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2026 Roadmap for Salesforce Admins: AI, Agentforce, and Emerging Trends
About this Episode
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jennifer Lee, Joshua Birk, and Kate Lessard from the Admin Evangelist team at Salesforce.
Join us as we look at what's next for admins and Agentforce in 2026 and revisit our predictions from last year.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jennifer Lee, Joshua Birk, and Kate Lessard.
Revisiting our predictions for 2025
Happy New Year! Last January, I asked the Admin Evangelist team to make predictions for 2025. So let's check in on those and see how we did.
Josh Birk promised that admins would find building with Agentforce to be easier than they expected. I think that's turned out to be true, especially with resources from Salesforce like Agentforce NOW to help you get started. However, building agents is only part of AI adoption. There's still plenty of work to be done to get organizational buy-in and get the most out of Agentforce.
Jennifer Lee was excited about the potential of Setup with Agentforce. And while these new features didn't make it out of pilot in 2025, she's still excited about how much easier things will be when it goes live. And if you want to see it in action, check out the Admin Keynote from Dreamforce '25.
Finally, Kate Lessard was all about security for 2025 and how important it will be for AI adoption. Time and again, what she's found is that getting Agentforce buy-in at your organization starts with a clear governance story. Dreamforce '25 featured our first-ever Security Keynote, so this is a topic that will continue to be top-of-mind for admins.
What's on the 2026 Roadmap for Salesforce Admins?
Next, I wanted to ask the team to make predictions for 2026.
For Josh, it's not just about the agents that admins can build. It's about the agents that help you get more things done on the backend. With tools like Setup powered by Agentforce, Agentforce for Security, and Agentforce Vibes, there are more and more ways to amplify your skills with AI. In other words, it's agents all the way down.
Jen, as always, is all about automation. As she puts it, "Without any type of automation, how good are your agents?" In 2026, she sees admins building with smaller, simpler flows that leave the heavy lifting to AI agents. With your Agentforce skills amplifying your automation skills, you can simplify complicated processes without breaking a sweat.
Meanwhile, for Kate, 2026 will be all about finding new partners in the organization. Admins will need a seat at the table with security teams, legal teams, and business leadership to ensure a trusted AI implementation.
In 2026, admins will have the agency to do what?
Finally, on the theme of agents and agency, I asked the team: "In 2026, admins will have the agency to do… what?"
For Jen, it's bringing innovation into your company by being at the forefront of everything that's going on with Salesforce. Trying new tools, looking for new ways to simplify business processes, and becoming the AI expert at your organization.
Josh gives some examples of that expertise in action. He predicts that admins will feel more empowered to jump in and build Lightning Web Components or even an Apex class with the help of AI. It's not about replacing developers, but expanding the potential for collaboration.
Obviously, Kate is focused on the importance of proactive AI governance. "When governance is reactive, admins get forced into cleanup mode," she says. So Salesforce Admins need to build strong partnerships with their stakeholders to make sure any AI implementation is safe and secure.
Be sure to listen to the full episode for insights from Kate, Josh, and Jen. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday. Happy New Year!
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Full show transcript
Mike:
Happy New Year and welcome to 2026 and the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Well, this year, we're going to kick things off by revisiting a tradition we started last year, which was future-gazing, with Josh Birk, Jennifer Lee and Kate Lessard on the Admin Evangelist team. Now, in this episode, we're going to get you started for 2026 by revisiting all of our predictions from 2025, and then exploring what lies ahead for Salesforce admins in this new year. From Agentforce breakthroughs to proactive governance, everybody brought some very sharp insights and a few surprises. And because it's the new year, it's a fresh start and the perfect time to plan your roadmap ahead for this year. So with that, let's get everybody back on the podcast.
Okay. So welcome back everyone to the podcast.
Jennifer Lee:
Hello.
Josh Birk:
Oh, hi.
Mike:
Great. I didn't call you out specifically. It's always like I've heard the story of you put 10 people in a room, one person will emerge as the leader. So I like to say intros like that and then just see who's going to speak first, because it's like, "Oh, you're going to go. No, you're going to go. No, you're going to go."
