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Agentforce is built for enterprise teams. Its declarative tooling and API-first architecture make it straightforward to compose assistants and automate CRM-centric workflows. But when agents need to work with data beyond Amazon Athena data, many implementations fall back on periodic syncs or bespoke middleware to replicate external systems into local stores. That adds complexity, creates governance and maintenance overhead, introduces sync delays, and limits the real-time potential of your agents.
CData Connect AI fills this gap with direct, live connectivity to hundreds of enterprise apps, databases, ERPs, and finance platforms. Using CData's remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server, Agentforce agents can securely read, write, and act on fresh, contextual data at runtime; no replication required. The result is grounded responses, real-time decisions, and cross-system automations with fewer moving parts and stronger control.
This article outlines the steps required to configure Amazon Athena connectivity in Connect AI, register the MCP server in Agentforce, and build a workflow that queries Amazon Athena data data.
CData provides the easiest way to access and integrate live data from Amazon Athena. Customers use CData connectivity to:
Users frequently integrate Athena with analytics tools like Tableau, Power BI, and Excel for in-depth analytics from their preferred tools.
To learn more about unique Amazon Athena use cases with CData, check out our blog post: https://www.cdata.com/blog/amazon-athena-use-cases.
Before you begin, you'll need a few credentials mentioned below:
Note: You can create the base64 encoded version of MCP_AUTH using any Base64 encoding tool.
Connectivity to Amazon Athena from Agentforce is made possible through CData Connect AI Remote MCP. To interact with Amazon Athena data from Agentforce, we start by creating and configuring a Amazon Athena connection in CData Connect AI.
To authorize Amazon Athena requests, provide the credentials for an administrator account or for an IAM user with custom permissions: Set to the access key Id. Set to the secret access key.
Note: Though you can connect as the AWS account administrator, it is recommended to use IAM user credentials to access AWS services.
To obtain the credentials for an IAM user, follow the steps below:
To obtain the credentials for your AWS root account, follow the steps below:
If you are using the CData Data Provider for Amazon Athena 2018 from an EC2 Instance and have an IAM Role assigned to the instance, you can use the IAM Role to authenticate. To do so, set to true and leave and empty. The CData Data Provider for Amazon Athena 2018 will automatically obtain your IAM Role credentials and authenticate with them.
In many situations it may be preferable to use an IAM role for authentication instead of the direct security credentials of an AWS root user. An AWS role may be used instead by specifying the . This will cause the CData Data Provider for Amazon Athena 2018 to attempt to retrieve credentials for the specified role. If you are connecting to AWS (instead of already being connected such as on an EC2 instance), you must additionally specify the and of an IAM user to assume the role for. Roles may not be used when specifying the and of an AWS root user.
For users and roles that require Multi-factor Authentication, specify the and connection properties. This will cause the CData Data Provider for Amazon Athena 2018 to submit the MFA credentials in a request to retrieve temporary authentication credentials. Note that the duration of the temporary credentials may be controlled via the (default 3600 seconds).
In addition to the and properties, specify , and . Set to the region where your Amazon Athena data is hosted. Set to a folder in S3 where you would like to store the results of queries.
If is not set in the connection, the data provider connects to the default database set in Amazon Athena.
👁 Configuring a connection (Salesforce is shown)A Personal Access Token (PAT) is used to authenticate the connection to Connect AI from Agentforce. It is best practice to create a separate PAT for each service to maintain granularity of access.
With the connection configured and a PAT generated, we are ready to connect to Amazon Athena data from Agentforce.
Install packages:
pip install requests asyncio langchain-mcp-adapters
Create config.py (replace placeholders with your actual values). It should define:
import base64 # --- MCP (CData Connect AI) --- EMAIL = "[email protected]" PAT = "your_PAT" MCP_BASE_URL = "https://mcp.cloud.cdata.com/mcp" MCP_AUTH = base64.b64encode(f"{EMAIL}:{PAT}".encode()).decode() # --- Salesforce Agentforce --- SFDC_DOMAIN = "https://your_domain.my.salesforce.com" SFDC_CLIENT_ID = "your_SFDC_CLIENT_ID" SFDC_CLIENT_SECRET = "your_SFDC_CLIENT_SECRET" AGENT_ID = "your_AGENT_ID"
The Python script has three main sections:
Open a terminal in the project directory where the script is and run:
python agentforce_script.py
import asyncio
import requests
import time
import uuid
from langchain_mcp_adapters.client import MultiServerMCPClient
from config import SFDC_DOMAIN, SFDC_CLIENT_ID, SFDC_CLIENT_SECRET, AGENT_ID, MCP_BASE_URL, MCP_AUTH
# ---------------- Salesforce / Einstein Agent ---------------- #
def get_salesforce_token():
"""Fetch a fresh Salesforce OAuth token using client credentials."""
