What You Will Find in This Blog
- The 10 most important Salesforce changes from 2025 and why they matter for 2026 planning.
- How Agentforce, Data Cloud and automation advancements will shape the year ahead.
- Key updates to governance, productivity tools and user experience that teams should prioritise.
- The growing importance of data quality and what organisations need to focus on before January.
2025 has been one of the most transformative years the Salesforce ecosystem has seen. With the arrival of the Agentic Enterprise, rapid Data Cloud adoption and significant platform enhancements, many organisations are now looking towards 2026 and asking an important question: what do we need to prepare for?
This year-end review highlights the ten most important Salesforce changes from 2025 and explains what they mean for your organisation in the year ahead.
1. Agentforce becomes the foundation of the future
Dreamforce 2025 made one message very clear. Salesforce is shifting from assistive AI features to true agentic capability.
Agentforce enables autonomous AI agents that can analyse data, take action, follow logic and integrate with workflows across Customer 360, Data Cloud and Slack.
What this means for 2026:
Your readiness for AI will depend on data cleanliness, process clarity and governance maturity.
2. Data Cloud adoption accelerates
2025 saw a major jump in Data Cloud adoption due to improvements in onboarding, connectors and pricing models. Many organisations who previously felt Data Cloud was out of reach are now using it to power unified customer views and analytics.
Why it matters for 2026:
Agentforce relies heavily on structured, unified data. Investing in data foundations early will pay off next year.
3. Flow continues to evolve into the automation engine
Flow took another leap forward in 2025. Key improvements included:
- Enhanced debugging tools
- More powerful reactive components
- Stronger support for Screen Flows
- Clearer error reporting and automation diagnostics
What this means:
If you still have Process Builders or Workflow Rules, 2026 is the year to retire them fully and consolidate everything in Flow.
4. Slack becomes a true automation layer
Slack is no longer simply a communication tool. Workflow Builder now supports conditional paths, AI prompts and agent triggered messages.
Why it matters:
Slack is becoming the front door for agent interactions. Many users will execute tasks via Slack rather than traditional Salesforce interfaces.
5. Outlook Integration, Inbox and Einstein Activity Capture gain momentum
This year, the trio became a core part of Salesforce productivity.
Activity Capture became more reliable, Salesforce Inbox gained smarter features and the Outlook integration was upgraded to offer a smoother user experience.
What this means for 2026:
Teams that adopt these tools will benefit from stronger forecasting, cleaner activity data and less manual admin work.
6. The Dropbox integration reached end of life
Dropbox retired its native Salesforce integration in 2025, prompting many organisations to migrate to Salesforce Files or explore alternatives.
Impact for 2026:
This signals a trend. Older integrations that are not vendor supported will continue to fall away. A more modern and secure integration strategy is now essential.
7. Security, governance and compliance saw major improvements
2025 brought significant updates to:
- Audit Trail
- Permission set reporting
- Field History Tracking
- Data access visibility
Why this matters:
Agentic AI increases the importance of correct data visibility and role-based access. Poor governance will be a blocker for AI adoption.
8. User experience improvements boost productivity
Salesforce delivered multiple enhancements to the everyday user experience, including faster search results, improved list views and cleaner page layouts.
Outcome:
These improvements help teams work faster and lay the foundations for more complex automation next year.
9. Proactive and preventative support became standard
There was a shift in 2025 towards proactive maintenance.
Admins and partners increasingly used monitoring tools, flow analytics and automated alerts to prevent issues before they reached users.
Why it matters:
As automation and AI use increases, continuous improvement becomes an essential discipline.
10. The biggest theme of 2025: Data quality
Almost every major Salesforce update this year included some reference to data quality.
Whether AI, automation or analytics, the message is the same: your data determines your results.
Clean, structured and complete data will separate high performing orgs from those who struggle with AI adoption in 2026.
Final Thoughts
2025 has set the stage for a major shift in how organisations use Salesforce. The businesses that succeed in 2026 will be the ones that:
- Strengthen their data foundations
- Remove outdated automation
- Modernise governance
- Prepare their processes for agentic AI
- Improve user adoption and productivity
If you would like help assessing your organisation’s readiness for 2026, our team would be happy to support you.