Josh Birk:
It's a very bold interview strategy, to actually ask a question and just wait for the silence to break itself.
Mike:
Yeah. It also is bold interview strategy of here's a podcast and a welcome and silence.
Kate Lessard:
Oh, I was on mute. I apparently still haven't figured that out.
Mike:
Goals for 2026.
Kate Lessard:
Aiming high.
Mike:
I still feel like they sell those shirts that say, "You're on mute."
Kate Lessard:
Well, maybe my Secret Santa will get one for me.
Mike:
One can hope, right? All right. So I will link to in the show notes, we did this podcast in what sounds weird of like a hundred years ago, 2024 for 2025. And I thought it would be fun to revisit that, because we've replayed it, but also revisit each of your predictions, and then have you break out the crystal ball, or Johnny Carson used to use an envelope, that shows how old I am, and look to the future of 2026. So Josh, we're going to start with you.
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Mike:
You said last year that admins would find Agentforce easier than expected. Did that hold up? Dun, dun, dun.
Josh Birk:
Dun, dun, dun. First of all, I think that was almost like a cheat strategy there, because I think when we recorded this, everybody thought building agents was going to be pretty hard. So anything we've done to make that easier, I think the predictions come pretty true. I don't have the numbers on hand, on me right now, but we've had a lot of success with the Agentforce NOW, the virtual workshops that this team has helped host and present. I don't know, Mike, what was your biggest audience number? It was like a few hundred, right?
Mike:
Oh, easily. But that aside, I think it's more of people aren't afraid.
Josh Birk:
Yeah, yeah. I think people aren't afraid, and I think the tooling... First of all, the tooling has gotten really good and the tooling looks like, if we're moving into the prediction phase, the tooling looks like it's getting better too. So I think that one held true. I feel like people are... It's not the building the agents, it's the can I make this into a use case that will convince my CTO to help me buy this agent kind of thing. But when it comes to actually understanding agents and topics and actions and things like that, I think our audience has done a pretty good job of grasping it.
Mike:
It's almost like a Lego brick problem. We understand the Lego bricks, we've got so many things we could build, it's what do we build next.
Josh Birk:
Right. It's one thing when you're doing the page-by-page, step-by-step thing. It's the other thing when you've got the child's basket of random Legos.
Mike:
Right, Lego bricks.
Josh Birk:
Lego bricks.
Mike:
Yeah, yeah, I'm reminded of that. Jen, it's always automation with you, but a little bit of a divergent, and I feel like you were on the right path, you probably had a secret futuristic whisper. Your big prediction for 2025 was that Cheryl's team would give us agents to instantly troubleshoot user access. Did we get that?
Jennifer Lee:
Kind of. So that's currently in closed pilot, and what I've seen definitely matches what I had predicted. So what I've seen is the tool does figure out, why does Josh have this permission, but Kate doesn't? And you don't have to go through and dig in setup to figure that out, you can go and use the tool, Setup Powered by Agentforce, to talk to the agent, and then it'll come up and say, "Okay, here's why." It could be the sharing role or whatever the reason is, you're in some type of public group, and then it will explain to you all that, and then ask if you want them to take action.
So it's even gone beyond just user access. Behind the scenes, I've seen flow creation, data modeling when you're creating a new app, being able to surface up, "Here are the requirements." Then it comes back and says, "Here's existing fields that we think you can just use, and then here are some new ones." But it all comes down to human-in-the-loop, "We're going to explain things to you. Is it okay for me to take that next step to actually do it?" So yeah, I'm excited for when this goes to GA, and I know Cheryl's team is working very hard in making that happen.
Mike:
Yeah. You think of the amount of stuff that has to get done in the background for it to understand all of that, insane, I'm sure.
Jennifer Lee:
[inaudible 00:06:26] setup assistant.
Mike:
Right.
Kate Lessard:
If you want to see it in action, you can also go back and revisit the admin keynote from Dreamforce. We've got some really great examples of what that looks like to build some excitement.
