💃 Salesforce in 2026🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerd! 2025 is the year Salesforce pivoted its positioning from merely a CRM that is enhanced by AI, to an Agentic Enterprise Platform 😉.

And while there is still no compelling success story of agentic solutions disrupting how you do business, Salesforce did continue to grow and increase efficiencies in 2025.

So what does the mothership have planned for 2026?

You’d unlock the infinite wealth glitch if you could predict that, but you can at least observe where they’ve been and where they’re directionally headed👇

PRODUCT AND PLATFORM DIRECTION

Is Salesforce Still a CRM company?

YES, Salesforce is still a CRM company.

Sales Cloud and Service Cloud remain the gravitational center of the ecosystem. The world runs on sales pipeline, cases, renewals, and forecasts…and Salesforce is deeply entrenched in enterprise operations 💯.

Across the product portfolio, 2026 is framed as an inflection point where Salesforce evolves from system‑of‑record CRM toward a decision and automation engine built around AI agents and an integrated data layer.

Several product‑line trends stand out for 2026 based on official and ecosystem commentary ⬇️

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☁️ Core clouds (Sales and Service) are being re‑tooled so that Agentforce capabilities are first‑class citizens, with agents orchestrating workflows rather than just predicting outcomes.

🕸️ Data Cloud is positioned as a central hub, tightly integrated with Informatica and MuleSoft, enabling federated access to external and legacy systems as a prerequisite for reliable AI.

🤑 A larger Salesforce stack is necessary to get the most out of their AI offerings - Sales and Service for users to do digital work, Data Cloud to manage and unify data across apps, Informatica to bring an enterprise edge to data that doesn’t already have it, and Mulesoft to pipe the data across the plethora of apps.

“AI works best when you buy more Salesforce” should be their new tagline 😘.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Salesforce AI in 2026

2 things we can count on in 2026-

1) Agentforce will be renamed and rebranded 😁

2) Salesforce will put their best minds on monetizing AI solutions 🧠 

In 2025, AI SKUs (Agentforce + Data Cloud) brought in about $1.4 billion, doubling AI revenue YoY, but still just a small slice of the nearly $40 billion they’ll make this calendar year.

2026 Agentforce revenue is well-positioned with a thicc pipeline, but Salesforce, themeselves, is acknowledging the impact of AI is less than even they’ve expected internally.

So what to expect next year? Here are 3 things

🤖 AI embedded into workflows, not sold as magic

Instead of “build an agent to run your company,” expect AI to-

Draft emails and summaries inside Sales Cloud.

Recommend next actions inside Service flows.

Pre-populate records and validate data.

🧑‍💻 Human-in-the-loop becomes the default

Autonomous agents running wild is a great keynote story and a terrible enterprise reality. 2026 AI will focus on assisted execution, approvals, guardrails, and auditability.

💸 Pricing moves from novelty to value alignment

Salesforce has already changed their Agentforce pricing a few times - volume-based, tranches, and whatever this flex pricing is. Expect continued experimentation, pricing is an art and science 🧑‍🎨 🤝 🧑‍🔬.

In summary, AI agents will NOT replace humans in 2026. At best, AI will quietly remove friction from Salesforce work (if the data foundation is solid).

YOU!

Salesforce Professionals

What will 2026 be for Salesforce professionals?

This is where it gets personal.

From a demand standpoint, 2026 continues a trend we’re already seeing- strategy and design skills are compounding in value.

Talent data across 2025–2027 shows:

📈 Technical Architect demand up 25 to 30% YoY

📈 Solution Architect demand up 20%

📈 Analyst and systems-thinking roles growing faster than pure build roles.

And admins and developers aren’t going anywhere. The backlog of legacy orgs, and their technical debt and complexity 🥵, guarantees years of work.

But expectations are shifting.

Admins

Admins are evolving from ticket-takers into platform owners:

👉 Managing Flow migrations at scale

👉 Owning data quality and readiness

👉 Understanding how AI features impact downstream users

👉 Making tradeoffs, not just changes

Developers

👉 Developers remain essential, especially for:

👉 Backend integrations

👉 Performance-sensitive logic

👉 Custom UX

But the premium is increasingly on senior developers who:

👉 Influence architecture

👉 Govern patterns

👉 Collaborate deeply with architects and analysts

Architects & Consultants

These roles become the system’s control plane:

👉 Data boundaries

👉 Integration strategy

👉 AI risk and governance

👉 Multi-cloud alignment

The market is uneven, yes. Admin and mid-level dev markets feel more saturated. But specialization - data, backend integration, AI readiness, business intelligence, industry knowledge - creates separation.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

Salesforce in 2026 won’t look radically different overnight.

❌ CRM isn’t disappearing.

❌ Admins aren’t being replaced by bots.

❌ Agents aren’t running your company while you sip coffee.

What is happening is slower and more durable-

✅ Salesforce is raising the baseline for what “good” looks like.

✅ AI is becoming infrastructure, not a feature.

✅ Careers are increasingly shaped by how well you think, not just how fast you build.

If you understand the data and the workflows, you’ll be fine 👌.

If you understand the platform and the business, you’ll thrive 💪.

2026 is still a very good year to be a Salesforce professional 🚀

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes