Ana Grace

💥💥BREAKING💥💥 A team of technical aces just dropped a 500+ page book on how to design and build Agentforce AI agents using common patterns. Here's why it's a holiday Kindle must-have: Co-authors Cynthia Q. and Andy Forbes (from Capgemini) do a heroic job moving the Agentforce conversation to another level, detailing primary patterns for AI agents, how they differ & thrive ... [FYI: I wrote the foreward ... and another holiday must-have book called "Agentforce: Harnessing the Agency of AI to Grow, Scale and Win Any Industry" (Wiley).] The patterns apply to Agentic AI in general as well as Agentforce. As they say the patterns are "abstract enough to apply anywhere" and reference common tools and frameworks beyond Salesforce like LangChain, Microsoft AutoGen, OpenAgents / CrewAI, #MCP etc. Since launching Agentforce in 2024 SF has been chanting "Don't DIY Your AI" -- which just means that agentic success is not as easy as it looks. Startups can show incredible brio but not a trusted, grounded, audited, governed, multi-#LLM platform that provides tools to help build and test agents & a Command Center to monitor the hybrid human-robot workforce ... such as Agentforce. Among the 8 patterns presented there are: 💥💥Sentinel (monitor-react): as an example, could monitor internal channels for policy violations and alert HR 💥💥Conductor (orchestration): coordinate the creation of a marketing campaign from brief writing through audience definition, media planning and optimization 💥💥Presenter (UX optimization): pull data from multiple disparate systems and present a rolled-up real-time view 💥💥Action (Task doer): automatically handle routine returns for an online retailer 💥💥Coach (insights/advisory): analyze a salesperson's upcoming pitch and suggest improvements And for each the authors provide detail around use cases across the enterprise -- Finance, Customer Care, HR, Marketing, etc. -- and event sources, evaluation logic, agentic actions, tools and tech. The latter spans platform events, Apex/Flow, Agent Builder, MuleSoft, #APIs and more, at times including actual code. In some ways, this is the design-thinking "handbook" that Agentforce users have been looking for ... And after detailing patterns, the authors delve deeply into topics like trust, handling memory and context, designing & governing multi-agent systems; and some sage hard-won counsel on deployment & staging ... There's no doubt Marc Benioff is right and the Agentic Enterprise is the present and future of business. There's plenty in here for readers from the merely agent-curious to the agent-adept, business-line users to architects and admins. Happy agentic holidays! (Link to buy Kindle edition in the comments; hardcover coming soon.)

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Just read “The Future of Agentic Teams at Your Bank" by Chris Nichols, a thoughtful take on how AI is shifting from individual assistants to cohesive, agentic teams that actually execute work across systems and workflows. The piece highlights how today’s breakthroughs aren’t just about smarter models, they’re about lead agents orchestrating swarms of specialized agents that automate complex tasks, integrate with legacy systems, and fundamentally redefine how banks get work done. At EnFi, this is exactly the future we’re building toward. Not just deploying isolated AI tools, but embedding agentic workflows directly into core banking processes so that teams are augmented, not burdened. We’re focused on: • Orchestrated agentic teams that tackle real-world banking workflows • Governance and guardrails that keep AI safe and auditable • Contextual integration with existing systems and data Because real transformation doesn’t come from asking every banker to be an AI expert, it comes from engineering AI to work with them in real time. What's your take on the rise of the "digital co-worker"? "The Future of Agentic Teams At Your Bank" https://lnkd.in/ec7_9n4Z

