It seems the Salesforce Admin role gets reassessed every few years in the ecosystem. But recently, that conversation has moved away from fears of becoming obsolete and toward how it’s evolving into a much broader, more strategic, and more central occupation.
In many companies, admins do more than just configure CRM. They are expected to understand how it fits into a wider ecosystem, support AI readiness, and ensure the system delivers long-term value. But there’s a big difference between evolving into something and potentially being pushed into it.
As expectations around data, security, and AI continually grow, many admins are finding themselves responsible for decisions and outcomes that look a lot like architecture. The challenge is that this shift isn’t always matched with the authority, support, or recognition that typically comes with that new level of responsibility. In some cases, admins are doing more than just evolving and are becoming what I’m coining as “accidental architects”.
The Admin Role Has Expanded, But Its Boundaries Haven’t
It’s now widely accepted that the Salesforce Admin role has expanded massively. As we explored in our previous piece about the role evolving, admins are increasingly expected to understand how the platform they’re managing fits into a wider ecosystem while supporting AI readiness and overall value.
What is less clear at the moment is where that expansion actually stops.
“The real answer is a very architect answer: It depends,” said Salesforce MVP and Certified Instructor, Vicki Moritz-Henry. “It depends on the size of the org, the size of the team, and many other factors”.
That lack of clarity at the moment is one of the biggest outstanding issues for admins. In some smaller companies, the line between admin and architect has potentially already blurred to the point where it’s almost indistinguishable. Decisions that shape how a system scales and how tools interact are increasingly falling to the same person, regardless of their title.
“I think that admins are indeed taking on architect-level responsibilities in some cases,” said Senior Salesforce Solutions Architect Tom Bassett. “This is more applicable to solo admins… typically in smaller organizations without an architect”.
So in practice, it looks as though many admins are already doing architectural work, just not explicitly.
“Whether you are a solo admin or part of a bigger team, if you’ve made a decision around governance, making a solution compasble, solution design, or designing for large data volumes, you are making architect-type decisions without even realizing it,” Tom detailed.
Another emerging factor complicating this even further is AI ownership. As Salesforce Architect Timo Kovala told SF Ben, AI readiness often sits in a “no-man’s land” between business and IT, where neither side fully owns the decision-making.
This shift clearly shows that the scope of the role has expanded faster than its definition. The responsibilities have arrived, but the boundaries – and what the role is officially accountable for – haven’t quite caught up yet.
“I am the Accidental Architect”
If the boundaries of the role have become unclear, the result is potentially a new kind of reality emerging across companies: the “accidental architect” (inspired by the “accidental admin”).
“I didn’t just observe this phenomenon,” Said Salesforce Consultant and Architect Jeremy Carmona. “I am the accidental architect”.
Jeremy’s experience reflects a pattern that may feel similar to a lot of admins out there, particularly those working in smaller or mid-sized companies. After starting out as a Salesforce Admin, he quickly found himself making decisions that would shape the long-term structure of the platform.
“Within six months, I was making data model decisions, designing integrations, and choosing automation patterns that would shape the org for the next decade,” he explained. “Nobody promoted me to architect. Nobody trained me on architecture. The org had problems, I was the person in the room, and the problems didn’t care about my title”.
This questionable dynamic – where responsibility emerges out of necessity rather than design – is at the heart of the issue we’re highlighting. When there’s no dedicated architect or no clearly defined ownership, the person closest to the system can sometimes become the default decision maker.
However, not everyone sees this shift as a positive evolution.
“Admins provide a crucial counterpoint to architects,” said Timo. “They’re grounded in user behavior and real business needs – something architects rely on to design solutions that actually work.”
For many admins, this can mean stepping into architectural thinking without formally recognizing it as such. The decisions they make become foundational, long-term decisions that define how the platform performs and behaves over time – as Jeremy experienced himself.
“For years I’ve been seeing admins and marketers on smaller teams making architectural decision without even realizing it,” said Vicki. “It’s the same for so many others out there. They’re already doing the work”.
Speaking critically, it seems as though the “accidental architect” isn’t about capability, and in most cases, they are actually more than capable of making these decisions – at least within smaller companies. The issue is that the responsibility often arrives without a clear structure, support, or recognition that should come with it.
Responsibility Without Authority
While we’ve looked at how the “accidental architect” has emerged, it’s important to consider the problems around having this responsibility without having clear authority over it.
For many admins, the shift into architectural thinking isn’t accompanied by the ability to influence decisions that matter most.
“Authority: it’s not close,” said Jeremy, when asked where the biggest gap exists. “The responsibility finds you whether you’re ready or not”.
In practice, Jeremy found that responsibility arrives in the form of vague or high-level requests with significant downstream impact.
“A VP says ‘just connect these two systems’ and walks away,” he explained. “That’s an architectural decision with org-wide consequences, handed to someone who wasn’t given the authority to say ‘we need a discovery phase first’”.
He further explained that this results in a mismatch that plays out across multiple levels of an organization. Admins – and increasingly platform owners – are expected to ensure outcomes, but lack the formal power to shape the inputs.
This tension is also potentially not limited to early-career admins or solo operators, like we initially thought. Even in more mature orgs – where roles are better defined – the same structural gap can persist.At IWU National & Global, Associate Director Alec Green describes being responsible for the performance of the entire Salesforce ecosystem – from architecture through to AI implementation – with accountability measured by outcomes rather than titles.
“True ownership means carrying the weight of the result, not just the title,” he said. But that ownership, according to Alec, often doesn’t come with control.
“Leadership often requires owning a result without holding the direct levers to change it,” he said, pointing to gaps across strategy, people, and overall execution. “I build the roadmap for Agentforce and AI integration, but I am not always at the table where final technology priorities are set”.
That disconnect, Alec detailed, often slows down even well-intentioned initiatives. Decisions are made in one part of the organization, while responsibility may sit in another, creating problems between the vision and the delivery.
He said: “I have the capacity to build high-impact tools, but most often wait for the organizational permission to deploy them”.
The obvious consequence then is a system where accountability and authority move at different speeds. Those responsible for outcomes are left reacting to decisions they didn’t shape, making the ability to prevent long-term issues (tech debt, poor data design, misaligned integrations) limited.
As Alec put it, “Closing the gap is essential for vision and execution to move at the same speed”.
Final Thoughts
The rise of the so-called “accidental architect” isn’t being driven by a single shift, but by several different things happening at once, such as leaner teams, increasing platform complexity, and growing pressure to move faster. Together, they may have expanded the role without clearly redefining it.
AI has, of course, accelerated that trend. Companies are pushing toward readiness at breakneck speed, and the responsibility falls to those closest to the system – namely, the admins.
“We’re also seeing a shift towards admins and others being encouraged to develop an architect mindset,” said Vicki. “We can see this already with the Well-Architected team creating more content about decision-making and other aspects of the architect mindset.”
That shift makes sense, but the mindset is evolving faster than the structure around it.
That doesn’t necessarily mean admins should become architects outright, however. Timo told SF Ben that the strength of the ecosystem has always come from the balance between the two roles, not their overlap.
The real challenge may not be evolution, but ensuring that ownership and collaboration evolve alongside it.
