that. So be a good listener. If you can Make sure that you're subscribing to Josh Force, make sure you're subscribing today to the Salesforce Career Show so that you don't miss a single bit of content or a single episode.

Josh Matthews: 9:04

With that, I'm going to go ahead and share a couple other little updates. One is I have two Salesforce consultant roles open right now. One we would like to see someone who's very focused on either non-profit cloud or some modicum depth of experience in NPSP. These are senior roles. So we're hoping for folks who are pretty much shovel ready, ready to jump in and get some senior roles. So we're hoping for folks who are pretty much shovel ready, ready to jump in and get some work done. It's with a top tier client of mine. These people absolutely love their employees. They take such good care of them, including career path planning, okay, certifications, bonuses, healthcare, all that A lot of the normal stuff. But I really believe that these guys go above and beyond. So how do you apply? Well, you go to the salesforcerecruitercom. You'll see some blah, blah, blah nonprofit cloud job post. Whether you're a nonprofit cloud or not, just apply to that one. I haven't opened it up, opened up a second one, I just got the order Okay. So go ahead and apply to that.

Josh Matthews: 9:59

You can also navigate to Salesforce staffing on LinkedIn and if you go there, you can click on jobs and guess what? Got a job there and you can click and one click, apply and do all that beautiful stuff. And if you're awesome and if I have time and if the gods see to it, then I'll be reaching out to you personally to have a conversation. If I don't reach out to you, don't fret. It's a big market. We get a lot of applications. We just want the best of the best. Please don't apply if you're not a citizen. Please don't apply if you're not a citizen or a green card is actually what I should have said. And if you don't have at least two years of experience working in a Salesforce SI practice, please also don't apply. You can go to the salesforcerecruitercom, click on jobs and do a general application. We'd love to capture your information and share with you amazing opportunities as they come up.

Josh Matthews: 10:49

Okay, the last thing I wanted to share, as far as a little update goes, is actually around speaking engagements. So I'll be on the opening panel at um, southeast Dreamin, which is going to be in Atlanta. So I'm really looking forward to that. Thanks, guys, and I think now is a great time. Let's have a show of hands. If you're going to be speaking at an event anytime soon, we can go ahead and get that out. Vanessa, you usually are. What's going on?

Vanessa Grant: 11:16

I'll be speaking at Tahoe Dreamin next month. I'll be speaking at London's Calling in June. I'll be speaking at London's Calling in June and also next month I'll be speaking at the Service Blazer Community Group, actually about Service Blazer careers. I'll be on panel at the beginning of May and I think that covers it for right now.

Josh Matthews: 11:38

Okay, wonderful, love hearing that. Josh, are you doing any speaking tours? Are you going to go be attending any conferences other than Dreamforce coming up anytime soon? Unfortunately, not.

Josh LeQuire: 11:50

I've got a lot of dad duties coming up at the end of the year and I've got a lot of personal items to attend to and business is going strong, which is good. But unfortunately that consumes my mind, share and time. But I do plan on throwing my hat in the ring eventually, especially as we're surfacing a lot of these great topics on this show about how to use AI in our jobs. There's just a lot of good fodder around that one?

Josh Matthews: 12:12

Yeah, there, sure is. With that, let's go ahead and dive right into it, shall we, sure? Okay, all right, vanessa. Mike Anthony, please just raise your hand any time that you would like to jump into the discussion. We're going to do that. Visually, we found everything gets so crowded when we've got everybody on the panel and it looks kind of funky, so we're going to just be going solo on you or bringing up one or two folks at a given time. The AI takeover, josh, what do you think? I mean, you've read the reports. I've read the reports.

Josh LeQuire: 12:49

What do you find? It's hard to tell what's fear-mongering, what's marketing and what's real. I got to be honest with you because I can tell you in personal experience and talking with minds like Mike McCulla and some others that you have here on the panel and folks out in the wild there's some applications where AI is ready to go works well. I want to summarize a meeting. I want to generate a document. It lets me play the role of editor and cuts out the hours and hours of creation time.

Josh LeQuire: 13:19

I can tell you that in some ways prototyping and Mike will speak a lot better to this than me you can generate code with AI and you can generate it to demonstrate concepts and iterate through that. I've used it personally in Cursor with Salesforce and I've been using it a lot, pretty heavily. The thing about AI is it amplifies your capabilities for what you already know. It doesn't replace or fill in gaps for things you don't know right. I would say that if you're using it to write code, you have to look at it very closely. Especially if you're doing work for a client. You want it to be production quality, deployment ready. It's not going to work or run on its own. So the talks about admins becoming developers, about developers becoming business analysts I don't know that I buy it so much. I think it's going to help people expand their capability, increase their productivity. I don't think it's going to turn a frog into a prince.

Josh Matthews: 14:19

That doesn't happen, too often, does it.

Josh LeQuire: 14:21

No, yeah. I just don't see it like giving people skills they don't already have or replacing it in that manner. So I think there's some truth, especially in three years, the technology is going to continue to get better and better. But I don't see it completely replacing a job or giving somebody the capability to do somebody else's job quite yet.

Josh LeQuire: 14:39

It's just going to help us do what we know better. At the end of the day, it's going to make you a better project manager if you know how to manage projects. It's going to make you a better analyst if you know how to do business analysis. It's going to make you a better developer to do things faster if you already know how to do it. It's not going to help you to build an application with no knowledge of how to build an application in the first place.

Josh Matthews: 15:06

Yeah, and Mike's actually working on a really interesting product my Vibe guy over there so he's going to share a little bit about that soon. And, folks I want you to understand, stick around. We're going to be giving you specific statistics around what might be happening to your job. Are you a Salesforce administrator, a project manager, a BA? Are you an architect or a Salesforce consultant? Are you a specialist? You know, we've got the numbers okay, and these weren't just pulled out of thin air. We did a deep dive, deep research on perplexity. We've got over 56 resources that pulled this together. It could all be BS. Who the hell knows right? I mean the top analysts at ESPN, the top analysts on CNBC. Like these folks are generally averaging about a 50 percent chance of being right.

Josh Matthews: 15:55

We've talked on the show about how wrong I get it right. I was convinced Britney Spears wasn't going to make it. Christina Aguilera, justin Timberlake, I mean. Clearly, when it comes to pop music, I definitely have it wrong. I got it wrong about how long the economy was going to tank from 2023. I got that wrong too. So I'm not, mr Like, the ultimate prognosticator of the future. I can't do it. So I really rely on some of these amazing tools that we've got. Let's do a quick take with you, vanessa. Just a general overview. What do you think is going to happen with AI and how is it going to impact careers? And if you could be even more specific about BAs, that would be awesome.

Vanessa Grant: 16:38

Oh, all right. So I think AI is already impacting certainly my day-to-day. So, coming from more of the consultant BA side of things, I could not be as fast as I am, and the expectations are that I'm faster now as well, just because everybody's a little bit faster with AI. So, thinking creatively as far as how you can leverage AI to write user stories faster, to get requirements faster, there's no more note-taking for meetings anymore. If there's somebody writing manual notes, it's like, eh, if somebody's not open to having AI join meetings, that's another eh. So there's a lot on the day to day.

Vanessa Grant: 17:24

As far as a business analysis. Uh, as far as business analysis is concerned, um, that AI is just having a major impact. I actually worked on a kickoff deck. Um, I did a kickoff this week, from my speaker notes to what was on my slides, to how my slides were arranged, all um consulted with with AI, of course, ultimately it was mine, but being able to have that validation and also just brainstorming somebody to brainstorm with or somebody to brainstorm with.

Vanessa Grant: 17:56

As far as the future goes, though, I really could see and I don't know, maybe Josh, one of the Joshes will disagree with me, I don't know. I don't think you could do it now, but I think maybe in the future we might have folks with maybe business and skills actually doing the code but doing it through prompting. I think if we can get AI to such a point where the code actually is good which I think it's going to get there at some point then really the skills to have will be those soft skills. Can you do documentation that will go into AI? Can you write the prompts? Can you communicate what it is that the business needs, which is business analysis all day. So I'm excited for the future, kind of.

Josh Matthews: 18:42

All right, I love it. Let's take that and go to Mr Mike. Mr Mike McCoola, you're on the cutting edge of chat-based development. You've been a developer, you know how to architect, you're an all-around smart expert and one of the people that I think is on the bleeding edge of taking advantage of the latest tools. What's your take?

Mike Mikuna: 19:07

Yeah, thanks, josh, very generous of you with your comments. But sure, I've been doing this stuff for like 13 years, building code for myself and doing software engineering, and it was an eye-opener to me when I first got introduced to a large language model and then answering questions I had, and then my journey to learning how to work with agents and then building my own agents in Salesforce, outside of Salesforce, and I just feel like the biggest mistake I made when I started to have success was giving all the credit to AI, like, well, look what AI built me and realizing it's all of the systems of thinking that I have that drive it to give it that edge, to give it that result. Um, and and and again in the different context of like you know, um, josh mentioned earlier the rapid prototyping approach versus the like enterprise software and there's a huge difference in how I work when I'm prototyping something versus delivering something that I can ship, and in all cases, to get to that shippable product, it requires all of my experience and a hands-on like point of view to like make that happen. And when I look at like where things are going, like I'm seeing different strategies of like, well, we have these large language models. Well, what if we have smaller, specialized ones and ways to communicate between them, so that you need less of my systems of thinking to take this huge model and find these thoughts of how to do things and make it executed that way, versus very well-trained ones that can automate some of the system prompts I used to have to use? So I'm very curious about things like that, especially with agent architectures, where you can embed the way that you think about things with systems and tools that the agent can use to achieve those results.

