Highlights
- Salesforce has been pushing Agentforce and AI solutions extremely hard in recent years, which makes sense, but has it come at the cost of ignoring its existing customer base?
- The company has recently made some significant changes to security on its platform, which is a reasonable decision given the security issues in recent years. However, there have been complaints about the lack of communication surrounding these changes.
- Similarly, after many years have passed since the retirement of permissions in profiles timeline, Salesforce has totally changed its pace and is reversing the decision. Not a delay, not a slight change, but a total reversal.
Recent actions by Salesforce have left many Salesforce professionals wondering if the company has changed quite significantly from what it was before. The company that pioneered the Ohana culture, the company that built the Trailblazer Community, and the company that has been a leader in shared success has made some interesting decisions lately.
Let me be clear here: I’m not trying to attack Salesforce, or accuse them of anything necessarily. I’m simply trying to highlight a trend that I’ve noticed, and one that leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth, and the mouths of many I’ve spoken to. So, it’s time to ask the question clearly: has Salesforce forgotten how to communicate with humans?
Setting the Scene
This isn’t a question being asked out of the blue. It’s one that’s been brewing for a little while now, due to a series of questionable decisions that Salesforce has made. To be clear, a lot of the decisions that Salesforce has made are totally valid, but it’s the way that they’ve been communicated that leaves a lot to be desired. Let’s take a slightly uncomfortable stroll down memory lane.
Permissions on Profiles
Back in 2023, Salesforce made an announcement that permissions would be removed from profiles, starting in Spring ‘26. Cheryl Feldman (then Product Manager, User Access) said it plainly at the time: “It’s finally here! We’re announcing the end of life (EOL) of permissions on profiles that will be the Spring ’26 release… Profiles will still exist; however, permissions on profiles will EOL, and permissions will be available only on permission sets.”
Cheryl has always made an effort to communicate with the community, and to do so with clarity. This post from her was no different, and was designed to help empower the Salesforce community so they knew what was coming, and what to do next.
Over the years, we saw the retirement delayed, which made sense given the scale and impact of the change. However, it was the very quiet blog post in June 2026 that stirred the community. Salesforce semi-silently announced that permissions were no longer being retired as planned, undoing years of reprioritization by Salesforce teams around the world.
Major Security Changes
2025 was a chaotic year for Salesforce professionals, and those who have any stake in the security of their customer data. Salesforce, rightfully, responded to these in a number of ways, including changes to MFA for regular users and phishing-resistant MFA for admin users. There were also new policies relating to using anonymized VPNs and connecting through proxies or from high-risk IP addresses.
While these were ultimately some very positive changes in terms of hardening the security of the platform, it wasn’t without its detrimental impact. I saw many Salesforce professionals who were unable to log in to their Salesforce orgs, and some of those were solo admins. This was due primarily to the anonymised VPNs that they were using at the time, and Salesforce revoked any OAuth tokens related to those users.
There was even an Idea on the IdeaExchange that garnered a lot of attention and support relating to this. This showed how widespread the issue was, and began to identify the scale of the negative impact of the rollout.
No Browser Required
At TDX this year, Salesforce unveiled Headless 360 with the tagline “No Browser Required”. With TDX being largely a developer event, it technically made sense. Headless architecture isn’t new, and most of the concepts introduced by Headless 360 (MCP tools, CLI, etc.) belong in developer territory. To be fair, TDX is a dev event where you’d expect the room to already know what “headless” means.
The tagline didn’t just stay in the room, though. Admins who’ve spent years building with “clicks, not code” heard the phrase “no browser required” from the company whose browser-based UI they’ve built their whole careers on. This caused some panic, evident in Reddit threads that sparked conversations around how people weren’t too happy about the direction Salesforce is going with their products and marketing.
This is a scoping problem on Salesforce’s end, because if you’re going to use marketing language built to make headlines, you can’t expect it to stay within the room where it was announced. “No browser required” was a message engineered for impact, without enough thought for who else might be standing close enough to hear it.
The Missing Dev Console
During the Winter ‘27 release, many Salesforce professionals had noticed that the trusty Developer Console that has been around for decades was missing from their UI. There was a popular Reddit thread where many weighed in and discussed whether this was done in favor of Web Console.
There was even a comment from someone claiming to be on a Product Team at Salesforce, who said that Web Console is moving to GA in Winter ‘27. They also claimed that the missing Developer Console was not a mistake, and that there was a new setting in Setup to enable it again.
This also felt like the kind of major change that deserved more than a small mention in the Release Notes. Developers and non-developers alike have been using Developer Console for many years, and having it gone suddenly is no minor change.
There’s also been a fair bit of pushback from many in the Salesforce community about Web Console not being as easy to use as Developer Console, which is another thing to consider.
Would You Like Agentforce With That?
Last but certainly not least is the huge focus on Agentforce. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’d know that Salesforce has been pushing Agentforce extremely hard for the last two years. The CRM giant has made it clear that they do not intend to let the opportunities that the AI revolution presents pass them by.