Mike:
I was going to say, that's exactly a great segue, Kate, I'm glad you came off mute.
Kate Lessard:
I've got it down.
Mike:
Right. It's a button, it's very important. You went a different route and said AI governance and security were going to be the sleeper topics that admins needed to watch. Did they become front page news, or did something else dominate?
Kate Lessard:
They really did. Security has always been one of our core responsibilities as Salesforce admins, and with new technology, we have new threats and new ways that we need to be prepared to deal with them. I would say in 2025, security really did become a front page discussion, as IT professionals focused on governance and security and addressing some of those new threats that we weren't exactly sure what they were going to look like.
For Salesforce admins, I think we saw a lot of cases where admins couldn't even get Agentforce buy-in at their organizations without a clear governance story. And at Dreamforce, we even had our first ever security keynote. And then, as just mentioned, I was just talking about the admin keynote, we featured security really heavily in the admin keynote as well. I think even one of the new Agentforce features that I'm personally most excited about is security with Agentforce, because it uses Agentforce to provide that automated risk assessment and will actually be really proactive for admins detecting and alerting them to any unusual activity in their organization in their Salesforce instance.
Mike:
Great. All right, Josh, we're going to come back to you. Looking in your crystal ball for the future, and you can't say S-controls will continue to be deprecated.
Josh Birk:
No, no. I think we have mission accomplished on that one.
Mike:
Yeah, right. I bet there's still an S-control that's firing today.
Josh Birk:
I do like that as a segue from security is important.
Mike:
Right.
Josh Birk:
Security is important also, maybe not have that JavaScript running from 2010.
Mike:
Well, I just have to think of somebody scrolling through the transcript, S-controls, what are they talking about S-controls for?
Josh Birk:
Right, right. You know the generation of Salesforce ecosystem you're from if you know what an S-control is.
Mike:
The same generation that mentions Johnny Carson.
Josh Birk:
In the envelope, yes.
Mike:
Welcome to the handful of listeners still pushing play. No, so 2026, we accomplished a lot. I think Agentforce went farther than we even thought. What do you see ahead for admins in this next year?
Josh Birk:
So I think to follow up with how Jen and Kate are describing the tools, there's going to be this evolution of agents that are there to help you get things done, not just the agents that are the ones you're building. So we've got Setup Powered by Agentforce, we've got Agentforce for Security, we've got Agentforce Fives, we've got brand new Agentforce Builder coming down the path, and that Agentforce Builder has, dun, dun, dun, agents helping you build agents. So I think that's the next layer that we're going to see, is the agentic enterprise being there in places that'll be at your fingertips is the way I would put it. Where you need AI to help you, it's going to be right there for you.
Mike:
Right, okay. Boy, that's awfully broad, I like it. Jen, you don't have to stick with automation, but for 2026, what do you see coming for admins?
Jennifer Lee:
Well, I see, not to stick with automation, but-
Josh Birk:
Automation.
Jennifer Lee:
It's going to continue to play a real important role in your agents, because without any type of automation, how good is that agent with just having basic instructions? And I'm going to stick with continuing to really build with smaller flows and not building with those humongous flows that you might be used to.
I was blown by a agent that I had created where I had two simple flows, and they were just to create a cupcake record and then a cupcake item record. And in the past, I would have had to build a flow that did massive loops to keep... Because you need multiple cupcake item records associated with a cupcake order, and I would have had to loop around and do some complex building of a flow to handle that. And then now, with my agent, I could just say, "Hey, there could be one to many cupcake items, and if the person said they wanted X number, just continue to use that action," and it understood that. I didn't have to make complex flows to do that. So it's really, again, having that mindset, and then just powering up your automation skills with your Agentforce skills, that's going to be where the magic happens.
Mike:
Wow, that's incredibly powerful. I never thought of that, that we would be building simpler flows. It's like writing stronger sentences, short declarative sentences, as opposed to long paragraph diatribes that go nowhere, which is common on this podcast.
Kate Lessard:
And an agent can help you build those flows, which is super cool.