Mike Mikuna: 20:54

It's interesting as we automate, I know there's people that are worried. Well, if you can just take all my systems of thinking and put it into a computer and it can just do everything, what's my job? And I feel like there's still this part of me that just sees that like okay, well, eventually everything starts being the same and people want to compete. Well, then someone has to turn it up a notch to make it a little bit different. I mean, I have friends that have worked at nvidia for 13 years and they they get paid to make a 0.5 difference of impact at their. So could there be something like that at some point if we get that optimized, where even 0.5% is enough of an edge that a company values your input. But that's my current take.

Josh LeQuire: 21:35

I'll stop there. I want to seize on that point for a second, because there's a difference between increasing productivity and that. Productivity is a metric, right, it's the number of cases handled, it's the number of sales generated, it's fill in the blank, right. I think it's going to increase productivity for all of us, but I don't think it's going to fully replace anybody's role until the technology fully evolves. Right, it's going to augment, it's going to expand. I think what's going to happen, because we're human beings, is we're going to continue to expect us to do it Like we're not really going to see jobs replaced. At the scale and the veracity, I think we're going to see a reduction of jobs. That's going to happen because productivity will decrease.

Josh Matthews: 22:17

Yeah, I totally disagree. I think we're going to lose jobs. But I'll dig into that in a little bit.

Josh LeQuire: 22:22

Yeah, yeah, I'll dig into that in a little bit, but yeah, I mean what it's worth. We're still human beings, right? So we're probably going to get a little bit lazier at times to say I'm going to let AI do more of the stuff I used to do and maybe not pay close enough attention. I think it's going to engender some mistakes. You're going to see some false positives coming from AI. You're going to see people allowing AI to do their jobs that they would have done in the past and maybe not pay attention. That's kind of the dark side. I think the positive side is us as humans are going to expect our teammates to do more and we're going to kind of reestablish what that equilibrium or what that norm is for what our productivity should be. So I don't know. I'm curious to see how this plays out. There's a lot of different dynamics. It's going to force us to be more kind of broader generalists. We're going to learn faster. We're going to develop faster.

Mike Mikuna: 23:09

What does that look like in two or three years? I don't know. I think I have some delta between the two Joshes of, like my, my formed opinion. I don't know, josh, how much you want us to focus on this, but I could have a little bit more to entertain on this conversation.

Josh Matthews: 23:17

Yeah, we're going to. We've got a lot to cover, so let's let's deep dive specifically on our opinions. I just wanted to do a little bit of a quick take and we've got one more awesome guy. It's Mr Anthony Rodriguez. Hello, anthony, who are you? What do you do, man?

Anthony Rodgriguez: 23:34

Yo yo yo.

Anthony Rodgriguez: 23:36

I work as a developer on the government contractor side and I just want to put in my two cents about AI.

Anthony Rodgriguez: 23:47

I do think it has a lot of great applications for making things go faster, easier, but security, security, security, especially on the government side. Being able to take AI and allow it just on a government contractor laptop would be a huge no-no in a lot of sections. And let's just say, two or three years from now they have the internal AI that's built just for that sector of government and it's helping things go quicker and faster. But as a developer, if you don't understand the architecture of your section of work, if you don't understand how this data is relating to that data and you let AI understand how this data is relating to that data and you let AI help write code, you have to know what you're doing and you need humans that understand what's going on into your system and what's going on into the AI's code writing. And without that careful bridge it's going to be a real hazard to allow AI, especially on the government side. That's my two cents.

Josh Matthews: 24:46

Take it as you will. I think it's worth five cents minimum. And Anthony's a great guy. He gave me and Casey a lift at Florida Dreamin' that's where we met and he had a minivan because he's got a million kids and fortunately, we all got to squeeze in there, get out of the rain. It rains a lot in this state. It's sunny but it rains a lot. All got to squeeze in there, get out of the rain. It rains a lot in this state, sunny but it rains a lot. And so thank you for that. And, anthony, how long do you think you've been listening to this? Um, listening to this program of ours.

Anthony Rodgriguez: 25:15

At least two years, because I got my first big break and I had just started listening to the show and I think it was like the first or second episode and it was fantastic, and so it's it's been a big help for me. You know, the first battle is always in the mind, right? If you're not feeling it, if you're not on the grind, how are you going to get that resume out, how are you going to apply, how are you going to interview, how are you going to tackle that new job? And I just want to say that the Salesforce career show was a big help in just helping me stay driven on point, pushing hard, and I thank you guys and all of the different amazing speakers that come on. It's the best, a hundred percent.

Josh Matthews: 25:57

Thanks so much, anthony, and if you've ever listened to any of our older episodes and you hear sound effects, that's Mr Rodriguez. Thanks for being on the show. We'll bring you back in a little bit here. I'd like to talk, if I can, a little bit about some of the actual numbers that this report that was curated is producing, and I've got some TLDR. And, by the way, if you actually want to read the article, you can find the article. You can subscribe to my newsletter on LinkedIn. You can subscribe and we'll email it to you. You can also check out our blogs on thesalesforcerecruitercom. You just click on resources and so we've got the full report there and go ahead and check it out.

Josh Matthews: 26:44

So, bottom line, what's going on? Well, we know what AI is going to do. Right, it's automating and eliminating manual task work, manual configuration work. By 2028, the prediction is 40 to 50% of manual configuration work will be gone and I just I look at this like building a website, right, nevermind using lovable or some of these lovabledev or some of these other platforms where you can chat, but just the ease of jumping into. Go, buy a URL, jump into GoDaddy and in 15 minutes you can have a website, just with drag and drop and pop, populating a couple of pictures and some text right, we used to have to spend five grand just for a one pager right, like just for a one pager and this is in, like you know, $2,004.

Josh Matthews: 27:36

It was expensive, it was not cheap at all to do it, and so everything over time becomes commoditized, becomes easier to do. That's what we're seeing in Salesforce. At the same time, there's an increase of complexity, right? Ai is very complex. And to Anthony's point, yeah, like you can't trust it, thank you, public enemy Can't trust it. So you know it hallucinates. You got to kind of be wise about it. But of course there's going to be a massive amount of the manual configuration work that's going away. Salesforce administrators are really going to go from configurators to strategic orchestrators involved in validating AI generated field structures for bias, risks, right, implementing metadata, quality controls, monitoring autonomous decisions, like in service, cloud deployments, things like that. And like what's that actually going to mean for Salesforce admins? It's something like a 30% dip. If you haven't adopted AI, you know soon 30% of those jobs will go away. You'll be replaced, right? Like there's that saying you're not going to like AI, ai is not going to replace you. Someone who knows AI is going to replace you.

Josh Matthews: 29:01

I think it's really really important to understand that every single revolution that has come through, whether it's agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, the internet, high-speed internet, computers in your pocket, and on and on and on. There's this adaptation that's required. There are some positions that are very much at high risk and I went and double checked on Manus today. I just joined Manus, which is another AI product. Claims to do everything We'll find out, we'll see but basically project delivery is going to be about 45% faster and one of the most stable jobs out there is actually going to be solution architects and technical architects. They're actually predicting quite an increase in demand for this type of work. What do you guys think?

Josh LeQuire: 29:58

100%. The job of the solution architect on the Salesforce platform is to be a generalist, not necessarily to be a deep niche specialist, and I think AI works extremely well. If you understand concepts of systems, landscapes and integrations, if you understand concepts of service processes, sales processes, marketing processes, and you understand that we have a platform of capabilities, ai is going to increase your capability to research solution alternatives, get to a prototype faster, test concepts and validate those with your clients. It used to take me 40 to 120 hours to produce discovery documentation. I'm talking about ERDs, data flow diagrams, integration models for contracts, a set of user-shortening requirements I can do now within an hour or two. So what that means is I can get to solving problems quicker and I can solve more problems faster, cheaper, better. So that's where the architects really come into play.

Josh LeQuire: 30:56

Now, another challenge is you kind of amplify the need for people who do have specialty knowledge, because, while LLMs and AI today can help you with the broad spectrum of things, in a lot of cases they're not niche specialists unless you train them or give them the material to become a niche specialist. So I think there's still going to be a need for advanced development skills, for advanced analysis skills. I think what's going to happen is you're going to see a lot of these jobs that we used to have, with people coming one or two years experience or out of college. Those are going to be a lot fewer far between. You're going to see kind of that mid-career or late-career type expertise elevated because they can leverage AI to do things that used to be hired out to people with zero to one years of experience. I think that's what you're going to see in terms of how job compositions and companies shift, at least looking at that variable of experience.

Josh Matthews: 31:49

Yeah, I mean that all makes sense to me. Let's give some people some really quality info that they can walk away with today, if you're listening and you're a solution architect Trust layer implementation mandates, so data masking pipelines for AI model training, real-time bias detection in recommendation engines and cross-cloud explainability frameworks. And then composite AI solution crafting God, it sounds so corny saying this stuff. Honest to God, it just sounds so like gobbledygook to me. Composite AI solution crafting Okay, whatever, but basically blending Salesforce LLMs with external models like ChatGPT or GPT-4, designing failover systems between predictive and generative AI, optimizing cost accuracy, trade-offs across AI vendors.

