Using Agent Skills

Skills are deep expertise in specific Salesforce products. When the agent uses a skill, it has access to detailed knowledge about APIs, best practices, and implementation patterns.

How to use Agent Skills

How Agent Skills Work

Most of the time, the agent automatically selects the right skill based on your request. If you mention "Data Cloud," the Data Cloud skill activates. If you ask about "deploy my Flow," the Metadata skill kicks in.

You can also explicitly request a skill:

Use the Data Cloud skill to set up identity resolution
for my customer profiles

Use the Agentforce skill to create a service assistant
that can look up order status

Data Cloud Skill

The Data Cloud skill knows how to work with Salesforce Data Cloud APIs. Use it for:

• Data streams — Ingest data from CRM, Marketing Cloud, external sources
• Connections — Set up IngestAPI, MCE, CRM, Snowflake, S3 connectors
• Segments — Create and publish customer segments
• Activation targets — Export data to S3, Azure, GCS, SFTP
• Identity resolution — Unify customer profiles across sources
• Query — Run SQL queries against your data lake

Example prompts:

Create a Data Cloud segment for customers who purchased
in the last 90 days but haven't opened an email in 30 days

Configure identity resolution using email as the primary
match key with fallback to phone number

Agentforce Skill

The Agentforce skill builds AI agents in Salesforce. Use it for:

• Bots — Create and deploy conversational agents
• GenAI Functions — Define individual actions the agent can take
• Plugins — Group functions with instructions
• Planners — Orchestrate how the agent decides what to do
• Apex integration — Connect functions to Apex invocable methods

Example prompts:

Create an Agentforce service agent that can look up orders,
check shipping status, and create return requests

Build a customer support bot that uses our knowledge base
to answer questions

Marketing Cloud Skill

The Marketing Cloud skill handles all Marketing Cloud Engagement operations. Use it for:

• Content Builder — Create and manage emails, images, content blocks
• Data extensions — Create, query, insert, update, upsert data
• Journeys — Fire entry events, manage journey configurations
• Automations — Create and manage automation studio workflows
• Transactional messaging — Send real-time triggered emails
• Subscribers — Manage subscriber records and lists

Example prompts:

Create an HTML email in Content Builder with our
standard header and footer

Create an automation that runs daily to export subscriber
data to our SFTP server

Fire a journey entry event for customer [email protected]
with the purchase data attached

Metadata Skill

The Metadata skill deploys and retrieves Salesforce metadata. Use it for:

• Apex — Classes, triggers, test classes
• Flows — Screen flows, record-triggered flows, scheduled flows
• LWC — Lightning Web Components
• Objects — Custom objects and fields
• Profiles & Permissions — Profiles, permission sets, permission set groups
• Other metadata — Layouts, tabs, reports, dashboards, and 365+ types

Example prompts:

Deploy this Apex class to my sandbox

Retrieve all Flows from production so I can review them

Combining Skills

Complex implementations often use multiple skills. The agent handles this automatically:

Create a unified customer profile in Data Cloud from Sales Cloud
and Marketing Cloud data, then create a segment for high-value
customers and activate it to an Agentforce service agent.

This request uses:

• Data Cloud skill — For connections, identity resolution, segments
• Agentforce skill — For the service agent configuration

The agent orchestrates across skills as needed.

Next Steps