Mike:
Yep, they usually do. The longer the intro, the more the agent had to help. Kate, are we going down the security path again for 2026, or what are we predicting for admins?
Kate Lessard:
I don't think that security is going to go away, I think it's going to stay a real hot topic. But I'm actually going to go back to one of my other predictions last year. I think I said that admins were set to become their orgs' AI specialist, and I think that we saw that shift start. But I think it's going to be really big this year as admins become AI orchestrators and stewards, because they're using their understanding of their organization's business and their business processes to identify those right use cases where we want to implement AI, and they're the ones that are going to be designing guardrails and bringing in decision logic.
I think we're also seeing something that we've been encouraging on this team for a long time, and it's becoming more prevalent and I think is really going to be huge in 2026, which is admins having a seat at the table to partner more closely with their security teams, their legal team and their business stakeholders across the board to ensure a trusted implementation, because the AI and the knowledge that admins have gained this past year, it's just helping them move upstream in those conversations.
Mike:
I just realized as you were answering this, this show sounds incredibly like Family Feud. Not that I just watched Family Feud last night. But it's the host repeating the question over and over again, and it makes me think, the next time we go to a community group-
Josh Birk:
You want a board?
Mike:
... we need to do a survey of a hundred admins.
Kate Lessard:
Oh, I love it.
Mike:
And I'm going to have you guys back on and we're going to guess the answers, because that sounds incredibly fun.
Kate Lessard:
That does sound fun.
Mike:
In a recent survey of a hundred admins, we asked them, "Karaoke or singing in the shower?" Okay. So bonus question that I just thought of and I didn't prep you guys for, so let's see how it goes, we'll start with you, Josh, to keep the order in the same. I realize we say agent a lot, and in the world, sometimes you can get confused and say agency, and I think we're all familiar with what it means to have agency. So in 2026, I wish admins had agency to do what? Josh, you're up first.
Josh Birk:
2026, admins have the agency to... Gosh, I feel like I'm just stealing from Kate here. Have the agency to feel like they can be the AI expert, basically. I think that there's going to be a lot of self-empowerment there. As a next developer, this is what I was thinking when Kate and Jen were talking about this kind of stuff, when developers develop something, it's a little bit in a package, it's kind of in a bubble, and they just get something working and then they run their unit tests on it, and then boom, that goes into the org and then they walk away. And like a lot of the other things when it comes to how that runs within an org can often be the role of the admin, like making sure the users have the right permissions, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I don't think that's going to change as agents become more prolific, I think the role is simply going to become more important.
I'm going to tack onto that and say, because this is where things are going to start getting weird, is when admins feel like they have the agency to build a Lightning Web Component, when admins feel like they have the agency to build an Apex class, and that's a brand new frontier we haven't really gone into, which reverses the thing I just described. But I would put the horse before the cart, so to speak, and be like you want to be that established AI expert first, because you're not trying to replace a developer, you're not trying to do their work for them. But if you understand what happens if you create a Lightning Web Component and how that belongs in your org, then you can be that proper steward for making sure that your org is going to remain healthy.
Mike:
I like it. Jen, I'll sound like Richard Dawson, in 2026, I hope admins have the agency to do what?
Jennifer Lee:
I'd say to be the person bringing the innovation into their company, being at the forefront of everything that's going on in Salesforce, being the first ones to get their hands on it, whether it's getting into a playground to play around with it and then pitching it to their company, but really being that true expert at their company.
Mike:
That's great, yeah. Kate? Last one.
Kate Lessard:
You're going to make me follow that?
Mike:
The hardest part when we do the Family Feud episode is I'm going to get some sort of audience clapping sound, because at some point, when everybody answers, everybody else in the team's like, "Oh yeah, good answer. Birthday cake, yeah. Birthday cake, good answer." So Kate, in 2026, I hope admins have agency to do what?