Josh Matthews: 32:39

I mean, I don't know about you, but as a small business owner, I get pounded with emails and you've all heard me complain about the common ones. Right, there it is for green check boxes. I know who wrote that email. Gpt did because they can't help itself. It's addicted to green check boxes. You see green check boxes on anything, buyer beware, it's on my it's, I use it's, I use it. It's on my. My guy who does my like seo, like write ups on my uh, josh force videos. It's always like green checkbox, like okay, whatever, right. So you know we're paying attention to all this stuff and I'm getting tons and tons and tons of ai vendors. Quick question, quick question, quick question, quick question. It's like stop, people, stop. And what I found is these products and services that people are are excited about and they're building. You can build it yourself, man, like you can build half this shit yourself, you know? I mean I'm gonna bring mike back up on the stage here. Mike, like, am I wrong in saying this?

Mike Mikuna: 33:41

like first hold on, first repeat it like what, what, exactly? What's your opinion?

Josh Matthews: 33:48

well, look, I'm on the, I'm on the small business side, right. Like we can get you more meetings, we can do this. Our ai predictive, blah, blah, blah. We'll target these folks and those folks and and this kind of thing. Or like, hey, we can review your resumes faster, and I know that that this isn't like Salesforce hands-on keyboard stuff we're talking about. We're talking about general business here. Well, guess who uses Salesforce? General business, right? So it's all part of it, and it's either going to be built into Salesforce where they can use it, or they're going to layer it on through an ISV, or they're going to use an external product, right, that's already been configured and built for them to use, or they're going to go build it themselves. That's kind of what I'm talking about.

Mike Mikuna: 34:35

Yeah, and just you know, I get those same kind of messages sent to me like, hey, I can bring you more leads for your business and such and such. And I'm just like right now, relationships are more important than just a bunch of leads and more than anything because those people are doing that for everybody right now and I've heard collectively from my clients and other folks they're sick of all the spam. They're more interested in people that they know that they can trust. And I think that's a huge thing that people don't play into enough during this big AI wave. They're like how fast can I get all these things? Versus how good can I get all these things, even with using AI to build the whole vibe coding scene, the prototyping, overselling, but under promising or like under delivering right, like it's over promising.

Josh LeQuire: 35:21

So, mike, I think you're right, man, because AI is going to get us out of the doldrums of generating documents and notes and stuff and more into conversations. I mean, that's what it comes down to, right, like, my selling point to my clients I've got a client I'm here in Philadelphia working with right now is let me get you out of banging around spreadsheets and filling out documents and doing all the bullshit, the minutia, and let me get you more into talking to your clients and having meaningful conversations. That's the bullshit, the minutiae. And let me get you more into talking to your clients and having meaningful conversations. That's the value. Right, like take, take us out of the doldrums of you know the days of. You know five siloed systems that can't talk to each other. Get a solution up next week and go talk to your clients. Hit the streets.

Josh Matthews: 36:01

There you go. I like it All. Right, guys, I'm going to just rant for a bit. It's not a full rant, I'm just going to. You know, gabby was like hey, I'm really curious what, uh, let's see, what did she say? I would love to hear, uh more about what roles you think will be in demand. So, yeah, let's go ahead and dive into that right now. Let's just give, give our listeners what they probably came for and then we'll shoot the breeze on opinions and what we think is going to happen here down the road. So here we go.

Josh Matthews: 36:30

Okay, this is our TLDR part of the show. So Salesforce project managers sorry to say, but you guys are the ones that are at risk the highest. Okay, if you've been a project manager your whole life, hang onto your hat and get AI fluent. Even if you are AI fluent, you still risk about an 18% redundancy over the next two years over the next two years. Right, this isn't just like running a sauna and you're in a bunch of other stuff. Like it's going to take over your stuff. It's going to send reminders, it's going to manage things, it's going to hit pauses on projects when the information isn't there. Everyone's going to suffer, kind of like tariffs. So you know, it's just how it goes, right? So 65%, 65% job failure rate if you are not AI fluent. So wake up. Wake up, smack yourself in the face, dunk your head under some cold water, go buy that car wash franchise that you've been looking at and maybe re-skill. Right. There are other roles in the ecosystem that will grow, but nothing's going to grow Absolutely zero growth for people that are AI ignorant.

Josh Matthews: 37:53

And I am shocked, guys. I'm shocked. I talked to this guy. Died in the world, died in the world. Solution slash tech architect, tech architect. And basically it's like uh, no, no AI, no submittal. If you're not working on this stuff, I'm not going to submit you to one of my pristine, beautiful, lovely, amazing jobs with one of my amazing clients. It's not going to happen, right, and it shouldn't happen. It's been on for two years, let's go, let's go.

Josh Matthews: 38:25

Okay, in February, you guys might remember that I made a commitment to spend 20 hours getting better at AI in the month of February. Well, mike McCool knows for sure that I spent way more than 20 hours because I got addicted, just like he did. This shit was better than Harry Potter on Xbox, like I was, like I couldn't get enough of that. I mean, I'm drinking coffee at 9 PM because I just want to work all night long and I don't want to let it go and I just want it done. I want to do it, I want to get it done, okay.

Josh Matthews: 38:58

So AI, ignorant redundancy risks PMs you're at risk the most out of all positions and I'm sorry because you guys are some of the nicest people, some of the most organized, some of the smartest, right, got great interpersonal skills. I worry about you guys. That doesn't mean listen to this episode and then go change your whole career. Just get good at AI. That's going to buffer things and the way I envision it is okay. So now you're working on, instead of a single million dollar project or $2 million project, now you're working on four or five of them. Right, because you can do it, because you can do it, because AI is taking a lot of the work. I don't know, josh, I don't know.

Josh LeQuire: 39:42

Josh, I don't know, man, I think this is going to force people to skill up. You've got project managers out there that don't do anything but sit in meetings, come up with spreadsheets and annoy the shit out of people to say are you done yet? Are you done yet? You've got project managers who really understand how emotions of a project need to run and get the team motivated and on task. So I think we're going to see the same thing in every role is every role is going to be required to skill up, and ai is going to force you to skill up but also help you learn uh, in a good way yeah, how much are you learning?

Josh Matthews: 40:14

like every time, I run some dope perplexity search and then I start drilling down, drilling down, drilling down or gosh even my content. Right, like my God, I never thought to write it that way. Now I don't even need to prompt half the time and I'm just like I'm cranking it out because I know what points I need to hit. I know the organization, I know the patterns. It's an absolutely incredible tool for just getting better at communicating, whatever it is, whether you're talking or creating content or writing an email, a difficult one. We all have to write difficult emails to people, right? So it's pretty amazing stuff. Let's keep rolling here and I love the dissent. By the way, Josh, Again, this is for AI ignorant redundancy risks, Even if you are not AI ignorant. It's an 18% drop. I don't know if anyone listening to this show was ever around when we had 18% unemployment in the United States across the board. It's been a really long time since that's happened Really long time. But if you're a PM in tech working in Salesforce, that's what these are saying. Again, it could all be bullshit. I don't even know. We'll figure it out All right. Technical architects 40% of current architecture is obsolete by 2027. That's what it's saying. 40% Salesforce admins we already covered that. Consultants AI-driven implementations cutting project timelines by 45%. Mr LaQuire is an absolute, exceptional example of that happening right now, real world, today. You don't have to wait till 2027 for that to be a possibility. You can do that right now. Developers 35% of Apex and LWC coding automated by 2026. I don't know if you guys have checked your calendar, but that's like not that far away, right? We're already in the fourth month, so that's eight months away. All right, 35% of Apex and LWC coding automated by 2026, reducing demand for basic dev work.

Josh Matthews: 42:17

Let's talk about AI skills Salesforce admins, AI governance, certified professionals you guys want to make some money. What do you think? 22% Where'd it go? Oh, these old eyes of mine. Oh yeah, AI governance certified professionals are likely to earn 22% more than non-certified peers ad nauseum. Haven't we, Vanessa, about the value of a cert? But I think maybe we can just say all right, it's not the cert, it's the knowledge, it's the ability to be able to do this. A certification is a certification, you know. So we've got that going on.

Josh Matthews: 42:58

Let's jump into a couple more things here, guys, because I love this meaty portion of our conversation and thank you, Mr Harris, for contributing so much. Do you guys see these things popping up on the live feed? These are comments from our audience members. Would you like to comment? All you have to do is comment and we'll see it and if it's cool, we'll probably put it up. So keep that going, Okay. Ai skills keep that going, okay.

Josh Matthews: 43:30

Ai skills um, developers, ai integration specialists are likely to command 30 to 40 percent higher salary premiums. 30 to 40 percent now we don't know what that benchmark is, do we Like? We just don't. The benchmark could go down as AI makes coding and development easier and it becomes more competitive and the salaries can dip. So we've got to look at this through the lens of things that happen when there are more people with an ability than there is demand. But if you are a developer and you're good at AI integration again looking at a premium 30% to 40% salary premium increase Business analysts, top-driven AI-driven BAs will earn now they gave us a different number $125K plus salaries by 2027. Let's get Vanessa up here for just a moment. Vanessa, talk to us, if you can, a little bit about what your take is on this. Is $125,000 a low salary for a BA in 2025? Because it's saying in 2027. It sounds low to me.

