A Salesforce Consultant Shares How He Trained in AI to Secure His Job

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Joey Monroe, a 34-year-old AI strategy advisor based in Oklahoma City. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I’m a senior Salesforce consultant at BlueGator, specifically focused on Salesforce implementations in the nonprofit, arts, culture, and entertainment space. I’ve been here for almost six years, and before that, I spent about a decade working in IT infrastructure.

About a year ago, I felt like my job was at risk. AI systems started to pick up steam and be more widely implemented. It became glaringly obvious to me that tech would be the canary in the coal mine for what would happen in the broader markets, and I needed to adapt.

I decided to train myself in AI to create a market differentiator for my firm and myself. This opened up opportunities to help skill up others in the community and give back, which is something I really enjoy.

Now, I lead project implementations for nonprofit clients, helping them build out their systems and improve operations using Salesforce tools.

Until recently, I didn’t have a formal AI plan

I started playing around with ChatGPT, Gemini, and other generative tools when they began making headlines.

When Salesforce rolled out its agentic AI product, Agentforce, in October 2024, everything changed. That tool started gaining attention not just from consultants like me but also from clients.

Clients would ask, “What do you think about this product? How should we use it? What would you suggest?” We didn’t really have great answers yet because it was so brand new to everyone.

I realized we needed to get involved in a real way

Someone needed to take the lead on this at my firm. We needed to build the knowledge and expertise to answer client questions, have meaningful conversations about whether AI or Agentforce was right for them, and decide what business drivers to consider when taking the plunge. I decided that someone was going to be me.

I fully immersed myself in learning everything I could, both about Agentforce and about AI more broadly. I started reading prompt engineering guides from Google and OpenAI and then went deep into Trailhead, our internal training and learning platform.

It was super impactful to connect with others who were learning the same things. I had many connections within the Salesforce and nonprofit space who were jumping in to learn more about Agentforce. There’s also the Salesforce-sponsored Agentblazer Community via Slack, which brings together people from all over the world who are interested in the product.

Seeing other people’s thoughts around use cases, technical implementation, and strategy really helped cement that knowledge and add additional perspectives to consider when discussing AI strategy with clients.

I went through an internal certification process and kept building on my expertise.

Eventually, we landed a client who wanted a large-scale AI implementation

That was a pivotal moment for me: my first time working on a real-world deployment of agentic AI in a production environment.

We closed on that in May, and we’re still actively building more agents for…