💃 Salesforce Professionals in 10 Years🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerd! What will your Salesforce role look like in 10 years?

Consider this-

It took 50 years for cars to be everywhere. 20yrs for the internet to be ubiquitous. 10yrs seems like a reasonable time for AI to do its thing 🤷🏻.

Let’s take a look at 0 to 10 years into the future of Salesforce professionals - broken down by the state of the mothership, the job market, AI and finally Salesforce professionals + AI 👇

0-3 YEARS IN THE FUTURE

Salesforce Professionals + AI | 0-3 years

☁️ Salesforce, the company

The current rate of high-single-digit growth continues. Salesforce needs to deliver a compelling, real-life AI success story to get back to double-digits.

🧑‍💻 Salesforce Professionals Job Market

Plateau or slight growth in the job market. Salesforce’s decreasing growth cruve directly trickles down into Salesforce roles.

AI is a tool, but not ready to replace you, but the pure potential is water on any job market fire.

🤖 AI

GenAI is ok! It’s taking a little work off of your plate - creates user stories, test scripts, and formula fields.

Not enough to replace you 🙂 but not enough to get you down to a 4-day work week 😢.

🤝 Salesforce Professionals + AI

Let’s put it this way - of that intern who shows up late everyday with a $18 starbucks smoothie is ever fired, you will be expected to replace them with AI…and AI would be better 💯.

But is AI at your fingertips, augmenting your every movement, thought, and breath like an Ironman suit? Nah.

3-7 YEARS IN THE FUTURE

Salesforce Professionals + AI | 3-7 years

☁️ Salesforce, the company

Salesforce will continue to grow. They may even clip double-digit % growth with some banger AI releases that directly increase high-profile customer’s revenue, like Disney, Toyota, and Amex.

🧑‍💻 Salesforce Professionals Job Market

A net-loss in headcount. Why hire 5 admins when you can hire one that knows how to manage a gaggle of AI agents?

There will still be some legacy businesses struggling to get on the AI-train and maintaining a hefty human team, but most understand they need to make AI work or they’ll get out-competed.

🤖 AI

GenAI is still really, really good. But it’s just a slice of the AI-pie 🥧.

There are Flow builder agents, page layout configuration agents, and data conversion agents 🤯. And there are agents that orchestrate other agents 🤯🤯🤯.

🤝 Salesforce Professionals + AI

If this was a workout at the gym-

🤖 AI would do the high sets, low weight. 6 sets of 20 curls @ 10lbs. AI will build reports, automations, objects, fields and pages.

🧑 Humans would do low sets, high weight. 1 max rep of 135lb curl 💪. Set the CRM-design strategy and deliver all of the context to AI for it to build.

You will be doing most critical work. Cool, strategic stuff. But little else.

7-10 YEARS IN THE FUTURE

Salesforce Professionals + AI | 7-10 years

☁️ Salesforce, the company

Salesforce will continue to grow but at legacy-industry, single-digit rates. Entrenchment is real, so the demand for resources required to implement, enhance, support, and maintain Salesforce orgs will remain steady, but…

🧑‍💻 Salesforce Professionals Job Market

Salesforce professionals headcount will continue to fall 📉.

Maybe the bottom is discovered and headcount stabilizes.

The human-touch will still be required for stakeholder alignment, communication finesse, and change management.

The role will be responsible for Salesforce, but it will be to support the AI. For example - data integrity, tweaking the trust layer, and sitting on the AI governance committee.

🤖 AI

AGI? Maaayyyybeeee.

Autonomous AI? 100% without a doubt. You will be coworkers with AI agents. Some may have more responsibility than you…if you’re a consultant, some may bill a higher rate than you 😳.

🤝 Salesforce Professionals + AI

You will have AI direct reports - you’ll be responsible for onboarding, training, and overseeing AI agents. Communicating feedback to your boss - “this agent is rocking it, will be ready to go next week, but this agent needs work - here is my write up for the AI developer.”

You will have AI peers - you’ll work together to strategize how to achieve max ROI, gather requirements and convert them to solutions, and deliver value to stakeholders. AI can plan, design, build, and QA test the things. You will align stakeholders, communicate to leadership, and get leadership-approval for additional agent-types to fill knowledge and resource gaps.

You will have AI coworkers that have more responsibility than you. AI will provide you the requirements on what to deliver to it. You’ll be thanked for your work. In the published success story, your company will list the AI Agent that made the success possible. You read it to the end but you’re not mentioned.

You read that correctly - the most valuable AI models will start and end with AI.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

The short-term outlook is the easiest to see…it’s closest to your nose.

The long-term outlook isn’t truly known. But what is for sure is that your role, like every knowledge role in the world, will look different when AI is mature.

Just like the automobile and the internet did, AI has big plans for you 🙏.

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