Vanessa Grant: 44:40

No, I mean you'll still find BAs. I think the range probably. So let me just preface this with I'm actually going to be writing an article for Salesforce Ben on business analyst salaries with Salesforce bend numbers in a bit. But my take right now, based on just anecdotal experience working with BAs, I would say you're probably looking at starting salaries of 80, with upper level salaries probably at like 160 right now. So, 125 sounds okay. I'm sure somebody, maybe, maybe somebody's making that in 2027. I'm sure.

Josh Matthews: 45:21

Okay, that's helpful to know. Thank you so much. Glad we've got you here today. Certified ethical AI experts. 78% of Salesforce positions will require AI ethics certification for compliance. So this might be one of those things where, for compliance, the cert is actually critical. I don't know, maybe, maybe not, we'll find critical. I don't know, maybe, maybe not, we'll find out. I don't even know if there's some governing body around this yet right, where they're like OSHA or something like that, where they're coming through and making sure that everything's working and operational and not getting screwed up. High demand AI skills for Salesforce professionals All right. For admins, pms, developers, ai automation and oversight. For developers and architects, ai model training and debugging. For admins, architects and consultants, ai governance and compliance. And for BAs and consultants, predictive and behavioral analytics. And for developers and architects, multi-cloud AI orchestration and this is a really big one, guys, this is a really big one. We're going to continue to see different words pop up in these types of shows and these types of conversations, but orchestration is one of them.

Josh Matthews: 46:38

Another one that I noticed recently was curation curating articles, right. Sometimes I sit down and I just bang out a blog, right, and I wrote it. I just sat down, I wrote it from scratch. I might've run it through AI to make sure that it doesn't have a bunch of grammatical errors and things like that, but it's just me yapping away on my keyboard Sometimes, as in this AI takeover of Salesforce jobs blog that I wrote. Well, I curated that. It took me longer than it would probably have taken me to just write the thing, to be honest, but I curated it. This isn't my data, this is just research. And then a computer compiled it, an algorithm compiled, while an llm compiled. Right, so you're going to start seeing orchestrate, curate things that end in the sound eight, okay, um, yeah, zero laughs on that one. Thanks, guys.

Vanessa Grant: 47:36

Dad jokes jesus where's anthony with the sound effect?

Josh Matthews: 47:40

yeah, right, where's Anthony with the sound effect?

Josh LeQuire: 47:44

Yeah, right, I'd like to throw something in there. I mean, you're talking about governance and ethics. Anthony actually brought up something interesting earlier, talking about AI and the use of governance or government and security. Right, I think this is an interesting topic, right, there are companies insurance companies, banking companies, healthcare companies, banking companies, healthcare companies that would probably love to use AI, but I'm pretty certain are hamstrung, you know, for PHI, hipaa, pci, you name it, all the three and four letter acronyms out there can't use it, I guess. Anthony, I'm kind of curious. I'm going to call you out a little bit here. Man, what do you hear in your line of work about this? I mean, you're, the government is probably not wanting their data to go into ai. Like, is there talk about the government coming and being a player here? Is it still just, you know, independent bodies researching, I mean, what's the word on the street?

Anthony Rodgriguez: 48:38

well, I don't know how much time you have, but I'll try to give you the cliff notes right. A couple of things to consider. Number one who owns the XYZ AI right? And the other thing is I don't know if you know this, but the government often likes the lowest bidder right.

Mike Mikuna: 48:54

Because they want to save money.

Anthony Rodgriguez: 48:56

Yeah, surprise, surprise, right. But the other thing, too is, I've had a chance to speak with a lot of cybersecurity security professionals and the need to protect the system against ai is is vastly different than protecting it against a human hacker, right, because ai can do a lot of things that that a human hacker cannot do, and so once they can safely and it's never like 100 safe right, but once they can reach a level that they feel it's worth it, then it's a question of which. Ai companies uh, we all, and also, like I said, it's a lot uh, most government systems use antiquated um, you know architecture to run their systems, right? Uh, some use code that's literally 50 plus years old, right, like.

Josh Matthews: 49:43

I don't know if you Social security records.

Anthony Rodgriguez: 49:47

Yeah, right, like social security, they use COBOL, which is an incredibly old code. Cobol, I think, might've been before object-oriented code even existed, right? So can AI bridge the gap into old school code? I think 100%, that's probably a small lift. Can we make AI used in our system some way that's safe? That's a tough question. Right, the government doesn't want to pay for going from the ground up building its own custom AI. I think that's a cool idea, but who's going to pay for that? Right, we already have old systems that are old, and so that's a lot of tough questions.

Anthony Rodgriguez: 50:27

As developers, it's another valuable tool you have to have in the toolbox. You don't need to be a Python AI master developer. You don't need that. In fact, you don't even need half of that as a developer If you just understand some basics right. Can I plug AI into my VSC, right? Can I double check my code? Can I run this? Does this make sense? Hang on, let me read the line by line. Okay, that won't work, but wait, bridge that gap. Heck, I can bridge that gap. I just saved myself a good two hours, and that's where you see a real great value with AI. But that's just one small view, one window with government work and developers, so I don't want to try to speak for all the different types of developers out there.

Josh Matthews: 51:19

Great insight, anthony, and a great question, josh. For real, we have a little bit of information on that, by the way, and it's under the consultants section right, which we haven't really dived into too deeply. But top consultants will specialize in industry-specific AI platforms. So, for instance, healthcare HIPAA-compliant patient journey automation or financial services with AI-driven SEC FINRA audit trails Tails, too Could be tails, probably trails Manufacturing IoT and AI predictive maintenance integrations, things like that.

Josh Matthews: 51:56

I think if you want really good information and good discussion about this, I would check out our friend Fred, fred Kadina uh, his podcast banking on disruption Uh, I'm a guest on there about once a month and and so is our friend Eric, and Fred gets way into, like, especially Eric Eric's in banking. Fred's from finance Uh, he did a lot of work at silver line before he launched Line, before he had some other career moves and now, like Josh, has his own SI practice. But this is his space. We were hoping that he could be on the show tonight. Unfortunately he couldn't make it. But check out Banking on Disruption podcast, because there are hours and hours and hours of this kind of a discussion going on right now.

Josh Matthews: 52:44

Banks want to, particularly the community banks, right, because they can't. You know it's so hard for them to compete against the big ones it really is. But it's also a little bit easier to manage some of the controls because of their size and they can afford to be a little bit looser not with compliance, of course, but they can take some risks. You know, by the time B of a, you know, gets around to approving something. You know, whatever Pacific Northwest community bank will have been doing it for 18 months, you know, and a lot of times when that's really successful and I've seen it in my career, back in my Robert half days when I was doing a lot of work when that's really successful. And I've seen it in my career, back in my Robert Half days when I was doing a lot of work with Surdogy.

Josh Matthews: 53:26

I think I had 30 people working over at Surdogy which got bought by a very large bank, but it was basically software. They built software for community banks, no-transcript Good stuff. I'll tell you too. The autonomous implementation, scaling when it comes to consultants, that's a big thing. Design, multi-agent collaboration frameworks, implementing self-healing configuration ecosystems which I've never even heard of before. Have you guys heard of self-healing configuration?

Josh LeQuire: 54:23

I don't know. I might ask Mike if he's familiar. I got to tell you something about implementation work, right? Clients a lot of times don't even know what they want until you show them something. And that's just because we're human beings, right? I can put a process diagram in front of you. I can talk about cases. I can talk about Marketing Cloud and tell you all the wonderful things they can do, and it sounds cool. But this idea that implementations could be automated and that we could have a system yes, I do think there's benefits for agents that can assist you with writing code, can write test cases, automate test cases and help each other out and give you better feedback to get to that point, but you still have to have a human in the loop, like there's never going to be a completely autonomous set of agents running an implementation. I mean, mike, correct me if I'm wrong, I love your take on this.

Mike Mikuna: 55:19

So you know, a few months ago I had experimented with this stuff right when I was working with some Apex code. And you know, in Cursor they have an AI agent that has access to tools, right, and it's doing more than just like an LLM that's calling a tool. It's actually thinking about what your request is. You know inputting, you know I set up rules right, and it didn't know what Salesforce was necessarily, and but my rules helped it understand like, hey, when you change code, you have to deploy it. Hey, there's this idea of test classes that also have to be deployed.

Mike Mikuna: 55:51

And then, once I set up rules that I could call, like these scripts to run, then it could deploy the code. It could, in terminal, see that there was errors, fix itself aka self-healing and then figure out the related code that was causing that error and, based on the rules and my systems of thinking, gave it a plan to follow. And now it has its agency to go and follow that plan with the tools and my systems of thinking that it was provided. Now, if you can imagine, that's using an agent that was built for more general, widespread coding. There's folks out there that are, I'm sure, building their own custom agents from scratch that have all these tools and systems of thinking at a more fine-tuned level and maybe even building fine-tuned models that are calling these tools to even do more with less of my input. I haven't seen it yet, I haven't seen it done well yet, but there's little tidbits I see pop up here and there and I'm like how much longer right you know? Question mark.