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10 tell tale signs that you are a deck warrior PM and don't have much experience shipping real products. You think of product management as shiny decks and roadmaps. ******************************************** 1. When some one asks you what really is an API, you regurgitate with utmost confidence the done to death example of restaurant and butler. 2. You draw leaky buckets out on your deck very confidently when your product analyst has supplied you the data but when asked to pull out funnel info from your web analytics tool you get cold feet. 3. You believe that product data automagically flows into your web analytics tool. 4. When your stakeholders ask you to give them a simple clickable prototype you run to your design team to get the prototype. 5. When your content team asks you to get the static assets hosted on CDN and give them the URL, you are like bro what is this? 6. You think Javascript is an extension of Java. 7. When you need to upload/set up stuff for the latest product release and your engg tells sorry there is no UI, just use this Postman collection, you start wondering what on earth is Postman. 8. When your QA guy gives you the details of staging environment where the staging APIs are deployed and asks you to complete the UAT by pointing to them, you wonder what does he mean. 9. When your backend engg asks for the cURL request so that he can checkout what is wrong on prod, you go in a curl. 10. When you report a bug and your web developer asks you to launch browser dev tools and share the API response on production you are like dude what are you talking about? Product Management is not just shiny UI or roadmaps and 100s of frameworks, it takes a lot of grunt effort to ship real products and enable your teams to ship with high velocity and not just talk about it. You have to earn the stripes before you just do roadmaps and product strategy. Love this list? Follow me at https://lnkd.in/dVGHnkRB  AND https://lnkd.in/g7J_sDyN While you are at it grab my product assignments playbook, 19 real product cases, all successful submissions, real job offers, ~258 pages of content. ***Grab it now**** - https://lnkd.in/gHzyN-Xc #careersuccess #productmanagement #jobs

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My 2nd article for October includes one of my favorite jeff@ isms, though I didn't include the whole story. Ignore conflicting anecdotes at your own peril. Great PMs don’t sound like executives. They sound like customers. Not because they ignore strategy or business needs, but because strategy only works when it’s anchored in the experience of the people using your product. I wrote this piece for ProjectManagement.com about why the best product managers speak in customer terms, not corporate ones. When you can translate user pain into business impact, you stop being a messenger and start being a strategic voice. #PMI #projectmanagement https://lnkd.in/gbdsTNpC

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Are your product teams starting with "what" instead of "why"? 🤔 I just had Jose Quesada, VP of Product Management at American Express, on the Product Thinking podcast and he nailed something that trips up so many teams. "The problem in many organizations or many teams is they start with the what they're gonna do rather than the why and what they want to drive," Jose shared. And he's absolutely right. Here's what I see happening everywhere: Teams jump straight into planning features, discussing roadmaps, and debating solutions before they've clearly defined what outcomes they're trying to achieve. It's solution-first thinking, and it's a trap. Jose's approach flips this completely. He starts with vision: something ambitious for the next 2-5 years. Then he immerses his team in data and brings in stakeholders. From there, they develop hypotheses around outcomes they want to drive. Start with “we want to drive this outcome” rather than “we want to do this thing," he explains. The difference? Instead of saying "we're building a new onboarding flow," you start with "we want to drive acquisition revenue by 15%." Then you explore multiple paths to get there. This shifts the entire conversation from feature debates to impact discussions. The key is bringing your partners along from the beginning. When everyone understands the why behind the work, alignment becomes natural. Teams stop building busy work and start building things that move the needle. I've worked with countless teams that get stuck in the "what" trap. They ship features, check boxes, but struggle to show real business impact. The ones that break out? They master this outcome-first approach. How does your team approach strategy? Do you start with outcomes or solutions?