print(" Requesting fresh Salesforce token...")
token_url = f"{SFDC_DOMAIN}/services/oauth2/token"
data = {
"grant_type": "client_credentials",
"client_id": SFDC_CLIENT_ID,
"client_secret": SFDC_CLIENT_SECRET,
}
headers = {"Content-Type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"}
resp = requests.post(token_url, data=data, headers=headers)
resp.raise_for_status()
token_data = resp.json()
print(" Got access token.")
return token_data["access_token"], token_data["instance_url"]
def start_agent_session(access_token):
"""Start a session with Salesforce Einstein Agent."""
session_url = f"https://api.salesforce.com/einstein/ai-agent/v1/agents/{AGENT_ID}/sessions"
payload = {
"externalSessionKey": str(uuid.uuid4()),
"instanceConfig": {"endpoint": SFDC_DOMAIN},
"streamingCapabilities": {"chunkTypes": ["Text"]},
"bypassUser": True,
}
headers = {
"Content-Type": "application/json",
"Authorization": f"Bearer {access_token}",
}
resp = requests.post(session_url, json=payload, headers=headers)
resp.raise_for_status()
session_data = resp.json()
print(f" Agent session started: {session_data['sessionId']}")
return session_data["sessionId"]
def post_message_to_agent(access_token, session_id, message_text):
"""Send a message to the Salesforce Einstein Agent session."""
messages_url = f"https://api.salesforce.com/einstein/ai-agent/v1/sessions/{session_id}/messages"
payload = {
"message": {
"sequenceId": int(time.time() * 1000),
"type": "Text",
"text": message_text,
},
"variables": [],
}
headers = {
"Content-Type": "application/json",
"Authorization": f"Bearer {access_token}",
}
resp = requests.post(messages_url, json=payload, headers=headers)
resp.raise_for_status()
return resp.json()
# ---------------- MCP part ---------------- #
async def query_mcp():
"""Query MCP server for catalogs and a sample query."""
mcp_client = MultiServerMCPClient(
connections={
"default": {
"transport": "streamable_http",
"url": MCP_BASE_URL,
"headers": {"Authorization": f"Basic {MCP_AUTH}"},
}
}
)
tools = await mcp_client.get_tools()
print("Discovered MCP tools:", [t.name for t in tools])
# List catalogs
get_catalogs_tool = next(t for t in tools if t.name == "getCatalogs")
catalogs = await get_catalogs_tool.ainvoke({})
print("Catalogs:", catalogs)
# Run a sample query
query_tool = next(t for t in tools if t.name == "queryData")
query_result = await query_tool.ainvoke({
"query": "SELECT * FROM [AmazonAthena].[PUBLIC].[EMPLOYEES] LIMIT 5"
})
print("Query result:", query_result)
return catalogs, query_result
# ---------------- Main ---------------- #
async def main():
# Step 1: MCP
catalogs, query_result = await query_mcp()
# Step 2: Salesforce token and agent
access_token, _ = get_salesforce_token()
session_id = start_agent_session(access_token)
# Step 3: Post MCP results to agent with instructions
context_message = (
f"You are a helpful assistant.\n"
f"The following MCP data was retrieved:\n\n"
f"Catalogs: {catalogs}\n"
f"Query result: {query_result}\n\n"
f"Please answer the user's question based on this data: "
f"List all available catalogs and summarize the query results."
)
response = post_message_to_agent(access_token, session_id, context_message)
print("\n Agent response:")
print(response)
if __name__ == "__main__":
asyncio.run(main())
Agentforce lets you orchestrate AI agents and automate CRM workflows. With live connectivity through CData Connect AI and the remote MCP Server, your agents can operate on real-time, contextual data across your stack CRMs, ERPs, databases, finance platforms, and more.
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