Josh LeQuire: 56:50

I like how you described that cycle. Let me kind of play that back because there were a lot of folks on the call. You kind of hit on the DevOps automation process. Which folks? If you haven't learned the SFCL live? If you haven't learned the SFCLI, if you haven't learned DevOps, do it. Please, for the love of God, get out and change that. And I know some of you folks can't because you're working in difficult environments and that's not feasible. But what Mike has described is only feasible through command line interface automation, through DevOps automation. Because what he said is I gave my agent a set of rules to follow for how to solve a problem.

Josh LeQuire: 57:27

That agent implemented something. It wrote an Apex class and what it also did is it may have written the unit test and it may have run those tests. It may have found failures. It may have fixed the code. It may have run a deployment. It may have found if that deployment failed. It may have found if we didn't have enough code coverage or a test failed, fix that and re-ran it and kind of went through that loop. That's actually an excellent example of one of these applications of AI. But know that you couldn't build that unless you understood how the Salesforce CLI works and how DevOps works and how CI automation works.

Mike Mikuna: 57:58

And just one more level to that. I told it that it needed a way to deploy it. So it wrote its own deployment script that would call the CLI, so that it understood, and not just deploy it based on the changes that were staged. So in my Git history it built a way to look at the files that were actually staged and then deploys only those stage changes. And I was like, wow, that's pretty cool, it's using all the fundamentals of DevOps. But I knew to ask it those questions because I've built entire DevOps pipelines right, so now I've built my sense of thinking into that agent.

Josh Matthews: 58:34

You guys are some of my favorite nerds on the planet. Just so you know. It's real. You guys are not hard. I love it, thank you. Thank you so much. You too, josh. I love it. Thank you, thank you so much. Nerd alert, thank you for that insight.

Josh Matthews: 58:46

We should have a show to an hour, but it's our last one. We're just going to let it roll and we'll be done when we're done, so stick around. We're still going to be talking about some more of this stuff. I'm kind of thinking about the PM conversation that we had earlier, right, thinking about the PM conversation that we had earlier, right? So you know, half the companies or half of employees in the United States work at big companies and the other half of employees in the United States work at small companies. That's just how it goes.

Josh Matthews: 59:15

When it comes to these smaller companies like one of my clients, for instance, Galvin Technologies a lot of those senior consultants they're project managing their own stuff. Right, because they can now, because they have the tools for it. Maybe maybe they're using jira, maybe they're using asana, maybe they're using some integrate home built system on salesforce, whatever it happens to be. But I think when we think about like and I know I'm kind of going backwards here a little bit on the topic, but why is there going to be a dip? And it's because of the tools being able to accomplish, Maybe they can accomplish 80% or 70%, I don't even know, I'm not going to guess, but they can accomplish a lot of what a dedicated PM would be doing.

Josh Matthews: 1:00:02

Maybe not for a million dollar project, maybe not when there's 30 matrixed employees on it, right. But if you're cranking out, if you're managing three projects at a given time with one, two, three or four people on those projects to get the work done, then do you need a dyed in the wool? Dedicated came up through the ranks, started as a BA, grew into a PM, got their PMP on and on and on. Do you need that skill set? I'm kind of curious what you think, Josh thinking about that kind of thing.

Josh LeQuire: 1:00:33

I think the key question to ask is what is the right skill set? What is a good PM? Right? I think I've mentioned before we all know the checkboxer, the person who comes in with their list. Did you get it done yet? Did you get it done yet? That doesn't add value to anybody, it just annoys everybody.

Josh LeQuire: 1:00:49

The good PM understands how to drive a team. That means how do I make a plan that works? I know I have people who perform business analysis tasks. I know I have people who develop. I know I have people to test who perform business analysis tasks. I know I have people who develop. I know I have people to test. How do I set up a process where I can feed these individuals work?

Josh LeQuire: 1:01:09

So think about development as a constantly, as a pipeline of work and we're kind of working on one piece or one batch at a time, right, you have people who build the front end of the pipeline. They're kind of creating all the orders, right, building the user story backlog, building the requirements, like getting everything ready for the developers. So you have the developers to come in and build, test, build, test and then you have the change managers on the tail end of that pipeline who work with the business. So a good project manager is going to know how to set up a process for these people to always have work to do at different points in the process. A good project manager is going to know oh crap, we don't have enough stories for the next sprint, our development pipeline is going to stop, our testing pipeline is going to stop because we're missing stories. So that good project manager is going to have the sense and know-how to look a sprint or two sprints ahead and say we need more pipelines. So business analysts, get out, talk to the business, figure out this next chunk of work we've got to work on. I'm not seeing the stories. I didn't need them done last week. They're giving people specific guidance about what is most important, what is urgent, prioritizing work and how to keep that pipeline flowing.

Josh LeQuire: 1:02:11

Because, as a project manager, your number one metric is throughput. When we look at this chain, this value chain of how the analyst feeds, the developer feeds, the QA feeds, the change manager feeds the deployment, any point that that chain breaks, the whole chain dies. So you have to understand that it's like having a hose right. If you have a kink in the hose right here, you get blocked on this end. If you're not feeding enough water through the hose, nothing comes out. On this end, your job is to build the pipe, manage the pipe. A good project manager is extremely value. Sets the pace. It's the pace setter for the project. It's the rabbit in front of the greyhound driving how fast the greyhound is from the track right, oh, I love that.

Josh LeQuire: 1:02:54

That's great. Yeah, that skill is insanely valuable. And a PM does that through a Trello board, a Jira board, a GitHub project board. That PM does that by defining a process for an engagement. We all know Scrum. We all know Kanban right.

Josh LeQuire: 1:03:11

How do we tailor it to the work that we're doing? How do we know that Joe's got to go out and talk to the business to feed us stories? We've all got to sit in a grooming session to figure out what the business has asked us to do and how we've solutioned that. We've got to have a planning session for a sprint that says we're going to do these 12 or 20 or 25 stories. We've got to be looking at these things on the board. We've got to figure out where we're blocked and need to solve that problem. We've got to figure out who's expecting. You know who.

Josh LeQuire: 1:03:39

We scheduled a week or two weeks from now to do testing so that we can show up with something to test, and then we got to figure out that deployment at the end of that and making sure we hit that. So a good project manager does those things right and I think that's where you can't just throw. I mean, to an extent, having a board is better than not having a board, but the board alone is not going to solve that problem. You got to have somebody who's looking across the project and knowing where we can facilitate throughput. That's the goal of a good PM.

Josh Matthews: 1:04:07

Yeah, wonderful words, man. I've been placing PMs since 2000,. I think it's been a long time, and they are I mean no offense to everybody else out there If I'm not like like leaders are my favorite people to talk to, and if it's not a leader, it's PMs. And I don't mean like in general, like oh, you're not a leader, so now I don't like to talk to you, because there's some of the biggest a-holes in the world too, and everybody knows that. Right, so fair enough. But just in general, like, okay, who do you like?

Josh Matthews: 1:04:42

We've got five job orders, you know. One is for COOs, one is for PMs, one is for consultants, one is for admins, you know, and on and on and on. Who do you want to talk to? It's like a COO, please, and the next PM, please. Right, this is kind of how it goes. So I hope, hope that the people that have dedicated their life to those roles don't feel the impact and they won't feel the impact nearly as much if they get on it today. It's insanity. People, I'm going to keep banging on about this. It's freaking nuts. The people that I talk to that are like, oh, I'm kind of an old guy, I'm not really getting into that and it reminds me of something and I'm going to have a little dedication here in a moment but it reminds me of when my friend, my friend Tom Graber, who I worked with Tom, was on our on our program in January at the end of January, when we were having an episode on basically, like all the things that you should do before you quit a job. If you haven't listened to that episode, I would listen to it. I listened to it preemptively because we all want to quit. Look, I want to quit my job every three months for the last seven years. It's just part of life. Guys Like you're going to have a day where you're like how am I doing? Right? So there's nothing wrong with that, but I would definitely check out that episode.

Josh Matthews: 1:06:05

I was sitting down next to him. We were working in a high-rise downtown Portland at Robert Half Technology. We were both division directors at the time and I ran web dev and software development. He ran IT infrastructure stuff, the IT infrastructure team, and he sat down. He's so funny, he's like, literally, he's the funniest guy. He was the funniest guy I have ever known in my entire life and he sits down and goes okay, josh, all right. So, look, I've got one word for you. Okay, the cloud. All right, I know that's two words. But and then I'd never heard of cloud anything in my life, even though I'd already used it. Right, because most of you know, I started using Salesforce in 1999, the year it came out. So Tom's sitting there, he's telling me all about the cloud and I was like like totally fascinated.

Josh Matthews: 1:06:55

It's been two years since people started saying you know LLM GPT, you know LLM GPT like it's. If you're not on it now, there's something wrong with your decision-making. Like you've got to get on this right. Imagine if you'd gotten onto the cloud stuff back when Tom Graber first told me about it. Well, this is the same thing, guys. It's a really big deal. It's a really, really, really big deal. It's life-changing, it's economy-changing. It's going to impact us in everything that we do other than maybe taking a nature walk right. And even then, who knows? Tom sadly passed away in February and we just got news of it a couple weeks ago. His wife passed shortly after, julie, a lovely, lovely lady.