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This is the BNPL Partnership the Industry Has Been Waiting For Fiserv and Affirm just announced an exclusive collaboration that fundamentally changes the competitive landscape for community banks and credit unions. As someone who's spent years watching the BNPL market evolve, I can confidently say this is an absolute homerun for financial institutions. The numbers tell the story. The U.S. BNPL market is projected to reach $111.6 billion in 2026, with over 86 million Americans now using BNPL as a mainstream payment choice. But until now, community financial institutions have been sitting on the sidelines while neobanks and fintech disruptors capture this massive growth opportunity. That changes today. What makes this partnership exceptional is the turnkey integration model. As Erik Wichita, Head of Card Services at Fiserv, explained: "This partnership gives our clients a practical, scalable way to offer such payment flexibility through their existing debit products, helping them compete effectively, deepen customer and member relationships, and drive top of wallet engagement with their products." Zero technical lift. Real time underwriting handled seamlessly through Affirm's platform. Native embedding into existing digital banking solutions. Access to Affirm's network of nearly 420,000 merchants with offers including 0% APR. The strategic implications are enormous. Community financial institutions can now keep customer spend within their ecosystem rather than watching it leak to standalone BNPL providers. Research shows that roughly half of U.S. consumers, and three fourths of millennials, will not complete a purchase if pay over time isn't offered at checkout. This partnership solves the classic build versus buy dilemma that has paralyzed many community financial institutions. Building internal BNPL capabilities requires significant technology investment, lending infrastructure, and merchant relationships that most institutions simply don't have. This provides enterprise grade capabilities with zero operational burden. Bottom line: This transforms BNPL from a competitive threat into a competitive advantage for community banks and credit unions. It's exactly the kind of strategic enablement the industry needs to compete in an increasingly digital, consumer driven financial services landscape. #BNPL #Fintech #DigitalBanking #PaymentsInnovation #FinancialServices #CommunityBanking #CreditUnions #DigitalTransformation #Fiserv #Affirm #BuyNowPayLater #PaymentTechnology #BankingInnovation #FinancialInclusion #ConsumerFinance

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🚀 𝐂𝐫𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐭 𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐝𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐬𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐨𝐧 𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 — yet many still struggle to connect the dots from marketing dollars ➡️ funded loans and deposits and many 𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐞𝐧𝐝 𝐮𝐩 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐥 𝐬𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐨𝐟 𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐮𝐩𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐬. The challenge isn’t re-inventing UTM tags (those have been around almost as long as the Internet 🌐). The real complexity is: ✨ Cross-domain tracking ✨ Cross-systems tracking (marketing tools → application layer → LOS & CORE IDs → BI tools) Earlier this year, one of our Credit Union partners saw their credit card product go viral thanks to an Instagram influencer 📈. We're talking tens of thousands of high value applications! We helped them: ✅ Track exactly where applicants came from ✅ Identify which ones were most valuable ✅ Engage the right members further to maximize loyalty The best part? Out of tens of thousands of applicants, not a single member had to call in — they knew their application status immediately. No waiting. No guessing. 🍕 Just like Domino’s Pizza Tracker, the lending journey should feel clear, transparent, and real-time. But since we brought down the steps to apply for a loan from 20+ to 3, the tracker focuses on 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐬 𝐨𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐚𝐧 𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐬𝐮𝐛𝐦𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐝 and while the ball is in the Credit Union's court. That's when applicants feel anxious and want updates! Now, applicants get instant visibility into their loan’s progress — no more guessing, waiting, or calling to check in. Real-time updates sync directly with the LOS, giving members a clear, mobile-optimized view of their application status right inside the portal. And we didn't stop there! We help Credit Unions apply AI across the entire lending lifecycle 🔄: origination ➡️ underwriting ➡️ processing ➡️ funding ➡️ collections to further streamline the whole process! 𝐂𝐥𝐮𝐭𝐜𝐡 𝐛𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐭 𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞: 🤖 HAL → AI that automates stips collection to minimize the time from submission to funding (see here https://lnkd.in/ddatJbqC) ⚡ Fastlane → The game changer in loan origination to allow applicants sign their loan docs in session and be done with the whole process in less than three minutes (see here https://lnkd.in/dg6bAjKc) 💬 Message me directly if you’d like to see some of it in action. The most common responses we're getting to our demos are "𝘐'𝘮 𝘣𝘭𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘢𝘸𝘢𝘺!" and "𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦'𝘴 𝘯𝘰 𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘥𝘰 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘨𝘶𝘺𝘴 𝘥𝘰!"

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Agents are swarming into the SaaS space. Join Apurv Bansal from Zenskar and Steven Forth from Ibbaka for a deep dive into how these agents are being priced and emergent best practices for agent pricing. Credit models will be a focus. https://lnkd.in/g-iExbvX #AI #agents #monetization #pricing #billing

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