2024 - The Year of AI
The surprising thing about 2024 wasn’t the fact it was the year of AI in the world of Salesforce, but that it was all packed into two thirds of a year. Einstein Copilot (as it was then known) didn’t become generally available until April, and we’re already at Agentforce 2.0. Of course it’s also coming up for the second year, as the original AI Cloud was being teased in content back in mid-2023.
Looking back over my 2024, it was definitely the a year of AI for me:
Talk at Salesforce World Tour on our Copilot pilot with Arjo
Trailblazer story at Dreamforce with a heavy AI focus
13 of 18 posts on the Bob Buzzard Blog covered AI
3 of 5 posts on Substack
A large chunk of my posts on LinkedIn
Advent of Code
Before moving on to 2025, a few words about Advent of Code 2024. For those that aren’t familiar with this, it’s a two-part programming challenge every day from 1st - 25th December, and a really good way to consume any free time that you find yourself with during the festive season. You can solve the challenges using any language you like - I use Apex because I find the constrained environment of the Salesforce platform adds another dimension.
Last year I got 39 out of 50 stars, and learned a few things about contains method performance and unusual ways to break batch Apex. This year I made 42 stars, and definitely benefited from the experience of the previous year. I also learned about the Bron-Kerbosch algorithm and how to use it to find the maximal clique in an object graph, and what Manhattan distance is and how to calculate it. I was also reminded that while modelling input data as complex objects with many relationships is great for business automation where you want to carry out multiple actions on it, it’s somewhat overkill for solving a single problem, and will almost always cause you to run out of heap on the second part of the challenge.
Predictions for 2025
I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to suggest that 2025 will also be the year of AI, and that we’ll have a new name once Agentforce approaches version 3.0 - the one constant is change (of product names).
I’m also expecting an AI Consultant certification, with less focus on knowing how to configure the Salesforce features and more on making the right design choices to satisfy customer requirements.
I’ll no doubt take on Advent of Code 2025 and fail to hit the 50 once again - I’ll have fun though, and that’s the main thing!
Finally, it feels like the investment can’t keep flooding into the myriad AI vendors and other associated startups, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see the inevitable shake-out start and a few fall by the wayside. Who will be the winners and losers is much harder to speculate on, given how quickly they rise and fall (and sometimes rise again).
One thing’s for sure, it will be another exciting year to be working in tech.