Josh Matthews: 1:07:52

Tom was my friend for, I want to say, 18 years, 19 years. We worked together. He was one of the best recruiters. He was one of the most tech-savvy recruiters. He was one of the most tech savvy recruiters you could. He used to be an IT manager, uh IT director you could ever hope to meet. He had zero fear about being himself, which is a lesson that I think I and many, many of many of uh us who got to spend time with Tom it rubs off on you. You can see that you can really be yourself. You can be funny, you can be goofy, you can be vulnerable, you can put yourself out there and the sky's not going to come crashing down.

Josh Matthews: 1:08:37

Today I interviewed a wonderful young woman. She's an MVP for a job and we had a wonderful discussion and she said to me and this is I promise I'm not trying to toot my own horn, but she said you know this conversation, this is like the best interview conversation I've had in like a really long time. I felt like I could really be myself and I just want to say like always be yourself, always be yourself. If there's going to be one lesson from Tom Graber, it's that you get to do that and the cost is, if you're not yourself, you want to spend energy, you want to spend time, you want to create drama. Don't be yourself right. Be yourself. Be yourself in interviews, be yourself at work, be yourself and authentic online, be yourself with your family.

Josh Matthews: 1:09:36

And if you feel like you can't dig deep, you might have to cut some people out of your life, the people that are creating an environment for you where you don't feel like you can be yourself. Guess what? There's 8 billion of us. There are people out there that will love you for who you are, that will support you for who you are, that will give you career opportunities and handups, that will support your decisions, that will call you on your bullshit, that will help you succeed in this absolutely incredible world that we're living in right now, this incredible time that we're living in.

Josh Matthews: 1:10:17

So I just we don't have to have a moment of silence or anything like that for Tom, but I I didn't want our next episode since finding the news to go by without highlighting how many hundreds, hundreds, probably thousands of people this guy impacted. He worked at Google, he worked at Tesla, he worked at Walmart digital, he worked at Nike. His influence has spanned literally thousands and thousands of candidates just like mine, but boy was he a unique guy and he's going to be missed. So thanks for all the lessons, tom, and we'll see you when I get around to it. Okay, all right, guys, let's do a little bit of a wrap up here. It's been a lovely show. Let's start with Mr Anthony. Any final words, my friend, that you'd like to share about what you think people should be doing right now to advance themselves and protect their careers from the AI future that we're already in.

Anthony Rodgriguez: 1:11:23

Yeah, absolutely, in fact, let me take my blue light blocker shades off so that you can hear me clearly. It doesn't matter if you're a PM, a junior ad man, a technical architect, it doesn't matter. Listen to me, the best AI, it has limits. If you're working on a multi-tenant cloud state-of-the-art thing or some ancient legacy system, there's always limits, but you and I, we have no limit. You don't let go of the joy of learning and being excited and wondering. Your ai journey can begin on a free app and asking to tell you new dad jokes, and then you can grow from there. Okay, like there's. And yes, I, I do look up new dad jokes and keep my children regularly annoyed.

Josh LeQuire: 1:12:14

It's, it's good stuff, it's good you have no, no capacity.

Anthony Rodgriguez: 1:12:19

You don't have to worry about concurrencies. You don't have a limit on your processor in your head. You can grow. You do this. You already have vast and amazing skills. Pms and BAs they are master people, they understand people and they do it. Most of my meetings are virtual right and some of them don't even have the camera. They hear all of the different people and they sense what's going on. They look at the problems behind what the client is saying and they orchestrate things to go even faster for us. They can learn this AI. You don't got to be an architect of AI. You can get some basics and go a ways. You can get a few more basics and probably go a long way. Just keep going, you can do it. That's my thoughts. Leave it at that.

Josh Matthews: 1:13:07

Thanks so much, Anthony. Those are great and very wise words and passionate words and I remember when you were just like you, just you were doing pep up tech, I think Right, and you're just breaking into the ecosystem and yeah, dude, you're smart as fuck. Man, Like I love your perspective, like for real. Awesome Sorry.

Anthony Rodgriguez: 1:13:27

Now, but yeah, like you're smart, it's awesome.

Josh Matthews: 1:13:28

Sorry, surround myself with smart people. But yeah, you're smart as fuck, dude, and it's great to know you, and thanks for being on the show. We all really appreciate you and we'll continue to appreciate you in the new iteration. Let's jump in and talk to our friend Vanessa here. Vanessa, some final thoughts, some final words as we bid the live programming goodbye and move on to a new era of the podcast. Let's start with final words on AI and what can people do right now.

Vanessa Grant: 1:14:04

I think you either need to learn how to master AI so all the different resources that are available or be better at your job. Be part of that top 80%. So be a master of best practices, be a master of understanding the Salesforce catalog, be a master of understanding what it means to be well architected, be a master of DevOps, or what dysfunction looks like on a team. I think those are all skills that will continue to be relevant. If it's a matter of writing copy or doing more of those kind of repetitive tasks, maybe it's time to skill up. Maybe you should work on those certifications at that point so you can be a little bit more well-rounded as far as what it takes to deliver and maintain high-quality Salesforce implementations.

Josh Matthews: 1:14:56

No one's earned a dime jumping on this show. Yeah, for a little while. Right, it works. It's a really amazing formula. So before we go and move on to Mr Mike McCoola, makuna McCoola, I can't help myself, vanessa any final words on the program Sunsetting the Live Show. What will be lost? What will be gained?

Vanessa Grant: 1:15:33

show what will be lost, what will be gained. Um, I think the I still miss the clubhouse experience that whole.

Vanessa Grant: 1:15:36

AMA experience and, and I don't know, with all the different changes in the technology over the years, as soon as kind of clubhouse died, um, and then Twitter happened and then we've tried LinkedIn Live and I really missed the engagement with folks. But I will also say it's a different time now than it was when we first started the show, when there were a lot of career transitioners because it was post-COVID and Salesforce jobs were abundant and so it really was like having that edge would get you that job really quickly, and now it's a little bit harder and so a lot of the questions that we were getting in the last year were very repetitive. So I think it'll replace some of that repetition and leave some room for some fresh content and some fresh ideas, and I'm really excited for the tighter format and seeing what you guys come up with.

Josh Matthews: 1:16:33

Well, thanks, vanessa. Well, you've been a gem this entire, you know, over the years. We appreciate you. We're going to have you on the show, by the way, too. That's going to happen for reals.

Vanessa Grant: 1:16:42

I love you guys.

Josh Matthews: 1:16:44

Yeah, and I'm, I'm with you. Like the clubhouse days, boy, wasn't that fun. I mean we'd jump on there, we'd have 100, 120 people. We just like, boom, they're on, and then they're like, what about this? And how do I do that? And the clubhouse days, and it never was really quite the same, although we've appreciated the engagement, we saw our live viewership go down when we launched the podcast. We saw that go way, way up. I'm glad that these are recorded and people can listen on their favorite platform whenever they feel like it, and also on the videos on Josh Forrest's channel on YouTube, which is great.

Josh Matthews: 1:17:29

I have been thinking I'll disclose a couple things that people might see coming from the desk of Josh Matthews here in the next six to eight months. One of them would actually be some sort of a career coaching platform. I'm looking at developing a GPT for careers. It'd probably be free, where you can just get on there, ask a question and it would be like I'm giving you some advice. Now don't take that a hundred percent of the bank because, as everyone has said, ai can hallucinate. It can give you bad information, so careful. But I am looking at developing a GPT. I am in the process right now of writing a book. I don't even remember the title. I think it's the people part how to hire and get hired without losing your mind. So I'm thinking that's probably four to six months. I'd like to release it by Christmas who wouldn't like that as a stocking stuffer? So, and there'll be an audio book as well. But I think that there's an opportunity out there for people who really want more than just a quick hit answer like we would get or give on Clubhouse, even though you know better than anyone that I could just like get a small question, not shut up for 25 minutes straight, right about it. So, but I think that there should be a platform, a little Slack channel, some sort of membership, one or two live sessions a week and some individual one-on-one with people, because the need for this specific career advice it's not going to go away. But if you really need a little bit more one-on-one help on your resume, on your career direction, on your interviewing skill sets or even just how you're framed in your video, right, I mean, I had to give about an hour of advice in two one-hour meetings just today, right, because it was not up to snuff and these people one of them 25 certifications and very grateful, very grateful for the feedback.

Josh Matthews: 1:19:35

But people are missing the bar and if someone just said you know what, for the next month I'm going to listen to one episode of the show every single day, I'm just going to pick the top 20, 30 shows from the podcast and listen to them. I promise you their career trajectory would skyrocket. Their chance of getting a job quickly, getting those bills paid if they're not working right now, right, making the job that they have work and not quitting and being a kangaroo and hopping from job to job and ruining their life in their forties because of what they did in their thirties or in their twenties with job hopping. I mean they would. They would skyrocket. So, by all means, dig deep into the archives of the Salesforce career show. Almost none of it is dated. There's going to be a couple AI episodes that are going to be a little bit dated and some market updates and hey, what happened at Dreamforce 21,? Right, Aside from those, it's pretty much evergreen material and I'd encourage people to go ahead and just, hey, you don't have to pick 30, pick five.

