In this interview, host Leah talks with Mark Wakeland, EVP of Ford Deploy Engineers, about the rapid adoption of AI agents by enterprise customers and the practical strategies for successful implementation. Mark explains that customers now recognize AI agents as essential and are eager to integrate them across multiple platforms, requiring orchestration beyond single applications. He advises a "think big, start small" approach, emphasizing that simple use cases can deliver high value and be scaled enterprise‑wide. To manage the blend of deterministic business processes with the probabilistic nature of large language models, Ford introduced AgentForce Script, which provides guardrails while leveraging LLM capabilities. The conversation then shifts to the "Headless 360" model unveiled at the TDX conference, which allows agents to be deployed on any platform, extending the 27‑year legacy of Ford’s unified platform. Mark highlights how the development lifecycle is changing: agents now write, test, and document code, and even generate marketing material, turning engineers into managers of AI agents. Finally, he stresses the importance of reusing existing enterprise workflows, security frameworks, and admin tools, ensuring that new AI capabilities augment rather than replace legacy investments.
Chapters
I want to welcome our first guest, Mark Wakeland, EVP, Ford Deploy Engineers. Mark, it's so good to have you. Hey, Leah.
How are you? It's great to see you too.
Yes. Now, Mark, one of your superpowers, and I have witnessed firsthand, is you can connect with customers like no other. So you've been out there talking to customers. Tell us, what are you seeing with customers in the industry?
I think the big realization is this is happening. Yeah.
Yeah.
Every customer now realizes this is happening and it needs to be a part of their plan.
Yes.
I think the other thing we're seeing is an acceleration in their ambitions to go and execute on this mandate.
Yeah.
And how do you do that? How do you execute faster? How do you know which use cases you should be focused on? Where do you start? These are the kinds of things that we've been dealing with customers. I think the other thing we're seeing is customers are realizing that this won't happen inside a single application space or in a single platform or environment. And actually what we're going to need to do is orchestration across platforms and across agents in order to really make sure that the power of this incredibly transformative technology can be a part of the holistic end-to-end business processes that power their organizations.
That's so important because there are— no one has one system. We've got to integrate across all. But there's so many options out there and there's so many, I mean, Customers are hearing from so many different people, different solutions. What advice would you have for any customers trying to get on this journey?
Yeah, well, we've worked with hundreds of customers with our forward deployed engineering team.
Yes.
Over the last year or so. And I think we do start to see some themes of those that are being successful. And perhaps one of the more common themes is this idea of thinking big, but starting small. Okay. Now that could be a really simple use case.
Okay.
And we shouldn't ever confuse the simplicity of a use case with its potential value. Right.
Yeah, but that simple use case, you gotta then get it from something small to something big that scales enterprise level.
You do. And I think this is really where over the course of the last year, as I say, we have learned a tremendous amount with our amazing pioneering customers in this space. Right. And I think as we move from the very simple use cases, we're doing things like, where's my order? We're doing things like FAQ agents, right? Really pretty straightforward use cases. Right. But we've seen demand from customers to move into much more complex business process orchestrations. And what that's requiring is the ability for us to blend determinism and probabilistic technologies together. And this is where the introduction of something like Agent4 Script has given us the ability to really bind the execution of a deterministic business flow. Something needs to happen, it needs to happen every time, it needs to happen the same way. Some wild hallucination from an agent is just not gonna work.
That's right.
In some of our major financial services customers, indeed any of our customers, right?
Right, right.
So how do we start to bind the agents within the guardrails of reasoning that we can control with Agentforce Script, but at the same time really capturing the benefits of all of the incredible primitives that we see from large language models, from text generation to classification and reasoning. So really now we're in an absolute game-changing space.
Mm-hmm.
With the introduction of Agent for Script.
But it's, it's, there's so many ways I wanna go with this because you just unlock so many gems there. And I hope everybody's picking up what you're putting down. 'Cause some good stuff here. One of the things in talking about Agent Script, the builder and building these agents, I wanna take a step back because AI is disrupting so much, including the development lifecycle. Humans are no longer the only developers in the room. We are now developing alongside agents. Hence the reason we are moving to the headless space.
Yeah.
Can you talk a little bit about, you know, the new headless space and why we're doing this and how we're collaborating in the development lifecycle with agents?
Yeah, absolutely. And let me take the first part on the role.
Yes.
Because I think our role is changing. You know, we have moved from being the writers of code, if you will, to really becoming now the managers of agents that are writing code. Right. The agents are not only writing the code, they're inspecting the code, they're testing the code, they're documenting the code. And you know what, Lior? It doesn't even end there. Outside of the agent development lifecycle, we have agents creating the marketing materials. We have agents warming up the pipeline. You know, so—
I wish we had agents doing my laundry.
Can we get that? Well, that's coming soon. But it really is, you know, starting to change our relationship and the way we actually go about executing this work. And this is really one of the big drivers of why we introduced recently at our TDX conference the concept of, of headless, right? Our headless 360 model.
Yes.
Really giving us the ability to not only develop but surface these agents really anywhere that the customer would want to use and engage with them. So it doesn't have to be the Salesforce UI anymore, right? You can bring the incredible power of Agentforce and these agents to really any platform in any space that you want to operate it on. On, but at the same time, take all of the benefits and all of the value of the 27 years of history we have creating this amazing, trusted, and unified platform. So it really is a complete unlock for the way these agents can operate.
It's all the way around from, like you said, serving up in the experiences for their users down to opening up the development on our platform and still utilizing those 27— I love that— 27 years of goodness. I mean, down to our sharing model, everything cooked into the platform accessible to agents.
Well, I think for so many of our customers, their ability to both accelerate in this agentic era, but not throw away everything they built in their enterprises, you know, their ability to be able to reuse the inherent business workflows they have, the security platforms and frameworks that they've established, all of this stuff is readily available to them.
And still important, right? I mean, I, I think of down to the level of our admin and developers, all the stuff that they have built and continue to build are still a big part of the conversation.
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it's an incredibly exciting time. It is. I think with AgentForce and Headless 360, we really are unlocking entire new avenues for our customers here. It's amazing.
Mark, I could sit here and talk with you all day because I know why your superpower is connecting with people, because you just pull people in. But I got a show to do here. So Mark, thank you so much for being here.
