I have released version 4.3.7 of the Datatable flow screen component. It fixes a bug where the table wouldn’t display when the Row Action button had the default label and added reactivity to the Preselected Rows attribute.

It costs about $600 per year to sustain UnofficialSF.com, and we’re experimenting with some ad placement to help keep the site running. I apologize for the inconvenience!

Check out him overview of this major new visual component:

Innovation in agentic orchestration is accelerating rapidly, and our automation product teams have been hard at work improving Flow to make it easier than ever to bring agents and human-centered work together. With the Summer ’25 release, we’ve introduced powerful new capabilities that help you embed Agentforce agents into your automations and extract structured data from agent responses. I also have an update on how we’re tapping into MCP to make Flow and Action Platform capabilities available to the full power of all actions —connect any agent technology to the full power of Salesforce actions.

Add agents to automation with Flow & Agentforce

As of Summer ‘25 release, you can now easily insert Agentforce agents into most flows. 

This video from Liz Awad, one of our product managers, demonstrates a flow that features two different embedded Agentforce agents. One of the great strengths of Flow is its ability orchestrate different agents and combine them with business logic that guarantees certainty and safety (often referred to as deterministic processing).

How It’s Done 

Activate your Agentforce Agent in Setup. Then go to a flow that supports the Action element, such as a Screen Flow, an Autolaunched Flow or a Record-Triggered Flow. Add the Action element, and in its property editor, click on the AI Agent Actions category, and you’ll see an action for each of your activated Agentforce agents.

If you have MuleSoft for Flow : Integration installed, you’ll also be able to find actions for sending prompts to OpenAI and Anthropic.

Easily extract information from Agent responses with Structured Outputs

One of the problems we have had to solve in the last year involves the handling of the text output that Agents return. That text is unstructured, just like this post. But suppose you want to use information that the Agent returned in subsequent parts of your flow? You need a way to accomplish several things:

1. You need to instruct the agent on which specific data you want to get back. For example you might want to tell it to return a temperature value labelled ‘Temp’ and formatted in celsius degrees.
2. You need to be able to surface those specific outputs from the agents as resources that can be mapped to the inputs of ‘downstream’ actions. For example, you might want to map the temperature value into an action that calls out to a legacy system that’s very particular about formatting. 

Our Action Platform team worked with our Agentic Orchestration program to solve this by enhancing all of the Agentforce actions to use Structured Outputs, a simple mechanism that lets the builder, at Design Time, identify specific named values that they want to use. These values are passed to the agent as instructions and the agent returns them in a format that the flow can automatically extract. The values also surface as available Design-Time resources that can be mapped to downstream inputs. 

How It’s Done

From the property editor use the Configure Structured Outputs section to define the outputs you want to get back from the agent:

Coming Soon: MCP Server Support for All Invocable Actions

There are now more than 1000 standard actions made available by different Salesforce products, and each month more than 350,000 different custom actions (written in Apex) get used. Most of these are available today in Agentforce, but what if you want to use a different agent technology but still access all of your Salesforce actions and capabilities? 

It will soon be possible to define MCP Servers on the Salesforce Platform. MCP is a new technology that, among other things, standardizes the way that actions can be tapped into by agents. When you create an MCP server, you will be able to add any Salesforce action to it, immediately providing a way to expose actions to your agent of choice. 

Summary: Orchestrate Agents Today with Flow and Actions

You can use generally available Flow and Action features today to orchestrate rich interactions that mix agents and humans. This allows the immediate combination of the reasoning power of agents and the certainty of process automation, which provides a way to insert agentic reasoning into all manner of business processes while maintaining control and safety. I encourage you to try our latest features out!

Disclaimer: This is more of a thought exercise than a valid use case, and contains some anti-patterns. It is meant to give one an example of parsing a prompt’s output with Apex.

Scenario

From a screen flow on the account page, we want to surface a list of the top 5 best products most likely to sell at an account. This information should be based on industry trends and purchasing history of the account.

We also want to know how much time passed since the last purchase of the product, and how many times the product has been purchased in the last year.

These top 5 products should be displayed in a table, from which the user can select one or more to create an opportunity and a related list of opportunity products.

We’ll use a template triggered prompt flow to ground the prompt builder with the appropriate data from the account.

The Tricky Part

The prompt builder output can’t simply return records. We can only access the output in its rawest form: as string of JSON. We’ll need to parse the JSON and map it to something that can be displayed in a table component in the screen flow.

The Solution

There are different table components available in flow. The out-of-the-box table component can only be used to display records. There are third party components that can display a list of Apex-defined objects. For simplicity, we are going with the former. That means every piece of data we want to show needs a corresponding field. We need two new custom fields: Time Passed from Last Purchase and How Many Times Purchased In Last Year.

Since our focus is on getting JSON from the prompt and parsing it, we won’t spend too much time on the precise business logic. Here’s what the template triggered prompt flow looks like.