Josh Matthews: 1:20:41

Start there, right? Listen at one and a half speed, like I do. I listen to everything one and a half speed, you'll consume this content and then the number one thing that you have to do is actually take some sort of action on it. Don't just listen and think that through osmosis you're going to get better. You have to do the things that Anthony did. You have to do the things that I've done or that Vanessa has done. It's like you learn something. Now apply it. Josh LaQuire is one of the best at this. Mike McCool is one of the best at this. He learned something. He's like okay, I learned that Now I'm going to go do it Right. Just go get it done. All right, let's go ahead and ask Mr Mike McCool for some final words on predictions around AI and what you're doing right now, what others can do, and I would actually ask if you don't mind highlighting a little bit about your vibe check um software so that's not out yet, but uh it it is.

Mike Mikuna: 1:21:37

the idea, right, is that there is a lot of vibe coders that are creating security, uh, with the things that they're building, because they just are rapidly prototyping and they will need engineers to help ship it. So that's a coming soon type thing, but is that enough of a tidbit about that?

Josh Matthews: 1:21:59

That's enough of a tidbit about that, Okay cool.

Mike Mikuna: 1:22:02

So then, my final thoughts on all this is just that you probably heard me say my systems are thinking because I I told you like early on I was giving AI all the credit, and I realized that's kind of misleading folks into thinking AI can do way more than it can engineering mindset or someone who really understands software or that product or that thing they're shipping. Otherwise, they're prototyping, and prototyping is going to lead to and it already is leading to lots of technical debt at a scale and order of magnitude that we've never seen before.

Josh LeQuire: 1:22:38

So I think, there's going to be there's.

Mike Mikuna: 1:22:40

You know, history repeats itself. There's a lot of what happened in the dot-com boom and crash, like people jumping onto the internet and then people overselling what they can actually deliver and then big flops. And then there's gonna be some people who are actually figuring out how to architect and do this the right way and they're gonna come out ahead. So first and foremost is really get good at how do you have a specialty and how do you like put that into an AI that you're using to optimize your productivity. The second thing is really how well can you train other people?

Mike Mikuna: 1:23:11

If you're really good at training people, you'll be really good at working with AI, whether you're a PM or whatever role you're in I know there's a big talk here about PMs are going to be lost. If you're a really good PM, you'll probably be one of the most valuable people on a team that's using AI, because they'll be constantly fine-tuning and looking for ways to optimize it to make that workflow better. You might be building a product that helps optimize everyone else's time being more product-driven. This AI time is more rewarding to people that are being creative and entrepreneurial than just, like I, do a task in and out, like it's just really important to consider, like creativity and making time for that, what like your own curiosity, so you know, experimenting, playing around like we're in a big entrepreneurial revolution, um and I think you said it right there play it, play right, it's time to play with it.

Josh Matthews: 1:24:05

You're not going to bring down, you know, armycom by playing with gpt or perplexity or whatever you're using, claude, whatever you're using at home in front of your tv with your laptop screwing around like safe. It's safe to go around right now.

Mike Mikuna: 1:24:25

Yeah, just stay off the clock yeah, I know I just kind of went down a fire hose of thoughts, but like it's. It's just, I'm very passionate about this stuff and like I know it seems scary because my last bit here is just that if you ask someone in the 1800s what their job would look like now, they probably wouldn't picture any of the jobs that we have right now. So we're kind of like that right now as things are rapidly changing. But this is our time to define those jobs and like be part of that process. It's just, we have to do this strategically. Don't just jump into the like I shipped to production because I had something built like really quick, like that's cool for prototyping, but don't be that person right now.

Josh Matthews: 1:25:00

So, anyways, that's my final thought dude, that's a great soundbite right there, bravo. Thank you, mike. Mike, no problem. Mr LaQuire, I'll ask you first about AI and then I'll ask you another question, but let's hear from you some final thoughts on what people should be doing, how they should be approaching AI right now.

Josh LeQuire: 1:25:23

Well, salesforce AI said it could predict my future success. I asked what it saw and it showed me a 404 error. There's a dad joke for you there, anthony, so I just want to throw that out there. I did generate some dad jokes here for fun. I heard a lot of great thoughts today. I want to kind of synthesize a few of those, and I saw something in the comments that popped up earlier that really, I think, is another interesting aspect that we could talk about at a later date.

Josh LeQuire: 1:25:52

Mike, you said it rewards the creatives 100% true, you know. I think, josh, this is why you have that euphoria kick, you know, at midnight and have trouble going to sleep. Right, you give it good props, it shows you results, you do it again, it shows you more and it's kind of and it can be very rewarding. Mike, you mentioned a second ago and I think this is the point worth emphasizing If you're a good manager, project manager, manager of people, you're good at giving instructions, you're going to be great at using AI to do your job. I will share in my company and Vanessa, I saw you posting about this earlier we are using it to write user stories, we are using it to build process diagrams. Using it to build ERDs data flows. Using it to build contracts for REST APIs, requests, responses and what those look like. Using it to build training documents and I can tell you that nobody has ever told me in the past they love doing documentation. So everybody's glad to see this coming in and filling the gap, which helps me feel better as a professional services provider because I can show my clients what we're doing. I can show progress. Oh, we've automated status reporting. I love that part too. I can't begin to tell you like 10, 12 hours a week off. Our PMs solid right there, that's true Delivers tremendous value to our clients. They can see what we're doing. They're getting value. So I do think there is a place for AI to take on the doldrums and the things that used to be time-consuming. I don't know necessarily that I see it replacing jobs entirely, yet I think this will happen over time as it improves and as companies learn how to adopt AI. When you learn how to adopt AI and how to use it correctly in your workflow, that's when I think jobs you know, particularly lower skill jobs that AI can do the function of, will be replaced. Somebody said something in the comments earlier. I want to call this out. There was a comment from Bunny McCauley who said it sounds like PA is becoming a great scrum master is invaluable to PM roles.

Josh LeQuire: 1:27:57

I see a blending of roles happening with AI because it can take on a lot of these documentation capabilities, ability you know. For example, with a client recently I had him, you know, say hey, project plan my best tomorrow morning and I knew how to prompt AI to generate a project plan. Now I consider myself more of like an architect or I would say classic PM type role, but more kind of heavy in the architect and BA type side. I do development but I don't do it nearly as well as 90% of the people I've worked with and work with today. I think for me it's been great for me to dip my toe into places that I'd normally hand off to another developer, I'd hand off to another architect, I'd hand off to somebody else and get answers more quickly.

Josh LeQuire: 1:28:46

So I do see SAs becoming better PMs. I do see DAs becoming better SAs. I do see SAs becoming better developers. I do see developers becoming better architects. I think we're going to see people kind of emerging and because these tools reward creativity, they rapidly increase the pace of learning. We're going to see roles blend and people's skill set broaden. There are a lot of really bright people, I think everybody on this call and certainly everybody listening, who, if you have that growth mentality, that hunger to learn, there's no limit to what you can do. That's what I love about this. I think it's just a giant blue ocean of opportunity.

Josh Matthews: 1:29:32

It absolutely is. Awesome soundbites on that one too, mr LaQuire. Very, very well said. So thank you for all of that insight. There's going to be a lot more of it coming up with the new format. So tell us, what are you excited about? I know we're doing our first couple recordings in two days from now and if you've actually made it this long into the program, we'll just remind you the Salesforce Career Show is being rebranded to Salesforce Hiring Edge. If you're already subscribed, it's going to be right there. If you're looking for it, just type in Salesforce hiring or Salesforce hiring edge and it'll be easily found. But what are you most excited about with the new format that we're going to be adopting?

Josh LeQuire: 1:30:18

All right. So I know this is the Salesforce career show and your audience and a lot of people here have come here to get good career advice. I want to kind of reemphasize a point you made earlier. The hiring edge will continue this and kind of broaden it to a wider spectrum. I think now we're talking about our clients. And do you hire a consultant or do you hire a full-time employee? And guess what? You still have to be really knowledgeable about how to navigate your career to be a candidate in those types of roles, and you're getting to hear more of the hiring perspective. So I think that's going to round out a lot of what you've learned so far on the show and broaden your horizons even further.

Josh LeQuire: 1:30:56

I'm really excited, josh, for you and I to have a very friendly, healthy, constructive debate about whether consultants can do a job better or a full-time hire, because I think there are pros and cons to both sides of the argument. Josh and I are honestly competitors if you really think about it. When we go approach our clients, our clients are often thinking do I hire this role in-house or do I hire a professional services firm to help out? And I'll tell you, both have their advantages, both have their disadvantages. So I'm really excited, josh, for us to unpack these topics with your lens as the recruiter, my lens as the consultant, and good battle. I think there's a lot of healthy debate we're going to have about the pros and cons of this world and the topics are endless, right. So I'm really looking forward to seeing that and I think what I really like that's emerged working with you recently and being invited here, and thank you for the invitation. This is a huge honor. Stepping into big shoes behind you and Vanessa is intimidating, but it's been a lot of fun.

