How AI Agents Proved Our Point

Introduction

For over 25 years, we’ve been championing the battle of rigorous analysis, business process mapping, metadata management, and documentation. While a small number of customers shared our vision, we were largely ignored, left shouting our warnings into the void.

Most saw documentation as a low priority, building complex Salesforce Orgs that became “black boxes” of technical debt. This has changed overnight. The arrival of AI agents has exposed critical blind spots in undocumented processes and data governance, transforming our message from important to urgent. The Elements.cloud ethos is no longer beneficial: it’s essential.

How Fortune 500 woke up to the value of process

Back in 1997, we launched a process mapping company, Nimbus. By 2001, we were one of the first Salesforce customers in the UK, and in 2007, we created a process mapping notation (UPN) that Salesforce later adopted as a global standard. Despite this history and our passion for helping people “build the right thing,” the majority of the market saw documentation as a burden. We felt like a “freak show off on the side,” watching as companies racked up technical debt that we knew would eventually haunt them.

However, there was a rich vein of gold. Fortune 500, highly regulated organizations like Nestle, Chevron, Astra Zeneca, and Bank of Montreal. They understood the value of process maps as instructional content for their teams. They also felt the cost of non-compliance with business processes was through massive fines. Little did we know that this content would be critical to instruct digital labor in the form of agents.

Nimbus grew from a startup in a bedroom in a fishing village in the UK to a multi-national business with 100s of enterprise customers, including 10% of the Fortune 500. It was acquired and the founders went their separate ways.

Getting the band back together

We still had this shared passion for getting people to build the right thing, and Elements was launched. Whilst it was architected for any application, we targeted the Salesforce ecosystem. Our message was simple: a lack of documented processes, clear data governance, and metadata management would create a major problem down the road. But without an immediate crisis, our warnings on the sleeper threat of technical debt went largely unheeded.

But not completely. Elements grew its customer base, partners, and revenue by finding evangelists with our shared passion for business analysis and a well-documented org. These were dark days. The first chink of light was when Salesforce purchased licenses, and Elements was made their global standard for customer-facing teams. 

And then Agentforce changed everything. The question we asked ourselves was, “Were we even going to be relevant?”

The inflection point

The landscape was irrevocably changed by the emergence of Agentforce. Agents have exposed the very “black boxes” we’ve been talking about for years, revealing that a lack of documented processes, data governance, and Org configuration is a critical blind spot. Without a clear understanding of an organization’s existing processes, agents simply cannot operate reliably.

As Aaron Levie, CEO Box.com put it, “We need Agents that can deeply understand the context of the business process they’re tied to”. 

This is the very foundation we have been advocating for, and it has suddenly become a prerequisite for any business that wants to leverage Agentforce. The Box.com report  “Becoming an AI-first company” emphasizes that “trust, governance, and security are paramount in this new paradigm”. There is a risk of simply automating a bad process – creating “your mess for less”. The time to address the root of the problem is now.

A recent McKinsey report has revealed that 80% of companies still aren’t seeing any enterprise-level ROI from GenAI, and only 1% say their rollout is “mature.”  Their recommendations resonate with us:

• Organizations are making significant organizational changes to capture value from gen AI, with large companies leading the way. These changes include redesigning workflows, elevating governance, and mitigating risks.
• The redesign of workflows has the biggest effect on an organization’s ability to see the EBIT impact from gen AI use. 21% of organizations using Gen AI have fundamentally redesigned at least some workflows.
• CEO oversight of AI governance is highly correlated with higher self-reported bottom-line impact from gen AI, especially at larger companies. 28% of organizations report that their CEO is responsible for AI governance.

Elements.cloud for agent design and governance

Elements.cloud is perfectly positioned to solve this new, urgent problem. Our Configuration Mining feature can take your Salesforce metadata and automatically build a business process blueprint. This feature instantly turns your “blackbox” Org into a clear, connected “Operational Graph” of processes, data, and metadata. The process that once took months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars now takes minutes.

From this blueprint, our Agent Finder (itself an agent) can automatically identify and categorize agent opportunities. This capability is a game-changer, allowing you to move from a messy, undocumented Org to a prioritized list of agent ideas in a matter of minutes. Agent Finder did a better in 2 minutes than a dozen CTAs in a 90 minute workshop. 

This gives our customers a significant competitive advantage over those still wondering where to even begin with AI. We are no longer shouting into the void. We are the pivotal link that enables businesses to confidently and intelligently deploy AI agents, providing a blueprint for accelerated adoption.

Documentation is key to becoming an Agentforce frontrunner

Agents are exposing critical blind spots in operations, data governance & Org configuration. A business-first approach can automate enterprise operations digitization. It develops an Operational Graph, which is a connected blueprint of processes, data and metadata, that accelerates agentification decisions.

This is not a consultant-heavy project. Every Agentblazer and SI has the foundations to deliver reliable digital labour with Agentforce. I’m delighted our architectural vision has been confirmed by customer engagement. And we are being heard. Because after 25 years my throat is getting sore.