Here’s what the prompt looks like:
You are a Sales Rep for the {!$Organization.Name} company.
You want to understand what would be next best order for the customer {!$Input:Account.Name} based on his previous orders
As the orders you will lookup in the last year orders
{!$Flow:Recommended_Next_Best_Product_Flow.Prompt}
Summarize the products to count how many times each product have been purchased but don't put this result in the answer.
Also try to understand from the purchase dates when it was the last time each product has been purchased, also don't put this calculation in the answer.
Based on this calculation propose 5 products to order that might be suggested for the next order for the customer based on the products that have been purchased more times or that is a long time since the last purchase.
Do not include "*" in the product name
Try to suggest products with the Product Family of Services or Software
Try to suggest also product that are more suitable for the customer industry that is {!$Input:Account.Industry}
Order the results from the most suggested to the less suggested.
For each suggested product, say how much time passed from the last purchase (in months or weeks) and specify how many times it has been purchased in the last year.
Avoid suggesting products like shipping charges since they are automatically calculated.
In the output of this prompt, return the 5 products in a list of objects. Each object should include the following attributes: ProductName, ProductId, ProductFamily, TimePassedFromLastPurchase, HowManyTimesPurchasedInLastYear.
In the output of this prompt, only include the JSON array of the objects. Do not include any other text.
Delete the "```json" at the beginning of the prompt, and delete the "```" at the end of the prompt.

Pay close attention to the last few lines of the prompt.

• In the output of this prompt, return the 5 products in a list of objects. Each object should include the following attributes: ProductName, ProductId, ProductFamily, TimePassedFromLastPurchase, HowManyTimesPurchasedInLastYear.
• In the output of this prompt, only include the JSON array of the objects. Do not include any other text.
• Delete the ““`json” at the beginning of the prompt, and delete the ““`” at the end of the prompt.

Note: It is critical to remove the “`json from the beginning and the “` at the end of the prompt output.

Parsing the Prompt Output

Remember, this will be launched in a screen flow. The screen flow will be distributed on the account lightning record page. It’ll take that account id, get the entire account record, then pass the whole record to the prompt builder.

The output from the prompt must be manually mapped to a text variable, in order to pass it to the Apex action.

Here is what the Apex code looks like.

public class ProductInfoParser {
    
    // Inner class to represent the structure of the incoming JSON
    public class ProductInfo {
        public String ProductName;
        public String ProductId;
        public String ProductFamily;
        public String TimePassedFromLastPurchase;
        public Integer HowManyTimesPurchasedInLastYear;
    }
    
    // Wrapper class to handle the input from Flow
    public class Request {
        @InvocableVariable(required=true)
        public String jsonInput; // The input from Flow, a single string containing the JSON array
    }
    
    // Wrapper class to handle the output back to Flow
    public class Response {
        @InvocableVariable
        public List<Product2> products; // The list of Product2 objects to return
    }
    
    // Invocable method to be called from Flow
    @InvocableMethod(label='Parse JSON and Map to Product2' description='Parses JSON array and maps the values to a List<Product2>')
    public static List<Response> mapJsonToProducts(List<Request> requests) {
        List<Response> responses = new List<Response>();
        Request req = requests[0];
        Response res = new Response();
        res.products = new List<Product2>();
        
        // Deserialize the JSON array into a list of ProductInfo objects
        List<ProductInfo> productInfoList = (List<ProductInfo>) JSON.deserialize(req.jsonInput, List<ProductInfo>.class);
        System.debug(productInfoList);
        
        // Map the ProductInfo to actual Product2 objects
        for (ProductInfo info : productInfoList) {
            Product2 prod = new Product2();
            prod.Name = info.ProductName;
            prod.Id = info.ProductId;
            prod.Family = info.ProductFamily;
            prod.Time_Passed_From_Last_Purchase__c = info.TimePassedFromLastPurchase;
            
            // Convert integer to string for the text field
            prod.How_Many_Times_Purchased_In_Last_Year__c = String.valueOf(info.HowManyTimesPurchasedInLastYear);
            
            // Add the mapped product to the response list
            res.products.add(prod);
        }
        // Add the response with the list of products to the responses list
        responses.add(res);
        
        // Return the responses containing the lists of Product2 objects
        return responses;
    }
}

Important: The object attributes of the JSON returned by the prompt builder output must match the attributes of the Apex class. Note the attributes of the inner class ProductInfo match exactly: ProductName, ProductId, ProductFamily, TimePassedFromLastPurchase, HowManyTimesPurchasedInLastYear.

These must match in order for us to take advantage of the system method JSON.deserialize(). It is possible to create a custom JSON parser, but that is both messy and unnecessary.

The remainder of the flow takes the top recommended products returned from the Apex, and renders them in a table. The user may then select the products, and the flow will create an opportunity and related opportunity products.

Key Takeaways

• Manually assign a text variable to hold the JSON string returned in the prompt output. You’ll need it to pass into the Apex.
• Be sure to include the following in the prompt instructions: Delete the "```json" at the beginning of the prompt, and delete the "```" at the end of the prompt.
• The object attributes of the JSON output of the prompt builder must match the attributes of the Apex class.