Josh LeQuire: 1:31:56

There are so many broad with the advent of AI. I'm going to demystify the bullshit marketing the fear mongering, like the stuff you're hearing in the news and talk about what's real right. Marketing the fear mongering like the stuff you're hearing in the news and talk about what's real right. Ai is actually very much here to stay and here to grow, but I don't think you need to worry too much about and lose too much sleep that it's going to. You know, eat your babies and, you know, take all the jobs on the planet. We got to figure out what the reality of AI is as a consultant, as a hire, and how to apply this, and I think Josh has brought up some really good topics today. Yeah, the reality is you got to kind of hop on the train and go, and there are a lot of rewards to that. It's not just do it out of fear, do it out of your desire to grow.

Josh LeQuire: 1:32:42

I do want to tackle that topic because consultants using AI, hires using AI whether you're looking to hire a consultant, whether you're looking to hire a full-time hire, there's a huge role for AI in that mix. So that topic itself is going to continue to play along. It's timely, it's relevant, it's hugely important to our work Understanding how we navigate this new world and how we continue to become more resilient, how we become stronger, how we, as folks who are buying services, hiring people, we as folks who are delivering services and selling those things, how can we evolve our thinking, our mindset, our capabilities in this rapidly changing world and continue to thrive? A lot of headwinds. Today, you don't have to pick up the newspaper or listen to the radio or watch the TV. We're heading into some very uncertain times. So my goal with you, josh, is to figure out how can we be more resilient, how can we be stronger, how can we take advantage in times that may seem like there's going to be a loss of opportunity, but generate opportunity in times of economic uncertainty?

Josh Matthews: 1:33:50

know, generate opportunity in times of economic uncertainty. Yeah, yeah, well said, and there is economic uncertainty. If anyone cared about knowing what my opinion about it is, I'll just tell you right now I'm not overly worried, right? People are worried about tariffs right now. Well, guess what? We should have been worried about them for the last 10, 15, 20 years and no one was not enough, right. And so just don't worry about it, right? At least I think with this administration and I'm not trying to get too political here it's like they still have elections next year.

Josh Matthews: 1:34:21

Trust me, even some moves today were made and the stock market bumped up 7% or something like that today through some recent moves. You're not gonna to be left in the dust. I don't think right. There's going to be some uncertainty, but hopefully there's going to be a resurgence of activity here in the United States. We are listened to in 70 or so countries around the world, and so how that affects you, I can't tell you. I can't tell how. I can't tell you how anything's going to affect anybody, to be honest. But yeah, just remember, the news is designed to get you to stay watching the news. The news is designed to get you to click on their advertisers. People like bad news and everybody knows that. But, yeah, still, you can look at the numbers and there's uncertainty. But guess what Job numbers were awesome last month, like they were great.

Josh Matthews: 1:35:09

They were really, really good. Okay, there are jobs. I'm busier now than I was at any given time during 2024. Right, and I think that says something. And it's not because I'm marketing more, I'm not, it's the clients are coming to us and saying we're getting busy.

Josh Matthews: 1:35:29

So, even though it's and remember too, we had a massive landslide. I mean, we just fell off the cliff in 22, like hardcore early 22, all the way through 24 and or was it 20? Yeah, sorry, beginning of 23,. My bad, we fell off the cliff. Demand for professionals in the Salesforce ecosystem completely fell down right on its face as soon as Salesforce let go 10,000 people or announced 10,000 people right around Christmas time of 2022, I mean, it was devastating. We lost half a million tech workers in the United States in the last two years Half a million.

Josh Matthews: 1:36:06

Well, where are all those jobs? Well, a lot of them are offshore. Now, right, some of them not all, not even a massive amount are AI. Right, because certain things are getting easier, but there's always going to be a place for top performers, right. There's always going to be a place, and you just have to figure out what does that mean for what your chosen career is? You know, if you're going to be an admin, be the best admin, right.

Josh Matthews: 1:36:38

That doesn't mean the most certs, it doesn't. It means probably the best communicator and someone who's actually like delivers on what they commit to communicator. And someone who's actually like delivers on what they commit to right and asks for help when they need it and doesn't get bogged down in perfectionism, right when it's unnecessary. Someone who's not burning hours doing the wrong thing. Knows when to ask for help. Knows when to go to AI for help. Knows when to get a peer review. Knows when to communicate the client or internal stakeholders or external stakeholders what's going on. Communicate to the client or internal stakeholders or external stakeholders what's going on. Knows when to push back. Knows when to capitulate and let go of things. Figure that out.

Josh Matthews: 1:37:18

If everybody just spent 10 hours in the next 60 days working on their emotional intelligence, I promise you you're going to get better and you know what it fucking hurts. It's so hard. It's so hard everybody. It's so hard to be vulnerable. It's so hard to take feedback and criticism and not let it grind you down. It's so difficult to speak up for yourselves. This is, this is the hard stuff.

Josh Matthews: 1:37:41

Learning AI is easy. They make it fun. Hey, perplexity, I want to learn about all the different LLMs and when I should use them right. Try to make it fun. Right, you can go to Grok and be like, talk to me like you're one of my homies and it'll tell you. You know, hit audio and let it play for you. Right? It's not that hard, guys.

Josh Matthews: 1:38:01

The hard stuff is turning that inner eye to see your own path, where you've gone, where you've made errors, where you've made mistakes, what haven't you owned? That Guess what Everyone in your life is ready for you to own. Right, what haven't you done for your fellow man or woman and friends that they have done for you? And where have been those missed opportunities? What about your boss? You know that survey that we did about toxic environments. I was like toxic, toxic, toxic, toxic. It's like, sorry, I get it, I get it, but I'm telling you toxic environments aren't always top down, often they're bottom up. One of my clients recently lost an employee and nicest guy in the world toxic. Who would have known. Okay, who would have known everybody?

Josh Matthews: 1:38:57

Just like, take, take a good look at yourself and then you can say to yourself I forgive you, I'm sorry, you're all right, you're good, let's get better. You know what I mean. You can do that. Be your own best friend for a little while. Right, because if you can do that, then you can withstand the input from the other people in your life, whether it's your boss, your coworker, your project manager, your mentor, your mentee, the CEO, right, some crappy comments on social media that you didn't like, that didn't sit well. Right, let it all go. Just get in love with yourself, but don't get in love with your ego, right? You have to love the authentic you. It's so important. If you don't, it's really hard to ask anyone else to and I know I'm really going off on kind of a moderately emotional tangent here, but we're talking about ai, and ai isn't human, but you are, and that humanity must shine through.

Josh Matthews: 1:40:00

If you are robotic in your communications with people, you will never achieve top 10 percent. Uh, in your right, it's just not, it's not going to happen. You might have mental health issues. You might have I can't even remember what the term like divergent thinking right. You might have ADD, you might have a touch of Asperger's or something like that. That's okay.

Josh Matthews: 1:40:28

But you get to embrace it and find out what are your strengths and just get that bike pump and pump them up really, really big. If you pump them up really big, no one's going to see all the other deficiencies and you can go and pick one or two to work on. One or two, right? Don't try to change yourself completely. Just be your authentic self, be your own best friend and embrace this AI stuff, because I think you'll find, at the end of the day, that, especially with the LLMs, it's learned from us. This wasn't dropped on planet earth by a bunch of fricking aliens people. This has learned how to communicate with us by witnessing and being exposed to how we communicate with each other and hopefully, so far, I haven't seen anything to the contrary. It's really focused on the good communications. Okay, so you can actually get involved in it. You can learn from it and become an even better human being. I think deeply that AI is already helping me be a better human being, so you can lean on it more than just agent force and AI governance. You can lean on it and learn from it, because what you have access to is a collective mindset of some of the best, smartest, most brilliant people in the entire world that it pulls a lot of its information and knowledge from. So get involved with AI. You'll become a better human being if you do. And let's leave it at that, shall we? And we'll be back in two weeks. Well, not live. I almost said live, not live.

Josh Matthews: 1:42:04

With the first of many, many episodes of Salesforce Hiring Edge. I'd like to bring everyone back on stage. Maybe we can do a quick little picture here, but thank you to everybody who's been on the show today, starting with Vanessa Grant. You're such a special person. Appreciate you so much. Good luck guys.

Josh Matthews: 1:42:26

Yeah, mike McCool, my friend, josh McQuire, thanks for being on the show. Thanks to all of our listeners. Please subscribe. We don't want you to miss a single episode. We don't want you to miss on what could be life-changing and career-changing information for you, because it's already out there and there's just more coming down the way. It's going to be a nice, smooth pipeline of knowledge and we can't wait to share it. Thanks everybody. Thanks for all the live questions, thanks for all of the dedication to showing up at 5.30, 4.30, or 2.30 every other Wednesday, depending on where in the US you live, or any of the other uh 21 time zones, probably 25 for some weird reason, any of the other time zones, no matter what country you're in. We appreciate you and I mean that sincerely, like we have all appreciated you. We're going to continue to appreciate you.

Josh Matthews: 1:43:19

You've got a question that you need answered on the new app, on the new show. You can currently just go to salesforcecareershowcom and you can drop in your question and we'll do our very best to get those answers. You can DM me or DM Josh LaQuire on LinkedIn. Okay, ask you. Hey, here's something I love answered and we'll save it for the show and we'll get you the answers that you need so that you guys can continue to thrive and succeed in Salesforce ecosystem for many, many years to come. Thank you everybody. That's the show. Bye for now.