New Year, New Release

Salesforce

We’re a couple of weeks out from the Spring ‘25 release of Salesforce and there’s a few crackers in there like Local Dev GA, Zip Handling and Formula Evaluation in Apex, and native visual progress indicators for Lighting Flow. If you were expecting wall to wall Agentforce, with not much for those continuing to use the non-AI features, then you are in for a pleasant surprise. If you are considering Agentforce, but put off because you can’t track usage, you are also in for a pleasant surprise as Conversation Consumption cards come to the Digital Wallet. Better late than never eh?

We’re also saying farewell to Copilot in Spring ‘25, as it gets a catchy rebrand to Agentforce or Agentforce (Default), thus clearly delineating it from the rest of Agentforce. Something tells me the renaming isn’t done yet, so probably best to avoid getting any tattoos.

Marc Benioff has been in the news as he revealed:

“We’re not adding any more software engineers next year because we have increased the productivity this year with Agentforce and with other AI technology that we’re using for engineering teams by more than 30%”

This has been slightly hard to square with the number of software engineering jobs Salesforce is currently hiring for:

But the key part of the statement is ‘adding any more’ - given the size of Salesforce, 722 will likely just be backfilling leavers rather than increasing the team, so I guess it’s technically correct. It’s also interesting that there’s no talk of a reduction in the number of software engineers, even with 30% greater productivity, just leaving it the exact same size. Given that some organisation are heading for another round of layoffs then that suggests to me that the need for software engineers remains as strong as ever at Salesforce, but that message won’t shift Agentforce licenses will it?

The reaction to this has also been interesting, with the focus on what development tools are in use to provide such productivity gains. I think that’s a bit of a narrow focus - maybe the engineers are more productive because they aren’t having to sit through as many meetings as they used to, relying on AI to attend in their stead and tell them what they need to know. Or perhaps AI is creating their demo and training decks, leaving the engineers to focus on the engineering - how great would that be?

Other

Are we seeing the return of Jack Welch’s beloved stack ranking? Meta announced they would exit 5% of their lowest performers and backfill them over 2025, eliminating the people rather than the roles. One surprise for me here is that they aren’t redirecting (or claiming to redirect) the investment from people to AI, which seems to be the trend right now.

Most months a new AI offering embarrasses the vendor, and January 2025 is no exception, as Apple suspends their AI powered iPhone news alert system after it turns out to be spreading fake news, but branded with legitimate news organisation logos. We know that Luke Littler is a darts prodigy, but winning the PDC World Championship Final before he played in it truly marks him out as a generational talent.