Kate Lessard:
All right. I'm going back to security, because I am really passionate about it, and I'm going to say to set governance standards proactively rather than retroactively after something goes wrong. I think that once AI is live in your organization, whether you're using Agentforce or any other type of AI, the risk isn't hypothetical, it's impacting real people and your organization's real data. And so, when governance is reactive, admins get forced into cleanup mode, which isn't a great place to be, and that puts you into a space where you're rebuilding trust and explaining decisions. Whereas if you have proactive governance, then you're giving admins that authority, that agency to define boundaries before any harm occurs, and it's, again, placing them in that position to just continue to move upstream and build strong partnerships with their stakeholders.
Mike:
Yeah. Well, those are great. If everything comes true, we've got admins building Lightning Web Components, short declarative flows and owning governance, so...
Josh Birk:
The bet.
Kate Lessard:
Yeah, that sounds great.
Josh Birk:
It sounds pretty good.
Mike:
Sit back and have your white Persian cat on your lap and put your pinky in the corner of your mouth and be like, "I own one million things."
Josh Birk:
How many admins would have their job easier if they had sharks with lasers on them?
Mike:
All of them.
Kate Lessard:
That's true.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Mike:
All of them.
Josh Birk:
All of them.
Mike:
Yeah.
Kate Lessard:
That's the new user punishment.
Josh Birk:
Exactly.
Mike:
It'd be really hard for people in the Midwest, because there's not a lot of water.
Josh Birk:
Right, right. I'm trying to think of the Midwest. We don't have crocodiles.
Mike:
No, we'd put it on cows.
Kate Lessard:
It's just slower moving.
Mike:
We'd put it on cows, yeah, it would just take a while. It's like if you've ever seen Goldfinger, the laser just takes a while, so the cow would just... It's common, don't worry. Or if you've ever... I forget what the movie is. Jimmy Shaker Day. You never know what day is going to be Jimmy Shaker Day. You never know when that cow's going to catch up to you, but it's going to happen.
Josh Birk:
Right, right.
Kate Lessard:
I have no idea what you're talking about.
Mike:
Well, that's because, Kate, you'd probably have sharks out on the West Coast, right?
Kate Lessard:
Yes, yes, absolutely. I've got my sharks swimming in the coast.
Mike:
We have cows. I have a feeling the cows would get to me long before they get to Josh. I've not seen cattle anywhere near the Chicagoland area.
Josh Birk:
Yeah, yeah. There's a mantra here in the Midwest when it gets to one degree and we have three and three feet of snow outside, we don't have earthquakes, we don't have crocodiles. We don't have earthquakes, we don't have crocodiles. We have winter, but we don't have earthquakes, we don't have crocodiles.
Mike:
Right. And we have tornadoes, but those usually hit unpopulated areas.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Kate Lessard:
Well, Jen knows, I cannot tough out your winters. I was a popsicle when we were in the cold last week.
Mike:
Yeah. But I think New York... Well, I don't know about Chicago, but New York gets pretty rough winters being right on the coast there.
Josh Birk:
They like to get dramatic for like a month, I feel like. They don't do the hibernation-style winter that we have to go through. But once a month, nobody wants to walk through the park because it's just nothing but snow.
Mike:
Right, yeah. Well, good, glad we hashed that out for this episode.
Kate Lessard:
Very important.
Mike:
It is. Thank you all for joining.
Josh Birk:
Thanks for having us.
Kate Lessard:
Thanks for having us.
Jennifer Lee:
Thanks for having us.
Kate Lessard:
Let's do it again next year.
Mike:
We should.
Jennifer Lee:
It's an annual thing.
Mike:
See how right we were. And if anybody is right about cows with lasers, then that'll be the last episode of the podcast.
Josh Birk:
Then AI's already won.
Kate Lessard:
We've done all we can do.
Mike:
We've done all we can do, cows have lasers now.
And that's a wrap on our first of many episodes this year in 2026. Big thanks to Josh, Jen and Kate for sharing their insights, laughs, and what admins can do to lead the way, whether it's automation, AI governance, or was that cows or sharks with lasers? Maybe both. Anyway, if today's conversation sparked ideas in your organization or in your user group, pass it along to another admin who might enjoy it. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.
No transcript available for this episode.