The complaint surrounding “Agentforce this, and Agentforce that” isn’t at all new and has only grown in the past few months. I attended a Dreamin’ event earlier this year, where I got to catch up with former colleagues still dealing with Salesforce orgs in their day-to-day, and I noticed our conversations kept circling back to Agentforce. While their higher-ups want it, they’re the ones who have to manage everything from rollout to cost predictions and answer for it when it doesn’t deliver.
The community has expressed a fair bit of concern about the focus being pulled onto Agentforce from other core products. From renaming certifications and cloud products that have held their identity for years, to a general concern around the attention that Salesforce is giving its core products, there are many valid concerns.
It makes sense, because if you hold a “Service Cloud Consultant” certification, for example, the rename turns it into “Agentforce Service Consultant”. What does that mean for people who hold the certification but haven’t actually touched Agentforce before? If anything, this seems to be a push towards making Agentforce mandatory, even going so far as to make it enabled by default this Winter ‘27.
The Pattern Emerges
The clear pattern that’s emerging across all of these issues is simple – Salesforce is changing the way that it communicates with its customers, and it may not be for the better. While I totally understand the need to keep up as technology evolves (looking at you, Agentforce), Salesforce must also remember who its customers are. They must remember that they were known for being top-tier when it came to communicating with their customers, and they must retain that value.
Similarly, while I admire the fact that Salesforce has responded to security concerns, they must also remember that there are small customers with limited resources that need time to adapt. Major changes that include locking single admins out and cutting off OAuth access are not going to go down well with these teams.
There is also a higher cost to getting communications wrong in this day and age. Docs, release notes, and announcements aren’t just plain reference materials for people anymore. They’re also the same materials AI tools comb through when someone’s trying to pull together a solution or troubleshoot an issue quickly.
If this source material ends up being incomplete, inaccurate, or walked back after some time, it becomes a bad foundation for anything that gets built in reference to it. The stakes for better communication and documentation just went several steps higher, thanks to AI.
What Good Looks Like
Again, I don’t want this to come across as picking Salesforce apart, as there are many things that Salesforce is doing right, including responding in a big way to security crises and the AI revolution.
Salesforce needs to find a better balance between leading the way with new technology and ensuring that its existing customers are not left behind. They need to find a balance between helping their large enterprise customers, while also ensuring that their smaller customers don’t feel overlooked and overwhelmed.
This is an extremely difficult balance to strike, and it feels like an awfully big ask! However, I know that with the resources that Salesforce has, as well as the fact that their track record proves it is possible, they can pull this off.
I’m sure we can all agree on one simple and easy first step: they could slow down the product renaming as a first step.
Credit Where It’s Due
It would be a total disservice to you, the reader, if I didn’t give credit to Salesforce where credit is due. Dreamforce ‘26 included the ever-popular True To The Core (TTTC) session where Salesforce product managers and executives answer questions from the community. This remains one of the most popular sessions at Salesforce’s events, and for good reason.
It’s designed as a way for the community to get answers to questions that they’ve been struggling with directly from the people who are most deeply involved in the product.
There’s so much good that comes out of this session, and one part that I want to talk about in detail. Tom Bassett, one of our beloved expert authors here at SF Ben, asked a question that many Salesforce professionals have been wondering about: Why does Salesforce keep changing the names of products? This was answered by Patrick Stokes, President of Applications and Marketing at Salesforce. His answer was thoughtful and well-articulated, but one part toward the beginning stood out the most to me:
“This drives us nuts too, if we’re being honest,” he said.
It was a reminder that, despite what recent history may have felt like to the community, Salesforce is still a company composed of human beings, just like you and me, doing their best. We are all entering into this new AI era together, and this comes with major changes to how we all operate.
Salesforce is preparing hundreds of thousands of companies around the world to defend against AI-enhanced cyberattacks, and that’s no easy feat. Rushing communications to try to solve critical problems at scale is frustrating, but we must remember that we are working with human beings at Salesforce as well as human beings in our own organizations.
While all of the above is true, it does show quite a big gap between the two hours per year of TTTC sessions and the remaining 8,758 hours per year of communication between Salesforce and the Salesforce community (yes, I ran the number to enhance my point). TTTC is the time where Salesforce shines in terms of engagement between the community and the cloud giant, but the rest of the year can be hit or miss.
It would be great to see Salesforce doing more frequent sessions like this – showing a scorecard of what they’ve actually taken onboard and how they’ve addressed it, and keeping the community close on a more regular basis.
Summary
Salesforce has built an incredible legacy and community within the last three decades. They’re known for their ability to bring people together and to share in success together. It’s what the Ohana culture was built on! However, their recent approach to customer communication has caused some friction.
It’s been a common sentiment that Salesforce is moving “too fast” with its recent technological advancements and leaps towards AI. But change isn’t a bad thing, and change is essential to grow. The company is still building for its customers, and simply “slowing it down” is not the answer to this growing sentiment. Salesforce just needs to remember that the way something is said can matter just as much as what is being said.
